Feldman replayed over and over Larry's and his meetings during the past year or so of his marriage, in the hope of registering any change in his friend's behaviour in Feldman's company. Surely something would have been notice-able. Feldman felt fairly certain that he himself could not have kept his cool dining with someone with whose wife he had been having sex; but then he, Feldman, had never had sex with another man's wife. 

Larry had been single for roughly fifteen years. He had had a disastrous first marriage, which he entered into at twenty-three and which lasted less than two years. No children came from the marriage, and the only effect on Larry of this marriage that Feldman could make out was a permanently low view of women. "In the end they're all in business for themselves," he remembered Larry telling him. When Feldman reported his own divorce to his old friend, Larry said that he was sorry for the girls, Diane and Miriam, but not for him. "You'll be happier on your own," he said. "Believe me."

Larry Goodman and Allan Feldman first met when they were eleven. Feldman's family had moved from Albany Park to Rogers Park, and, luck of the alphabetical draw, F coming before G, in class Allan Feldman sat in front of Larry Goodman. At that first morning's recess, Larry introduced Feldman to his friends, and the two of them walked home together after school; they lived only a block apart. 

From the very beginning there was nothing the two of them couldn't talk about: sports, girls, their vague ambitions. Larry was a kid with no meanness, no malice, to him. Feldman remembered Larry once telling him that he thought he couldn't bring himself to hit another boy in the face. Feldman thought it the statement of a boy with a good heart, especially since at the time he felt he himself would have no difficulty in doing so, and often fantasised about doing it. Of course, Larry said nothing about kicking a guy in the nuts — which, in sleeping with Elaine, if he did, is what Larry had done to Feldman. 

In their friendship Larry and Feldman never asked much of each other, certainly not through their boyhood years. Nor did Feldman recall their burdening each other with their troubles.