“This seat taken? Look at you, drinking—what is that?—an old-fashioned. Dude, a few weeks in the city . . .”
Henry ordered the same, and they clinked glasses. “To us,” he said, then he lowered his voiced and added: “And to getting away with it.” He touched a knuckle to the wooden bar.
They spent the summer in each other’s company, developing a routine, meeting every evening after work for a cocktail at Jimmy’s Corner. Sometimes there were other people there—coworkers, college friends—but more often than not, they were alone. They usually had a martini, altering the ingredients on a nightly basis in a quest to discover the perfect concoction. After that initial cocktail they’d move on to other venues, other drinks. Henry had rules. “Always head downtown as the night progresses.” “Never have more than two drinks at any given bar.” “Don’t waste everyone’s time talking to girls before midnight.”
They’d break these rules, but not often.
Their nights together blurred into one long shimmering party. Henry made friends at every bar they frequented, yet he never abandoned Corbin. They’d always find one another toward the end of the night. Sometimes, of course, Henry would wind up going home with someone. But it was always a one-night stand, and never turned into anything serious. On one sweltering night in July, at a bar called Balcony, Henry left with a couple he’d met, an older man with a younger woman, and Corbin remembered the party in London when Henry had beckoned him into the bedroom. He wondered if there’d be another similar invitation, a night that would end with Henry and Corbin in bed together with the same woman. Corbin hadn’t been with anyone since Claire, and the thought of any kind of sex made his stomach buckle with a combination of anxiety and lust. But it never happened. Henry, for all his success with women, seemed, conversationally at least, uninterested in sex. He was, however, always interested in talking about murder.
When they were alone, they often recounted the story of what had happened with Claire, telling it in the same way that new lovers tell each other the story of how they met, going back and forth, remembering every detail.
“And then there was that look she gave you, dude, like you were some little boy who got talked into doing something he shouldn’t have done,” Henry would say.
“I remember that look very well.”
“She read you wrong, that’s for sure.”
The conversations made Corbin feel infinitely better, more at ease with what they had done. He still thought back with horror about what had transpired in that cemetery, but talking about it, especially in the way that Henry talked about it, well, it normalized it a little. They had been wronged, and they got their revenge. And now they’d gotten away with it. And that was the whole story.
“Think of all the men we’ve saved from Claire Brennan,” Henry liked to say.
“A lifetime’s worth. God knows how many.”
Toward the end of the summer, just before their senior years began, Corbin took Henry to his mother’s house in New Essex while his mother and his brother were touring Europe. They had the house to themselves for three warm days, punctuated by bouts of rain. They watched movies—thrillers, mostly, from the 1960s and ’70s—and because of the rain, had the beach to themselves, swimming in any weather, including a thunderstorm at dusk during a slack tide, the water frothing around them from the torrential downpour.
On their last night they watched Knife in the Water, then sat on the deck, drinking a bottle of Corbin’s mother’s expensive Bordeaux and sharing a joint. Henry said: “We should do it again.”
“Do what? Come back here? Sure, man, anytime.”
“No. I’m talking about Claire, and what we did to her. We should do it again someday.”
It was sunset, and the house cast a long, narrow shadow across the dunes and onto the flat of the beach. “The right person, though,” Corbin finally said, when he’d realized what exactly Henry was proposing.
“Fuck yeah, the right person.” Henry slid forward in his chair, pulling a Parliament from his pack and lighting it. “Someone like Claire. Someone who would get involved with two guys, with both of us, and think she was getting away with it. I was thinking about it with Anna this summer till I realized I couldn’t spend another moment with her. You could’ve hit on her some night, see what she would do—well, we know what she would do—and then we’d