Who do I hate today? Some mornings I ask this question even before my husband and I have downed our coffee. Is it the woman enrolled in a writing workshop I teach, who emailed an ungirdled manuscript unimpeded by the Microsoft doodad that lets an author know she's repeated "really" seven times in a paragraph, caused the entire group (me, too, drat) to spend an ice age ruminating on her submission, then dropped the class? Without paying? Really.
Sure, I cursed. For five minutes. This object of ire fell into the same forgettable category as the line-jumper at Ben & Jerry's or the clueless creep who hissed when my arm grazed hers on the subway--as if I chose to go skin-to-skin with a fellow commuter. No, I reserve my true animus for people who, before I had an abrupt attitude adjustment, I considered to be close friends.
Today's chart-topper is the couple whose daughter got married last weekend. When their sweet pea became engaged my hubby and I listened patiently as our pals talked up the do-over required to take their humble Hampton's hovel to the level the groom's parents, Captain and Mrs. of Industry, would expect. We gave up a summer weekend to attend an engagement gala thrown by the other family, arriving suitably attired mit gift. The fireworks were matched only by the psychedelic wedding chatter the next day at our friends' home. Only a year away! So many plans to make!
The talk went on and on. Until it didn't. As the months passed, it became clear that after our pals had done the math, my husband and I had slipped to the B list, if not the C, most likely replaced by a knob from Waterworks. This was a demotion with which I could live -- one fewer trip to Barneys to decide between the large caviar bowl and the small. So it was chutzpah on steroids when the bride's daddy called my husband weeks before the nuptials-to-which-we-weren't-invited to ask him to put in a good word to Brother Big on a business deal. Thus you can understand my schadenfreude when I saw the dainty size of Sunday's Times wedding announcement. Shortest little sucker on the page. There's a God and she's an editor at Styles.
If we're lucky, we find caring friends who'll value us as much as we value them. They're not just fine company, they'll make us balloon animals if life throws a punch and don't secretly rejoice when we lose a job and a husband or gain a chin and a second mortgage. Nor do they send us internet chain letters with apocalyptic threats should we fail to forward the news flash to 17 pals in the next hour. It's when such sterling friends disappoint us that north starts looking like south.
We know not every friend is destined to be a perennial, the James Taylor or Carole King of our emotional road show. What brings a friendship to the Do Not Resuscitate point? The result depends on how bad we feel we've been had, whether and to what degree the evil one serves up remorse and plain old manners.
I'm a big forgiver. A friend tried to snatch an apartment I found and bid on. Afterward we didn't speak for many months. This wasn't exactly Draconian punishment, but I missed her enough so that once she sang her sorries, we moved on. I had a harder time trying to get past a very close (or so I thought) chum who "by mistake" copied me on an email kvetching about how she didn't want to go to my last book party. I was hurt and I was furious, at this and other passive-aggressive gestures I began to realize I could not overlook. The anger festered -- until I dropped it like a bomb.
After the gotcha, she apologized. Betwixt the fallout, we're pretending everything's OK. It's not. The slow erode of this friendship -- which I thought would be a lifer -- is more painful than the bruise caused by the friends who edited us off the wedding list or the savage apartment-hunter, because with my party-dissing friend I'd believed there was an unbreakable mutual regard. Getting past pettiness is one thing, but realizing that you're not appreciated at a molecular level moves a relationship into the land of phony baloney, a place reached by sailing on the ship of fools -- and truly, who's got the time? Do. Not. Resuscitate.
A wise man I've begun to call a friend recently said, if you want to tell the truth, write fiction. This is one reason why I decided to parse the subject of friendship in my forthcoming novel, With Friends like These. An early review called the story line -- about four once-close women -- "achingly real." I tried hard to show friendship untouched by Photoshopping. The characters don't set out to hurt one another, but reality gets in the way, and sooner than you can say steak tartare, four friendships turn raw and bloody.
It was pre-ubiquitous-cosmetic-surgery Camus who said, "After a certain age every man is responsible for his face." Ditto, friends. If their behavior is ugly, we are partly to blame. We enabled them. But we also get to decide when a friendship is over.
Sometimes it's the only choice, though afterward, the gaping hole in our lives left by the missing friendship can hurt like a phantom limb.