Fortnight Friends
In April Sue and I worked in the beds around the library, filled mostly with mature rhododendron and hydrangea, some of my favorite plants on campus. The tall winter stems were hanging with curled, wilted leaves that looked like sleeping bats. We were cutting them back and mulching.
“Have you seen the paper?” Sue asked.
“Not today. Why?”
“That reporter is either trying to make you famous, or . . .” Sue frequently got herself into these comparative binds.
“What?”
“She’s written a piece about some rich guy in Paris who was inspired by your hashtag.” Here Sue stopped shoveling mulch and stretched her back.
“Not mine.”
“Yeah, well, he sold his apartment and most of his belongings, everything except what he could fit into a suitcase—an extremely expensive suitcase—and a leather backpack. He just turned forty and has decided to downsize his life and focus more on his friendships and experiences. Sound familiar?”
“How much was the suitcase?”
“Fifteen hundred dollars! He’s a tech entrepreneur or something. He doesn’t have a home or a base of any kind. He just travels from friend to friend.”
“Oh. Does he have a lot?”
“The article didn’t say.”
We worked for a few minutes.
“Aren’t you curious how it’s going?” Sue asked.
“I guess.”
“His friends are miserable! Apparently he keeps terrible hours and the wife of the first friend ended up making his bed and doing his laundry. That visit lasted a week. The next one, where he ended up just taking his friend’s clothes, only lasted three days. It’s just so typical. He took your idea—which, Maria says, and, I don’t know, maybe she’s wrong, but she says it’s about visiting your friends to see their lives, not to impose your life on theirs—and turned it into something else, something that’s all about him.”
I was moved by the idea of Maria and Sue discussing me. “Well, it’s a work in progress,” I said.
I almost told her I’d named Grendel, but I was stuck on the cost of the other suitcase. I was also impressed by Maria’s understanding. I didn’t remember outlining my thinking so clearly. But it had occurred to me that one of the questions I most wanted to ask my friends was: Can I see an average day in your life right now? A real day, not one curated for social media or filled with the best activities to entertain a visitor. On the one hand, it’s a simple question. On the other, it’s almost too intimate. And it might be impossible, because the presence of a visitor changes a day, no matter how close the friends are. Destinations are planned, observations made. It’s the way we function when people come to see us, often because the trust required to really let someone see your life is rare. Even Henry James felt the need to take good friends for a view of the sea when they came to spend a day with him.
“Well, I hope he has a lot of friends,” I said.
“He won’t when this little experiment is over.”
Sue lost her footing and stumbled against a rhododendron, bending to the breaking point a long stalk with many buds. “Shit,” she said softly to the plant. “I’m sorry.”
I READ THE ARTICLE later and everything Sue had said was accurate. I did a little Googling and realized that the hashtag had persisted into the new year. It had survived the backlash and was now a fairly regular meme, due in large part to the efforts of Abby Mara, who was now a stringer for a major newspaper.
Mara had gotten people talking again about the Dunbar number—the maximum number of people with whom any individual can maintain stable relationships—and how, despite predictions, it hadn’t gotten any bigger in the age of social media. Related articles discussed how social isolation seemed to be killing us and how the platitudes of contemporary friendship (the status update, the tweet, the hashtag) were not enough because it is ultimately shared, face-to-face experience that we need to feel understood. Someone had shown that a touch on the arm between friends increased endorphin production by three times the rate of a heart-eyes emoji. The term “radical friendship” had been coined and was being bandied about in essays short and long. And for the first time in its history, Facebook was having a sustained dip in its share price. With personal days, vacation days, or by whatever means they had, people were making plans to spend more time with friends.
If radical friendship and the popularity of #fortnightfriend continued to grow, it seemed possible someone would eventually want to come and stay with me. Before bed, I took a good look at the guest room and concluded it needed work. For one thing, Hester had been sleeping in there and the bedspread was covered with cat fur. She was curled up now against the pillows and raised her head to look at me while I stood in the doorway. Outside I could hear a spring robin, a melancholy sound more searching than song to me. It’s not my favorite harbinger of the season.
“Come on,” I said to Hester, and carried her upstairs to sleep in my room.