I switched off the television. I went to bed. I tried to smile into the dark but I kept thinking about the ground opening up and swallowing the building where I lived, so I found it difficult.
The next morning on my way to work I practiced my new repertoire of smiles. I felt pleased, like I had been given a second chance against the odds. But when I arrived at my office, on my desk I found a note that had not been there when I left. I picked it up and read it. It was from Gladys Kemp.
It said: I know that this is not really usually done at work, but I wanted to thank you again for understanding about my situation and I wondered if you would like to maybe sometime meet up for a cup of coffee or something like that. anyway: here’s my phone number. And there was her number, all those lovely digits in a row, and I looked at them and felt the expression on my face turn serious. I felt a kind of nervous anticipation, a fluttering inside my chest. It was not a bad feeling but it made it difficult for me to maintain the sense of placid optimism that I had been carefully cultivating since I woke. I put the piece of paper face down on my desk and looked at it. I wanted very much to call the number, but immediately I thought about what might happen if I did. What if we went out for coffee and it turned out that I bored her or we did not have that much in common? What if we dated for a while and then things did not work out and we had to see each other at work every day and now it was not a happy sight but a painful one? What if we went out and fell deeply in love and I began to feel her feelings along with her, which is what should happen when you love someone very much, and I began to worry about her daughter’s illness and her lack of opportunity and even her lost cat? Any of these outcomes would wreck my Smile Report. And what about Gladys Kemp? She was already struggling to keep her face under control. How on earth would she cope with any more disruptions in her life?
I swallowed hard and tried to think of calm, benign things like flowers and nice, melodic music, and with some concentration I was able to neutralize the breach in my demeanor. I stood struggling mightily and it occurred to me that if this woman had such an adverse effect on me simply by giving me her phone number, what would happen if I actually called her number and took her up on the offer to meet for coffee? It could have far-reaching negative repercussions for my entire career.
No, I thought, I can’t allow that. I picked up the piece of paper and bravely, with purpose, barely thinking at all about amber light or melancholy or lopsided smiles or dark, smooth hair swept back or legs crossed or lavender or green tea, I dropped the note into the trash beneath my desk. I watched it fall among the other papers. I watched it settle. There. I had made a sound and sensible decision, one I could feel positive about. I could feel proud of myself for doing the right thing. I felt the smile return to my face and settle there, roost there, like it had come home.
Now I was ready to get to work.
On Friendship
PHONE CALLS
The reason we are no longer friends is simple, really. When I would call her last year, which admittedly I didn’t do very often, she did not sound happy. Her voice on the other end of the line would be flat and uninflected, not lively and pleased to hear from me like certain of my other friends’ voices when I called them. Hi, she’d say. Not: Hey! How are you doing? Nice to hear from you! Just: Hi. Then she’d stop talking and wait for me to continue, to step in and carry on the conversation. It was as though there was something she was expecting me to say, some problem that I ought to know about, something I had done wrong for which I should apologize.
I did know, at least I thought I knew, what was wrong. It was that I hadn’t called more recently, that I didn’t call more often. For several years, there had been an imbalance in our friendship that we both felt but did not talk about. She felt, at least I think she felt, that I did not call enough, did not make enough time for her, that I held her at a distance. I felt that she expected me to call too often, that she wanted too much from me as a friend and that she didn’t appreciate the attention and time I did give her.
A year or so before, she’d been going through a difficult time, a run of misfortune and disruptions that seemed to build on each other: there were problems at her job, which made her depressed and then, in part because of the depression, her partner left and then because her partner left, she decided to quit the job she disliked so much but then she couldn’t find another one right away. She was the kind of person who would pick up the phone immediately if something in her life went wrong, to talk, to share her distress. She would call me, sometimes late at night, and we would talk, sometimes for a long time, about the difficult things that were happening to her. And each time we would talk in this way, I would feel like I’d paid into an account, fulfilled a requirement, and that now she could not accuse me of neglecting her. Because I am — I’ve always felt I am — a person who keeps her distance from people, who doesn’t return phone calls right away and who doesn’t like to see people too often in case I run out of things to say to them.
On the other hand she would feel — or so I can infer from her behavior — that with each of these conversations we were getting closer and more intimate, becoming better friends. And so she began call more frequently, to talk about what was happening in her life, to get advice, to find out how I was doing. But even though her phone calls were more frequent, I was still returning them at the same rate, with the same couple-of-days delay. Only now it seemed like I was returning them more slowly, like I was pulling away from her, retreating, even though in fact my behavior hadn’t changed. She made more phone calls than I returned whereas before she had made fewer phone calls and I returned a higher percentage of them. After a while she came to resent the fact that she was calling me more often than I was calling her and her voice, when we did speak, took on that flat, resentful tone that came to characterize it during the last months of our friendship.
As I said, we never talked about this. But last year, when things were going very badly with me — I was separated from my husband for a while and my new job was not all that I hoped it would be — I would think periodically that I really should call her, that it had been too long since we’d spoken, and I would sometimes get as far as starting to dial her number. But then I would anticipate how she’d sound when she answered, and the prospect of hearing her lack of enthusiasm or pleasure, of encountering yet another person that day to whom I was a problem or a matter of indifference, would stop me; I would hang up the phone and I wouldn’t call.
In the end, it had been so long since I had called that I thought if I called her, we would have a fight because I hadn’t called sooner and she was angry at me for that, or because I was now angry at her because I knew that she was angry at me for not having called sooner and what right did she have to be angry at me about a situation that was as much her fault as mine? It wasn’t as if we were family, whom you are supposed to call whether you feel like it or not. What did we really have tying us together apart from the simple pleasure of hearing each other’s voice on the line? And if she could not even muster that, well, what was the point of trying to stay in touch?