One Last Thing Before I Go

and ice-skating and karate and Gap Kids and private school and speech therapy and tutoring and after-school programs and health insurance. Standing in the lobby, you can feel the building vibrating with the collected agitation of desperate men living in a constant state of subdued panic, in a permanent frazzle, avoiding bank statements, selling off dwindling assets, knowing that they can only keep this colossal mess aloft for so long before the whole thing comes crashing down in a miasma of courtroom vitriol and bankruptcy.
    And so the men of the Versailles
,
brothers in disgrace, reach out to one another in the invisible ways that men do, and small, fragile friendships of convenience form like desert moss. They bitch and moan to sympathetic ears, preaching to the choir about the courts, the antiquated laws, the goddamn fucking lawyers, and this new, enforced, seemingly insurmountable poverty in which they have all landed. And when they aren’t bitching, they try like hell to believe that this isn’t a permanent state of affairs, that they can and will find love again, that they won’t die alone, that they will have some version of sex in the near future. But in the meantime, they will mope, drink to excess, and stare at women of an inappropriate age, searching for the silver lining, wondering when the perks will finally kick in.
    * * *
    Which brings us back to the college girls.
    “I mean, just look at them, would you,” Jack says.
    Jack is handsome in a manner that allows him to get away with this unabashed leering. He is tall and slim, built for shirtless lounging, with dark, wiry hair and the dimpled chin of a superhero. He and Silver had been casual acquaintances in their old lives, part of a loosely associated ring of husbands and fathers connected less by genuine friendship than by the friendship of their wives. And now they are connected by their absence. No one was happier about Silver’s divorce than Jack, who practically did a jig right there in the lobby when he took up residence in the Versailles.
    “You look at them,” Oliver grumbles from beneath the crumpled baseball cap resting on his face. “I’m napping here.”
    Oliver is in his late fifties, tall and beefy with loosening skin, tired eyes, and an ocean of whiskey under his belt. He is one of the few men who doesn’t have to live there; he is rich enough to live anywhere, really, but he likes the camaraderie. He has been married—count ’em—three times, has grown children who don’t speak to him, grandchildren he has never met. Oliver is fourteen years older than Silver, and Jack is an oversexed misogynist, but somehow, in a way he couldn’t retrace if he tried, they have wordlessly become a unit.
    And here they lie, every day baking in the sun: Jack, long and lean, only now beginning to lose some of the definition in his abs and chest. Silver, thickened everywhere, like an aging baseball pitcher, and then Oliver, long gone to seed, his sagging beer gut rounding him out into something vaguely pear-shaped. Jack and Oliver are like Before and After pictures, and he is the softening middle stage, the moment it all went wrong.
    “Sure, there’s the obvious,” Jack says, ignoring Oliver. “The anatomical advantages go without saying. But go deeper. Look at their eyes, the way they move, the way they laugh. They’re brimming with this . . . unspoiled sexuality. They still love men. They’re at least a thousand fucks away from the bitter, cynical women they all eventually become.”
    “Or one night with you.”
    “Ah, fuck you, Oliver.”
    “They’re kind of young for you, aren’t they?” Silver says.
    “Fuck no,” Jack says. “Who do you think is going to gratify these girls, college boys? Think back to when you were twenty. Sure, you were a walking hard-on, but were you any good? Did you really know how to please a woman? Did you even care to? No, all you knew was where to stick it, and nine out of ten times, you were finished before she’d even gotten started.”
    Silver thinks of a girl, he can’t remember her name, lying beneath him in the sweaty confines of her cramped dorm single, her wide eyes looking up at him with unrestrained desire, and he feels something he’s become accustomed to lately, a dull, humming grief for all the things he can never get back.
    “Forget what you think you know.” Jack is gathering momentum now, which is never a good thing. “These are not the girls you and I went to college with.