When I leave the restaurant, I look at my phone and there’s a message from her. I don’t touch it. I put it back in my pocket. And then after I’ve walked a couple blocks, I take it out again and click on it. It’s long. The voicemail transcription software hasn’t fully made its way through all the text. I put it back into my pocket. When I’m a few blocks from my house I take it out again. This time it starts to play as soon as I’ve opened the voicemail box. I pause the recording and read the transcription. The gist: she’s not angry because she’s above that, but our friendship, for all intents and purposes, is over. Various digs at my character (bad) directed at me with a venom I’d believed, previously, that she reserved solely for men. Physically I am unaffected. Mentally—I am uncertain. I turn the key and walk two flights up to my studio apartment. I sit on the bed and scroll aimlessly through old promotional emails on my phone. I won’t call her back and she’ll either leave another voicemail or a message or an email or she won’t and that will be that. Or I will call her back and I’ll be forced to defend myself, which will be fine as I’ve done nothing wrong. Either way, I need to decide, so I pull up the recording again, to listen to it and to really hear it out this time, to establish with certainty what I already know, which is that I’ve done nothing wrong.

The first thing that happens is that her voice fills the room. She is berating me with a list of my wrongs the first of which is that I have always been jealous of her and, in fact, she says that I have “coveted” the things she has. This first verdict I evaluate as she goes on. Consciously, over the course of our ten year friendship, I don’t recall coveting. Though it was true that she was richer and thinner and men were drawn to her. Perhaps I had coveted her clothing at various different points. It was true that I remembered she had worn a Betsey Johnson corset dress to our prom, which is not something one remembers casually. It had had an outrageous tulle tutu—along with its outrageous price tag—and the effect of the corset and the tulle tutu was that she looked both childish and a bit lewd and, of course, that had been the purpose. And, perhaps in conjunction with the coveting of her dress, I had coveted her body as well. For if I had worn the dress, my breasts and thighs would have spilled out of it and I would have appeared as a woman and not a teenage girl and so in a way, because she was built like a pole, I’d imagined her childhood and adolescence to have been richer than mine, because I had looked like a woman before I was one.

Was this what she had meant about coveting? I imagine it had more to do with the man who I had been at the restaurant with who had been her lover, her partner, and so I evaluated this, as well. It didn’t surprise me that she’d known because even if he hadn’t told her, it seemed the only logical way for the narrative to progress. The meal had been strictly platonic, but we had talked about her and not in a way that she would have liked. But this was due to the things she had done, the things I had seen her do and the things he had told me she’d done, and not simply because I intended to sully his view of her. I was not attracted to him. Though hadn’t I, at one point during this meal, considered that he had started becoming infatuated with me? Because I knew that I listened well and this was a trait that won certain men over. And if he was infatuated with me, then this would have been flattering because I knew he was a man to whom many other women were attracted, including the woman who had been my friend, who now claimed I had always been jealous of her, had coveted her things, among which, she must have felt, was the man. Didn’t that lend me a certain power? To be able to attract men, not to draw them to me, as she did, but to attract them? Because there is a difference, I think, between drawing and attracting, the former more of a magnetism, the latter a kind of psychological welding, more laborious, more hazardous, more lasting. With the man, had I been covetous? Perhaps, but not of her. But hadn’t I considered, as I left the restaurant, even as I saw on my phone that she had left me a voicemail, what might have happened if I had pressed on, being fairly certain that the man had developed an infatuation for me, even if it wasn’t really physical? Would it not have gone, essentially, the way these things tend to go, not deviating too much from what I know to be the standard interaction between men and women? And wouldn’t this have set off a chain of events that would have been stressful for both of us, that would have eaten away at my psyche, the way now the voicemail was eating away at my psyche, but nonetheless fueled my interest, entertained me, for I was often so bored and looking for ways to correct that?

So now I am frozen cross-legged on the bed with the phone lit up in front of me and she is telling me how women, how friends who are women, should conduct themselves amongst each other. And among the things she thinks women who are friends should do is offer support, as in “women should be supportive of one another,” as opposed to covetous and conniving, as I have been, she says. In fact, she says to me that I have tried to “tear her down” in the way I complain that other women have tried to “tear me down.” And this, too, I must evaluate. It’s true that I have complained of this, but when I think more about it, I find that women have not tried to tear me down but that I have simply never really been able to relate to them, except for the woman on the phone, who has made it clear, at this point, that she no longer wants anything to do with me. I find I cannot relate to single women in their desire for men or, indeed, for other women, in their hatred of men, in their obsessions with their bodies which I cannot help but understand only in terms of men. Or I’ve simply begun to find them boring. And, though I’ve often entered into friendships with women who are in relationships, these friendships become slowly and consistently more cold and terse as though the woman has tightened a rubber band between us that slowly severs me from her. And now I must evaluate whether or not this is a pattern that is specific to me, as in it’s my fault that I have made myself so unrelatable or, perhaps, so unappealing, that only men—whose reasons for befriending me, I am told are suspect—want to associate with me.

And even this woman, who until now I had been friends with for ten years has, in the past, intimated that she’s found me insufferable or, at least, baffling. As in the time that I drove across two state lines to visit her in law school when she was going through a break-up, as she often was, and proposed we go on a hike. She had acquiesced and, without consulting any maps, I had driven toward the mountains and, somewhere along the road, we had lost cell signal, which she had discovered almost immediately and I had insisted we continue, though she protested, and after ten miles of such discussion, she had snapped at me. She’d told me I was reckless, she’d separated herself from me. She said I’m not like you. She said there’s something wrong with you. She’d demanded that we turn back. And I had seen then that she was frightened and thought that perhaps there was something wrong with me, if not because I would have gone on in pursuit of something that might not have even existed, then because I had ignored her, had considered her fears negligible.

And so now I am standing and walking about the room with the phone in my hand, listening to her as she calls me a coward. And this I am considering very hard because it is the most cutting of her accusations and could be in reference to anything, anything. But, ok, the situation at hand—specifically the night last week when we were all at the restaurant, the three of us, and the man who was her lover was being distant for reasons I didn’t understand and which she responded to with aggression. Namely, the two of them left the restaurant twice and I could see them just outside the window, under the awning and he was facing the ground with his jaw clenched and she had a finger pointed towards his chest and, even from behind the glass, it was clear this gesture was menacing. Still, I allowed this leaving and re-entering of the restaurant to happen twice, their demeanor upon re-entry the second time, eerily more placid than the previous. And finally, when they left for the third time, I followed them and they ignored me and the man turned away from the woman, still my friend then, and began to light a cigarette. She pivoted, then, to face him and slapped the cigarette from his hand onto the ground at which point I said, okay, no more of this, I’m leaving, and you two can sort this all out, whatever it is. Or some such phrasing. And, indeed, I had left and gone home and, not even an hour later, she rang me and when I picked up she said something’s happened and I told her to come to me and as I walked her up the two flights of stairs, it was clear that she was shaken and I asked her what happened and she told me she had hit him. Not hard, she said. Still, I said. And she asked me then if I thought he intended to call the police, which I thought was crass, but I told her no, I didn’t think he would. She began to cry quietly in the middle of the bed, holding her knees to her chest and, in the light from the one lamp I keep, I thought she looked ugly and frightening, but a bit angelic, and I put my arms around her and we rocked a bit back and forth, though I might’ve imagined the rocking, for we had had sake at the restaurant and my head still spun from it.

And then I didn’t see her for four days, but I did see him at the grocery store. And he had a little yellow crescent moon beneath his left eye and I thought of her saying not hard. But I just nodded as we passed each other beside the squash. Only later did I send him a message. And, in it, I said, I understand if you don’t want to talk to me, but if you do, you can reach out. And he did. And that was why we were at the restaurant, so that he could detail to me the things the woman, who had been my friend, had done, the things I had seen her do and the other things I didn’t know about but could have intuited. But also, of course, I had understood that he’d become infatuated with me and, though this had not preoccupied me, had not prevented me from hearing the terrible accusations he had made, I did sit with it. He had left her, he said. And then he’d said, do you think it makes me any less of a man, and I had thought that was a very intimate thing to say and I felt, in some way, that he had meant for it to be. And so perhaps all of this had prevented me from calling the woman who had been my friend, from confronting her about the things I knew she did and the other things she’d been accused of which I knew to be true, though I hadn’t witnessed them. Did this make me cowardly? I don’t think so.

But I had not told the man about that night when I held my friend in the lamplight and I had not told my friend that I had met with the man covertly after he had left her. So I had been duplicitous then, but it had been impossible for me not to be. Because I hadn’t had all the facts of the story that I had now at any of the points I had acted. In fact, the story remained elusive to me, somewhat like a prism, because if I looked at it one way, perhaps I could see two other ways obliquely, but at least one way was always obscured.

And one way of looking at things that I haven’t addressed but that she had, fleetingly, in the voicemail, was that any way I looked at it, we had indeed been friends for ten years which certainly was the longest relationship of my life and who was I, she’d said, to throw that away. And that, too, I am considering. And alongside that fact, I am evaluating the fact that our ten year friendship had been fueled, in some way, by my fear of her which, unlike my friendships with other women, had also fueled my interest and excitement. It hadn’t always been this assault on my character, my friendship with her, though that, I was beginning to understand, had held importance to me. When we were younger we’d had, as I’d heard it once described, a “relationship of the mind,” meaning that we’d had many debates of an intellectual kind that left me feeling comfortably exerted and satisfied and, though these had happened less frequently after we began our separate pursuits of long term romantic partnership, I revisited them often in my own mind. And I can remember so clearly sitting beside her in her stepfather’s Toyota Camry as she read passages of Crime and Punishment aloud and we smoked pot out of a crushed soda can she’d keyed a hole into and stared out across strips of beige and gray parking lots, for we’d always park at the top of the shopping plaza parking garage so that we could feel we were above all that aimless suburban fray. And we had dissected his prose down to the last sentence because she’d been enamored with it. And though I couldn’t remember what conclusions we’d drawn, nor had I read any Dostoevsky since high school, I felt I had to credit her with the way my mind worked now. Like a machine—equipped and efficient. I hadn’t ever wanted to disappoint her. And when I said something that had forced her to give pause, that meant so much to me I remembered the feeling still.

Wasn’t it unique to have a friend who didn’t allow you to become complacent? Who felt comfortable criticizing the things you’d thought only you could see about yourself, those secret ugly things you loathed? Wasn’t that worth preserving? Perhaps those other friendships with those other women had all begun to bore me because I’d known they weren’t genuine, that those women hid from me the things they really thought, which this woman listed now, in the voicemail recording. Such things as my cowardice, yes, but also that, in my relationships, I was uncaring, “borderline psychotic,” and this was why they didn’t last, that truly, in my heart of hearts, I was a fraud, that I fed off the achievements of others like a parasite, that I had no loyalties to anyone, not even my family, that I was lazy, that this laziness permeated into my diet and exercise and this was why my weight fluctuated wildly with my moods, that, frankly, I was weird, had been born weird, and that it was impossible to hide, though I did try to hide it, and this hiding, this cowardice, essentially, was what would eventually cause me to die alone and, indeed, she hoped that I did die, and soon. And other such things. All this I would need to evaluate. And I felt some relief, at least, that this list of my flaws was recorded, so that I could revisit it periodically even though my friendship with the woman was, as she had made clear, over. And perhaps I might even create some sort of assessment to evaluate whether I had made any progress and what, still, I had left to accomplish.