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When the Netflix anthology series “Beef” premièred, in 2023, it was a revelation in more ways than one. The show, which traced the depths into which two Angelenos descend after a road-rage incident, reintroduced Ali Wong as a dramatic lead, gave Steven Yeun a chance to go darkly comic, and shined a rare light on the issue of Asian American mental health. It also remade the career of its creator, Lee Sung Jin, a seeming overnight success who actually had nearly two decades of TV-comedy writing under his belt.

Lee first pitched the show after he stalked another driver for a half hour following a parking-lot dispute; he similarly drew from life for Season 2, which stars Oscar Isaac as Josh, a country-club manager, and Carey Mulligan as his interior-designer wife, Lindsay. The couple are caught on video having a nasty fight by two members of his staff, Austin (Charles Melton) and Ashley (Cailee Spaeny). The Gen Z employees, about to embark on their own marriage, see the footage as blackmail material—and thus an opportunity to start their next chapter on secure financial footing. As in the first season, the story quickly broadens beyond the central conflict, roping in the club’s new billionaire owner, Chairwoman Park (Youn Yuh-jung), her unreliable plastic-surgeon husband, and the seething resentments of both the haves and the have-nots.

I met Lee earlier this month, at his new office in Hollywood. The space was sparsely decorated, but he’d already mounted posters for “Beef”; “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” the show that gave him his start in the industry; and “Thunderbolts,” a 2025 Marvel movie directed by his creative partner, Jake Schreier. (Lee did a couple of passes on the blockbuster, and has been tapped to pen Schreier’s upcoming “X-Men” movie with one of his “Beef” writers, Joanna Calo.) A freestanding whiteboard charted more than a dozen future projects.

Lee, who has gone by Sonny since childhood and was credited as Sonny Lee for the first half of his career, opened up about the long road to “Beef”—a journey toward more intentional storytelling, as well as feeling “O.K. in my own skin.” Perhaps surprisingly, the “Beef” character he seemed to relate to most was Josh, a congenial go-getter who mires himself in workaholism to avoid addressing his grief, as Lee did when one of his dogs died suddenly during production. We talked about his method of tailoring dialogue to his actors, the differences between Korean and American billionaires, and why class and capitalism are such inescapable themes on TV today. Our conversation—which contains some spoilers—has been edited and condensed.

You changed your name professionally in 2018 or 2019. What led to that decision, and why did you put your last name first?

It actually might have been earlier, because I did it on “Tuca & Bertie.” I was born in Korea, went to elementary school there, then moved to Minnesota [for sixth grade]. And every single day, taking attendance was a nightmare, because the teacher would add new consonants to the name that did not exist. And so, one day, without telling anybody, I was staring at a piece of homework and wrote “Sonny,” and I told everyone I go by Sonny now. It fit my personality, I think.

How so?

Definitely a people pleaser. And I feel like my noonchi [a Korean concept for interpersonal observation] is really strong. So when you have that strong self-awareness, you’re always trying to make the situation O.K.

When I came up, the writing rooms were different and I was usually the only person of color on staff. You get these subtle digs your whole career—some not so subtle. One time on a show, I went to the bathroom and came back and everyone was laughing, and they told me to check my e-mail. So I opened my e-mail and one of the writers had put two chopsticks as buck teeth, wore a straw hat, and did slanty eyes, and they took a photo of it and sent it to me, apropos of nothing.

What’s so funny about that?

Exactly. In the moment, I just laughed it off. But I have that photo saved as a favorite in my phone, and I’ve stared at it a lot to motivate myself. If I hit a writer’s block, I push through it—I just bring up that photo.

Oh, wow, you’re sick. [Laughs.]

[Laughs.] Well, it’s quite motivating, because I keep wanting to go back to younger me and be, like, Why don’t you have a backbone? Cut to years later, I was working on “Tuca & Bertie.” I was at my local coffee shop, and they call out the name on the receipt when your order’s ready.

It was like a flashback to childhood, where they’d be, like, “Siong Ga Chin Lee.” I heard two thirtysomething-year-old white women laughing, and I literally cowered. [He rounds his back to demonstrate.] I got home, and I felt horrible that my default state is to crouch. So I asked Lisa Hanawalt, the showrunner of “Tuca & Bertie,” can I change my credit to my Korean name? And do you mind if I put the last name first, because that’s how it was meant to be said? She said, absolutely.

I was thinking, when I hear “Director Bong Joon-ho” or “Director Park Chan-wook,” I feel proud. Those names sound cool, and it’s because they are making the coolest stuff of all time. And I thought, if more Koreans went by our given Korean names and just made cool stuff, maybe that stigma [against Asian names] would change.

How often do you get called Lee?

I get called Lee or Mr. Jin all the time, so it’s led to much confusion. But my mom and dad were really happy—they were proud to see the name that they had given me. My mom always told me growing up that she put a lot of thought into the name Sung Jin. The Chinese characters that the Korean is based on loosely mean “shaking saint,” because she wanted me to be a saint who shakes the world.

What led you to TV writing? And when you started, did you feel like you had to choose between comedy and drama?

I was an econ major. I went to the University of Pennsylvania, and, senior year, I decided to abandon it because I couldn’t stomach it. My poor parents, spending a fortune on an Ivy League education! I moved to New York with no plan. I packed all my things into a Honda CR-V and stayed at my friend’s house. I thought, just to play it safe, I’m gonna cover all my belongings with clothes to hide my important things. And when I woke up, everything I owned had been stolen. To this day, I don’t have my diploma because that was stolen.

Oh, wow.

The only thing they left was an “Aladdin” soundtrack. So I was really aimless in New York, just temping, really depressed. I watched “The O.C.” non-stop, never left my room. I started a blog called “Silly Pipe Dreams” that talked about TV, and especially “The O.C.,” that, later, Josh Schwartz [the show’s creator] referred to all the time. Josh actually invited me to visit the “O.C.” set. That was one of my first intersections with the industry. My friend then slipped my résumé to the page program at NBC. I got in, and I wore the peacock tie and gave tours for ten dollars an hour. I thought, O.K., I like this.

A friend of mine in the page program, Patrick Walsh, and I decided to write a script about the page program, and somehow it got in the hands of Jeff Ingold, who was the head of NBC comedy at the time. He called us and was, like, “This is incredible. Do you guys have agents?” We’re, like, no. He’s, like, “I want to call every major agency on your behalf.” When you have the head of NBC comedy calling, we were getting offers from top agents across every agency. We went to the fanciest agent and moved out to L.A., and everything fell apart again. I couldn’t get the agent to answer our calls, and suddenly I was unemployed. I slept on a hospital cot that my roommate’s nurse girlfriend brought from work because I couldn’t afford a bed.

I just thought comedy was the thing I was supposed to be doing. I started writing the pilot around 2005. My first job was on “Always Sunny,” 2007 or 2008. It was comedy’s heyday. And in my twenties—my whole life—my M.O. was to look around and copy and mimic. There was no true sense of self. I thought, everyone loves U.C.B.-type comedy, and that Tina Fey, “30 Rock”-like zinger thing is working. So all my early samples read like that. But it got me a job on “Always Sunny,” which I was super grateful for.

It was also their heyday.

Oh, yeah, very much. Season 4, Season 5 is when I was on there and started selling broadcast pilots. Eventually, I was on a multi-cam for three years. I was miserable. The work environment was really stressful and intense; someone cried every day. I did not feel like myself. More and more, my personality was turning into an amalgamation of everyone around me, and I was not around the best people at the time. At the end of that run, I had my lowest low, mental-health-wise. I’ve always struggled with mental health, and I attempted to take my own life.

How old were you?

I was thirty-two. I want to say it was December 13, 2013; I remember the thirteens. And I’m pretty sure it was a Friday. I still have scars from the incident that I can’t seem to get rid of. But there’s this piece of dialogue that Steven Yeun’s character, Danny, says in Season 1—something like, “Rock bottom can be a trampoline.” And for me it was.

I started therapy. I started reëxamining, like, if I am going to participate in all of this, why? And it made me think, O.K., I can’t write like this anymore. I need to write because I’m tapping into some truth, or there’s something in me that needs to get out. I started getting rid of all these performative layers and trying to become more comfortable being myself. It was really “Beef” Season 1 that made me feel O.K. in my own skin for the first time in a long time, and a lot of it is due to the collaborators I had that season. They created a loving environment to allow me to feel not judged. So that comedy-drama thing—it started as hard comedy, because I was trying to please others. And then it’s become what “Beef” is, which is more me. I like having a sense of humor, but I also want to talk about some very real things.

Speaking of, were you surprised that the theme of class resentment became such a core part of the show?

I was. Coming off Season 1—

Which also had a bunch of class resentments.

Yes, definitely. It was a literal upstairs-downstairs with [Ali Wong’s character] Amy and Danny. And coming off a season when we were doing the award stuff, we still hadn’t gotten a Season 2 pickup. I was aggressively pitching Netflix Season 2 ideas, and Jinny Howe, at Netflix, very wisely pulled me aside and was, like, Look, we will happily do another show with you, but you should only do a Season 2 if it’s something that you’re passionate about.

It wasn’t until real life happened that I got inspiration for Season 2, where I was in my neighborhood and there was a heated debate from a house that caused a bit of a stir. I told this story to several people, including fellow-writers, and without fail, the younger people were more shocked. They’re, like, Oh, my God, did you call the police? And a lot of folks my age or older would be, like, who among us hasn’t had a. . . . [Laughs.] I thought that was so funny, the dichotomy of that. Once I found that inspo, I pitched it to Jinny. She was, like, There you go: you want to talk about love through these two different couples. That’s how we started—no intention to talk about class.

Then I had the blessing of house-sitting for my goddaughter’s parents; I’ve known my friend since he was broke with me in L.A. He sold this tech company for billions of dollars. He’s a member of Montecito Club, and he let me use his membership. I would turn my nose up, like, “Oh, my gosh, you’re spending this much money on a country club.” And then I use it for a month, and hedonic adaptation kicks in. I’m, like, all right, show me the prices. In 2026, you really can’t talk about anything—life, marriage, love, career—without the theme of class being the variable.

In between seasons, I was able to direct a music video for one of the members of BTS, RM. It was my first time back to Korea in a really long time, and it was a side of Korea I’d never seen when I was living there, because I’m meeting with C.E.O.s, doing the red carpet, dining with all these important figures. And I very quickly knew, whatever I did for Season 2, I wanted this Korean-conglomerate piece to be a huge factor, so the dots started to connect. That’s how Chairwoman Park and this country club became the centerpiece.

The country club, to me, is a great little microcosm of society, because from my observation, most of the members seem to be boomers and Silent Gen, and most of the employees seem to be millennial, Gen Z, and sometimes Gen X. And no matter how hard those employees work, they’re never going to be members of the country club. I think that is a very potent feeling right now societally.

Do you have any theories about why there are so many TV shows about awful rich people?

I think, as writers, you’re looking around to draw truths from somewhere. Because we’re in an all-gas, no-brakes capitalism, it’s hard to look for inspiration in the world and not just constantly be barraged with, Hey, this is the thing that you have to talk about. We’re all trying to say this message louder and louder in the hopes that if you scream—

Someone’s listening?

Yeah. Austin says to Ashley, “I guess we should all get out and vote.” But we do, and yet nothing changes. So then, in your work, you feel a responsibility to try and tackle some of these themes. [He points to the whiteboard in his office.] On that board, I have my future slate. I’d say every single one on that board has the theme of class and capitalism really baked into it. But, if in my lifetime things change, I would love to be able to tackle other things.

In all the experiences you’ve talked about, have you noticed any differences between American and Korean élites?

[Laughs.] That’s a question that could get me in trouble. There’s definitely differences. No knock on American C.E.O.s or anything, but there’s just a more elegant way the wooing and wining and dining goes about in Korea. There’s, like, a decorum, you know? In America, there’s a more overt “I scratch your back, you scratch mine.”

Were there any actors you had in mind or who had already signed on when writing the characters?

Almost all of the main cast. I always like to have the cast attached before I write. I have a hard time writing to nothing. I wanted to have this Korea piece, and I knew there needs to be a tug-of-war for this person’s identity. So will it be a Korean American character or a half-Korean character? I felt that we covered so much ground in Season 1 about the Korean American diaspora, and one huge part that we didn’t cover was the experience of half-Koreans or half-Asians. Several people on the writing staff are half, and, my daughter being half-Korean, it felt like fertile ground. So I was, like, O.K., who do we go after for this? And I’d just seen “May December.” I was blown away by Charles Melton, as many people were. I pitched him several beats of the season and he said yes. That was the first piece, because I felt that that was going to be the harder couple to cast.

Then I looked at the older couple. I knew the configuration had to be two actors who have a history together, because when you meet them, it’s such a bad first impression that if you don’t sense an inherent long history, you may lose the audience. And what I love about what Oscar [Isaac] and Carey [Mulligan] have done is that even though they’re being horrible, you believe that there’s some love buried underneath there. And I think it is partly due to them having, in our collective psyche, been a couple for multiple decades. On “Drive,” they were the young, volatile, twentysomething couple, and then on “Inside Llewyn Davis,” it’s, like, late twenties, early thirties, breaking up, paths starting to diverge. And now they’re an older couple who have been together for fifteen years, reaching a tipping point.

I met with Oscar first—on a Zoom which lasted three or four hours. We quickly departed from the show because I didn’t have a script yet, and we just started talking about life, and I knew I had found a great creative partner. He also had a dog named Bugsy. It felt so synched. I asked him, Hey, I’m thinking about Carey Mulligan, given you guys’ history. He was, like, no-brainer, that’s my favorite person to act opposite of. We’ve been trying to work together again. Every project they pitch each other, and it just hadn’t happened.

Oh, wow.

So I met with Carey. And I actually had to meet her from a country club because we had budgetarily run out of money to have an office for the writers’ room. And so we were meeting at one of our writers’ country clubs’ conference rooms that we were just booking every week.

One of the writers belonged to a country club?

He’s a big golfer. The club is in Brentwood—but traffic to Brentwood sometimes is insane for me. So, I was severely late for the Zoom meeting with Carey Mulligan. Also, I’m meeting her in a country-club restaurant with plates of calamari behind me. I was mortified. Carey told me later that it actually helped her decision, because she was, like, Lee Sung Jin is such an important man that he’s showing up late to my Zoom and he’s in the middle of eating at a country club. She was so ready to tackle this kind of tone, because so many people cast her in dire, dramatic things. One of the first things she said to me was, “Sonny, can you just promise me I won’t be a dying mother?” I was, like, I can assure you.

Can you talk about the paintings that serve as the title cards in this season?

They’re all Flemish and Danish paintings from the sixteenth century, I believe. And it just happened accidentally. I have a habit of collecting paintings on my phone, whether I’m at a museum and I take a picture, or I see something cool online. And for some reason, for Season 2, I was saving a lot of Danish and Flemish painters from that era—there’s just something about that style that fit the mood of the season. Like, that first painting, [Quentin Matsys’s] “The Moneylender and His Wife,” kept calling to me. In the corner, you see the hint of something, like another couple.

We had the dark Giuseppe Arcimboldo painting with the four seasons at the finale, because they just felt very appropriate. It’s got the four faces all looking at each other, and seasons was such a big theme. We have the couples that represent each season between Ashley/Austin, Josh/Lindsay, Troy/Ava, and Park/Kim.

I was also really struck by the final image of the season, with Chairwoman Park at the grave.

That was actually a reshoot. I thought it would be clever to show the four seasons again, ending with winter, which was Chairwoman Park, and winter being filled with regret. Even with all the money in the world, you’re crying at the graveside of your first love and realizing you did it all wrong. As scripted, it was in extreme closeup: Chairwoman Park rests her head on the grave as a tear falls, and ants cover her face. We cut to black. We shot that. We even VFX’d the ants. And I just wasn’t feeling anything.

I had saved these samsara paintings on my phone. Throughout Buddhist and Hindu history, it’s always the same thing: It’s the wheel of life with the god of death holding it. And I would just look at that for spiritual inspiration, but then I’m, like, what if it’s visual inspiration? What if we do a top shot that depicts samsara? We should do these little vignettes of each couple. It can rotate like the four seasons, like time passing, and Ashley and Austin and Josh and Lindsay. The outer ring could be vignettes of other lives. We put that together in a week. We didn’t even have all the cast, so we had to shoot each element separately.

We actually Easter-egg that monster earlier in the season—you blink and you miss it. I talk in the writers’ room a lot about good confusion and bad confusion, and the thing that I always want to try to avoid is bad confusion, where the audience isn’t sure if we meant for them to be confused. My hope is, with the god of death, that people are, like, I think they want us to interpret this and I’m going to Google what this might mean.

One of the things I really enjoyed about this season is that all of the characters have such different styles of speech. What is writing such different voices like for you?

It’s something that I take great pride in, because it takes hours and hours of conversations with your actors to start molding the dialogue to how they naturally speak.

With Charles, we would spend hours on the phone, and I would tell him, Hey, I’m gonna have my Notes app open and just write down the way you speak. And he loves to put handles on everything before he gets to his point: “Sonny, if I may say this . . . ,” “My perspective is, Sonny, if I may say this . . .” And so throughout Austin’s dialogue, you’ll see these Charles Melton-isms.

That’s very sweet.

Cailee will do a lot of sorries. She’ll cut herself off a lot, interrupting herself, which is a very anxious-attachment-style type of dialogue. And then for Oscar, when he doesn’t like something, he purses his lips and does a lot of eyebrow raises. So we put that into the parentheticals [in the script]: “Eyebrows raise.”

Were the actors ever freaked out by it?

Well, they knew that was the process. They knew that I was trying to get this to fit like a glove. And, for me, that’s the best part of this. As writers, our first instinct is to write things a bit more “written” and a bit more jokey, and then you get it on its feet and it doesn’t feel real. So then you start rehearsals, and you start molding it. But it requires a two-way street: you need actors that are willing and vulnerable and giving to allow me to absorb as much as I did.

I’d love to talk about the role that the tech-assisted “soft” adultery plays in the season. Josh seems to prefer OnlyFans to intimacy with his wife. Lindsay flirts with other men online when her marriage hits a rough patch. It felt very timely.

Thank you for highlighting that, because that’s something we talked about at length in the writers’ room. Originally, for Lindsay, we had a version where she had one person that she was actually cheating on Josh with, and it felt like a bridge too far. And then I saw a headline someone sent me that said—and I’m gonna butcher the statistics—something like sixty per cent of married women have a backup guy ready and willing to go if the current marriage fails. And forty per cent are thinking of someone that could be their backup plan.

As we got to know the character of Lindsay more, it just felt appropriate for her to dabble, and right when it gets too far, block someone, and just get joy out of seeing how much she can push this emotional connection. But ultimately she keeps revisiting this royal ex, which came out of a conversation with Carey. She was, like, I went to school with these women; I know these women very well. They for sure have a royal ex that they can’t stop thinking about.

It’s always fun, starting with these first-thought ideas and looking at headlines and life and all these things. Suddenly we found these textures that are so much more complex—and weird—in a way that only life can supply.&nbsp♦

Your story “Ordinary Wear and Tear” follows the long friendship of two men who grew up together in a small town in Montana, where they both continue to live as adults. How did the characters of Carl and Jed come to you? Did one character lead you to the other, or were they both on the page from the get-go?

I don’t know how anything comes to me. I’m sometimes drawn to ideas that fail to thrive as soon as I act upon them. Or an abandoned ember flares into life. I had taken time off around the publication of a book, but I was soon tired of not writing. I set out to work on New Year’s Day, determined to write something. After an uncomfortable spell—backache, feet going to sleep—a couple of faces arose, and I decided to follow them around. Memory and the unconscious came along. After a spell in that pleasant trance, I realized I’d made a mess. I’d have to get to work.

Carl grew up with financial security, went to boarding school, and became a lawyer. Jed was adopted by parents who had little interest in him, had to join R.O.T.C. to pay for college, and always felt he had a more precarious grip on success. How much does the differences in the two characters’ trajectories account for the differences in their personalities?

Carl’s upbringing contributed to his complacency, for sure. He is unlikely to experience the kind of discomfort that would motivate him to aspire to more, and may think that his decency is a sufficient achievement. In a society like ours, it may be. Jed, for all his charm, is just feral. Few people had a hand in his upbringing. Women are attracted to him, and that has been all the motivation he’s needed. He’s generally thoughtful, but that, too, is part of his apparatus. (“A gentleman is a patient wolf,” Lana Turner said.) His solitary state at the end of the story suggests the future toward which his nature trends.

Carl is decent but a little dull. Jed behaves badly, and arguably gets more pleasure out of life. The voice of the story inhabits Jed a little more than Carl, perhaps because his behavior would be harder to explain if we weren’t given insight into it. Do you feel more for Jed than for Carl?

I feel that I understand Jed, while Carl is the result of observation. We’re baffled by disruptive or immoral people whom we also like. We view them with a detachment that they don’t have, and are confounded that they can’t see where they’re headed; or we’re unpleasantly surprised when their worst traits lead them to success and happiness.

Ultimately, Carl upholds certain moral standards and Jed doesn’t. But Carl is referred to as a “soft touch” and “guileless.” Is his decency an active moral choice or is it a form of passivity that leaves him exposed?

It’s the culture of his origins, which his passivity keeps him from challenging. He’s a lawyer with little passion for justice. He’d just like to go on being a lawyer and eventually a judge. He’s not fascinated by his wife, but he loves boats.

Shirley, a woman who moves to the town and marries Carl, becomes a fault line in the men’s friendship. Is their rivalry really about her, or is it about something unresolved between the two of them?

She raises the temperature until the flaws in the friendship are exposed. Carl’s and Jed’s lives have been ones of amiable incompatibility, which endured in its untested state.

Why is the title of the story “Ordinary Wear and Tear”?

It’s a story about mating and its preliminaries, the longing for permanence among unstable humans. Desire is restrained or disorderly, and, in either case, it exacts some toll. That’s hardly unusual; in fact, it’s ordinary. ♦

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Thomas McGuane reads his story “Ordinary Wear and Tear,” from the April 27, 2026, issue of the magazine. McGuane has published more than a dozen books of fiction, including the story collections “Gallatin Canyon,” “Crow Fair,” and “A Wooded Shore,” which came out in 2025.

Carl backed the car down the ramp, and, with little effort, Jed slid the boat off the trailer and into the river, where it tugged gently on the rope and slapped on the current. Carl parked the car and trailer, and came back to the bank carrying the oars. He was crisply dressed in khakis, a tattersall shirt, and a belt that displayed nautical signal flags. Jed, lean, nearly gaunt, with widespread blue eyes, wore a Seahawks sweatshirt with the sleeves cut off and flip-flops. He wondered why Carl thought he needed to be so spiffy. Carl took the oars as the river carried the boat downstream. It was a cloudless September day, with a dusting of snow at the higher elevations. The cottonwoods were just changing color and stirred in the morning breeze. This was a new river, the Ruby. Last month, they’d gone down the Gallatin, which had had too many rapids for their limited skills, and they’d barely avoided a wreck. They didn’t fish or take their phones, just chatted as they floated along, a monthly summary. In the winter, they snowshoed in nearby hills or watched football.

Friends in childhood, they’d had an uninterrupted companionship until Carl went to boarding school, a place Jed called a breeding ground for suits. Carl’s parents had been separating for the second time and had thought it best to get him out of the house and avoid a custody fight. They reconciled soon after, but let him come home only for holidays. He had fought to stay in town, where Jed and his other friends were, but eventually adjusted to boarding school and became a star lacrosse player, a game he’d never encountered before. Jed had attended the local Catholic school, though not for religious reasons. He had been adopted, from a hospital in North Dakota, by a Methodist couple, who thought the public school was full of drugs and casual sex and who referred to Catholics as Papists. Jed found the catechism baffling. His parish school, staffed by nuns, was a small island in a sea of Protestants, from the “Bible churches” in strip malls to Carl’s family’s church, St. Andrew’s, presided over by Father John Oliver, who had been a missionary in Ecuador and returned with a souvenir blowgun, a modest knowledge of the Chicham languages, and a beautiful Shuar bride, Nunkui. Nunkui had grown obese and diabetic on American food, which affected her reproductive health, and Father Oliver often lamented the fact that they had been unable to “multiply.” Jed asked Carl if he thought Nunkui had shrunk Father Oliver’s head. “You can’t possibly know how not funny you are,” Carl said as he watched wild geese along the bank complaining about their intrusion.

Carl’s parents took him on educational vacations during school holidays. One year, while they were in Chichén Itzá, Jed and two friends broke into their house and drank up the liquor, favoring the fruit-flavored bottles, Cointreau and Grand Marnier. None of it stayed down for long. The incident was investigated by the police and written up in the paper as a burglary. Terror made the culprits conceal their ghastly hangovers, which their parents treated as the flu. Jed wanted to confess, at least to Carl, but lost his nerve. Carl’s parents offered a substantial reward, but no one buckled and the break-in remained unsolved. Carl’s mother said, “They shall live with this crime forever.” Jed often ate at their house and joined in speculating about the culprits, trying to frame Gary Fjelstad, a bullying upperclassman. But he was nervous. Carl’s mother complained that he tore his napkin into little balls, which she found uncouth. When they ate Salisbury steak, she challenged him to spell it and called him “Buckwheat” when he failed.

Carl went to Pomona College to get away from his home town and his parents, but it only made him love them more. Jed attended the state university and lived off campus, indulging in a cavalcade of liaisons. He needed R.O.T.C. in order to meet his college expenses. By the time Jed got out of the National Guard, where he crewed on helicopters, Carl was already on his way to a comfortable life. Jed got a job at a title company. Two eligible bachelors.

Shirley Crane arrived from Albuquerque with her parents, who bought the savings-and-loan building on Selfridge Street and turned it into luxurious condominiums that were well ahead of local markets. The family lived in one of the units while making plans for an R.V. campground. Carl’s father had died when Carl was in college, but his mother was available to despise these new people, whom she found shabby. Carl still called her Mummy.

“Gorgeous,” Carl said, the first time he and Jed saw Shirley standing on the diving board at the city pool. “Tawny,” Jed said. Carl soon announced that he’d fallen for Shirley. Jed considered this preëmptive. He said, “I noticed you were sizing her up. I didn’t realize it was a thing.” Carl married Shirley Crane after a very long engagement, long enough for Shirley to adapt to his mother, who, believing Shirley a danger to her son, fecklessly monitored their courtship, but failed to survive their honeymoon, felled by a “massive” stroke in her greenhouse.

Carl’s mother had snubbed Shirley’s parents at the wedding, recoiling from the father’s loud sports jacket with exaggerated disdain. Shirley’s mother now made no secret of the fact that they were glad she was gone, which left Shirley in an awkward position as she tried to support Carl in his bereavement. He couldn’t conceal his grief, and it was months before his mourning subsided.

The newlyweds had travelled all the way to the Dodecanese for the honeymoon, but only Shirley went for a swim. Carl struggled with the time change, and asked Shirley why the locals were all milling around. When they got back and moved into Carl’s family home, Shirley threw herself into becoming a wife, doggedly working her way through her late mother-in-law’s “Joy of Cooking” and transforming herself into an Irma S. Rombauer fangirl. Clearly, Carl and Shirley loved each other, but Carl’s work ethic and his financial striving made their marriage other than Shirley had expected. It was as though marriage were something Carl had needed to get out of the way, a view that explained the couple’s meagre intimacies. Shirley admired Carl’s discipline and met the long solitary days with obsessive volunteering, counselling battered women and cleaning cages at the animal shelter. Carl worried that her work with mistreated women would place him under suspicion. And, channelling “Mummy,” he called her friends at the animal shelter “empty nesters with rubber gloves.” Carl visited the shelter just once, and peered at the animals while holding a Kleenex to his nose. Shirley wanted to rescue a dog, in particular a Corgi mix named Drew. Carl hugged her and said, “No.” She asked him to consider two very small dogs, Sparkle Plenty and Sister Hooch. “No and no.” She pushed him away. He raised his arms. “Now what did I do?”

To compensate for his position on the dogs, he asked Shirley if he might visit the women’s shelter so that they could display their own affectionate and violence-free marriage. “Otherwise, the gals might conclude I’m battering you—something I’ve never considered, as you know,” he said, following this with a joke about batter being the basis of pancakes.

That’s all I need, Shirley thought. The idea was soon forgotten. Shirley had spent years “pulling men’s hands off my ass” but had found them meek when rebuked. She’d never been abused but she heard stories at the women’s shelter that amazed her. When her disgust subsided, she was angry. “If you find the perpetrator,” Shirley said, “get a rope, get bombs, get rat poison.” The women so liked Shirley that they forgave her for not knowing what she was talking about.

Shirley’s exuberant nature balanced Carl’s placid ways, but the marriage turned out to be too much work, and it didn’t last. Carl was sure that his kindly and thoughtful nature, his good manners and solicitous demeanor were way more than enough—until the moment when Shirley announced that she’d had all she could stand. “Was it something I said?” Carl inquired. Jed was touched by this obtuse response when Carl described it on the river. He had long sensed that Shirley was adrift. Carl said, “This whole thing has been a real eye-opener. Oh, well, back to the drawing board.”

Shirley’s father, well-versed in litigation, brought in a real killer, a lawyer from Albuquerque. Shirley got more than enough money to buy a condominium in Kauai, where she’d spent several happy years in her teens while her father fleeced his partners. The condo was discounted as a result of one of her father’s bankruptcies. Shirley had her future to consider, but the move surprised Jed anyway. “Did you just roll over and play dead?” he asked Carl.

“Don’t be snide. I wanted to make sure she’d be O.K.” Jed saw right through this.

The river narrowed and turned to the right. They picked up speed for a pleasant stretch and swept quite close to the rocky shore, so close that they spent a moment under branches while the shoreward oar tapped on the stones and flushed a pair of sandpipers.

Carl announced, “I married the daughter of unscrupulous developers and paid the price.” It didn’t sound at all like Carl. It was something his parents might have said. Still, Carl wasn’t entirely their product and enjoyed his anomalies. He had a complete set of David Bowie albums and a black cowboy hat. Jed teased him with Bowie imitations—“Bladder control to Major Tom,” and so on. Things could have been worse. There were no children. Jed knew that they were two kind people who were unsuited to each other, hardly a hanging offense. Carl’s ambivalence and grief caused him to make all sorts of ugly remarks, which he’d regret once things settled down. “She’s no dope. She’ll land on her feet.”

“Carl, honestly.”

“She’s in a phase. I’d take her back but she’d need to crawl on her tongue.”

Carl looked stricken, even a little crazy. He began to question everything: he drank more than usual, at least by his temperate standards, and was constantly in church, grilling Father Oliver. Jed told him he’d be better off going to the gym. But Carl was a believer and accepted what Jed called “the whole enchilada.” Jed’s own early indoctrination had evaporated, except maybe the fear of a damnation he hardly believed in, but there it was, a tincture. He wouldn’t have had even that if Sister Calista hadn’t often referred to “the charred doors of Hell,” a phrase that resurfaced in Jed’s mind at indiscreet moments.

Jed was not at all curious about his biological parents. Because of his raw-boned frame, crooked teeth, and blue eyes, he assumed that they were hillbillies. His remote and quarrelsome adoptive parents had left him with an aversion to both marriage and religion. His belief that getting married was a dim thing to do in the first place was likely behind his detached view of Carl’s marital failure. Military service had confirmed Jed’s bachelorhood perhaps as much as the example of his adoptive parents had. He had the dubious standing in town of someone who’d slept with more women who had gone on to marry and start families with other men than anyone else. He keenly admired the children of those women, as though he’d had a hand in their lives; he even kept track of their birthdays. He’d chat these young mothers up, hoping to get a reminiscent smile out of them. It was a pleasant way to live, and new talent arrived regularly.

They passed a cornice that poured swallows overhead. Carl watched them as they spiralled above, but neglected to notice a man fishing from the bank and accidentally rowed across his line. Carl raised his hands from the oars and apologized, but the angler shook an enraged fist. Carl found that merely interesting and said, “Wow!”

Jed said, “Let’s go back and whip his ass. I’m old-school.”

Carl chuckled. “Jed, Jed, Jed.”

These were usually such contented days on the river. They often saw deer come down for a drink and, once, a wolf stared at them over the body of a fawn. They passed a marshy side channel filled with duckweed and blackbirds. Jed thought Carl was hogging the oars, but he wouldn’t give them up.

“I’m sublimating through exercise. I wish Shirley well and I’m resigned to her building her cheeseball with my money. Smart girls prepare for rainy days.”

“She made out like a bandit.” Jed didn’t know why he would say this.

“I wish we hadn’t built so close to the highway.”

Cartoon by Frank Cotham

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“It rains on bandits, too,” Carl said. “I’m fine with it. Why aren’t you? How else could she afford a condo in Kauai?” Jed decided against saying that the condo might not have been so affordable if her father hadn’t bankrupted his partners.

At the head of a grassy island, a cluster of teal took flight and whistled over the boat. On a day like this, a day of cloudless skies and sparkling foothills, it was not easy to stay on message or relieve tension. Carl was playing his plight for laughs, but his pain was evident. Jed wanted to leave it at that.

“You just need time.” Jed yawned.

“I imagined some residual good will between us, but Kauai makes it clear that she means to move on. I guess they have great weather there. But I don’t think our winters were the problem.”

“She knows she has a lot of years left.” Jed leaned back to watch a hawk overhead, a harrier.

“I’m not tracking her. If she wants to fuck some Polynesian in Kauai, I’ll buy him a war canoe.”

“Oh, dear me.”

Jed was finding Carl’s agitation disturbing. He looked wild-eyed. There was little doubt that Carl had provided Shirley with a life style that most would find dull. Shirley had hoped to learn to ski but Carl had said she’d only break a leg. As for travel, better to read about it; otherwise, it was just sightseeing. He had suggested that she work at his office if she wanted to keep busy, but she had declined. “You have a secretary!” she said, surprising Carl with her indignation.

“Evidently, she wanted more,” Jed said, wondering when this dirge would end.

“Don’t they all? Whose side are you on?”

It was a relief for both of them to laugh heartily at this.

“My mother, God rest her soul, would have liked Shirley if only she’d had more time. We were arguing about having kids. Shirley didn’t want to and she was getting loud. I raised my hand to stop it and said, ‘Halt.’ She accused me of trying to resolve marital disputes with hand signals. Mummy would have loved that. Sarcasm was her favorite.”

Carl carried the anchor up into the streamside willows and Jed put the cooler on the sand. He opened one of the sandwiches and said, “Find these at Ptomaine Gardens?”

“Next time, you get them. It’s hard to shop for a fussy eater.” Carl opened his sandwich to examine its contents, then said, “I don’t know why you’ve had so many girlfriends. Don’t you get sick of it?”

“It’s never the same. The housewives can be quite timid, but the divorcées buck like goats.” Carl held his head and moaned. Jed had thought guy talk would cheer him up. “You should try it. You squeeze them and it’s fun.”

“What in the world do you get out of it?”

“You just never know. Sometimes it’s a thrill. Sometimes it’s customer golf.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand your checkered quest for monogamy.”

“I have hope. It doesn’t sound like you do.”

Their bantering boat trips would go on forever, unless Carl learned that Jed had slept with Shirley within days of the divorce being final. Shirley had been sitting on a bench in the park, watching young people sword fighting with lacrosse sticks that Carl had donated. It was as if she were having a last look at her life in this town. Jed spotted her as he took a shortcut to his office. Her arms were stretched across the back of the bench. She didn’t see him coming.

“You look sad.”

“Oh, it’s you. I’m just watching the kids trying to figure those things out.”

Jed’s heart was racing. “I hope we can stay in touch.”

“I do, too. I’m not proud of how this ended.”

“I assume you loved Carl.”

“I still do. He’s so good. I just can’t live like that.” Jed wondered why Carl was such a poor husband but such a great friend. Maybe the two things were connected.

Jed gazed at her, as if to express that he shared her wish for Carl’s well-being. She held his gaze. They took separate routes to Jed’s house. He would long remember Shirley’s slumberous voice, saying, “Don’t rush. I’m enjoying you.” But, if the occasion was something that Jed liked to replay in his mind, Shirley appeared to want to forget it. She left for Hawaii as soon as she could. The animal shelter threw a nice party with dogs, the women’s shelter a private, even covert farewell that brought Shirley to tears. Jed was left wondering if he’d fallen in love. Maybe he had: he was quite lighthearted about the end of Carl’s marriage. It seemed to him that his dalliance with Shirley was not unlike the time he broke into Carl’s family home with his friends and got sick on Carl’s parents’ liquor. I get it, he thought. I’m going to Hell.

The condo in Kauai looked like a clean break. Even Jed was bothered by it. Carl pretended to shrug it off: “I’ve got a law firm to run.” (He’d hired a young intern from the law school he’d attended, so now it was a “firm.”)

Jed said, “Shirley and I were great friends. I hope to see her again.”

“Be my guest,” Carl said.

“I have been,” Jed replied. Carl assumed Jed meant the sandwiches. To avoid misunderstanding, Jed pointed to them and cautiously took a bite.

Shirley had wanted to take Drew to Kauai with her. The dog had been in the shelter for more than a year and was ready for adventure. But in order to avoid a long quarantine she had to leave the dog with Carl until many requirements were met. She understood Carl’s issues with dogs and warned him that Drew could be very opinionated. Carl accepted, clinging to this last connection to Shirley.

Drew was suspicious of Carl and at first declined to eat, but Carl kept moving through the process, towing Drew on his leash to be microchipped or to acquire a health certificate from a veterinarian, whose face Drew licked. Carl wished that Drew felt the same way about him, but wondered if the licking was sanitary. Carl scheduled two rabies vaccines, thirty days apart, arranged for a proof-of-tick-treatment certificate and a rabies-antibody test. He took pains filling out the animal-import form and mailed it to Shirley at Bali Hai condos, in Kauai. By then, Drew and Carl had become quite used to each other.

The flight to Kauai over Christmas was no picnic, with gruesome layovers. Jed had told his office he’d be travelling. Carl was out of town—Jed didn’t know where. Shirley’s condominium was in a neighborhood that was undistinguished but pleasant, with ocean air. Carl had shown him a picture of it on his phone, one of several brown cottages near the water. Jed had memorized the details—the palms on either side, the crooked walkway, and the red door, which Shirley barely opened to him. A pelting tropical rain had begun to fall, bouncing around the landing. She suggested that he call first next time.

Next time! What about the four-hour layover? She broke Carl’s heart, he thought, but she’s not breaking mine.

It wasn’t true. He clung to a memory of Shirley flinging herself across the bed to check her phone while he gazed ruefully at the wet spot. In some way, he enjoyed the unrequited infatuation, kind of a buzz. Women were tyrants! He vowed to keep the mortifying boarding passes. Better to remember the whole damn thing as a one-off. This brief moment in Shirley’s doorway was a bruising encounter, and he was soaked.

No flights out until the next day. Home seemed across the planet and filled with guileless citizens with strong Western values who would never find themselves in Kauai for unethical reasons. The stucco motel would have to do. It was out of the rain, and he could work on his flight booking. He asked the desk clerk if he could borrow the dryer. “No.” He’d have to hang the clothes. He thought to try Shirley on the chance she’d kept her old number. Staring out the window at the sheeting rain, he dialled. She answered.

“Why didn’t you ask me in?”

“Carl is here.”

His face grew hot. He felt the skin on his back prickle.

“I see. Where is he now?”

“Some motel in town.”

“You don’t know which one?” Jed cried.

“Hey, Jed, take a hint.”

He called the front desk and asked if they had a guest under Carl’s name.

“We don’t share that information. It’s the law.”

“Of course! Just like the fucking dryer. Why did I ask?”

“The use of the dryer is not protected by law. The names of guests are.”

Jed wondered how he’d come to this, taking abuse from some jailhouse lawyer at the front desk. He’d rarely been homesick for his town but he was now. The old trees, the playgrounds, winter days at his office, breakfasts at the drugstore with friends. He should just move on and book a flight. He looked at options on his phone. He grabbed a motel scratch pad with a picture of a pineapple, but the first thing he wrote was “Shirley.” He hunted in vain for non-stops. His thoughts were all over the place, and included the prospect of a layover in Honolulu with an escort service. He’d tried that once and been sent an attractive surgical nurse named Joan. It was too embarrassing, so they just went to dinner. Joan commented on what she called his comical lack of self-awareness. Shirley could have said the same thing, instead of telling him not to rush when he was already rushing.

He called her. “Shirl, I’m so sorry to bother you again, but this could get awkward.”

“It’s for you.”

Cartoon by Michael Maslin

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“No shit.”

“I’m just gonna scoot. But, of course, it would be best if I didn’t bump into Carl. What’s he doing here, anyway?”

“We’re in discussion.”

“Ah, nice. I’m touched by his determination. He’s a great guy.”

“Make your reservation. I’ll do what I can to arrange a clean getaway. And never again confuse a slip with a real event.”

“No, ma’am!”

“Bye, now. Don’t be ugly.”

He had to get out of the room and decided to go once the sun was setting. Walking along the beach and kicking at shells, he met a couple from Indiana enjoying the last light of the day. “I’m from Indiana, too!” he told them. It was a pointless fib but it helped his anxiety. The couple looked rural and Jed wanted to talk about agricultural things. His title company increasingly managed farmland that was going to other uses. But the Hoosiers were obsessed with the new Colts quarterback and the drug problems of the team’s owner and, besides, they seemed troubled by Jed’s restlessness. They moved along, eyes fixed on the water as though something might soon happen there.

When it was dark, Jed left the beach and walked beside the road bordering the sea, wondering why the locals needed so many pickup trucks. How did they even get them there? He began to feel as if he was being followed but didn’t look behind him to check. When he pulled his phone out of his pocket, he saw that he had missed a call. Shirley. He listened to his voice mail. Her voice was subdued; he couldn’t tell if she was being sultry or just careful not to be overheard. The message was clear. Carl had just left. Jed dismissed the idea that he could visit her with impunity. He knew better.

Tomorrow he’d be inching his way home. No first class, but he had an aisle seat. He’d scan the crowd at the Honolulu airport in case Carl had missed his connection and was craning at the display board to find his new gate number. For a moment, he felt solidarity with Carl. Why was Shirley such a problem for both of them? Her blunt decency was hard for guys like them. Why had Jed’s little flutter with her mattered so much more to Jed than to her? Why did it still trouble him?

“Old pal,” Carl said, “we’re restating our vows. At least, I hope we are! Shirley’s a flight risk!”

“Let’s assume once was enough.” If not, Jed thought, I could pop back to Kauai.

In a small town, it’s hard to get people to the same wedding twice. Jed had hoped to recruit some showstopper to accompany him for the occasion—to give Shirley second thoughts?—but couldn’t find anyone willing to go along. It was a modest affair at St. Andrew’s, with business friends of Carl’s, baffled but loyal friends of Shirley’s. Her friends from the women’s shelter seemed to trail the ghosts of the thugs in their past. One was a real looker but not keen to enter some charade with Jed, whose big smile put her off. When he flirted with a schoolteacher he knew—“Well, well, well”—she gently knuckled him in the ribs and told him to get a life. The principals were at the altar now. Father Oliver wore a retro surplice and added sly details about the previous wedding to his homily. Jed wondered how the beaming cleric felt about being dragged through this again. No doubt he viewed it as pure spiritual affirmation. Jed watched Shirley’s lips as she repeated her oath. “May the Force be with you!” Father Oliver concluded.

Jed wondered if the wedding guests considered him less successful than Carl. Probably they did, and, if their values were entirely pecuniary, shame on them. For a moment, Jed felt in pitched battle with his oldest friend, his suit still rumpled from the first wedding, while Carl was crisp, stylish, and formal. Jed was starting to feel that he couldn’t live with this—not the erotic memory, which had hardly faded, but the guilt, which was growing. He feared that it would have to be resolved or he’d be on the horn with Re/Max looking for another town.

Carl led the celebrants out as though they were a platoon. Shirley stayed inside with her friends from the animal shelter and a sampling of battered women. Jed walked toward them and the friends fell away to accommodate him. Did they know something? Jed felt strange and uncomfortable, and thick-tongued as he intoned, “I truly think this is the best thing for both of you going forward.” He was surprised at his own orotund phrasing. Shirley looked at him for a long moment, bemused at this awkward solemnity, and told him to fuck off.

Jed was taken aback. He said, “Ah,” as Shirley joined the rest of the wedding party out front. People were driving away. It was like a drag race. Carl was waving to the departing cars, married again and filled with hope. Jed admired his guileless enthusiasm as the guests shot off, this bit of drudgery out of the way. Father Oliver raised a hand to wave, his cowboy boots squarely planted. Never before now had Jed felt his betrayal so powerfully. Carl was loved in the community, even by those who considered him a sap for lending money to people who came to him with sketchy sob stories. A real Christian, they said out of the side of their mouths. Carl’s housekeeper had had him co-sign a big note at Stockmens Bank, then left town with a handyman who was not her husband. Carl said that he understood her desperation, referred to her as a “poor thing,” and wrote it off. Jed told Carl that he would have followed her to the gates of Hell to get his money back. He hated it when people treated Carl like a sucker and ran up his receivables. “People think you’re a soft touch,” Jed said.

“Oh, probably I am.”

“It’s open-wallet surgery.”

“I know, I know. But, hey, that’s funny.”

The second marriage of Carl and Shirley lasted less than ninety days; it was over before she’d even begun to think about selling the condo. Carl was spared the pain of embarrassment, as he seemed incapable of it. But Jed’s guilt was eating at him. He could scarcely think what it would take to resolve it. This anguish surprised him. He tried without success to see his betrayal as merely something he’d gotten away with.

“What’s this?” Carl said, leading Jed down the corridor to his office. Jed didn’t return the wave of Carl’s secretary, Jenny, even though she had gone to high school with him and they had shared each other’s company out by the cellphone towers in inclement weather back then. “You made an appointment to see me? What on earth!”

“I’ll be quick,” Jed said. Carl stopped for a moment, looking at Jed in concern, but then led him into the office, closing the door. A sign on his desk said “THINK OR THWIM.” Jed sat facing Carl, gazing around at the pictures without seeing them. He was determined to come clean. “I have something I want to tell you.” This was the hardest thing Jed had ever done, but he had no choice. “I have to get this off my chest.”

“Stop right there! We knew you broke into the house. Mummy figured it out in a New York minute. We forgot about it long ago. You should, too.”

Jed sat quietly, unrelieved even when Carl began to laugh. He stared into his lap while Carl went on to summarize some personal news. He was trading in his Taos for a Tiguan, and Shirley already had another companion. “I call him Tarzan, but Shirley’s happy. So . . . so, that’s good.”

“Carl, that’s not what I came to tell you.”

Jed told him what he’d done, blunt and without details. “I’m sorry.” The two sat in silence. Jed couldn’t look up. He let it sink in.

Carl spoke, his voice level. “We never had a chance. You ruined my marriage.” Jed knew that this was not the time to say that the marriage had already ended. “I don’t understand why you did it.”

“Neither do I.”

Jed had never seen this expression on Carl’s face. Carl looked down, tapping his thumbnails against each other. “I need to think about this. I heard you were in Kauai. I thought it was a courtesy call. What did you make of the island?”

Jed’s attempt to speak came out wrong. “A poor man’s Maui.” What could that possibly mean?

“I visited the Breadfruit Institute.” Carl sounded robotic. “All about global food security. I’m not a beach guy. What do you actually care about, Jed?”

“Not enough, maybe.” Jed stood. “May I give you a call?”

“Sure, Jed, give me a call.”

A day later, Carl phoned Jed to propose a formal discussion. He said that he wanted to put this behind them. His disquieting voice hadn’t changed. He told Jed to meet him at the vestry in St. Andrew’s on Tuesday morning. Father Oliver would stand by. “Be there.” It was a command.

Jed’s relief was palpable. He hung up the phone and gave a little fist pump. He dared to think that the friendship could be saved. Nothing else in his life had lasted so long or ever would again.

It was the last snowy day of the year, wet spring snow. Jed started toward the church from his house, a long walk that would allow him to collect his thoughts. He paused at the corner of Cottonwood to watch a children’s snowball fight. Only one girl, in a Wonder Woman snowsuit, could really throw, and it was unclear if they’d chosen sides. A small black dog with a bandanna around its neck tried to catch the snowballs. Jed watched as long as he could but kept an eye on the time. Maybe the children were unable to choose sides. There were five of them, and the odd number would make for awkwardness. Jed stalled to consider this, but he had to get going and stop spinning scenarios. A deputy sheriff pulled alongside him as he walked, calling, “Jed, want a ride?” Jed said he needed the exercise and resumed, avoiding parts of the sidewalk under branches laden with snow. Puffed-up birds adorned the overhead wires. In the morning sun, the street seemed to sparkle.

Father Oliver stopped him on the sidewalk in front of the rectory, coatless, with his arms crossed. “Jed, it would be best if you just go home. Let me work it out with Carl now. We’ll get him some help.”

“Can’t I just go in?” Jed bridled at Father Oliver’s stern gaze.

“You wouldn’t be safe.”

“I wouldn’t be safe? What are you talking about?”

“Just please take me at my word. It’s a bad idea. Carl told me what happened and, if I may say so, Jed, I pray that one day you will find redemption.”

As Jed crossed the park, he felt put upon by Father Oliver taking up Carl’s grievance. His indignation was a relief. He stopped by the swings to greet an old girlfriend, Cathy Chitham, with her handsome toddlers. He didn’t remember her married name, something Polish. He rested his hands on the children’s crowns as she pushed her sunglasses back with a finger. “How am I holding up?” she said.

“You never looked so good.”

“Oh, funny. I suppose you’d know,” she said. Jed was aghast that, in front of these beautiful children, she was leering. It had been a hard day, and he was in no mood to plunge into her gaze. Cathy wore a light sweater. Jed asked if she was cold and she said, “Oh, Jed, give it up.”

“I’ve just been told by a man of the cloth that I’m a bad human being.”

“I already knew that! I’m not surprised you never married, given all the antics. It’s lucky that you don’t know what you’re missing.”

“I like being alone with my faults.” That was true. Jed knelt to say goodbye to the toddlers, who were trying to figure out who he was. “You take good care of Mommy, O.K.?” No reply from them. Jed found them nearly as bland as their mother.

Cathy said, “See you around.”

Jed thought, Yep, says it all. The children continued to peer at him as he walked up the empty street toward home.

In the following days, Jed noticed Carl watching him from a distance, and one night he thought he heard him on the porch. He could see a silhouette from his darkened bedroom. He declined to find out more and waited for the figure to depart before returning to a restless sleep.

Carl received a citation from the state bar association noting his “tireless advocacy for indigent rights,” a baffling accolade, which Carl accepted cheerfully without suspecting that it was the result of an intervention by two lawyer friends who’d learned that Carl was, as one of them put it, “on his way to the rubber room.” Carl sought advice about ordinary life from his secretary, Jenny. It was good to have someone normal at hand. He began to return to the office in order to talk to her, and soon fell in love again. Jenny was forthright about his previous nuptials. She said, “If Father Oliver knew shit from Shinola, he would have talked you out of both of those marriages.” Thanks to Jenny’s guidance, Carl stopped conferring with Father Oliver, whom she described as “medieval.” Carl’s faith had once been a consolation in his life. His secretary’s stark remarks made him turn to her instead. Carl asked where the indigents in town were, and she said, “We don’t have any.” Then, recalling the award from the bar association, she added, “I mean, they’re careful to stay out of sight.” She visited Carl at his home or stayed over, then moved in. People in town began to notice a renewed spring in his step, and were pleased to see his improvement.

Cartoon by Roland High

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Jed and Carl bumped into each other, at the bank, the gas station, and the grocery store. Jed found Carl’s cordial greetings fishy. Shirley had never claimed Drew, and now Carl rarely went anywhere without the little dog. Jed recommitted himself to his work, trying to understand trends as the town changed. His relations with his neighbors may have been formal, but they had begun to check the lights at his house to make sure he was O.K.

Carl accidentally ran over Drew in his driveway and was not seen in his office or elsewhere for nine days. Knocks on his door went unanswered. The cold was extreme, the Alberta Express. Jed scraped his windshield and got in his car. He drove to Carl’s office, where he found Jenny, at her station with her usual crocodile smile, still wearing her hat. Her forehead wrinkled at the sight of Jed.

Jed asked, “What should I know?”

“He ran over Drew.”

“I heard.”

“The dog was the only reason he forgave you.”

“That’s hard to follow, but sure.”

“Carl loves me.” Jed thought that this was probably true. Still, it landed with a thud.

“I heard that. It’s wonderful, but why doesn’t he come to work?”

“When he lost the dog, he got mad at you again, and I didn’t want to hear about it for one more minute—the betrayal, the quote shattered friendship unquote.”

“He said that?”

“Jed, your zipper problems have caused so much heartache in this town.”

Jed thought to stay silent this time on the subject of the eager volunteers, even about the steamy hours at the cellphone towers, where opportunity had illuminated the frosty nights. Of course Jenny’s right, he thought. I’m an absolute pig.

“Maybe Carl thought Drew was a stand-in for Shirley.”

“That hurts, Jed.” Tears filled her eyes. “Perhaps it’s true. I hope it’s not.”

“I didn’t mean to upset you. You could buy him a dog—”

“Why, sure. Or how about a parrot? Or a horse?” Jenny stood, a handful of papers crushed in her fist. Jed quietly excused himself and returned to the snow. He started home, then stopped. It was clear. He’d go and see Carl. He had to.

He had not gone past Carl’s house all winter. He remembered the side window that he and his friends had broken. The replaced glass didn’t match the other panes. Where had those friends gone? Moved away, most likely. Jed wondered if he should be grateful that his dreary job had kept him here. It wasn’t really a question.

He smiled painfully at the security camera and knocked. Carl answered the door in his bathrobe. “I’ve been expecting you,” he said.

Maybe Carl would shoot him. It might be welcome, though he imagined it would hurt.

“How’s biz?” Carl asked as he placed a pod in the Keurig machine.

“My secretary earns the only reliable living.”

“As it should be,” Carl said. He led Jed into the living room, where they sat before a rock fireplace with a gas log, and, above it, a painting of a wagon train, a woman in a bonnet driving the oxen. It hadn’t been there when Jed was last in the house. It must have been a reference to Carl’s pioneer family. What an eyesore. “Jenny and I are getting married,” Carl announced. “We’ve been close since I don’t know when. It’s time to act. In a way, I’m grateful that you disrupted my life. It’s been a long way around the horn, but I’m with the right girl now. We have no secrets.” Carl paused and Jed didn’t speak. “I’m at last coming out of a very dark place. Yes, I’m moving toward the light.” He stared into his coffee for a moment, before lifting his eyes and holding Jed’s gaze. “Jed, I’ve waited all this time to tell you to your face that I hate you.”

“I understand.”

That was it. Carl saw him to the door, clutching his bathrobe as the snow blew in. Jed stopped when it shut behind him. Was this, finally, the end? Still, they had the long years of friendship to overcome this mishap. Jed felt it was inevitable that they would eventually reconcile.

Jed read about the wedding and wondered how Father Oliver could have performed the ceremony with a straight face. He had lost his indigenous wife to diabetes and was no longer a social presence in the community, now rarely beaming from the front of the church with indiscriminate benevolence. Carl and Jenny’s sparsely attended wedding was felt to be the end of an era by those who noticed it. The follies that had been cheerful topics for the town had dried up. The principals were starting to look old. At first, people thought Jenny had taken on airs, but she was one of them, and, in the end, they wished she were more pretentious and had a place in Arizona.

Kauai had long since gone from being a subject of gossip to a travel destination, and several neighbors vacationed there, returning with anomalous souvenirs from the Pacific Islands or brochures from the Breadfruit Institute. Global food security was a new topic in this comfortable town.

Carl’s practice—“a big frog in a small pond”—suffered as people now travelled to seek services. A modest trauma center was all the town had to offer by way of medical facilities, and Carl’s office rarely took on cases beyond the town limits. His many friends in the bar association recognized that he could again use some help and arranged for him to fill a district-court vacancy. They’d known him since law school and agreed that he was solid. The court’s residency requirements meant that Carl and Jenny would have to move to Helena—or else decline the position and face a straitened future in a place that seemed to be dissolving. They sold the house, took the furniture and the wagon-train painting, and moved away.

As Jed ate breakfast at the drugstore counter one summer morning, he remembered that it was Carl’s birthday. He thought to make it an occasion and wandered past Carl’s old home. A tricycle and a trampoline stood on the lawn. A dog barked behind a window.

Jed moved along, hoping to bump into someone he knew. ♦

There’s a bracing image partway through “Amrum,” a new historical drama from the director Fatih Akin, that has the makings of an antifascist meme. It’s the spring of 1945, and word of the Second World War’s impending end has reached the residents of Amrum, an island off the coast of Germany. The general response to this news seems muted; apart from an outspoken potato farmer (Diane Kruger) who looks forward to the conclusion of “Hitler’s damn war,” the islanders know that their rage against the Nazi regime is, like an illegal radio or extra rations, something best kept to themselves. Hille Hagener (Laura Tonke), a Third Reich true believer, is shattered by grief; cradling her newborn baby, she murmurs, “What kind of a world is this for a child to grow up in?” Her tough-minded sister, Ena (Lisa Hagmeister), sees things with greater clarity. She pulls a photograph of Hitler out of its frame and—here’s the meme-able moment—quietly burns it on the kitchen stove, as if to mark the end of an era and, perhaps, of a collective delusion. Whatever uncertainty the future may bring, Ena knows that the only way forward is forward.

We watch the immolation of Hitler’s likeness and feel warmed, even hopeful. But Nanning (Jasper Billerbeck), the eldest of Hille’s four children, looks on with wide-eyed curiosity and a measure of confusion. He’s the movie’s protagonist; he’s also an angelic-looking young stand-in for the German filmmaker, actor, and novelist Hark Bohm, who died in November, at the age of eighty-six. (Akin and Bohm, who were longtime friends, are credited as co-writers; Bohm was originally planning to direct, but eventually asked Akin to take over.) “Amrum” is a fictionalized memoir of a wartime childhood, in which the remoteness of island life is shown to breed its own specific sufferings and bestow its own strange lessons. The conflict may be at something of a geographic remove—the transfixing sight of warplanes soaring over the beach, or of an airman’s corpse washed up by the tide, comes as a jolting reminder of a distant yet ever-present horror—but its psychological effects prove no easier to shake, especially for an impressionable child.

Put more bluntly, the film is a Nazi coming-of-age story and a drama of deliverance, in which Nanning, a twelve-year-old member of the Jungvolk (basically, a kinder-Hitler Youth), takes his crucial first steps toward throwing off the ideological shackles. They’re not easily cast aside. Nanning’s father, a Nazi officer, is off fighting in the war; his mother, who gives birth the same day that Hitler’s death is announced, sinks into a depression that seems more post-Führer than postpartum. When an exhausted Hille declares “All I want is white bread with butter and honey”—former staples that have now become unobtainable luxuries—Nanning, a good, obedient son, sets out to make his mother’s dream come true. Soon, we are caught up in a boy’s grand adventure, though one that is grounded by a keen understanding of wartime scarcities. Preparing his mother’s meal of choice will require him to barter and negotiate with a baker (Marek Harloff), a beekeeper (Jorid Lukaczik), and a fishmonger, Arjan (Lars Jessen), whose brand of smoked flatfish has become an island currency in itself.

Arjan, a grizzled fellow with mirthful eyes, is one of many locals who quietly expand Nanning’s horizons. The old man once went to New York to make his fortune; so did Nanning’s grandfather and other Amrumers, a revelation that sheds new light on the pride, insularity, and xenophobia of this community, where even German mainlanders are regarded, contemptuously, as outsiders. Nanning, who was born in Hamburg, is bullied by a schoolmate who tells him that he’s no more a native Amrumer than the Polish refugees who have recently arrived on the island. Hille tries to reassure Nanning, noting that they are dwelling in their ancestral home: “Through me, your Amrumer blood goes back nine generations.” Tonke, in a haunting performance, gives these words an unmistakably fanatical chill. Hille’s every thought, word, and deed is governed by an obsession with blood purity. Clinging to her sense of racial and cultural superiority with an ever more unyielding grip, she seems utterly beyond saving. Her children, mercifully, are another story.

Fraught questions of national identity and dislocation have long weighed on Akin, who was born to Turkish-immigrant parents in Hamburg, and who charted the difficult journeys of German Turkish protagonists in his two major international breakthroughs, “Head-On” (2005) and “The Edge of Heaven” (2008). Since then, Akin’s restless streak has sent him all over the map—geographically, dramatically, and stylistically—and although he seldom seems disengaged, he has struggled to retain, or regain, the bristling urgency and jagged formalism that gave his early work its undeniable vitality. He confronted the Armenian genocide in “The Cut” (2014); went after neo-Nazi terrorists in the revenge thriller “In the Fade” (2017); and, most inexplicably, chronicled the life and crimes of a notorious Hamburg serial killer in “The Golden Glove” (2019), a little-seen abomination. My personal favorite of Akin’s films might be one of his most lighthearted: the shambling foodie comedy “Soul Kitchen” (2010), whose culinary concerns give it the slenderest of links to “Amrum” and its bread-and-honey mission impossible.

The new film is both Akin’s strongest and, with its stately, picturesque classicism, his least characteristic work in some time. “Amrum” almost acknowledges as much; it comes billed as “A Hark Bohm Film by Fatih Akin,” an unwieldy yet moving onscreen declaration of joint authorship. But, by dint of its story and its subject, the movie also feels like part of a broader cinematic conversation. It can’t help but conjure the vast range of films that have shown us the horrors of war from a kid’s perspective—a field that has yielded a few masterpieces, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s “Ivan’s Childhood” (1963) and Elem Klimov’s “Come and See” (1985), and, more recently, an underappreciated future classic, Steve McQueen’s “Blitz” (2024). Curiously, and through no fault of Akin’s or Bohm’s, the children-at-war picture that “Amrum” most resembles on its face is Taika Waititi’s “Jojo Rabbit” (2019), the rare film to which I’d admit a grudging, gun-to-my-head preference for even “The Golden Glove.”

Like “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” tracks a young Nazi boy’s reverse indoctrination and moral awakening during the last gasp of the Second World War. (Both films also feature scenes of bunny slaughter, clearly a popular rite of passage for that demographic.) Unlike “Jojo Rabbit,” “Amrum” does not infantilize the audience, trivialize the Holocaust, abuse the music of David Bowie, turn Hitler into a grotesque imaginary-friend caricature, or shy away from the idea that Nazis might, in fact, be terrible people. The two films’ most relevant point of connection might concern their pint-size protagonists, both of whom appear to have been cast for maximal cherubic appeal, as if to short-circuit any qualms we might have about embracing a Hitler Youth in training. Billerbeck, a first-time actor and a superb discovery, is such an immediately likable screen presence that it’s only natural to wonder if you’re being worked over.

Worry not. Nanning is an engaging lead, but he isn’t sentimentalized. He is, like many children, susceptible to the pressures of obedience and groupthink—qualities that can be weaponized under totalitarian circumstances—but he also has sufficient clarity to be horrified when he learns how antisemitism has shaped his own family. His character is, in a way, as malleable and half-formed as the white coasts of Amrum: invitingly sandy beaches that can turn instantly harrowing when the tide rolls in. More than once, Nanning, carrying a precious portion of butter or sugar, must wander into that treacherous tide. In one instance, he’s forced to make a swift, momentous decision about the value of another human life.

He chooses wisely, and you sense, by the movie’s end, that he’ll keep doing so. “Amrum” ends on a freeze-frame closeup of Nanning’s face, a visual gesture that immediately invokes one of the greatest of semi-autobiographical dramas, François Truffaut’s “The 400 Blows” (1959). But, unlike Antoine Doinel, that film’s troubled young hero, Nanning is smiling. He has not broken with his mother, as Antoine does, but he has come to a healthy understanding of her and her limitations. He is, no less than Antoine, a product of a failed system—and “Amrum,” without spelling out how, leaves us with little doubt that he will outlive it. ♦

On the first Saturday of Coachella, Justin Bieber started his concert by looking down at a camera on the floor of the stage. If you were watching the show at home, on a laptop or a TV screen, via Coachella’s live stream on YouTube, he was, for a moment, looking you dead in the eye. If you were out in the Coachella Valley, near Palm Springs, where young people flock annually to get loud, hear their favorite tunes played live, hallucinate in group settings, and herald the coming of summer, you saw Bieber’s gaze emanating from a pair of huge screens. Either way, before things had really gotten going, the pop star was already acknowledging the fact that the “liveness” of his performance was a subtly shifting, always mediated, geographically expansive quality. He was in California, but also, if you wanted, in Albuquerque or Seoul or the South of France. If you could meet his gaze, outside or in bed, you were in some sense right there with him, humming along.

He was singing a song called “All I Can Take”—a distressing title that offers to catalogue, down to the most minute speck of experience, the limits of the singer’s patience, or of his sanity. In reality, though, the song’s lyrics are downbeat but vague, held together by a loose emotional logic. “These symptoms of my sensitivity,” Bieber sang. “There’s things that I can’t change: Lord knows I’ve tried. Ooh baby, we can leave it all behind.” It’s a love song, sort of. Maybe it narrates a moment after the singer has already had more than he can “take,” when he has finally decided to use romantic love as a fugitive vehicle, speeding him away at high velocity from the details of overwhelming everyday life.

Bieber’s stage was large, roundish, and mostly bare, with a hilly ridge around the edges. It was populated by neither background singers nor a band. It looked like a catcher’s mitt that had been flattened and truncated, or a diorama of a desert with the suggestion of many mountains surrounding it. He was alone, except for a thin lectern holding an Apple laptop. In its minimalism, chic or shabby, depending on your perspective, the stage looked a lot like the setup for Bieber’s recent performance at the Grammys, where he appeared naked except for a pair of socks and some baggy boxers, played the electric-guitar part for his song “Yukon” until he’d successfully recorded and looped it, then sang plaintively, unhelped by the company of other bodies or the excitements of, say, pyrotechnics.

Bieber, the former child star who, now past thirty, often gestures at a deep well of discontent, is currently in a stripped-down, melancholy, D.I.Y. phase. A guy who gets famous in the music business at such a young age—Bieber was barely a teen-ager when the world came to know his high, clear voice and innocent face—can’t help but be labelled a product, furnished with beats and lyrics, and made to play a part. Now Bieber wants us to know that he’s got his own ideas, his own artistry, his own bad mood. The only way to get the message across is to raze the usual clutter of spectacle.

In 2024, he posted a picture of himself placidly crying, a pair of tears running trails down his face. Sources claimed that at an Oscars after-party this year, he had a conspicuous altercation—maybe even physical—with the R. & B. star Usher, who, back in the day, claimed to be his mentor and chief booster. Bieber has had clashes with the paparazzi, and has sent ambiguous messages over social media hinting at his sorrow. Rich and famous though he is, life for Biebs ain’t been no crystal stair, and now he’s willing to risk boring or confusing us to make sure we know it.

For the first few songs at Coachella—all of them coming from his two latest albums, “SWAG” and “SWAG II,” released within two months of each other last year—Bieber wandered around the stage alone, sometimes ascending the gentle ridges on the outer ring. He wore a big, boxy, pinkish hoodie and ballooning pants that cut off at the shins: slouchily stylish, stuff picked out from the fanciest but loneliest bedroom in the world. His voice was in its usual form, bright and buoyant, but with a new heaviness that has creeped in with age. He often avoided the highest notes of the songs, letting a backing track do that airy work while he carved out choir-like lower harmony parts. These are his gifts: a fluid voice and a sterling ear. He’s never lost in a song and never seems nervous in the slightest. The guy’s a pro.

He didn’t offer much banter between songs, except some fairly bland expressions of gratitude to the rabid audience, which, by the camera’s evidence, was full of emotional fans mouthing each of his lyrics. “Wow wow wow wow,” he said softly, without the vocal emphasis that so many “wow”s would imply. “To be up and close and personal with you guys, man: this is special. This is a night I dreamed about for a long time, so to be here is amazing.” He didn’t sound so amazed.

Bieber had stepped onto a smaller stage, more sharply circular than the first, and two acoustic guitarists came to sit on either side of him, flanking him like twin cherubs attentive at their harps. They eventually glided into a song called “Glory Voice Memo.” In the recorded version, the audio quality is scratchy; the song is more an improvised sketch than a fleshed-out composition. It’s a straightforwardly religious tune with bluesy themes:

Well I been used,
And I been beaten down,
I been let down, stalled out.

The peak is a kind of praising howl:

“I’m begging You for mercy
Please Lord, would You lead me?
So, I reach out
Singing glory
Singing glory
To the King.

Bieber has always been outspoken about his faith. (Speaking of being “let down,” his public father-son-like relationship with the popular former Hillsong pastor Carl Lentz—the emergent sort of new-agey, vaguely hip-hop motivationalist who struts his way through the sermon wearing skinny jeans and aviator glasses—petered out after Lentz was caught having an alleged affair.) After having played the sadboi for a while, crooning about love across a chasm of alienating grief, now he was the heart-on-fire, born-again penitent. A ring of lights far behind and above his head looked like a tasteful bracelet, or a halo. Another song he sang was called “Everything Hallelujah.”

Hearing this explicitly devotional detour in his set offered another way to interpret Bieber’s voice. Although he has tried on many personas—the yearning teen (“Baby”), the wised-up loverboy (“Love Yourself”), or the ongoing turn as a heartbroken artist hoping to show himself once and for all—he has in many ways always been, at least on the level of style, a Christian-contemporary-music artist. You can’t think of a C.C.M. song—the best ones featuring intensifying, drone-like repetitions and an undertone of intermingled ecstasy and sorrow—that wouldn’t be improved with a guest verse by Bieber. He’s got a great vocal range, but seldom strains or goes gritty or risks cracking the glass surface of the song.

Part of why “SWAG” and “SWAG II” are such interesting albums, suggesting a whole forest full of hidden pathways for Bieber’s career, is that their spare, sometimes harsh production plays in interesting contrast to Bieber’s stubbornly smooth delivery. Even when he’s talking his biggest shit, professing to be “bad,” the larger implication is that it’s been a journey, a conversion in reverse. He’s pop music’s fallen angel, always threatening to rise again.

The guitars disappeared and Bieber was alone again. Now he approached the altar of his laptop. What intimacy! Maybe you have a friend like this, who convenes six or eight people at a time in her living room, YouTube on the TV screen, just to play music videos, first new ones that she’s discovered, then, gradually, a bevy of oldies that turn the screening into a dance party. In our new day of algorithmic individuality, it’s hard to really know a person better than this.

Teasingly, Bieber started to play his own videos, going back and back into his early catalogue. “I feel like we gotta take you guys on a bit of a journey,” he said. Soon, he was watching the homemade videos of cover songs that made him famous: Chris Brown’s “With You,” Ne-Yo’s “So Sick.” He looked up at the huge onscreen version of his younger self with an air of something like astonishment. “Was I really that little?” he seemed to be thinking. He kept looking back and singing along, sometimes taking the octave below his long-gone young-boy soprano’s high notes, sometimes flitting into harmonies that made the old songs sound sadder.

There was a camera affixed to the laptop; between songs, you could see his face as the computer must—big, inquisitive, hungry for history. He looked like a live streamer, his screen a collage of revealing former moments.

The concert was a kind of four-act scheme—obvious loneliness, public revelation, private reminiscence, and then . . . what? That’s the big question about Bieber. He has been open about struggles with his mental health, has floridly thanked his wife, Hailey, for sticking with him through the worst depths, has turned the by now cliché trauma of child stardom into a compelling portrait of inner unrest. But what’s next? He’s got a whole life yet to live, more songs to sing, unless this recent foray into a kind of pop performance art is a way of saying goodbye. I doubt it.

Suddenly there were lots of other presences onstage, arriving in waves—the singer-songwriter Dijon, one of his closest collaborators on the “SWAG” series; the Afro-pop eminences Wizkid and Tems, to sing a remix of Wizkid’s song “Essence”; the singer and producer Mk.Gee, shredding on a guitar. The stage was awash in purples and pinks, psychedelic with the promise of exciting company. Suddenly Bieber was dancing around, trading fun glances with his fellow-artists, finally gesturing toward the usually obvious fact that a concert might also be an uncomplicatedly good time.

Bieberchella, as it’s been called, was wistful, intriguing, and soon quite controversial. Lots of people online are calling it a lazy way to deliver a show for which Bieber was paid a reported ten million bucks. (He plays again on the second Saturday of the festival.) But to my eye, it was also strangely fertile with ideas about pop performance in an isolated age. Maybe the last bit, the part with all the friends showing up, was the first tendril of a big question: Having emptied out the party—the great commons of a mass-media audience—how do you start it up again? ♦