This Isn’t the Actual Sea

As I approached my friend’s house, I could see by the number of cars on the street that many people had been invited, far more than I expected. I considered turning around. Instead, I let myself in to a clamor of voices and the barking of my friend’s poodle. The long living room windows swam with gusts of color as guests circled in their bright sweaters.

“Come here,” she said. “You look older! And I thought you were timeless.” She hugged me and I hugged her back, and when I pulled away my ring snagged in her hair.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“It was silly that we went so long without seeing each other,” she said, dipping her head as I disentangled the ring, like a child letting its mother work out a knot. She smiled over my shoulder at someone. “You humiliated me.”

I pulled two long, crinkled strands of her hair from the ring, a flat, square, algae-green-and-black-speckled stone, set in gold. It wasn’t my wedding ring. My husband and I didn’t wear wedding rings. Mine gave me a rash, his he’d misplaced sink-side in a restaurant in LA, gone by the time we went back. The thought of wearing someone else’s wedding ring seemed unlucky to me, darkly incantatory. (Probably it had been sold.) We’d decided not to replace it, and now, as I released my friend’s hair from between my pinched fingers and watched it drift to the ground, I wondered if this made us weak or strong, reckless in our indifference to the totems of our pairing. My friend moved to the center of the room and thanked everyone for coming, and I took a seat on the couch sandwiched between two others. The poodle was sprawled on the floor in the middle of everyone, and people would reach out their arms and legs occasionally and give his side a swipe. Guests leaned against walls, crowded out of the kitchen. It was a happy, eager group, willing to give themselves over to art, to be transformed by an encounter with what they would remember later as intellectual beauty. One always remembers one’s first time with intellectual beauty.

“It’s been twenty years since I did this,” my friend said. “I was twenty-nine when my first film was released. I never expected it to be received the way it was. I never thought it would become something of a cult favorite. It took on a life of its own as I married, raised twins, saw them off to college. Recently, at a party, I overheard someone talking about it. He thought it was by Peter Bogdanovich.”

A redheaded man raised a tremulous hand. “That was me. Sorry. I thought it was his juvenilia.”

“I told myself what I’d had was enough,” my friend continued. “Why would I deserve anything more? No one expected a second film from me, and for a long time it seemed as if there wouldn’t be one. I’m not going to say I was writing even when I wasn’t writing, because I don’t know what that means. It sounds good, like the mind is a ledger and nothing is lost, but the truth is more like I wasn’t writing even when I was. I’d start something and it would turn into a to-do list . . .” Her voice trailed off and she gestured toward a white bedsheet unfurled in front of the fireplace. “And then there was this. I give you The Park.”

The lights dimmed, and the movie began playing. It doesn’t matter, just now, what it was about. When it was over, everyone applauded and thronged my friend to congratulate her. I watched them say how much they cared about the characters, how she made them care, how they didn’t expect to care so much but they did. The darkness outside was now complete, and I was reminded of a sensation from early childhood, of waking from a nap and feeling that the heart, the dense bud of the day, had disappeared and I was left with misplaced time, an hour I didn’t recognize, silty and mournful and gray.

My friend took my elbow and drew me into the kitchen. “Did you like it?” she said. “I thought it would be different this time, but it’s not. If anything, it’s worse, because I’m older. I should know better.”

I told her I did. I said these quartz countertops were the pathetic kingdom of doubt, and she must leave it, she must leave it forever. “If behind every great man is a woman, behind every great woman is a panting blob of doubt and insecurity, a fanged blob nipping at her heels,” I said.

“I just think it sort of sucked,” my friend said.

“It did not suck,” a man who’d approached without us noticing said. Our heads rolled in his direction.

“I don’t mean sucked sucked,” she said.

“Oh, it’s false modesty, is it? A relic like a shard of pottery or something?” To make sure she got the friendly spirit of his delivery, he reached out and touched her arm.

She laughed. “Here lies the museum of false modesty. Do you have a ticket?”

I slunk away.

I couldn’t fall asleep that night. “Let’s have sex,” I said to my husband, but he didn’t like the way I broached the subject, and we quarreled. I rose from bed and scuffed into Birkenstocks and walked outside to the park across the street from our house. Leaves massed above me like filigreed clouds. Trash cans waited to be emptied, filled. Their inhuman patience leveled my racing heart. I, too, had given things to the world—let’s say poems, but they could be stories or novels or simply my opinions—that I felt, immediately, I wanted to take back, and hated with a sickening intimacy. Why did I feel that way? Here is the shuddering dark inside of my brain, these things seemed to say. Here is my religion. Bear in mind I am not religious.

My friend and I had avoided seeing each other in order to avoid falsehood, because to not speak of what had happened between us, what had caused our break, would be a lie. To not speak of what we had gleaned of one another, for while I had seen vulnerability in her so had I seen an adherence to hierarchy, to an idea of who should do her bidding and how that bidding should be done, while, for her part, she had seen something stubborn, disloyal, in me. To speak of this would expose us to scrutiny and take every last bit of her strength, the strength she was using to make her movie. It was only when she’d finished, when she had proof of some sort, that she decided she could see me again. The proof wasn’t the movie; it was the survival of her secret self. After all, her friends weren’t making movies, the woman who taught her yoga class wasn’t making a movie, the twins weren’t making movies, her ex-husband wasn’t making a movie, the neighbors who stopped her for small talk weren’t making movies, and so she—the she they knew, the she in the material world— wasn’t making a movie, either. It was some hidden, grotesque part of her, some immaterial urge that roiled inside her like steam in a bottle that was making a movie. She must’ve known that there were other women who were making movies (and had seen some of them, the few that eked through), she just didn’t know these women personally. She texted me the next day, a Saturday.

That guy

The ticket guy?

I slept with him

What!

A rando as the twins say

Listen to you with the youth’s lingo

Yes cheap perfect words

I shut my phone in a drawer and ate a yogurt and tried to work.

When I checked it again after what felt like at least forty-five minutes, twelve had passed. I was rewarded with an invitation for coffee.

How different a house looked after a party, its façade flattened, washed of responsibility. In the kitchen, the poodle sniffed my crotch until I pushed his head away. The coffee maker burbled; my friend poured. She placed two steaming mugs on the breakfast table, a sugar bowl, cream. Her hair was pulled back with a tortoiseshell clip. Her ears were very pink, and I was reminded of the peppermint pig my husband brought forth each Christmas after dinner. He placed the pig in a velvet bag, and invited our son to smash it with a little silver hammer. It was a tradition from his childhood—eating a piece of the pig was supposed to mean you’d be prosperous in the year ahead, but I rebelled against the idea of treating prosperity like something to be heralded, hoped for, coaxed forth with rituals, placed at the zenith of human ambition. Give me insight, I always thought as I let the peppermint dissolve in my mouth, which was in its own way rapacious, an invisible acquisition, sometimes undependable.

“You left early last night,” my friend said.

I made a what-of-it-face.

“I know, okay. I’d never met him before, a friend brought him. Afterward I cried from some kind of ancient exhaustion and we ate leftovers.”

“Which leftovers?”

“Those almond horns.”

“And then you felt better?” I said.

“About me. I won’t see him again. I’m over it, the drama. Give me a good meal, good weather, a comfortable bed.”

“You already have those things.”

“The weather’s only mine when it’s bad,” she said.

“I know what you mean.”

“We’re so blind,” my friend said exultantly.

I felt very close to her then.

My friend couldn’t stand the idea of her movie being ignored or reviewed. Both scenarios were terrible to her. Being ignored would confirm her invisibility, while being reviewed would dissect her presence. It was more than the individual circumstance of her releasing a movie, I imagined she thought. It was historical, societal, gendered. The pathway one took when considering one’s success was wide and well-groomed, and branched off in several places; the pathway one took when considering one’s failure was narrow and icy, and circled fatefully back to oneself. Her movie played at a few art theaters in New York (but not at any of the Laemmles here), and when she found out it was to be reviewed in the Sunday New York Times, she asked me to come over and read the review first. I did so with a mean need for it to be panned. If her movie was panned, I would find some fuel for myself, a source of heat, a jagged, terrible pleasure. It wasn’t panned. It was well reviewed, and I felt, too, genuine happiness for my friend, and shame at my animal thought.

I was sitting on her front stoop. She took the newspaper from me and read it herself and then rattled it decisively closed.

“It’s too generous,” she said.

“It’s not. It’s very perceptive.”

“You don’t mean it. I can see it in your eyes.”

“My eyes lie!”

“I think what I’m most afraid of is never having another original thought again.”

Her street was lined with ginkgo trees that had turned yellow and were shedding their fan-shaped leaves. It was early December and fall had finally arrived. Even so, the cooler weather could erupt at any time into heat like the brush fires that broke out near highway exit ramps, long tongues of smoke in the distance. Now, though, the air was clear. Leaves plastered the sidewalk. I had once been afraid of the same thing, but I went so long without an original thought I forgot what it was like; in my maze of the familiar I forgot how grand the strange could be.

I saw her in the grocery store. We were at opposite ends of the freezer where bags of fish were kept. I saw her ask an aproned clerk a question. I saw her not like how slow he was to respond, for she brandished her phone in his face, causing him to step backward into someone else’s cart. They both turned to this third person, an elderly woman who’d approached with fragile steps, and apologized profusely. I saw her face move from anger to concern; I saw how swiftly and shamelessly she camouflaged herself inside separate moments and the forces that made them. I saw her see me and come forward explaining before she even quite reached me that she’d had to scold the boy for scrolling at work. I asked if he might not have been searching for music, as my son so often claimed he was doing when I caught him gazing dumbly at his phone, and she said no, he was watching someone skateboard off a roof. “A roof!” my friend said, as if had it been steps it might’ve been different. As if all human effort must go through her, her body a sieve with the heavy organs caught in the bowl of her and the rest running out.

She was invited to screen her movie at the women’s college in our town, and she asked me to accompany her. The campus was a lush collection of bougainvillea- and fountain-filled courtyards that seemed designed less for the delights of the mind than the senses, the plashing of water, the wax-paper weight of the sun. In a velvet auditorium, a professor of gender and sexuality studies introduced my friend. The lights dimmed and the movie began. Ten or fifteen minutes in, I became aware that students were leaving, swiftly up the aisles, the shushing of their leggings. Afterward, the professor opened the floor to questions. The questions asked by those students who remained were deeply skeptical of the movie’s depiction of the lives of middle-aged women as lives of frustration and anger and shame. You could tell they didn’t think their futures would bear any resemblance to that. Their futures were like stacks of soft-folded sweaters in a pretty store with a salesgirl whose hair was cut in a style they would soon see everywhere. Some girls were nearly soothsayers that way. The movie, no, the movie didn’t feel that apt. It felt a little irrelevant to be honest.

My friend nodded vigorously as they spoke. She said she understood. She used to feel that way herself. But everything changes when you get married, she said. I thought of her ex, a slight man with slick lips who had disappeared early each morning onto a train that took him into LA to work at a podcast production company. The most shocking thing about him was that he was missing a nipple. My friend had felt he didn’t take her seriously and had only tolerated her creative ambitions. I had a recurring fantasy about him, or not a fantasy exactly but a sequence of thoughts I summoned when I couldn’t fall asleep: I was dying and asked to see him, and he walked into the dim room where I lay quietly, and he held my hand and confessed his regret, and I realized I didn’t have any regret and that was the great, the only gift of dying.

After the Q&A, we had dinner with the professor of sexuality and gender studies and her wife at an Italian restaurant. The professor apologized for the students. She said it was ironic, their objection to the vision of women the movie presented, for had my friend’s movie depicted women as reduced figures in entirely functionary sexual roles they would’ve been fine with that. My friend came to the students’ defense. To the professor it must’ve seemed like generosity, but I knew the choice my friend was being asked to make was to align herself either with the bitterness of age or the shiny glaze of youth, that icing-sweet shellac that cracked in skittish lines at a fork tap. After dinner we walked home, politely drunk. She’d chosen the side with all the joys and disappointments still to come.

I understood what my friend’s movie was about the first time I saw it, but I was too distracted by the other people in the room for it to sink in. (I tended to succumb in other people’s presence to an awareness of their presence, a closed loop.) It was only after my second viewing that I realized how little she’d changed about the incident that had caused us to stop seeing each other. It had happened shortly after her husband moved out, in those early weeks of her aloneness. She had asked me to dog sit for a few days while she went to soothe herself at a hot springs. Of course, I agreed. It was a midweek trip, so the poodle couldn’t stay with her soon-to-be-ex. The poodle was used to having someone around—it wouldn’t work for him to be left alone all day. My friend dropped him and his bed and leash and kibble at my house on a Tuesday morning, and I told her to have a wonderful time. She was traveling to the hot springs with another of her friends, a woman I knew only slightly and who was so beautiful I felt like an old, cracked log in her presence.

Later that day, I decided to take the poodle to the dog park. It would be fun, I thought, to see him loping about, and to pretend that he was mine. I loaded him into the car and we drove there, and there he bit a small dog, badly, on the neck. The small dog let out a cry like a peacock’s, and gushed blood. My friend was very upset when I called her and told her what had happened. She drove straight home, came into my house, and dropped to her knees to inspect every inch of the poodle, who had sustained no injury and was lying in his bed panting with residual angst. My friend said she hadn’t told me to take the poodle to the dog park, and I said I assumed it was somewhere he had been before, and my friend said it was, and it had been fine, but she’d sensed the park’s potential for chaos, for violence. But it was your dog’s potential for violence you sensed, I said. My friend began to cry. She said I was selfish, a selfish person willing to blame others for their own suffering. Then she piled the poodle’s leash and kibble into the dog bed, and left, the poodle trotting after her with a hung head. He knew we were talking about him.

I had disavowed my relationship to the poodle right after he sank his teeth into the small dog’s neck. The small dog’s owner and I had been chatting so pleasantly before the attack. Oh my god! He’s not mine! I had cried, though the small dog’s owner was too busy kicking the poodle off her dog to respond.

Seeing my friend’s movie a second time, I noted how brusquely the friend who was dog sitting treated the dog after the attack, how completely she shunned the animal, and I realized that my friend identified with her dog very closely. I thought back to the attack again, trying to picture exactly what had happened, and I remembered that the small dog had sniffed the poodle under his muzzle right before the poodle bit him. Raised his little head and sniffed the soft, vulnerable throat so pink beneath the poodle’s lambswool coat. The attack appeared unprovoked, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t justified, but it was not unprovoked.

As I swam laps, I considered how to talk to my friend about her movie. I knew she’d deny an explicit connection. If pressed, she might say a movie is a dramatic experience, and the filmmaker won’t be around to explain it, so of course I was free to interpret it any way I liked. Putting it that way would undermine my authority quite nicely while seeming to argue for the autonomy of art and the independence of the viewer, for an authentic relationship between two entities which were both, in their own ways, staged. My friend might quote Gertrude Stein, who said she wrote for herself and strangers. Everybody is a real one to me, everybody is like someone else too to me, Stein had said. I began to backstroke, droplets from my fingertips falling into my mouth. The ceiling panels were open to pale parcels of sky.

I emailed my friend’s ex-husband to ask if he’d seen her movie. He had not been at her house, and I didn’t know if that was because he hadn’t been invited, or had declined to come. (My husband had declined to come.) I wrote, I felt it didn’t imagine enough, filled with a sudden desire to commiserate with someone who must, himself, wish my friend had done more work creating rather than replicating, building something new. I sent the email before I could stop myself. He replied politely, with no insight.

My friend was raking leaves in her driveway, her car parked in the street and the poodle sniffing about the yard. It had rained the night before, and the mountains were covered with snow. Palm trees in the foreground, white mountains in the background, the sky a heartrending blue. I sat on her stoop and said the name of her ex.

“What about him?” she said.

“Do you see him regularly?”

“We’re very friendly.” She turned her head and called to the poodle, then turned back to me. “We don’t have to explain ourselves to each other anymore. We can be more generous.”

I had heard this before, or some version of it, and indeed it made sense that those who had suffered divorce’s pain would also want to broadcast its freedoms. Like swimming in an icy lake and feeling very alive, very awake, in intimate contact with the elements. A genuine feeling, an admirable one, though I wouldn’t for any reason, not for clarity or moral forthrightness or inner rectitude, choose an icy lake over my eighty-two-degree pool. She called the poodle again more sharply, and he came and sat at her feet and despite this act of obedience, or because of it, she picked up his leash from where it lay coiled next to me and leashed him.

“Why do you ask?” she said.

“I’ve been thinking about him for some reason. And you. You seemed so happy together.”

She snorted. “You can’t know what it’s like to be another person, not really. This is what we depend on.”

She loved Ingmar Bergman, especially Wild Strawberries. I objected to his depiction of women. She said that to dramatize an ideal, one always exaggerated. I said ideals were for cowards. She said my thinking was too grim. I said hers was too accommodating, stretching to fit the flatness she had been given and asked to believe was profundity. She said I needed to smile more. I said that was what men always said about women. She said that was because unsmiling women scared men, but she wasn’t a man and I didn’t scare her. Why then? I said. You just look better when you do, she said. Bergman and Fellini and Cassavetes and Coppola and Anderson and Fincher, all that male weather, sun storm, deluge, drought, downpour.

And then came a few weeks during which we did not see each other, for no reason. Just a stretch of being idle. But I was aware as the weeks went by that although there had been no incident this time, every day we did not see each other brought us closer to not seeing each other again. How telling myself I’d be fine before—when we really weren’t seeing each other—meant in fact I would be fine, though something would be lost. How you can lose something and still be fine. How the lost thing is more present when it’s lost.

Sometimes my thinking about her was clear, thrillingly absolute. Sometimes my thinking was laden with regret. One might say it was really about myself though it felt so precisely about her.

I was driving into the foothills, listening to an interview with Bruce Springsteen on the radio. He was saying when he first met his wife they had so much in common. “It was like, before you were you, you were me,” he said. I stopped at a red light. A car with a loud muffler pulled up next to mine and rumbled in place and when the light changed took off in a series of ignominious putts. The road rose and narrowed. We go to music not to learn something but to be reminded of something, Springsteen said, and I turned onto the street where I’d arranged to meet my friend, parked, and got out. She was leaning against her car, staring at the mountains. She had brought water and I hadn’t, and I imagined asking her for water, whether I could or whether it would seem too forward, drinking out of the same spout. Of course, I could unscrew the lid and sip from the bottle, or she could unscrew the lid for me before handing it over, a sure indication she would not like to share the same spout, though it was also possible it would mean she thought I was about to do so myself and trying to save face by beating me to it, or even that she was simply being helpful. I determined to trudge through my thirst. We donned hats and set out on our hike and she began to talk about her movie, about how she was trying to scare up more interest in it. Attention wasn’t something she wanted, but needed. She supposed it was the people who wanted it that got it. She was grateful her movie had been reviewed in the Times, but it hadn’t been reviewed anywhere else. No one had approached her for an interview, no film festivals had contacted her. She was getting no publicity and her window of relevance was shrinking every day.

“My little performance at Shelton College might be it,” she said.

I mentioned that I knew an editor who may be interested. “Send me a link.”

“Thanks. I’ll give you a DVD, too.”

We were climbing on loose, pebbly dirt past gray-blue agaves and manzanita trees whose dried-blood bark seemed to run in rivulets down the trunks.

“You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about what I said to you in the kitchen that night. I was wrong,” she said. “I’m better than many. I’m downright good. If others can be, why not me?”

I told her I agreed. I said her next movie would be her best, meaning it as a compliment, meaning it would be more elusive, more mysterious, that it would range farther afield and might surprise her, but it sounded if I were saying that what she’d made wasn’t enough. To make up for it I decided to tell her about what I was working on now. She had given me this story, and I realized she could take it back by uttering two or three condemnatory words, or smiling with a little question mark at the corners of her mouth, or allowing a glaze of disinterest to come into her eyes. We walked higher and higher until we had a view of the valley, cars swimming through the milky smog, flitting close behind one another like fish in an aquarium about whom one inevitably thinks, Do they know this isn’t the actual sea? Then we walked back to our cars, and I followed her to her house and idled out front while she ran inside. She reemerged and handed a DVD to me through the car window, and I could hear the poodle barking and smell something coming off her, a stab of deodorant, a sort of unnatural hope and exertion, and I felt then the terror and promise of friendship, the daily encounter with what the other dares to be.