Philip McGuane and John Asselta’s Friendship

Philip McGuane and John Asselta’s friendship is defined by a tension the men never resolve: they recognize one another as best friends, yet McGuane admits he might have killed Asselta under different circumstances. Their exchange moves from shared memories to that stark possibility, making affection neither a guarantee of safety nor a simple opposite of violence.

Shared memories and changed circumstances

McGuane pours brandy, hands Asselta a snifter, and sits with him. Their present drink prompts Asselta to remember a very different ritual: hanging out in the woods behind Riker Hill and drinking the cheapest beer they could find. McGuane supplies the brands—Schlitz and Old Milwaukee—and Asselta confirms the recollection. The brief exchange gives their friendship a concrete history: its intimacy is expressed through a remembered place, a cheap shared pleasure, and the ease with which each recognizes the details.

The contrast between that beer and the fine brandy they drink now marks a change in circumstances without erasing the earlier bond. Asselta cups his glass and smiles; McGuane takes a deep sip. The scene does not explain what has brought them to this more luxurious drink, but it places recollection beside their present closeness. Their connection is not described abstractly: it emerges through the small, mutually remembered particulars that make a shared past legible.

Loyalty tested by the possibility of violence

The friendship’s most consequential test comes when Asselta asks whether McGuane would have killed him if Asselta had not taken out the two men at the cemetery. McGuane chooses honesty and answers that he does not know, then adds that he probably would have. His reply makes the friendship’s limits explicit: affection does not cancel the possibility that McGuane might have treated his closest friend as a lethal threat.

Asselta responds by naming McGuane his best friend. McGuane answers, “You're probably mine.” The qualification matters. His response is reciprocal, but not entirely unguarded; placed directly after his admission, it cannot make the danger disappear. Instead, the conversation holds the two facts together: McGuane may have been willing to kill Asselta, and he still regards him as probably his closest friend. The scene offers no assurance that loyalty would have prevailed in the counterfactual situation they discuss.

A bond acknowledged, but not explained away

Asselta then smiles and asks, “We were something, weren't we, Philip?” McGuane does not reply. That silence leaves the friendship acknowledged but not neatly defined. The remembered beer, the mutual best-friend declarations, and the unanswered appeal establish its substance; the prior admission keeps that substance from becoming uncomplicated nostalgia.

Asselta continues by recalling that he met Ken when he was four and that neighborhood children were warned to stay away from the Asselta house because the family was considered a bad influence. This recollection places Asselta’s friendship with McGuane beside an earlier history of social suspicion surrounding the Asseltas, though it does not establish that McGuane shared that childhood experience. The conversation thus moves from a particular memory between two friends to the stigma attached to Asselta’s family, without resolving what either man thinks the past ultimately means.

Friendship in the aftermath

The exchange takes place amid the aftermath of violence: the young lawyer Cromwell’s body is gone, while Joshua Ford is alive and conscious but unable to move. The scene identifies neither man as responsible for those conditions in the evidence presented here. Its significance for their relationship is instead one of juxtaposition: McGuane and Asselta sit together with brandy while danger and its consequences remain close at hand.

Their friendship is therefore neither a sentimental refuge from the surrounding violence nor merely a disguise for enmity. The men can remember the same cheap beers, name one another as best friends, and acknowledge that one might have killed the other. McGuane’s silence after Asselta asks what they were to each other leaves that contradiction open; the bond is real in the scene, but its durability is never proven.