“Do you think we would have fought if we’d been a couple?” my best friend Jeff asked me the day before he died.
Two days earlier, we had left the hospital with information about palliative care and hospice. That morning, he had nudged me awake before 4 a.m., saying, “I think it’s going to be today.”
We spent the next two hours sitting in bed surrounded by paperwork, dealing with the business of dying. When the sun rose, we ventured into the kitchen to make coffee and feed the doves on Jeff’s fire escape. “My doves,” he called them.
I smiled, wiping down the counter. “I don’t think we would have fought.”
“We would have fought a lot,” he said. “But it wouldn’t have mattered.”
Throughout our 16-year friendship, Jeff and I had, indeed, fought a lot. I delighted in reminding him that he admitted he didn’t even like me the first time we met.
“That’s not it,” he said. “It’s not that I didn’t like you.”
“But that’s what you said!”
“Fine, have it your way,” he said, laughing. “I didn’t like you. But that’s not what I meant.”
“Oh, really? Tell me then — what did you actually mean?”
A friend of mine had dubbed Jeff “Actually Man” after she complained of an itchy spider bite, and he said, “Actually, most spiders don’t bite.” Always the contrarian, he started many of his sentences with “Actually.” When I wanted to get under his skin, that’s what I called him.
In my phone, however, he was “Blue Falcon,” a code name he adopted when we were keeping tabs on a new neighbor in my building whose erratic behavior included napping in the lobby. Jeff lived down the block near the subway entrance, and from his balcony he would text: “I have eyes on our target, Red Sparrow. He’s coming in hot, headed right toward you.”
Jeff and I were introduced by my then-husband, Tom. One night after Tom and I moved to Brooklyn, he came back from an artists’ networking event excited to report that he had met a single father with a daughter close in age to our two children.
Soon we were all friends, taking the girls trick-or-treating, celebrating birthdays and Thanksgiving. When a string of gray days got me down, I decided to take up running, and Jeff offered to join me.
On those cold mornings, I would roll out of bed, bundle up and jog down the block to find Jeff waiting on the corner, hopping up and down to stay warm, goofy grin widening as I approached. We would head for Prospect Park and run the 3-mile loop, sharing increasingly intimate tales with each mile.
When he told me stories about the sexual proclivities of his latest girlfriend, I laughed so hard I peed my running tights.
As often as we laughed, we butted heads. I am a churchgoer and carry a light-up Jesus on my keychain; Jeff was an atheist who listened to Eckhart Tolle lectures on YouTube. “I’m spiritual, not religious,” he said.
“So you’re not an atheist! You’re agnostic, at best,” I replied. “You’re a believer. Admit it.”
“How can you believe in Jesus and astrology?” he said. “It doesn’t make sense.”
I was a Scorpio and Jeff was a Gemini; we shouldn’t get along at all, which is what I said to both him and to my friends who suggested, after Tom and I divorced, that Jeff could be more than a friend.
“What about Jeff?” they would ask after I recounted yet another dating fiasco. “Why not try and see?”
Try, meaning what? Kiss him? Have sex with him? I shuddered at the thought. Jeff and I knew each other too well to be attracted to each other. But when a list of questions appeared in this very column purporting to help people fall in love, we decided to give it a go.
One winter afternoon, he and I sat down and asked each other about our pasts, our values and our aspirations. When we were done, we stared into each other’s eyes for four full minutes, as prescribed — and collapsed, weak with laughter.
“The thing is,” I said, “we already love each other.”
He nodded. “Let’s go sledding.”
I looked out into the January dark. “But it’s nighttime.”
“So?”
I pulled on my boots and mittens and grabbed the children’s sled. When we reached the park, we had the hill all to ourselves.
A few months later, Jeff learned he had thyroid cancer. Instead of following doctors’ advice, he embarked on a series of special diets and alternative therapies. One afternoon he called me in a panic after ingesting too much high-dose cannabis oil. Terrified of losing him and infuriated by his pigheadedness, I didn’t pick up.
When the tumor in Jeff’s neck began to interfere with breathing and swallowing, he relented, and our morning runs were replaced with trips to Memorial Sloan Kettering. After surgery and a brutal summer of radiation, Jeff recovered, and so did our relationship, but both had sustained damage.
I lost count of how many times I stopped speaking to Jeff over the next few years. Often, it was because of an insensitive comment he refused to apologize for. (“Look at your cute chubby arms!” he said after I gained a few pandemic pounds.) The last time, instead of saying, “I’m sorry,” he texted, “Come watch a movie with me.”
Hurt, angry and stubborn, I ignored him.
But when a mutual friend told me Jeff was in an emergency room with breathing problems in Los Angeles, where he was visiting, I didn’t hesitate. “Blue Falcon, do you copy?” I texted. “I hear you’re in the hospital.”
“Red Sparrow,” he replied. “I fear the worst, my comrade.”
Six days later, I was on a plane to California. Jeff picked me up at LAX looking frail but more handsome than I remembered. He folded me into his arms, and we held each other in the arrival lane.
Jeff had booked us an Airbnb for a couple of nights before we returned to New York to find out what was going on with his lungs. The apartment had a queen and a twin bed, and as we changed into our pajamas, I suddenly felt shy.
“Do you want me to sleep in the big bed with you?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “I need you to be the big spoon.”
We climbed under the comforter and switched off the lights. Inching closer, we responded to each other in a new way that felt both unfamiliar and natural. Of course, our bodies seemed to be saying. Of course this is how it should be. No fireworks. Slow, quiet, gentle, tender.
“We should have done this before I got sick,” he said the next day. “You’d have seen what I’ve really got.”
“We’re not having sex in New York,” I said. “This is a California-only thing.”
“Oh no, we are,” he said. “We’re going to do it every possible way.”
Our first night back in Brooklyn, we retreated to our own apartments. The second night, after sleeping through Jeff’s 3 a.m. and 5 a.m. “you up?” texts, I woke at 7 a.m. to a message saying his neighbor had taken him to the emergency room.
“I’m coming,” I texted.
“That’s what she said,” he replied, not missing a beat.
When the doctor showed us the scans of Jeff’s lungs, I wept.
“I’m not fighting this,” he said.
They sent us home that night, the eve of his 59th birthday.
Now we stood at his kitchen window, morning sun streaming in. I rose on tiptoes to kiss him. “We could have been doing this the whole time,” I said. “What was I thinking?”
“It’s OK,” he whispered, wrapping his arms around me.
“I’m such a jerk,” I said, sobbing. “You’re the love of my life, and all this time I’ve been too dumb to know it.”
“I think things happen the way they’re meant to. Anyway, it wasn’t just you. I was a bit of a player,” he said, waggling his eyebrows.
That night I curled up with him, listening to him breathe. I thought he might be slipping away when he startled awake, dropping a heavy hand on my head.
“You OK?” he said.
I was so surprised, I laughed. “Yeah, I’m OK. Are you OK?”
“Yeah.”
“I love you,” I said, knowing it might be the last time he would hear me say it.
“Love you too,” he said, drifting back into morphine-aided sleep.
He didn’t wake up. I held his hand until the funeral home men arrived, red-faced and sweaty in their suits and ties.
The day before he died, Jeff, the atheist, had said, “We’ll see each other again in another life.”
When we do, I hope he likes me as soon as he meets me.
The post Friends for 16 Years. Lovers for One Night. appeared first on New York Times.
