A CLOSE FRIEND GOES AWAY. Someone important. Say your life is a soup, then she is a vital ingredient. The soup will still be nourishing, appetizing, but different. Something’s missing, you’d say if you tasted it. She too feels the loss: how will she manage without your conversations? she says. Still, she goes, for reasons of necessity. Quite far, to the other end of the earth. And she doesn’t write. Nothing but a card, that is, giving her address.
You think of what it was like having her around. Around the corner, actually, so that often you’d run into her on the street, going to her car, maybe. A huge mustardy-green sedan, one of those ancient boat-like cars. She was very particular about having passengers fasten their seat belts even in the back seat, which was out of character—she wasn’t especially cautious or finicky. Or only in certain ways. She maneuvered the car through the city with deft grace, with moderate aggression. She was good with machines, though she seemed, deceptively, the sort of gentle, elegant, sometimes even ethereal person who wouldn’t be. She was one of the first people you knew to use a computer and used it with delight, long, long ago when it was a novelty; when you asked her what something typed on a computer would look like, she sent you a very brief letter that read, This is what it looks like, then signed her name. That was in character.
You would sit in her fifth-floor apartment with the French doors open, the breeze blowing in. The living room was cool and airy and colorful. You sat on one of several second-hand couches covered with print throws in muted colors, amber, lemon, mustardy colors. The room was filled, though not cluttered, with odd and distinctive objects you find now, regrettably, you cannot recall one by one, as well as with piles of books and papers. On the verge of messiness but not quite. Neatly messy. And paintings she had painted herself, in chalky tones, of flat disingenuous figures in rooms with mirrors and double images.
On a table in front of the couch she would set out neatly arranged snacks, wedges of cheese, crackers, small clusters of grapes. She would snip clusters of grapes off the bunch with a scissors—this you watched, sitting on a stool in her narrow kitchen while she prepared the snacks, poured the wine or made the tea. She was fussy about tea the way she was fussy about seat belts: the water had to be boiled. Very hot was not good enough, she said. It tasted right only if the water came to a boil. In restaurants, she said, she would ask specifically that the water be boiled, but could always tell when her request had not been honored.
Back in the living room her gentle voice murmured sly, hilarious, bitter words. Your topics of conversation were men, children, work, books, clothing, food, travel, parents, money, politics, mutual friends, pretty much in that order. She spoke so softly that it took a moment to grasp how outrageous and rebellious her words were. There was this unexpectedness in her, the subversive words belying a compliant surface. Also, unexpectedly, she was often late. Not insultingly, just mildly late, but always unexpectedly because her precision and considerateness suggested the habit of promptness.
You miss all of this. You wait for a letter about her new life. Finally you write; after a while she answers. You don’t know her handwriting well—there has been no need for letters before—and studying this new representation of her, you feel puzzled. The handwriting is clear and fairly conventional, quite out of character. You write back, she doesn’t answer. You are beginning to revise your naive notions of in character, out of character.
A year later she sends a card announcing she’ll be back for a few months. She resumes your close friendship as if there had been no absence, and no absence of letters. You bring up the subject of her not writing. She explains that things have been difficult. In some ways. While in other ways, things have gone very well. She is so far away, she says, so stunned by the move and the distance, that in order to keep her equilibrium in the far place she cannot allow herself to think of anything or anyone from the old place. If she did, she would feel her feet were rooted on different continents and she might very well topple over or split down the middle. Therefore she cannot stay in touch. But on her intermittent returns, you can resume your close friendship just as before.
This is odd and puzzling. But, very well.
A year passes and again she returns for a while. Another year, another return, the close friendship once more resuming as if there had been no absence. You try to “catch up.” But many things happen in a year, many changes. Every few months your own outlook on life shifts, you learn some hard and required lesson that makes you a slightly different person. The soup that is your life has a different taste, different ingredients, is thicker or thinner. Presumably the same is happening to her. How to take account of these shifts, let her know who you are now? You cannot sum up each lesson like a homily; you can, if you try, recount the events that led to the lessons, but that takes time and her time is limited; there is the present to enjoy; and it is tedious to narrate a series of small events whose vividness and importance are bound to the moment they took place. The pacing is what matters. The organic accumulation that is change. Had she been present to witness the small events succeeding each other, there would be no need to present the lessons in a package—they would be self-evident.
There is of course the telephone. You can call anywhere now, easily, even the other end of the earth. But you feel she doesn’t wish to hear from you. She said it pains her to think of people from her old place. The fact that she does not wish to think of you, that she chooses to forget you for long periods and is able to do so, is painful and makes you angry. Naturally, you have passed permanently out of existence for many people, as many have for you—this is not troubling. But you cannot understand the shift taking place in her mind that enables her to banish you from existence for a year at a time, then to return and feel as close as before. This process you cannot understand shakes your sense of solidity: how odd to move in and out of existence in her mind while you feel so strongly your continuous bodily existence. This process she is capable of is what places distance between you, even more so than the actual expanse of land and ocean.
You have, of course, other friends who live far away. But they always did. They were never part of the soup but rather a snack, a special treat. Moreover, with other faraway friends you exchange letters, even phone calls. Or not, as the case may be. With other faraway friends, there is a tacit agreement on how to keep in touch. They do not put you out of their minds; they call or write now and then, saying, I was thinking of you and thought I’d call, or write. Or, Something important is happening that I must tell you. In this case, anything might be happening and she feels no need to tell you.
On the next visit, when she calls to announce that she is back, happy to hear your voice and ready to resume as if there had been no absence, you respond with anger. How can she expect, and so on and so on. She cries. She has no excuse. Things have been very hard, complicated, almost indescribably so. She repeats that she cannot think of anyone or anything here, she would be in two places at once, and so on. At her weeping, your anger dissipates. Very well, you will resume as if there had been no absence. You try to tell her some large things that have happened to you and how you are a different person because of them. But you are also the same person, the person who can tell her such things and have them understood. She listens and responds in the same gentle, sly, comprehending manner, as satisfying as before.
Still, you come away unsettled, confused about the continuity of identity, about the nature of friendship, of existence, even—the way, in her view, we can slip into and out of existence for each other. Not a congenial notion for you, though it apparently works for her.
When she leaves this time you try with, yes, a touch of vindictiveness to do as she does, not think about her, but you do not readily succeed. You wonder about her difficulties, what her house looks like, what kind of car she drives, who are the new people she thinks about daily. She has told you some and you imagine the rest; what is missing from your imaginings are things like snipped grapes, thoroughly boiled tea, and furniture. The details that do not, by their nature, get spoken of when time is short, and without which our images of people are wan.
After a while, though, you realize you are succeeding in your effort. You do think of her occasionally, but with an alien detachment. You think, but you do not care. It is as if she does not exist. She is not on the other end of the earth at all, she is nowhere, her life static, in abeyance until she returns next year to resume her existence. You do not especially look forward to her return or miss her anymore—the soup changes all the time, and that old soup of which she was a vital ingredient is a thing of the past—but when she returns you will be happy to see her and to care anew, as deeply as always, to take up your close friendship as before, as if there had been no absence.
This is a lesson. This is how you are different now.