Complaints

People complained that, when Chuck and I were together, there might as well have been nobody else in the room. We were a pair, not a couple, but we laughed all the time. When I got married again, even Rich, who came upon Chuck and me as we were deep in conversation at Live Bait, felt uneasy, backing away. Later I asked him what had happened, why had he left?

“I felt like an intruder,” my husband said.

“You’re my darling,” I said, but I knew what he meant.

“So what was it,” I ask Chuck now, “that made us such good friends so fast?” I expect him to say that we laughed at the same things, or disliked the same people, or loved the same two lines out of a three-hundred-page manuscript.

“Neither of us had any ambition,” he answers.

I open my beat-up American Heritage Dictionary. “ ‘Ambition’ comes from the Latin, meaning ‘seeking votes,’ ” I tell him.

“So it has always been political,” he says.

“Oh my god,” I say, “exactly! That explains everything!”