Feldman had a ping-pong table in the finished basement of his house, and he and Larry played hours and hours of ping-pong together. Feldman didn't remember those long games as competitions so much as their being in tandem, as if they were a doubles team, though each was playing on different sides of the table. Their rallies could run to sixty or seventy shots. In ping-pong as in life, they knew each other's moves, all of them, or so Feldman thought. Elaine's claim to have slept with Larry made him think otherwise. 

Feldman went to the University of Wisconsin, Larry to Illinois. Spring vacation of their junior year fell on the same week, and Larry proposed they take a tour of the great cat-houses of the Middle West. And so they did: beginning in Danville, moving on to Kankakee, Terre Haute, Steubenville, and Covington, in Kentucky. They drove Feldman's mother's Chevy Bel Air. What Feldman chiefly remembers of the trip is endless laughter. Once, outside Youngstown, Ohio, they were laughing so hard the Chevy went off the road and into a ditch. 

After college Larry went to work for an uncle in the cardboard box business. The uncle had no children, and the plan was that someday he, Larry, would take over the business, a lucrative one. The plan went up in flames when, a few years later, the uncle, a widower, remarried a strong-willed woman with two sons, whom his uncle brought into the business, leaving Larry odd man out. Around this time Larry's marriage, to a girl he went to high school with named Marilyn Rothman, fell apart. 

Larry's life was a shambles. He was working in a dead-end job and had just departed, at some cost, a childless and hopeless marriage. After his divorce, he began putting in lots of time at Rush Street bars, dedicating himself to the woman chase. He would sometimes show up for dinner at Feldman's house in Wilmette with a stewardess or nurse in tow. He was by then in his mid-thirties, rather late for such antics. Elaine, strangely enough, used to make fun of him, at least to Feldman. His defence of his old friend was that he was going through tough times and would right himself soon enough. 

Feldman had gone to law school, at DePaul, and at the time of his divorce was working for a small firm in The Loop called Horowitz, Friedman & Simon. He would eventually go out on his own, doing estate planning, real-estate, and all-purpose law for individual clients. He made a decent living, but less than a killing. So when, in their early forties, Larry came to Feldman to borrow twenty grand, it was not an insignificant sum. Feldman came up with the money, and didn't ask him what he needed it for; nor did Larry volunteer to tell him. Feldman's suspicion was gambling debts.