LIVES; Lawless Friendship

We were sitting on a sea wall one summer afternoon, laughing about a future that we envisioned as countless days in porch rockers, reminiscing and complaining about our dentures, when suddenly she said, "I can't imagine growing old without you." I was touched, but also startled. Ruthie and I had spent our lives together, separated by 200 miles and often many months, but always able to pick up a conversation as if space and time had never interrupted it. Still, we were undemonstrative, unsentimental, closemouthed really. Even in silence, we could always hear what the other was saying. "I can't imagine growing old without you." It was the only instance in which one of us had articulated what both of us had always known: that the glue that bound us was as powerful as that which binds parent to child, husband to wife.
Ruthie is not going to grow old with me, or with anyone. She died in September, and all I could think of were Wordsworth's lines about Lucy: "But she is in her grave, and oh,/The difference to me!"
She was my sister," I said, crying, to her husband. "No, she was more than a sister. She was. . . ." And then I stopped. I did not know how to explain, not even to myself, what she was to me. "Father," "mother," "wife," "husband," "child": all evoke similar resonances. But not "friend." Friend has many definitions, and no two are ever alike. I am reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald's remark about there being all kinds of love in the world, but never the same love twice. There is never the same friend either.
Wordsworth and Fitzgerald come naturally when I think about Ruthie because we were both much given to reading. When we were 12 our Christmas presents to each other were identical copies of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's "Sonnets From the Portuguese." E. B. B., we said in our also identical inscriptions, had "helped us so much" -- we who were still years from tabulating "How do I love thee." But already we had found magic in words, though seldom the same words. "You must read this," she'd say, pushing Tom Robbins at me. "God forbid," I'd moan, and respond with Bruce Chatwin.
Long after that solemn exchange of the sonnets, it was another book, or rather a line from a poem, that linked me to a second friend. Acquaintances at the time, we were in a jewelry store looking for elephant-hair bracelets, the rage at the moment. Trying one on, she said, "Whoever comes to shroud me, do not harm," and I continued, "that subtle wreath of hair, which crowns my arm." I do not recall our mentioning Donne, or any other poet, ever again. But a chain had been forged, and it lasted until she died. Or, to be precise, almost until she died. If we had been "domestic partners," I might have had official leave to give up work, be with her 24 hours a day. But with our friendship unsanctioned by sexual connection, we were outside the law's protection.
But, then, friendship is essentially lawless. There are no rules, only expectations. Realized, they are all the more valued because they are freely given. Unrealized, their lack usually occasions only a few tears. Saying, "This person is no longer my friend" rarely entails the same devastation as saying, "This person is no longer my husband."
Yet it can, because "friend" covers degrees of affection ranging from that which emerges from constant (and often mindless) proximity to that which emerges from the deepest consonances of thought and character. I shall never forget the desolation in the voice of a very old man speaking of a lost companion. "There is no one left with whom I can talk about Diaghilev," he said. A culture, an esthetic was concentrated in those 12 words, and so was the sorrow of someone who had lost not only his friend but a good part of his world.
Friendship is lawless, too, in that it is the rogue elephant of emotions. It crashes into relationships, splinters intimacy. A parent is jealous of a child's cherished schoolteacher; a wife, of her husband's buddy; a husband, of his wife's old pal. What do these people -- the teacher, the buddy, the pal -- have that they haven't got? It's not physical attraction. Physical attraction would be understandable, if painful to accept. But it is not as powerful as two psyches touching and employing a lingua franca all their own.
They touch in different ways. One friend and I have been through a marriage apiece, reams of gossip and countless conversations about the difficulty of finding a decent lipstick. Yet in the end, we always come back to our work. Work is our passion, its language our language, and if we have both maintained our footing on some rather perilous ladders, I believe we owe our stubborn balance as much to each other as to ourselves.
We employed a different vocabulary, my friend who will never grow old and I. It started small -- we met, literally, as babies -- and over the years grew to encompass the pleasures and pains of a lifetime. Today I can scarcely bear the terrible singularity of my memories. Now no one but I knows what it was to be chased around a bandstand on an autumn afternoon by two little boys bent on kissing us. No one but I remembers our scary trip along Fifth Avenue on a snowy December day, Ruthie determined to drive me to my wedding and I certain she'd get us killed en route. No one but I remembers how at midnight after lobster dinners we would surreptitiously hurl the empty shells into the harbor. Returning them, we intoned, "to the deep whence they come." Yes, I remember. Sometimes I even laugh. But I laugh alone and, oh, the difference to me.
Mary Cantwell is a member of the editorial board of The Times.