We Should Not Be Friends by Will Schwalbe

Author:Will Schwalbe [Schwalbe, Will]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2023-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

As Maxey continued to talk about Omeros, Singer and I both stood quietly, listening to him, and looking out at the stillest water I had ever seen create an ocean. I was certain that Singer was going to stop him, make fun of him, or just ask if we could go back to the house and finally have a beer. But Singer didn’t. Maxey talked about the conch shell’s invocation and discussed the light that gave the fisherman Achille happiness, the same light right before us. He talked about the way Walcott wrote about wounds and afflictions.

I suspected this was a talk he gave to the students to introduce them to the poem that meant so much to him, but I also felt that it was important to him to share these works with us during our time with him; Maxey was clearly wounded in some way and wanted me to know, even if he wasn’t ready to talk about it directly.

Finally, Maxey stopped talking and just stared at the ocean. There we were, three friends on the wrong side of forty, with our eyes fixed on the horizon, which was growing harder and harder to see as the sun was melting behind us.

“Let me show you one more thing,” Maxey said. He took us down to the boats to point out one that was named Dave and Di. When that letter came from Maxey those years before, Singer and his wife, Diana, had sent a check—and now had a boat named after them. I was even more sorry than before that I had waited so long to send a check or give my friend support of any kind when he was building the school of his dreams.

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