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LEAVING UNLOVING LOVERS AND UNFRIENDLY FRIENDS
Out of the blue, the woman who had once been my closest friend and confidante left me a message that she was in the hospital. We hadn’t spoken in two years. I decided, after several days of agitated deliberation, not to call her back.
It was one of the hardest, and smartest, things I’ve ever done.
At first I was gratified—even thrilled—to hear her voice again, speaking my name. “Hello, Jeanne,” she said, informing me of her whereabouts in the slightly stilted tone that I remembered she always used whenever she was uncomfortable. “I’m getting some tests—an MRI and some others. I think I’m all right. We’ll talk over the weekend.” My first impulse was to try to reach her immediately. But something about her message and the way she delivered it, both what she said and what she omitted, gave me pause.
I remembered all too clearly our last conversation, two years earlier. She had used the same tone then. I had been the one in the hospital—for an entire month, with a dangerous but curable form of leukemia—and I had asked her to come and see me when I felt desperate for her company and some edible food, and she neither came, nor called, nor sent me anything, abandoning me on one of the darkest nights of my life. It took her two days to call me back with a lame excuse (there was too much traffic, and the hospital food couldn’t be that bad, as if that was the point). Her voice was flat, vague, slightly disembodied, and subtly defensive, and she had gotten off the phone as quickly as possible. She promised to explain later, but she never called back.
“Why on earth would you call her?” said my husband, who knew our whole history and had witnessed most of it, both our long intimacy and its abrupt demise. “Be careful.” His pronouncement seemed so bald, so final, so devoid of hope. What he said disturbed and frightened me because I didn’t want his verdict to be true. Here was my chance to get back the one woman in the world who spoke my language when I thought I had lost her forever.
We had been soul mates and professional colleagues for more than twenty years before she vanished, each other’s bulwark in life. She understood things about me I didn’t understand about myself, and I never knew anyone more generous, more delighted by a friend’s success, or more consoling in adversity. She was brilliant, mordant, and astute, and I loved that she never suffered fools. Our conversations were my stimulant and my solace; “I’ve never talked to anybody the way I talk to you,” she told me once, and I felt the same way. But even before she deserted me, the fallout from an extended marital crisis had made her increasingly self-absorbed and subtly demanding, and I found those conversations less mutual as time went on. Her fuse also got much shorter, and I, who prided myself on addressing problems in relationships, never felt I could reveal my growing discontent without risking the fallout of her displeasure.
Despite her shocking behavior, I missed her so intensely that I wasn’t ready to give up on her yet, so I made excuses for her, putting the best possible spin on that twenty-second message: clearly, I wasn’t forgotten. She was seeking me out; she was turning to me in her hour of need. Maybe she felt all the things I hoped she felt, but couldn’t put them into words. Being hospitalized must have brought me to mind. Maybe she identified with me, felt sorry about the way she had acted, and wanted to make amends. It must have taken a lot to make that call; after all, she risked getting me on the phone, and then she would have had to explain herself. I was glad I hadn’t answered the call, because caught unawares I would certainly have followed my first instinct and engaged with her, even if all she’d wanted was advice. But shouldn’t I at least give her the benefit of the doubt after two decades of intimacy, acknowledge the effort, and send her a brief e-mail asking what she wanted to talk to me about?
I couldn’t immediately see the message for what it was: the presumptuous, self-absorbed expression of a person who now only thought of me to make use of me—for support, for attention, for the medical expertise I had often provided in the past. There was neither empathy nor apology in her voice or her words—no acknowledgment of how I might feel to get a call from her two years late, and then only when she needed me because she was in trouble herself. The person who left that message, regardless of what she had once been to me, was not capable of apologizing now; she could never again be a true or trustworthy friend to me. Slowly it dawned on me that the woman I wanted back in my life didn’t exist anymore and hadn’t for years.
The first sensible thought I had was to do nothing, to wait and think it through. If she were sincere, if I really mattered to her still, she would certainly call again. I listened to her message twice more and asked my husband to listen as well in case I was misinterpreting. So much seemed at stake that I felt I had to be careful; one false step and she might retreat forever. The fate of the relationship seemed entirely in my hands, a thought that in itself should have tipped me off to its precariousness.
Then two songs came into my head. I found myself singing them aloud, over and over. “Cry me a river…” I belted repeatedly as I walked around the apartment pondering my options. Julie London’s bitter torch song segued into Linda Ronstadt’s “You’re No Good,” the unofficial anthem of all reformed masochists—and of masochists trying to reform. I hadn’t thought of it since the seventies, and very satisfying it was to proclaim.
But why, I suddenly asked myself, was I singing about exorcising a tormented love affair after getting a cryptic call from a former friend? Because the state of mind that she evoked in me—the paralysis, the desperate attempts at self-control, the justifications that couldn’t justify, the anxiety that a wrong move on my part could be fatal, the strangulated fury, the feeling that parting would be unendurable—was exactly the same.
I had heard that same cool and heedless tone she used from the first man I felt I couldn’t live without. He was a graduate student on a time-limited fellowship from another university—graceful, sardonic, golden haired, with a motorcycle, and I was an intense, lonely, nineteen-year-old sophomore. My parents’ marriage was disintegrating, and I tried, unsuccessfully, to make him my refuge. I would do anything to have him reach for me, even though I could never count on him, even after he told me he preferred an old girlfriend in another state. The night before he left town forever, my darkest until the one on which my friend forsook me, I had also waited by the phone that never rang. When he finally came to say good-bye the next morning just before he rode out of my life, he explained gratuitously that he had spent the night consoling another woman who was broken up by his leaving. Unprotesting and dry eyed by force of will, I let him kiss me good-bye and promise to stay in touch.
But even this did not break the spell of my longing for him. To my astonishment, he actually did write and call me over the next year, often to ask advice about other women and to tell me about his travails with them. “You’re the first person I turn to when I want to talk,” he said, and despite everything, I was gratified to hear it because it meant I was special to him—the same response I had when my friend said virtually the same thing to me decades later. When he came back to see me briefly the following summer, I welcomed him with a combination of vengefulness and excitement—a mistake I vowed not to make again with my friend.
My entire adult life, my long career as a psychoanalyst, and thirty-three years of marriage to the man who showed up every day I was in the hospital as well as every other day had not severed the bonds of hunger, despair, and enraged humiliation over my long-lost lover that I buried in 1967. My reactions to my friend’s call catapulted me back to him and exposed a wound that had never healed, that I had not even realized I bore. I knew the outlines of my youthful disastrous attachment, but the full meaning and impact of the experience had lain, unmetabolized and radioactive, a long-dormant template I thought I had destroyed long ago, until I heard her voice and felt exactly the same way.
The parallels between these two people from opposite ends of my life were both uncanny and enlightening. The common denominator was that both seemed so essential to me that I would have done anything to keep them, to the point of ignoring information that would make a more rational person flee. Betrayal is gender blind, and sex is a sufficient, but not necessary, component; a woman can hurt you as much as a man, a friend as much as a lover. Anybody who feels indispensable has power over you, and your desperation can make you behave in equally self-damaging ways.
Masochism is an equal-opportunity destroyer, and crumbs from the table are the same, whether they are offered by a beloved who kisses your eyes and then turns away or an intimate who prizes you and then disappears when the going gets rough. Masochism can hide behind the most beguiling facades, and it can seduce you at any age if your history makes you susceptible. The bonds of empathy between friends even much later in life can be as deceptive and compelling as adolescent passion, as skin deep as beauty. And the cure is the same: walking away. It took me almost half a century to realize this and only three days to do it.
Copyright © 2016 by Jeanne Safer
