Page 1 of Thoughts Left Unsaid
Thoughts Left Unsaid
I sat on a bar stool near The Agora’s only pool table, one hand gripping the thin end of a pool cue, its base on the floor. I was meeting my friend Phil to watch a baseball game and have a few beers, maybe play some pool. I looked absentmindedly at a TV mounted high on the wall as the Red Sox took the field for the start of the first inning. I wasn’t paying close attention; I had something else on my mind, a secret I had been harboring for many months, a secret I wanted to tell Phil, though I knew I shouldn’t.
“Phil! Over here!” I hollered across the bar after seeing my friend walk through the door.
A few of the patrons looked at me as if I’d yelled out in the middle of a church service. The Agora’s that kind of place. More of a lounge than a bar, it’s dimly lit with tall ceilings and an eclectic décor, featuring modern art on the walls and an ornate marble fireplace. Dirty jazz or blues bleeds from the speakers, but never so loudly that you have to raise your voice to have a conversation. A lot of the traffic The Agora gets comes from the nearby colleges. It’s common to see law or grad students and their professors having informal discussions while sipping dark-colored pints. Phil and I started coming here when he was teaching in the math department at one of the colleges, though he’s since moved to the private sector. We liked the place, or at least we were used to it, so we kept coming.
Phil wound his way through the maze of tables and joined me at the pool table sequestered in the back of the place.
“Hey, David. How you doing?” Phil removed his jacket and hung it on a coat hook on the wall.
“Can’t complain. You’re looking good, rested. Maine treat you well?”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” He took a deep breath and expanded his chest, as if he were inhaling the fresh air of a beautiful morning, a reminiscence of his recent vacation swelling inside him.
“What’s this?” I knitted my eyebrows in overstated curiosity and approached him, patting his distended stomach that had heretofore conformed to his beanstalk frame. “Time catches up with all things, eh Phil?”
He laughed, partially at my jest, partially because he had tensed up at my sudden approach, unsure of my intentions, caught off guard by the physical contact. The laughter helped diffuse his constricted muscles.
That’s how Phil’s always been. Not necessarily a tense guy, but rigid, reticent. The first time I met Phil he stumbled into my dorm room drunk, and after several minutes of incoherent rambling vomited all over my floor. I passed him several times in the hallway after that, but despite my approaches, my attempts to make light of the situation, he never said much. My initial thought was that he was peculiar, if not a bit of a jerk. It wasn’t until the next semester that I actually got to know him. We were in the same chemistry class and had been selected to work together on a group assignment. His reserved and serious demeanor had put me off at first. I guess I had always been more the gregarious type, a kidder, someone who, though having been a resolute student and later a successful entrepreneur, didn’t take myself too seriously. But I soon found that when Phil has something to wrap his mind around, he can be as engaging as anyone. One thing led to another and there we were, still friends twenty years later.
“There was this one restaurant,” Phil said, explaining his added heft. “The Crab Shack, it’s called. The best clam cakes I’ve ever had. We must have eaten there four or five times. I gained six pounds that week.”
I whistled in acknowledgement of the hefty number. “It’s about time your metabolism started acting its age and stopped making the rest of us look so bad.” I rubbed my own voluminous girth which, for me, had started to take shape around my sophomore year in college.
I hadn’t seen Phil in several months. We usually got together for golf or racquetball or to grab a beer at least once every couple of weeks. But Phil had been having marital problems. He didn’t come right out and tell me, but he hinted at it, made indirect references while looking uncomfortably at his shoes. Phil’s not one to discuss sensitive, personal issues. It took some prodding, but I finally extracted a few details.
He told me about the distance that had grown between him and his wife, about the disconnect that, try as he might, he just couldn’t figure out. It was discomfiting watching him struggle to come up with a reason for why it was happening, to deduce a solution that would make everything all right. Phil’s problem, and this was what I told him, was that he analyzed everything like a goddamn math problem, like there were definite rules and principles to be followed. If he did A, and his wife did B, then they should arrive at C. It would be nice if things were that easy, I said, that if we did as we thought we should, everything would be okay. Unfortunately it doesn’t work that way. The best you can do is pay attention to how you feel and hope for the best.
“Any score yet?” Phil asked while closely examining the pool cues.
“Just started.”
“Who’s pitching? Wakefield?”
“Yup. Means they probably won’t score any runs.”
“He’s seventeenth in the league in ERA,” Phil said, “and has only two wins.”
“Terrible run support.”
“Two point six nine per nine innings.”
Phil the mathematician. He knew the numbers, the data. It could be interesting having a knowledgeable guy like him around. The details make life interesting, and Phil was good with details. But I wondered, at times, what it was like to live with him. Wouldn’t it get dull? I think Phil’s a great guy, but when he told me things weren’t going so well at home, I wasn’t that surprised. As if I’d been expecting to hear it.
We played a leisurely game of pool, occasionally stopping to watch the Sox or talk about baseball, work, or other random bits of information extracted from our lives. I guess I took a little of my own advice that afternoon, because I intended to tell Phil about an affair I’d recently had. Sixteen years as a faithful husband to a beautiful and intelligent woman, two lovely children, a family life that, for all intents and purposes, was as rewarding as I’d hoped for, and I had come within one blood test of abandoning it all. My wife still doesn’t know. And there was no logical reason to tell Phil. Nothing good could come of telling him, but somehow I couldn’t help myself. I felt compelled.