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Memories gather dust in various places.
On the top shelf of Neil's hall closet, tucked back behind a forest green blanket. In Knox's attic, where the kids can't reach. The bookshelves of Todd's office, displayed but never really seen. In Charlie's bedroom, two cigar boxes under his bed. Yearbooks, letters, photographs, drawings, scraps of poetry, and a thousand and one promises begging to be reopened.
In the end, there are promises.
Neil promises not to let Harvard turn him into too much of a stiff. Knox, off with him, promises to hold him to that — and both of them say that they'll try to forget that Cameron is there, too. Todd smiles uncharacteristically wide and passes the bottle of whiskey along, promising in an even voice to make Keating proud at Cornell.
Charlie sneers when it circles around to him. All he can promise is that he'll never go. Ever. He's the only one in the group to pass up an Ivy League, but Ithaca can still shove it. "My father thinks I'm going, but forget that," he says with a lazy grin. "I've got the money, I'll just go to Paris instead." He promises, he swears that he'll be there in two months' time, smoking and playing sax and never going anywhere near a bank.
No one pokes holes in Charlie's plan, because at this point they still all believe that miracles can happen. They share promises to keep in touch, keep finding like-minded thinkers, keep spreading carpe diem, keep writing poetry, keep living.
("Promises are like rules," Charlie will say to his wife years later, meticulously shaving the stubble that takes days to grow in (because studies show that people are more likely to trust clean-shaven men with their money). "They're meant to be broken.")
Neil's valedictorian speech moves his parents to tears. Charlie still thinks that he should have scrapped it at the last minute and made something up off the top of his head — a monologue, poetry, something brilliant to blow the minds of everyone at Welton. "Make them think twice about sending you off to med school," he spits, but Neil cuts his diatribe short.
"No, Charlie," he says, the words weatherworn in his voice. "I have to give the speech that they approved."
"You don't have to do anything," Charlie hisses, one hand tight on Neil's arm. They share a few seconds just with one another, a moment of intense understanding, before Neil's eyes deaden and he pulls himself away.
Just another tiny loss in the battle for their freedom, he reconciles. Charlie still thinks he'll win the war.
Shut up and enjoy it while we have it, Charlie keeps telling Todd, and he tries to flick ash at him but it just hangs still in the dead heat of summer.
They've taken to Lake Champlain, as per usual — sometimes Charlie manages to get ahold of his father's boat, but for the most part they swim and smoke and try not to spill lemonade on the poetry anthologies gifted to them by Keating at graduation. "Watch where you're splashing," Charlie says from atop his rock, pressing the book protectively against his chest.
"Shut up and enjoy it, Nuwanda," Todd retorts with a sly little smile before ducking back underwater.
Later in the night when the lemonade turns into wine and they're all in the Overstreet's backyard for a garden party, Charlie inclines his head thoughtfully — "I think I'll legally change my name," he says.
Neil snorts a laugh and raises an eyebrow (it would be infuriating on anyone else). "Nuwanda Dalton?"
"No, just Nuwanda." The leaves are making strange shadow-patterns across their three-piece suits, and Charlie's eyes are shadowed as he grins. "Like Houdini, making my escape."
Two weeks later, he's at Ithaca.
For the first month, Knox and Neil are inseparable as only old friends in a new and strange environment can be.
It's not that they'd ever been particularly close before; when Neil found Charlie, he just happened to be with Knox, and he stuck around. They like each other well enough, there's certainly nothing they dislike about one another — so they're amicable at Harvard, studying together and going to parties for ten minutes before realizing that they'd rather be elsewhere and leaving. Knox works up the courage to share a new poem with Neil, and Neil talks to him about trying out for plays in the area.
But he never does. Neil's studies get the best of him, and Knox gets involved with intramural sports and clubs to keep him occupied. They stop running into one another. They stop trying to.
"Call me if you need a break from being a stiff," Knox jokes one morning as they cross paths, but the laugh they share is mirthless. He's walking with a pretty blonde girl; Neil's starting to get this idea that none of them are ever really going to change.
There's stark contrast between letters from Todd and letters from Charlie.
Todd writes almost religiously, once a week, every week. It's all part of his routine. They're type-written and signed in pen, they're informative, never more than a page, and just the slightest bit stilted. He and Neil end up knowing each others' day-to-day activities just through written correspondence, the names and basic traits of acquaintances they make, how they're trucking along toward their respective careers; the minutiae of life.
Charlie's are scrawled on paper stained with coffee or alcohol or both. Sometimes they get so frantic and Neil can barely decipher them. He talks about hand-rolling his own cigarettes, about the people he's met at cafés in the area, about the jazz theory class (which seems to be the only class he actually cares about). Charlie writes like he speaks and hits on some poignant parts of himself, but never delves deeper. And he expects the same of Neil. If Neil doesn't deliver, the letters become even more sporadic, and Charlie only resurfaces again when his friend writes first.
Sometimes he's drunk when he's writing them. Neil can tell. Sometimes he includes fragments of poems or songs he's been working on — the two instances aren't mutually exclusive.
I heard Paris out my window this morning, Charlie writes in the spring.
I like it here more than I did in the fall, Todd starts.
I still wish I had gone.
I think I made the right choice.
If I don't get out this summer, some heads might roll.
I'm getting a job to stay in New York over break.
Forget this. Bye—
Sincerely,
Neil sighs and folds the letters back up. Somehow, he always knew they'd walk perpendicular paths.
Neil's summa cum laude speech moves his parents to tears.
Charlie throws back another flute of champagne and motions for Knox to lean in. "My father's in the hospital," he says in a flat voice. His friend's face flashes concern, but Charlie just shrugs. "I'm not too broken up over it, but if he bites it I'm gonna have to take care of Mom."
Mr. and Mrs. Perry had been nice enough to allow Neil a few of his old friends at the party, though they flutter around Knox and his girlfriend of three years (Charlie doesn't let himself recognize her as a fiancée yet). He's fine with being ignored; he's the one with a goatee and an uninteresting degree and no curriculars to speak of. He doesn't have stories about soccer teams and service clubs — well. He does, it just happens that they're from high school.
Across the room, Neil bumps a thin girl accidentally and stops to apologize. "I like your shoes," he adds, charming smile in place.
Why not?
Everyone always thought Knox would be the first to marry, but it ends up being Neil and Elaine. Todd isn't able to make it, he's studying in London, so Charlie gets stuck with best man. The good part is that he gets to plan the night of getting Neil hammered — the bad part is, well, everything else. Weddings aren't Charlie's bag.
"It's my duty to make sure you want to do this," he slurs two nights before the wedding. "Do you really want to do this? Really, Neil?"
His answer is another swig of beer and throwing down his royal flush. Charlie concedes, because the groom-to-be should win something, at least. It doesn't occur to him that Neil never says yes or no or anything of the sort. Maybe he's not really sure. Maybe he doesn't want to have to think about it hard enough to come up with an answer.
Knox and Marianne follow in kind, and by that time Todd's back on the East Coast, looking for a job teaching English. He gets stuck with a public school, though Charlie argues that that's probably better than Welton anyway, and swears that if any of them ever have kids, they can never, ever go to Welton.
"But in the end, it was a good school," Neil says. Were he younger, Charlie's sharp glare would cut him off, but now he just talks over his friend's silent tension — "You can't deny that, Charlie. We all got a great education and went on to good schools." He pauses to consider, then adds, "Not that I could send my kid there."
"I knew you'd come around," Charlie mutters, but the other two are quicker on the uptake. Charlie's the only one surprised when Neil's holding a baby girl seven months later — "Oh, I get it now," he grins. "Well, there's one saved soul out there, at least."
He proposes after the landing of Apollo 11. Later that night over drinks, Neil tells him that there's probably some significance in there, but Charlie just shrugs. "I just didn't have anything to distract me anymore," he says.
Neil never asks if he really wants to do this. No one does. He marries Diane anyway, and after half a year realizes that guaranteed sex isn't all it's cracked up to be, and certainly not a reason to get hitched.
It's the age of hippies and drugs and music that none of them can really connect to. Charlie still listens to smooth jazz; Neil takes his daughter to see Broadway musicals. Their children grow up and, despite their best efforts, become entrenched in a world that they have no clue how to deal with.
The day Neil sees his daughter on television with her sign for FREE LOVE held high, he squeezes his glass too hard and it breaks, slicing open his palm. Todd sees the same broadcast in his office and can't stop laughing at the irony of it all, because isn't that what they were all supposed to do? He teaches these kids day in and day out, and so so so desperately wants to be their guiding light, show them the sort of controlled rebellion that can open minds and free spirits, not this drug-addled anarchist haze they all seem to be living in. But he can't be Keating, no matter how hard he tries, and when Charlie calls him on this through a drunk enraged letter, he laughs again. Because what else can he do?
Charlie does keep one of his promises — in between marriages, he manages to make it to Paris.
He'd gone once before, the summer of '58 — Knox and Neil sure as hell won't ever forget it, because it's all he talked about. Their friend had returned with post cards and photographs and stories about chain-smoking with French prostitutes behind the classiest bars, and truth be told, neither of them are sure where reality ends and hyperbole takes over. Charlie's first taste of freedom changed him forever, and it could have been anywhere, but it was Paris. It always will be.
This time he's back after only two weeks. It's dirtier, he tells them. Even more congested. It doesn't shine at night anymore. All artificial. "It's changed."
"You've changed," Todd mumbles into his drink, but he throws an extra five into the poker pot so Charlie doesn't let his anger stay apparent for too long.
His son never forgives him for leaving, and once Charlie returns from Paris, he doesn't see the boy or his ex-wife again. All the better, he decides. He made a shitty father anyway.
"For a guy who doesn't want kids, you sure have a lot of them," Neil deadpans at the first new Dalton garden party. Charlie couldn't possibly look more like he hates his life — it's the backyard of the same house he grew up in, only now he has a daughter running around under foot and a second wife hanging off his arm. He doesn't even pretend to smile anymore. Funny, Neil realizes, that Charlie ended up the most miserable out of all of them.
Because while the three slipped placidly into their mediocre lives, Charlie is the one who keeps trying to break out. But it's all a backwards slide, and every time he thinks he's seeing the light, everything falls in on him and he's back at square one.
"That's going to kill you, you know." Neil punctuates his words with a nod to the antique pipe clamped in Charlie's mouth, and is met with a roll of the eyes. "Really, Charlie, tobacco's a lot worse than we thought it was. We just got a study in—"
"I've smoked forever," Charlie snaps. "I'm not quitting now."
His wife's voice cuts the tension, calling into the dimmed den from outdoors — "Charles? The Wilsons just arrived! Charles…"
"She calls you Charles," Neil observes.
"Just like Mom did. And isn't that what we all want?" A fake, saccharine smile, and Charlie's gone again. Neil follows, as he always did, mentally trying to calculate whether he's more likely to die of liver disease, lung cancer or his own repressed rage at this point.
God, medicine is a morbid career.
The twenty-five year reunion is the only one that all four boys make it to. None of them want to go back to Welton, but it had been Todd's pleading — he finally got a job at their alma mater, and he's been bored stiff. No one who worked there while they were in school is still alive, though Keating does fly in from London for it.
Charlie shows up drunk and keeps drinking, trying to ignore how disappointing this all is. Knox and Marianne are loveless now, but they still have the collegiate days of cheerleading for football games and their beautiful, successful children to remind them of what could have been — or what was, and what is no longer. Elaine died in a car accident, and Neil hasn't been the same since, though he's doing fine raising his kids on his own. He's even made amends with his oldest daughter. Everything Todd says is tinged with bitterness and suppressed anger, because he'll never say exactly what he's thinking: that Keating was wrong, that there's no place for freedom in academia, that it's nice in theory but in practice it just doesn't work. That he doesn't have the balls to make it work. And Charlie, with two ex-wives in the hole and two children who resent him for needing to get away — sure, he's made an excellent living off of banking and can afford to spend time in Paris on vacation, but in the end, what does it amount to? Gathering dust in closets, in desk drawers, on shelves, under beds.
"That's life," he tells the aged and fragile Keating. "To dust we shall return, right?"
"Funny, Mr. Dalton, I never pegged you as a religious man." With a wry smile, the old man leans in and adds, "Unless you were worshipping yourself."
Keating's too old to make the trek to the cave, though he wants to — he sends the four out on their own with a request to reconnect with themselves. Rediscover what made them so passionate when he was teaching them.
"Youth," Charlie spits, climbing through the underbrush that's grown over the natural paths to the Indian cave. "That's what made us passionate. It's not like we could hang onto it forever."
"We can at least try," Knox says, trying to recapture the optimism and romance his voice once held, but now it just sounds half-hearted.
There's graffiti on the walls of the cave; the stones they used as chairs are gone, the God of the Cave is nowhere to be seen, there's cigarette butts and even a condom wrapper and it's all hideous in the light of day, with absolutely none of the magic that it used to hold. "How enlightening," Neil deadpans and tries not to notice Charlie draining his hipflask.
They keep trying this, trying to recapture the mysticism of the cave, of Lake Champlain, of the English classroom, of any of their old haunts. But just having the four together isn't enough to resurrect ghosts of good times. You get what you give, Charlie thinks and half-mumbles, not realizing that he's doing so.
In the end, if you don't give any effort toward the life you want to lead, you're not allowed to be surprised when it doesn't happen.
He stumbles away, ignores the three calling for him to not go off on his own. "Two roads diverged," Charlie shouts over his shoulder, dizzy and disoriented and wanting nothing more than to just lie down, close his eyes, and wake up at age eighteen again — something he'd never thought he'd want.
As it turns out, he can still be surprised.