My Friends

I fell in love with a woman in college who later became my friend. At the end of sophomore year, there were a few nights in her apartment when we made out. At one point I pulled off my T-shirt, and she slipped it back over my head, guided my arms through the sleeves as my mother had when I was small. Then she went home for the summer and I stayed in Philadelphia working at Domino’s on South Street delivering pizzas on my bike. I kept a thick rubber band around my wrist. I’d be out riding around with a pizza strapped to the back of my bike, the city whooshing past my cheeks, and every time I thought of the woman I loved, I’d pull the elastic and let it snap hard into the flesh of my wrist. By the end of the summer I had a raised welt across the tender skin inside my wrist. Those few months, I never even spoke to the woman on the phone. When she came back to school, she started dating a boy named Xander. I understood that it would be difficult to compete with a name like that. Anyway, I had sort of moved on. But she and I became very good friends. In fact, she introduced me to my wife.

 
I have a friend who had a difficult divorce, then a new relationship that he ended with some amount of regret because the woman was quite a bit younger than he was and her parents refused to accept him. This was followed by a brief second marriage and then another divorce. At the end of all that he had terrible back pain accompanied by leg numbness and no doctor seemed to be able to help. The summer after his second divorce, I invited him on our family vacation in the Outer Banks. The ocean might be good for your back, I said. The way it turned out, he and I drove from New Jersey together and met my wife and her family, who were already down there. It was such a fun drive. We made each other laugh the way we always had. The car smelled like salami because we’d stopped at an Italian grocery on the way out of Jersey so that we could make an antipasto with dinner that night. On the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I pointed out the osprey nests. I felt like a real friend, doing my friend some good in his sad time. When we arrived at the beach, my friend and I prepared an amazing meal for my wife and her mom and stepfather. We ate out on the deck with a view of the sun setting over the sound, pelicans flying over in loose Vs. Pasta, bread, wine, everything. It seemed like the cloud of unhappiness over my friend was dissipating. We all got drunk and had a great time. But when I went up to bed and got in next to my wife, she said, I don’t know why you brought him here.  

 
Sometimes I say to my daughter, You’re my daughter, but you’re also my best friend. My daughter does not want me to be her best friend. She’s twelve. She wants friends who are her age and who are girls and not middle-aged men. The truth is, I don’t want to be best friends with her either. Being best friends with her would mean I’d have to watch a lot of YouTube videos.

In third grade, my best friend moved to New Mexico and though we promised to remain best friends, we lost touch after a few letters. I remember that one of his letters had a drawing of a New Mexican lizard and, above it in careful block letters, the word HERPATOLOGIST, which is what he’d decided to become. I was jealous. We didn’t have lizards in New Jersey. Decades later, I discovered that my friend had actually become a writer, and that he worked for a creative writing program at a university, just like me. I found this out when I saw his name as the winner of a prize named after one of my favorite writers, Donald Barthelme, for a short story he’d written about Taylor Swift. The prize was one I’d fantasized about winning. A few years after that, I ran into him at a writing program convention in Chicago. He remembered me from the old days in East Windsor. Both of us turning out writers, I said. Must have been something in the water. My friend looked at me like he didn’t think we’d drunk the same water at all. He excused himself and went to talk to some important people. I teach his story still, in my microfiction class. I don’t have hard feelings about this friend.

 
I have a friend who is a pretty famous poet. She lives in a rambling apartment filled with beautiful and whimsical objects. There is nothing in her place that you would not want to pick up and inspect. But much is delicate, not unlike my friend herself, who is tiny and sometimes wears red shoes like an elf. In her apartment are antique puppets that, if you stuck your hand inside them, might fall apart. This friend of mine suffers from health problems that make her high risk during this pandemic. She has barely ventured out in seven months, and our visits, our wine nights, have been mostly virtual since last March, except for one evening recently when we met up on her apartment building’s roof overlooking the park. We slipped crackers underneath our masks to nibble, sipped our wine through straws. My friend loves a coconut cake that is only available in one store in the city. The cake comes in a small white box bound in red and white twine. When unpacked, it resembles an even smaller white box, furred with coconut flakes. The slice my friend serves herself is the size slice you would present to a doll. My friend has written poems about dolls. She has also written poems so sad that they make my mother, an unsentimental woman, weep. After we eat our cake on the roof, it’s time for me to go. My friend is always apologizing about keeping me from other things I might want to be doing, like spending time with my family. This makes me sad. Believe me, I tell her. I spend plenty of time with them. Too much time, these days, I say. But the fact is it’s getting late and I do need to get home because I want to watch a home-organizing show on Netflix with my wife.

 
A friend has commissioned a local metal worker to make a gate in her alley which will prevent trespassers but will also be beautiful. My friend asks if I’ll help select the color scheme for the gate. My friend has made several mockups of a portion of the gate and painted them in the combinations of colors she is most interested in. The mockups, made of foam core and painted with precision, look like they must have taken my friend hours and hours to make. I stand in the alley and my friend holds one mockup up, then puts it down, then holds up another. The colors are tasteful mossy greens and earth tones. They all look good against the red brick. I ask her to hold each mockup up again as I step backward and forward, squinting, trying to look like the painting student I once was. I decide on the mockup with the dark green and ochre combination. A week later, my friend texts. The metal worker has installed the finished gate in her alley, and she isn’t crazy about the colors. She isn’t blaming me, per se, but texts that at full-size the colors look a bit “institutional.” It was probably my mockups, she says. I drive over to her place to see the gate for myself. My friend is standing in front of her house, looking at it. It’s a very tall, heavy gate, with the bars painted dark green and some larger planes in ochre as we’d decided. I try to reassure her, since the impressive gate looks like something she’ll be living with for a very long time. I don’t think it looks institutional at all, I say. But then her housemate comes through the alley from the back, grips the bars, and tries to rattle. The gate is so heavy there is no sound. Let me out, Warden, my friend’s housemate says. 

In eighth or ninth grade, a friend spent an entire evening trying to convince me to jerk him off. I was sleeping over at his house, in the living room, our two sleeping bags laid out in front of the television. His family had a big-screen television in the days when not many families did. His father worked on Wall Street. His father had a white Mercedes convertible in the garage that nobody ever drove. We had a plan that once we got our licenses, we would drive the Mercedes to Seaside with the top down. My friend told me that he could jerk me off, too. After I did him. Or he could do me first. He was really nonchalant about it, but I could tell he had rehearsed it in his head. I can’t say I wasn’t intrigued, but I was scared. This way, he said, we get it over with. I said I was sorry, and I rolled up my sleeping bag and left, walking home in the middle of the night, past the volunteer firehouse. A few volunteer firemen out front smoking cigarettes watched me go by. For months, I wondered what he meant by that. Get it over with.

Then there’s this friend who goes to church. He really believes in god. This used to bother me, but as I’ve gotten older I’ve become more forgiving. He asked me to be the godfather of his daughter. It’s okay that I don’t believe? I asked him. Yes, he said. Totally fine, he said. It’s not going to be that thing where I have to stand up there in front of everyone and renounce Satan? I asked, thinking of the scene in The Godfather. They don’t do that sort of thing at my church, he said. When I think about it now, it’s funny to me that I was more concerned about maintaining my atheism than the possibility of raising my friend’s daughter if he and his wife were killed in an accident. I agreed to do it and drove to West Virginia. I arrived the day before the ceremony and spent a really nice evening with my friend and his wife and her friend who was going to be the godmother. I got a little drunk and wondered what the status was for a godfather and a godmother, if we weren’t a little bit married. The next morning, I put on a suit and tie and looked at myself in the mirror. You’re going to be someone’s godfather, I thought to myself. Your friends put you in positions where you never thought you’d be.

Like the time back in grad school when another friend of mine convinced me to drive out to the suburbs with two women from the Comp-Lit program and break into someone’s backyard to swim in their pool. This friend had it on good authority, he said, that the family who owned the house was out of town. Who knows how he knew that? He is one of those people who have information. But I was the one with the car, so I was the hero. I got us there. It was one of those soupy St. Louis nights in early summer. On the warm concrete ringing the pool, we slipped out of our clothes. My friend’s dashing smile flashed in the dark. I spent a half hour in the water talking to one of the Comp-Lit students about Lorrie Moore. Her breasts bobbed in front of her. I thought of my wife, back in the city on the couch with our dog, probably. I said I had to go home, sooner than my friend or the Comp-Lit students wanted to. My wife had recently miscarried and I knew I ought to be sitting with her on the sofa, talking or not talking, instead of out in the suburbs, naked and trespassing.

In West Virginia, I leaned into the mirror and furrowed my brow to make it like Brando and mumbled like my mouth was full of cotton, See how they massacred my boy. My friend’s church was one of those friendly, welcoming churches where the pastor seems like a normal person that could be your friend. She wore some kind of ceremonial garment, but it was casual as far as such items go. So I was surprised when, a few minutes into the ceremony, she asked my friend’s wife’s friend, the godmother, to repeat after her that she renounced Satan and his deeds. I tried to make eye contact with my friend, but his eyes stayed stuck to his daughter in her tiny white dress. And then the pastor looked right at me. Gone was the casual demeanor she’d maintained before, when we sipped coffee in the room behind the nave. Her eyes were stern, imploring. The baby, who had been asleep, began to babble. Do you renounce Satan? the pastor asked. And all his works? I had no choice but to say the words. Yes, I said. I do renounce them.

I remember being at a formal function, a wedding or bar mitzvah, when the deejay played Dionne Warwick’s “That’s What Friends Are For,” and my mother and her friends and some of my aunts rushed to the dance floor even though it isn’t really a rush-the-dance-floor kind of song. They put their arms around each other and just started singing along, swaying to the music. My mother had lost some weight and I could tell she was proud to be up there, in the center of this group of women, the skinniest one. They raised their heads to the ceiling and sang the chorus. Knowing you can always count on me, for sure. It was embarrassing to see my mother singing, but I kept watching. Waving as a body, eyes closed, they seemed to have come together in this moment, over this song, in order to re-form a bond that was ancient and unknowable to me, something among women. Then the song was over and they disentangled themselves from each other and left the dance floor to sit down next to their husbands.

I’m not one of your god-damn friends is something my father used to say when I was a kid. Now my father is losing his memory. Sometimes when I call, I can tell he doesn’t quite know who I am. I think he thinks I might be one of his friends.