A Friend For All Seasons
MY FRIENDS HAVE GIRLFRIENDS from day camp, from second grade, from nursery school. I, on the other hand, have Harry. We have known each other for 30 years. He is my oldest friend.
I do not have old girlfriends -- although I wish I did, just as I wish I were two inches taller or marginally less moody, more of a regular gal. But I inherited from my mother a tendency to take everything personally, and from my father, a dogged ambition; the combination made for a cut-and-run adolescence.
Which is not to say I was an outcast. Just that I was in a hurry, wary of becoming comfortable.
This made Harry the perfect pal. He defied category -- interested equally in  magic tricks, poetry and alcohol. He was mysterious without any of the flirty baggage that made other boys so complicated. Harry told me he would be dead before 40, like the other men in his family. He did not have time for the usual  teen-age rituals.
We were sarcastic and restless. And we were comfortably mismatched, which may be the key to our longevity. He still remembers the "lunch from another planet"  that my mother served when he dropped by one summer afternoon -- cold borscht with sour cream, an unremarkable meal in our Jewish home. I found his quiet, dark, fatherless house -- I cannot recall his mother's feet making any sound as  they hit the floor -- a comforting escape from my combustible family.
We went for endless bicycle rides along Lake Michigan. I appeared in one of Harry's poems ("damned deodand of bike and Jewess"), which I immediately tucked  into my wallet, and subsequent wallets, for years. While I cannot lay my hands on it right now, I know it is in this house somewhere.
When I picked the wrong college, Harry, a sophomore at a men's school nearby, showed up for a big football weekend so I would have a date for the scheduled festivities. And he believed that I might become a writer -- no big deal today,  maybe, but a minority opinion at the dawn of the women's movement.
He is the only person with whom I have been falling-down drunk -- six whisky  sours, The Orange Bar, Syracuse, 1968. I may be the only person who knows he used to have a manual typewriter at his bedside so he could record his dreams the instant he woke up. I liked to listen to his dreams. I led such a matter-of-fact existence -- Rice Krispies, matching kilts and knee socks. Harry  was my escape.
At this point in the narrative my husband likes to smirk. He thinks this is all polite euphemism. He refers to Harry as "my wife's high-school boyfriend."
Yes and no. We dated a little during Harry's senior year, and the summer after he graduated. And there was a fervid interlude when we were both in college, long nights of sexual brinkmanship in a deserted fraternity house. He said please, I said no. I changed my mind and he held back. We were never lovers.
This is where the story usually ends. People don't know how to be friends with someone who never wanted them or doesn't want them anymore. But Harry and I were lucky. Somehow we understood that this was not rejection. It was fumbling,  of the late-teen-age, presexual revolution variety. Nothing personal; a rehearsal for later life.
We escaped with our affections intact -- but three years later, we had a disagreement on a topic neither of us remembers and retreated to opposite sides  of the country.
The annual transcontinental phone calls began in the mid-70's. Steadfast as ever, Harry would call late at night with a grocery list of questions, and we would talk until we caught up. I called him once, when an abrasive first marriage made me wonder whether I had ever been a decent person; Harry was the only one with a historical perspective. He showed up in Los Angeles in 1978 in a rumpled summer suit and with a swollen jaw, the result of emergency dental work. When he came back in 1985 we were both better off: I had a second sweet husband and a new book; he had a computer software company and a businessman's dark-blue suit.
Then, in 1990, he and his new wife stopped by on their way to see a doctor in San Diego. Harry had made it to just past 40, but barely. He had already undergone open-heart surgery; he had pills, he was on a no-fat diet, but still his arteries threatened to close up.
It had been 20 years since I kissed him, and we never had the kind of wonderfully sloppy physical relationship that women have so easily with each other. But I wanted to do something. Harry once extracted me from a vitriolic family picnic, and then sat with me while I sobbed about the great injustice of  being born. Now I listened to him crack wise about the coronary Roto-Rooter -- and I did not know what to do to rescue him.
So I handed him our then-infant daughter. I was one of those loopy late Moms  who believe our children personify nothing less than hope, promise and magic. Maybe Sarah's invincibility would rub off on Harry. Given the careful vocabulary of our friendship, it was all I could think of to offer.
Go head, sneer. Six years later, Harry has just become a father himself. We allow ourselves a sweet joke here: perhaps some day Sarah and young William will meet and fall in love. We like, now, to talk about the passage of time -- Harry, who always thought he had too little of it, and me, still eternally in a hurry.
Our friendship exists at more of an emotional distance than I imagine it would have been between old women friends. We visit the past for entertainment and its charm -- but never long enough to make judgments about what we did or did not do. The important thing at this point is to maintain, because there is much at stake: Harry has known me longer than any other woman in his life (except his mom), and I have known him longer than any man except my dad.
My husband has a friend named Harry who lives down the street and is our daughter's godfather, and recently Sarah wanted to figure out how to distinguish one Harry from the other. Calling them new Harry and old Harry seemed wrong, since they both have been our friends for decades. We settled on "our Harry," for her godfather, and "my Harry," for my friend.
He, however, calls Sarah's godfather "the other Harry," wishing to assert his pre-eminence in the field.
That's O.K. with me.
HERS Karen Stabiner is writing a book on the war againstbreast cancer. She lives in Santa Monica, Calif.