Widow's Dozen. Marek Waldorf

      We first met during the winter of my sophomore year. My college roommate, a new recruit to the then-burgeoning Church of Christ, had invited me to join him and his born-again cohorts on a few weekend runs to Greek Peak near the Cortlands. It was a package deal, and a good enough one, I figured, to make allowances for the company I’d be keeping. For some reason, Aaron joined us on the second trip. He was riding shotgun, and he was doing everything in his power to make a bad impression—which he did, on me. The Church of Christers were going out of their way to show how unflappable they were. He talked a lot of puerile blasphemy. Failing to get a rise, he started in with his sexual hang-ups. It was like a one-man Truth or Dare session, and I can’t remember who repelled me more, this petty maestro of needling and put-upon resentment, or his hosts for not chucking him out of the car.

      Our paths crossed again several months later, at a party. To my surprise, he remembered me—just not my name. I feigned ignorance, then amnesia. It wasn’t long before I realized that he had nobody else to converse with, and since I was in the same boat (abandoned by my date), I decided to stick it out with him for a while. I had to admit he was more of a character than I’d given him credit for.

      He was also older than most of us, by about five years. He wanted to make me understand that his association with the Church of Christ had been entirely opportunistic—he’d been writing an exposé on them for Pipe Dream, Harpur’s weekly paper—and while not outright implausible, something in the story or his telling of it tilted me toward disbelief. Aaron had a habit of inventing complexities where none were needed. A ferociously dignified liar. Besides, around the time of Aaron’s purported tenure, I’d “comped” for the paper—unsuccessfully, in fact—and would have remembered him. Later, for that reason or a different one, I hinted that he was full of shit. He pretended he himself couldn’t be needled.

      “Exactly what part of the country did you say you’re from?”

      * * *

      Not too long into law school, the same place as I’d gone undergrad, I saw I had made a terrible mistake. Out of what I thought was a lack of options, I’d chosen a career I had neither the aptitude nor the inclination for. The “law” of course can be made to cover many interests. Friends and family advised me to identify a niche. I tried corporate, criminal, taxes, torts and international before I made housing my area, not because it was the most interesting, but it seemed the easiest to coast through. It was around this time that I started running into Aaron more often. The third or fourth time, it occurred to me that these encounters might not be the product of chance.

      So this was where our friendship began, queasily but in earnest. Since I lived near his job and was rarely out, he would drop by after work, in the early evening, and wind up staying late. We watched a lot of TV together, during which Aaron kept up a running sarcastic commentary—I’ve never met anybody with such a mania for attaching points to things. He left his background sketchy: mother dead (his mixed-up guilt and sorrow were “unimaginable”) and “an egregious lump” of a dad, whom he never saw anymore and swore he’d kill, obviously hyperbolizing, if he did.

      He could fall into free-form, all-out rants, whatever set him off. And though sometimes it was entertaining, mainly I wished I’d had a stun-gun handy. Then when life knocked him around a little more, he learned to control himself, and, where there had once been angry outbursts, there now came these protracted, sour silences. And I would make a point of testing the artillery, so to speak, to see if it would sputter out or like to explode. Sputter, usually . . .

      “Very funny,” he might grumble. “Maybe you should wear a special hat, you know, like for humor.” Like a native New Yorker, he pronounced it yumor. “That’s very yumorous,” he might say, for instance, definitively. Watching him fail to rise to the bait or fail to dignify some exceeding stupidity of mine with a response, I would feel strange surges of affection for Aaron, because that’s where I wanted our friendship to be, not quite at the end of something but near enough to the end so that speech was no better than an irritant. It wasn’t like you knew what the other person was going to say, no, you owned it. The various personal revelations I turned a deaf ear to, of course. One day—this would be in New York now—I met up with him at the Zinc Bar (it was near the office), and was shocked