The New Republic. Lionel Shriver
to switch into your English section. Clingy. You used the word clingy. So I let go.”
Thumbs pressed into his temples, Falconer kneaded his forehead with his fingertips, eyes closed. “God, Kellogg, I’m so sorry. I promise, it wasn’t you, or only you. It was all of them. I was tired. I was only seventeen years old, and I was already tired.”
Having held in that story for two decades like a breath, now that he’d exhaled it Edgar relaxed, looking on his companion with uncharacteristic tenderness. “Hey, water under the bridge. Anyway, you’ve changed. I mean, you’ve grown up and all, and you seem a lot more—forgiving.” Edgar thought that was a nicer way of putting the fact that Falconer had no edge anymore and had turned into a soft touch for the likes of Wallasek. “But there’s something else. Something, I don’t know—missing.”
Falconer didn’t take offense, but smiled wanly and smoothed his palms down his face to rest them flat on the table. “You mean I’m not surrounded by adoring fans? I’m not tap-dancing on the ceiling with a hat rack?”
Edgar tore a wet shred slowly off his Amstel label. “Whatever.”
“Senior year—you heard my father died?”
“Secondhand.”
“You weren’t speaking to me at the time. Anyway, it hit me hard. All the gang were consoling, for about five minutes. Maybe that made me lucky. Maybe less, well, less prominent kids whose parents died got consoled for only two or three minutes. But after my five minutes were over I was supposed to go back to thinking up pranks to play on our Spanish teacher, leading sneaks off campus after curfew, and inventing new ways to propel our pineapple upside-down cake at lunch. I couldn’t do it. I had more ‘friends’ than anyone at Yardley and I was so lonely I could scream. They all wanted their emcee back, but meanwhile, who was going to lighten things up for me?
“So my mom was a mess without my dad, and I felt bad for being away at school. My sister had started sleeping around at the age of twelve. You were spreading rumors that I led circle-jerks, and I was badgered by volunteers who wanted to join in. I was depressed and couldn’t concentrate on exams. All I got from my buddies was snap out of it. I was sick of the phone ringing in my hall and it was always for me. I was sick of people whispering and all their little theories about what made me tick. I was sick of brown-nosers who liked me a lot more than I liked them.
“This is going to sound a little out there, so cut me some slack. That ‘something missing’ you mentioned: it was all that crew wanted and it had nothing to do with me. It was some weird power that wasn’t to my credit because I didn’t invent it, and it was totally beyond my comprehension. I had no idea why if I said jump in the lake, you guys would jump in the lake. If you told me to jump, I wouldn’t do it. And I looked at myself, I saw a regular high school senior with problems, and you people saw, what—truth is, I have no idea what you saw. This gift, it was like a magic lantern. But it was also a curse.
“So I tossed it. I didn’t apply to Yale or Harvard, but Haverford. And at college I wore pastel button-downs and plain slacks. I didn’t talk in class and I didn’t go to keg parties. I stayed in my dorm room and studied. I was a bore and nobody ever talked about me behind my back any more than they’d mention the wallpaper.”
“And then you lost your hair.” Edgar was being undiplomatic again, but he almost wondered if Toby’s metallic locks had been yanked as punishment. The notion of willingly giving up whatever it was that Falconer had in high school was reprehensible.
“Like Samson.” Toby grinned. “I wonder if it’s just as well. Maybe it all came down to my hair to begin with, huh? My sister has the same coloring, and I swear that half her admirers only wanted to sink their fingers into that waist-long corn silk. Deborah got so pissed off with one guy that she cut it off and gave it to him in a box.”
“It wasn’t the hair.”
“I don’t even care. Whatever you guys were so hot for, I couldn’t see it myself. I’m sorry I called you ‘clingy.’ I don’t remember saying it, but I’m not surprised I did. Honestly, Kellogg, you did get to be a pain. You were always dogging me, but never wanted to really talk. That part of you that I was drawn to, that lost a hundred pounds in six months? That part never seemed to speak up. And on the one hand you acted so hard-ass, but on the other, you, I don’t know, seemed to idolize me or something. Made me feel creepy, like a fake. I’d no idea what you saw in me, what about me was so great.”
“I guess I did try to impress you,” Edgar admitted. “Maybe I tried too hard. But you had such style, Falconer.” Edgar couldn’t help the past tense. “It’s rare.”
“I may be kidding myself that I gave it up,” Toby mused. “It could have just got away from me.”
“I’ve watched out for your byline for years: from Belfast, Somalia, the Gulf War. I always pictured your life as exotic, edgy. One reason I quit law. Thought I’d join you.”
The confidence got out before Edgar realized that it sounded like more of the same: searching a dozen vintage clothing shops for a fifties baseball jacket, and the one that fit the best and had the coolest logo on the back just happened to be the same cardinal-red as Toby Falconer’s. Edgar’s biggest concern about his own character was that he wasn’t original. He didn’t know how to become original except by imitating other people who were.
“I do my job, and pretty well,” said Falconer. “It’s more ordinary than it seems, though. Like you said, to do with sentences—plodding, workaday. I am, anyway. I’m quiet. I’ve got to the point I don’t much like being on the road, and I’ve encouraged Guy to give the firefighting assignments to younger reporters who’re still hot to trot. I like going home to Linda, sourdough pretzels, and the Mets on TV. You put your finger on it: I’m sincere. I don’t have a lot of friends, but they’re real.”
Edgar raised his empty Amstel and clinked it against Falconer’s mug. “Just got yourself one more, then.” Edgar’s inability to complete the toast with a swig seemed apt. If idolatry made a poor basis for a friendship, pity wasn’t much of an improvement. Falconer seemed like a dead nice guy, and Edgar felt robbed.
“When you off to Barba?”
“Soon as I can pack.”
“Good luck with Saddler, anyway.”
“I don’t expect to have good or bad luck with Saddler,” Edgar protested. “He disappeared, remember? Abracadabra. Hell, the guy probably just fell in a ditch.”
“The likes of Saddler don’t just fall in ditches. Or if they do, there’s plenty more to the story, and nine times out of ten they crawl out again. I got a gut sense says the legendary Barrington belongs in your life.”
Edgar found himself obscurely cheered up. Much as he might resist the prospect of some bombastic and unaccountably fawned-over scoundrel bursting unannounced through his front door, suddenly he felt he had a future, and its vista widened into the big, big, big—big as life; bigger, even. As Falconer settled the bill at the bar, having waved off a half-heartedly proffered ten-spot, Edgar studied the plain, kindly face, searching its prematurely haggard lines scored by “three hyperactive kids and a depressive wife,” too many red-eyes out of Addis and tight connections in Rome. Though he thought he was scanning for some flicker of the sly, playful Adonis at whom he’d marveled at Yardley, Edgar recognized in his failure to see any resemblance at all that he didn’t want to see a resemblance.
Out on the street, they shook hands. Edgar clapped Toby’s shoulder for good measure. Neither made a feint toward meeting again. “Take care of yourself, Falconer.”
“You know, there didn’t used to be an airport in Cinzeiro, only a bus from Lisbon. Now there are two planes a day. Presumably to make it that much easier for the SOB to blow them up. Watch your back, Kellogg.”
Instead Edgar watched Toby Falconer’s. In no time the beige knit shirt and gray slacks blended with the bland attire of other pedestrians, helping to form the backdrop against which strange