Alas, a Blog

The discussion on Myca’s Nice Guy™ thread reminded me of someone I had not thought about in a very long time, a woman–I’ll call her Kim–with whom I was close friends in college, whom I lost as a friend after she decided to marry a man I was convinced was no good for her, not because I dropped her as a friend, but because she dropped me. We’d been classmates, but not more than that, in sixth grade and had not seen each other until we met again as English majors during our sophomore year in college. I have no memory of how we became close friends, but we did, quickly, and, eventually, I wanted very much to turn that friendship into something more.

I don’t remember if I ever told Kim how I felt. I do remember, however, very clearly when she told me how she felt about me. We were at a beach not far from campus and she had just come out of the water and plopped down on her stomach. We started talking, most probably about something we were reading for class, when suddenly Kim sat up and faced me. “You know, Richard,” she said, “you’re like a brother to me.” I don’t remember what, if anything, I said in response, though it was certainly not what I wanted to hear. Still, our friendship was far more important to me than the possibility of a sexual relationship which might end up not working out, so I swallowed my disappointment and accepted her, and loved her, as the intimate friend I assumed she was saying was the only thing she ever wanted to be to me.

Before Kim met the man she married, she had one boyfriend that I remember, a guy I thought was a jerk long before they became a couple, not so much because he was arrogant, though he was, but because he epitomized that arrogance, at least this is how I remember feeling about it back then, by braiding and beading his hair in imitation of Bo Derek’s hairstyle in the movie 10. The semester Kim went out with him, she also moved to a dorm across campus nearer to where he lived. In fact, she might have done that to be closer to him, but I am not sure. Once–and this is what confirmed him in my mind not just as a jerk but as a true asshole–he came back with her to her old dorm room to pick up some things. I walked by the open door on my way to leave a note on another friend’s door down the hall, saw them out of the corner of my eye as I passed and figured I would pop in to say hello on my way back. At first, I didn’t think they’d seen me, but then, when I was still just a couple of doors down from where they were, I heard him say, “See, I told you that once you moved across campus, he’d forget about you.” I put the note on my other friend’s door and hurried back, but by the time I got there, Kim and her boyfriend were gone.

I know she eventually broke up with that guy–it’s funny, I remember his name, first and last–and that she, too, decided he was a jerk; and I have memories of going to at least one classical music concert with her during our senior year (if I remember correctly, she played the violin) and of there being that night what I thought might have been some sexual tension between us, though nothing came of it. Indeed, I didn’t even realize it might have been sexual tension until the following day, and then it confused me because it was so at odds with the substance of our friendship; and I remember how ambitious she was as an aspiring journalist and how much I respected the integrity of her politics and her belief that she could make a real difference in the world. Mostly, though, I remember how much I liked being with her. Just being with her. She laughed a lot, and I don’t think there was anything we could not talk about. Her friendship enriched my life, plain and simple. It made me happy, and I was deeply grateful for that.

Then, in our senior year, a speaker came to campus, a man who’d written a tremendously popular book on “how to woo and win a woman.” The school newspaper assigned Kim to cover his talk, and when she did–at least this is my memory of the story she told me the next day–she asked him during the Q&A about something that, if true, would call into question the validity of his claim to be the kind of man who could write the kind of book he’d written and be taken seriously. His response, in front of the entire audience, was to invite her out to dinner that night with the rest of the press, where he promised he would answer her question. At the dinner, he offered to give her an exclusive, private interview back in his hotel room. She went with him. At some point, if I remember correctly what she told me, I guess it became clear to her that he was interested in giving her a good deal more than an interview and she asked him to take her home, or to call a taxi. He refused and she ended up having sex with him that night.

When she told me this, I was, for obvious reasons, horrified, and I told her so, and I pleaded with her not to see him again. Even if she did not think that what he did was date rape, I said–because she didn’t–a man who behaved like that was not someone she ought to trust; but she did not listen to me, and she started going out with him. This inevitably meant that she and I saw less of each other, though we still talked on the phone pretty frequently, and then, after what seems in my recollection to have been a very short while, and I mean a very short while, she told me he’d proposed marriage and that she was thinking of accepting. I asked her if she loved him, and while she did not say no, she very pointedly did not say yes. I don’t know how much time passed before she agreed to be his wife, but she did finally do so, and that was the end of our friendship. I remember trying to call her, to write her, but she did not respond at all. I was not surprised not to be invited to the wedding. Several years after we graduated, I was talking with someone who had also been her friend when we were in college, and he said that she’d told him she wanted to cut out of her life completely anyone she’d known during her college years. She didn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him why.

I googled Kim’s name today and was surprised to discover, given her one-time desire to be a writer, that she has almost no online presence. There are a couple of references to her and her husband, recent enough that I assume they are still married, and a couple of scanned articles she wrote for our college newspaper back when we were undergraduates. I read them wistfully, remembering the strength of her voice and of her character. I hope–despite everything that what I have written here implies about the man she married, because I would wish her nothing less–that her marriage has been a good one, happy and challenging in all the right ways, and most of all loving; and I hope that she has found ways of making her life as meaningful as she once thought being a journalist would make it; mostly, though, I wish there was a way I could find out if those hopes are true, because I never had the chance to say goodbye to her, to grieve the loss of her as a friend, and I guess I would also like the opportunity to tell her that a part of me still misses her.

I am not interested in reopening the debate from Myca’s thread about the definition of Nice Guy™ and any comments which do so will be deleted.

Cross posted on It’s All Connected.