“traditional” Japanese marriage you’d migrated from the complicated world into an elegantly calm piece of eighteenth-century screen art. I’m probably not the first person guilty of finding it convenient to imagine my friends’ lives are simpler than my own. It’s also possible I began this letter by speaking of A. in order to discredit myself as any sort of reasonable counsel, to put you in mind of my abhorrent track record (or maybe I’m just obsessed).
Let me be more honest. I don’t spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at Music and Art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you’re a digital wraith. When I try to think of your marriage, I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don’t mean to suggest anyone doesn’t find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.
Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, an eighth-grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being a year older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we’d never attained. I’ll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess’s appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she liked me , too.
Shortly after that, Bess Hersh saw through me. I hadn’t known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don’t work on girls in high school. What’s required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what gives a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You, you mastered those poses in short order—I’d wait until college.
Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Adam Reisner’s arm, and I felt that I’d only alerted the hipper Adam to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she’d mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy, slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I’d glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.
Funny, though, I don’t remember speaking to her more than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her, chortling about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big, empty sky. I recall talking this way with you, too, about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we’d write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in Mad magazine, Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.
When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it
Let me be more honest. I don’t spend all that much time imagining Japan. However much you and I speak of our contemporary lives, I picture you as I left you: eighteen years old. You and I were inseparable for the first three years at Music and Art, then distant in our senior year, then you vanished. Now you’re a digital wraith. When I try to think of your marriage, I instead tangle, helplessly, in the unexamined questions surrounding our first, lost friendship. I don’t mean to suggest anyone doesn’t find a muddle when they recall that year, launching from twelfth grade to the unknown. But it is usual to have you lucidly before me, daring me, by your good faith in these recent letters, to understand.
Do you remember my obsession with Bess Hersh? Do you remember how you played the go-between? That was junior year, just before the breach between us. Bess was a freshman, an eighth-grader. You and I were giddy dorks in rapidly enlarging bodies, hoping that being a year older could stand in, with the younger girls, for the cool we’d never attained. I’ll never forget the look on your face when you found me where I waited, at the little park beside the school, and said that Bess’s appointed friend, her “second,” had confirmed that she liked me , too.
Shortly after that, Bess Hersh saw through me. I hadn’t known what to do with this coup except bungle it when she and I had a moment alone, bungle it with my self-conscious tittering, my staring, my grin. I tried boy jokes on her, Steve Martin routines, and those don’t work on girls in high school. What’s required then is some stammering James Dean, with shy eyes cast to pavement. Those shy eyes are what gives a girl as young as that breathing room, I think. You, you mastered those poses in short order—I’d wait until college.
Soon, agonizingly soon, Bess was on Adam Reisner’s arm, and I felt that I’d only alerted the hipper Adam to her radiant presence among the new freshmen. But I still cling to that moment when I knew she’d mistaken me for cool, before I opened my mouth, while you were still ferrying messages between us so that she could project what she wished into the outline of me. I still picture her, too, as some sort of teenage sexual ideal, lost forever: her leggy, slouching stride, the cinch of worn jeans over that impossible curve from her narrow waist to the scallop of her hips, her slightly too big nose and fawny eyes. I wonder what kind of woman she grew into, whether I’d glance at her now. Once she gave me boners that nearly caused me to faint. Just typing her name is erotic to me still.
Funny, though, I don’t remember speaking to her more than once or twice. I remember speaking with you about her, chortling about her, I should say, and scheming, and pining, and once, when we were safely alone in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, bellowing her name to the big, empty sky. I recall talking this way with you, too, about Liz Kessel, Margaret Anodyne, and others. I recall the dopey, sexed-up love lyrics we’d write together, never to show to the girls. You and I were just clever enough, and schooled enough in Mad magazine, Woody Allen, Talking Heads, Frank Zappa, and Devo, to ironize our sprung lusts, to find the chaos of our new-yearning hearts bitterly funny.
When, six months on, you first began combing your hair differently, and when you began listening to New Romantic bands, and when you began dating Tu-Lin, I was disenchanted with you, M. Violently disenchanted, it
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