The Last Good Night by Emily Listfield Page A

though,” he said. “I read it in the magazine article. A girl, was it?” he asked.
    â€œYes.”
    â€œThat must be nice for you.”
    I nodded. I’d been drinking quickly, nervously, and I felt the wine begin to form a hazy scrim across my mind. I played with the edges of my large linen napkin, staring at Jack’s hands resting on the table, his long, thin fingers knobbier, more callused now.
    â€œTell me about Flagerty,” I said. “Has it changed much?”
    He laughed. I had forgotten his laugh. “Sure. One step forward, two steps back. We lost the store, you know.”
    â€œI didn’t know. I’m sorry.”
    He shrugged. “Back taxes.”
    â€œWhat do you do for a living?”
    â€œWell, I obviously couldn’t practice law,” he said dryly.
    I winced. It had been his dream once. When we first met,just after the Vietnam war and Watergate, Jack had a great burning optimism, an overriding belief in using the law to correct all the injustices that he took so personally. All that righteousness had given him a certain nobility that seemed so wounded now, by age, by events, by me.
    â€œThere was a small inheritance,” he said. “And I draw.”
    â€œYou draw?”
    â€œFor the paper. You know, editorial cartoons, caricatures of local events, stuff like that.”
    â€œI didn’t know you could draw.”
    â€œNeither did I.” He paused, inclining his face to me. “Do you want to know how I discovered it, this wonderful talent of mine?”
    â€œSure.”
    â€œDrawing you.”
    I looked at him curiously.
    â€œThat first year away, when I began to realize you wouldn’t come back, I started to draw you over and over again. So I wouldn’t forget what you looked like.” He stopped and, looking down, he pulled out his scuffed leather wallet and opened it up. Slowly, carefully, he extricated a small pencil drawing, the paper thin and cracking, its creases worn almost into oblivion. He looked at it once and then handed it to me.
    It was me, exactly me at sixteen, my long dark wild hair, my scared and insolent eyes. My throat caught. They were strangers both, the man across from me, the girl in the picture, strangers and yet not, and for a moment I was lost in the dark vertiginous tunnel between the past and present.
    I looked slowly back to him. “Oh, Jack.”
    With a single motion, he took the drawing back from me, tenderly folded it, and replaced it in his wallet.
    â€œDo you remember the boat we had, how we used to get splinters every time we sat in it?” he asked.
    I took another sip of wine. “We were kids,” I said. “Just kids.”
    â€œNo one ever truly changes. Not really.”
    I said nothing.
    Our food came and we began to eat. I looked up at Jack, at once so familiar and so new, twirling his angel hair pasta, taking the fork into his mouth, swallowing. “That’s what you eat for lunch?” he asked.
    I looked down at my plate of steamed baby vegetables, my standard fare, and wanted to disown them, their glazed primary colors, their preciousness.
    Jack leaned across the table suddenly. “I couldn’t believe you would just vanish like that,” he said in a pained voice. “We could have explained what happened. If you’d stayed.”
    â€œI’m sorry.”
    â€œSo you said.”
    â€œI mean it.”
    He looked at me closely to gauge my expression.
    â€œJack, I know I can’t make up for what I did. But if there’s anything I can do for you, anything I can do to help you…”
    â€œHelp me?” he asked. “I don’t need your help. Is that why you think I came here?”
    â€œNo,” I admitted.
    For a few minutes we ate in silence and then we both stopped, stopped the pretense of it.
    â€œHave you ever been to New York before?” I asked.
    â€œNo. I don’t travel much. Funny, the way things