"Just Friends"

“So, are you excited about your upcoming birthday?” Jerry asks me. I’m turning 35 in two weeks, a fact I’m not thrilled about.

“I am a woman in my mid-thirties, what do you think?”

He laughs. “But at least you’re going to be with friends.”

“Yeah, that’s true.”

“And you’re healthy.”

“Yup – true, too.”

“And you’ve got a job. Some people don’t have one.”

“All true statements.”

“So, things are good, right?”

Jerry has a need to alter everything I say so that it means what he wants it to mean; another fact I’m not thrilled about. It’s because he wants me to be happy. I want to be happy too, but the only way I know to be happy is to let myself be unhappy when I’m unhappy.

“You’re right, Jerry. Things are good.”

“And Allie?”

“Yes?”

“In case I haven’t told you this today, I think you’re wonderful.”

“That’s nice. Thank you.”

Lately, I really want to tell him to fuck off. I don’t because I care about him and don’t want to hurt his feelings. Besides, I haven’t been able to tell a man to fuck off ever since my father died six years ago. Losing my father was hard to do. Just thinking about telling a man to fuck off felt like I was losing him all over again, so I stopped doing it.

Jerry and I’ve been friends for four months now. At least, that’s what I keep trying to tell him – that we’re just friends.

We met last fall at a dinner party that Sharon, a mutual friend of ours, had thrown. From the moment he and I met, we couldn’t stop talking to one another. We just had that kind of chemistry. I wasn’t physically attracted to him, though. He was 20 years older than me, was 5’8” tall, wore his thinning white hair à la Donald Trump, and had badly capped teeth – but he seemed grounded in a way that was easy and comfortable to be around. All in all, I liked him. Each time we’d get together, he and I would talk until we were kicked out of whatever place we were hanging out. Our conversations were all over the map. We talked about the meaning of life, heartbreak, and disappointments; we talked about schools, recreational drugs, and the stock market. It was great. A few weeks into it, though, I began to sense he was attracted to me and was steering our relationship in a romantic direction. It wasn’t something I wanted; I had just gotten out of a romantic relationship that had left me a little fetal on the side of my ex’s road, so getting into another relationship wasn’t a good idea to me. Besides, I only wanted to be friends. The next time we got together I told him this.

“Jerry, a relationship I was in ended recently and I’m not over it.”

“What happened?”

I shook my head. “Too long and too complicated a story.”

“So tell me anyway.”

I shook my head some more. He looked at me as if to say, talk. I shook my head again at him more vigorously.

“Allie!”

I rubbed my face before answering. “What’s there to tell, really? For a while, a man and I were in love until one day, he decided he wasn’t anymore.”

“Hmm… I’m sorry.”

I nodded and looked down. “Yeah, me too.”

“What’s his name?”

“Angus.”

“Angus?!”

I laughed a little. “Yeah, Angus.”

“That’s some name.”

I smiled and nodded.

“So …where are you in the process? I mean, how not over him are you?”

“…I’m uh …so not over it that I spend my Saturday mornings crying while I run around the track in Riverbank State Park.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah,” I laughed, “Oh. So listen, what I’m about to say is gonna sound sort of junior high school, but the truth is, I need a friend. I have lots of people I talk to and am friendly with, but I have only a handful of people I call my friend. For whatever reason, it feels like you might be someone it’s okay to call at 3am if I have a problem I need to talk through – not that I’m in the habit of calling anyone at 3am if I have a problem I need to talk through.”

He said my instincts were right. That he was someone I could call any day or night if I needed him, and that he also needed a friend. After all, he told me, he had just gotten out of a marriage, for crying out loud! The divorce papers had yet to be signed. I knew about all this. Sharon had filled me in on him when I called her the day after her dinner party to thank her for inviting me. That’s why I had figured, given Jerry’s recent breakup and my own, that we could commiserate with one another. Moreover, I was looking for a father/mentor type relationship (I was always looking for a father/mentor type relationship). Anyway, we agreed that we would “just be friends.”

On our first night hanging out after the “let’s just be friends” conversation he said, “I don’t want to be just friends. I want to be more than friends with you.” Jerry has a dark, misshapen, melanoma-like freckle on his left cheek. I was looking right at it when he said this to me.

“You and I are in different places in our lives. You’re settled and retired and I’m not – I’m building my life. Besides, you just got out of a marriage not even a month ago.”

“True, but I think I’m really over it. I gave it everything I had when I was in it so for the first time, I’m not obsessing and thinking about the relationship afterwards. I believe the whole thing is really complete for me.”

That struck me as a lie. “Um … Okay, that’s fair enough. But that’s not the case for me. I just got out of a relationship, and I’m still crying over it while jogging or riding the subways. I wouldn’t exactly call myself emotionally ready to be involved with someone, you know what I mean?”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. I understand. I’m just saying that I find you attractive and I want more than just a friendship with you. I care about you and want to get to know you better, is all.” He jutted his chin forward as he said this. When he did, his head caught a shaft of overhead track-lighting that cut harshly through his cotton-candy-comb-over-coif and reflected brightly off his scalp. It wasn’t his best look.

“Thank you, that’s very flattering – and getting to know me better is fine, but having more than a friendship is not a good idea.”

“Why? I love talking to you – I think you’re great, Allie. You’ve said to me that you love talking to me as well. What’s the problem?”

“Well… I …I …I might want a child at some point in my future. I can’t imagine that a child is something you would want at this stage in your life. Remember that I’m 34 years old. I have to be honest and tell you that I simply don’t think of you in terms of a romantic possibility, do you understand? I’m sorry, but I have to be pragmatic about matters of the heart nowadays.”

This was all true but really, I was playing the odds with our ages. The truth is, the idea of sleeping with him was revolting to me and I just couldn’t bring myself to jab him with that hard-edged truth.

“This is strange to be saying this to you so soon, but not having a child is the only regret I have in life. I do want a child.”

“Oh…” I shrugged and slowly shook my head. We sat for several moments in silence.

“Listen, I don’t want you to feel uncomfortable. If this whole thing makes you feel weird then forget about it. I just want you in my life – I don’t care how it is, okay? We’ll be friends.”

“Okay,” I said and let go of my breath. “Thank you for saying that. Really.” And we went on with our evening as though the subject was resolved.

To be honest, this wasn’t the first time I had found myself in one of these situations. For six years now, I’ve been in one May-December relationship after another. The ages of these men have ranged anywhere from fifteen to thirty-five years my senior. To make matters worse, they’ve all been skewed variations of my father who could at best be described as the imagined love child of Humbert Humbert and Tony Soprano. I knew I was looking for a father, but I didn’t think I was looking for my father. Unfortunately, he was all I kept attracting.

The next week, Jerry called me and told me he had informed Rachel, his ex-wife, that he was hanging out with me.

“Really – why?”

“New York is a small town. I didn’t want her to get the wrong impression if she were to accidentally bump into us one day.”

“Wrong impression of what? Jerry, we’re just friends.”

“I know, but if she were to see us, she wouldn’t know that. I just wanted to protect her from any misunderstanding or unnecessary hurt. I am a very honest person. Not telling her seemed like some sort of dishonesty on my part.”

From where I was standing, his telling a fifty-something-year-old woman he had recently separated from that he was becoming friends with a thirty-something-year-old woman seemed a lot to me like his trying to stick it to her, but what did I know?

“I’m curious, are you going to call her whenever you make any new friend? Like, if you become good friends with your butcher, are you going to call her to tell her that?”

“Allie, it’s not the same thing.”

“It is the same thing, but whatever. Listen, I don’t get this whole thing completely, but I’ve never been married, and obviously you two have your own way of communicating, so if this is something you needed to do for yourself, then fine.”

For the next few weeks, everything ran smoothly; we talked on the phone, went to brunch, and generally just filled each other in on our lives. It was beginning to feel like a good friendship, and I started to feel like I could relax. He even once asked for my advice on dating, which made me feel as though he wasn’t looking at me romantically anymore.

“I have a car, but last night, I didn’t feel like picking my date up in Brooklyn, so I told her I was going to take a subway to meet her. She got upset with me, and we ended up in a 15-minute argument about it. This was on a second date! Do you think I was being unreasonable to not want to pick her up by car?”

“Of course not. But it does make me wonder, are you really interested in her?”

“Now that you ask, no, not really. Why?”

I shrugged. “When we’re really interested in someone, we inconvenience ourselves for them. You didn’t want to be inconvenienced, so it sounds to me like you’re not really interested in her.”

He looked at me as though I was a wonder, like I was the Sphinx or something, and then smiled at me with his Chiclet gum-like capped teeth. I looked down, feeling a little uncomfortable. I noticed that his fingernails were freshly manicured. In the couple of months that I had known him, I couldn’t recall having ever seen him with manicured nails.

“Jerry, did you get a manicure?”

“Yes.”

“Since when do you get manicures?” I grabbed his hands to get a closer inspection.

“Since you said that you would never let a man touch you if they had ugly hands or fingernails.”

I dropped his hands.

“Allie, don’t get nervous. I just thought that if you feel that way, then most women probably do too.”

“Okay.” I changed the subject. I couldn’t tell if he was telling the truth or not. Besides, it felt easier to think he was telling the truth than to have another “let’s just be friends” conversation with him.

The following week, on the phone, he told me, “I really feel like hugging you sometimes.”

I laughed a little. “That’s good. Sometimes, I need someone to hug me.” We sat in silence.

“You’re not uncomfortable with what I said, are you?” he asked.

“About you wanting to hug me?”

“Yes.”

“No.” That was a lie. I just didn’t want to talk about it.

“Because I don’t mean anything sexual by that or anything.”

Now I felt really uncomfortable. “No, I know how you meant it.”

“Because you got quiet.”

“I was just uh …I don’t know, feeling myself.”

He laughed. “You were what?”

I laughed back. “I didn’t mean it that way. I meant I was just feeling myself be …awkward and …whatever. Just sort of giving myself the space to be.”

“Oh. …Well, do you want to talk about it?”

I sighed. “Not really… Besides, I have to cut this conversation short. I have a train to Long Island I have to catch. My friend just had a baby, and I’m going out to visit her.”

“Oh, okay…”

“Uh …maybe I’ll call you from the train, okay?”

“Okay.”

I didn’t call him. The next day, he called me.

“Allie, you told me you were going to call me yesterday, and then you didn’t.”

“Yeah, I know. I thought about calling you when I was on the train, but then, I don’t know, I just hate it when people talk on their cell phone as though they were in their living room. I didn’t want to do that, so I didn’t call you. And then I got home too late from my friend’s house to call, so –”

“Oh come on! We’re getting closer, and you got afraid. That’s why you didn’t call me back!”

“What? No – what are you talking about?”

“I told you yesterday that sometimes, I really want to hug you, and then suddenly you didn’t call me back!”

“…What?”

“You heard me.”

“Jerry, what the hell are you talking about?”

“You! You got afraid of me.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“Oh, come on! Are you trying to tell me that this was all just a coincidence?”

“Yes.”

“So, you’re telling me you didn’t get afraid when I said that to you?”

“…Listen …I always get a little freaked when people start getting close to me, but that’s not everything that was going on for me yesterday. I didn’t call you back because I didn’t call you back – that’s all. Now what is all this about? I mean, you’ve got a lot of intensity on this for it to be just about me.”

“Don’t give me your psycho-babble bullshit, okay, Allie? If not you, then who the hell else is all this about?”

I gritted my teeth. “Jerry, this is not psycho-babble bullshit. Your reaction is over the top. Yeah, I didn’t call you when I said I would, but that’s something that gets hammered out in a conversation, not this big upset you have going on about it. Now what the hell is going on?”

We sat in silence for a few minutes over the phone.

“…Okay, you’re right. I’m overreacting.”

“Ya think?”

“Yeah… Yeah …I think maybe my break-up with Rachel has affected me more than I’ve been willing to admit.”

“Hmm.”

“…I’m going to have to give all this some thought.”

“Yeah …Alright then.”

“Alright then.”

Jerry was overreacting, but he hadn’t gotten the idea that I was romantically interested in him out of nowhere.

I have a charm - the same one my father had. The same one Bill Clinton has: I know how to make someone feel safe, heard, and really understood.

Let me be more direct: If I see someone I find interesting, especially a man, especially an older man, within the next hour or so, you can bet that that man will volunteer up to me their most intimate, private selves. The kind of stuff they would never consider telling their priest or best friend. It’s partly because of how I behave; it’s unmistakably intimate. I touch them. I gaze at them. I uncross my legs and arms, open myself up, and thoroughly take them in. I surround them in a feeling of compassion and understanding so persuasive that it’s like we’re soul mates. Sort of. At least for a little while. And for that little while, no one else exists for me except that man. It’s a seduction. I make love to them without ever taking my clothing off. But it’s the emotional equivalent of a one-night stand. And it’s my twisted way of getting a father, any father out there, to love me.

I had given Jerry that kind of attention, and now he thought I was interested in him but playing hard to get. No matter how many times I said it, he refused to believe that I only wanted to be friends with him. I hadn’t seen this right off the bat, but whatever had happened to him in his marriage – or before his marriage – had turned him into someone who wouldn’t settle on “no” for an answer. Couple that with the fact that I was a confused woman with a daddy complex, who had difficulty telling a man to “fuck off”, and we had a problem.

After that conversation, things calmed down for a while. We went back to our routine of hanging out and talking every other day, filling each other in on our lives. But I kept feeling as though he was covertly trying to woo or screw me, and I kept getting swept along in the process.

He made plans with me to go out for dinner. I said yes with the internal understanding that I would somehow explain to him (again) that we could only be friends. That didn’t happen. Instead, and when I think about this, I want to throw myself off a bridge, I became Sybil. I got tipsy from one margarita and began to flirt with him. Then I started babbling about Angus. And then I started to cry about him. Jerry’s response to all this was great. He listened to me without saying a word – just sort of held me in his gaze and nodded here and there to let me know he understood where I was coming from. It had a soothing effect. When I had calmed down enough, I said:

“Jerry, I feel as though I’m defective goods. Lately, I’m convinced there’s something wrong with me.” I blew my nose. It made a sound like a foghorn. He laughed. It made me start crying again.

“Allie, you’re not defective goods. You’re great. And you’re going to be okay. I know it’s hard for you to see that now, but I promise you, you’re going to be okay.”

He reached across the table and took my hands in his. They felt warm and generous. It was the safest I’d ever felt with him. So, when he asked me if I wanted to go back to his place to hang out, I replied, “Yes.” It was when he brought me into his bedroom and invited me to sit down next to him on his bed that I became afraid.

“Jerry, I don’t want things to get physical between us.”

“Why?”

“Because I don’t know who I am right now and can’t be responsible for whatever sleeping together might mean for me.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means I’m ambivalent and don’t want to do anything.”

“Okay, but what does that mean?”

“It means I want to be friends – just friends.”

“Okay, but can we talk about it?”

“…Um …okay.”

We go around and around for 20 minutes about why I don’t want to be sexual with him. It’s basically the same thing over and over again: he asks me why, and I explain to him how ambivalent and fucked up I feel. If this is his idea of foreplay, it sucks. By the end of the dialogue, I feel so weirdly violated that all I want to do is coil up like an armadillo and never open up or out to him again. Had he just attacked me physically, the line he crossed would have been easier for me to read. This seemingly reasonable, quiet, 20-minute discussion over why I don’t want to sleep with him was something I was flat out emotionally ill-equipped to handle.

“Okay,” he finally says, “let’s just lie here, and I’ll hold you.”

I don’t want to, but say okay, anyway. We lie there for half an hour. When the caresses on my arm start moving surreptitiously towards my breast, I get up abruptly and tell him I have to leave.

“Why don’t you just sleep over?”

“Because I don’t sleep well with people.”

“Oh. Okay,” he says and looks disappointed.

On the way to his door, he stops, pulls me towards him, and kisses me. Surprised, I keep my eyes open and come eye to freckle with the dark, misshapen melanoma on his cheek. I feel like vomiting. I pull back sharply and say NO. He pulls me back towards him and says Okay – shhhhh, as though he were soothing an upset child. We stay like that for a few minutes until he takes me outside to get a cab. When a cab comes, he gives me $40 to pay for it, hugs me goodbye, and tells me he’ll call me tomorrow. On the way home in the cab, I try to cry but instead go completely numb.

The next day, he calls me early in the morning to talk about the night before.

“How are you about last night? Is there anything you want to talk about?”

The absolute last thing I want to do in that moment, or possibly for the rest of my lifetime, is talk about last night. In fact, if I could scrape the memory of it from both our minds with a jagged spoon, I would.

“No, I don’t need to talk about anything.”

“How are you feeling about it?”

“Um …fine. How about you?”

“I can’t stop thinking about how hot and beautiful you are.”

I cringe so big in response to what he says, I practically hit my face with my shoulders. “Hmm.”

“By the way, I have a surprise for you.”

“What?”

“Well, you know how you told me you really needed to get away for a little while?”

“Yeah?”

“Well, I’m going to Atlantic City next weekend! Why don’t you come with me?”

“I said I wanted to get away and be completely alone for a little while. Alone. As in, with no one, so that I can think.”

“But you’ll be alone the whole time we’re there! I’ll gamble during the day, and you and I can go out for dinner at night.”

“Uh …That’s not exactly me being alone. That’s me hanging out in some hotel room in Atlantic City, waiting for you to take me out to dinner. It’s not exactly what I had in mind. Besides, I hate Atlantic City.”

“Why do you have to be so negative?”

“…I’m not being negative; I’m just trying to tell you that it’s not what I want.”

“Why can’t you just say that, then?”

“Okay, it’s not what I want.”

“Fine. I still think you should think about it, though.”

I say nothing to him in response.

The next day, I bring up how uncomfortable I was at his apartment, and more specifically about how violated I felt during that 20-minute discussion over why I didn’t want to sleep with him. He doesn’t get it. We have conversation after conversation about it all week long, where he asks me over and over again about what I mean. I answer him, over and over. It never gets through.

Finally, it came down to this. Two days before my 35^th birthday (which was, coincidentally, his birthday), he decided to take me out to celebrate at a restaurant downtown by the South Street Seaport – a restaurant that was close to his apartment. Given his behavior, I had to assume his plan was to try to get me back to it after dinner. My plan, which ran contrary to his, was to terminate our relationship during dinner. This time, I absolutely wasn’t going to drink, talk about Angus, or vacillate. My best friend, Sandy, asked me why I was even bothering with the whole thing in the first place.

“Why do you need to see him or talk to him about it? As far as I’m concerned, the guy’s a freak. Just throw him to the goddamned curb!”

“Maybe you’re right. But Sandy, I’ve been attracting freaks to myself for the past six years. It’s been weird and demoralizing and really, really depressing, and I just feel like I’m stuck inside of something awful. I’m not sure, but I think I need to do this so that I can stop having to do this, do you understand?”

She looked at me with her warm eyes. “No, I don’t understand, but I trust you. Go do this if you feel you have to. You have to promise me one thing, though; no more perverted, disgusting, old men! I mean, really. Enough already! Shit.”

I laughed. I nodded and then started to cry. “Okay.” I looked her in the eye. “I promise you I will do that.”

I met Jerry at the restaurant. During the main course, he said, “You’re not the same as you used to be with me.”

“I know.”

“Why are you so different?”

“I just am.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one I have.”

“Allie?”

“What?”

“Why can’t you be loving and sweet to me, the way you used to be?”

“Because I don’t feel like it.”

“You don’t feel like it?”

“Yeah, I don’t feel like it.”

“…What has happened to you?”

“Nothing’s happened to me. I’m sure I seem cold and distant to you right now, but that’s just the way it is. You want me to be different with you, and that’s not going to happen.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because it’s not going to happen - that’s all. End of story.”

“But Allie, we’re friends. I need you to reassure me and tell me that you still care about me sometimes. That’s what friends do for one another.”

“Well, tough. I’m not gonna do that.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t want to.”

“But why? What have I done?”

“Nothing! Listen, you have all these needs, and I don’t want to be the person who’s responsible for fulfilling them, do you understand?”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that what you want, I’m not willing or capable of giving you.”

“What do you think I want?”

“For us to be romantically and sexually involved with one another.”

He nodded. We looked at each other. After a moment, he asked, “Why can’t that happen?”

“Because I don’t want to be involved with you like that.”

“But why?”

“Because that’s just how it is.”

“But why?”

“Because I don’t want you that way.”

“But why can’t we talk about it and work this out?”

“Because there’s NOTHING to talk about! I don’t WANT you! Now will you PLEASE just FUCK OFF!” When I yelled, everyone in the restaurant turned around and stared at us. Jerry looked at me as though I had punched him in the stomach. I started to shake and swallowed back the metallic taste that had come into my mouth.

“Listen!” I continued more quietly to him, “You want someone to love you - that’s fine. Just go and look for that elsewhere. Not here!” I said and stabbed my chest with my finger.

He looked at me. I coldly returned his gaze. He looked down and nervously pinched the bridge of his nose with his thumb and pinky, and rubbed his forehead with his other three digits. I looked out the window at a digital clock on the side of a building a half mile away. We sat like that in silence for a full 8 minutes.

He looked up at me. I turned in his direction. He reached his hands across the table towards me and said, “But you’re hurting me.” I resisted the urge to lunge across the table at him and rip out his trachea. Instead, I turned my face back towards the clock, crossed my arms, narrowed my eyes, and shook my head no. We sat like that for another 5 minutes.

“So, what do you want, Allie?” he finally asked. I turned to look at him. He looked beaten and resigned. I felt sorry for him. I felt sorry for us both.

“I want you to back off and to give me space.”

He took another full minute before asking, “What does that look like?”

I took a deep breath in and said, “It looks like my leaving here and us never talking again.” I started to shake worse.

He looked at me again for a long time. I returned his gaze. Finally, he nodded and said, “Okay.”

I nodded back to him. “Okay.” I released my breath in one long stream and felt tears come into my eyes. “Thank you,” I said to him. And I meant it.

For two weeks after, I got emails and phone calls from him, imploring me to talk to him and tell him what I wanted him to do. I never returned a call or an email.

After that, I never heard from him again.

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