“I've got a friend who calls that ‘The National Anthem,'” she said.
I gave her what was surely a weak-sickly smile, though likely I thought it was a cool and dispassionate one, at the time. She didn't elaborate, just let it sink in. I didn't ask who the friend might be — the unspecificity seemed as essential to the mood between us as the dual rental cars, the welcoming basket of cookies and fruit we'd ignored downstairs, or the silent fucking we'd enjoyed, our orgasms discrete, in turn. To press one another back into the world of names, of our real individual lives, would have seemed a rent in the shroud of worldly arbitrariness which enclosed our passion. Of course this was morbid, I see it now.
“There's a Bob Dylan song,” I said then. “‘Ninety Miles an Hour (Down a Dead End Street).' I think it's a cover, actually. Same thing: We're on a bad motorcycle with a devil in the seat, going ninety miles an hour down a dead end street. .”
“Yes, but this is ‘The National Anthem.'”
By refusing the comparison A put me on notice that this wasn't a dialogue, but a preemptive declaration. She'd be the one to manage our yearnings, by her foreknowledge of despair. Fair enough: her jadedness was what I'd been drawn to in the first place.
Of course you know, M, because I've told you stories, how we rode her jadedness — our bad motorcycle — down our own dead-end street. It wasn't kept anonymously cute, with baskets of cookies, for long. The perversity of the affair, it seems to me now, is that under cover of delivering her from the marriage she claimed to be so tired of, A and I climbed inside the armature of that marriage instead. By skulking at its foundations, its skirts, we only proved its superiority. However aggrieved she and R might be, however dubious their prospect, it wasn't a secret affair, wasn't nearly as contemptible as us. Certainly that can be the only explanation for why, in a world of motels and with my own apartment free, we so often met at her place — at theirs. And I think now that though I mimed indifference whenever she predicted imminent destruction, I'd lusted to destroy a marriage, that I was far more interested in R than I allowed myself to know.
But I don't want to make this letter about A. You've written at length about your uncertainties in your own marriage — written poignantly, then switched to a tone of flippancy, as though to reassure me not to be too concerned. Yet the flippancy is the most poignant of all — your joshing about your vagrant daily lusts in such an unguarded voice makes them real to me. Having never been to Japan, nor met your wife and child, I've been guilty of picturing it as some rosy, implacable surface, as though by moving from New York to Tokyo and entering a “traditional” Japanese marriage you'd migrated from the complicated world into an elegantly calm piece of eighteenth-century screen art. I'm probably not the first person guilty of finding it convenient to imagine my friends' lives are simpler than my own. It's also possible I began this letter by speaking of A in order to discredit myself as any sort of reasonable counsel, to put you in mind of my abhorrent track record (or maybe I'm just obsessed).
Let me be more honest. I don't spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at music and art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you're a digital wraith. What would it take to displace the visceral daily knowledge of our teenage years — how extensive would the letters have to be? When I try to think of your marriage I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don't mean to suggest anyone doesn't find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.
Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, a ninth grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being two years older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we'd never attained. I'll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess's appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she liked me too.
Bess Hersh saw through me shortly after that. I hadn't known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don't work on girls in high school. What's required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what give a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You mastered those poses in short order — I'd wait until college.
Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Sean Hyman's arm, and I felt that I'd only alerted the hipper Sean to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she'd mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too-big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I'd glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.
Funny, though, I don't remember speaking to her more than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her, chortling about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep's Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big empty sky. I recall talking this way with you too about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we'd write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in Mad magazine, Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.
When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it seems to me now. I felt all the music you listened to was wrong, a betrayal — you'd quit liking the inane clever stuff, and moved on to music that felt postured and sexy instead. I felt you'd forgotten yourself, and I tried to show you what you'd forgotten. When I'd third around with you and your new Vietnamese girlfriend, I'd seek to remind you of our secret languages, our jokes — if they hadn't worked on Bess they should at least still mean something to you — but those japes now fell flat, and you'd rebuff me, embarrassed.
Of course the worse I fared the harder I tried. For a while. Then that became our falling-out. I must have appeared so angry — this is painful speculation, now. Of course, what seemed so elaborately cultural or aesthetic to me at the time — I faulted you for hairstyle, music, Tu-Lin's Asianness — all appears simply emotional in retrospect. I was threatened by the fact that you'd gone from pining for girls to having them, sure. But I'd also invested in you all my intimations of what I was about to surrender in myself, by growing up. By investing them in you I could make them something to loathe, rather than fear. Loathing was safer.