I usually park somewhere near Northwest Eleventh and Glisan and walk up Eleventh toward Couch, entering Powell’s at the corner the way you enter a city that has been quietly assembling itself for decades, room by room and stairwell by stairwell and shelf by shelf, without ever asking to be mapped, and I am almost always late, a habit so old it feels less like a failure of punctuality than something hereditary, some defect carried faithfully through the blood, and by the time I push through the doors the others are usually already somewhere inside, though first there is that familiar alteration in the air, the faint must of paper and glue and dust and time, the low murmur of voices softened by shelves, the calm of a place containing millions of words and somehow asking almost nothing of you, and I feel myself slow even while I am hurrying, because Powell’s does not care about the phone in my pocket or the meeting that ran long or whatever small emergency seemed important fifteen minutes earlier, and I cut through the rooms I know now by color and feel, up and down the shallow stairs and through the narrow aisles I have followed hundreds of times before, until I arrive where I almost always arrive, in the Blue Room, where fiction waits in careful alphabetical order, dependable and democratic and gloriously indifferent to whether any of us ever gets around to reading all the books we swear someday we will.
I go straight to the H’s.
Hemingway first, mostly because I have known him longer, because there was a time when his writing spoke to something in the younger man I was, and I slide the spines partway out and feel their weight in my hand and turn over dust jackets and open copyright pages as though examining birth certificates, looking for something early, something worn, something that has survived, and eventually I make my way to Brian Doyle, my favorite now, because the things I need from writing have changed as I have changed, as a husband and then a father and then whatever combination of things I have become since, and I look for inscriptions and signatures and underlinings, some small evidence that the book had a life before mine. I have always preferred used hardbacks to new paperbacks for precisely this reason, because a used book arrives carrying more than its sentences, carrying the time of other rooms and other hands and other lives, a name written carefully on the first page, a date, a birthday wish, a coffee stain, a corner folded down by someone who stopped there twenty years ago and perhaps never returned, and I love that a book can belong completely to you while retaining evidence that it once belonged completely to somebody else.
Tony almost always arrives before me.
He moves through the shelves the way a man might wander a cathedral in Dublin with no particular intention of praying and find himself doing it anyway, lifting books to sample their first paragraphs, carrying one for a while before exchanging it for another, eventually settling onto a quiet bench behind a pillar in the Gold Room or somewhere near the coffee-shop windows facing Burnside, and Tony has always possessed that rare and occasionally dangerous ability to be merciless and generous in the same breath, to say something sharp enough to make you laugh before you realize it has also landed somewhere uncomfortably close to the truth, and I listen carefully when he speaks because, infuriatingly, lovingly, he is often right.
We began long before any of this, before Powell’s and the Blue Room and marriages and children, on soccer fields in McMinnville where the grass was patchy and unevenly cut and bare dirt showed through in the places worn thin by repetition, playing on teams with names like the X-Men and the Wolverines while Tony’s dad called instructions from the sideline, correcting us and encouraging us and believing in us a little more than the standings suggested he should. We were good, Tony was great, but never so good that we could forget where we came from, traveling to play teams from places that seemed bigger and wealthier and better equipped, learning without knowing we were learning it that there was dignity in trying hard anyway, and years later, when I transferred to Tony’s high school, finding ourselves walking the same hallways as juniors, I remembered him fondly from those soccer fields, and he welcomed me into the remarkable circle he had already found in Elliot, Chris, and Scott, boys who made room for me with the easy generosity of rides home and shared Encounters, small kindnesses I understood better years later than I ever could have then, until one day, I looked around, and I was already inside.
That is one of the mercies of certain friendships. They survive stretches of silence without interpreting the silence as abandonment.
The book club came later, after marriages, after jobs and mortgages and adulthood had begun demanding calendars and reasons to see the people you once saw simply because they were there, and it was Tony’s idea, offered casually, that we meet at Powell’s and choose a book and read the same thing and then come back and talk about it, giving ourselves, though I do not think either of us understood this at the time, not merely something to read but a reason to return.
We only had two rules: neither of us could have read the book before. And only the two of us were invited.
No half-remembered college reading. No favorites smuggled in under the guise of recommendation. No exceptions. We wanted the first encounter, the honest reaction, the possibility of arriving at something together without one of us already knowing the road. Whoever chose bought the books. Whoever had chosen the previous book paid for dinner and chose where we would eat, always somewhere we could walk to from Powell’s.
The first was Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, and perhaps there is something fitting about the fact that this long friendship-within-a-friendship began with a novel about a small circle of people bound together by books and the dangerous intensity of belonging, though ours, thankfully, has involved considerably less murder and considerably more fried chicken. After the stacks, we would walk somewhere nearby, Oven and Shaker often enough that it became part of the geography of these nights, walking in that direction without mentioning it and just ending up there, walking up the narrow sloped ramp, and then sitting beside one another at the bar or near the window, letting the conversation become loud and ridiculous and full of laughter and profanity and the intimate relief of sitting beside someone who knew you before you had acquired most of the things you now use to explain yourself.
And then, during one of those early years when the book club still belonged only to the two of us, we read Karl Ove Knausgård’s My Struggle: Book Two.
Tony had just become a father.
His daughter had arrived and rearranged him completely, and he was exhausted in a way that had almost nothing to do with sleep, stunned and cracked open by a love he had not known was possible, while Nicole was eight months pregnant with Benjamin and I was living in that strange suspended country before the birth of your first child, when devotion is already present but has not yet acquired a face, when there is a crib and there are clothes small enough to fit a person who has not yet entered the room and there are appointments and names and plans and everyone keeps telling you that your life is about to change as though this were useful information, as though the word change could contain what was coming.
And there we were reading Knausgård, two men at slightly different points on the same road, one of us already holding his daughter and the other waiting to hold his son.
The book moved beside us during those weeks as a companion, because it was trying to name things we were already struggling to name ourselves, the confusion and terror and monotony and awe of fatherhood, the strange disappearance of the self and the simultaneous discovery of another self underneath it, the fact that love could be immediate and absolute and still coexist with exhaustion and doubt and irritation and fear, and Tony talked about the hospital and about his daughter and about the way his heart had not merely stretched but seemed to have split open and doubled, somehow making room where there had been no room before, and I listened to him with the intensity of a man studying a map to a country he was about to move to, because beneath all my excitement there was fear, quiet but persistent, that I would not be enough, that fatherhood would ask for something I did not know how to give, that I might confuse pressure with care because pressure had once been confused with care for me, and here was my friend only a few months ahead, exhausted and astonished, telling me that whatever I thought was coming was both harder and more beautiful than I understood.
I do not remember every book we have read.
I remember that one.
Maybe that is because books sometimes find us at the precise moment when our lives have made room for them, and afterward it becomes difficult to separate the words from the person you were when you encountered them, difficult for me now to think about My Struggle: Book Two without thinking about Tony newly holding his daughter and Nicole carrying Benjamin and me standing there on the brink of the greatest love of my life without yet knowing the face of the person I would love, the three of us, or four of us really, because the children were already there in every way that mattered except visibility, moving toward lives none of us could yet imagine.
That book lingered. It stretched across weeks and conversations that kept returning to it, resurfacing years later whenever fatherhood came up again, whenever one of us tried to name what it meant to have been changed so completely and not wish the change undone, and it brought us closer not because it was perfect but because it arrived when our lives were already opening, when listening mattered more than speaking, when there was a place between us to set down the need to be impressive and simply tell the truth.
Over time the circle widened.
Elliot joined, then Chris, the thing learning to hold more people without losing its center, and even now Tony is often there first, and sometimes I can hear them before I see them, because after enough years you know the laughter of your friends in a crowded bookstore the way you know certain voices in your own family, and I will come around a shelf and there is Tony holding a book or, more likely, a small stack of them, some destined to go home and some reluctantly returned to the shelf until next time, and then Elliot sees me lumbering toward them and that enormous smile opens across his face, and whatever else happened that day begins loosening its grip.
There is a history between Tony and Elliot that runs deeper than I can trace, years and stories that precede me, and I feel that history sometimes not as distance but as gravity, something holding them to one another, and yet it has always made room, and I have come to understand what an extraordinary thing it is to be welcomed into histories that did not begin with you, to be gathered into friendship rather than merely admitted to it, to discover after enough years that you are no longer quite sure where the edge of belonging was supposed to have been.
I listen carefully when Tony and Elliot talk about fatherhood because they are fathers I admire, men whose steadiness I trust, and these nights have given me the chance to sit beside men I love and watch how they are becoming fathers, husbands, friends, how they carry work and marriage and children and worry and joy, how they fail and recover and laugh at themselves and keep showing up. We talk about books, certainly, sometimes even for impressive stretches of time, but inevitably the conversation widens, and soon we are talking about marriages or children or work or parents or the things we fear or the things we have done badly or the people we are trying to become, and I have noticed how often, as we walk back toward our cars, one of us says some version of the same thing: we are lucky to have this.
We know it now.
Maybe we did not know it when we started.
This is a place where performance stops. A place that requires almost nothing of me except arrival, even if my arrival is predictably late. A place where faults are already known and therefore need not be disguised, where stories are embellished and immediately challenged by the men who were actually there, where truths can be held gently, and bullshit rarely survives the table, where laughter covers some of what does not need naming and silence does the rest.
Now the evening usually carries us somewhere nearby, most often Screen Door, sometimes still Oven and Shaker, and there is comfort in how little negotiation any of this requires anymore, Tony ordering the fried chicken dinner without hesitation and me ordering the chicken and waffles and two orders of that one salad we all like for the table to share, the food reliably good but never really the point, the conversation moving easily between whatever absurdity someone has brought to the table and whatever has accumulated in the weeks since we last sat together. Over the years, Tony and I have watched restaurants come and go around Powell’s, even the burger place on the corner becoming at least three different restaurants while we have been doing this, the neighborhood changing storefront by storefront while we keep walking out of the same bookstore carrying another book.
It is always better when Chris is in town from Phoenix and can join us, calendars bending to make room, everyone accommodating my Mondays, the table feeling full when all four of us are there, and this thing that began eleven years ago with Donna Tartt and The Secret History feels more necessary now, shaped by time rather than diminished by it. We have joked for years that someday we will convince Scott to join us too, if we can ever persuade the doctor to read a book that is not a medical journal, and somehow the joke is still funny because we are still telling it.
I used to think friendship survived because of affection, because people loved one another enough, and of course that is part of it, but I think now friendship survives because somebody keeps choosing the next book.
Somebody sends the text.
Somebody finds the Monday that works among the overlapping grids and alerts and obligations and relationships of four middle-aged lives.
Somebody waits because someone else is late.
Friendship in middle age is threatened by attrition, by children who need rides and parents who need care and jobs that consume the hour you thought belonged to you and marriages and relationships that deserve your attention, by the thousand legitimate reasons not to go tonight, maybe next month, until one month becomes six and six becomes years, and eventually there are people you once loved whose lives you know primarily through photographs on a screen.
Against all of that, we have Powell’s.
The Blue Room.
A book none of us has read.
Dinner afterward.
A reason to return.
And perhaps this is why the books have become more than books without ever ceasing to be books. They are the architecture we accidentally built around a friendship, the excuse that became a ritual and the ritual that became a promise, the thing that says there will be another night after this one, another book after this book, another table somewhere within walking distance where we will sit down older than we were the last time and discover that we are still ourselves and still becoming someone else.
When the night ends, we stand outside a moment longer than necessary, reluctant to leave, talking about children and our partners and the next book and when we will do this again, hugging the way men can hug when they have known one another long enough to stop being embarrassed by love, sometimes pairing off toward different directions, sometimes walking together as far as Glisan before splitting apart.
There are things these friendships have survived that others have not.
I know enough now not to regard that casually.
And then I walk back toward my car somewhere off Eleventh, through the same city I walked through a few hours earlier but carrying another book beneath my arm, and I think sometimes of those boys on the patchy soccer fields in McMinnville who could not have known where any of this was going, not the marriages or children or losses or middle age, not that someday we would stand between the stacks of the Blue Room discussing fathers and sons and novels and marriages, or sit over fried chicken and waffles talking about the people we had become, not that one of the great gifts of growing older would be the stubborn continuation of one another, and certainly not that a book club Tony suggested all those years ago would become one of the ways we made sure we did not disappear from each other’s lives.
There will be another book after this one, another walk through the Blue Room, or the Gold Room, another table somewhere nearby, another night when we arrive carrying everything that has happened since the last time and set some of it down between us, and perhaps that is all permanence ever really asks of people, not that they remain unchanged, but that they keep returning to one another changed.
I reach my car knowing I was late again.
Knowing they waited anyway.
Knowing we will do this again.
And it will remain.