8

W__ and I went to dinner chow and ended up staying there until midnight chow. The chow hall personnel cleaned and swept around us, as he talked.
He seemed to be exhaling, he barely paused between stories, stories I didn’t ask for or lead into.
Since he was now making moves as far as us being friends I had gotten used to us being friends, and things felt natural. Now he seemed to be talking without thinking, one cop story after another, he told me about his three best friends at his job, how they were a second family for him.
He told me about the reason for the break without my asking him. For the two years W__ and I were close friends, he was with a girl named Holly. In the beginning she was eighteen and from a bad home, he was nineteen and just back from a violent deployment.
I never met her, and wondered about that, but thought little of it. When it came to Holly I was always either gracious or tactful -- usually tactful.
I remembered when he first really told me about her, during a long drive to an armory in a very loud hum-vee. W__ has a way of talking everything up, then, finally, weeks later, telling the truth of the situation.
That’s how he had done things with Holly, describing her only as the perfect girl, and little else. During this particular three hour drive he explained her as she really was.
Upon hearing it I became concerned. The only response I could come up with was to tactfully tell him that a shy, insecure person wasn’t anybody at all yet. That it was like having a relationship with someone who was sick, while never acknowledging that she was battling an illness; you have all these ideas of her being a ‘not very active person,’ or ‘a person who likes to read and be a homebody,’ when you couldn’t know anything about her until she got well again. The only person who could possible know her was herself, and even that wasn‘t likely.
At the time W__ didn’t seem to pick on the relevancy of what I was saying. I was afraid for him, because they were already talking marriage.
During the military training events ,W___ and I were pretty much inseparable, and would regularly go out on the town together, many times because we snuck away.
People would joke about our friendship, because we were so obviously close, but I knew that I had never had any family before, so I understood why I was prone to such close friendships, and W__ seemed to naturally understand.
Once, during a two week training event, we got an unexpected night off. W___ could’ve gone home to Holly, but instead chose to hang out with me. I remembered thinking maybe he just needed to get away, feel free for awhile. He and Holly were acting married, and very domesticated, despite one being nineteen and the other twenty. I was concerned for him, and due to my experience with the women of the House, I knew that an insecure woman was much worse than a woman scorned.
Unbeknownst to me, Holly didn’t like W__ having this good friend on the side. She didn’t like him calling me and ending up talking for two hours straight, like after an important job interview he had, or like how every afternoon after he got off from his new job as a corrections officer he’d call me and talk till he arrived home.
Oftentimes I had heard W__ talk on the phone with Holly and noticed quickly that he never talked freely with her. I knew he had been affected by his deployment. So on that night it didn’t seem odd that he would suggest we go out instead of us going home.
He had decided we would go out and only afterwards would he go home to surprise Holly, which meant he’d sleep with her. So after eating and drinking and driving around I was surprised when he pulled into a small white building out in the country, beside a highway, that was a massage parlor.
I went along with it, because being in the military I had gotten used to being in places like strip clubs even though to me places like that were too superficial to feel sexual.
I allowed the girl to give me a hand job, but nothing more. W__ allowed his to give him a bl_w job.
Afterwards, in his car, he asked me how far I went, and I lied and said a blow job, he told me the same, and I still think he was telling the truth.
_I’ve never cheated on Holly before,_ he said, as he started his car.
_Okay,_ I said, wondering what was going on. He dropped me off at the armory shortly after, where I got into my Jeep, and he went on home to Holly.
According to W___, months later Holly saw it on their credit card statement, even though it had a cryptic name. W__ couldn’t explain himself very well, and finally he went with the story that it was my idea and he was just tagging along.
It was the last straw for her, concerning me, and she made him choose. He chose her. They were married shortly after. I wasn’t invited.
He cut me out of his life without telling me; he would call but wouldn’t talk freely, he called to tell me when his daughter was born, but the calls became fewer and fewer, and in the end, when I innocently called him, he hung up on me once he realized who it was.
That was the last time I ever tried to call him. I had never allowed anyone to get so close to me before, and was deeply affected.
What W__ did, is what I was always afraid K__ had done -- deciding on his own the friendship was over, then slowly cutting me out without telling me.
I didn’t know W__ had done that already, I thought I had done something to him that had made him not want to have anything to do with me anymore. Maybe Intuition was to blame for my occasional suspicions of K___.
I kept it to myself that I had never let anyone tell me who I could or could not be friends with. That I never would get in such a situation like that because I wouldn’t have such a personality type around me, that I would smell the insecurity and its disease a mile away.
Same as I didn’t tell him then, during that drive at drill years ago, I didn’t tell him at chow, here during this deployment; instead I said:
_You made the right choice_
_Yeah, I know,_ he said, looking down at table, _I just went about it the wrong way. I understand if you hate me, and don’t want to be my friend._
All I could do was take a deep breath, and allow him to continue, and try not to get distracted by the implications of what he had told me, including the implication that the break in friendship meant little, because I missed out on little, because he turned out to be less.
Maybe I should have been more angry, I don’t know. He just didn’t seem okay, and if I had been more openly angry I would have felt like a bully.
Again he went right into another story, this time about his time while on leave, and how he had almost cheated on his wife, but didn’t.
He explained that the reason he had come so close was because she had cheated on him during this deployment. He explained that about a year after they had married, divorce was imminent.
_We were taking each other for granted,_ he said. _I was really focused on my new career as a cop, something I’ve wanted all my life, you know, but I worked all the time, you know._
He described Holly as being this strong woman who deserved better than that and had demanded it. Since he had described her as strong I knew he wasn’t telling the whole truth, he was giving her too much credit and himself not enough. It was making me angry.
He said that the deployment had been very hard for him, and that whenever he called Holly he’d basically lay it all on her, so that the majority of their conversations on the phone were made up of him complaining to her of how bad thing were.
She got tired of it.
Finally they got into a bad argument, and she contacted a guy who had been hitting on her for awhile, and she met him at a hotel.
Over the phone, she told W__ about her cheating on him, and again divorce was imminent. Still, within weeks, W__ decided to forgive her. He said it was because she asked him to, and because he had gone online and researched if marriages could still be good after infidelity and because his closest friend during the deployment had advised him to.
I was the second person he had talked to about it.
The first person, his friend, had been a fellow cop, who told him that cop life was hard, and that his marriage was actually normal and worth saving.
It took him over an hour to tell the story of how Holly had cheated on him.
_So what do you think?_ he asked me, leaning back in his folding chair, studying my eyes.
_What do I know, man,_ I said. _Don’t ask me._
I had to be careful not to show too much disagreement with W__, who was telling the story as if he was still to blame; I was talking about his wife, and you never say anything negative about a guy’s wife.
_Just tell me what you’re thinking right now. Just f-cking tell me what you think._
_I’m just so angry for you. I’m furious for you. An hour ago I was furious at you. You got me all twisted up._
I paused, not wanting to be overly gracious or tactful, like the dream had implied I was, but having a hard time either way.
_You don’t seem okay, and that’s all that matters to me. I don’t care what your situation is, whether you stay with her or not, as long as you’re okay. And you don’t seem to be okay._
By saying that I was implying that there was still something wrong with his situation, like maybe what was wrong was that he was still loyal to a woman who wasn’t loyal to him.
Suddenly W___ started talking affectedly, like he was angry, or hurt: _I hope one day maybe you’ll know what it’s like to be in love._ he said, _I really hope you experience that one day. You don’t just walk away from that._
It was at this point I saw there were tears in his eyes. It might have been kind of mean, his saying I had never known love. I allowed him what he said, but I went on and convinced him that I had been in love, I just never mistook it for codependency.
I decided to be tactful and told him that I didn’t agree with keeping a marriage just because of a vow. _No one can promise you they’ll feel the same way about you in the future as they do now. No one can control their own feelings. No one -- including you -- can just decide to love someone. It’s natural to be in love with someone for awhile, or maybe even for a long time, or maybe even for the rest of your life, but it’s not something you choose. It‘s something you try._
_I know that. I swear._
_You don’t just go home, decide you’re going to love your wife, then go on a cruise with her. It doesn’t work that way._
_I know I know,_ he said, looking down at the table.
_So you’re going on that cruise to give it a chance, right? Because that’s all you can do, is allow the love if it’s still there. But you’re not just deciding. You’re going home to her to find out._
_Yes, when I get home I’m just going to give it a chance, to find out, that’s all, I swear._
_Okay. Okay, then._
We walked back to W__’s tent. House lived there too, and asked me if I wanted to smoke a cigarette.
I knew House and W__ didn’t exactly like each other, and didn’t want to remind W___, but what can you do.
Outside, he asked me _So when do you leave for your bike trip?_
_I don’t know,_ I said, _I’ll probably wait a few weeks after getting home, just to take care of a few things._
Then he told me about a get together he was planning for when we got home. One involving an expensive hotel suite on a street full of classy bars.
_Only the cool people here know about it,_ he said. _Maybe you don’t know them, but if you did you’d like them._
He seemed to imply that he wasn’t going to invite someone I didn’t want there. _Obviously, some people simply won’t be invited,_ he said, a little too pointedly, as W___ was walking back from the latrine and entered the tent.
He made a motion like he understood the insult intended for him. Surprisingly, he allowed the door to close between us without saying anything.
As soon as the door closed, I said to House, loud enough hopefully for W__ to hear: _Watch it. I’ve been friends with him way longer than I’ve been friends with you._ Then I quickly changed the subject.
Finally, it was time to go, and as I walked back to the tent, I noticed how I was handling the truth of these friendships in the opposite way as the true way. I’m seeing it as something incredible instead of normal. I still don’t see it as normal for me to deserve friends.

__________