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by Emily Mitchell

  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?

  So I left it alone and didn’t call. And now it’s been a year and a half since we last spoke.

  FACEBOOK

  I have 143 friends on Facebook. My sister has 341 friends. I’m not surprised that she has more friends than me because she’s always been the more outgoing and sociable one. She was the vivacious extroverted sibling and I was the bookish introverted sibling, because in families siblings always define themselves against each other, trying to be as different as possible so that we can figure out who we are. Hence, she has more people whom she can call friends than I do.

  On the other hand, my sister isn’t more than twice as friendly as I am. I would say that she’s maybe 20 percent friendlier than me, maybe as much as 30 percent more fun overall. I can be aloof and difficult to reach out to; I tend to simmer and withdraw into myself when I’m upset; I can sometimes make harsh judgments about people too quickly or because I feel threatened by someone’s behavior or personality or way of talking. But my sister can be explosive. She gets into fights and tells people what she really thinks of them, no holds barred, no punches pulled. She breaks off friendships abruptly, dramatically, while I let them wither through studied inattention.

  So really, those things should balance each other out and we should have about the same number of friends or maybe she should have a few more than me. But not twice as many.

  I put the disparity down to the fact that I’m a person who has high standards for friendship. I don’t count just anyone as a friend. For example, I don’t pretend that I’m friends with someone whom I just spent time around getting stoned in college. I don’t count as a friend someone with whom I just share mutual friends and acquaintances. I don’t know if my sister has these high standards.

  Or maybe the difference in numbers is partly explained by the fact that some of those friendships are people whom she’s going to get mad at and break things off with, but that hasn’t happened yet and so they are still on the rolls right now, the way dead voters sometimes remain on the list long after they’re deceased. Once my sister and each of those friends have their fight, then they’ll disappear because you can’t stay friends with someone after a huge, disastrous fight, whereas it’s easy just to have people hang around when you’ve just kind of let things slide between you through a gradual diminishing of contact and affection.

  WAR

  We were friends until the buildup to the Iraq war. We’d been friends since college and back then we were very close, him and me and whoever I was dating at the time and whoever he was dating at the time. We lived in England at the same time, right after college, so we saw each other a lot during those early, uncertain years when we were all still finding our directions in life, deciding who we were going to be and staying out late every night. And then later we lived in New York at the same time. That was where things went wrong.

  When preparations for the war began, we still agreed about a lot of things. For example we agreed that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a disaster of terrible proportions that nothing could excuse or mitigate. We agreed that while a certain radical element of fundamentalist Islam was pernicious, it was important to differentiate between the vast majority of Muslim people
, who might not agree with the West about everything and might even dislike the United States, but should not be confused with their militant co-religionists any more than we ourselves should be confused with Pat Robertson. We agreed that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator. But beyond that we did not agree.

  I thought that the terrible events of the preceding years had showed that, in spite of all our flaws, the United States and those countries known collectively as “the West” were nevertheless better than our enemies and we should therefore try to spread our ideals, imperfectly realized as they are at home, to other countries that didn’t have them yet. I thought that we had been too strategic, prioritizing security over justice, supporting any foreign leader who could keep order at whatever cost. What had that achieved, except to make people around the world hate us?

  He thought that these same events showed that the United States and “the West” had already caused too much resentment by trying to spread our ideals and that if we’d only stop trying to make everyone behave like us and acting like we knew best and imposing our version of free-market capitalism on everyone through the mechanisms of the IMF and the World Bank, people from other parts of the world might not hate us so much. Even if we could agree that democracy was a good thing, using the military to spread it wasn’t just wrong, it was also antidemocratic.

  I thought that Saddam Hussein was so bad that even though usually it’s not a good idea to invade other countries that haven’t attacked you, it would be better to get rid of him while we had the chance. He thought that sending troops into a country that hadn’t attacked us, however bad their government might be, was categorically wrong. He also thought that the reasons the government was giving for why it wanted to do this—WMDs, collaboration with al-Qaeda—were bogus, a cover story that the men and women pushing it didn’t even believe. I thought that, though perhaps this was so, our motives didn’t need to be 100 percent pure to do some good; if we did the right thing for the wrong reasons that would be all right.

  In principle we agreed that it was fine for us to disagree as long as we respected each other’s reasons for thinking as we did. The problem was that after a little while, every conversation that we had seemed to circle back to this topic whether we meant it to or not. We would go out to the movies and if we saw an American film, he would always be sure to mention how it exemplified our militarism, our belief in ourselves as exceptional, our simple-minded concept of heroism through blind faith and physical exertion. If we talked about the news as it was reported abroad, I always made sure to note the knee-jerk way that America was portrayed as stupid, boorish and brutal. If we went out to a restaurant, if we discussed a book we’d read, if we related an encounter between ourselves and a stranger, everything seemed to come back to this question: good or bad? Are we (Americans) basically good or basically bad, basically better or basically worse than other groups of people? In the end it became difficult for us to speak about anything, and around that time he moved to Holland. We call each other occasionally but not as often as I wish we did now that some time has passed and those concerns, which seemed so urgent at the time, don’t seem that way to me anymore.

  What I remember most vividly, when I think of him, is none of that. It is a trip we took together in March just before we graduated from college. We went to France, where it was already spring, coming from New England where it was still cold and dark and snowbound. I remember that we took the train into the city from De Gaulle and emerged from the Metro into the Jardin du Luxembourg, into sunshine and green. I remember that we put our backpacks down on the grass and ran around in circles, waving our arms and laughing madly from the pure pleasure of being together in a place that beautiful.

  THE GROUP

  When we lived in New York, my husband, who was then my boyfriend, had a group of friends I didn’t get along with. What was wrong with them? Nothing was wrong with them. As individuals, I liked them all, more or less; at least I didn’t have a problem with any of them. One of them was a gifted composer; another was a well-read student of politics and philosophy; yet another was an interesting, funny and insightful writer about art and literature. But when they were all together, I found them difficult to deal with.

  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.