May We Be Forgiven

doesn’t get distracted by his “boss” in a skirt. I shift my weight and look down below; suddenly my testicles are trapped under the harness, which has slipped. It’s excruciating, and now I’m almost dancing, trying to address the situation.
    “What are you doing?” Nate screams.
    I hug the wall, use both hands, and adjust accordingly.
    I notice some men have special climbing shoes on—I’ve got George’s fucking slip-ons. One falls off, bouncing against the wall, tumbling to the floor.
    “I can throw it back up to you,” Nate says.
    “Never mind,” I say, pushing higher, my sock foot slipping.
    “Is this Dad’s shoe?” Nate shouts up to me.
    “Yes,” I call down.
    “Weird.”
    I turn and focus on the wall. Fuck, yes, I tell myself as I fight my way to the top.
    And guess what’s there? A goddamned GOLDEN EGG. I’m not joking: there’s a golden egg, a porcelain fucking piggy bank at the top. The problem is—how do you bring it down? How do you carry something fragile when you need both hands and feet? I stuff it down my pants. Hung like a horse, fucking the golden egg, I rappel down. Nate is at the bottom with tears in his eyes, and I’ve got no option other than to unzip my pants, extract the egg, and give it to him—a kind of offering. He’s hugging me and crying. I taste victory and sweat and think this is amazing. For one shining moment I am HIGH!

    T wenty minutes later, my head is throbbing. I’m walking like a broken cowboy and I have a distinct absence of sensation in three fingers. When I sit on the toilet I can barely get up. I ask Nate if he’s got any Tylenol, and he says I should go see the school nurse.
    “Forget it,” I grouch, and we head back into the main building for afternoon sherry and cheese cubes.
    I drink too much—honestly, drinking any sherry constitutes drinking too much. The headache is getting worse.
    “Have a Coke,” Nate suggests, and he’s right.
    I have two Cokes and a half-pound of cheese, and show off my medal to anyone who will listen to the story of my stroke and miraculous recovery.
    “What now?” I ask as the cocktail hour winds down.
    “We go to dinner at the Ravaged Fowl,” Nate says, as though it’s obvious. “You made the reservation?”
    I look blank.
    “We always go there, but you have to have a reservation.” The way he says it, there is no way out, it’s definitive.
    “Not a problem,” I say. “All taken care of.”
    From the stall of the men’s bathroom I call the Ravaged Fowl; there’s a embarrassing echo.
    “Sold out,” the woman says. “Fully booked. No tables until Monday.”
    I don’t tell Nate—some things are best addressed in person—but as we’re heading there, my already fragile constitution is taking on a kind of anticipatory stress, wondering what is going to happen.
    We arrive, I play dumb, I give the hostess our name. “Let me check,” the girl says. I get nervous. “We have a reservation. Every year we come here. How many years now?” I turn to Nate.
    “Four,” the boy says, looking at his shoes.
    “For the last four years we’ve been coming here, this same day every year. I always make the reservation.” I become indignant. The girl doesn’t care. She is busy answering the phone; I talk right over her: “I thought we could rely on you.” She holds her finger up, as if putting me on hold—my voice is getting louder. My mood turns.
    “Your face looks like Dad’s,” Nate says.
    “Always, or just right now?”
    “Right now,” he says.
    “I’m in a lousy mood.”
    “Do you want to leave me here? You can go deal with your headache, I’ll join another table.”
    “That’s not an option,” I say. “Can’t I be in a bad mood for a minute? It’s a lot for me.” I can’t begin to explain how or why, but the opulence, the success, the beauty of this bright and shining day is getting me down. It has all been so wonderful that it’s made me sick—I can’t tell Nate and his buddies that the threat, the creeping encroachment of their youthful, excellent promising future, is for me a giant fucking depressant.
    “Yeah, sure, whatever,” he says, and I feel him retreat, vacate, leaving an empty shell.
    The hostess hangs up the phone and walks away. I am tempted to chase after her—you can’t walk away from me, you can’t leave me standing there, having made a fool of myself in front of the kid.
    My anger is intense. Without speaking, I am tearing her apart, surprised at the