Equal Love by Peter Ho Davies

Author:Peter Ho Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Equal Love

DIXON WAS MAKING COFFEE, listening to the spit and splutter of the percolator, waiting for his best friend’s wife to come downstairs. That sounded bad, he thought, but he tried to remind himself that nothing bad, nothing terrible, nothing irretrievable had happened yet. He looked out the kitchen window, down the long garden into the trees beyond. It was March, spring break, and his best friend and his best friend’s wife had come to visit for the first time in almost two years. They’d come east for a cultural anthropology conference in the city—a series of mediocre panels on rites of passage, according to the best friend—then driven up to Dixon’s place in rural Maine for a couple of days.

Dixon had cotton mouth. They’d drunk two bottles of wine the night before, mostly him and his best friend’s wife. Dixon’s own wife had a class this morning—they both taught at the local state college, she English, he psychology—so she’d turned in early, and his best friend never drank much. His wife—the best friend’s—liked to tell a story of him throwing up on their first date, explaining how he lacked the enzymes to break down alcohol. “She makes me sound dickless,” the best friend complained mildly. “Someone has to drive,” he added—an old line—although no one had had to drive last night. It slightly annoyed Dixon, his friend’s reticence with drink, the way he would sip at a glass of red for hours, finally get bored, and dump it into his wife’s glass. The driving thing was a joke, but not just a joke. The best friend gave off this aura of readiness, as if he were raring to take someone to the hospital, the all-night pharmacy, the airport. As if he and not they were ready for disaster, the designated cool head. “Driving, remember?” the best friend said with a smile when Dixon offered him another, and the best friend’s wife pretended she held an imaginary steering wheel in her hands. “Driving,” she mimicked, crossing her hands, making the sound of screeching tires. “Driving where?” And the best friend said dramatically, “Who knows?” as if nothing could surprise him, nothing could catch him off guard. And in fact many years before, the best friend had been the only one sober enough to take Dixon’s daughter to the emergency room when she woke up late one night with an acute ear infection.

Dixon poured wine for himself and an almost brimful glass for his best friend’s wife to kill the bottle. Dixon had known his best friend since college, but they’d barely been acquaintances then. It was only when they’d met again in graduate school, each part of an established couple, that they’d become close, become each other’s first adult friends (so they’d congratulated themselves), learned to measure their relationships and then their marriages against each other’s. Dixon wondered how long his best friend had irritated him, and if he’d be his best friend if, in fact, Dixon had any other friends at all.

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