Free Amateurs by Dylan Hicks Page A

started flipping unobservantly through the fabric samples. “The one I have in mind’s right in front,” John said.
    Archer held up the card. “Seems just like my current suit.”
    â€œWell, but it’s a much lighter shade.” John’s Moleskin contained many comprehensive and maybe only subtly differentiated lists of his dream wardrobe. It killed him that Archer wore the same bluesuit year-round to weddings, funerals, and charity functions, the same one he’d worn for graduation.
    â€œYeah, I don’t see the difference,” Archer said.
    â€œIn sunlight you would.”
    â€œI’m not gonna wear it to the beach.”
    â€œEven in artificial light, though, if we did a side by side.” John had been an authority on style and grooming long before he had the testifying closet, and in college he had sometimes played the valet. Archer arrived in Cambridge just barely able to tie a four-in-hand and with no knowledge of the half Windsor, a more complementary knot for his widish face. Surprising ignorance, it seemed to John, or, as Archer joked, “Engels-level class treachery.” John laughed at that, not quite getting it, then stood behind Archer in front of the cloudy mirror John had hung in their suite’s common room, guiding Archer’s long-fingered hands through the steps of three essential knots. “Lighter weight too,” John said now. “Nine seriously airy ounces. We could have this made just in time for spring.”
    Archer brushed threads off his jeans.
    â€œI noticed last time that your current suit’s getting awful shiny at the elbows,” John said.
    â€œLends character.”
    â€œThat comes from dry-cleaning and pressing it overoften. Really a suit shouldn’t need more than a natural-bristle clothes brush like the one I gave you and occasional sessions in a steamy bathroom. Resort to the cleaners—I still like Jeeves on Madison—only if the suit’s been dirtied beyond the hopes of at-home spot-cleaning.”
    â€œGot it.”
    â€œWhich I can help you with, man. Just come over sometime; I’ll run you through it.”
    Archer decided to hold off on the suit, left instead with a cashmere robe for his stepfather. He was a great one for unoccasioned gifts. Over the years he had given John a pair of vintage cuff links, amonogrammed flask, a mandolin (a challenge for John’s fat fingers, but still). On his way out of the store, Archer proposed a jogging date for the unspecified future. It seemed to John—not always, but it sometimes seemed to John that Archer was trying to maintain their friendship in the most efficient way possible, often building plans around mundane things he was going to do anyway. But then, maybe that two-birds-one-stone approach had always held sway; maybe in the past Archer would have gone from restaurant to gallery to bar to party whether John was with him or not. It hadn’t felt that way, though; it had felt as if the barhopping and what all were secondary to their togetherness, even if it was agreed—established, you could say, by Archer—that they would abandon each other on the arrival of what Archer called “sex-type potentialities.”
    Not heaps of those arrived for John, who had little aptitude for bar chat and assumed that all lack-love sex started with dishonesty and led to heartbreak. Mostly he and Archer stuck together, talked about movies and Archer’s travels and their mutual friends; sometimes they touched on spiritual matters in a chill way that made John feel deeply understood. These days, a jog’s spare, panting conversation met their needs, or Archer’s, and even when they had more to say, the extra words only stressed what was missing. Or worse, what had never been there, like with the italicized words in the King James Bible: what often seems like random emphasis is actually the translators’ honesty, their way of pointing