I have not, as I think I’ve implied, attempted to “patch things up” with my friend. What would be the point? And what would I say? “I was wrong, and I was always wrong, and I knew that I was wrong. However!” And then there is the fact that I was exasperated, furious, even, with my friend, when I had incontrovertible proof that all my allegations against him were false. He seemed to me, then, as he still does, I’m afraid, so weak, so pitiful, so inconsequential, unable to have committed the sins I’d accused him of. Good Christ! He’d had no courage at all, he’d done nothing, not one thing that I’d — I don’t know how to say this — that I’d wanted him to have done, perhaps. How could I ask him to forgive me, when I couldn’t forgive his intolerable innocence, his insufferable friendship? He was much, oh much less than the perfidious monster I’d longed for him to be. It was too much to ask of me that I invite him into my life, such as it is, again; or that I ask to enter his. It is too much, for that matter, to ask anything of me.
Recently, I have come to see that I had been waiting, all those many years ago, waiting for I really don’t know how long, for an invisible door I’d yearned to discover, to open, so that I could walk through it and away from life, for good and all.
The Diary
A man I once knew somewhat casually married a woman because she reminded him of another woman he had earlier wanted to, had, in fact, planned to marry, but did not, for reasons that, as he once remarked, “are best forgotten.” He loved the woman he ultimately married, but after a few years, this was no longer the case. Forgive me for the triteness of this situation, which is as “common,” as my mother used to say, “as dirt,” although she was usually speaking of people of whom she disapproved, and they were, believe me, many. For the sake of candor, I should mention that my mother disapproved of the man I once knew and his wife, and I don’t doubt that she would have disapproved of the woman he did not marry, as well. I may have been influenced in my own opinions of these people because of this. Or perhaps not. It is very hard for a man to think straight about his mother, which may be why so much psychoanalysis never quite works. With honesty and candor and as much accuracy as he can command from his neurotic mind, the analysand reveals all; but that all is, of needs, attenuated, twisted, and fictionalized. If and when the analyst finally peels away the sincere and intricately fabricated layers to get to what he and his patient agree is the truth, they’ve usually found, as Oscar Levant famously said of Hollywood, “the real tinsel underneath.” But this is frivolous digression.
My friend and I met one night, ten years or so into his marriage, over drinks in a bar we had regularly patronized at a time when both of us worked for the same publisher, in its unglamorous school department, a claustrophobic section of the house devoted to satisfying the medieval textbook-adoption requirements of, for the most part, the State of Texas. It was there that I learned that Texas more or less fed the entire company, and that we had a vice president whose job was, essentially, to fish and play golf with the members of the textbook-adoptions board. I find it pleasant to recall these things when I read of publishers and editors speaking of their devotion to good letters.
The bar was off Madison Avenue in the Forties, a neighborhood that has always unaccountably made me feel successful, a harmless delusion. We sat in the back room and ordered martinis, then he abruptly told me that his marriage seemed to be, that it really, more or less, might be, probably, well, was, in serious trouble. I didn’t care one way or another, for I had come to realize that my mother’s notion of this man and his insubstantial snob of a wife had become mine, I really don’t know how, and even though my mother had been dead for almost four years. I’ve neglected to mention that my mother once met this couple in a restaurant. They were not at their best, so my mother let me know. It turned out, not surprisingly, that his marriage was “in serious trouble,” because of his adulterous mooning over a young woman in the office of the company he now worked for as something called a “marketing-systems analyst,” a term dismal enough to bewitch an academic. It also came out that he had been driven to this absurd behavior (this was his version of the story; I never heard his wife’s, nor did I want to) because of — what a surprise! — his wife. She, paralyzed with ennui in her job as a legal secretary in a tort mill, after having been equally paralyzed during her brief tenure as what I had been told she called a “gold-plated housewife” (with the implication that she was much too gifted to scrub the toilet), had become a devoted follower of a “psychic enabling” discipline, a combination of Zen, Hinduism, evangelical something or other, and nature in all its glorious something or other. As we began our fourth martinis, I found out, from my sad friend, that the discipline involved some brilliant claptrap that had to do with “energy vortices,” access to which would open devotees the path to self-knowledge or self-realization or self-acceptance, or maybe it was self-love or self-actualization — whatever, it insisted on rapt attention to one’s inimitable Being. It was, no doubt, another polished grift, happily based on the surety that the most petty, vapid, selfish, envious, and useless people can be convinced that they live lives of real importance and consequence, are thinkers of subtly finespun thoughts, and, most importantly, deserve to be happy.
I was by now, as you might imagine, stupefied by this soap opera of love gone awry, of love locked out in all the cold and rain, as Max Kester’s 1933 lyric remarked, in an aberrant flaring of talent never revealed by Max again, who, clearly, never realized himself. I may have even sung the opening line to my friend, a gin-smeary grin on my face, but probably not; he was one of the troops who pretended never to have heard a popular song, his musical tastes running to what has come to be known as, God help us, “easy jazz.” Or maybe it’s “easy-listening jazz.” I wanted to tell him that he was boring me to fucking death, but in the irritation of my impatience, I told him that he should start keeping a diary, in which he could make up lies about his wife’s behavior, making it all up, making up anything, writing down anything, an-y thing! that came into his head. Then, after he had thirty or forty pages he could, I suggested, leave the diary where his wife could find it. She’d read it, I told him, because of her suspicions concerning his dalliance with the office siren. Right? Sure! Then, after she’d read his crackpot fantasies, lies, ramblings, maybe, just maybe, in amazed disgust, she’d let him “live life,” as he probably liked to say, with, of course, suitable hambone emphasis. I did not, as I remember, have to spell out that by “living life,” I meant carefree carrying-on with the assistant assistant. My point, as I recall, was that his wife might think him too weird to annoy with the domestic. In effect, he’d lie his way to freedom. He seemed to like this idea, but my memory of the evening is, understandably, hazy. All I clearly remember after my grotesque suggestion is his maudlin description of Ms. Cubicle’s legs as “like a fawn’s.” Oh Jesus.
About six months later, he unexpectedly called me up to thank me for my advice of that sodden evening, which advice, he wanted me to know, he had taken. I had all but completely forgotten about this boneheaded “plan,” and when he refreshed my memory of it (my hesitant conversation, designed to make him tell me what I’d forgotten, was mistaken by him, as I’d hoped, for unassuming, good-guy modesty), I laughed a quiet, friendly laugh, and waited for him to get off the phone. But he thanked me again, and added that his marriage was better than ever, stronger and more assured, loving, fulfilling, wonderfully this and thrillingly that, and that he, his blossoming wife, and the wonderfully giving young woman from the office were together every weekend, sometimes even more often. For “marvelous interludes” (he said this). These “interludes” were “psychic springboards” to self-realization, which led to humble introspection and knowledge, even if imperfect, of self. I wanted to reach through the phone to strangle him, but I laughed warmly, and eased out of the conversation, but not before he said that he’d call me again, and I said wonderful! The impossible bastard!