Conversations with Friends

Nick and I had started to exchange emails after the night he missed our performance. In the message he’d promised to send about my work, he described a particular image as ‘beautiful’. It was probably true to say that I had found Nick’s performance in the play ‘beautiful’, though I wouldn’t have written that in an email. Then again his performance was related to the physicality of his existence in a way that a poem, typed in a standard font and forwarded on by someone else, was not. At a certain level of abstraction, anyone could have written the poem, but that didn’t feel true either. It seemed as though what he was really saying was: there’s something beautiful about the way you think and feel, or the way that you experience the world is beautiful in some way. This remark returned to me repeatedly for days after the email arrived. I smiled involuntarily when I thought of it, like I was remembering a private joke.

There’s no need to be secretive, said Valerie. We’re all friends here. Nick suffers from depression, I’m afraid.
Yes, I said. I know.
Melissa looked up at me and I ignored her. Valerie looked at the floral arrangement and distractedly moved one blossom slightly to the left.
You’re a friend of his, are you, Frances? Valerie said.
I thought we were all friends here, I said.
Finally she looked at me. She was wearing some artistic brown resin jewellery and had handsome rings on her fingers.
Well, I know he wouldn’t mind me asking after his health, said Valerie.
Then maybe you can ask after it when he’s actually in the room, I said.

They thought you were miscarrying a pregnancy, she said. That’s kind of intense, isn’t it?
Is it? I don’t know, I didn’t know what to feel about it.
She sighed audibly into the receiver. I wanted to explain that I didn’t know how much I was allowed to feel about it, or how much of what I felt at the time I was still allowed to feel in retrospect. I panicked, I wanted to tell her. I started thinking about the heat death of the universe again. I called Nick and then hung up on him. But these were all things I did because I thought something was happening to me which turned out not to happen. The idea of the baby, with all its huge emotional gravity and its potential for lasting grief, had disappeared into nothing. I had never been pregnant. It was impossible, maybe even offensive, to grieve a pregnancy that had never happened, even though the emotions I’d felt had still been real at the time that I felt them. In the past Bobbi had been receptive to my analyses of my own misery, but this time I couldn’t trust myself to deliver the argument without weeping into the phone.

I should have known it wouldn’t work out between us.
Didn’t we always know that? he said.
I paused for a second. Then I just said: I didn’t.
Well, but what does it mean for a relationship to ‘work out’? he said. It was never going to be something conventional.
I got up from the bench. It was too cold to sit outside. I wanted to be warm again. Lit from below, empty branches scratched at the sky.
I didn’t think it had to be, I said.
You know, you’re saying that, but you obviously weren’t happy that I loved someone else. It’s okay, it doesn’t make you a bad person.
But I loved someone else.
Yeah, I know, he said. But you didn’t want me to.
I wouldn’t have minded, if …
I tried to think of a way to finish this sentence without saying: if I were different, if I were the person I wanted to be.