We joked about it long beforehand, when I described the place I’d rented in New Orleans for my birthday weekend: a two-story former firehouse with seven bedrooms and baths, good for destination parties. Three of the rooms had spiral staircases leading up to sleeping lofts. Visiting Phyllis in London the summer before, I said I would be sure not to put her in one of those rooms. Laughing, she mimed a tipsy version of herself clawing for an elusive banister. That February, I showed her to her room in a separate building behind the main house. I’d put my other best friend, also British, in the room beside her. “The English Quarter,” we dubbed it. As we passed a square raised lily pond near Phyllis’s room, I warned, “Stay away from that when you’ve had a few.”
“Former English professor drowns in pond at fiftieth birthday soiree,” Phyllis said, putting on a self-important broadcaster’s voice.
Phyllis was the first friend I made when I moved to the Deep South in 2000 for a teaching job at the University of Alabama. Bitter, funny, raucous, barely five feet tall, Phyllis told people exactly what she thought of them and didn’t care if they didn’t like it. Some found her difficult, but I enjoyed her candor, saw her as a woman who didn’t take shit from anyone. I myself was a fairly reliable shit-taker, and trying to break myself of the habit. Phyllis quickly became my closest friend. Fifteen years older than me, she was free with both advice and criticism. When an unexpected teaching opportunity landed me in Florence for the summer, she flew over for a visit. In the early evenings, we sat on the ledge of my apartment’s big picture window across from the Bargello and tried on pashmina shawls we’d bought on the street earlier that day, each of us in just a linen skirt and bra, laughing at the contrast between her double D cups and my A’s as we drank wine and watched the Italians zoom around on their Vespas. They had places to go and we, happily, didn’t.
In 2005, Phyllis moved back to London. Her departure was a great loss for me, but also something of a relief. There had been incidents, things I couldn’t entirely dismiss. In late 2002, when my fiancée and I had her to dinner to tell her we were getting married and ask if she’d stand up for as a witness at our wedding, she ended up drinking too much. As we were finishing the meal, I developed hiccups, tried home remedies like holding my breath for thirty seconds, plugging my nose and ears and sipping from the lip of a glass of water, remedies I remembered from grade school. Nothing worked. Then, a blow to the head, so hard that tears sprang to my eyes. Beside me Phyllis swayed, curious if her solution had worked. She’d wanted to surprise me, to get rid of the hiccups. I just stared at her. She had hit me very hard across the face.
“I think it’s time for Phyllis to go home,” Neal said.
I’d return to this incident later, but for the time being, all was well in our friendship. The next morning, we did our usual campus loop walk, saying nothing about the night before. I didn’t even have a bruise.
*
After watching the Krewe of Ponchatrain parade with family and friends on Canal Street, Phyllis and I found ourselves alone on Burgundy Street. I wasn’t sure where everyone else had gone, but we’d all meet back at the house. I had my eye out for a bar where we could grab plastic cups of wine to go, when Phyllis made a full stop in the middle of the sidewalk and grabbed my wrist.
“Don’t you ever, ever do that to yourself again. Promise me!”
I shook out of her grip. I’d planned to wear long sleeves the whole time so she wouldn’t see I’d harmed myself with a knife a few weeks earlier, after learning a short story accepted by The Atlantic was going to be axed; no one had thought it necessary to inform me until I called to check on the publication date. But my sister had seen some of the hash marks on my arm the first night of the party, when several of us gathered in the kitchen. Phyllis had been standing near enough to see my sister ask me about the cuts on my arm.
Now, with Phyllis confronting me, I felt angry her impulse was to scold, rather than comfort or be curious. Instead of arguing, I ducked into a bar and bought us each a go-cup of white wine. We’d have time for something to eat before Chewbacchus, my favorite parade, rolled at eight p.m. My father and stepmother were going to meet us, and Neal’s parents, and my sister and her husband. I was there with all of them, but most of all I was there with Phyllis. I watched with delight as she leapt to ask for beads and trinkets. Her short stature and pixie cut blonde hair made her an adorable sixty-six-year old. A group of women parading with signs printed, “Rosemary’s King Cake Baby” pushed baby carriages past with demonically-altered dolls in them. I was astonished to see one woman pluck the doll from her carriage and place it lovingly in Phyllis’s arms. Dressed in a pink onesie with a matching ribbon around her head, her lips had been painted black, and she had thick eyebrows drawn on with black marker. In the parlance of Mardi Gras, this was known as a quality throw. I congratulated Phyllis as she hugged the doll to her neck.
She gazed up at me with shining eyes. “This is the best night of my life!”
Back at the house, most people had gone to bed, though Laura and her husband Seth sat in the living room, her nursing an injured ankle. We had another drink and displayed our best throws; I showed off a bumper sticker that proclaimed, “I’m From Uranus.” Phyllis kept interrupting us, speech slurred, to say it was time for bed. Go off then, we said. The previous night, as Seth walked her down to her room, Phyllis called him a motherfucker.
We heard the distinctive plastic jangle of Mardi Gras beads followed by an awful thunk. A moment later, my brother-in-law knelt beside Phyllis. I watched him take her pulse and thump her sternum. Wake up, Phyllis. In the space of less than a minute, one of her eyes swelled purple and shut. Orbital fracture, Stan said. In minutes EMTs wheeled a stretcher down the narrow hallway. We watched from the landing as the medical team lifted Phyllis onto the stretcher. I entertained a brief, semi-drunk, selfish moment of calculation in which I tried to determine the seriousness of Phyllis’s injuries, and to reassure myself that she’d sleep off the booze and be released in the morning.
*
A violet window hanging cast a brothel hue over the room. Morning. Three king cakes drizzled with violet, green, and bright yellow icing, one with apples and goat cheese, sat on the kitchen counter. As we stood and unceremoniously ate slices of cake from paper towels, it was decided Neal and I would be the ones to go to the hospital.
At Tulane University’s ER, drums and horns of a parade played in the distance, a bizarre counterpoint to our moods. I felt myself on the verge of tears. Before we stepped inside, Neal hugged me, but rage tensed in his body. “She is poison,” he whispered. A man in green scrubs met us at the entrance. “Oakley,” he said. “Like the sunglasses.” Young and good looking, compact, he looked like he worked out a lot, but his face was soft and open. “How much do you know about your friend’s condition? I’ll go from there.”
“All we know is she was drunk and had a fall,” Neal said.
Phyllis had a bleed in her temporal lobe. If the doctors couldn’t stop it with non-invasive methods, they’d have to do brain surgery. “Since she’s an alcoholic,” he began. I didn’t hear the rest of the sentence. Alcoholic? The word hit me like a foreign object. Things got a little crazy sometimes, I told myself, but Phyllis wasn’t an alcoholic. How had this person come to that determination?
Phyllis lay on a gurney with her head raised, a brace immobilizing her neck. Her right eye had gone purplish black and was swollen shut. IV lines snaked from both arms, and she kept fussing at a catheter at her groin. Neal ordered her to put both her hands outside the blankets and leave the cath alone. I took one of her hands in mine and held it the way I imagined I would want someone to hold my hand if I had a brain bleed. Her hand felt small and cool to the touch, as if there was no blood running under it. Her nails were perfect crescents painted blood-red.
“I’m so scared.” Her hands kept traveling away from me to her forehead, as if touching her head might reveal the roots of her predicament.
“What year is it?” Oakley asked. “Who’s the Prime Minister? Where are you?”
Phyllis managed to come back with “seventeenth.” It took me a moment to realize this was her response to the question about the current year. When Oakley asked which prescription medications she took, she couldn’t remember the names of the drugs or the conditions they treated. I tried to reassure her we could get that information from her doctors. Phyllis remained narrowly focused on trying to remember such details, rather than confronting the much scarier possibility that she might have suffered permanent brain damage. I considered this a plus.
A slender, handsome man introduced himself only as Lockwood and explained Phyllis wouldn’t be allowed to eat or drink anything, as she might need surgery. Furthermore, no painkillers, as the head injury prevented them from knocking her out with drugs. The IV line into her groin wasn’t going to pop out, he averred, as he was the one who sewed it in. Phyllis quarreled and cursed in a way that, strangely, made her seem a little less alien to me. She looked a lot like Phyllis after a bottle of wine, her lower lip pushed out, her face set in diffuse but absolute challenge. She got Lockwood to agree to have a nurse swab out her parched mouth, and her complaint about being freezing cold got nurses dispatched for more blankets.
I held her hand for another while, until my hand fell asleep, and then she fell asleep: this tiny, busted woman, snoring.
Out in the ER’s bustling central room, EMTs wheeled in a man singing on a stretcher, his face bleeding. A little later, he shouted “nigger” at someone helping him, and though the word hung in the air, no one paid any attention. It was Mardi Gras, and these people had work to do.
Back at the party house, my family members had left for their flights back to New York, so just a few friends and Neal’s parents convinced us to go to Barkus, the parade devoted to dogs and their owners. This was supposed to be a highlight of the weekend, but I felt carved out, unable to shake the conviction my best friend might die at my party. We walked out into a bright, unusually warm day in February. I had a sense of moving through a humid fantasy where my closest friends walked in step with me and dogs were feted in the streets with glitter and milk bones. Perched low on a curb, I focused on a dog’s soft muzzle, its gooey drool. But then Phyllis’s ruined face swam into my field of vision and I felt almost blinded by worry and a sense that all had gone catastrophically wrong, and that I should have known it would.
Neal and I had to leave on Monday—I to teach, and Neal to his duties as department chair. Two of our retired friends, Bernard and Jackie, agreed to stay on with Phyllis. Once home, memories of the weekend took on the quality of a dream, with its inexplicable logic and improbable pairings of disaster and joy. I remembered the rainy, windy evening in the second story restaurant dining room when my father and Laura gave speeches while my sister tried heroically to get Phyllis to eat a few bites of jambalaya. I remember my former student Violet, a New Orleans native, safety-pinning a twenty-dollar bill to my sweater and explaining to the dinner guests that this was a Cajun birthday tradition, after which a parade of friends and family pinned tens and twenties to my sweater. I remembered Phyllis and me in the back seat of Laura and Seth’s car after dinner, Phyllis berating us for leaving her out of a conversation we were having in her presence, and which she could have joined had she been sober enough. I remembered opening the Cards Against Humanity game my sister gave me as a birthday present and playing it for the first time in the living room of the party house, all of us laughing at the risqué answers to questions on the cards except for Phyllis, who sat among us no longer present, wine having taken her from us, her head lolling from side to side. Both mornings before her accident, Phyllis padded in her slippers and oatmeal colored bathrobe into the kitchen the next morning, smiling sheepishly as one does when the night before has, one hopes, gone okay, but when the memory lapse leaves open the possibility that something embarrassing might have happened.
Was I wrong to leave my friend in the hospital in New Orleans? I liked to do the right thing.
What was the right thing?
The hospital’s insurance people couldn’t get in touch with Phyllis’s insurers, so by the end of the week she was discharged from the hospital. Unclear about what to do, Bernard put her in his car and drove her to his house in Pensacola. The doctors said she would be unable to fly for six weeks. All of us quarreled about what to do with Phyllis. Guilt-ridden, I sent Bernard and Jackie gift baskets from Zingerman’s. Was this my fault? I kept asking myself. To Phyllis I wrote Get Well cards. To one she replied:
I have been very scared and fall backwards but gradually getting slightly better. I eat a lot of pills but it helps. In a while I believe I am going to stay with Jackie and doctor so far needs to say I must stay four weeks. Everyone seems to know, and Bernard is being marvelous. Will go to Jackie for a bit I think. So then will come back here. Not really sure was happening. So was Inga great but she is in Germany for a bit.
I can read emails etc but not allowed to go to read books. I had no idea my brain was loosing blood but only Wednesday that gave me horrific test and they were thrilled blood stopped so gradually ate slight about food, and have lost announcement weight. But eating very as much as possible. On street I have to walk on iron weird rolly thing. This afternoon Bernard took me to breach.
The worst thing is number of pills, as my head goes crazy. Anyway hope you and Neal keep well.
She had, of course, meant “beach,” but Phyllis’s error made its own kind of sense. To the breach. A break in things. In another card Phyllis wrote, Week in hosp like a nightmare but remember you very frightened. Did that constitute an apology? I sat and read it a few times. I had been terrified. But a part of me – not one I welcomed, not one I knew how to manage – had begun to harden against my friend. One day Neal got a call from Phyllis inquiring about some jewelry she was missing, as well as a brand-new blue bra. Did he have her things? My friend Diane and I had been the ones to pack up Phyllis’s room and bring her stuff to the hospital once she was admitted. We had worked silently, grimly, but in my memory, we had been extremely thorough. Neal explained this to Phyllis. All business, she asked him for our landlord’s contact information, so that she could see about getting the lost items back. On Facebook, she posted an image of herself with the caption, “One week intended in America, and finally back home in London after an extended seven, due to a horrid dangerous accident.” She thanked friends who had helped her in the aftermath. Her seeming refusal to acknowledge her own role in the accident enraged me. I stomped upstairs with the door knocker in the shape of a dog’s head she had given me as a birthday present and flung it across the attic.
One day while taking a walk, I remembered how, several years earlier, a former neighbor had called me out of the blue and admitted she’d had a key to my apartment that she’d used to let herself in when I wasn’t home. “I drank your vodka,” she said. She had since joined Alcoholics Anonymous and was working Step 8 of the program: Made a list of all persons we had harmed, and became willing to make amends to them all.
I congratulated her about getting sober, but was quick to reassure her that it was water under the bridge. Besides, I hadn’t even noticed. No apology necessary.
She insisted, very forcefully, that one was.
When friends asked why I couldn’t just let go of the need for an apology from Phyllis, or, if I was so offended, why not just let the friendship go, I thought about Step 8. Laura reminded me of the time Phyllis had slapped me across the face, and another time when she had stopped speaking to me for a period of more than a year when I wasn’t able to drive to Florida to meet her when she was visiting friends; I had badly injured my hands breaking up a fight between my dogs. I later apologized to Phyllis at a friend’s funeral, groveling while she eyed me imperiously over a glass of champagne.
But the truth was, despite all the terrible behavior, I missed her. I missed her taking me on the train to Brighton for fish and chips in a restaurant by the sea at my request, me eating both my own mushy peas and hers, as she hated mushy peas. I missed her getting all excited that I could make a good Bloody Mary, then laying in single serving bottles of tomato juice from Waitrose before I arrived from the States so we could sit in her back garden and drink them. I missed sitting in her back garden with her London girlfriends, telling stories about sex as her friend Sandra marveled to me, “You’re so open about everything. It must be because you’re from America.” I missed how those women admired our friendship, which had been my most intimate. I had a visceral, perfect memory of the two of us lying on the air mattress in her guest room and entwining our legs in the air as she told me she loved me so fuckin much. Now, though, the gaping hole in the fabric of the friendship had been exposed. We had intimacy, yes, but not reciprocity. Not accountability.
I tried to piece together the reasons for Phyllis’s behavior that weekend. She liked to be the center of attention, and in that setting, she hadn’t been. I’d asked my father and Laura to give speeches, and my father had assembled a slide show with photos of him flanked by my sister and me in bikinis on a sailboat in the British Virgin Islands, others of him holding me as a baby at the beach. He broke down in tears as he described how much he loved me, and I remembered thinking then of what I knew of Phyllis’s chaotic childhood. Her father, a rich man who had seduced her mother on a boat, met Phyllis only fleetingly in a public place when she was a little girl. Her mother had been unstable, inconsistent; Phyllis told stories of being yanked around Africa with her mother and a criminal boyfriend. And she’d had a half-brother who in his twenties killed himself. There had been a brief marriage, late in life, to an upper-class man she envied for his money and status. That ended when she found out he was cheating on her, had been for years with a woman who was neither educated like Phyllis nor worldly. Perhaps my father going on like that, and then Laura giving her speech about our shared love for shelter dogs and beaches had been too much for Phyllis. All that speechifying, and none of it about her. So, she poured more wine in, blotted out the parts that pained her.
I remembered getting some advice from a therapist about needing to ask for what I needed. People weren’t mind readers. I needed to make myself known. Finally, I sent Phyllis a letter saying she owed me an apology. Just the word sorry, I told myself. She could even make a joke about her drunkenness, the way she had before my birthday party, and we could laugh it off the way we so often did. There had been that Sunday night at the Queens Arms near her flat in Kilburn, when in spite of declaring it a seedy pub she ventured out with me, both of us half-drunk already. We met a plumber who bought us drinks, and later in the night while dancing to live reggae music, I fell down on the dance floor, and she laughed and helped me up. It would be like that.
*
It has been five years since Phyllis’s accident. I have not heard from her. Was she too ashamed even to respond to me? Not likely; I can’t think of a single instance during our long friendship when she evinced any familiarity with that emotion. Did she believe that her suffering meant she didn’t owe me an apology? Or did she perhaps blame me for her fall, imagine I pushed her? No answer satisfies me; none makes sense. I’m a person who apologizes for my shortcomings with relative ease. Clearly, it cost Phyllis more to admit wrongdoing, than to say, “I’m sorry. I need to seek help for my problem.” I search my emails and find one from her on February 5th, just before my party.
Love you so fuckin much. Soon I will be with you darlin. Xx
Did the accident destroy that person? Or did that person never exist in the first place?
I try to picture a sober Phyllis padding about in her Crocs, a garden hod draped over her forearm as she clips dead branches from her roses. Clipping roses, making tea, reading difficult novels in the evenings. Can I even imagine Phyllis existing outside our friendship, with its in vino veritas moments of calling me “Poodle,” her nickname for me, and telling me she loved me more than anyone? I hear the sneer in her voice as I head out to buy wine and cheese for us at the Tesco near her flat: “They don’t have any proper cheese at Tesco.” Though when I check, of course they have proper cheese, French Brie and Camembert. When the newspaper seller at the Tube station entrance flirts with her, I see her sashay toward the escalator in her kitten-heeled shoes and say over her shoulder to me and her London girlfriends, “I can still pull.” I see her stretched out in a dressing gown on her living room sofa during one of my visits when she adamantly refused to go out all day and sat with the newspapers and tea on the sofa, enjoying what seemed to me, as I walked lost in her neighborhood in search of a pastry, her peculiar brand of impudent, solitary glamor. More than anyone I’d ever been friends with, Phyllis insisted on behaving in exactly the way she wanted to at any given moment. Friendship for her was not, as it was for me, a constant negotiation. Her terms were non-negotiable.
*
In 2016, Phyllis and I went to a solo show of Ukrainian-born Sonia Delaunay’s work at the Tate Modern. I had never heard of the artist and was captivated by the bold geometric patterns and colors that reminded me of modernists like Picasso but seemed infused with a distinctly feminine spirit. Paintings gave way to rooms full of dresses, coats, costumes, sculpture, furniture, and even an early motor car decorated by Delaunay. As much as I loved the work itself, I was wowed most by the amount and variety of work she made. I had slipped into a kind of art daze, forgetting my body entirely, having turned into just a set of roaming eyes, when Phyllis said she didn’t feel well and would meet me outside the exhibit. When I emerged, she was resting on a bench. “All those patterns were making me sick,” she said. In my journal, even at the time, I wondered if it was actually the prodigious output of this woman artist that was making her sick.
How do we make our way in the world, with its opportunities and disappointments and our weaknesses? I had been willing to leave so much on the side of the road to carry my friend’s burdens, and she knew it. “Side of the road,” “carry her burdens”: what do I even mean? But I know what I mean. I always knew my friendship with her would cost me. I would be in the one-down position; she would call the shots. At the Horn of Plenty pub, the last time I visited her, the woman bartender with a kerchief tied on her head like Rosie the Riveter told us it was Happy Hour. If a customer beat her at Rock, Paper, Scissors, the prize was half price drinks. Phyllis expressed profound bewilderment, mixed with annoyance, at the rules of the game, which she had never played before. But if there’s anything my friend likes it’s a half price drink.
“I can play,” I said, aware of a certain desperate gallantry on my part.
As the bartender and I began, I became aware of feeling a kind of terror incommensurate with the smallness of the stakes. I have to win this.
And I did. The bartender handed over two large glasses of chardonnay. I had won with rock over scissors, and Phyllis was so delighted with my performance that she deigned to ask me to explain the rules of the game.
I left the Horn of Plenty feeling victorious, as if I’d won my friend a new car, another life. I would be the best friend she ever had.
This was our friendship. It was not like other friendships. It was not composed of a felicitous balance of colors and shapes. For a long time, I was entirely devoted to it.
