Sharon Wahl

1

I had a friend who was so deeply in lust with the actor and director Miranda July after he saw her first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, that he asked my husband to film him in a vintage white lace wedding dress, proposing to her.  We had a friend whose wife left him the day before his 50th birthday.  She insisted that nonetheless she would throw him a party.  On the drive to his wife's new apartment, our friend picked up a hitch-hiking prostitute.  She gave him a blow-job while he drove.  He invited her to live with him for several weeks, and made a website for her business.  I had a friend who decided to leave his wife while they were living in Japan, where she was teaching English.  He thought he loved another woman, a Japanese woman, more than he loved his wife.  He flew to Vancouver, intending to buy a kayak and traverse the Inside Passage to Alaska, though it was already mid-September and the months-long voyage would not be safe.  That was part of his plan: there was a chance he might die.  He spent two days pacing a beach in rainy weather, then flew back to Tokyo, back to his wife.  I had a friend who wrote reviews of restaurants.  I was thrilled to become friends with a food critic.  There were margarita rankings to debate, my first Pisco sour.  One day she told me that she didn't read the writing of people she was friends with.  This was something you might say if you believed that people who wanted to be friends with you were people whose writing you probably wouldn't like.  Also, that she would respect me less if I wrote a bad short story.  While I had read dozens of her reviews without ever mentioning my doubts that someone who refused to eat raw garlic or raw onions was qualified to be a food critic. 

            When I was young (by which I mean thirty or forty), I could forgive a friend anything.  I had a loyal dog's happiness in the company of a friend, even if she was hours late, even if she left me alone for twenty minutes in the middle of lunch in an expensive restaurant to call her lover because some little thing we'd just talked about reminded her of him.  We lose friends for many reasons.  Time.  Distance.  Knowing too much.  The possessive fury in the voice of this same friend's lover when my friend and I were spending a weekend in New York and he called our hotel room at one a.m.—calling for the third time that night—and demanded to speak to her, and I refused to pass her the phone.  The confusion in the voice of this friend's husband a month later, the confusion masking what he, a gentle-mannered Chinese man, was too polite to say: Why are you calling?  You're not friends anymore.  The realization that you are being used.  That you are a cover-up.  That she has told you about her lover not because you are friends, but because you aren't friends anymore.  Something she has neglected to tell you, and never will tell you. 

2

                                                                      Drinks with T. at a sidewalk cafe on a warm fall evening

            You don't know me, I'm no good in a relationship.  I fart in bed.  My feet stink.   Who

            invented rubber sandals?

            I usually don't like hairy legs, but hers are like peach fuzz.  It's a rare woman who can wear

            short hair.

            Have you ever growled at a man?  Have you ever growled with a man?

            Is it impolite to hit on waitresses?

            I went to a boys' school from eight to thirteen.  I never knew a girl who had just gotten her

            period.

            Do you talk a lot while doing it?

            I was thinking of that Spanish girl I told you about.  My only real love.  It was nice having

            someone to cut my hair and shave the back of my neck.

            I could swear the girl in blue at the goddess table is flirting with me a bit.

            Every woman I see, I want to put in my mouth.  I can't just walk up and say that.

            I think the waitress lingered a bit longer than was necessary.  Didn't she?  She hovered.

            I'm looking at that guy and that girl, and they're both attractive, and they're having a good

            time, they're talking, and I think they're not thinking about sex.  I don't understand them.

3

One of my acquaintances, too cool to be my friend, has very beautiful handwriting, print and cursive.  I wonder at what point in his life he learned to write beautifully, and how long he practiced.  This is a man who has mastered many effective mannerisms.  In a group reading, where everyone else is staring at the words on their phone or their printed pages, he recites his poem from memory, leaning casually against a wall.  When someone is passing around a phone to share a photo, he takes the hand offering the photo between both of his hands, cradling warmly the hand and the phone, then lifts it to his face. 

            When I was fifteen I borrowed a book from the public library and learned to write a few Chinese characters.  It would never have occurred to me to make a study of my own cramped handwriting, to practice it, to learn to make it exquisite.