Saturday morning I'm up at 5 am and will do just what I had planned to do, clear brush in the back yard, burn a whole lot of it and take the rest to the landfill. I work hard at it and it's good for me, cleansing. Sublimation or whatever it might be. I see Anna peek out the window a few times, but I never acknowledge her. Just before noon I go back inside and walk past her into the bathroom. I'll do exactly what I had planned. I have a date with Roger at his house, some lunch, a few drinks, some chat. He's a good friend. Get my mind off things.
Roger Williamson is my neighbor three doors down, a rather weird guy I'm happy to call one of my best friends. He and his beautiful wife Claire bought their place about a year before Anna and I came to our leafy suburban retreat. That was three summers ago. The four of us bonded right away, almost inevitably since they were so nice to us and were the only neighbors about our ages. Anna and Claire hit it off like a couple of long lost sisters, girl stuff like fashion and hair, and more serious stuff like politics and the economy since they're both so smart.
My wife and I could see that Roger was almost as eccentric as his wife was beautiful, so he was a bit more of a lift. It took me a couple of months with him to see beyond the goofiness, but since then we've become quite close. He's one of the genuine good guys, sweet natured, considerate and giving. The kind of guy you trust instinctively. The man certainly isn't perfect, but he has the biggest heart of anyone I've ever met.
One thing about old Roger, though, he is the kind that talks a lot, like a real lot, like a really real lot. He can drive you nuts with his talk. And not just a lot of it, sometimes it's just plain weird talk, like I can't figure out what he's talking about. Sometimes it's off-key weird, like did he just say that? Sometimes it's these funny non-sequiturs that made you laugh. Sometimes it's him mixing up words. He does that a lot. It all made me wonder how he functioned as a lawyer until one day he explained that his job was mostly churning out boilerplate legal documents from his home office.
I may have loved Roger from the start, but I often wondered if he was playing with a full deck. He is, I suppose, a major doofus when you get right down to it, pretty much all the time but especially when anything out of the ordinary occurs. That's when he gets nervous and excited. That's when the talk comes out bubbling and babbling fast. Sometimes it's weirdly funny, other times it's just weird. So, a doofus, but a lovable doofus. He has always been there for me and Anna, always a good, loyal buddy, a good man, a good heart, a good friend and a good husband to Claire.
When he called me two nights earlier and suggested a Saturday lunch on his patio I agreed right away. We hadn't spent much time together lately, he seems so busy.
That was before Anna dropped napalm on me. Now the question is: Do I unburden myself on the poor dope? Do I pretend everything is normal? The idea of pouring out my heart to him has real attraction. I was so hurt. Would I get advice? Probably. But Roger, for all his goodness, might not be the best guy in the world to get advice from. (From whom to get advice? Anna would know.) Likely he'd chew my ear off even more than usual, just babble a lot and whirl his arms around to show how seriously he took the problem. I hadn't a clue where to go with Anna's news, or whether even to accept her apology. Do I leave her? (Impossible.)
As I walk down the three doors to his home, I think to myself: No, it's too soon, I wouldn't know how to begin to tell him and I'm in no mood for ten million words of meaningless advice. Why ruin his afternoon with my problem? Why ruin mine? So no. Maybe someday when I get my own head straight, but not today.
Roger greets me with a hug and a slap on the back. He gives me a drink and we sit out on his beautifully shaded patio. Claire seems not to be around, which is a shame since it's always a pleasure to get a look at her. The conversation begins fast and light and breezy. What this one did at work, this whacky divorce he's working on, what this one said, this funny joke he had to tell three times before landing the punch line. (See there's like this minister, a priest and a rabbi and they're...) But it's easy to see that underneath the chatter Roger is nervous about something. He looks tense. Some of his laughter is forced. He even, on this beautiful and mild day, has to wipe his brow a few times as we sit with shish-kabob.
I'm just about to ask if he's OK. Maybe he was reading my face for some cue because just then he jumps in both feet first.
"Hey Bill, listen. Let me go serious here for like two secs, OK?"
"Sure Roger. I was..."
"Listen, my friend, I know this is none of my business, really none at all, like totally none of my business, but..."
Something no guy wants to hear from another guy.
"...but there's something, something serious, I gotta talk to you about."
If he hadn't seemed so nervous, and if it hadn't been for the "none of my business" I would have found it amusing. Roger is the kind of guy he has something he needs to talk about seriously it might be the best tires for a midsize SUV, or do I like his new socks, are they too much? But that "none of his business"? That was strange. I held back and waited.
"See," he went on, "thing is, to be totally up front about it, I know, old sport,..."
That's another thing about Roger. He has these little affectations. Today apparently we're going club-English. Other days he might be French or Spanish.
"...I know that there's some...heavy stuff...," he nods sympathetically, "...really heavy, heavy, heavy stuff...going down right now at home, going down with you and Anna."
