PART 1 — THE CHAIR
Gil and I were best friends from seventeen.
Not boyfriend and girlfriend. Just Gil and Roz.
He went out with other girls. I went to prom with Dermot Nash, who was perfectly nice. Everybody in Belmire told us we would work it out eventually and we laughed at them, because losing it was more frightening than whatever the other thing was.
One night in the summer we were nineteen, after two spectacularly bad dates, we sat under the bleachers at the school field with a bag of chips.
“If we’re both single at sixty,” he said, and put his little finger out, “we stop being idiots and we find each other.”
“Deal.”
Two months after that he went to college three states away.
We wrote constantly and then a lot and then less.
And by the time I had worked out what I actually was about that man, Gil Hartigan was telling me about a girl in his year.
