How to Talk to a Widower

up and down, mostly down.
I can wipe the floor with you, you little prick.
    “Pretty good,” I said.
You might have won the handshake, but I’m sleeping with your ex-wife. Do the math, big guy.
    “So, you all moved in?”
To my goddamn house?
    “Pretty much.”
You snooze, you lose.
    “Well, maybe now you can fix it up a little.”
You look like you wouldn’t know a power tool if I shoved one up your scrawny ass.
    “I’m not really the handy type.”
Maybe if you paid your child support every once in a while, Hailey would be able to afford some basic repairs. Fucking deadbeat.
    “Must be some adjustment, having to live with a kid like this.”
My kid, motherfucker. So you just watch yourself.
    “Oh, I don’t mind.”
A small price to pay for sleeping with your ex-wife. Did I mention that I’m sleeping with your ex-wife? I am. Frequently. Repeatedly. Constantly. Everything else is just what I do when I’m not having sex with her.
    “He’s a great kid.”
Stay the fuck away from him.
    “I know.”
No thanks to you, you pube-shaving freak.
    “So, I hear you’re a writer?”
Fag
. “What sorts of stuff?”
    “Magazine writing, mostly.”
Like you even read.
    “Oh.”
Broke fag
.
    We stared across the gulf at each other, smiling like macho idiots. If we had antlers they’d be locked; if we were in high school, he would be tripping me in the cafeteria and stepping on my head.

    Two long-haired girls in tight, low-riding jeans and bared midriffs walk past us, and Jim momentarily cranes his neck to watch them from behind as they walk toward the back of the bar. The place is crowded, but Jim has managed to snag a table off to one side, taking the seat up against the wall so that he can watch the passing parade of ass while we talk. I’d offered on the phone to come see him in his office, but he was already finished for the day, and told me to meet him here at Clover, which I’m sensing now is a regular after-work hangout of his. I don’t know if he thought it would make for a friendlier meeting, or he just likes to look at the college girls who seem to make up about eighty percent of the bar’s clientele, but I figured a little lubrication could only help, which is why I got here early and laid down a primary coat of two Jack and Cokes at the bar before he showed up. And now here I am, floating on my minor buzz and sharing a pitcher with Jim, who ogles the girls while drumming his fingers on the table to Gwen Stefani on the jukebox. I haven’t seen Jim in some time, and I’m at that early, sharp stage of drunkenness, where all of your senses are heightened and you see everything in high definition, so I find myself doing a quick visual reconnaissance. He’s dressed in khakis and a short-sleeve polo shirt that strains equally against his large biceps and his impressive gut, which kind of cancel each other out. His hair, once dark and thick, is starting to gray on the sides and show more forehead, and the flesh under his eyes is gray and puckered like an orange peel. His once ruddy complexion has become soft and doughy, the incipient jowls just beginning to soften his square, superhero jaw. Still, he manages to look healthy and handsome, like a retired football player just beginning to go to pot.
    Jim looks away from the girls and sizes me up thoughtfully, a salesman mentally choosing the right pitch. “You and I have never really hit it off,” he says.
    “I guess not.”
    “And if you think about it, there was really only one reason for that.”
    Because you’re a colossal asshole?
“How do you figure?”
    Jim nods and takes a sip of his beer. “Hailey,” he says. “It was a sticky situation. She was your wife and my ex. I don’t doubt that she gave you an earful about me, and you would have been biased before you ever met me.”
    “If it makes you feel any better,” I say, “I probably wouldn’t have liked you very much anyway.”
    Jim studies my face, trying to calibrate his own level of antagonism against mine, and then chuckles lightly. “Nice.”
Little shit.
    This is what inevitably happens when Jim and I are forced to approximate cordiality. Jim hates me because he takes it personally that Hailey loved me, even though that happened after they were through, and I take it personally that Jim cheated on Hailey, even though it happened long before I was in the picture. The chronology should nullify or at least temper our instinctive hostility, but we have penises, Jim and I, and