It was the last week of October. David Sanborn and his wife Claire were driving away from Philadelphia on Route 1, heading out towards West Chester. The oldest son of David’s freshman year roommate from college, Walter Hummel, was getting married. The afternoon was cold and bright in the way days sometimes were in late autumn. Large clumps of brown and yellow leaves were heavy with day old rain along the side of the road. Numerous farmer’s markets were set up in the parking lots of shopping malls, selling their final produce of the year.

The wedding invitation had been slightly surprising. David and Walter had never been close friends. David had always said they were dissimilar people. Walter was a doctor, and had been for practically his whole life. But living with someone grew strange bonds. There were moments of vulnerable intimacy that simply could not be avoided.

David remembered one night quite particularly. It was in January, shortly after winter break. He had taken mushrooms with two of his friends and stayed up until four in the morning wandering around campus, eventually breaking into the university’s massive chapel through a side door. He and his friends, whose names he could no longer remember, had stood on the pulpit and pretended to preach. They ended up sitting Indian style around a small fountain in the midst of a spiral staircase in the chapel’s basement.

He had returned to his dorm and found Walter sitting as his desk, studying for a test the next morning. Walter rarely stayed up later than eleven. David, coming down from the mushrooms, was momentarily convinced he was going to die. He lay in bed, staring up at the stuccoed ceiling which danced like a sea in the depths of a storm. His fingers pulsed and fluctuated against the stark white of the stucco.

Walter turned off his desk light and climbed into bed. He breathed heavily, like a smoker, which he was.

“Walter,” David said. “I think I’m dying.”

“Why?”

“I took mushrooms. I know I’m dying right now.”

“You aren’t. Your stomach bleeds and you’re probably just coming down.”

“What if I’m dying?” David asked.

“You aren’t.”

They sat for a long while in silence. David was wide awake, and feared that Walter might have fallen asleep.

“How did your dad die, Walter?” David suddenly asked.

Walter did not answer for almost a minute.

“He had a heart attack, two weeks after Christmas. He survived, and they thought he was going to be fine. I remember visiting him in the hospital and he was sitting up, looking happy. We talked about the Phillies. He said we’d go to opening day, like we always did. He died the next morning from another heart attack.”

“I’m sorry,” David said.

“Thanks. But it was a long time ago. I didn’t know much about him, other than that he loved the Phillies. It didn’t change much when he died. Mom was still alone, still worked a lot. I still watched my brother and sister.”

After that, David and Walter talked more often before bed. They even went out and got drunk a few times. But they never became close in the way many friends would. They stayed in touch, partly because they were both from Philadelphia, and partly because David felt obligated to. He hated losing track of people, no matter how minor the connection.

When David received the invitation for the wedding in July, announcing that Walter’s eldest son, Shane, was getting married in West Chester, he called Walter immediately and said he’d be there.

“We won’t know anybody there,“ Claire had said one morning at breakfast.

“We’ll know Walter. And Martha.“

Martha was Walter’s wife who once got drunk off of champagne when the four of them went out for dinner (which they did every five years or so) and vomited in the parking lot of the restaurant they were at, all over the hood of David’s Honda Civic.

“Martha’s a drunk. And haven’t you always thought Walter was an asshole?”

“He’s an all right guy. He’s just tough to get through, sometimes.”

The ceremony started in the late afternoon and was in a small Lutheran church with dreary lighting and narrow, stained glass windows. David and Claire arrived relatively late, and ended up sitting alone in the final row of pews. The church was a little more than half full. Walter greeted them at the door nervously, unable to smile and looking like he might vomit.

“Martha is downstairs crying,” he said, his face looking haggard behind a grey beard. He was still thin, perhaps thanks to the smoking David thought, and his eyes were a dull, defensive blue.

“I’m sure it will be beautiful,” Claire said.

“There will be more people at the reception,” Walter said. “A lot of people wanted to watch the Penn State game.”

Martha cried audibly for most of the service. Walter sat upright beside her, resting his hand on the back of her neck. Thankfully, the service was short. The preacher, a short, young man with steely glasses, guided Shane and his wife, a tall, featureless blonde named Mary-Anne with narrow, bare shoulders, through their vows while Martha let out a snotty wail and Shane’s best man eyed up one of Mary-Anne’s bride’s maids.

The reception was at the country club Walter belonged to. A band, some of Shane’s balding friends from college, set up shop across the room from the bar and played poorly tuned renditions of old rock and blues songs. David and Claire sat at a table far back from the bride and groom, with the parents of the best man, who played drums in the band. They were a quiet, Presbyterian couple from central Pennsylvania who owned a soy farm. They did not drink, and didn’t talk much, either. When they went to the bathroom together, David remarked that they were the worst guests he’d ever sat with at a wedding. By then, he and Claire were both quite drunk.

The big moment of the wedding was when Shane joined the band for a song. He played tenor saxophone, and played some song David did not know while his new wife sat and cried when Shane played a long, raspy solo. He was out of practice, David thought to himself, and his transitions from higher notes to lower notes were rather rough. David’s father had played alto sax for his entire life, and had often taken David to bars where he would watch his father sit in with bands.

Later, after two more martinis, David and Claire danced without much abandon to “Old Time Rock and Roll,” “Night Moves,” and another song that sounded like Seger but that David could not name. He moved drunkenly, his knee aching (he’d had his third ACL surgery two years before after blowing it out in a pick up basketball game with his youngest son, Luke). Claire laughed repeatedly, and was as graceful as could be considering her arthritic feet. David felt nostalgic about something he could not quite place, and wished they had taken dancing lessons when they were younger. He always had a strange, sneaking fondness for dancing but had never gone about cultivating it. His body always moved more stiffly than he liked. He was bad at dancing, too, with no real sense of rhythm, but that didn’t much bother him. He was old enough to be comfortable with his embarrassing qualities.

Shortly before midnight, Walter found him sitting against a wall, watching Claire dance with one of Shane’s friends (his wife, despite her age, was still beautiful in a chiseled sort of way, her narrow face softened with wrinkles, and her brown eyes growing more incisive as her hair greyed. Her hips had grown in width, which gave her a sultriness she had not possessed in her youth).

“Do you smoke at all still?” Walter asked.

“I quit about ten years ago,” David said.

“Me, too. Want to have a cigarette?”

David smiled. “Sure.”

The night was cold in the kind of way that implied winter. It reminded David of watching high school football games. The sky was crystalline in its blackness. David had felt rather listless for the last month, with Luke finally out of the house and with Claire working more, but he was happy that the nights were growing colder. They felt nostalgic, too, and reminded David that he was not as old as he felt. He could still stay up late and walk in the cold.

“I’m glad you could make it,” Walter said.

“Me, too. It’s been fun.”

Walter nodded, and then looked out at the dark golf course. “I always kind of worried Shane was gay.”

David laughed. “What?”

“He never had many girlfriends when he was younger, and one of his friends seemed, I don’t know. Gay, I guess.”

David tried not to laugh again. “Well I’m glad he’s not?”

“Yeah,” Walter said, pausing for a long time. “Me, too.”

David thought of his own children, none of whom he had ever thought were gay. Matthew was living in Brooklyn with a smart Jewish woman named Samantha, who was seven years younger than him, and wanted to be a poet. She was round, in every sense of the word. David adored her. Matthew was struggling as a teacher at a mostly black school, and David often wondered why he didn’t move out to the suburbs. He occasionally worried about his son’s safety, and had always wished he had decided to write more, even if it meant he and Claire would have had to support him. He hoped that Samantha, with her poetic impulses and her wondrous chest, might convince him to begin writing again.

Christina was married to a man, Javy, from Puerto Rico who was getting his doctorate in religion at Rutgers, and worked at Border’s on weekends. He didn’t seem in much of a hurry to finish his doctorate, David thought. Christina and Javy had a son together, Castellano (after Javy’s grandfather, who had died for some cause David could not remember). Christina worked at a nursery school, the same one Castellano attended, and was thinking about being a teacher, too. She seemed blithely happy, reveling in the busyness of having a family. She invited her parents over once a month and cooked elaborate, four course meals that were never as good as she thought, although once she had cooked a brown sugar and lemon salmon so delicious, David wondered why all her food wasn‘t better. Her and Matthew had stayed close.

Luke was a freshman at Temple. He was studying photography, a decision his mother had tried to dissuade him from - “You’ll be poor, you know. You’ll have to marry a working woman, like your father.” - She was half joking, but really did worry he was choosing an impractical career. David had wholly supported him, and even bought him a new camera as a graduation gift, unbeknownst to Claire. Luke and David had bought season tickets together for Temple’s basketball team, and David found himself more excited about the start of the season than almost anything else.

“I guess I’m just happy Martha got to see this. She’s had a bit of a rough go around with things, and this means a lot to her,” Walter said, bringing David back. Martha had been in a rehab facility the winter before for her drinking, and was inside, tanked off her ass. David had seen her crying outside of the bathroom.

“How are you doing, Walter?” David asked. “You seem off.”

Walter smiled, and sipped the scotch he was holding. “We’re old, aren’t we, David?”

David laughed. “In some ways, sure. I don‘t move as well as I once did out there.”

“You never moved well.”

Again, David laughed. “Probably not.”

Walter smiled sadly, smoke coming out of his narrow nostrils. “I don’t feel I’ve loved anyone in a long time,” Walter said. “I mean, I love my family. But not in a way that moves me.”

David looked down at Walter‘s shoes, which were scuffed up from the rocks of the parking lot and had turned a dusty white. “I think I understand that,” he said.

“What more is there to life than being moved by the newness of love, right?” Walter asked.

“Sure, I guess. There’s a lot to life, Walter.”

“But isn’t all the good stuff as simple as feeling love? I feel I’ve wasted a lot of time not loving enough people, not falling in love as much as I should have.”

David thought about what Walter said for a moment, took a harsh drag of his cigarette, and wondered about the hangover he would have in the morning, and if he was sober enough to drive home. “I’m sorry to hear that.”

Walter faked a smile. “I’m glad you’re here, David. Again. Thank you for coming.”

“Of course, Walter. Thank you for inviting me.”

Walter threw his half smoked cigarette to the ground and extended his hand. David took it, and squeezed tightly. Then, Walter nodded and turned around to head back inside to his son’s wedding. David finished his cigarette alone, and then went in and sat back down on the floor, smiling while he watched his wife hike up her skirt and wipe her brow with a napkin. He imagined making love to her in the bathroom, something they had once done at a friend’s wedding when they were in their twenties, before they were married themselves. Perhaps they were getting old.


David Sanborn is driving home on Route 1. The road is narrow despite its four divided lanes, and curves lasciviously over the hills southwest of Philadelphia. It rises and falls, carving its way through the shedding oak and elm trees. David is still drunk, and drives slowly, gently weaving between the two lanes. There are very few other cars out.

Claire may be asleep beside him. Her feet are curled up under her, and her chair is reclined. Her head is leant back against the frosted window. Her eyes look closed, but David cannot tell.

He is thinking about Walter and his sadness, his lack of love. He wonders if he, too, has not loved as broadly as perhaps he should have. But it is difficult to think of things that have passed him by in concrete terms. There were probably women he could have loved that he did not. Perhaps even men, too. But he does not know who they are, or what they would have been like to love. He smiles thinking of Claire’s relatively new hips, and the new found roundness of her varicose thighs.

Route 1 climbs a steep hill, and David slows as he passes a police car. He checks his rear view mirror to make sure the cop does not follow him. It doesn’t. The road banks to the right at the crest of the hill, passing under an old railroad bridge. Distantly, in the clearness of the night, David can see the lights of Philadelphia. It’s a small, blot of light, but David can make out the icy white glow of the Comcast Center, and the triangular spires of Liberty One and Two.

He remembers being nineteen and driving home from college for the first time. There was a young woman with him, his girlfriend at the time, Anna Lensky. She was a poet and wore thick rimmed glasses that she would throw off during sex, dramatically and much to David’s joy. On the drive home from Indiana, she had stayed awake with him through the night, having never seen Philadelphia before (she was from Chicago), and had laughed when she saw the skyline in the distance, still glowing against the mute colors of the morning sky.

“That’s it?” she had said.

David had smiled, and kissed her.

“Well, it’s not Chicago,” she had said. They’d broken up that next summer, when David met Claire, without Anna ever coming back to Philadelphia. They had stayed friends though, even after David married Claire. He even went to one of her readings one summer in Chicago, which he had never told Claire. He and Anna were never again lovers, though perhaps they could have been. She had died four summers earlier. He had not seen her in almost a decade.

He thinks now that maybe she would not have died were they together. He doesn’t know this for sure, but perhaps it’s possible. Maybe they would have been making love in the shower together, and he would have reached around to feel her breasts and might have felt a lump, something not ordinary about her chest. Of course, maybe they would not have been making love at all after all those years. He tries to remember what she looked like undressed, but cannot. He remembers only words he’d once ascribed to her: pert, long, delicate.

The road begins to descend into a small valley. The city disappears into the black silhouettes of the trees. The lights of the car bounce gently on the road ahead. Suddenly, a deer bounds over the median, directly into David’s path. He slams on the brakes, the car screeching in exertion. The deer jolts with a shock, looking at the car in terror, frozen. David sits on the horn, and the deer unfreezes and, at the last moment, skips away, narrowly avoiding the hood of David’s car.

David’s heart pounds violently, awoken with rare vigor. He stays on the brakes and sits in the middle of the road, unmoving. Claire stirs beside him, and is now sitting upright, leaning forward.

“What was that?” she asks groggily.

“A deer,” David says.

“Hm.”

“Did you see it?”

“No,” she says.

“It looked terrified,” David says.

“Well,” she says airily, nuzzling back into her seat and closing her eyes, “thankfully he got away, right?”

“Yeah,” David says. His hands have begun to steady, though his heart is still thudding in his chest, rattling his ears. He eases off the brakes, looking past Claire into the woods, thinking he might see the deer again. He looks for a long time. There is nothing there, however. It, too, has disappeared into the night.