My friend Robert

We called him many things. Aaron called him Bobby-Boy. He’d introduce himself on the phone as TallDarkandHandsome. Then we nicknamed him TDH. When we met he was called Bob. When he moved here, he wanted to be called Robert. He’s still Bob to me, although to people who met him here I refer to him as Robert. When I speak to him, or write, I address him as Robert. It’s what he prefers.

I don’t know what to say. My best friend is dying. He was my best friend—we shared a lot, did many things together, enjoyed similar interests. He was my worst friend—he was not nice, he could be cruel and demanding, relentless, mean. When we were together, he would tell me emphatically that he was “Not Nice.” Recently I sent him a card that read “To a nice boy.” The woman at the homecare agency who has taken care of him for the past five years called me yesterday and said, when she read it to him, he laughed.

He was a very perceptive and very dense person. He was a mass of contradictions. The best and the worst of people. Well educated by his own efforts, independent and very proud. He has kept his penetrating wit right to the end, charming and befriending everyone in the nursing home where he was this past month. The service people who have cared for him over the past few years think of him as family. Apparently his primary caregiver, a large Nigerian man (needed to be able to pick him up) was devastated when Robert was taken to the nursing home from his apartment. As trained caregivers, they know how to relate to difficult people. They know he is difficult. And they love him.

Bob was diagnosed with Multiple Schlerosis twenty-three years ago, when he was thirty-five. It has been the slowly progressing kind. Just getting worse in slow increments. Recently his friend Jim called to tell me Bob is paralyzed from the neck down and in a nursing home. I had been trying to reach him but couldn’t get through. As of yesterday he is in a hospital, gravely ill, but being kept alive a little longer (against his wishes, although it is hard at this point for him to express himself) with antibiotics. He had stopped eating, a good way to die. Except that now it will take longer.

As long as I have known him, he has been talking about suicide. He would go through periods of intense depression, bleak dark days. Then recover. Be lively, enthusiastic, productive, enjoyable. I told him once, if he died, I wanted his jaunty walk. I haven’t seen that walk for many years. When he first had trouble with his legs (he told me it was like walking through a bowl of jello) he would use an umbrella, a beautiful black one with about twenty spokes, so that people wouldn’t think he needed a cane. I’ve since used that umbrella for my students to draw (not an easy assignment).

We met in Manhattan when we were both ending bad marriages. The first time I saw him, he was putting the plumbing in for their kitchen sink. We were immediately attracted to each other. I was renting a third floor loft space next to the one he and his then wife were living in. Mine was to be my studio. My home away from home. I later called it my halfway house—halfway between my marriage and not-marriage. Bob and I talked one rainy afternoon in the stairwell of the loft building, chatting about movies and books and art. He said he liked rainy days; he liked Bergman, Miles Davis, Eva Hesse. He was mostly self-educated, broadly read, very intelligent and we shared so many literary and artistic affections. And then we arranged each week to spend time together, to go to art galleries, coffee shops, movies, walk around, talk. He was a painter, a master with collage. I respected his work and his opinions about my work as well as other art. It was romantic. And innocent. At most, we played footsie under the table. The attraction was obvious to both our spouses. But when, at the end of our respective marriages, we tried to be together, it was too difficult. Although I know he loved me, and I him, his harsh ways with words were too unpleasant for me to sustain a relationship with him. Nevertheless, we remained friends. He was always my Friday night movie date, whether we were together or not. We tried to be together many times, but it never worked. It was too difficult.

Then I asked him to come live with me here in Nova Scotia. I foolishly thought my love for him would break through his stubborn anger. We had a three month honeymoon. After that it soured. He was tortured by his increasing physical limitations and was not nice. After a year and a half, a friend asked me what if my son Aaron were five years old and living in my house, what would I do to protect him. Suddenly I saw the verbal assault I was experiencing every day as intolerable. And I forced him to leave. That was thirteen years ago.

He is the one who sends me boxes of books every few months. First I have to air them out. Rid them of the cigarette smell before I read them. I treasure these books. Usually some become my favorites and I enjoy passing them around. Sometimes he would ask me how a book ended. He knew I always finished a book. But he could definitely put one down if it didn’t sustain his interest.

Our friendship has spanned more than thirty-three years. It began with that sudden attraction, the one romantic movies are based on. What makes us love someone? Is it hormones, chemistry, a matching of minds, of bodies, of fluids, of desires, values? Robert, I do hope we meet again in another life and do it right. Next time.

Posted by leya at December 11, 2005 07:32 AM