Some of Feldman's and Larry's old intimacy leached away, as is perhaps normal over the long haul of years, even with close friends. They phoned each other less. Their lunches were more infrequent. Two or three months would pass without their seeing each other. They made it a point to go to at least one Bears game and one Cubs game every year. They still saw each other five or six times a year alone. More and more they now met at the funerals of old friends and acquaintances. 

When together they mostly talked about the old days. Sometimes they shifted into what Feldman called "crank", which was to compare the way people live today with the way they did when they were growing up, and finding the latter, inevitably, much better. Talking crank, they agreed, can only be done with contemporaries, lest one sound, quite literally, a crank among the young. But when alone together they gave way to it, with much pleasure. 

They talked a lot about the kids they grew up with and what time and fate had done to them: the great athlete who died young of colon cancer, the nebbish who ended up a billionaire, the dazzlingly beautiful girl who turned out to be bi-polar and ended her life by suicide in her early fifties. 

Feldman thought less and less about the probability of Larry's sleeping with Elaine. Meetings between them would go by without his thinking of it at all. Then something would trigger it. One day, sitting in their regular seats at Wrigley Field, Larry told Feldman that the last time he took his then ninety-one-year-old father to a Cubs game, the old man asked him who this new pitcher Gotteratti was. Larry hadn't the faintest idea; then he looked up at the scoreboard and saw in neon letters the words, Gatorade Pitching Change. "That's very amusing," Feldman said, and suddenly found himself thinking about Larry sleeping with Elaine, and the rest of the afternoon was shot.