A.K. and Friends: The Emotional Knapsack

1.

This time of year, I always think of my home girl Anna Karenina. There is something about the oncoming winter months, the gorgeous melancholy of the turning seasons, the endless cups of rose and strawberry scented tea, the Russian dolls on my mantelpiece, and of course the late fall wardrobe consisting of gold and deep hues of green and burgundy that make me long to be on the pages of her misfortune.

A lot of people say that the first time they read Anna Karenina, they loved her story, and were all but flipping the pages forward, hurrying through Konstantin Levin’s babblings on the working class and ideas of happiness and the great Russian escape, the bliss of the countryside, as opposed to the superficial values and evil siren calls of the great cities, because who cared about these boring issues, right? The second time was all about Levin’s story, and the reader started to see how important he was for the whole unraveling of events, as Anna’s mirror, her counterpart, the light, yes, light, to her darkness. This is exactly how it happened with me. Also, between the first two reads I had aged a good ten years, so obviously the point of interest had shifted as well.

I have touched on Tolstoy’s big book several times here before, and alas, here I go again, mostly perhaps because there is a huge theater production of Anna Karenina right now in the town where I live, and I was there at the grand premiere.

2.

We stood there, surrounded by the most stunning collection of cashmere sweaters and wool blend cardigans and satin dresses and silk skirts one could ever imagine, planning our girls’ night out on the town and theater with the hyperbole and gusto only ladies who work hard and raise kids and never get any time for themselves can muster. Of course I, having no kids and working only semi-hard because I had standing, pre-planned work shifts and days-off, and was therefore basically swimming with free time for my writing, was trying to keep up the best I could, trying my damnedest to live vicariously through the hardships of my girl.

Oh, and I have that Anna Karenina premiere coming up in two weeks, I said, marveling at myself in the mirror in a calf-length checkered skirt with floral prints and my own homely white tee-shirt, which seemed to go really well with the expensive bottom piece, because anything goes if you want something badly enough, doesn’t it?

Were you thinking of wearing within the theme? Sally asked, pro forma, because she already knew the answer like the back of her hand.

I was thinking of the green and brown vintage dress, with the gold embroidery, with the lace-up boots and some dangling earrings, I said, still coping with relief. But what of our night? We should make a whole night of it, dinner and a show, the works!

But whatever will we all wear to a function like that? Sally asked, exaggerating on purpose, because who knew better than her, really?

This was some time after the disagreement. I had never fought with Sally before. She is one of the most nonconfrontational people I know, and over the years I have learned to appreciate her silent acceptance and support and lack of judgment more and more. It isn’t in her nature to challenge or point out weaknesses. She lets everyone be who they are and never evaluates or allows a friendship dissolve on account of, shall we say, creative differences.

So when I did eventually have an argument with her, seventeen years into the friendship, I felt the world was going to end. I continued to feel like that for several days, until there was the much-anticipated peace-making phone call – as with another old friend, Alessandro, most of my relationship with Sally happens over the phone at this point of our lives - we both knew would come but I guess had feared might not come after all.

Well, you know, I was thinking of buying the black dress with the granite floral print on the chest, she answered her own question, actually taking out the piece she was describing from the rack as she spoke. I was thinking of getting this anyway, for the upcoming trip with my husband. Of course, if he asks what I’m planning on bringing along, I’ll just say the old black dress with the roses down the front, remember? And he’ll be like ohh… sure I remember.

What a genius! To insert incoming dresses in the wardrobe before they are there, to prevent a blowout! I was in awe of her capabilities and gladly bowed down to the master, making mental notes for future purposes.

So it’s settled then, you will be the femme fatale and I’ll go as Poirot, I concluded. But first tonight, it’s Alessandro’s play, so on with the show, my lady!

3.

I thought about calling or texting you back when I was writing it, but you know, you are such an asshole, so instead I sparred with Jim, Alessandro said.

I have no idea if I flinched or not when he said that. I did flinch inside, but I am pretty sure my smile stayed on. We were surrounded by people with champagne flutes in hand, the soft murmur of voices growing steadily as the party grew livelier and more raucous after the initial polite half-hour.

Why, all of a sudden, was I the asshole? Had I missed something in the conversation? Was the comment payback for my mentioning earlier, in his presence, to Sally that he had been in tears on the opening night of his very first directing job years back, and that this was clearly progress since no one was crying yet?

Was he, in a weird way, showing off the intimacies of our long friendship, suggesting not very subtly, that I had to take it, that I was the one person in the whole world who had to sit back and take it when he wanted to blow off steam, and to not mind too closely what he was saying, that I was the brother he never had and if he felt an urge to call me names, well, that was how things lay (note: he does have an actual brother)? Or, my god, was I deserving of the title? Was there a precedent or, horror, precedents, to my assholeness that had slowly grown out of the long body of our friendship?

Whatever the reason, I sat back and took it. I did. We were standing ten feet away from the party crowd, it was his night, and in a vague, inexplicable way, I was flattered. Because it’s true. He is one of my oldest and closest friends, and if I’m the asshole, well, then so be it. And all things considered, I probably deserve it, too.

But not for what he was accusing me of in the conversation. The thing is, I’d love to be bothered. Writing is such a lonely job, this is something I know myself, and support of any kind, brainstorming with another mind, even having someone give suggestions as to how a piece of work could be bettered a little, is valuable beyond gold. One needs to spar, discuss, argue, elaborate. Even if one ends up not using the suggested corrections, one gets a fresh look at the text through the eyes of another, and that is always a good thing. One longs to discuss one’s work with others, it is a natural desire. All writers are egomaniacs.

That said, I would have never behaved the way he was implying. Never. The world will give us plenty of beatings, so why thrash each other’s work? No reason.

I felt confused and taken aback, though, and wrongfully accused, and was overcome by a mad urge to start picking a fight right there, telling him he made me sound like such an awful person, that I had come to see his play because I wanted very much to see it and wanted to support his work, because I missed him and was glad to talk to him for however short amount of time before and after?

Was I the asshole for continuously pestering my friend to read my stuff which he never did? For writing an endless amount of text messages over the years, asking how he was, and getting zip in return? For coming to his premiere and, by that simple act, making him face the music? Did he really think I had shown up just to bust his chops? Was it a preemptive strike? Perhaps it was yes to all these questions.

4.

There are basically limitless oceans of tolerance and forgiveness in store for those we love. We treat our friends like crap, sometimes. Look at Levin and Oblonsky’s long friendship in Anna Karenina. Levin keeps on giving his friend a hard time about how he chooses to live and rages on about this and that, while Stiva sips some champagne and beds another dancer girl, telling Kostya yes, yes, whatever you say, dear friend. Because if you are a true friend, you will weather the storms. Someone said once that it really isn’t a real friendship until it has endured at least one decent argument. I used to think it was so true, and who knows, maybe it is, and who knows, maybe I was the one who said it. Then again, a heated fight isn’t necessarily required in order to call someone our true-blue friend.

I do have friends I have fought with, sometimes bitterly. And those fights do change the relationship a little; sometimes it becomes more intimate and honest, sometimes it takes the intimacy and honesty away and it takes a few years to recreate the feeling of security and fun and the circle of trust that are the cornerstones of any true friendship.

Dynamics in friendships also alter with time, people change, and real friendship I guess is more about tolerating change in each other. Anyone can become enamored by a likeminded person in our formative years. Especially girls tend to form extremely tight bonds and walk arm in arm in twos, and that attachment is nearly impossible to break when the love is at its height. This is something I know, having had close friendships with other girls and women my whole life.

Sometimes it is as important and necessary to be able to break away. From those unhealthy powerplay friendships from our youth with dominant, forceful others who eat at our self-esteem and belittle us to the point of invisibility. To get away from under somebody’s wing who is determent we can’t become without them. Finding friends who will support us and be our bosom buddies without trying to maneuver us or pressure us or put us in a box is not always difficult at all, but sometimes holding on to those friends can prove the real challenge over the years.

For instance, in one’s forties, it can be the silence, the overlooking, the long months, years even, of not hearing a word from our friends, that will prove the true son of a bitch of a challenge. The high noon of our lives, lived in the hustle and bustle of kids and a career and significant others yammering in our ears about whatever, and time management issues continuously pressing us down, I believe there isn’t a soul here who doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

Sometimes a friendship is measured in a time frame of an important life event. For example, a lot of my girlfriends have been involved in all sorts of Mommy Play Groups at one point or another, mostly formed while hanging on the Baby Rash -sites online, or in the kindergarten hallway, or on Facebook, and once the kids no longer go to kindergarten, the group often dissolves. Peer support is not irrelevant, and these types of friendships, while perhaps a bit more superficial than the true-blue friendship that lasts hopefully a lifetime, can surpass momentarily in importance any other relationship. When living conditions change, one needs to talk about it. Or at the very least stand in vicinity of others who are going through the same thing. And that is not a small thing. We need all kinds of friendships, all kinds of relationships, and it is perfectly fine if not all of them consist of pouring one’s heart out on a variety of very personal issues every time we meet them. Sometimes it is refreshing to just chat away and not have to face those closet monsters right at that moment.

5.

My man sometimes likes to point out in our many fights that I tend to surround myself with friends who are mellow and calm so that I can be the drama queen, the rock star, the one whose problems are always on the table. In some ways I guess it is true. I have a selfish streak, and a tendency to go a little overboard with the hysterics on some issues. Life things are dramatic things for me, and it is true, I like people around me who do not nurture the craziness or enable me to become even more of a basketcase, but whose presence helps me to calm the hell down.

Some of my very best friends are very unlike me on the surface. My closest friends at work, for instance, the oft-mentioned Hanks and Roberts, are both kind, compassionate, warm, and sunny people with a what can be described mellow disposition and joie de vivre. Just sensing Hanks, quiet and steady, standing beside me with a half-smile, thinking so obviously about how mad I must be right now when a customer is screaming my ear off, has a calming effect. There are few things I love more about my job than getting a delighted laugh from Roberts when I am making with the funny, since not everyone at work gets my sense of humor at all.

But there is danger, there, in oversimplifying our friends into stereotypes. It is quite possible Hanks secretly detests me for calling him Mr. Cow Nerves. When you think about it, isn’t that a terrible thing to do to someone? Chris Messina is so upset in Julie and Julia when Amy Adams keeps referring to him as a saint, telling her it makes him feel like, well, an asshole. And what about Roberts? I have seen days when she was anything but sunny side up, and to be frank, calling her my anal girl is like calling the kettle black.

It is so easy to start drawing distinctions by way of you’re so into superficial stuff like clothes and shit while I think deeper and never put any make up on, an actual confrontation I had with someone a few years back, that after a while those arbitrary, often humorous lines start becoming their own creatures, and if we don’t feel the characterizations character us in a truthful way, we start getting peeved at the friend who is drawing those exaggerated, sometimes downright false and made up, markers. I am guilty of this, too, obviously, and the biggest blowout I have ever had with a friend boiled down to this kind of assuming and oversimplifying that had gone on for years, making it harder and harder to break out of our respective roles until a huge argument was at hand that nearly destroyed our friendship entirely.

Turned out a lot of things I had believed to be true about my friend weren’t true at all, that I had assumed things about her, and she had never felt compelled to correct those assumptions until it was almost too late, since I was such a nervous, energetic, overbearing, overwhelming, dominant person and she felt overshadowed by me, and so on and so forth.

Another friend once told me during a not so much fight, but a series of snaps delivered back and forth, that she didn’t owe me a damn thing and I should just quit it. As if, instead of enjoying a friendship that existed as a rare flower in the electric storm of our lives, the one relationship without any burdens of bad feeling, I was pressuring her to be my friend, to hear me out, as if I was obligating her somehow. Which I guess is exactly what I was doing.

These have been some of the most horrible moments of my life, these conversations, hearing those things about myself and recognizing the truth in them. We all like to think we are Kathy from Never Let Me Go, not Ruth.

6.

Alessandro once said I had no idea who he was now, that there were things about him I could never even fathom.

What things? What things would those be? Considering we met every six months or even less now, of course there were things I didn’t know. Hell, he had no idea what was going on in my life, either.

Levin wanted a full disclosure between him and Kitty, otherwise he could not marry her, convinced that he would be lying to her, that she needed to know everything, everything, every bad, distasteful, disgusting thing he had ever done. The audience at the premiere roared with laughter at this, and my man called him a putz, but I understood completely. While Levin was referring to his relationship with Kitty as man and wife, I have a tendency to disclose fully to my friends, and like the Russian high society in the novel versus Anna’s real friends, for instance her sister-in-law Dolly, there is always, sooner or later, the shall we say baptism of fire that will separate the wheat from the chaff, and sometimes the wheat is very far and between indeed.

This is something I know personally, having in my own life gone through a similar chain of events to Anna’s journey of terror and losing everyone dear to her one by one.

7.

Where will we be in another twenty years? At another opening for a play, dancing through another set of veiled accusations and innuendo and morphing into our younger selves and changing quickly behind the set? Isn’t it all so dramatic, the different acts in our various friendships and the states they are in, the heavy pauses, the comic reliefs, the long monologues, the fast-paced dialogue when things are good, the dress rehearsals, the dreading of the criticism, the heckling, the applause, the standing ovation, the boos? Will Alessandro consider me an asshole then, too? Will I even be invited at all?

Sally said she did not hear the comment, so maybe it was all in my head. Maybe we didn’t even talk. Who knows, really. But I do know that when he showed up on the stage for elated and well-deserved thankyous, he had picked out one flower from the large basket of opening night flower gifts to hold.

The one from me.

8.

Anna Karenina wasn’t, as mentioned earlier, Alessandro’s play, his was an original work, a deeply felt, personal story on Alzheimer’s and caregiving and how John Lennon holds the keys to acceptance, forgiveness, and deeper understanding, that left nary a dry eye in the house, but it happened to coincide with a lot of other opening nights and friendship-related stuff in my life. We make our own choices, we pay our own prices, says Jennifer Tilly in Bound. The long years of friendship with what I like to call our old, chosen people. Holding on to these friends for dear life. The difficulty to make new friends after the age of thirty, and this isn’t even a tiny exaggeration. Almost every single friendship I have struck since then has dissolved. The ones I made twenty years ago, with Tolstoy’s help, are surviving, thanks to small, simple acts like picking out a flower to hold that packs volumes in meaning.

And this time, at the Anna Karenina premiere, for the first time ever, I experienced the tale as a complex, interwoven network of stories on different kinds of life-long friendships and why friendships end and loneliness and crazy decisions made in the heat of the moment and head troubles when there is no one to turn to. We really do get by with a little help from our friends. Anna and Vronsky’s solitary existence in Italy, friendless, without even the support of their families, loose and aloof, drive them eventually to pack their bags and return to Russia, to the cold shoulder and horrors that await on the dark streets, because they miss their lives, their family and friends, everything they gave up when they decided to be together.

9.

I used to be so damn angry at some of my friends for not recognizing how sick I was a few years ago, for apparently not giving a damn, even when I called them, crying, telling them I couldn’t sleep and what the hell was going on. But that is just the way I am. Selfish, self-centered, self-indulgent, assuming everybody’s world revolves around my shit. I interrupt, I consider myself the funniest person alive, I go through a thousand emotions a day, my changes are constant, my worries are always the largest in the universe.

I guess my biggest fault as a friend is that I assume too much. And you know what they say about assuming. I assume things stay the same with people when clearly, they don’t. I assume I can pick up the phone and call them when in truth I may have lost that right years ago. I assume there will be no real change in people or relationships that aren’t romantic affairs which are forever in flux and volcanic and full of interruptions and tidal waves, Anna would know, right? I want my friends to be my constants, and when they are not, I get angry. I end up badgering my friends into being with me, and well now, how delightful is that, honestly?

Maybe that’s what Alessandro really meant by the asshole comment. Maybe I fail my own imperative and requirements. Is it so that tolerating change in others is, in the end, not my strong suit? Having an angry friend may be endearing and funny on Gilmore Girls or Anna Karenina, like Michel or Paris or poor fuming Levin, but not really in real life.