The Friend

by Sigrid Nunez

From The Oxford Book of Death:

  Nabokov’s syllogism. Other men die; but I am not another; therefore I’ll not die.

  “The one experience I shall never describe,” I said to Vita yesterday, journaled Virginia Woolf. Fifteen years before the undescribable took place.

  • • •

  In writing workshops, many stories begin with someone getting up in the morning. Much less often does a story end with someone going to bed. More likely a story will end with a death. In fact, many student stories either begin or end at a funeral. And when a student wants to convey a character’s stream of thoughts, they almost always set the character in motion. They put him or her into some kind of transportation, usually a car or a plane. As if they could only imagine someone thinking if that person is also moving through space.

  Q. Why did you send this character on a trip to India when that has nothing to do with the rest of the story?

  A. I wanted to show him worrying a lot.

  • • •

  Last words. So this is how the story ends, my friend in the AIDS hospice said. Eyes wide with wonder, like a child’s.

  PART ELEVEN

  How should the story end? For some time now I have imagined it ending like this.

  A woman alone in her apartment one morning, getting ready to go out. One of those early spring days with equal periods of sun and clouds. Chance of a shower, late. The woman has been awake since first light.

  What time is it now?

  Eight o’clock.

  What did the woman do between the time she woke up and eight?

  For about half an hour she lay in bed trying to fall back to sleep.

  Does the woman suffer from that particular kind of insomnia: frequent waking, inability to stay asleep?

  Yes.

  Is there some little trick she tries when this happens to get back to sleep?

  Counting backward from a thousand. Naming, in alphabetical order, all the states. This morning, though, neither worked.

  So she got up. And then—?

  Made coffee. One espresso brewed in a single-cup moka pot that she acquired only recently and that she has found she likes better than the French press she’d been using before and that about a month ago she accidentally broke. In general, she enjoys this morning ritual. Brewing and drinking the coffee while listening to the news on the radio.

  What news did the woman hear?

  In fact, this morning she is preoccupied and hasn’t really been listening.

  Did she eat anything?

  Half a banana sliced into a cup of plain yogurt mixed with some raisins and walnuts.

  What did she do after breakfast?

  Checked email. Responded to one message, an inquiry from the college bookstore about some books she’d ordered for a course. Confirmed a dentist appointment. Took a shower and began to get dressed. But she keeps wavering because of the kind of day it is. Will a sweater be too warm? Will her raincoat be too light? Should she take an umbrella? What about a hat? Gloves?

  Where is the woman off to this morning?

  To visit an old friend who’s been in the hospital.

  What does she finally decide to wear?

  Jeans and a cardigan over a turtleneck. Her hooded raincoat.

  How does the woman get to her friend’s house?

  She takes the subway from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

  Does she stop anywhere on the way?

  At a florist near the train station in Manhattan, where she buys some daffodils.

  And when she gets off at her stop, does she go straight to her friend’s house?

  Yes. See her now approaching his brownstone.

  Does the friend she is visiting also live alone?

  No, he lives with his wife. Who isn’t home this morning because she’s at work. But there’s a dog. Hear him bark at the sound of the doorbell. The door opens and the man steps out, greeting the woman with a hug. The man is dressed—by coincidence—just as she is under her raincoat: blue jeans, black turtleneck, gray cardigan. They hold each other tightly for a few moments as the dog, a miniature dachshund, barks and leaps at them.

  Now they are settled in the living room, drinking the tea the man has made for them. A small plate holding a few shortbread cookies remains untouched. The daffodils have been placed in a small crystal vase in a sunny spot on the windowsill where they glow with a neon brightness that (the woman can’t help thinking) makes them look fake. One of the stems has bent, and the flower hangs down as if ashamed, or shy of the spotlight.

  Now it can be seen that the man has the paleness and gauntness of a convalescent. His voice is strained, as if it’s an effort to speak above a whisper. There is stress in the air as of something about to burst or break. The dog senses this and for that reason is unable to relax, though he lies very still in his wicker basket. The man speaks, and the dog, hearing his name, beats his tail.

  “I wanted to thank you again for taking care of Jip.”

  “Oh, he was no trouble,” says the woman. “I liked having him. It was like having a furry bit of you there.”

  “Ha,” goes the man, and the woman says, “I was just glad to be able to help.”

  “And you were a big help,” the man assures her. “Jip’s a good boy, but he’s spoiled and needs a lot of attention. And my poor wife had enough to deal with.” A pause. The man lowers his voice. “By the way, I meant to ask, what exactly did she tell you?”

  “That she was on a business trip and her flight was delayed because of a storm in Denver. That she tried calling you from the airport but there was no answer. Then the flight was canceled and she took a cab home, and when she got there she saw the note to the cleaning lady warning her not to come in. And to call 911.”

  The man does not look at the woman as she speaks. He stares at the daffodils on the windowsill, squinting as if their brightness hurts his eyes. When she stops speaking he waits, as if expecting more, and when there is no more he says, “If a student put that in a story I’d say, That’s too easy.”

  At that moment a cloud blots the sun and the room darkens. The woman has a surge of panic, alarmed at the stinging threat of tears.

  “I had it all worked out,” the man says. “I’d taken Jip to the kennel. The cleaning lady was scheduled to come the next morning.”

  “But how are you now?” asks the woman a bit too loudly, making the dog startle. “How do you feel?”

  “Disgraced.”

  The woman starts to protest but the man cuts her off. “It’s true. I feel humiliated. But that’s a common response.”

  I know, the woman doesn’t say. I’ve been reading up on suicide.

  “But that’s not all I feel,” the man says, lifting his chin. “Turns out I’m nothing special. I’m like most failed suicides: happy to have survived.”

  At a loss the woman says, “Well, that’s good to hear!”

  “I keep wondering, though, why I don’t feel more,” the man goes on. “A lot of the time I feel hazy, or numb, like it all happened fifty years ago—or never even at all. But that’s partly the medication.”

  The cloud has moved on and the light pours in again.

  “You must be glad to be home,” says the woman.

  The man pauses. “I’m certainly glad to be out of the hospital. It felt more like months than a couple of weeks. There really isn’t a whole lot to do on a psych ward. What made it even worse was that I couldn’t read, my concentration was shot, I’d forget each sentence as soon as I got to the end of it. And because I didn’t want people to know what happened, I couldn’t exactly have visitors. By the way, you’re still the only one outside the family who knows the whole story. For now I want to keep it that way.”

  The woman nods.

  “Not that it was a totally negative experience,” he adds. “And I kept reminding myself: When somet
hing bad happens to a writer, no matter how terrible, there’s always a silver lining.”

  “Oh?” says the woman, sitting up straight. “Does that mean you’re going to write about it?”

  “That’s certainly possible.”

  “As fiction, or memoir?”

  “I have no idea. It’s too soon. I’d need to get some distance from it.”

  “And are you writing now? Have you been able to write?”

  “Well, in fact, that was something I wanted to tell you about. We had a little workshop on the ward! Part of group therapy. There was this woman, a recreational therapist as they’re called. She had us write poetry instead of prose—because we didn’t have lots of time, she said, but no doubt also for other reasons. And she had everyone read what they wrote out loud. No analysis, no criticism. Just sharing, you know. Everyone wrote the most appalling stuff and everyone else gushed over it. All this dreadful poetry that wasn’t poetry—you can imagine the sort of thing. Voices trembling and cracking, some taking forever to get through it. And everyone was completely in earnest, you could tell how much it meant to them to have a chance to spill their guts and see that they could move people to tears. And oh, were there ever tears. And every poem got a round of applause. It was very strange. In all my years of teaching I’ve never come close to the kind of emotion I felt in that room. It was very moving, very strange.”

  “It’s hard for me even to imagine you in that situation.”

  “Believe me, the irony was not lost on me. At first I thought I didn’t want any part of it, just like I didn’t want any part of the coloring books they kept encouraging us to use—not just to pass the time but because coloring is supposed to reduce anxiety. But that was problematic because they all knew I was a writer and a writing teacher and I would’ve looked like the most awful snob. And as I say, life on the ward was so boring. I couldn’t read, and I refused to go on any outings—I was terrified of running into some person I knew and having to explain what I was doing at the movies or a museum with a nurse and a gaggle of nutcases. If nothing else, the workshop was a distraction, a way to kill some time. And then, to be completely honest, there was the therapist. She wasn’t gorgeous but she was young and she was kind of hot, and you know me. I wanted her attention. I might have been a mental patient, and old enough to be her gramps, but still I wanted to impress her. Really, I wanted to fuck her—not that there was any hope of that. Anyway, I hadn’t written poetry since I was in college, and there was something quite wonderful about turning back to it after all those years. I’ll remember that round of applause till I die. And the big surprise is, I’ve kept it up.”

  “You’re writing poetry?” The woman feels another surge of panic as she thinks maybe she’ll be asked to read some of this poetry. Or, worse, sit and listen to him read it to her.

  “Oh, nothing that I’d show anyone at this point,” the man says. “But right now it’s easier for me to be working on short things. The idea of writing anything longer frankly scares the hell out of me. Going back to the book I was working on—like a dog to its vomit! But enough about me. What have you been up to?”

  She tells the man about a new course she’s teaching. Life and Story. Fiction as autobiography, autobiography as fiction. Writers like Proust, Isherwood, Duras, Knausgaard.

  “Good luck getting the little fuckers to read Proust! And what about the piece you were working on? Did you finish?”

  “No, I dropped it.”

  “Oh no! Why?”

  The woman shrugs. “It didn’t work out. Partly because I kept feeling guilty, like I was using the people I was writing about. I can’t explain exactly why I felt that way, but I did. And you know how it is with guilt, it’s like smoke and fire: you don’t feel it for nothing.”

  “But that’s nonsense,” says the man. “Everything is material for the writer, it just depends on how you use it. Would I have encouraged you to write something I thought was wrong?”

  “No. But the truth is that when you suggested that I write about those women you weren’t thinking about them but about me. It was something that would be good for me. I would get published, I would get read, I would get paid.”

  “Yes, that’s what writers do, it’s called journalism. But you can’t tell me there weren’t other good reasons.”

  “Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. Because the truth is, I couldn’t do it. I mean literally. I would write something like ‘Oksana is a twenty-two-year-old woman with a pale round face, high cheekbones, and blond-streaked hair who speaks with a light Russian accent.’ Then I would read what I wrote and feel nauseated. And I could not go on. The words would not come. I’d done all this research. I had all these notes. And I’d sit there and ask myself, what was I hoping to do with all this evidence of violence and cruelty, this catalog of atrocious details? Organize it into some engaging narrative? And if I did that, if I managed to find the precise words and the right tone—if I got the full true filthy horror of it down, in good clean prose—what would it mean? At the very least, I thought, writing should help me, the writer, understand better, but I knew this was wishful thinking. Writing wasn’t going to bring me any closer to understanding the kind of evil I was confronted with. And it wasn’t going to do anything for the victims—that sad fact was also inescapable. The only thing I could say for sure, and which I believe is true in general for projects like this, was that the important person involved is always the writer. And I started to feel there was something not just selfish but cruel—cold-blooded, if you will—about what I was doing. I hated the forensic attitude that seems to be a requirement of the genre.”

  “Then maybe it would work better if you tried turning it into fiction,” the man says.

  The woman flinches. “Even worse. Making vivid, interesting characters out of those girls and women? Mythologizing and novelizing their suffering? No.”

  The man gives an exaggerated sigh. “I know this argument, and I don’t buy it. If everyone felt the way you do, the world would remain ignorant about things it has every good reason to know. Writers have to bear witness, it’s their vocation. Some would say the writer has no higher calling than to bear witness to injustice and suffering.”

  “I’ve been thinking a lot about this since Svetlana Alexievich won the Nobel,” says the woman. “The world is full of victims, says Alexievich. Ordinary people who experience horrific events but who are never heard and who end up forgotten. Her goal as a writer, she says, is to give these people words. But she doesn’t believe it can be done through fiction. We’re not living in the world of Chekhov anymore, she says, and fiction just isn’t very good at getting at our reality. We need documentary fiction, stories cut from ordinary, individual life. No invention. No authorial point of view. She calls her books novels in voices. I’ve also heard them called evidence novels. Most of her narrators are women. She thinks women make better narrators because they examine their lives and feelings in ways men usually don’t, more intensely and—why are you smiling?”

  “I was just thinking about the argument that men should stop writing altogether.”

  “Alexievich doesn’t say that. But she does argue that if you want to get at the depths of human experience and emotions you need to let women speak.”

  “But silence the writer herself.”

  “Right. The goal is to have those who actually live the suffering also do the witnessing, with the writer’s role restricted to empowering them.”

  “It’s become entrenched, hasn’t it. This idea that what writers do is essentially shameful and that we’re all somehow suspect characters. When I was teaching I noticed that, each year, my students’ opinion of writers seemed to have sunk a little lower. But what does it mean when people who want to be writers see writers in such a negative light? Can you imagine a dance student feeling that way about the New York City Ballet? Or young athletes despising Olympic champions?”

  “No.
But dancers and athletes aren’t seen as privileged, and writers are. To become a professional writer in our society you have to be privileged to begin with, and the feeling is that privileged people shouldn’t be writing anymore—not unless they can find a way not to write about themselves, because that only furthers the agenda of white supremacy and the patriarchy. You scoff, but you can’t deny that writing is an elitist, egotistic activity. You do it to get attention and to advance yourself in the world, you don’t do it to make the world a more just place. Of course there’s going to be some shame attached to it.”

  “I like what Martin Amis said: deploring egotism in novelists is like deploring violence in boxers. There was a time when everyone understood this. And there was a time when young writers believed that writing was a vocation—like being a nun or a priest, as Edna O’Brien said. Remember?”

  “Yes, as I also remember Elizabeth Bishop saying there’s nothing more embarrassing than being a poet. The problem of self-loathing isn’t new. What’s new is the idea that it’s the people with the history of greatest injustice who have the greatest right to be heard, and that the time has come for the arts not just to make room for them but to be dominated by them.”

  “It’s kind of a double bind, though, isn’t it. The privileged shouldn’t write about themselves, because that furthers the agenda of the imperialist white patriarchy. But they also shouldn’t write about other groups, because that would be cultural appropriation.”

  “That’s why I find Alexievich so interesting. If you’re going to put an oppressed group to literary use, you need to find a way to let them speak and keep yourself out of it. The reason people now cringe at the idea that you have to be gifted in order to write is that it leaves too many voices out. Alexievich makes it possible for people to be heard, to get their stories told, whether they can write beautiful sentences or not. Another suggestion is that if you write about an oppressed group you should donate your fee to some cause that helps them.”

  “Which defeats the purpose if you need to make a living. In fact, under those rules, only the rich could afford to write whatever they wanted! Well, for me, the only serious question is whether Alexievich’s brand of nonfiction fiction produces work that’s as good as fiction fiction. I myself am inclined to agree with people like Doris Lessing, who thought imagination does the better job of getting at the truth. And I don’t buy this idea that fiction is no longer up to portraying reality. I’d say the problem lies elsewhere. That was another thing I noticed about the students: how self-righteous they’ve become, how intolerant they are of any weakness or flaw in a writer’s character. And I’m not talking about blatant racism or misogyny. I’m talking about any tiny sign of insensitivity or bias, any proof of psychological trouble, neurosis, narcissism, obsessiveness, bad habits—any eccentricity. If a writer didn’t come across as the kind of person they’d want to have for a friend, which invariably meant someone progressive and clean-living, fuck ’em. I once had an entire class agree that it didn’t matter how great a writer Nabokov was, a man like that—a snob and a pervert, as they saw him—shouldn’t be on anyone’s reading list. A novelist, like any good citizen, has to conform, and the idea that a person could write exactly what they wanted regardless of anyone else’s opinion was unthinkable to them. Of course literature can’t do its job in a culture like that. It upsets me how writing has become so politicized, but my students are more than okay with this. In fact, some of them want to be writers precisely because of this. And if you object to any of it, if you try talking to them about, say, art for art’s sake, they cover their ears, they accuse you of profsplaining. That’s why I’ve decided not to go back to teaching. Not to be too self-pitying, but when one is so at odds with the culture and its themes of the moment, what’s the point.”