My Life in Agony by Irma Kurtz

Author:Irma Kurtz [Kurtz, Irma]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846883231
Publisher: Alma Books

9

Can Men and Women Be “Just” Friends?

At the end of the phone was a man I have seen through several marriages – all of them his. During the heyday of London’s sit-down dinner parties, Chris and I bumped into each other at the homes of mutual acquaintances. Should we both be unattached, a condition more frequent on my side, we generally found ourselves seated side by side by the hosts to maintain the required man-woman pattern at genteel tables. Light-hearted conversations between Chris and me generated laughs, but no sexual electricity: we were not tempted to remain together after coffee and cognac. Over the years we stayed in occasional contact by phone to and from the Spanish coast, where he retired with his last spouse and nothing much to do. His recent call caught me with the question on the tip of my tongue: “Can men and women be friends?”

“Well, of course they can,” he said. “You and I are friends, aren’t we?”

“We’re certainly not enemies,” I replied. “But you’re a bloke, Chris, so tell me, please, how does a bloke define a friend?”

“A friend is someone you can say absolutely anything to…”

“That’s fair enough, I guess,” I replied. “But what about saying absolutely everything?”

“Anything or everything – what’s the difference?” he asked.

“Anything is jokes and chit-chat and the latest news; anything is all the bits bobbing around on the top of your mind. But everything? Some of everything washes ashore battered by emotions and some of it sinks too deep to salvage. Anything is flotsam. Everything is jetsam. Believe me, Chris, you would not like it if I told you everything.”

“Look here: friendship between the sexes is not as complicated as all that,” he said. “You and I are friends, aren’t we? And you know why? It’s simple. You and I can be friends because we never had sex.” He paused for a thoughtful moment: “Did we?”

Back in the ’60s, when I lived in Paris, local residents did not give dinner parties – or, if they did, impoverished young foreigners were not invited. After residing for a while in London, it was a pleasure to find that dinner parties were the done thing and that alien newcomers like me were invited to them, presumably for our novelty value. Until the late 1960s in London, the woman of the house set and served the table or instructed hired help, and the tradition still held that after the meal had been consumed, the woman of the house invited the other women to retire with her to a neighbouring room, leaving the men to port and sport and politics. Even in hippy circles featuring avant-garde “open” relationships, it was the chicks who left to gossip and do the washing-up in the kitchen, while the guys sat around smoking joints and making plans to bring down the government. And those were but privet hedges between genders in society compared to the barrier reef I bumped into a few years later while travelling in Australia.

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