Before He Finds Her

by Michael Kardos

  “So you’re asking me to invest?”

  I didn’t like asking Nolan for money. Jeffrey, actually, was the wealthiest of my friends—but Nolan owed me. During his first run for state senate, I’d moved to Missouri for the last four weeks of his campaign. I’d given him my time, because that was all I had.

  “Ten thousand,” I said, then quickly added, “I know it’s a lot. But you’d be part owner, of course.”

  “That’d be interesting, owning part of a record company.” He sipped his beer, set it back down on the table. He looked at the label for a moment. At last he said, “But I won’t invest ten thousand dollars. I’m sorry.”

  So much for that.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”

  He frowned. “Do you?” He drank from his beer, set it down again. “You’re going to run into costs you never expected. That’s how business works. So if you think you’ll need fifty thousand, then you ought to be raising a hundred. So no, I won’t invest ten thousand. But I’ll invest twenty.”

  He finished his beer, got two more from the refrigerator, opened them, and handed me one.

  “You’re joking,” I said.

  He laughed. “You’re my friend and a talented guy. I believe in you. Why on earth wouldn’t I invest?”

  I had no answer. “So twenty thousand, just like that?”

  He snapped his fingers. “Just like that.” He grinned. “Now, if we can get twenty grand each out of Jeffrey and Evan, that’d go a long way toward getting those first two records off the ground, wouldn’t it?”

  It sure would. And maybe I’d mention it to Evan at some point over the next few days. But Jeffrey clearly needed a vacation, and I intended to give him one without hitting him up for cash.

  The majority of Newfield’s citizens commuted to New York City, where for eight or ten hours they pushed and pulled the levers that made America run. Newfield Station was at the center of town. I parked the car, and Nolan and I waited for Jeffrey and Evan to arrive on the 4:12.

  In the past, we’d met up in Palm Springs, Hilton Head Island, Bermuda. Once a year, I didn’t mind splurging. But now I was trying to save, and so back in January I’d asked them all to consider coming here. My friends worked long and hard, and I didn’t like asking them to downgrade their vacation on my account. Yet without a single complaint, they’d all agreed to forgo an exotic locale for a weekend in Jersey.

  At least the weather was cooperating. The forecast called for a sunny, mild weekend. The sky was currently a deep blue, with only the thinnest rim of gray on the western horizon.

  I’d reserved tee times at two courses about thirty miles to the northwest, in the Kittatinny Mountains, an area I hadn’t been to for years. Back when I was a Boy Scout I’d camped there a couple of times but had found the woods frightening. I was a city kid, not used to nature or silence. By high school these same woods had become a place of escape, somewhere to hike around with friends and drink beer. You could forget you were in New Jersey, walking for hours without coming across a single irritated, short-tempered soul.

  Tomorrow we’d warm up with the easier course, one with wide fairways and few hazards. Then on Sunday we’d play the top-rated public course in the state, a heavily wooded eighteen holes in a secluded valley, where supposedly it was common to spot eagles overhead.

  “You can’t imagine how much I’ve been looking forward to this,” Nolan said, when I described the courses to him. “Campaigning can wear you down.”

  “I remember,” I said.

  “Nah, that was only a statewide election,” he said. “This is a whole different ball game.”

  I’d wondered whether Nolan would have time for us this year. But when I’d e-mailed him a few weeks earlier, asking if he was sure his campaign could do without him for a weekend, he fired back a philosophical reply: If I can’t take a weekend off to see my closest friends, then what the hell is it all for?

  The train arrived and spat out dozens of businessmen and women, well dressed but rumpled in the aftershock of their work-week. Jeffrey teetered off the train, suitcase in one hand, golf bag in the other. Seeing us standing by my car, he set the suitcase on the ground and waved. We went over to greet him.

  “I didn’t see Evan on the train,” Jeffrey said by way of greeting. He’d boarded at Newark Airport. Evan was supposed to have boarded the same train earlier in New York.

  Just then my cell phone rang, cutting the mystery short.

  “Don’t even try to imagine all the fucking work that got dumped on me today,” Evan said into my ear.

  He was a year away from making partner at his law firm. The way he explained it, to make partner at a major New York firm you couldn’t simply work eighty-hour weeks. You had to work eighty-hour weeks and ask for more.

  When I got off the phone, Nolan and Jeffrey were both looking incredulous. I confirmed their suspicions. “He’s tied up.”

  “Tied up?” Jeffrey said. “What the hell does that mean?”

  I shrugged. “Lawyer stuff.”

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Nolan said. “Jeffrey made it. I made it….”

  “He said he’ll be here tomorrow morning,” I told them. “He promised to be on the first train.” I picked up Jeffrey’s golf bag and headed to the car. “Come on—you guys must be starving.”

  They were. We decided on an early dinner. Afterward, we’d go to the golf range and hit practice balls. Then we’d head back to the house for a drink on the porch.

  “I bought a bottle of Scotch and some cigars,” I said as I lowered Jeffrey’s luggage into the trunk.

  “None for me,” Jeffrey said. I figured, given how drunk he’d obviously been last weekend, that he meant the Scotch, until he added, “I’ve quit smoking.”

  “So have I,” I said. “Cigarettes, anyway.” It’d been a month since my last cigarette. Not easy considering where I worked—where there was no ventilation and the carpet reeked so badly it seemed to have been woven from smoke. “But I’ve got a baby coming. What’s your excuse?”

  “Same as yours,” he said. We looked at him, confused. “Sara’s pregnant.”

  “Well, I’ll be damned,” Nolan said.

  Jeffrey and Sara had been married for eight years with no children.

  “Congrats, man,” I said. “That’s terrific news.”

  “Yeah, I guess so,” he said listlessly, and I couldn’t help wondering just what the hell he wasn’t telling.

  Antonello’s was a favorite restaurant of Cynthia’s and mine for special occasions. I returned from the restroom to find antipasto on the table and Nolan engaged in a full-on sales pitch.

  “I told Will it sounded like a great idea,” he was saying to Jeffrey, “and that he should count me in for twenty. So what about you?”

  I sat down, torn between interrupting the conversation and hearing what Jeffrey had to say. He shrugged. “I’ll have to think it over.”

  “Forget it,” I said. “We can talk about this some other time.” Then, to Nolan: “I’d rather hear about your campaign.”

  “Think what over?” Nolan said. “Come on, we’re talking about a twenty-grand investment. It’s a no-brainer.”

  “Look, guys,” I said, “I don’t want anyone feeling pressure over this.”

  I wondered, though, if I was being completely honest. Jeffrey lived two blocks from San Francisco Bay. He had joined an Internet start-up at the beginning of the boom. When the company went public, it took him five beers over dinner to admit to us that his stake in the company was “hovering around thirty million dollars.” This was at another of our golf weekends, in Palm Springs, and I remember him trembling when he told us. He could have been confessing a crime. He had just turned twenty-five.

  I’d been staggered. Playing the drums was earning me fifteen thousand dollars a year. The trip to Palm Springs was costing me close to a month’s pay.

  There were a few follow-up questions, but soon enough conversation returned to the old standbys: stories fr
om college, highlights from the day’s round. The fact of a twenty-foot putt was more real to us than thirty million dollars. After dinner we played low-stakes poker long into the night and finished off a case of beer. We were laughing again. A lightness to the evening had settled in. By morning, I’d done my best to put Jeffrey’s wealth out of my mind. I think everyone had. We never talked about it again.

  I hadn’t planned to ask anyone other than Nolan for money this weekend. But now that the matter was on the table, I couldn’t help weighing Jeffrey’s enormous wealth against the relatively small investment Nolan was asking him to make. Okay, so Jeffrey was feeling a little gloomy lately. But still. If our situations had been reversed, I liked to think I would’ve opened my checkbook without any hesitation.

  “But this is a solid plan.” Nolan dipped a corner of bread in a plate of olive oil and used it to point at Jeffrey while he talked. “It’s solid, and Will needs for this to happen. You’re not even going to help him get it off the ground?”

  “The music business is risky,” Jeffrey said.

  “So take a risk.” Nolan tilted his head, as if just noticing something. “You seem really down. Are you down?”

  Jeffrey smiled. “Good work, detective.”

  “Okay, so tell us what the fuck’s the matter.”

  I had planned to share a golf cart tomorrow with Jeffrey, see if he felt like talking. Nolan was always a little more direct.

  “Oh, a lot of things.” He took a sip of water. “I don’t mean to be mysterious. I just don’t feel like getting into it now.”

  “You’re in a rut, aren’t you?” When Jeffrey didn’t respond right away, he said, “Of course you are. You just turned thirty, you’ve got a baby coming, and you’re looking at the rest of your long, boring life and freaking out. Am I right?”

  “I guess it’s something like that,” Jeffrey said, though his face was uncharacteristically hard to read.

  “Piece of cake,” Nolan said. “Know what you need to do?”

  “I give up.”

  “Do something unexpected. Surprise yourself. That’s why guys are always skydiving and swimming the English Channel and shit. You need a shock to the system, something to remind yourself that you’re alive.” He poured himself some more wine. “And for starters, you can become a record company executive.”

  “Or,” I cut in, “we can table the whole discussion about making records until later.” The waiter was setting a vast tray of food on a stand beside our table. “How about we just eat until we can’t move. How does that sound?”

  Jeffrey managed a smile. “I think I can do that.”

  Nolan laughed suddenly.

  “What?” I asked.

  “There’s a girl over there”—he nodded somewhere behind me—“who looks just like that fifteen-year-old you asked out at the Quakerbridge Mall. You remember?”

  “Fuck off,” I said, not bothering to glance over my shoulder. “She looked a lot older. And she said she went to Trenton State.”

  “Yeah, and with her mother right there, overhearing the whole thing.”

  Jeffrey glanced over at the girl. He shook his head, then refilled his wine as Nolan and I recounted this anecdote we all already knew, one of the many we told and retold over the years.

  When we stopped speaking, Jeffrey took a sip of wine. “So, Will, have you thought of a name?”

  I explained that Cynthia and I had decided ahead of time not to find out the sex of the baby. “So our list is getting pretty long.”

  “No, I mean a name for the record company.”

  “Oh.” I smiled, having decided this long ago. “Long-Shot Records.”

  “Good name.” The combination of wine and shared memories seemed to relax him. His face warmed. It was good to see. His moods could be as erratic as his golf game. Some days he had the touch of a pro, and other days he’d psych himself out and miss every three-foot putt. You never knew exactly which Jeffrey you were going to get. “All right,” he said at last. “I surrender. Count me in for twenty grand.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Nolan smiled, but then his smile faded away. “Seriously, though—do something bold. Surprise yourself. And for God’s sake, don’t buy a sports car.”

  Sometimes Cynthia asked me what we talked about when we got together and played our rounds of golf. She must have imagined us on the course baring our souls, the game primarily an occasion for the talk of old friends. But it wasn’t that way. We talked, but mostly we golfed. Conversation tended to center around the previous shot, the next hole. Which club to use, which way the green might break. At night, over steaks, we’d reminisce. We had a deep well of stories from which to draw. But weightier conversation felt almost like an intrusion, business to be gotten through.

  And yet tonight, as I ate my chicken cacciatore and drank my wine, I was thinking that even long-standing friendships required periodic injections of the now. At one time, we had all taken classes together and lived in the same dormitories, drunk from the same kegs and vomited on the same lawns. Our lives were led in close proximity, and we knew one another as only friends living together do. And while we liked to believe that our shared past was the anchor from which we could drift only so far, the truth was that each of us had changed. Maybe even a lot. And this should have been cause for celebration. It meant that we’d grown up. But to acknowledge this, to announce, “Look at me! Look who I’ve become!” would have been to disappoint everyone somehow, to destroy the illusion that we knew one another as well now as we once did.

  The funny thing was, Cynthia wouldn’t have liked me when I was twenty. Twenty-year-old Will was too raw, too desperate for everything: love, success, and confirmation that all his choices were the right ones. Probably we were all a little wiser now, a little more complicated. All of which is to say, I felt grateful for our new business partnership. Our friendships were secure to the degree that we all trusted in the past’s strong anchor. But here, finally, was something new to bind us together, something in the present that had us looking to the future.

  I proposed a toast.

  “To what?” Jeffrey asked.

  “To your fat pregnant wives,” Nolan said. “And to Will’s new business.”

  I raised my glass. “To old friends.”

  Leaving the restaurant, full from dinner, I thought about the phone call I’d make on Monday to Fred McPhee, my ex-bandmate, offering his new band a record contract. I loved knowing that I could help him reach a level of success that we—High Noon—might have had, if it hadn’t been for Gwen’s death. And for a moment, I could imagine it was all already happening: the record was made, rave reviews were being published. Songs I’d recorded and Cynthia had promoted were being bought and reviewed and downloaded and talked about.

  And maybe—to continue the fantasy—we’d make enough money where, after some time, Cynthia and I could buy a home after all, a slightly larger place where we would raise our child.

  Nolan asked me if I planned to give Cynthia the news about Long-Shot Records on the phone tonight or surprise her with it on Sunday. But this was no decision at all: I would tell her as soon as I heard her voice.

  Looking back, I’m glad I allowed myself that fantasy. Glad to have indulged in that much hope—because within the hour, everything would change.

  It started at the golf range, where the three of us stood on adjacent AstroTurf mats, driving our golf balls into the dark, misty field. Despite the earlier sun, it’d begun to drizzle, and thunder rumbled in the distance as we settled into the rhythm of our swings. After hitting a dozen or so balls, I happened to glance up at Jeffrey, who was standing to my left. I’m a lefty, and Jeffrey’s a righty, so we were facing each other. He stood over his ball as if he were about to take a swing. But the backswing didn’t come. He just stood there, head down, holding the club. At some point he must have sensed me watching him, because he looked up.

  “Hey, Will?” he said quietly.

  I raised my eyebrows in response.

  M
ore silence. Then, in the careful voice of a physician making a grave diagnosis, he said, “She’s cheating on me again.”

  Before I could think of a suitable reply, he looked down, brought his club back, and swung. The ball went so high that I lost it in the grayness overhead. To my eyes, never good at twilight, it simply shrank into the sky and was gone.

  On the drive home, Jeffrey was being very quiet. But as we approached the little shopping center across from the entrance to my neighborhood, he said, “Pull in there.” He wanted to buy antacids at the Milk-n-Bread. “My stomach’s been killing me lately. Stress.”

  “Stress?” Nolan said. “It was the clams.”

  In a few hours Newfield would be placid again, but at 7:15 the Friday rush was still in full swing and traffic in the westbound lane was bumper to bumper. “For real?” I asked.

  “Trust me—you need to stop.”

  I put on my left blinker and, seeing a small opening in front of an SUV, raced across the lane of cars. I pulled into a parking space and Jeffrey got out.

  “Wait here,” he said. “I’ll be back in a minute.” He went into the Milk-n-Bread.

  Nolan clicked the radio on and immediately started fiddling with the dial. “He shouldn’t have given you such a hard time back at the restaurant,” he said, settling on a Van Morrison song.

  “It’s his money. He can decide what to do with it.”

  “Bullshit. He’s just being negative. I love him, Will, you know that. But he can be such a downer sometimes.”

  Maybe so, but Nolan’s observation was based on incomplete information. He didn’t know about Jeffrey’s marital problems, and it wasn’t my place to tell him. And so with Jeffrey inside the Milk-n-Bread changing all of our lives forever, Nolan and I sat in the car quietly and listened to the radio, while the drizzle turned to the kind of soupy rain that was good for vegetable gardens but bad for golf. The forecast was turning out to be wrong, and I hoped that our round tomorrow wouldn’t get rained out.

  A white-haired woman left the store using a magazine for an umbrella. She hurried to her car and drove away.

  The song ended. Another began. Daylight savings wasn’t for another week, and now that the sun had set night was coming on quickly.