The Friend by Sigrid Nunez

Author:Sigrid Nunez [Nunez, Sigrid]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: fiction
ISBN: 9780735219441
Google: gQIvDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0735219443
Publisher: Penguin Group
Published: 2018-02-06T05:00:00+00:00

PART SEVEN

Wife One lives abroad. She had flown to New York for the memorial event, and one night before she flew home she and I went out to dinner.

“I know it’s worse for you,” she said kindly. “We were married, but that was so long ago. And after it was over, nothing. No friendship, no contact, nothing. That’s how it had to be. And I’ll be honest, at first I thought I wouldn’t even go to the memorial. But then I thought, you know, closure. Whatever that means.”

When it’s suicide, someone at the memorial said, there can be no closure.

“But you,” she said. “You two were such good friends for so long. How I used to envy that. I used to think, if only he and I hadn’t fallen in love, then we could have had a friendship like that!”

But there’d been no resisting, had there. A love so potent it might have been the effect of a spell. One of those grand passions given only to some to experience, the rest to hear tell and dream about.

Even now it has the force of legend for me: beautiful, terrible, doomed.

I remember when being near the two of you was like being near a furnace. And I remember thinking, when things went wrong, that one or the other of you was going to end up dead. You yourself said it sometimes felt like you were doing something forbidden, even criminal. And she, raised Catholic, was convinced that such idolizing love had to be a sin. And, of course, in the end it was this that drove Wife Two to despair: not all your womanizing but the belief that such love doesn’t come twice in a life, that whatever you felt for her could not equal what you’d felt for Wife One, who, she would always fear, still had your heart.

If only we hadn’t fallen in love: she said it over and over.

“I was just thinking about it on the cab ride here. Remember how we worshipped him? How we were all his little groupies? What did they call us back then?”

“A literary Manson family.”

“Oh God, yes. Ugh. How could I forget.”

Remember how we hung on your every word and ran out and bought every book or album you mentioned.

Remember how everything we wrote was some pathetic imitation of you.

Remember how you had us believing that one day you’d win the Nobel Prize.

Now he’s just another dead white male.

He did all right, I said. He did better than most writers.

“But I hear the last couple of years he didn’t write much.”

No.

“Did he seem that depressed? Did he talk about it? I’m not just asking, it’s been keeping me up nights. Why did he quit teaching?”

I recite your various gripes, which were not much different from those heard every day from other teachers: how even students from top schools didn’t know a good sentence from a bad one, how nobody in publishing seemed to care how anything was written anymore, how books were

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