Small Change (13 page)

Then I went back to the story the way you seek refuge in an open hiding place, fully exposed yet somewhat comforted; a child under a table, surprised that others can see her when she can’t see them, yet never able to come up with a better spot.

In the story it was November and Emma was having a birthday. Carol had invited a dozen children and their parents for a Saturday afternoon party. At the party the kids tore across
the living-room floor while we parents sat in a row against the wall. Each time the bell rang Carol went down the long curving hallway to open the door. I was too busy wondering where Mario was to offer to help, until she asked me to. “Beth,” she said, “the next time the bell rings, could you?”

So Beth walked down the hallway and in passing their bedroom poked her curious head inside. He was there, the movie star bent over his books. He looked up and smiled at his wife’s friend, managing to grimace at the pile of papers on his desk even as he smiled. I was his stand-in. The substitute husband.

After my first spat with Carol, Ted said to me, re-creating the moment in the cottage, “I thought, she’s not really going to say this, and then you said it.” He spoke with almost clinical kindness. He didn’t condemn me. He seizes the high road always, and without effort.

He and Carol are still very good friends. He sees her whenever he goes to New York and reports back. She is well, she looks well, extremely well, wonderful, he says. Everything is going well, extremely well. She sends you lots and lots of love.

Does he think I want to hear this? No, probably not. He thinks I
should
hear it. I am glad when he tells me these things in bed, with the lights out, because then I can make all sorts of faces without his seeing.

The first spat laid the groundwork for the big fight. It made me careful, it made me quiet; it made me all the things I am naturally, but more so. After Carol forgave me at the cottage, after we returned to the city and as soon as they returned two weeks later, I called her. I wanted to prove that
I could be a good and lasting friend. There is a sort of innocence in me that my darkness rescues me from, but for what? I am never sure.

Emma had her birthday in November, Carol had her birthday in December (the one that should have been celebrated on the day), and in January Carol and Mario went alone to Venice for a two-week holiday. In that dreamy setting they fell in love again. They came home happy, and their happiness spoiled mine. For the next few months I saw very little of them and I got increasingly angry.

My anger came on early in the morning like a tidal wave, astonishing me with its size. I would lean against the kitchen counter and hang on. In my mind Carol would make some small comment – a sneer – a criticism – and I would explode back with such derision, viciousness, and pent-up hatred that it rocked me. After all, I was fond of Carol. I remembered that I was fond and then I tried to remember why.

My mood swung around my head like a rope with a stone at the end – something I had seen illustrated in a book – a man swinging it, then letting it go to tangle around a bird on the wing. In Argentina they use these things to prevent birds from landing, swinging them far and wide over the pampas until the birds die of exhaustion. But how can enough people swing enough
bolas
, that’s the word, to keep the birds from coming to rest on distant grass? I drank my cold coffee (in my anger I had forgotten making it), then on impulse I called Carol. She was glad to hear from me and we laughed, we joked, we arranged to see each other; she said she had some
clothes she wanted to pass along, I said wonderful. Even I found this breathtaking. It was as if my anger had never existed. But it did exist. It had lit on a farther field to rest.

In the evening I prepared dinner and my shoulders got harder and harder. My body was turning to concrete. It occurred to me that much of my anger came from fear. I was afraid that Carol had turned against me. Almost immediately I felt suspicious of this thought. How could anyone walk five paces from the counter to the phone to talk to the very person she had been raging at as though they were the best of friends? The hypocrisy shocked me. Yet I wasn’t willing to say that my affection for Carol was hypocritical.

I thought, I only get this angry with someone I really love. The anger is a sign of love.

Then I felt suspicious of that thought too. First, because I was angry with everyone under the sun. Second, because I felt no love whatsoever.

Months before we had promised to spend Passover together. In early April I called her to make plans. She didn’t call back for several days. When she did, we discussed the meal. Then she said, “Are you angry at me?”

I paused. “Yes,” I said. “I’m annoyed.”

“Can you say another sentence?”

“It’s a long story,” I said. And then, “Well, it’s not such a long story.”

And briefly I explained the components of my sense of rejection, which formed a short story that had occurred so often it was a long story. I tried to find words for my feelings
without seeming to be a complete fool, since all of this certainly had its foolish aspect, and I managed to say that she and Mario rarely called any more: we had had a certain kind of friendship, it had changed a great deal, I felt angry and hurt.

Carol was patient, even graceful. She accepted what I was saying, even saying that I was right, but somehow the conversation didn’t know where to go. I didn’t say: Oh, everything is all right then, I’m sorry for thinking the worst of you. She didn’t say: Well, let’s try harder to see each other without appearing to try harder. The conversation petered out and I had to think of an excuse to hang up.

The following Thursday, at two-thirty in the afternoon, the phone rang. I went into the kitchen and picked up the light grey phone off its small blue shelf. I stood while Carol talked.

She said our conversation had been bothering her. She said that my anger and hurt were unjustified. She had been sick and I could have been more attentive, our encounters had been fewer but their quality had remained unchanged. She said I had ten times the social life she had anyway and why hadn’t I taken up any complaints I had about Mario with Mario himself.

“Why not?” she asked. “Why haven’t you called him?”

I felt the old old sensation. The one where your insides give way and slop around like water.

She went on. “You are really pulling a number. You think you’re the only person bad things happen to.”

“Bullshit,”
I said, anger suddenly coming to my rescue.

“You’re like Rosana,” a former friend of hers she often complained about. “You’re into this thing of wanting to feel victimized, you’re always -”

But I cut her off. I yelled, “
THAT’S BULLSHIT
!” And I hung up.

I had imagined that fight for weeks, and finally it happened. I had imagined hanging up on Carol, and I hung up on her. The next morning I felt as if a huge weight had been lifted off every part of me. We had written each other off. It was mutual. Even. Over. I lay in bed, peaceful and refreshed.

The next day I felt less buoyant.

The day after that Ted told me he had bumped into Carol in the street. She had told him she felt terrible and thought she understood what had happened. He said he didn’t want to know what had happened, he just hoped we would resolve it.

But she didn’t call and I didn’t call. I got up from my desk at work and my stomach ached. I imagined meeting her. I imagined saying, “excuse me,” and leaving.

We used to dress for each other, not conspicuously but consciously. We noticed each other and were glad to be noticed. The pleasure of looking and being looked at generated serenity rather than sex: the days of sexual romance are over, I thought to my nearly forty-year-old self, the romance of friendship has begun.

We were both fascinated by the way women age. We would walk down the street looking at women in their fifties, following with our eyes the ones with sufficient
means to weather life with style and grace. We admired and envied them.

One evening we went to a piano recital in a museum, entering through the back door and taking a carpeted hallway to the auditorium. A woman in blue waited beside the door. She was fifty-five, perhaps sixty, and in the company of another woman and a man of about the same age. Her white hair was fashioned into a bun at the nape of her neck, she had finely wrinkled skin, red lipstick, terrific posture, gold earrings in the shape of shells. We stopped a few feet away from her and waited until it was time to go in. Our glances shifted around, but always returned to the woman in blue.

We followed her into the concert hall, taking seats behind her and to the side, drawn to her, relaxed by the sight of her. Isn’t she beautiful, we murmured to each other. During the concert our eyes shifted back and forth between the small bald twinkling pianist on stage and the woman’s straight shoulders, jaw, neckline, hair. We studied her: a painting, a room, another way of life.

In Carol I had found a similar pleasure: someone to observe and contemplate: a view. For a while our friendship was almost cinematic.

The aftermath was a surprise. Three weeks after our fight Carol invited us for lunch. She greeted me with a hug and said she had missed me. There were no traces of the fight except, it seemed, in me. She called me Bethie.

It was a Sunday afternoon and raining. We had planned to go to the park and were in her apartment instead.

We had never discussed our fight. We had referred to it when we made contact two weeks after it happened, but only to say – I said, I made the call – that I hadn’t called sooner because I was afraid of getting into another fight. And we alluded to it when we discussed qualities our children possessed – bad temper, fatigue, an inability to communicate – explaining without apologizing (neither of us apologized) our own behaviour. The burden of these conversations in which we couldn’t speak directly weighed on me, and yet I didn’t trust Carol enough to change the way I spoke – Carol of the razor-sharp tongue and rapid-fire assumptions.

It was half a friendship the way you have half a marriage or half a life. You might think there would be no need to have this kind of friendship, yet I have had many.

She had invited another couple, so there were six adults around the table and various children darting from room to room. We stayed for several hours. As soon as we got home, the phone rang. It was Carol. “I feel bad,” she said. “We barely saw each other all afternoon. We should get together by ourselves.”

I smiled. “We saw each other.”

“But we didn’t get a chance to really talk.”

We had talked as much as we wanted to. But I went along with her suggestion that we get together.

“Or,” she said, “we could get a babysitter for our children and the four of us could go out for dinner, as adults.”

Clearly we were relieved by this alternative.

And yet she had been so transparently friendly all afternoon that I wondered about myself. I felt milky with the past, an unexpressed past to which I kept returning in my
head but not out loud. Was mine sadness at the loss of friendship? Or sadness at my inability to be a friend? Or sadness at my inability to end a friendship in a friendly way?

There were several lush new plants in her apartment. I touched the fern, gently turning over a leaf, and was delighted to see rows of white specks, and upon closer inspection, cobwebs, small and delicate. I wondered if there was any limit to my pettiness.

The paintings were in different places. I looked at them as though for the first time. “Was this here before? Is this new?” Nothing was new, but everything had shifted. I hadn’t been in the apartment for several months.

At the table they were saying the only constant is change, everything is always changing. I said no, certain things remain steady. In my mind I saw salmon, gigantic tardes, and myself, refusing to learn from experience and throwing ourselves against the same old dam, plopping down on the same old beach, returning to the same old wound – the scene where friendship is born and goes wrong – to this apartment which a wiser person would have avoided.

Carol and I could not say: Look at us. Look at us avoiding each other while pretending we’re not. The most we could do was remain in contact without seeming to overdo the contact, and cushion the contact with other people.

I wondered how long this would last.