Epitaph For A Friendship

1.

The thing that struck me most about my friend’s letter was not her protest that I’d given her “far too much credit” for my own development as a writer. She’s said things like that in the past and it is something about which I am sure we will always disagree. “All I ever was,” she wrote, “all I did, was be your friend and listen to you.” As if being present for someone who desperately needs your presence is not a huge thing in and of itself, even if being present is for you a simple and easy thing to do. As if being the first person to take my writing seriously—and she was that person; she saw before anyone else, and almost, I think, before I saw it myself—that writing was what would, what could, keep me whole…as if that were not something I would remember and be eternally grateful for.

My friend was responding to the very emotional inscription I wrote in the copy I sent her of my first published book, Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan, and it is a kind of deflection I remember well from when we were younger. I was a freshman in college, and I told this friend that I loved her, and I did, and I knew she loved me as well. She refused to acknowledge what I’d said, and then more than a decade later, over a dinner we had because she contacted me again. She’d been married for ten years, and we had not spoken since I walked out of her wedding early, without saying goodbye. I was hurt she was marrying someone else, but I was more hurt that her husband, or at least it appeared that her husband was doing everything he could to keep her from talking to me, and finally couldn’t take it anymore, and so I left. Anyway, at that dinner, she told me that sometimes she wished she’d had the courage to be a little more like me, adventurous, impulsive, that she sometimes regretted the very conservative choices she’d made in her life, and we held hands in that restaurant, briefly, and I felt the same charge run through me that I felt when we sat in the dark in the room in her dormitory where I slept when I visited her at the college she was attending and she danced her fingers up and down the skin of my arm. Her touch was warm and I wanted to bathe in that warmth, to feel it seep inside me, to inhale it, but I was not willing to promise her the future; I wanted to let it happen or not. We were young; we’d be moving from a deep friendship into romance, always a difficult and potentially dangerous move, and I thought it would be better for us to take things one step at a time and not worry yet about whether there was a serious commitment to be made. She wanted that commitment, though, and so we never got together.

Like I said, though, it was not my friend’s demurral that surprised me. What surprised me is that she did not ask me a single question about my life. She told me about her children, commenting that her oldest is now entering “the stage of meeting people who will have a profound effect on her life and her worldview or who become lifelong friends. She has met and become friends with children of my college and high school friends” (some of whom, no doubt, were my high school friends as well, since we’ve known each other since we were in 8th grade). She told me that things with her husband “are well” and that she stopped working three years ago—and good for them that she could afford to do so!—“when all I did was work,” and that she has been “living, volunteering a lot and trying to stay healthy,” which suggests that all the work she was doing had been unhealthy for her in a serious way. But she never once, in this letter that praises my accomplishments as a writer, asks me about my wife or my child. The only reference she makes to my life outside of who I am as a writer and who we were to each other when we were in junior high and high school is this: “…when I received the book I was struck by how different our lives have become, that you have become involved in a whole different world, one so removed from my experience and knowledge. And yet I must say, it is one that I have not looked to be involved in and one that is at odds with my beliefs.”

It’s hard for me to know precisely what my friend is talking about here, but my guess is that she’s talking about the fact that my wife is not Jewish, that she is, in fact, Muslim, and so I have betrayed one of the major tenets of the Jewish community within which we were both educated (the high school we attended together was a yeshiva): Thou shalt not intermarry. What I don’t know is whether the fact that I have intermarried is why my friend does not bother asking me about my life. On the one hand, of course, her reason or reasons don’t matter. Her silence—especially given the fact that the introduction to my book talks very explicitly about my marriage—feels like a rejection. What she wants, what she is willing to talk about is the book, to congratulate me for it, to distance herself from how I feel about the role she played in my development as a writer and to insist that I alone should “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”

It feels, in other words, like she is willing to tell me about herself, but at the same time she wants to make sure to tell me to keep my distance and that makes me very sad. I could flatter myself by thinking that she doesn’t want to get too close, or want me to get too close, because she’s afraid she’ll be tempted to disrupt the very stable and conservative life she has built for herself, but I really do think that would be flattering myself. My sense—and I could be, and I hope I am, wrong—is that she doesn’t want that life to be contaminated. I think she sees in our friendship and how different we have become, and the temptation that I was for her when she was younger and when she reached out to reconnect with me, a danger that lies in wait for her daughter. Most probably I will never know because, most probably, this letter she was written me will be the last I have from her. I plan to send her a copy of my own book of poems, The Silence of Men, which will be published next year, and which is dedicated to her (Selections from Saadi’s Gulistan is dedicated to my wife and son), but I do not expect that she will respond to that. It’s just the feeling I get from the tone of her letter and from her silence about my life. I am sad and it almost feels like I have written here the epitaph of our friendship.

2.

Or maybe I have misread my friend’s letter entirely. Maybe her silence is in response to a silence about her that she heard in the inscription I wrote in my book, and so I need to look to myself and my own feelings to understand what’s going on in her letter. Or maybe she wrote the letter quickly, and so she wasn’t thinking about anything in my life beyond the book that I’d sent her—though it’s also true I sent her a birth announcement when my son was born and she never responded. Or maybe she wrote the letter over a couple of different sittings and put down what came to her mind at the moment without really thinking about the letter as a whole, and so it never occurred to her that she hadn’t asked me about my family and my life. Or maybe, or maybe, or maybe, or maybe. I could go on and on making excuses for her, finding reason after reason why I should not trust my intuition that this letter, consciously or not—though I am pretty sure it was conscious and I will tell you why in a minute—was intended to establish, very nicely, but firmly, a distance between my friend and me that I am supposed to understand as signifying the end of the friendship we once had.

Why do I think it was conscious? Listen again to how she closed the letter: “please take credit for all your hard work. It is yours and, because you are a survivor, you should that you would have achieved this no matter what.”

I am a survivor. What she is referring to is the fact that I am a survivor of child sexual abuse, something I told her about when we met for the dinner I wrote about above. I wanted her to understand why I’d reacted so strongly against her decision first not to become my girlfriend and, second, to get married to someone other than me. If you know anything about the psychology of survivors it’s a pretty conventional narrative: I felt myself to be dirty and unworthy of love and yet my friend clearly loved me—whether she loved me only as a friend or as something more is beside the point—and so when she rejected me, I took it as a sign that I was, truly, unworthy. I felt ashamed and enraged, and while the none of the myriad narrative threads that make up a person’s life story can ultimately be reduced to a single cause and effect, I know that this feeling of unworthiness has an awful lot to do with the choices I’ve made in terms of the women in my life—but that is grist for the mill of another piece of writing.

My friend was shocked when I told her that I’d been sexually abused, and I could see in her eyes both the compassion she felt for me and how much she wished she had known what was going on at the time, but here’s the thing: In her letter, she feels the need to remind me that I am a survivor, that I shouldn’t forget—as survivors are wont to do—to take credit for what I have accomplished. What I intended as an honest acknowledgment of how important she was to me as a friend and as the first real supporter of my writing, in other words, she understood as an expression of an insecurity and inferiority borne of having been sexually abused. This hurts. It feels patronizing and it feels, again, like rejection, but this time I am not ashamed and I am not angry. I am only, deeply, sad. I have missed this friend a lot over the years. I have missed the way we used to talk and the way we would sometimes go out for ice cream and French fries, a habit of eating she introduced me to where the saltiness of the fries provided a wonderful balance to the sweetness of the sundaes we’d just eaten.

Most of all, I suppose, I have missed the chance we had after she got back in touch with me to reconnect on a more permanent level, as individuals, as couples and, once my son was born, as families. We told ourselves we were going to try, but we also—I still think reasonably—told ourselves that we wanted first to meet a couple of times, just the two of us, to talk out our unfinished business. My friend’s husband had a problem with this, though—or at least that’s what she told me. He resented the time away from home that her meeting me for an occasional dinner would mean, and when she told me about this, she connected it to the feelings he had about me when they first started dating and then became engaged. He was jealous. Looking back, I suppose I don’t blame him: She and I had been friends long before they started going out, and maybe he knew—because maybe she told him—that I had tried to become her boyfriend; and then once they became engaged, I gave him good reason to resent me: they were either living together, or he was often at her place, or she was often at his—I don’t remember which—but when I would call to talk to her, as I still did, hoping secretly that they would eventually break up, and he answered the phone, I refused to acknowledge him, even though I knew him. He’d been a year ahead of us in high school. Without saying his name or asking how he was, I simply asked if my friend was there. It must have felt to him as if I was trying to tell him that, as far as I was concerned, he didn’t exist.

Anyway, my friend connected her husband’s problems with our seeing each other to what had happened ten years earlier, and even though I could understand why he’d felt the way he did back them, it seemed to me that if he was still having those problems with me then there must be other, larger issues at stake between him and my friend and I didn’t want to get involved with that. I told her this in a letter to which, as I remember, she never responded, and that—except for the birth announcement—was the last time we communicated before I sent her my book. And I will not be surprised if the dedication in next book I send her will be the last thing I say to her ever again.

3.

I am mourning my friendship with this woman and yet I am also haunted by the fact that I could be wrong about all this, and that haunting, oddly enough, is what makes the saddest of all.