5.
The friendship of George and Richard
was wrought with enough complicated feelings and nuances that I feel compelled
to describe it in familial terms, but that does not provide the sort of
shortcut I wish it would. I want to say,
“They loved each other like brothers, and like brothers, neither one could
imagine life without the other, but, also like brothers, they did not always
enjoy each others' company,” but this is not quite right, because, through Beth
as well as Molly (me), George and Richard were connected to each other for over
20 years, but their connection had its lulls and eddies, and there were whole
years where they only saw each other at holidays, when Richard would be
dropping Molly off at Beth’s apartment and, like clockwork (because George was
set in his ways) it would be George who answered the door, having arrived at
Beth’s place a couple hours earlier to help clean up for Molly’s visit, and
George and Richard would have a brief conversation, not bothering to fill each
other in on recent significant events, assuming that Molly took care of
relating important news to all the outposts that comprised their makeshift
family, which she did. However, these
brief and apparently superficial doorway conversations were not insignificant
to either man. After kissing Molly on
the crown of her head and saying, “Have fun, kiddo,” as Richard walked back to
his car, invariably anticipating the date he almost always had with one of the
girlfriends of his life on the nights Molly stayed with Beth, there was also a
portion of his consciousness that was considering the conversation he’d just
had with George. George. George.
George made funny quips referencing characters from contemporary British
novels written by women, and Richard had never read any of these books. It filled him with pity for George that
George’s life was so limited to books and Beth.
But it filled him with gratitude that George had assumed Richard had
read the books George spoke about. Did
he spend the night at Beth’s, or just get to her place early this morning?,
Richard would wonder, and if he got there the night before, what did they do
that night (not sex, of course, but what movie did they watch on TV, or did
George take her out for drinks and dinner?), and did childishly selfish Beth
make him sleep on the couch, or give him the bed (Richard never knew that Beth always
preferred sleeping on couches to sleeping on beds, much as her own mother
had)? What does George think of me?,
Richard asked himself. Unlike the
friends he made at work, who drifted out of his life and never drifted back in,
and who were, ultimately, expendable, Richard knew, during the years he and
George acted as mere acquaintances, that George would always be in his
life. Is that how brothers feel about
each other? Is that the rhythm of
brotherhood? I can only guess.
Then, there is the first year of the
friendship of Richard and George. Before
Richard and Beth’s brief marriage ended, before the afternoon a newly divorced
Beth showed up at George’s bookstore, pushing Molly in a dark blue stroller,
knowing instinctively that George would provide her lifelong safety the second
he looked up from his book and smiled at her, it had been Richard who stopped
by George’s bookstore all the time, sometimes as often as three evenings a
week, after work. He didn’t know, during
these visits, how significant George would become to the woman he would marry,
the child he would have. He liked to
spend a few hours in the bookstore almost the same way a celebrity likes to
shop in a K-Mart unrecognized; in other words, to slum. But what is at the heart of the enjoyment
people find in “slumming” is something genuine, though the act of slumming
hinges on falseness. What is at the
heart of slumming is the desire to experience another way of life.
Those are two stages of the friendship of
George and Richard.
Beth moved to Phoenix, Arizona, during the
bewildering summer of 2001. It was the
most uncharacteristic act imaginable; she hated the heat, she hated even to
leave her apartment sometimes for days at a time, and her survival depended on
her proximity to George, who gave her money whenever he could and who even
bought her groceries for her, often, knowing what she liked to eat, delivering
the bags of food, Vodka and diet cola right to her doorstep. Nonetheless, she moved to Phoenix,
Arizona.
Once Beth left the state of
California, with all its legendary goldenness, George was a changed man. He became bewildered and wore a constant
searching expression on his face. At
this point in their friendship, Richard, with Molly’s help, became providers
for him. They had him over for dinner
every Tuesday, Thursday and any other night he seemed to want to linger at
their house. In 2002, he began to rapidly
lose weight. It was discovered he had
renal cancer. I think this might be a
common way for poor people (which he was by this time, having lost his store
long ago) to die: the county hospital
can perform surgery on a poor person, sometimes, when its budget allows for
charity, but the patient might have to wait for months, and is sent back home
as soon as possible. George’s
chemotherapy treatment was in the form of a pill. He swallowed it and then retched and shivered,
hardly able to move, for the next few days.
During this first bout with cancer, he lived with
Richard and Molly for two months. Molly
liked to behave particularly solicitously with him during this time, because
she’d thought she would never get a chance to openly love him, that because of
his reserve and shyness, she would have to permanently act like she took him
for granted, as she used to when she was a young chile.
Richard began to think of George as
a paternal figure during this stay. He
noticed that when he told George about his day at work, George always asked
follow up questions, and ended the conversations with an encouraging summary of
the strong points of Richard’s character.
Maybe I matter in this world, Richard came away from their conversations
musing. Maybe I do.
