"You don't have to tell me anything, Ezra," said Jared. "Nothing I don't already know."

"You know," began Ezra, "I loved her." He paused. "Once."

Jared nodded. "Nothin' I don't already know."

"Did you? You didn't! About what?"

"Oh, I knew. About you and Larissa."

"No!"

"Of course."

"Since when did you know?"

"Since college."

Ezra stammered. "It can't be. Since then? No. But you said nothing!"

"What was there to say?"

"Some word perhapsa"

"What for?"

This stumped Ezra.

"Honestly, what for?" Jared repeated. "What was, was. It was a long time ago, it was before she and I got together. It was over and done with. It was fine."

"But how could you never have said anything?"

"It amused me. Had I felt threatened, I would've said something. But, see, I thought I knew her. I felt safe with her. And we were all friends. I thought you knowing that I knew might make you more awkward with me."

"I had asked Larissa if she ever told you and she said no."

Jared nodded. "That was true. She never told me. Now that I think about it, I find that peculiar, don't you? Like another sign I missed. She knew how to keep secrets. But I knew anyway, Ezra. When you looked at her, it was so obvious. You used to look at her with a longing that I used to look at her with. Not easy to hide."

"Wow, dude."

"It's okay. It's all good."

"We were such good friends."

"Yes. I loved that. The four of us were always close."

"I didn't know, Jared. Believe me. If I knew I would've said something."

Now it was Jared's turn to pause. "Would you?" he said. "Like what? And to who? To me? To her?"

"She was always happy with you. You were the one she was meant to be with." Ezra looked into his beer gla.s.s. "For a while this b.u.mmed me out, years ago. That you were the one she was meant to be with, not me."

"Believe me when I say this, man, but how I wish to G.o.d I weren't the one she was meant to be with."

They both sort of laughed, except Ezra less, and this amused an intoxicated Jared. Was Ezra thinking that perhaps Larissa might have stayed had she chosen differently back in college? "Funny, how our preconceptions become misconceptions," Jared said. "Had you seen that I wasn't the one she was meant to be with, you might've seen the other thing in her."

"The thing we all missed?"

"Yes." Jared looked away to the blue light shining down on the bright gla.s.s bottles of top-shelf liquor. Her mother hadn't missed it. Which is why Larissa wanted nothing to do with her. "You missed it because you looked at an illusion. You saw the crystal gla.s.s from the outside. How were you to know that inside the flute was empty?"

They both agreed there was no way to know. "I can't believe you knew about me and her."

"You couldn't hide yourself, Ezra. Not like she could hide herself. You loved her back then. It showed. Everybody knew."

Ezra was quiet. "Not everybody. Not Maggie."

"No." Jared didn't want to say that Maggie just didn't want to look. Like he didn't want to look. "Maggie is the greatest. I don't need to remind you that your wife is still with you."

"I'm sorry, man."

It seemed like Ezra was crying dried-up tears, dry-heaving and moist of face, but it was hard to know because Jared couldn't look at him. "Me, too, Ez. Hey, did you catch the Queen retrospective on MTV last weekend? It was quite good, but the whole two hours was worth a split second of Freddie Mercury's face at one point toward the end. He was singing in his last ever video performance, and the song was *These Are the Days of Our Lives.' And in this video, Mercury is like Skeletor. He can barely move, and when he does it's in slow motion. He is heavily made up to disguise the unmistakable fact that he is this close to Deatha"and knows it. And so like this, gaunt, eaten away by illness, he stands, barely moving, and sings. *You can't turn back the tide,' and then he stares into the camera and whispers, *Ain't that a shame.' And in his eyes you see his life, and his regret and his imminent death, and how much he wishes he had lived differently then so he could live a little longer now. If you blink, the moment is gonea"like many things, but that blink is how I feel. I wish I could go back to the days before, when I thought I was happy. Just one roller-coaster ride, one more week in that walk-up in Hoboken, us broke, diluting milk, and yeta"

"Dude, it wasn't one thing," said Ezra. "There's no one moment you can go back to and say, if only I did this differently. Besides, you're looking at it all wrong." Ezra turned to Jared on the bar stool, his liquid eyes animated. "It wasn't up to you! Her leaving was not your choice and it's the one thing you can't undo, you can't fix. But you can now look at your life in two ways. You can look at all that had been taken away from youa"and that's what you have been doing. Or you can look at the great many things you still have."

"Ezra," said Jared. "Haven't you noticed? I vacillate wildly between both."

"I know, man," Ezra said, subsiding, putting his hands on Jared's shoulders. "Me, too."

Another hour went by. Or two. Was it closing time? What if Maria was asleep? A cab was in order. They'd never been out that late. They had moved to a corner of the bar, to a table.

"I picked her, Ez," Jared said. "I was in love with another girl before her, a real wild child, but I never slept at night. Yvonne was not the girl to give anyone peace."

"What about when she wasn't with you?"

"Especially," Jared replied, "when she wasn't with me."

"Ah."

"Larissa, on the other hand, had everything except the thing that made me nuts inside, and I mean that in a good way. She was goofy, she was funny, she had interests, she was smart. She was beautiful."

"Yes," said Ezra, and the way he said it, Jared didn't know if he was saying yes to the last thing or to everything.

"But the main thing was, I looked at her and saw a life with her. I thought we could build something together that would stand."

"And you did."

Jared was contemplating.

"You wish you'd stuck it out with wild Yvonne?" said Ezra. "I knew Yvonne. She walked around campus with no underwear, and when she thought someone behind her might not know it, she would pitch forward to pickup something off the sidewalk. Just so that they would know it."

Jared nudged Ezra. "This is spoken from experience?"

"The bitterest kind."

Jared laughed drunkenly. "Wasn't she swell? In hindsight, she seems so charming and adorable."

Ezra laughed. "Does it make you feel better to think about her?"

"I dunno. Wonder what she's doing now."

"She's a flight attendant."

Jared stared at Ezra in surprise. "You speak from experience?"

Ezra nodded solemnly. "The bitterest kind."

Now Jared gaped. "Don't tell me she's kept her wanton ways."

"Okay, I won't tell you."

"G.o.d, Ezra! That could've been my wife! And Larissa could've been yours."

"I'm not sure," confessed a tearful Ezra, falling down, falling down, "that I would say no to that, even knowing what I know now."

I had once hoped it was me you saw when you were alone in the daylight, Jared had wanted to say to Larissa, but it was too late.

It wasn't him she saw. The rest was moot.

It all went up like a dream, and suddenly living became like sleeping. Your heart is raw, and somewhere inside it still hurts a little bit, but all the details have gone, all the memories banished in the plural from the singular of your soul, and sometimes you still reach, reach for her heart, your fingers stretch to remember what you dreamed about, the thing that's forever gone. But you can't. After grasping at the nebulous half-images, you rise, and you dress, and you go about your present day.

At the moment life no longer feels like ether. And it doesn't feel like a dream either. Jared's feet are firmly planted on the ground. His eyes are open. He is realistic, pragmatic, practical. He knows he is blessed with much. And if a part of him remains closed, that's the price he pays for drinking his half-empty cup with grace.

Sometimes he wishes he could keep the memory of her alive, remember her better. Sometimes he wishes he hadn't thrown out all her photos, in an act of Neanderthal fury, burned and cut and excised all photos of her from their life. Sometimes he wishes he had saved at least the wedding photo. She was a different person then. He was a different person then.

Sometimes he wishes he could feel that clarifying hate againa"for anything. He has mellowed. Nothing fazes Jared nowadays. Nothing can.

He remembers often Kavanagh's words to him, the ones that have stood the test of the merciless river called Time. She cannot give you what she doesn't have.

That had been almost comforting. Almost as if the carefully wrought destruction was out of Larissa's hands. Almost as if it was nothing more than a casual demolition of the things he believed to be true.

Excepta When Jared went through Larissa's things, he found a poem she had written, buried thoughtfully underneath the sheath of careless papers, a poem undated, untyped, written in her long and flowing, precise and elegant hand, t.i.tled "Runaway Child."

I'm a runaway child.

Jump for joy. Full moon. Summertime. Falling into snow.

Our song, our wedding song.

Marry me you sang

champagne on your lips.

Bon Voyage, a calm day.

It's traveling day.

The shooting stars have popped the air

out of my hot balloon, and I floated, hair down.

Heart up.