Chapter Five Friends

Chapter Five

 

Friends

 

“My friends are my estate.”

       --- Emily Dickinson, on wealth.

 

This particular secret visit with Jesse concluded, I drove as fast but as cautiously as possible to a secluded payphone spot, entered the calling card codes and, in turn, dialed Grace, Stormy, Lynda, László, Jane and Kincaid and Joseph and Sheryl.  These are my closest personal friends who know every sordid and intimate minute about this story and its anatomy.

 

Lynda, who has three adult daughters and one son my Zane’s age, and László, with a long, long – time partner, are unmarried.  Grace and Stormy are both in wondrous, many years’ – long marriages with sons each, lives of regular and rousing family togetherness and space for individual pursuits and calm.  Joseph and Sheryl are also ecstatically married to each other ten or fifteen years now after not – so – fine first unions each and have together raised Sheryl’s daughter to adulthood.  Jane and Kincade are a divorced, devoted mother and her adult, devoted son.

 

I am truly blessed.  Apparently lots of persons are not.  It seems that having close, personal, emotionally intimate friends, especially of the same gender as oneself, is something not everyone has in common.  In fact, it seems that not everyone has even one such person in their lives.  They don’t get up every day and count, for that day nor for any other, someone of their same sex as being an individual to whom they can go with their slight – to – great problems or joys of that day. 

 

Some folks have it this way because they want it this way.  Some have it this way because they say they want it this way.  Still others are without this necessity in their lives because they choose not to do the work that it takes to be a friend themselves.

 

Did I say necessity?  O, quite.  For me, anyhow, they are.  On a good day, friends are a necessity, nourishment.  On a bad day, year, decade, lifetime, friends are to my spirit what breath is to my carcass. 

I don’t know how persons thrive without the knowledge that when they need their core uplifted by the sound or touch of another trustworthy human being and the unconditional validation there is in that accepting voice or that leveling grasp, there isn’t one such individual around for them.

 

In 12½ years of marriage to Herry Edinsmaier and in my knowing him since our chance encounter at a discothèque just off the University campus, more like a saloon it was … come to think of it, where I’d been celebrating my receipt that very day, 06 March 1974, of the letter of acceptance into veterinary medical school and he was drinking off rejection after his date for that evening had stood him up – 26 years now it has been, I have never known this man, Edinsmaier, to have had even one such person in his life.  If ever pressed about this, Herry would make it vividly clear that to have this ‘necessity’ – really close personal men friends – was a weakness in a guy.  It was the same thing as being needy, dependent, incapable of self – sufficiency and, therefore, quite a negative thing.

 

What he did have in his life were many, many persons he said were friends.  What they were were women.  His activities, schooling and job as a physician in pathology laboratories all put him around many women; and they were almost always in positions of subordination to his status as that of a doctor.  But, like a host of other people know, although Herry never wanted to acknowledge, this is exactly how men get themselves into a passel of trouble.  By not seeking out other men to fulfill this absolute necessity of humankind and life.

 

Usually the worn – out, ages – old excuses proffered for this behavior of men is that women are ‘so understanding’, ‘so easy to talk to’, ‘can read my mind’.  Hello here?  Women can’t – and never could – read minds yet have continued to let these impossible expectations that they can prosper.  Herry never wanted to reckon that if he had a problem, a gripe or a joy, he could have avoided a whole lot of shit if he’d’ve just taken it to me, his wife and supposed ‘best friend’.  Well, best friend, at least, according to all the TV talk show psychologists anyhow.  Or.  If he had complained or reveled, instead, with a couple of cronies down at the corner café over a cup of java. 

 

This concept is so easy for most secure men and women to fathom.  That having only women, especially subordinate ones, as confidants and sounding boards, as ‘someone to talk to’ when you are a man, is not going to lead to therapeutic relief.  In a true therapy sense, that is.  In the sense of what the right thing to be doing with one’s self is.  It is only going to get him into a great big mess.  The Reverend Billy Graham understood this from Day One of his worldwide ministry and often, publicly, credited this understanding with his ability to avoid all the shit the other evangelists always seemed to be getting themselves into.  But, hey, it’s his mess, aaahh, life.  Herry’ll get out of it what he puts into it, not?  Garbage in, garbage out. 

 

This massive mistake is true for women as well, of course.  Having only men friends when one is female is tantamount to begging for destruction.  Except for one tiny little matter:  women, when they do have friends, have women friends in their lives also and, more often than not, have more women friends than they do men friends.  Plenty of women have no friends, I know; and plenty of women have men friends as do I.  But when women recognize that the need for friends in general exists at all, it just so happens that they, more than the men I’ve known, seek out persons of the same gender with whom to be friends.

 

It’s that little, simple process of recognizing the need that’s the key.  What it certainly isn’t is a weakness.  Needing true friends is not a negative.

 

*     *     *     *

 

“O! M’god!  You’re married to Dr. Edinsmaier?!  Dr. Edinsmaier??!!  Get outta’here, Woman! … No! Really?!  O!  M’gosh, you are soooo lucky!”  Over the course of the 14 – plus years that Herry and I were both in the medical and research professions together before and after marriage, my path crossed repeatedly with those of many, many women who would exclaim to me, upon learning that I was, indeed, his alleged ‘best friend’, how it was that he would bring them flowers and it wasn’t even Secretary’s Day and how it was that he’d provide doughnuts Friday after Friday and take them all out to lunch together or individually just spur of the moment – like, his treat …

 

… and how it must just follow, didn’t it, that he did all these same romantic, appreciative gestures for

me, his wife and best friend, didn’t it?  I would listen quietly, o – so quietly, and nod, never letting myself tell any of them, in all those 14 years when we worked so close in real physical proximity to each other day after day after day, that we had actually gone to lunch with each other exactly twice.  I never told any of them that, although we’d had three young and mighty hungry sons in 12½ years of marriage, not one time, at 7:00 am, when Dr. Edinsmaier was preparing his body to smell o – so luscious for his all – day meetings with so many of them, did he ever take something out of the freezer to thaw for when the Boys’ supper would be coming up some 12 hours later and he and I would be returning home with them ravenous.   And, as regards the initial gathering in of the trainloads of food for these same wondrous Boys of ours, I never told any of these women, in 12½ years of marriage to this so incredibly charming and romantic a man, that we had never, not once, with or without the Boys, gone shopping together for groceries for them and us, our beautiful, ‘liberated’ and deliciously perfect family.   

 

I never said to any of them that this man quite willfully and literally refused to use my first name, Legion, to address me or even to speak to others about me.  He would enter a room.  It could be crowded, lots of people milling about or there could be only me in it; and I would simply have to know that when he spoke, it quite probably meant that he ‘may’ be intending his statements for me to respond to … If he stayed in the room long enough to say something at all.  These women did not know that a favorite and well – honed shunning practice of his, in addition to his not using my first name except to ostentatiously yell it as if he were calling off the dogs when I’d been disciplining any one of the Boys, was to exit a room or space immediately upon my entering it or to hastily and abruptly, in reverberating silence, back up and out of a place that I already occupied.

 

And, most especially, I very carefully never told these fawning and adoring women that this supposedly greatest and foreverest, most belovéd and trustworthy best friend of mine, whose voice was the touch of velvet and the color of chocolate syrup, whose voice could smooth out and plump up a corsage bloom shriveled for a century, had never, not once, in 14½ years of his knowing me before he left us, used it, that rose – petal voice of his, to tell me … me, the strong, warm, wonderful, brainy and so wildly working womb for and half the gene pool of his children, those three most brilliant and beautiful kids in all the history of the entire World, “I love you.”  Not even one time.

 

Zero is the number of times these most amazing children’s most amazing mother ever heard from their father that I, Legion, was loved by him.