CHAPTER TWELVE
Scott was running toward him. It was obvious he didn’t run much, but he was tall enough to get away with it, crossing the remaining distance between them with relative ease. Carver stopped, panting, enjoying the familiar sear up and down his respiratory system.
“Oh my God,” Scott wheezed when he reached him, bending over with his hands on his thighs. “You’re so fucking fast. I might throw up.”
“Why’d you come after me?” Carver said, doing his best to stay upright as his inner ear abandoned its duties and black spots swam in his vision. “What do you want?”
“I wanted to say — okay, I was going to say I’ll leave you alone, this was stupid, we can both just go back to our lives, but I don’t — I don’t want you to, man —”
Carver turned from him and started walking again. He couldn’t deal with any of this. He would just walk toward the black horizon until he found the edge of it.
“Carv,” Scott said, catching up with him. “Carver.”
“I don’t want to hear it.”
“Don’t want to hear what?”
“Whatever you’re trying to tell me.”
“I’m not fucking — I’m not saying we should be together — but I don’t think you should be with her —”
“Why not?” Carver said, wheeling around and abrupting Scott, who almost ran into him. “Because she’s fucking nuts? So what? I’m fucking nuts. And what did she say that was wrong?”
Scott reeled back from him and wheezed out a laugh of disbelief. “How about the way she said it?”
“What about it?”
“It’s not the way you talk to your spouse. It would have been more fucking normal if she was throwing shit at you. Whatever that was, it was not normal.”
“I don’t need my shit to be normal, so drop that line.”
“Fine, it wasn’t healthy!”
“Okay,” Carver said, shrugging.
“Nothing about your life is healthy,” Scott said, gripping him by the shoulders. Carver didn’t resist him. He brought his face in close, leaning over, almost pressing their foreheads together. “Nothing about your life is healthy. Nothing about your life is healthy.”
“Okay.”
“This is the life of a person who hates himself.”
“I know,” Carver said. His guts twisted as he spoke. “I know, but that’s not her fault.”
“Carver,” Scott said, his breath warm.
“What would you do with me if you were her? You don’t even know. You think you want me, but you don’t know.” Carver pulled back and searched Scott’s face in the low light. All he saw was a tight mouth and large eyes. “And do you even want me?”
Scott was silent for a moment. “Yeah,” he said.
Carver exhaled, dizzied again. He didn’t know what to do with that except: “I don’t believe you.”
“Why not?”
“It’s hard for me to take you seriously. It’s not like you take to responsibility well.”
“Fuck you,” Scott said, surprising him. “Go fuck yourself. You don’t even know what kind of responsibilities I have. You don’t even know me, you just see a caricature.”
“You present yourself as a caricature!” Carver screamed in his face, his voice echoing through the fairway.
Scott still hadn’t let go of his shoulders. He squeezed Carver hard, almost pushing him down a little. He was strong and firm and outweighed him. “I need you,” he said, “to stop seeing what you think you’re supposed to see, and see what you know to be true.”
“I don’t know what’s true.”
“You do. You do. You know who I am. You know me.”
“I don’t. I haven’t spoken to you in almost twenty years.”
“I haven’t changed. Carver, look at me. Am I a different guy?”
“I didn’t even know you when we were fucking teenagers!”
“Yes, you did. You did.”
“Well you didn’t know me,” Carver said hoarsely. His throat felt scraped raw.
“I did know you, I still do.”
“No, you didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because there’s nothing to know. You’re working so fucking hard to make me into this idea in your head,” he spat in Scott’s face.
“And you’re absolutely fucking delusional, okay?
A person is the sum of their choices! What you fucking do is who you fucking are!
Stop blinding yourself with this fantasy and look at who I am, and wake up! ”
Scott withstood this with total unflinching equanimity. “What did you do that’s so awful?”
Carver stood there for a moment getting his breath. “I threw myself in the garbage,” he finally said. The remark came out of him without warning or conscious thought.
“Yeah,” Scott said, still hanging onto him.
Carver tore himself from Scott’s grasp and walked away, running his hands through his hair. He didn’t start walking toward the horizon again — he just walked in small circles in the grass.
“It’s not too late to stop doing that,” Scott said.
“Shut up,” Carver said. “Shut up for five seconds. My God.”
“I’m just saying.”
“You love the sound of your own voice.”
“I do,” Scott admitted.
“You have no idea how hard I worked to get what I have,” Carver said, filled with rage again, “or how fucking tired I already am.”
“Maybe you’re tired because you worked your ass off earning and paying for someone else’s life.”
“Whose?”
“Whoever this guy is you keep pretending to be.”
“But I am him! Fuck! In a lot of ways I am, I like a lot of this shit!”
“Some guys find ways to like being in jail,” Scott said.
Carver stopped mid-circle and turned to face him, squinting at his shadowed figure. “She was right that you want to save me, you want to rescue me.”
“I want to help you. I care about you.”
“You want to fix me. So what if that’s not possible?”
Scott was quiet.
“That woman back there,” Carver said, pointing at the clubhouse where it sat twinkling on the hill behind them, “knows me. That woman gets me. That woman, in her fucked-up, insane way, cares about me.”
“Carver,” Scott said, “you are her dog.”
“No, I’m not, you prick! That’s your interpretation from spending one weekend with us, a weekend where I capped off months of depression by passionately fucking my high school boyfriend before I crawled back into bed with her, then fucked her over mid-deal!”
“Fine, put aside how she feels about you, just tell me if you actually love her.”
Carver was brought up short by this. “Yeah, I love her,” he said.
“In what way?” Scott said. “You’re in love with her? You’re really into her, sexually? You’re crazy about her?”
“We’ve been married for like, five years.”
“So?”
“Shit cools down,” Carver said, sounding lame and false even to himself. His head was starting to pound.
“Okay,” Scott said. “But did you ever feel that way about her?”
A silence stretched out between them, enveloping them and then spreading across the entire golf course.
There was a hard lump in Carver’s throat. He opened his mouth, closed it, then opened it again. “Did you ever feel that way about me?”
Scott inhaled, then drew closer to him, closing the gap between them. Carver waited. The lump grew more painful.
“Yeah,” Scott said, nodding. “Yeah, I think I did.”
“Okay,” Carver choked out.
“Why do you think I asked you to come with me to California? Why do you think I said I love you when we had sex?”
This was fucking unbearable. “I don’t know,” Carver said, bringing his fingers to his temples. “I don’t know.”
“And I thought you felt the same way, and that’s why you said it back.”
“I don’t know.”
“I think you know.”
Carver did know. He still didn’t remember saying I love you to Scott, but he remembered the soaring, reckless thrill of doing so. He remembered the sensation of being held in something all-powerful and deathless.
“I have to go,” he said, fixing his gaze on the bright clubhouse. “I can’t do this.”
Scott stepped in his path as he walked forward, and kissed him. Carver kissed him back. It was the most natural act possible. They pressed their bodies together, gripping and pulling each other. Carver pressed desperately into the heat of Scott’s mouth.
Scott broke the kiss to breathe, and Carver made a needy sound he was embarrassed by. A moment later, he said, “What the hell is that?” then nudged Carver and pointed over his right shoulder.
Carver turned and looked heavenward, where he was pointing.
There was a small pinprick of light with a long plume inching across the black, star-speckled sky, sloping downward at a diagonal.
It passed in front of the visible stars, looking almost like an airplane — a lovely falling airplane made of light.
“It’s the comet,” he said. “I forgot about it.”
“I didn’t even know there was supposed to be one,” Scott said. He sounded thrilled. “I thought you needed a telescope to see comets.”
“Not tonight, apparently.”
“That’s so fucking cool.”
Carver swallowed, feeling sobered. His lips felt numb.
“Look, I’m going back to this stupid wedding,” he said, walking away while he still had the nerve.
“I’m gonna go say goodnight to everyone, and I’m gonna go home and go to sleep, and if we need to talk more then we can do it tomorrow. Is that okay with you?”
Scott was quiet. Carver wheeled around and faced him, walking backwards. “Is it?”
“Yeah,” Scott said. “Yeah. We are gonna need to talk, but yeah, tomorrow is fine.”
“I actually don’t have to talk to you ever again, just so you’re aware.”
Scott shrugged so hugely that Carver could see it even in the dim light. “Sure,” he said. “Yeah, give it a try.”
Carver gave him two middle fingers and turned back around.
He started taking longer strides, desperate to return to the wedding.
He was irrationally convinced that if he could just get back inside the reception hall, the world would be put back on its axis.
Of course, he’d been trying this trick his entire life, hadn’t he?
Just get into the good college, just get the job, just get the wife, the car, the duplex.
This time, though, he wasn’t trying to claw his way to the happiness that had always eluded him, he was just trying to get back into the life he’d had before this weekend.
He knew he’d hated it, yet he was convinced he may have taken it for granted in all its sedate predictability.