Bret and Thom Wright

Bret and Thom Wright’s friendship is both a source of closeness and the setting for Bret’s long-concealed love. Thom’s effortless popularity and apparent heterosexual certainty make him seem both intimately near and unreachable; when his relationship with Susan Reynolds begins to fail and he turns toward Robert Mallory, Bret experiences the changes as a threat to the emotional world he has built around their friendship. The bond remains unfulfilled, and the narrator’s later recollection presents that absence as a lasting measure of desire and loss.

Friendship and Attraction

Thom has been part of Bret’s life at Buckley since seventh grade, after transferring from Horace Mann. Bret remembers a change in Thom after a summer visiting his father in New York: he returned to school in 1979 with a more adult appearance, and Bret’s attraction sharpened. Thom seemed unaware of his effect on others, while his good looks, athleticism, and easy manner made him an ideal figure in the school’s social world. Bret repeatedly understood his feelings as unlikely to be returned, since Thom appeared resolutely heterosexual.

The friendship developed in the ordinary company of school and weekends. Once they had cars, Bret, Thom, and Susan began spending time together at movies in Westwood, on the sand at the Jonathan Beach Club, and at Century City Mall. Thom and Susan became a couple and were widely regarded as the school’s most popular pair, moving through their social world together. Bret was close to both, but his position beside them also left him as an observer of a romance he admired and envied. He later says he would have married Thom, imagining him as kind, attractive, intelligent, and reassuringly easy to be around.

Popularity and Unspoken Desire

Their friendship unfolds within Buckley’s tightly visible social hierarchy. The school’s uniforms, small classes, and rules were meant to restrain distinctions among students, yet particular figures still commanded attention. Thom’s athletic ability and amiability helped make him the school’s informal king; Bret’s own social standing, by contrast, depended substantially on being known as Thom and Susan’s close friend. That proximity gave Bret a place in their circle without making his private feelings legible to them.

The difference between Thom’s openness and Bret’s concealment is central to the relationship. Bret had imagined that, if he ever approached Thom, Thom might respond gently before rejecting him, but these were fantasies, not events. The friendship offered no clear way to turn affection into a mutual romance. In retrospect, Bret recognizes that the conventional futures surrounding him—school status, heterosexual dating, and the apparent stability of Thom and Susan’s coupledom—stood in sharp contrast to the life he privately wanted with Thom.

Robert and the Fracture in the Friendship

The balance changed during the fall of 1981, when Susan began to tire of a relationship that had lasted about two years. At the Homecoming preparations, she objected to being expected to serve as Queen alongside Thom, arguing that the ritual was foolish and that someone else should have the chance. Thom pressed her to go through with it, concerned about how their refusal would look. Her anger and the slap that followed made the couple’s problems visible to their friends. Bret, who had regarded Thom as nearly ideal, was shocked to recognize that Susan might no longer want what he himself had long wanted.

Robert’s growing closeness to Thom sharpened Bret’s jealousy. After the argument, Bret watched Robert walk beside Thom, listening as Thom spoke; the sight made Bret dizzy with envy. He understood that he wanted both men and believed neither desire could be fulfilled. When Susan later apologized and agreed to participate, Thom hugged and kissed her, and the gathered students applauded. Robert joined the applause, while Bret performed his own participation in the moment. The public reconciliation restored the appearance of the popular couple without undoing Bret’s awareness that the relationships around him had shifted.

At Susan’s party, Thom’s intimacy with Robert again became difficult for Bret to ignore. Thom apologized for having been on edge, attributing his behavior to the party, drinking, and cocaine. Bret’s attention fixed on how close Robert sat beside him and on the fact that Bret himself could not recall ever sitting so close to Thom. When Susan returned, Thom reached for her hand and they kissed; Robert moved aside, and the group relaxed. For Bret, the sequence did not resolve the triangle of friendship and desire: Thom’s connections with Susan and Robert remained visible, while Bret’s own longing stayed unspoken.

Conflict, Care, and Retrospective Meaning

The strain between Bret and Thom also surfaces through their differing judgments of Robert. Thom calls Robert a wuss and a clueless rich kid, dismissing his apparent worldliness, but later speculates to Bret that Robert may be gay and that this might be what he is hiding. These remarks show Thom trying to interpret Robert while remaining unaware of the depth of Bret’s own concealed desire for him. Bret’s attachment therefore carries a double burden: he wants Thom’s intimacy, yet has to listen as Thom discusses another boy’s sexuality as though it were a distant problem.

When Susan finally confronts Thom and the relationship reaches its last act, Bret sees him crying in his Corvette after lunch. Thom says he has football practice in fifteen minutes and does not know whether he can manage it. Bret feels an overwhelming wish to comfort him physically and tell him he will not leave him for someone else, but instead says that they have to do something about Robert. The moment condenses the relationship’s pattern: intense tenderness remains internal, while the words Bret can actually offer turn toward the crisis surrounding them.

Decades later, the narrator identifies his love for Thom as one of the forces that shaped the book he was writing. He traces the attraction back to seeing Thom after that summer away, and admits that he had never met a man he wanted to live with for the rest of his life as much as Thom. He also concludes that such a future had not been available to him in the way he wanted, and that part of him had remained a child. Bret and Thom’s relationship thus persists in memory less as a romance than as an enduring, unanswered attachment: friendship gave Bret sustained access to the person he desired, but never the mutual future he imagined.