We went on like this for nearly ten years. And then one day the bond between us began to unravel. I had a bad exchange with Emma’s husband, and she saw it as divisive. She read a book by a liberationist writer I prized, and I was stung by her scorn. We each made a new friend whose virtues the other failed to respond to. That winter I could barely pay the rent, and Emma’s preoccupation with redecorating her place got under my skin. Suddenly, the adventure we had made of our differing circumstances seemed to be going sour: my cozy apartment felt sterile, her amiable husband a fool. Who are we? I remember thinking. What are we doing? And why are we doing it together?
Slowly but inexorably, the enterprise of mind and spirit to which our friendship had been devoted began to lose strength before the growing encroachment of the sympathies out of which our lives were actually fashioned. Like an uncontrollable growth that overtakes a clearing in the forest, the differences moved in on us. In no time at all, the friendship that had for so long generated excitement and exerted power was now experienced as a need that had run its course. Overnight, it seemed, it took one long stride and moved from the urgent center to the exhausted margin. Just like sexual infatuation, I remember thinking idly one morning as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. And then, somewhat dazedly, I realized, That’s right. That’s exactly what this is like. Sexual infatuation.
In the end, my friendship with Emma did prove to bear a striking resemblance to romantic love. The passion that had flared between us now seemed an equivalent of the kind of erotic feeling that dies of its own intensity at the moment one begins to realize that much in oneself is not being addressed by this attraction of the senses. The irony here was that sexual love usually fails because of an insufficiency of shared sensibility, whereas sensibility was what Emma and I had had in abundance.
When my friendship with Emma was disintegrating, I recalled Winston Churchill’s having once said there are no permanent friends, only permanent interests, and although I understood that Churchill meant worldly ambition trumps personal loyalties, I remember thinking even then, He’s wrong, there are no permanent interests, either. It was the infidelity of our own mutating “interests” that had brought me and Emma low.
Our inner lives, William James announced, are fluid, restless, mercurial, always in transition. The transitions, he speculated, are the reality, and concluded that our experience “lives in the transitions.” This is a piece of information difficult to absorb, much less accept, yet it is transparently persuasive. How else account for the mysterious shift in emotional sympathies that, at any hour of the ordinary day, brings a marriage, a friendship, a professional connection that has repeatedly threatened dissolution, to a “sudden” actual end?
The withdrawal of feeling in romantic love is a drama most of us are familiar with and therefore feel equipped to explain. In thrall to the intensity generated by passion, we invest love with transformative powers; imagine ourselves about to be made new, even whole, under its influence. When the expected transformation fails to materialize, the hopes interwoven with the infatuation do a desperate dissolve. The adventure of having felt known in the presence of the lover now bleeds out into the anxiety of feeling exposed.
In both friendship and love, the expectation that one’s expressive (if not best) self will flower in the presence of the beloved other is key. Upon that flowering all is posited. But what if the restless, the fluid, the mercurial, within each of us is steadily undermining the very thing we think we most want? What, in fact, if the assumption of a self in need of expressiveness is an illusion? What if the urge toward stable intimacy is perpetually threatened by an equally great, if not greater, urge toward destabilization? What then?
* * *
On Fourteenth Street, at noon on a summer’s day — in the midst of honking traffic, bargain store shoppers, crosstown bus riders — I run into Victor, an unhappy dentist who has lived in my neighborhood for years. Tall and slim, with a Caesar haircut and sad brown eyes, he is a nervous man who smiles compulsively. Whenever he sees me he coos, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how a-a-are you?” Then, like a mother in a permanent state of interested alarm, he peers intently into my face and very gently asks, “You still writing, dahling?” Some years ago Victor, in search of inner peace, began traveling regularly to Japan to consult the Zen healer who has given him the wherewithal to get out of bed in the morning in New York. He must be sixty by now.
Standing here on Fourteenth Street, a Con Ed drill blasting in our ears, Victor croons at me, “Dahling, sweetness, beautiful girl, how are you, still living in the same building?”
“Yes,” I reply.
“Still doing journalistic work?”
“No, Victor, I teach now.”
He pushes his chin out at me as though to say, “Tell me.”
I tell him. He listens intently as the words fall rapidly from my mouth, nodding steadily as I speak of the deprivation of spirit I suffer living for months at a time in one university town or another.
“It’s exile!” I cry at last. “Exile pure and simple.”
Victor nods and nods. His brown eyes are dissolving in watery pain. He knows exactly what I mean, oh, no one in the world will ever know better than he what I mean. His face goes dreamy. My own starts feeling compromised. Car brakes screech, sirens pierce the air, the Con Ed drill stops and starts, stops and starts. No matter. Victor and I are now quarantined on this island of noise, spellbound by matters of the soul.
“But you know, dahling?” he says ever so softly. “I have discovered there’s a lot of love out there.”
“Oh yes,” I reply quickly, suddenly aware of the harm my relentless negatives may be doing.
“A lot of love,” he repeats reverentially.
“Absolutely,” I agree. “Absolutely.”
The Con Ed drill starts up again.
“I mean, people care.” By now Victor’s face is radiant. “They really do.”
And it is me who is nodding and nodding.
Victor puts his hand on my arm, leans toward me, looks searchingly into my eyes, and delivers himself of his wisdom.
“Dahling,” he whispers in my ear, “we’ve got to let it go.”
Yes, yes, oh yes, I know just what you mean.
“Let it all go.”
* * *
After 9/11, an atmosphere difficult to describe enveloped the city and refused to abate. For weeks on end the town felt vacant, confused, uprooted. People walked around looking spaced-out, as though permanently puzzled by something they couldn’t put a name to. The smell was eerie: like nothing anybody could describe exactly, but when your nostrils inhaled the air, you felt anxious. And all the while a kind of otherworldly quiet prevailed. In restaurants, theaters, museums; shops, traffic, the crowd itself — all seemed muted, inert, even immobilized. A man who loved New York movies found himself turning the television set off when one came on. A woman who enjoyed seeing photographs of the city in a storefront she passed daily now flinched as she approached the shop. The pictures, she said, felt like “before,” and nothing “before” gave comfort.
One soft, clear evening about six weeks after the fateful day, I was crossing Broadway, somewhere in the Seventies. Halfway across, the light changed. I stopped on the island that divides the boulevard and did what everyone does: looked down the street for a break in the traffic so that I could safely run the light. But there was no traffic: not a car in sight. I stood there, hypnotized by the grand and awful emptiness. I couldn’t recall the time — except for a blizzard, perhaps — when Broadway had ever, even for a moment, been free of oncoming traffic. It looked like a scene from another time. Just like a Berenice Ab—, I started thinking, and instantly the thought cut itself short. In fact, I wrenched myself from it. I saw that it was frightening me to even consider “a scene from another time.” As though some fatal break had occurred between me and the right to yearn over that long-ago New York alive in a Berenice Abbot photograph. That night I understood what it was that had been draining out of the city throughout this sad, stunned season.