Dream State: Oprah's Book Club: A Novel

Now, double-fisted, Garrett felt a stirring of warmth toward these old friends he barely knew anymore. A comforting pity too. They were like children, children who had children.

warming was a hoax—or at least a symptom of “catastrophic thinking.” Only when Garrett was in the field like this, exhausted from trap checks, did his brain get up to its old tricks; even then it was just a glimpse, like the flash of a monster’s tail.

But Brig had outdone them all, dressed as a businessman caught in a storm. His umbrella had been turned inside out, exposing its ribs, and he’d shellacked his hair so that it looked like it was gusting back; even his tie was sticking up in the air, molded to seem like it was blowing over one shoulder. He staggered around, hunched and bandy-legged,

He had no desire to go to a bachelor party, Charlie’s or anybody else’s, but he knew from past experience that reneging on the basic requirements of friendship was a slippery slope.

So why, driving home from the airport, had they struggled a bit to make conversation? They’d kissed, yes, and had said I missed you to each other, but then a murky drizzle of embarrassment seemed to descend upon them, as if they had to live up to the momentousness of the occasion. For the first time in his life, Charlie felt a brush of terror that

Maybe marriage was like that. Gradually you renamed the world and created a new one, one only you could enter. You turned flowers into money, took the lullaby of unexciting days and called it happiness.

How he’d missed her those three weeks of living alone! In LA, doing his rounds in the cardiac care unit, he’d conceived a vision of her that was impossible to live up to, according her a gorgeousness that did full justice to his love. Sometimes it was all that kept him from having a nervous breakdown. The night before his flight, he’d faced what th

Charlie had said Garrett was having a bit of a hard time—what that meant exactly, Cece wasn’t sure, except that in guy-talk “a bit of a hard time” generally meant something much worse. It meant depression or addiction or both.

He has on a tie-dye shirt, not because he likes the Grateful Dead but because he found one in the mothbally dresser in his room and it reminds him of being sixteen, the last time he felt this happy.