They were very close-knit, had been to the same college and after that they all lived in an old, converted warehouse in Brooklyn where some of them, the ones who were visual artists, had studios. They always spent time together in a big group and they liked to give one another nicknames that the whole crowd would adopt and use whether the person liked the name or not. They liked to go drinking and dancing and talking late into the night, having long, involved arguments about art and politics, making plans, starting projects. Sometimes, when they’d all stayed out too late or drunk too much, they would have disagreements that devolved into shouting and tears and people storming out and vowing never to speak to each other again. But then, like the members of a big, rowdy, extended family, they would usually make up and be friends again before too long — so even that was not really so bad.
But what really upset me about them was how content they seemed being friends with and talking to one another. They weren’t always trying to find new and better friends, like most people I had met in that city. When they had a party, all of them attended and they didn’t worry about whether there were other, better parties happening somewhere else to which they hadn’t been invited. When they argued about ideas, they did so freely and without any apparent sense that other people somewhere else might be more qualified than they to make judgments about the subjects they were discussing. What egotism, I would think, that they believe the things they are doing and saying are actually interesting and possibly original and that they expect these things to be of interest to others besides themselves. Whereas I spend so much time worrying if anyone will ever care about what I do and what I write, and feeling that the bright center of the world is always elsewhere, that wherever I go chasing after it, it departs just before I can get to it.
So I found reasons to stay away from the group, even when my boyfriend (now my husband) would stay out late with them. It caused some problems between us because he would spend time with them and I didn’t want to. In the end, we moved away from New York and that solved that problem. In our new city we didn’t know anyone and so we spent most of our free time with each other and that’s when we decided to get married.
KISS
Our friendship came to an end after he tried to kiss me. It was after we’d been drinking at a bar one evening — we used to like to do that, sit in a corner booth at one particular bar on 17th Street in San Francisco and talk for many hours together just the two of us. Sometimes we would invite other people along, too, my boyfriend, who I lived with, or a girl he was dating. But mostly we liked it best when it was just the two of us. We talked like people who were younger than we were at the time; we were in our thirties already, but we talked like we were still in college, all that enthusiasm, the wonderful, wandering hours of talk about all things, love and books and music and politics. I talked so well when I talked to him; it really felt like we might discover something new.
Looking back, I guess I’d always known that underneath the surface of our friendship was attraction, unacknowledged. It was in the way we looked at each other, in the time we reserved for each other; the beautiful way we spoke together was part of it, too. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when, one day, as we were leaving our bar to go home, he put his arm around my waist and leaned in toward me, bringing his face down very close to mine before I pushed him away. I remember how his arm felt around my body and how his breath smelled of the whiskey we’d been drinking, not bad just sweet and warm. After I’d put my arms up and shaken him off, he took a step back, embarrassed, and said:
Sorry.
That’s okay, I said. I know how you feel. I do. But I live with Greg.
Sure, he said. I know. Then again: Sorry. I’d better go.
So he went home and so did I and later that night I sent him a message saying that we could continue to be friends only if something like that never happened again. He wrote back and said okay. He said he was embarrassed by what he’d done, that it hadn’t really meant anything. He really thought of me as a friend and not romantically at all and he’d hate to lose our friendship over something insignificant like this. I wrote back and said okay, I understood, although I felt obscurely disappointed when I read his message. We made plans to meet the following week as usual.
We did meet up and at first everything seemed all right between us, but after a while I noticed that he was making sure to sit a certain distance away from me on the bench instead of right next to me so that our legs sometimes touched, as he had always done before. I noticed that, where before our fingers had brushed when we would hand each other drinks, now he scrupulously avoided this contact by putting the glass down on the table in front of me. We still talked about the same things that we always had, but after a while I realized that I was unhappy. I didn’t want him to simply agree that, fine, we were just friends. What is wrong with me, I thought, that he doesn’t want to try to kiss me again? What was I lacking that he “didn’t think of me romantically”? Wasn’t I pretty enough? Wasn’t I interesting enough?
Our conversation slowed and we found ourselves sitting there in silence. He tried to restart it a few times, suggesting topics that fizzled after a few sentences. I thought how I’d never noticed how much he liked to talk about himself. I thought how I’d never liked the way he talked about books as though it was a competition to see who’d read the most. I saw him looking at a girl across the room, a girl with black hair and a swirly tattoo showing in the small of her back where her tank top was riding up above her jeans. In the end we said goodbye and he didn’t even try to hug me and I thought: Am I that repulsive? He just waved goodbye and walked away down the street.
RECIPES
For a long time, I thought of her as someone who had let me down. Some years ago, I had been seeing a man to whom she had introduced me and the affair went badly wrong. He drank too much and didn’t really want to stop, and in the end I got tired of dealing with the Jekyll-and-Hyde roller coaster of dating a drunk and I broke it off. I was very sad after that because I was in love with the man in spite of his bad qualities. I felt that this was a case where one person, him, was clearly at fault in our breakup, and that as a result he ought to be shunned by our mutual friends.
When she kept in touch with him and continued to see him, I was angry with her. When she continued to go out drinking with him, in spite of openly agreeing with me that he had a problem with alcohol, I felt it showed callousness and a lack of caring on her part. I was so much more upset than he was and so much more deserving of companionship, yet I was the one home by myself while she and he and others of our circle went out on the weekends. It didn’t occur to me at that time that she might be struggling with her own desire for various kinds of oblivion and with the problems in her marriage, which wouldn’t last beyond the following winter.
That was years ago. We’ve been in touch from time to time since then, but not often and not for long and always on my side with a feeling of resentment that I could banish for a while but that would inevitably come back when other things in my life were difficult or felt unfair. Then, the other day, I was looking through a box of books that I hadn’t unpacked the last time I moved and I found something she had made for me when we used to live in the same city. It was a book of recipes she’d compiled, chosen by her and handwritten into a hardbound notebook complete with pasted-in pictures and hand-drawn designs to make them look nice. The notebook was full from end to end and divided like a real cookbook into sections: soups, main courses, desserts, drinks. I looked through the book and thought how I had not yet made any of the recipes it contained. I took it out of the box and put it on the shelf with my other cookbooks. I thought how much trouble had gone into making it and how I couldn’t think of any time I’d taken that much trouble over something that was meant for just one other person to enjoy. I thought: I should really, really call her and tell her that I found this. So I searched until I found her most recent number, took the phone to a comfortable armchair in one corner of my living room, dialed the number and listened to the phone at the other end start to ring.