from “See Friendship”
Jeremy Gordon | See Friendship | Harper Perennial | March 4 2024 | 288 Pages
America was on its way out, the stranger insisted. This much was clear. He wrote history books nobody read, and taught classes nobody revered, and composed tweets nobody shared—a path he didn’t regret, because his work was vital and had led him to conclude, at odds with the forgivable naïveté of his undergraduates and the unforgivable naïveté of his peers, that the signs were dismal. Fucked, even. The student loan bubble? Tensions with China? The hollowing of rural America? The collapse of the reasonable center? Medical debt, race relations? My God, the climate crisis, and on top of all that the looming threat of another four years, which, all liberal hysteria aside, our enemies in the Kremlin were probably planning right this moment? It added up, and it added up, and it added up until one actually could not believe how much it was adding up.
“For sure,” I said, stretching to see if the bartender was back with my gin and tonic.
“It’s ironic,” the stranger said, leaning into the bar, “because the Russians are only doing what we’ve done to however many other democracies around the world. In a way you could say we’re getting our just deserts. Actually I’ll say it exactly like that: We’re getting our just deserts.”
He apologized for getting bent out of shape, he knew it made him no fun at staff meetings or baby showers, but if you looked at the world with unblinking clarity—the way one must if they wanted to fall asleep every night with a clean conscience and clear heart—it was the only possible takeaway, and if it meant he was “drinking by himself on a weeknight” instead of “spending time with his kids,” well, that was a tolerable trade- off. There were worse fates, such as obliviousness or unearned arrogance, he said, along with something else I didn’t catch in the ambient noise before I nodded several times and walked away.
I was not interested in feeling nihilistic about the state of the world. I was more interested in the bar, as part of my ongoing taxonomy of Los Angeles nightlife. The walls were painted pitch black and lined with taped-up cushions. The jukebox didn’t follow any logic beyond “music for people to kiss to,” skipping from Lynyrd Skynyrd to Travis Scott to Sade. The room was blanketed in an ominous red light, except for the cheap, fluorescent glow of the beer fridges behind the bar. Overall, it had the vibe of an Amsterdam sex dungeon. But it was no more bizarre a place to meet Kelsey than anywhere else in Los Angeles, because I hadn’t been anywhere else in Los Angeles. When she suggested it, I didn’t possess the knowledge to confidently counterpoint with No, not there, how about here, as I might have in New York. I was just along for the ride.
In fact I’d agreed so enthusiastically that I hadn’t considered how unusual it was to be meeting her at all, until I walked into the bar. Five more days until my medical leave ended and I flew home, which meant five more opportunities to hunt down the night in this alien city, and I was using one of them to maybe awkwardly hang out with a professional acquaintance, or whatever you called those tertiary friends from way back you followed on social media without ever thoughtfully interacting with them. I knew what Kelsey looked like now because I’d seen photos of her on Instagram and received her press releases in my inbox, but I didn’t know how she talked. I didn’t even remember how she’d talked when we’d actually known each other, because it wasn’t like we’d been close in the first place. She’d mostly been a girl from high school, until the unfortunate sequence of events during the summer after high school when I tried to make her my girlfriend, which not coincidentally was the last time we’d hung out. I hadn’t really thought about all that in at least a decade, but it pushed its way to the front the instant we recognized each other in the bar, and after the requisite hug and burst of hellos I sat down hoping she didn’t remember, or at least that she hadn’t held it against me.
It had been a cloudless, perfect Chicago day. We were sprawled atop Navy Pier’s verdant lawns, near the cubist water fountain at the center of the park. Tandem bicycles rolled along the sidewalk; the sound of children’s laughter skipped through the air as they chased the perfect cylinders of water erupting from the ground. Navy Pier was infested with tourists and suburbanites, but it had always been one of my favorite places to sit, not spend money, and ponder a bold life move, like bleaching my hair or getting into country music or telling Kelsey she was the dreamiest girl alive, and that was just swell. I would’ve been happy lying there forever, fixating on her blond punk bangs and her bright red lipstick, searching for the tender look hinting she wanted me to divulge all the infinite mysteries of my heart and mind.
Anthony had said my plan wouldn’t work but I’d insisted on proceeding, and I listened patiently as Kelsey rambled about the wonders of home-studio technology while leaving no room to hear my confession of undying affection, which was really just a limp, unexamined crush. That’s why I’d invited her out after hearing she’d broken up with her boyfriend at the end of senior year, though we’d talked for an hour and I hadn’t made my move.
“With the right plug-ins, your laptop is just as good as a real studio,” she said. “Still, I’m going to major in music tech just so I can get that formal experience.”
“That’s fascinating,” I said. “Hey, did you know how potatoes are a perfect expression of love?”
I’d read the whole spiel on a message board after Googling “things to say to girls,” and it had struck me as romantically absurd in a way that Kelsey, the punkest girl in our graduating class who didn’t hate me, would surely appreciate. Potatoes could survive in any climate. They were ugly, but nutritious. Stick one in a jar of water and it would sprout branches against the glass, growing with and within its surroundings in perfect symbiosis. You could even turn them into a working battery, sort of. Potatoes were durable, hearty, adaptable—everything found in true love, I said, mustering my most earnest voice.
It’s hard to believe I was ever such a fucking idiot. Even then, I had enough intuition for faces to tell Kelsey was deeply put off by what I’d just said, though she spared me her thoughts and graciously maneuvered the conversation back to laptops.
Another half hour went by, Anthony happened not to show up, and when Kelsey continued asking where he was, I made a big show of texting to find out. “I’m confused,” I told her. “He’s usually so punctual.” A few minutes later he replied with the exact phrase: I can’t make it, my mom says I have to clean the bathroom, just like we’d talked about. “He can’t make it, his mom said he has to clean the bathroom,” I said, showing her my phone.
The truth was he’d never planned to be there in the first place, because I had a desperate crush on Kelsey but high school was over so I couldn’t exactly ask her out in the hallways after AP Calculus, and because she and Anthony were real friends a group hang was the perfect pretense for me to see if she might be into me asking her out, and if Anthony happened not to show up I could just skip the middleman and find out for myself. But as soon as I confirmed his absence, Kelsey said she should get going, because she had work in a few hours. I asked if she was sure, and the way she said yes. with a period at the end indicated I shouldn’t offer to walk her to the train, or force the issue of my undying affection, or even go for a hug. I was eighteen years old, I’d kissed one girl in my life—an unimpressed classmate named Natalia, who’d given me the boot not long after—my favorite movie was Reservoir Dogs, and I’d never been published outside the high school newspaper. I didn’t yet know how to bring a conversation around to where I wanted, how to subtly gesture at an idea until it emerged through its own momentum. When I looked at Kelsey then, all I saw was a dead end I could do nothing about, except smile and say, “Okay, see you around.”
A few days later, Anthony and I went by the Italian ice window where Kelsey worked. We were transcendently stoned and giggled constantly while requesting a half dozen samples, but despite our obnoxiousness Kelsey was warm and talkative in a way that surpassed her professional obligation to the customer. Exchanging jokes under the outdoor lights, the summer heat thick on our foreheads, I could almost believe we’d be real pals from here on out.
“That went well,” Anthony said as we walked away. “Not at all what I’d expected.” He told me Kelsey had texted him right after she’d left Navy Pier to say how deranged the whole ordeal had been, and how if he ever participated in something like that again, she wouldn’t talk to him for the rest of our lives. “She saw right through your trick, dumbass. I told you it wouldn’t work.”
“What? Shut up.” I tried to brush him off, but I obsessed over what had happened for days, devastated by Kelsey’s powers of observation, by my total romantic hopelessness, by the unquestionable truth of Anthony’s judgment. I was a dumbass, and enough of a misguided romantic to think Kelsey could be convinced by my passionate declarations, though she’d never so much as flirted with me, only smiled—something young men confuse for flirtation when so psychotically horny and lovesick the sudden memory of a close hug is enough to sustain them for months at a time. Though I’d eventually learn how to tell the difference between mutual interest and basic courtesy, whatever I believed back then was only enough to make me act like a fool.
Right now, Kelsey looked incredible. Her red lipstick was the same, but she’d grown out her bangs into some wavy mermaid veil, and her punk fashion had evolved into whatever you called the way women looked in French New Wave movies. As for myself, I’d finally learned how to dress, or at least avoid color clashing. My hair was grayer, and I was definitely fatter, but I was still cute and desirably tall, or so I’d been told on second dates. We were drunk, and I felt attractive enough, and if we’d been sitting side by side on the cushions I might’ve seen it as an electric opportunity to make out, thousands of miles away from where I lived, thirteen years out from that disastrous day at Navy Pier, and ninety-six hours after I had spent the equivalent of my combined utility bill on a purple chore coat that looked unquestionably sharp in the bar’s red lights because I was in Los Angeles, and that was what you did here when you finally had a bit of money.
Kelsey had become a somewhat successful musician, and I’d become a somewhat successful writer, and we’d both matured into the type of sociable and interesting adults who could have a conversation more involved than “So . . . what’s up?” We still followed each other on Instagram, giving me the satisfaction of informing my postcollege friends, “That’s my high school friend,” whenever one of her new songs was released to increased acclaim. We’d stopped interacting somewhere in the Obama years, but when I realized I hadn’t made any real plans in Los Angeles, I trawled social media until I remembered she existed, thought “Why not,” and shot her a message saying I was in town, and did she want to catch up. She responded surprisingly fast, and on my sixth day we were happily drunk and talking like the lifelong confidants we weren’t.
We’d gone through current events and career moves and future plans and started on relationship history before she asked if she could get a serious answer about something. “I know it’s going to sound crazy, but I have to bring this up,” she said. Soon we were dissecting the entire Navy Pier afternoon as though it had happened yesterday.
To my surprise, she didn’t seem to remember it with disgust. Like me, she recalled the weather, and the novelty of lingering in a space hated by most people we knew. She made a touching comment about how I was “such a cutie,” confirming her complete lack of sexual interest. “Yeah, ha-ha, a cutie,” I said, instinctively running my hand through my hair, glad she couldn’t see how gray I’d gone.
Most revelatory, however, was the admission she hadn’t just relied on my emotionally stunted body language to recognize the construction of the entire charade, because Anthony had spoiled my plan the night before. She paraphrased his heads-up: Jacob has a crush on you but he’s too nervous to say it, so what’s going to happen is I’m going to not show up, and then he’ll ask you out or try to kiss you or I don’t know, he’s sort of a retard about this type of thing. Just like that, with no pretense.
So what I’d correctly recognized as Kelsey’s hesitancy following my moronic potato spiel was in fact a more complex web of reactions encompassing her annoyance about the whole scheme, and the secondhand embarrassment of realizing that this had been my big shot, that I’d really thought about this, for real, and could do no better. “I always did attract the tragically awkward types,” she said. “No offense.” (I nodded sagely, to communicate I had transcended offense.) It was all that experience with the strangeness of boys that allowed her to intuit afterward that Anthony also had a crush on her. In the end she delicately brushed off his feeble attempts as well, easier to do when he never formally announced his intentions beyond a few feints at “chilling.”
They’d drifted apart during college, and she had no idea what he was up to. Neither did I, but everyone had a digital paper trail. Kelsey and I took out our phones to discover that he now operated a yak farm in Delaware with his husband. “No way,” we said simultaneously.
The people from your youth were rarely doing exactly what you’d expected of them—I knew that, and could process Anthony’s unexpected traversal with the all-obliterating logic of “that’s just how it is.” What was actually unexpected, even thrilling, was learning about how that period of time hadn’t transpired as I’d perceived it in the moment—about the secrets churning under the surface. Kelsey and I may have been professional acquaintances, but we’d independently traveled along parallel arcs toward becoming fully considered and reflective human beings, which was why we could soberly—even though we were drinking—break down the interpersonal dynamics of that disastrous afternoon, recalling the emotional valences with the neutrality of a psychologist.
I had the distinct feeling this was an unfamiliar conversation, that we weren’t trying to impress each other, that there was no end point in mind. I wasn’t trying to go home with her. We weren’t going to be best friends the next day, and this wasn’t some burning issue we needed to resolve in order to move on to a new phase of our lives. It was just the kind of thing that came up when you had history with someone, history you’d never considered because it didn’t matter that much, until suddenly it did.
See Friendship comes out March 4th. Preorder the book on Bookshop.com