Bad Behavior

Connection

SUSAN HAD NOT been in Manhattan for five years, and she had been looking forward to this visit as a gorgeous wallow in sentimentality and the mild pain of déjà vu. The first three days had been just that. She had gone on long walks, visited with old friends and sat in cafés she’d once frequented as a thin, long-haired girl, lonely and worrying over tea. She had wandered through these days desultorily, enjoying the odd mix of memories and emotions that playfully showed their shadows and vanished again.

She had been walking on Bleecker toward Lafayette when a tiny, youthful bag lady entered her vision. She was standing still in the middle of the sidewalk, one hand out, the other daintily holding a small plastic garbage bag as though it were a pocketbook, begging from everyone and looking at no one. Her torn sweater, ragged skirt and wool socks were drably color-coordinated; her small head was tilted at an odd birdlike angle that was an unintentional caricature of childlike curiosity. Her clearly once-beautiful face was as still as her body; her full lips, potentially so expressive, were held fixed and tight. Her stillness amidst the march of New Yorkers made her look lost and groundless, but there was an intensity about her, and a feeling of heat, as though she were exuding some sticky substance from her pores. The quick feeling of panic in Susan’s stomach made her turn and walk the other way before she had a mental reaction; when she figured out why she was upset, she felt even worse. The bag lady looked exactly like Leisha, her best friend many years ago. Her face, posture, even the style of her rags recalled Leisha.

Susan turned a corner and stopped against a wall, her heart beating miserably. She remembered an article or a talk show or something where a smug somebody discussed the problem of chance meetings with old friends who were not as successful as you, and how you could avoid rubbing it in. She thought: This could not be Leisha. She had not seen or spoken to Leisha since their unhappy falling-out six years ago. The last time Susan had heard from her was when she received an invitation to Leisha’s wedding (she was marrying an attorney at a country club), which Susan had scornfully thrown in the trash. Surely even Leisha couldn’t have gone from being a well-off wife to a bag lady in six years. And even if she had, she had a middle-class family ready (and alert for just this purpose) to sweep her into its bosom. Still, anything was possible, and, as Leisha herself had constantly pointed out, she was very unstable. She was unskilled except as a waitress, and Susan had always worried about what would happen to her once she lost her beauty.

Turning the corner wasn’t simply a selfish desire to avoid unpleasantness; Susan could imagine the pain that Leisha would feel if she was recognized, and it made her cringe. But she would have to get her off the street, buy her a meal, get in touch with her family and so on. She acknowledged and then stifled the idea that her old friend might be too disturbed to remember her, and was appalled to suddenly identify a part of herself that was satisfied, even pleased, at the thought of Leisha the bag lady. This part of her wanted to help Leisha, but only out of duty and the pleasure of condescension; their friendship had ended angrily. Susan dropped her head and covered her face with her hands, raising it to the gawking gaze of a passing teenager.

She stepped into the sidewalk march again, and the bag lady was gone. No, there she was, standing against the wall. Susan walked right up to her and started to speak, then realized that the woman wasn’t Leisha. The stranger looked at her with mild, glassy eyes (hazel, not dark brown) and put out her hand. Relieved but disconcerted, Susan groped through her purse, found five dollars and pressed it into the pinched little hand. The woman put it away without looking at it and said, “Jesus loves you.”

Susan walked back to her friend’s apartment via Eighth Street, becoming depressed as she was reminded of expeditions with Leisha for shoes. Leisha had been part of an amorphous body of memories provoked by this visit to Manhattan, but now she was the lens through which all the other memories were seen, Susan cursed her impressionability and tried to think of something else.

Susan was thirty-five years old, and Leisha thirty-four. When they were friends, Susan was an aspiring writer and Leisha an actress. Whenever she had a positive image of Leisha — a rarity during these last six years — she saw them together in Leisha’s apartment drinking tea, drinking wine, snorting coke, something, and talking about their careers. Leisha had loved the word “career.” “I think it’s going to happen for you really first,” she’d say. “Like boom, your career’s just going to skyrocket — I mean it.”

It hadn’t. Susan had spent most of her New York years typing, proofreading or coat-checking, selling an article maybe twice a year. Little by little she had given up trying to make it as a writer and had taken an entry-level position with a journal that she didn’t think much of. Her editorial career didn’t exactly skyrocket, but it puttered along nicely. In Chicago, where she lived now, she edited a pretentious TV magazine and occasionally wrote film reviews for a local entertainment guide that paid almost nothing but gave her a chance to pontificate about aesthetics. When she thought about the magazine, she despised it and considered herself a failure; when she didn’t think about it, she would catch herself enjoying the work and decide that it was where she belonged.

“And what do you think will happen with my career?” Leisha would ask, pulling back her shoulders and revealing her long, alert neck. Susan had answered her cautiously and it had been just as well. Leisha had taken the same acting course repeatedly for three years until the teacher told her she couldn’t take it anymore. She’d had one showcase, a string of auditions and then spent the next few years wringing her hands, seeing therapists and going into debt on her charge cards.

Susan passed the Eighth Street Theater and noted the long-haired boys in black pants hanging around the entrance in a communal slouch. She remembered when she and Leisha would stand outside the St. Marks Bar and Grill in the summer wearing black Capri pants and white lipstick. She snapped her tongue against the roof of her mouth, making the classic junior-high-schooler’s noise of contempt for her own sentimentality, then remembered that sentiment was what her visit to New York was all about.

She walked up Greenwich Avenue, scanning the Korean fruit stands that she had always liked so much, the tiny hardware stores selling toylike, largely superfluous wares, the cafés with tense outdoor patios and waiters racing to classical music with prim, neurotic steps. It was almost nauseatingly rich compared to clean, terse Chicago. She admired the swaggering young women in their sweaters and leather jackets and the aloof-faced men with arrogant hip-twitching gaits. She imagined Leisha walking with her in a tweed jacket and short black boots, a tiny spike-haired girl with an odd beeline walk and an intent, condensed quality illuminating her angular face.

They had met when they were college students in Ann Arbor. Both had been involved in brief affairs with the same man, who unfortunately turned out to be an uninteresting swine, something that took each of them an unduly long time to realize. Leisha had been the first; he had met Susan only a month after they broke up. She’d become aware of Leisha at a party given by his roommate, Leisha’s then-current lover. Susan had been standing against a wall in the dark, drinking vodka from a plastic cup and watching this theatrical little creature flap drunkenly around a clearly more sober partner on the dance floor, all elbows, jerking hips and senseless knee-bending dips. Her partner suddenly hoisted her up and solemnly circled the room, holding her aloft over his head like a sacrifice as she squeaked, “Give me a break, Eliot, pulease!” Susan disliked her immediately. She thought: I’m a much better dancer, and, putting her drink on the windowsill, went to demonstrate it. (Much later she learned that Leisha hadn’t thought much of her dancing either. “It was like, okay, what does a girl do when she dances? She rotates her hips and sticks out her breasts a lot and undulates.”)

Susan was aware of her intermittently after that — at parties, coffee shops, movies or walking at a distance with her stiff-hipped, mobile-necked poodle walk. She would hear Leisha’s name mentioned in gossip, usually in a tone of amused tolerance and in the context of some blighted romance, with the word “crazy” figuring prominently. Then Susan became friendly with a girl named Alex, who was, coincidentally, sharing a house with Leisha and another girl. Alex didn’t like Leisha either; she and Susan loved to talk about how trivial and fake she was.

But this talk began to have an unexpected effect. As they disparaged and analyzed Leisha, a strange affection for her began to manifest itself. They started to say things like, “Well, she’s an asshole, but you have to admit she has a good heart.” When Susan saw her on the street, she regarded her as a character in a movie, a mysterious figure who might or might not reveal herself. Her reputed excesses and romantic fiascoes began to appeal to Susan. Her overblown gestures seemed like the gaudy plumage of something too refined and frail to appear unadorned. Besides, morbid, serious Susan, who would brood with a bespectacled roommate for hours over tea and toast when a romance collapsed, could not help but feel a kind of admiration for this person who ran around town chattering about the most embarrassing and painful situations as though she were discussing a musical comedy. It was vulgar, but there was a bravado to it that Susan began to sentimentalize against her will. (In fact, she did discover later that Leisha was very fragile, and that she was usually reacting to a nasty scene that some boy or other had already made public before she ever opened her mouth, that her hysterical tattling was thus a form of self-defense.)

This burgeoning interest in her finally found expression when Leisha got pregnant — for the third time, said Alex. She was in bed with the flu and morning sickness when Alex and Susan went to visit her. She was sitting up in her dishevelled bed in an old blue velveteen robe, surrounded by fashion magazines and sodas, her brown eyes lively and alert. She looked at Susan with discomforting but flattering intensity. Susan sat on the bed. “I heard you were sick. I thought I’d come to see how you were doing.”

They talked about leather gloves, high heels and their favorite writers. It was the first time that Susan had ever really heard Leisha’s voice — the quick, low-pitched voice affected by a certain type of teenage sex star in the fifties and picked up again by bouffant-haired singers in the seventies, only in Leisha it had an intelligent edge that was not ironic but somehow plain and comforting, as if, honey, she’d been there and back, and she knew how important it was just to sit and have a drink and a good talk — which now seemed like a ridiculous affectation in a twenty-one-year-old college student. Susan realized that almost anything you talked about with this girl would seem important. And it appeared that Leisha was having a similar reaction to her. It was, as Leisha said later, the time they fell in love.

After Leisha had her third abortion, they began spending time together. They met ritualistically for brunch at the Dialtone Café on Sundays so they could discuss whatever had happened the night before, or rant about whatever they’d been obsessed with the previous week.

“The thing that drives me nuts about it is that Elena — well, she’s just a twat. She really is.” Leisha was talking about a party they’d been to, during which a recent ex of hers had disappeared into the bedroom with a South American. “He thinks she’s so exotic because she’s twenty-six and she’s been married and she’s from South America, but I’ve seen her and she’s nothing special. She’s just passive and quiet and looks totally ordinary. He probably thinks she’s got a lot going for her because she’s a law student and I’m not directed yet. But I know I’m as interesting as she is and when I figure out what I want to do … I don’t know.” She picked up her fork, put it down, pulled at the back of her hair and wrapped her arms around her shoulders in the straightjacket position that she assumed when she was upset.

Susan could actually remember her response: “I’m so sick and tired of hearing the words ‘directed’ and ‘career,’ I could scream.”

“But you do want a career, don’t you?”

“No. I want to work at Dunkin’ Donuts when I get out of school. I want to get fat. Or be addicted to heroin. I want to be a disaster.”

“Why? Oh, you’re joking. But I know what you mean. I’m sick of these closed-minded career people too. It’s just that I’m getting tired of feeling like a stupid … well, a stupid cunt. I want to do something with my talent. I know I’ve got talent.”

Susan ate her toast and stared at her, loving her, almost gloating over her. She loved her tiny fingers, her hot face, her bright nervous energy, her pathetic assertion that she had talent. That she talked like the worst stereotype of the girliest girl imaginable only enhanced her appeal. Susan could not explain this perverse love to herself, but there it was. Perhaps it was so strong because she had almost no other female friends in college; most of her emotional energy had been spent on men — she’d had fewer affairs than Leisha but spent twice the time brooding over them. Maybe the extremities and obviousness of a cartoon girl were all that she could handle in another woman. It was probably for this reason that Leisha chose to be a cartoon girl, she thought sadly.

The curious thing was, Leisha had loved Susan too, at least initially, as another kind of caricature. Susan had been surprised to hear that for months she’d been a source of jealousy and speculation, that Leisha had been deeply puzzled by this solemn, self-contained and (to Leisha) weirdly silent girl. Besides, Susan had quite a reputation in Ann Arbor herself, thanks to their mutual boyfriend. “She’s nothing like she looks,” he’d say to anyone who’d listen. “She’s kinky as hell.” Then he’d generously explain how and in what ways, somehow managing to leave his kinkiness out.

“You remind me of black stiletto heels,” Leisha had said. “I used to picture you all in black, in stretch pants and spike-heeled shoes.”

“Oh, brother,” said Susan. But she was flattered.

The apartment Susan was staying in belonged to an old friend named Bobby, who was in Europe for the month and hadn’t bothered to arrange a sublet for so short a time. It was located in the Village only a few blocks from the apartment she had lived in for most of her time in Manhattan. It was much larger than her old apartment, and brighter.

Her apartment in Chicago was even larger than Bobby’s. It had high ceilings and large windows; it was fashionably decorated with soft colors and spare-limbed furnishings. It was kept clean by a weekly maid. She had attractive kitchen accessories in matching colors. She remembered Leisha visiting her tiny Manhattan studio and laughing at her, incredulous that after four months Susan’s utensils were still limited to two forks, a knife and a spoon.

She went into Bobby’s bedroom and looked at herself in the long mirror, a plump woman wandering calmly toward middle age, standing with one arm wrapped around her waist and a drink in her hand. She had never thought she would be plump or calm. Ten years ago, even six years ago, she never gained weight, no matter how much she ate. Her sudden plumpness was such a novelty that she enjoyed it rather than fighting it, as did most women her age. “You’ve finally come into your real … look,” her mother said approvingly. “You’re not a skinny kid anymore.” This late maternal acceptance had pleased her to such an extent that she found it somewhat sad; just a few years earlier she would’ve rejected it as the words of a woman glad to see the last of an unreasonable reminder of youth and insouciance in the form of her unusually slender daughter.

Her life in New York had been erratic and unconnected. She had lived hand to mouth most of the time, working a series of menial jobs that made her feel isolated and unseen, yet strangely safe. She ate dinners of rice and beans or boxes of Chinese takeout food on the floor. She stayed up until seven or eight in the morning working on her manuscripts, and then slept all day. She went to Harlem to interview voodoo practitioners. She went to nightclubs and after-hours bars, standing on the periphery of scene after scene with Leisha or some other, less central girlfriend. She took long walks late at night, especially in winter, loving the sound of her own muted footfalls, the slush-clogged city noises, and the sight of the bundled, shuffling drunks staggering home, looking up in surprise to see a young woman walking alone at 4:00 A.M. The desolation and cruelty of the city winter horrified and fascinated her. She was astonished by the contrasting layers of existence sitting so closely atop one another, and the desperate survival of bag people and misfits wedged into the comfortless air pockets and crawl spaces between layers. During her first year in the city she gave spare change to anyone who asked her. Eventually she gave money only if she happened to have some in her hand when she was asked.

Her relationships with men at that time were disturbing; she had conversation after conversation with Leisha, agonizing over why she always wound up with these terrible people. She remembered them all in an embarrassing blur: the pretty, delicate drug addict, the masochistic Chinese boy, the pretentious Italian journalist, the married professor, the pompous law student, the half-crazy club owner who almost strangled her one night with his belt. The guy she met and screwed in the rest room of some tiny East Village bar, the one who later involved her in an exhausting ménage à trois with his Italian girlfriend. Leisha had violently (and primly, Susan thought) disapproved of that one. Strangely enough, after fleeing what she contemptuously labeled “conventional” and “suburban” for anything “unconventional” she could safely lay her hands on, Leisha had performed an indignant and sudden about-face, calling the bohemia she’d adopted “pretentious” and “fake.” When Susan didn’t follow, Leisha had said things like “It’s just horribly painful to even be around you when you’re involved in this adolescent, self-destructive garbage.”

It was too bad Leisha couldn’t see her now, with her steady job, her matching housewares, her kind and gentle boyfriend. It was also annoying to know that Leisha would come to some happy conclusion about her based on the current trappings of her life (“How wonderful it is that Susan has become so stable”) and then compare her favorably with the younger Susan. Susan examined her clearly lined face as she stood before the mirror. There had been changes in her during the last six years, and she thought most of them were good. But she was still, for better or worse, the same woman who had drunkenly screwed a stranger in the reeking can of a tacky bar and then run out into a cab, smiling as she pressed her phone number into his hand.

She sighed and went into the “living area,” leaning against an exposed brick wall to look out a curtainless window. It seemed as though her friendship with Leisha had never been what she would now call a friendship at all, but a complex system of reassurance and support for self-involved fantasies that they had propped up between them and reflected back and forth. Susan now identified her early fascination with Leisha as a vicarious erotic connection with the ex-lover they had both slept with. She did not fantasize about Leisha and this man together, but she had been oddly gratified to experience secondhand the dynamic between him and this throaty-voiced little bad girl, and to reflect this dynamic back to Leisha, making it more of a drama by becoming another character in the story. Leisha had done the same, clearly enjoying her two-way link with their lover and the mysterious, contrary, perverse woman he had described to her, this tackily glamorous icon of a dirty-magazine woman who was also her reliable friend Susan. During the first year of their friendship they discussed and described him, pro and con, right down to the blond pinkness, the raised, strangely exposed quality of his genitals, and they were both greatly amused to discover that the sight of them talking and giggling together unnerved him.

She had dinner that night with her old friend Barbara. They went to a restaurant on Bleecker Street that served neat little dinners to predictably soothing music. Barbara was a jeweler who had never quite been able to become a big name in the industry, but whose work was a persistent presence in fashion magazines and department stores. She had recently separated from her husband of twelve years, a sculptor whom Susan had known. Barbara didn’t seem so much upset by the separation as appalled.

“I can’t say that suddenly we didn’t know each other, or anything like that, because I actually know John very well. It isn’t even that we don’t love each other anymore, because I do love John, even if it’s more of a sisterly love at this point. People say that it gets that way after you’ve been married awhile.” She cut her salmon steak into pieces with polite, relaxed moves, as though pausing in a discussion of art or film.

“Well, what is it, do you think?” asked Susan.

Barbara sat back. “I’m not sure how to describe it. It was like everything that supported the relationship was coming from the outside. Judging by all the signs, we were a perfectly successful couple and John was an ideal husband for me — rich, blond, tall, sensitive, ad nauseam. But even worse, it seemed as if our most intimate conversations were based on what we were supposed to be saying, and what we were supposed to be. Nothing seemed to come directly from us. Do you know what I mean? I sound like a hippie, I know.”

“No, I know what you mean.”

“I don’t know. I didn’t see it that way at the time. He was just driving me crazy and I guess I was driving him crazy too.”

“I don’t know anymore how much a relationship can be based on what comes from the inside,” said Susan. “With Steve and me, it’s all based on us, and it’s very genuine and very sweet but sometimes it seems as if we’re involved in a fantasy that has nothing to do with the real world. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that, I don’t know, but it can begin to feel solipsistic.” She remembered what her father had said to her during an argument when she was fifteen years old: “You want to suck people dry, you expect them to pour out their guts to you and you to them over and over and over until you know everything, and it just doesn’t work that way. Relationships are built from ‘Hi, how are you doing?’ and ‘I’m fine.’” He had said this last word like a stake was being driven through his heart.

“Do you remember Leisha?”

“I sure do. The nutty one with the musician boyfriend. Why?”

“I thought I saw her on the street today. There was this bag lady who looked just like her.”

“Oh, my God.”

“I didn’t realize that it wasn’t her until I was an inch from her face.”

“What did you do?”

“Gave her five dollars.”

She lay on Bobby’s futon and thought of Steve. He was a quiet man whom she considered brilliant. He worked in the public relations department of a magazine neither one respected. They saw each other almost every night, they had keys to each other’s apartment. They had private jokes and several cute nicknames apiece. Sometimes it seemed as if they spoke a language foreign to other people, that there was something closeted and defeated in their closeness. But they made each other happy. There was, in magazine-speak, a “real connection.” She opened her eyes. “Connection” was a vague word when applied to humans. What did it mean? She remembered a man she’d had a short affair with before she’d met Steve. He was a sweet, practical person who never read books, rarely went out, and didn’t seem to care strongly about anything except a few close friends and a martial art he practiced with fanatic zeal. They had nothing in common. In most ways he bored her. Yet when she touched him she felt a sensitivity in his body, a sense of receptivity that she rarely encountered in men. When he held her against his chest, she felt secure and protected in a way that had nothing to do with his muscular body. She felt that they were nourishing each other in some important, invisible way. But they could barely hold a conversation.

At times she had thought that this was the only kind of connection you could have with people — intense, inexplicable and ultimately incomplete. During the months that her friendship with Leisha was beginning to wane, she would think, Well, I can’t talk to her and I don’t respect her, but she has a beauty that can perhaps only be appreciated on a nonintellectual level. Like a sudden flame of piercing movement in an unexceptional dancer, or the grace and spirit of an animal.

She remembered them walking down St. Marks together doing an acting-class exercise. One person would say something and the other person would repeat it, with slight changes in words or expression. Susan thought it was pointless, but Leisha loved the exercise.

“I love to walk down the street and look at people,” began Leisha.

“You love to walk down the street looking at people.”

“People look at me when I walk down the street.”

“You like it when people look at you.”

“You like it when people look at you.”

“I’m scared when people look at me.”

“I’m scared when people look at me.”

“But you like it.”

“Do you like it?”

“It makes me nervous and I pull my earrings.”

“You pull your earrings all the time.”

“I hate to pull my earrings.”

“I want to pet your earrings.”

“You want to pet my earrings.”

It was like nursery rhymes; they were two cute girls walking down the street talking harmless nonsense, while all around them the world was in full operation. Desperate vendors displayed miserable items arranged on dirty blankets — T-shirts, ratty sweaters and vinyl belts, wrinkled old magazines, faded books and records. Garbage flapped in the streets and humans walked up and down the sidewalks, on their way to perform hundreds of actions in a remarkably orderly fashion. The sun was evenly warm and pleasant and it seemed as though this was all that anyone could expect out of life. Susan felt an ache of futile tenderness for Leisha and she impulsively reached out and stroked her four serial earrings the way she would pet a cat.

It was sometime during her second year in New York that their conversations began to seem like frantic attempts to wring each other for support that neither could give. Leisha became involved with an abusive rock musician. She called Susan, it seemed, only when she was hysterical in a phone booth after a fight with him. When he left her for a singer, Leisha went to Bellevue, was discharged, slit her wrists, went home to Michigan and returned in a state of quasi-hysteria that remained constant for the rest of the time Susan knew her. She immediately moved back in with the musician, who had been dumped by the singer. She was dropped by most of her Michigan friends, who said that she was too self-indulgent and theatrical to cope with. Susan didn’t know if what they said was true or not, but it seemed unkind. She wanted to remain loyal to Leisha, but she was floundering so thoroughly herself that when they talked they seemed like drowning people clinging to each other for life.

The first time the musician walked out, Leisha called her at five in the morning, sobbing and pleading with her to come over. Susan got out of bed and took a cab down to Eighth Street, where ghostly men and women were tipping over garbage cans to better examine the contents. She sat in Leisha’s grandly rumpled, granule-ridden bed, holding her tight in her arms, as though the pressure of her grip should equal the intensity of Leisha’s trembling. “I feel so empty, Susan, I feel so rotten and empty inside.” Susan kissed her forehead and stroked her hair and held her until her arms were sore, but she did not know what to say. Eventually, Leisha’s trembling subsided and she slept, and Susan sat completely still, watching some fat, hideous pigeons stump around on a neighbor’s filthy window ledge while Leisha’s skin became stuck to hers and her limbs went gradually numb. Why did Leisha feel empty? What did empty mean? What should exist in Leisha that didn’t? Was it a quality that other people had? She tried to imagine what Leisha looked like inside and pictured a set of dull-colored wires, some dead, others short-circuited and flickering in the dark, discharging a profusion of heat and bright color that sparked wildly, blew fuses and went dead.

There were more of these calls and Susan began to resent them, particularly because when Susan needed someone to talk to Leisha would not return her calls. Leisha was too upset, it seemed, to do anything but fight with the musician, but she liked having Susan available as a witness. Susan felt like an accessory, especially when Leisha invited her to a dinner party that ended with Leisha and the musician flinging pasta and otherwise slugging it out while a plump drummer tried vainly to separate them. Eventually he left her for the singer again and Leisha began seeing someone else. Sometimes the three of them would go out, but the evenings would invariably conclude with Leisha drunk in a phone booth, screaming at the musician’s answering machine while her new boyfriend stared into space.

The really annoying thing about this was that just as Susan was getting ready to tell Leisha that she was feeling used, Leisha told her that she felt Susan only called her when she was depressed. Susan was flabbergasted and outraged, and so was Leisha when Susan told her why. They didn’t speak for almost a year. It was apparently during this time that Leisha finally got rid of the musician and began dating the lawyer.

The friendship resumed when they ran into each other on the street and found that they couldn’t stop talking. They began having lunch. Leisha grimaced and shrugged her shoulders and said “I don’t know” a lot when she talked about her acting. She said that she wanted to have a baby. When they walked down Eighth Street she would say, “Oh, don’t you hate these people with their standard-issue green hair standing straight up?”

“No,” said Susan.

“But it is so passé, I mean, can’t they do anything else?”

“I think teenagers need these things.”

Susan refrained from pointing out that barely a year ago Leisha’s hair also had stood straight up, but soon they argued about other things.

“We have to talk,” said Susan, and they met in a cappuccino bar frantically decorated with annoying statuettes and candelabras.

“I feel drained by you,” said Leisha. “Every time I’m around you I feel like you’re hanging on to me, that there’s something you want and I don’t know what it is, and I can’t stand it.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. All I want from you is friendship. If you feel drained by that, there’s nothing I can do.”

“Maybe some of this is old stuff, because you seem more positive now than you did before, but I still feel the effects of those phone conversations we used to have when you would call me and say that you felt like dying.”

“Wait a minute. Don’t you remember when you’d call me at six A.M. and tell me that I had to come over right away or you were going to kill yourself?”

“You used to tell me that you didn’t see how people could stand to live. Any people.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, this is stupid. Who was the one who started all those depressing conversations, Leisha? You did, after—” She started to say “you went into Bellevue” and couldn’t.

“I’m not saying it was all your fault, and don’t try to tell me it was all mine, because it wasn’t. It was this strange dynamic that somehow got started between us. We got turned into these sob sisters and I don’t know how it happened. I don’t know what happened to us, Susan. It was never like that in Ann Arbor.” Leisha’s round eyes were full of an unreadable emotion.

“I didn’t mind giving you support,” said Susan. “But it was always the same thing, always Eddie and you. It didn’t matter what I said, you never listened to me anyway. And if you didn’t want to talk about Eddie, you never called just to talk to me. You wouldn’t even return my calls. You even got Eddie to tell me you weren’t home when you were. He told me.”

“Oh, Susan, I was sick then, don’t you understand? I slit my wrists, remember? I was a sick, worthless piece of shit.” Her voice faltered; Susan recognized the prelude to tears.

“You weren’t a piece of shit,” mumbled Susan.

“And anyway, I feel like you’re doing the same thing to me now.”

“What?”

“All we ever talk about is you. You don’t seem interested in my relationship with Jonathan or my wedding or my therapy. Those are the things I’m doing in my life. I’m trying very hard to get well and to have a good relationship and get married.” Her voice became a tremulous squeak, tears appeared, her face crumpled delicately and she pecked at it with her napkin.

Susan scowled at her cold cup of chamomile tea. She couldn’t bring herself to say that she despised Jonathan, that she thought their relationship was a farce, that she hated traditional weddings and that she thought Leisha used therapy the same way she had used Eddie — to distract herself from her own life. A wave of classical music surged through the room, loudly enough to knock over a table, aggressively soothing the eaters of cannoli and cute cakes.

“And the way you talk about Stef all the time—”

Stef was the man Susan had met in a public rest room. “I don’t talk about Stef all the time.”

“It seems like you do. And what you say is so horrible, even if you talk about him a little it’s a lot.”

How could we have pretended to be friends for so long, Susan thought.

“Especially when you talk about him and that Italian girl, it’s so awful it makes me hurt inside. Don’t you see how they’re using you?”

“They’re not using me,” Susan said stiffly.

“Oh no, what about the time they tried to shoot you up in the bathroom at Area, or wherever the fuck you were?”

“They didn’t shoot me up.”

“They tried.”

“Not very hard, obviously. Anyway, it doesn’t matter if they’re using me, I don’t care. I’m doing this thing with them because I want to. I can take care of myself, and I’m not trying to make you a part of it.”

“But when you tell me stories like that nipple-piercing thing, you are making me part of it. Why do you put yourself in positions where you have to take care of yourself?”

They stared at each other with what seemed painfully close to hate. A raw feeling traveled up Susan’s throat. She was sweating.

Leisha spoke slowly and deliberately. “I think you’re involved with them because you don’t have anything else to do. I think you think it’s interesting.” This last word was sarcastic enough for two or three words. “And it’s not interesting at all. It is sordid and disgusting.” Her nostrils dilated.

“How dare you?” said Susan. “How dare you judge me?”

Susan opened her eyes and contemplated the maniacal outline of a feathered hat hanging on Bobby’s coatrack. In retrospect she had to admit that part of her anger had come from the element of truth in Leisha’s last accusation. But Stef and Anna had been interesting to her at the time; and anyway, how dare she indeed?

Susan turned over in bed. Their fantasies had changed, their tastes in props had diverged, and neither one could satisfy the other’s needs any longer. Since what they were inside didn’t matter, they separated. Susan had ended a chapter in her life, and doubtless it had felt the same to Leisha, who probably saw their friendship as a symbol of bad living and delusion. Leisha had sent Susan the engraved wedding invitation a week after their discussion. (“The honor of your presence is requested at the marriage of …”) Susan had said “How beautiful” to her empty apartment and summarily shredded the card.

Susan turned over again. Still, she wished she knew where Leisha was. She would like to talk to her. She remembered the time they had gone dancing one summer. They had danced for hours in a hot, damp place, until they collapsed in each other’s arms, Leisha’s small, sweating, palpitating chest pressed against hers. She remembered having the almost tangible sensation that they were creatures with delicate invisible feelers waving between them, sending tenderness and warmth from one to the other.

She sat up and turned on the bedside light. She could reach Leisha. She probably still had friends in Manhattan who knew where she was. After a minute’s thought, she remembered the last names of two of Leisha’s friends. Dialing information, she discovered that one of them no longer lived in the city and the other was unlisted. She called the restaurant where Leisha had worked; it was still open, but no one remembered her. The only possibility was the man they had both dated; the last Susan had heard, he was living in New York, but they hadn’t spoken for years and it was after two o’clock in the morning. She had to pace the room for fifteen minutes before she developed the courage to call. When he finally answered he was too surprised to be nasty, until she asked him if he knew where Leisha was.

“I really don’t know. I heard that they moved to Los Angeles a couple of years ago, but that might’ve been a rumor. You called me at two-thirty in the morning to ask about Leisha?”

She hung up rather gratified that she’d slighted and irritated him. She paced a bit more and then settled down in the living area, where she stared into space. She remembered a story she’d read once in which the main character, an older woman who was pining to see a boy she’d likely never see again, found accidental solace in late-night TV, where she saw an actor who looked like an older version of her young heartthrob. Leisha had, after all, wanted to be an actress at one point. Susan found the remote-control unit and flicked on the TV. It was on the pornographic cable station. No one there resembled Leisha. Neither did anyone on Get Smart, Love That Bob or the Japanese horror movie. The last channel she tried revealed a nameless old Italian thing about international espionage, which had a murky, kinky sexual flavor that held her interest for several minutes. And, in fact, there was a dark, intense woman who was playing an intellectual slut. If Leisha had ever become an actress, this was probably the kind of role she’d get, but Susan doubted she had the tenacity to land roles even like this one.

She flicked off the TV. It embarrassed her to hold such a low opinion of Leisha’s ability, but it wasn’t a reflection of contempt. Leisha was simply meant to feel and be, not to do. But what an arrogant thing to close off Leisha’s possibilities like that. After all, no one who knew Susan six years before could have predicted exactly where she would wind up, and some people had been surprised.

She put her head back on the couch and closed her eyes. She imagined Leisha as an actress in a sci-fi movie, playing a tiny queen in silver lamé. She saw her as a mother in a blue-and-white checked blouse, kneeling on the floor to play a game with her child. She saw her as an aging hipster in a bar, her eyes made up in flames of black and silver, complaining about her current relationship to whoever would listen. She saw her as a bag lady. Then the images peeled away and she saw her standing in empty space, wearing the tight Capri pants she used to wear, a dreamy, half-smiling girl, her intensity momentarily muted by some inner reflection. She looked at this girl and realized that, with all the falseness and silliness between them, she had cared for her, and been cared for in return. She wanted to talk to her, and tomorrow she would try again. She sat in the living area for almost an hour thinking about what she might say to her, and what Leisha might say back.