The Narrow Door (13 page)

It’s different with a friend. The breaking up is more diffuse, though
breakup
isn’t even the right word for it. Whatever it is, it happens over time, and soon old patterns are breaking: no email in the morning, no phone call at night. A week goes by, silence. Another week, a deeper silence.

Perhaps our thinking about lost friends feels like a kind of love. Sure, it might feel like rage, but aren’t rage and love part of the same water?

All friendships arrow toward it: the moment of accountability. The moment at which there’s a fire in the road. Smoke roiling above the break. And you can either step around it or turn back. Or walk straight into it, after which the friendship will be a different thing.

The closer we get to someone, the more we must stand humbly before her freedom.

2004 | 
How to say it? Denise fails me. I’m sure I fail her. How is it that we do that to each other? How could we take a beautiful friendship to this place?

Some guesses: I publish two books just as her agent cannot seem to sell her third novel. I move to different parts of the country—to Iowa City, to Florida, to Provincetown, to Houston, to New York—as she digs deeper into Philadelphia. She makes bewildering choices in boyfriends just as I’ve settled down with M. I think I might be finally moving into my life while she seems to be determined to hold on to what was. She and B split up. She has fallen helplessly for the man next door. When I’m introduced to this man next door, in a crowded café in SoHo, he seems unremarkable to me, a cipher, a projection screen. I stop calling her for fear that she’s going to go on and on about the man next door, who seems to be the means by which she’s avoiding more serious problems, problems she could fix. I think she wants to be lovelorn—or doesn’t know any other way to live. It’s the feeling that’s keeping her alive. She’s Emma, Cathy, Anna, Mrs. Bridge, Vanessa Turin, all the heroines she’s loved in books, all the heroines she’s wanted to write her own version of.

We became different people, as two people do over the course of many years.

And yet, at the hospice, on the night before she died, her sister-in-law said, with wonder and mystery, you were the one person who stayed around.

We were in coastal North Carolina, where M was a visiting professor for the semester. Our dog, Arden, was quite literally on his last legs. No one was happy. We were a half hour east of the part of town where our colleagues lived, in a cold, drafty house up on stilts. It smelled of dust, mold. There was serious mold everywhere, in the heating vents; on the bathroom floor, behind the toilet; in the kitchen cabinets. But, as usual, we made the best of it. We made jokes about all the things that didn’t work. We shook our heads at the theater that showed
The Last Temptation of Christ
seven times a day, from 9 a.m. on, or the poor owners of the Indian restaurant whose menu cover featured the statement: WE BELIEVE IN GOD. We drove to Southport, a little town by the water hidden inside live oaks draped with Spanish moss. We drove to Kure Beach, Carolina Beach, Topsail Beach, and even Myrtle Beach, which always seemed like a bit of a hoot, with its pine trees, pancake houses, outlet malls, and Dolly Parton’s Dixie Stampede.

But the promise of Denise’s visit, at the halfway point in the term, made our isolation bearable. She was scheduled to be part of a group reading at a local bookstore, and it seemed like a fun idea to combine that with a longer stay. She’d been a visiting professor at the same university three years before, and though she was cautious about coming back (the permanent position she’d applied for had gone to my friend Robert), she’d wanted to spend time with us. Now that she had a new job close to Philadelphia, the lost thing could hurt less. And maybe we just wanted to compare notes, to see how we saw the place together. What to make of all the crosses and military stickers on the car bumpers? Certainly M and I must have seemed strange to the people who came in contact with us: two tall men with shorn heads and facial hair.

So why don’t I remember more of the fun we must have had during her stay? I know we walked on the beach. I see the pier getting closer and closer as we walked to the north, the underside just ten feet over our heads. Feel the shells in the tidal pools, just getting warm now, beneath our bare feet. See us driving past her former apartment in a squat wooden compound downtown, college housing, though she never described it as such: green-gray, dim, a barracks with a flat roof. See us sitting at an old-fashioned seafood restaurant near the beach with our mutual friend Sarah, where the three of us must have laughed as we ate fried seafood and cole slaw, getting used to the feel of the three of us together.

It’s important to name these things. I need to say that there was delight when that visit has concentrated into two memories. I don’t want to define that visit by only two memories. There is always more, isn’t there? There is the life the cup can’t possibly hold without spilling.

Event number 1. Sunday. We drive over to the bookstore, on the other side of the drawbridge, where Denise is to read with some other writers for a new anthology. The editor of the anthology is already standing by the display of the book. Denise walks over to him. Instantly the energy isn’t friendly inside. M and I stand back, give them the chance to say their hellos. We’re waved over. I’m not sure why our hello is received awkwardly by the editor. It isn’t what he says, but what he doesn’t. It’s all in his body language: eyes averted, a weakness in the handshake. It says, I’m only interested in players. We come from different species. That is okay. We step away, as if instinct tells us there’s no fellow feeling to be found around here. We stand on the other side of the store as it fills up with Denise’s former students. I’m not as confused by our exclusion as I am by the spectacle of Denise working hard to impress the men, the straight men, as the five of them stand in front of the store. She’s trying. She can feel all their energy moving toward her, and she’s pulling it up through herself, as if she’s convincing us that these guys are the people to know. These are the people who will help her. And she wants us to see how valuable she is to them. Maybe that’s true, right here, now. The editor also runs the book section of a large-circulation newspaper; he has assigned reviews to Denise. He has made sure she’s writing about the important writers of the moment so that her name and quote appear on the covers of the paperback edition. That is all great. I tell myself it’s okay to be a spectator. Am I jealous? Maybe not so much jealous as confused. But to bear witness to the theater of power and exclusion? Well, I’d rather not be a part of that.

Event number 2. M, Denise, and I are just back from dinner at Indochine, our favorite restaurant, along with Sarah. Perhaps we have had a glass or two of wine, but nothing more than that. We’re sitting in different positions in the living room, M and I on the rattan sofa, Denise and Sarah in separate chairs. The smell of mold is a little more forgiving tonight. The room feels different with four people in it, the knotty pine looks friendlier than I would have expected. We’re talking about a fiction writer we all know in common. He is a kind man, but a troubled man. It’s the troubled part of him that makes him both appealing and not. He’s so consumed by his own problems that he can’t see he isn’t the giving person he thinks he is. I make an observation about a recent story of his. I say a word or two about sentiment and earnestness clouding the thinking in the story. The magazine in which it appeared just happens to be on the coffee table, and I pick it up, read a little bit of it aloud, not in my usual reading voice, but in an actory, hushed, sentimental voice. It is not my most generous moment, but my point has been made. Sarah and M shake their heads in agreement. I look up at Denise’s eyes, which are wide open and watching me.

Sarah gets up to leave. We hug her good night. I tell her we’ll see her in a little while and we close the door. We walk over to pick up the glasses from the coffee table. We start to turn off lamps and begin straightening up. And here everything comes undone. Linearity is not possible. Order? See what you think. This I remember: M and I sitting on the couch while Denise paces back and forth in front of us, a hunted animal. Or more likely, someone pleading her case. She’s a hurricane of woundedness. Her hands are moving, incisive. She crouches in at her waist to emphasize that the story I made fun of was a good story, a great story. She is not making sense. Is not being specific, though she is certainly trying to be. Everything about her is crackling, electric: the look in her eyes, the tone of her voice. Pain whips through her body, making her more alive. She keeps defending the story, but the intensity is so extreme—it has to be about other matters. Is she just jealous of Sarah tonight? Have we mentioned too many names she doesn’t know? Is she still upset about the permanent job she didn’t get here, a job she pulled out of when she sensed it wasn’t going to be offered to her? Does she blame Sarah for that? Maybe she pictures the three of us sitting down at some greasy spoon tomorrow, laughing about her after she boards the plane—pure paranoia. All we know is that she’s a force we can’t speak back to. There are no words to calm her, soothe her. She won’t respond to reason. And just as quickly as the outburst started, it stops as if no body, no throat could sustain that howl for long. She’s herself again, looking at some knot on the wall, trembling a little, vulnerable, shocked by the emotion she’s spilled all over us.

If that emotion were water, it would be dirty, trapped in a tank until it turned dark green.

We use that time to say good night, slink past her, and secrete ourselves in the master bedroom.

“What was
that?
” M whispers, after we pull two layers of covers over ourselves. The bedroom is dark but for the yellow reflection of the porch light on the oleander.

I might be shaking. For the briefest instant I press my palms into my eyes, as if too much from outside might be leaching into them.

Across the hall: teeth brushing, water splashing on the face, water running in the sink. The shower turns on and stays on. A troubled spirit is in our house. It is pushing into us. Outside the cabbage palm threshes in the wind.

“That was crazy,” M whispers. “I’ve never seen anything like that. Is she on medication?”

I whisper no.

“Did she drink tonight?”

“Maybe a glass or two. No more than Sarah.”

“Is she having a breakdown?”

“Not that I know of. She seemed fine, perfectly fine all day.”

“At dinner?”

“Yes, at dinner. She made Sarah and me laugh. She seemed to be having a happy night.”

I feel awful and worked up, as if I’ve been responsible for bringing a dark force through the front door. It would have been bad enough to be on my own with it, but M seems to have taken Denise personally, as if the spirits of his difficult past have joined forces in her and confronted us, insulted us. (The mother of his high school years, pointing the loaded gun at him; the father who sends back his memoir manuscript with the words “Return to Sender” on the envelope.) He is not happy with me, and I feel it bodily. We are not a couple used to fighting, to living in the midst of confrontation. Calm and equilibrium are how we get by; we are at sea when they’re disrupted. As for Arden? His dry nose points east, completely oblivious to what’s transpired around him. Maybe it helps to be deaf.

Is it Katrina? She’s on the other side of the country, teaching, busy with young children. Iowa? Too simple. Provincetown fellowships? Too simple. Books published? We’re only talking two. Life with a famous writer? No, no, no.

Maybe she thinks I don’t like her writing. But I love it, especially when she’s having fun on the page, especially when she’s not trying too hard to impress, to be literary, to sound like someone else. Oh, there I go. A lot of her writing lately has begun to sound like someone else, and it wouldn’t hurt to write in that
Good Deeds
voice again, if she hasn’t totally lost it.

She probably thinks I think she’s lost it. She’s not a star anymore—is that what she sees in my eyes? But she’s been feeding people that old story for years. At this point it’s hard not to take it as truth. “I was one of those eighties girls,” she’d told Elizabeth, with a rueful smile, when both of them happened to meet in the living room of the Provincetown house. By “eighties girls” she meant Laurie Colwin, Renata Adler, Ann Beattie.

Anyone not now. She almost sounded delighted by the designation, as if a designation were better than none.

The next morning is just about pretending that none of last night happened. She’s clearly not going to talk about it, and I’m not going to talk about it. She’s not a decent person anymore—I’ve come to that conclusion. Bitterness has changed her. I just want to get her out and away. I’m driving her to the airport. It is the spring of Alicia Keys. It is impossible to go to the supermarket or the gym or the shopping mall without hearing Alicia Keys, and though we would have sung together to the song not so long ago, we’re too careful for that now. Our good-bye at the terminal is friendly. I’m sure I kiss and hug her as I always kiss and hug her. I look over her shoulder at the fenced retention basin. The grass around it is mashed and browned. We are silent about last night. Or if she does acknowledge any strangeness, it’s in the breeziest fashion, but that’s not what I want to hear right now.
You were a guest in our house
, I want to mutter.
You behaved horribly. What if I did the same in your house?
But where would I go from there? She turns around and walks toward the door. I press the gas pedal gently before she even makes it up the sidewalk. If she turns around to wave at me, I’ll make sure I’m not around to see it.

When I get back to the house, I will burn sage. I will burn stick after stick after stick of it until even the front porch reeks.

I drive back across the drawbridge through the column of palms on either side of the causeway. A speedboat races around one of the hairpin turns of the creek. It is an old story for her, a story that has concentrated as the years have gone by: I am in the in-crowd, while she’s looked over, passed by, doomed, punished, betrayed, forsaken, unseen.