Andrew Pyper - The Guardians

But Carl was restless. For him, female affection was something to gorge on, swiftly and roughly, then leave behind without clearing his plate. His habit was to break up with his girlfriends without teling them, refusing to return their cals or meet their eyes in the school halways. Unlike Randy, Carl made girls cry.

Ben, on the other hand, mostly did without. Not that there weren't sideways opportunities offered to him. Quieter girls, too studious or artsy to attract more aggressive attention. Instead, they made themselves available to Ben (in camouflaged ways), and he went about his business. And what was Ben's business? Living in his head. Reading dragon and time-travel novels. He wrote poetry. Stranger stil, he read poetry.

But what Ben did more than anything else was watch. Our backup goalie, folowing the play from the bench like a shoulder-padded Buddha. A silhouette in his attic bedroom, staring at the house across from his.

Of the four of us, I was the "married man." Funny to think how true this was at the time. And how, for the more than twenty years since I last saw Sarah Mulgrave, I've been about as far from married as a man can get.

The obvious explanation for this would be the Thurman house. It messed al of us up in different ways.

Addiction. Professional failure. Emotional amputations. For me, it was never being able to love—or be loved by—a woman again.

Personaly, I favour an even more sentimental explanation: Sarah was meant to be mine. And the wound I am to bear is to have had her taken from me.

Even today, I whisper "Sarah Mulgrave" and she is with me. A wrinkled nose when she laughed. Hair the colour of a new penny. A mouth that articulated as much when listening as when speaking: sharply etched, blushed lips, amused creases at the corners. And green eyes. Lovely in their colour but lovelier in what they promised.

Sarah came to al the Guardians games, and though this earned her inclusion among the "puck bunnies" who fawned over Carl and the older guys on the team, the fact is she had little interest in sports. She would never have shown up to sit at the top of the stands, clutching a hot chocolate beneath the maniacal, hockey- stick-munching beaver of the Akins Lumber bilboard, were it not to shout for number 12. Me.

Afterward, if my dad wasn't using the car, I would drive her home. The last of the wood-paneled Buick wagons. Hideous but handy. Because on those evenings we would take a spin out of town. Spook ourselves by switching the headlights off and flying over the night roads. Knowing that no harm could come to us because we were young —not children anymore, but stil immune to what grimly went by the name of the Real World. The car hurtling into darkness. A foreplay of screams.

We would slow only once we passed the "Welcome to the Vilage of Harmony" sign. Park in an orchard of black walnut trees. The pulsing silence of a kiled engine.

It was often cold out. But the shared heat of our skin fought off the chil until we lay side by side, our breath visible exclamations against the windows. My dad would take measurements of the gas he left in the tank, so in heating the car, we had to weigh the risk of discovery against the fear of frostbite. The result was sporadic, short hits of warmth from the front vents. To avoid getting up and baring my ass to those who might drive by, I learned to turn the keys in the ignition with my toes.

Sarah's dad was friendly but strict. He liked me, and was even prepared to look the other way when his daughter was returned home an hour past curfew, her cheeks flushed, smeling faintly of cherry brandy. But the unspoken deal between us was that he was permitting these liberties on the condition that, sooner rather than later, I would propose to Sarah. He married Sarah's mom when they were both only a couple of years older than we were then. Teen weddings in Grimshaw were far from uncommon. Many kids knew what their professional lives were going to be by that time, the house they would one day inherit. What was the point in waiting?

It was a plan I was happy to entertain myself. I had no sense, as Carl and Randy had (and maybe Ben too, though who could tel?), that we were too young to judge who was right for us, that more sophisticated, realized women awaited us in our post-Grimshaw lives. There was nothing I could imagine wanting beyond Sarah anyway. I would marry her, just as her father wished. Why not? Sarah and I would look out for each other and let our lives, long and benign, wash over us.

And I would give my right arm (for what it's shakily worth) to know how that life would have turned out. Sarah could have waitressed, I could have found work on a construction crew or factory floor. We would have had our own apartment, something on the second floor over a shoe store or laundromat, the bedroom in the back.

Just the two of us (the three? the four?), getting along fine without a coach or Heather Langham or friends I felt I should be ready to die for. Without a Thurman house.

For that, go ahead. Take both arms.

[4]

My room smels of ammonia and wet dog.

I'm on the top floor—the third—of the Queen's Hotel. A brick cube whose one gesture toward grandeur, a tin cupola over the corner suite, had over the decades been painted with coats of blue and yelow and green that wouldn't stick, so that these days it appears psychedelicaly polka-dotted. Other than a couple of motels on the edge of town—the inexplicably international Swiss Cottage and Golden Gate—the Queen's is the only place to stay in Grimshaw. For this reason alone, it enjoyed a reputation for fanciness that was never deserved. Though there were sporadic efforts to renovate its rooms or hire a "French chef" to pour sherry and cream over the menu, eventualy the Queen's always returned to its fatigued self

I open the window that looks out over Ontario Street and breathe. Grimshaw is a farming town, and in the summer and fal there is always a breeze carrying the perfume of cow manure to remind you of the fact. Not to mention the afternoon traffic of eighteen-wheelers hauling livestock to slaughter. Pig snouts and cattle tails and chicken feathers poking through the slats of passing trailers. As a kid, I felt that only the pigs knew what was coming. Watching them now, the pink nostrils flaring, I feel the same thing.

I lie down on the bed for a time. I must have, because when there's a knock at the door, that's where I am.

"Who is it?"

"Wayne Gretzky. Team Canada needs you, son."

I open the door and Randy is standing there. And while I am almost light-headed with happiness to see him, I have, at first, an even more overwhelming thought.

Good God, you look old .

And then, after a glimpse of ourselves in the hal mirror: We both do. The indoor skin, the lines of shoulder and chin grown soft. Randy and I look as though some internal dimmer switch has been lowered, puling us into partial shadow.

What the hell happened ?

The worst part is we know the answer.

The project of Being a Man had shifted with overnight suddenness, so that we awakened one morning with the hungover certainty that something was wrong. Al the things we had been working for, what we had managed to achieve, now required maintenance. For most it is a home, a family. For Randy, an acting career limited to bit parts and commercials. For me, it was Retox, the girlfriend with a bar code tattooed on her inner thigh. Whatever it was, it would prove to be too much. Some of it was bound to slip away. It had been slipping away.

But here Randy and I are together again. Overdressed and middle-aged, improbably standing in a bare room of the Queen's Hotel like actors in a Beckett play who've forgotten their lines.

You too .