I had coffee the other day with a friend I kind of hate.
Yes, yes, it’s been pointed out to me: we may have to discuss my understanding of the word “friend”. I still haven’t fully figured out why, and have often lamented this fact, but for some reason, for my entire life, I’ve always had one friend that I actually–truth be told–despise. When I mention this to people, “You know how you always have that one friend you can’t stand?”, they stare, blankly. Clearly, this isn’t a common phenomenon. We do have to discuss my understanding of the word “friend”.
In first grade it was a girl who shared my name. She lived down the block and was, frankly, a nasty little piece of work. My parents couldn’t stand her. But we had the same name. That seemed enough—at six—to form an intractable bond. When my family moved away, I was bereft, even though in my heart of hearts, I knew I didn’t really like her. Luckily, six-year-olds rarely “keep in touch”. Once we moved, I never saw her again.
In grade school it was Vanessa (names have been changed to protect the terminally irritating; and, you know, me).
Sadly, even by my twenties, I still found myself in strangely unsatisfying friendships. Tracy and I met the first week of grad school and in many ways she was the friend version of a date that’s “perfect on paper”. We’d both grown up in the Tri-State area; both attended Northeastern, liberal arts colleges; both had worked for two years between college and grad school, so we could patronize the 21-year-olds in our program about their lack of “real world experience”. We had similarly unruly hair. When we met, neither of us had a boyfriend. Tracy perfectly looked the part.
And for years, I admit I enjoyed having Tracy in my life. She was exceedingly smart, funny, and a game socializer; she was up for almost anything. We bonded quickly, introduced each other to all our respective friends, hung out on weekends, went on trips together. But as the years went on, certain things increasingly nagged at me. She had a keening—and resolutely untreated; she thought therapy was “self-indulgent”–set of neuroses. She second guessed her way through her life and managed to end up, after three years of graduate school, doing the exact same job she’d done right after college. She had a Hamlet-like facility for worrying and over-thinking her way out of any real forward momentum. An outsized sense of righteous indignation resulted in her getting fired from job after job. Hours, days, of discussions about her issues had no effect. She was exhausting.
Tracy also held her closest friends to impossibly high standards (random acquaintances–ironically–often could do no wrong). I always felt I was disappointing her, even for minor infractions like not spending the night at her place or neglecting to call her as often as she called me (a constant, Grandmother-worthy harangue). And when someone–invariably–didn’t live up to those standards? No apology was enough. When a mutual friend “let her down”, she simply wouldn’t let it go, long after he’d explained and apologized. I finally asked her, “What do you want him to do, buy you a puppy?” She answered, without a trace of irony, “Yes.” She was also an incessant “teaser”; constantly poking at people’s little foibles and inadequacies with a trail of giggles that—she clearly had no idea—was incredibly annoying and did nothing to soften a blow’s impact. Combined with a frighteningly sharp memory, the “playful teasing” felt like a cudgel. Once, in a moment of callow grandiosity, I’d said, “I hate theater”. Years later, when I came back to New York to visit and mentioned to her that I was seeing as many plays as I could, she barked, “But you hate theater!” I’d made the comment when I was 24. Does anyone want a friend who reminds them–ten years on–of the insipid, pretentious shit they said in their early twenties? (Trust me: you don’t.)
So why did I remain friends with Tracy? Even when we lived in the same city it often nagged at me. Did I really love her company or did we hang out so much because we liked the same things (going to movies), and were in the same field (and had a similar lack of success)? Were we friends because we really wanted to be, or because no else was left? Was this true friendship? Or inertia? And once I moved 3000 miles away, why did I bother to engage in the heavy lifting required to maintain the relationship? Just because she liked me?
Finally, on one visit to New York, when wrangling our schedules together somehow became impossible, and Tracy was clearly piqued that I was staying with a high school friend—who had a guest room—and not her (who’s angry to not have a house guest on their couch?), and she seemed not the slightest bit concerned or sorry that my boyfriend and I had just broken up, I thought: that’s it. I’m not calling her again. I’m done making the effort. And thankfully, just as it had been when I was six, distance was my ally; nearly fifteen years after we’d met–probably six after it had occurred to me–the friendship ended. But I’d just let it die from lack of care. Should I have made a stand? And earlier? I couldn’t have “broken up” with her just because her nervous giggle made me want to punch her in the neck. Right?
Ah, the desire to punch someone in the neck; that brings me my recent coffee date, Patricia. She and I met through work, years ago in New York. She was the part time bookkeeper, who told me far too much information about my boss’s financial practices, blithely instilling terror that my paycheck would bounce. (It was a small business kept barely afloat with credit card debt, the owner’s father-in-law’s grudging largess, and, apparently, spit). She also regaled me with tales of her vaguely to-the-manor-born life. She was an equestrian and owned her own horse. Her father lived all over the world, and “kept” a house in Aspen. Her mother lived on Hilton Head. I would listen to her wild stories–meeting the entire Giants defensive line in First Class on the way back from a weekend jaunt to Luxembourg to buy a polo pony for an Austrian businessman–and feel wildly inadequate. (My weekend: a movie, a trip to Ollie’s Noodle House and schlepping my cat to the vet.) Once, at party I threw, one of my college friends pulled me aside. “That Patricia woman?” he offered, “Is either the most interesting person on the planet or a pathological liar. I’m leaning towards the latter.” It was the first time I’d even had license to doubt her. What if she was just a pathological liar? I could cut her loose for that alone. Couldn’t I?
Luckily, I thought I would never have to; I moved to L.A. and figured that was the end of that. We weren’t close enough that I thought I had to fight time zones to keep in touch with her. And then, a year after I got to L.A., she moved here too. She looked me up almost immediately. Still finding my feet in a new city, with only a few solid new relationships, I accepted an offer to dinner. And then another. And then a party here or there. I kept wanting to want to spend time with her—really I did; she is incredibly smart, wildly well traveled (if it’s all true), politically engaged. But I couldn’t shake the feeling that I just didn’t, well, like her much.
Patricia, I’ve come to realize, is possibly a textbook narcissist. She can talk almost non-stop (which she did at our coffee the other day) about ten thousand different subjects—her work, her son, the environment, the compressed disc in her spine, how none of us should ever, under any circumstances, eat fish again. She’s an emphatic pedant and she knows so much it’s impossible to argue with her. She drops names so hard you can actually hear the thud. (At this coffee: “Leo”.) She will ask you exactly one question about yourself—and half way through your answer she’ll interrupt and be off on one of her own tangents. The other day we were together for almost two hours and she has no idea what I’m working on, if I’m seeing anyone, how my family is. Honestly, for the life of me, I’ve no idea what she sees in me: she actually doesn’t know me at all.
I minimize this relationship, believe me. If I see her name on my phone, I let it go to voicemail. I come up with reasons not to meet for coffee. But after a while, for reasons still mysterious, I feel guilty. Patricia hasn’t really done anything wrong. And she keeps trying. So I run out of excuses, and there we are, stirring the pretty milk foam flower from our lattes. Maddeningly, we play Facebook Scrabble (she beats me incessantly and mercilessly with words like “quoin” and “byzant” and “paiks”; some of my friends are convinced she cheats) so I actually have almost daily “contact” with her. And I just can’t think of a way, which isn’t impossibly rude, to cut her loose. Am I being too nice? (Or, considering this piece, too mean? Do I subconsciously find something entertaining in how irritating she is?)
How do you end a friendship that’s no longer satisfying or never was really meaningful enough to matter? Patricia and I aren’t going to have some emotional blow up (we’re frankly not close enough for that) which kills this “friendship” for good. And to be honest, I loathe confrontation. (That’s not…surprising by now, is it?) So do I just suck it up, get what I can out of it (the Scrabble, if I’m being brutally honest), and see her once a year? That’s basically the way I’ve been playing it (though we live within two miles of each other). But honestly, it feels like a real failure of character on my part. If I were a better person, I’d have the integrity to only surround myself with people I really love and cherish. Why am I needy enough, as an adult, to be this passive? Why do I let other people steer the relationship? Do I stay friends with anyone, as long as they seem to like me, they really like me? Why am I the Sally Field of this piece? And is someone being annoying enough of a reason to never see them again? How, exactly, do you say that? “Um, here’s the thing; I know we’ve known each other for years. You’re perfectly nice, in your own way. I bear you no ill will. But you bug the ever living shit out of me. M’kay? Bye!”
Let me know your thoughts. Apparently, I won’t tell you if I think they’re impossibly stupid. As long as you seem to like me.
Photo Credits: Jing Qu, Archie Comics, D. Sharon Pruitt
