MANNERS JUST FRIENDS

I HAVE come to a time in my life when platonic friendships mean as much to me as romances, and sometimes more. They sweeten my bachelor existence. How much drabber and colder my life would be without the supporting friendships of two or three clever, tender and sarcastic women.

By “platonic” I mean merely that we do not and never have slept together; there is nothing otherwise in the relationship, so far as I can tell, that pertains to the philosophy of Platonism. Now, why should it be so important to observe this one restriction? We are reaching an epoch, some might argue, when sex has become a simple courtesy, a way of consoling a friend on a lonely night, no more significant than watching the sun come up together used to be. I don’t believe it. Once the deed is done, everything changes. Possessiveness, fury, jealousy, absolutism, scorn, inability to tolerate the other’s weaknesses – all the glories of romantic love rush in. On the other hand, I have no right to speak authoritatively, since I have never put any of my platonic friendships to the test.

It is said of the poet, O’Hara, that he could move in and out of this kind of intimacy easily, take a friend to bed one night out of sheer closeness and drunken good spirits, then return the thing to a cordial camaraderie the next, and that several dozens of people, when he died regarded him as their exclusive best friend. Were my platonic friends and I to begin shacking up, I have the feeling that the balance we have so tolerantly and religiously built up would suffer a disastrous strain. And we care too much about what we have to risk losing it. (It might be that nothing terrible would happen. That would be terrible in its own way.)

Besides, the presence of formal constraints in friendships and other relationships can become a source of rich understanding. There is an aesthetic pleasure to be enjoyed in observing forms, like the rules for a sonnet or fugue.

I can appreciate now that growing up with two beautiful, bossy, doting and clever sisters must have been good practice for the present stage of my life, which seems to be dominated by platonics. However, it took a while for the lessons to cohere. I can’t remember having any good female friends when I was in my 20s and married. It was only when I turned 30 that the change began. Jung speaks of the stage when a man stops regarding everyone of the opposite sex as his potential enemy or conquest, and begins to make friends with the Woman (the woman in himself, perhaps). I rather think the hostility never goes away completely. But a platonic friendship at least offers the chance, or becomes the arena, for intimacy and charity to be played out between a woman and a man – free from the intense unrealistic expectations and disappointments of romances. It may even be a dry run for more serene marital companionships to be undertaken later on.

There are no rules for the makings of a good platonic friendship, but it helps for one or both parties to be less than totally physically attracted to the other. A little plainness is good. I am not saying the friend need be ugly – in fact, it would be hard to have a friend whom one did not find, on some level, pretty or handsome. But all the same, it creates a problem if the person is so delectable that you keep wanting to pounce on her. That is sure to lead to pouting resentments and forced distancing. Your best bet is to find someone who is certainly attractive in his or her own way, but not your carnal type. Then you can appreciate the genre of looks without having to be uncomfortably aroused by it, and can rest easy escorting the friend in public, knowing that he or she is present able and attractive to others and thereby no discredit to you.

Escort duty is, in fact, one of the most solid uses to which platonic friends put each other.

My friend Emily (Emmy) is the ideal platonic woman friend. Since I knew her first, in the old days, as the wife of an old friend of mine (they are since divorced), the taboo was already set in place; and the fact that she is thinner than the type of woman I go for – and a little plain, God bless her – drove it in further still. There was perhaps a moment or two when it might have turned out differently, when we first started seeing each other after her divorce and we would sit in her car talking before she went upstairs. I even fancied that she was attracted to me, but both of us were too tactful to make a first move, or too engrossed in something else that seemed to be developing between us; in the end we left it that way. We still talk about spending our old age together, having camper trucks side by side in Florida. That is one thing platonic friends always promise each other: becoming “a number” in old age. Even then, we will not be able to live together. We will have to have separate campers because Emily is so finicky, and I, of course, am so used to living alone. One can already see the outlines of a strong-willed old woman, a preview of coming attractions, emerging in Emmy from time to time. She has become an encyclopedia of lore about health, food and safety, and does everything the right way and in a certain picky order not to be denied.

A typical Emmy remark is: “I just have to go by the bank and do Y and then we can do X and Z.” Sweetly, but with chin set, and no mistake about it: It will be Y, X and Z in that order. I long ago gave up trying to argue with Emmy about plans and surrendered to her full arrangements. It is such a comfortably passive holiday for me to go somewhere with her, to put myself in the hands of someone who has precise notions for doing everything, like a Mon-tessori kindergarten teacher.



EVERY YEAR we plan an excursion out of New York City, usually during the dog days of August. The first four tentative dates are canceled because Emmy is taking a course and needs to study harder (Emmy is always taking a course), or because she wants to train to run in a marathon, or because her boyfriend is coming in for a few days, or simply because she won’t be able to start until the afternoon and she doesn’t want to drive when it’s dark. I never listen to the excuses anymore. I just say, “All right.” She’s the one with the car. And there is no possibility of getting her to change her mind, once she develops resistance to a plan.

Nevertheless, excursion day does come. I phone her in the morning to ascertain that the weather meets with her standards and is deserving of a day in the country. I bring my swimming trunks, tennis racket, baseball bat – everything – just in case. “Just in case,” says Emmy, “we decide to go to Lake Momo instead of Lake Domo. Lake Momo has clay tennis courts, but I don’t like the water there.” “Whatever you say, Emmy. I am at your service.”

When we get in the car, I am nervous for three seconds. Emmy and 1 have had only one big fight. This was about my slamming the door of her Volkswagen. She claims I do it too hard and that it will damage the door frame; the subtext of this fight is that in her view I sometimes act without thinking, without first considering all the consequences – an impetuous physical recklessness for which she forgives me, generally. As I forgive her for her thoroughness.

We are ready to take off. But not yet. It is not so easy to leave the city with Emmy. She is having some friends over for dinner seven hours from now, and she will need to stop off at three stores near the George Washington Bridge. Why not just go to the supermarket? Because one has good bread and not good fruit, and she wants to make a fruit compote, and she might have to buy some fish because she’s afraid that the stores will be closed by the time we get back; on the other hand, the fish might spoil in the car. It is pointless to argue that we will probably be back hours before the stores close. “No, they close early in the summer,” she says authoritatively. The result is that we make the three shopping stops and drive back to her house to drop off everything in the refrigerator. But then we are free for the rest of the day.

Once out of Manhattan, Emily relaxes. She cracks jokes, observes funny road details, listens, draws me out – a perfect companion. Our favorite conversation is exploring the bad manners and blindnesses of our mutual friends. We are particularly merciless toward married couples. (Why not? Being single, have we not suffered most at their insensitive hands?) I am the more malicious-tongued of the two of us; but Emmy is the more dark-visioned and pessimistic. Perhaps because she places so little hope in people changing for the better. She usually counsels – when another friend and I are having difficulties – that I go around the problem.

My instinct is always to confront directly; hers is to wait out the storm. Emmy is as adept at what we have come to call, in a private joke, Sneak Therapy. One day we set down some of the rules for Sneak Therapy:

1. Make them think they have theupper hand.

2. Don’t trust them, but don’t letthem know it.

3. Lay low; wait them out. Letthem provoke the rift. (Especiallygood when you want to break up witha lover.)

4. Don’t bother to be straightforward and honest, it’s wasted on themanyway. They’ll just misinterpret andtwist it to their purposes.

5. Promise the hosts anything, butsneak out when they’re not looking.

6. When you get a lousy waiter,keep smiling and don’t leave a tip.

I often fear Emmy is practicing a little Sneak Therapy on me. Since she understands me so well, though, I suppose it is a small price to pay.

EMMY AND I are scampering over rocks, climbing some gradual hiking trail that she found in her topographical maps. We stumble onto a natural swimming hole at the base of a rushing stream. She becomes like a child, all curiosity and independence and wide eyes. I find myself sitting on a rock with the waterfall rushing under me, the roaring current tickling my bottom, making me laugh uncontrollably. Emmy smiles at me, waves, then goes around a bend exploring. I love being with her because she leaves me alone; she doesn’t force me to appreciate anything.

ONCE A MONTH or so, I go uptown to Emmy’s house for dinner. If it has been snowing she will say, as soon as she opens the door, “Take off your shoes. I don’t want the street salt tracked in, it’s toxic”- but in so gentle a voice that one does not mind complying. “Why don’t you come into the kitchen, while I fix dinner.” We always start off in the kitchen, a tight squeeze of table, cooking range and refrigerator, with a clothesline right outside the window. Emmy gets me a beer (she orders some excellent dark German brand by the case), and I sit at her table watching her cook. “Are you very hungry?” she asks. “Medium,” I say, already sleepy and quiet in her kitchen. Here it is all right to relax and say nothing. I do not have to sing for my supper, as I feel I do at other households.

While she is cooking, we gossip about the people we have seen recently; about all that is strange and uncanny left over from social situations. Forty minutes later, after parents, friends and relatives have been swept off the stage, the section called “Love Problems” begins. Now it is time to examine from every angle the calculus of indecisions, non-commitments, disappointments, attractions and chagrins. “It’s hopeless,” Emmy will say. “What shall I do? Put my foot down?” She will laugh, knowing how little this has changed things in the past. I give my cagey male advice. “Men respond to direct commands.” Or, if it is my turn to complain, she will shake her head at the capriciousness of the woman in question. She has no patience with these silly women. One of Emmy’s most endearing qualities is that she is not forever pestering me to be more sympathetic to the other person’s position. She knows that I will be sympathetic in time; meanwhile, I want to complain. Nothing is more obnoxious than a friend who is forever taking the side of one’s antagonist/love and identifying with her as the victim, or else always nudging one’s vexed account toward the pole of greater compassion. Emmy waits until I have delivered myself of the whole sorry narrative, with all my favorite details and harangues, before inserting her own cautious wisdom. Even then, it is phrased in terms of how I might avoid further pain to myself.

The joke in platonic friendships, especially if both friends are single, is that each complains at great length of the thirst for an enduring love relationship, of the maldistribution and scarcity of decent partners of the opposite sex, while in a sense the solution to the problem is ever present. The opposite sex is pummeled in toto, with an exception being made for the listener, whose understanding personality is appealed to, flattered and made into an ideal. “But you’re not a typical woman.” “But you’re not a typical man!” And by the way, where do my platonic women friends dredge up their crew of male losers? They always seem to get involved with men who are near-catatonic, sleep a lot, won’t see them more than once a month, won’t go anywhere with them in public, won’t leave the house, are at a low point in their careers, are defeated, alcoholic, saddled with child-support payments, never buy presents, are violent, withdrawn, compulsively unfaithful, cute and sexy. I think there must be a club where all these sleepy narcissistic men hang out. I can’t – I refuse to believe that this is what the male sex has come to. More likely, this is what the female sex is still attracted to. Another platonic friend, the glamorous A., seems to fall in love with nothing but these slugs with drooping bedroom eyelids. According to her, she is turned on by men who operate out of a libidinous energy (and who are often lost and disoriented in the working world), as opposed to men who operate “from the ego,” like me. So much the worse for her, for me, for the human race. It seems to me that some sort of prejudice is at work that tends to segregate the clever and ambitious people from one another as sex partners.

None of these speculations ever arrives at a very satisfying or profound conclusion, but it is fun to turn them over. The psychology of male/female attraction forms an inevitable subject of interest to platonic friends.

BY NOW we have moved to the dining room, Emmy and I; I have set the table and brought in the Pyrex serving pots and salad bowl, enjoying all the charming duties of couple domesticity without the ennui and risk. We sit at a marble-topped table in front of a window filled with Emmy’s hanging plants, and Emmy brings in the Parmesan cheese and wine, and I pretend we are in a good, cheap, cozy working-class restaurant in Italy. The sounds of teen-age Hispanic kids playing ball in the street, the elevated train rolling past the tenements with black tar roofs, with the Bronx projects in the distance, under a rosy dust of late-lingering sunset, are all conducive to good appetite. Sometimes there is even a light rain to listen to. Emily is a fantastic cook, and they used to be even more wonderful, these meals on the marble top, before she became a vegetarian. It is unfortunate. I can’t help thinking that something has gone out of our banquets. Now I must make do with second helpings of lentils and groats and summer squash and African yams. I must admit, she prepares them all deliciously; if only they might prove to be the surroundings for something more.

After the meal, a quiet time follows. We retreat to the couch in her living room. Emmy stares at her cat. “Gato! Come here, silly.” Gato wanders over to the couch and jumps up on the woolen blanket between us and starts actively licking my armpits. “Enough, Gato.” I try to pull my arm away.

Then there are little cups of espresso with lemon rind.

Afterward, Emmy may show me her latest series of photographs. Or, if there is no new work to show, she shows me some bargains she has picked up in a thrift shop. If I am lucky I get a fashion show while she tries on her new schmattes: a Chinese turquoise brocade padded robe, a navy pea jacket, some sweaters and scarves.

Then a yawn, the signal that she is getting tired and I will have to leave soon. She has very precise notions about her bedtime. Though she is a person of immense,enviable stamina, when Emmy’s energyleaves her, it leaves her all in one second.She explains apologetically that she has toget up early tomorrow to drive to her job,and she is no good if she tries to fall asleeppast 11 o’clock. Yawning, she has becomeexactly like her cat; I lift her face with hershort red hair up to my lips and give her agood-night kiss, first on the nose ormouth, then on the top of her head, myplatonic friend.