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When preparations for the war began, we still agreed about a lot of things. For example we agreed that the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were a disaster of terrible proportions that nothing could excuse or mitigate. We agreed that while a certain radical element of fundamentalist Islam was pernicious, it was important to differentiate between the vast majority of Muslim people, who might not agree with the West about everything and might even dislike the United States, but should not be confused with their militant co-religionists any more than we ourselves should be confused with Pat Robertson. We agreed that Saddam Hussein was a horrible dictator. But beyond that we did not agree.

I thought that the terrible events of the preceding years had showed that, in spite of all our flaws, the United States and those countries known collectively as “the West” were nevertheless better than our enemies and we should therefore try to spread our ideals, imperfectly realized as they are at home, to other countries that didn't have them yet. I thought that we had been too strategic, prioritizing security over justice, supporting any foreign leader who could keep order at whatever cost. What had that achieved, except to make people around the world hate us?

He thought that these same events showed that the United States and “the West” had already caused too much resentment by trying to spread our ideals and that if we'd only stop trying to make everyone behave like us and acting like we knew best and imposing our version of free-market capitalism on everyone through the mechanisms of the IMF and the World Bank, people from other parts of the world might not hate us so much. Even if we could agree that democracy was a good thing, using the military to spread it wasn't just wrong, it was also antidemocratic.

I thought that Saddam Hussein was so bad that even though usually it's not a good idea to invade other countries that haven't attacked you, it would be better to get rid of him while we had the chance. He thought that sending troops into a country that hadn't attacked us, however bad their government might be, was categorically wrong. He also thought that the reasons the government was giving for why it wanted to do this—WMDs, collaboration with al-Qaeda—were bogus, a cover story that the men and women pushing it didn't even believe. I thought that, though perhaps this was so, our motives didn't need to be 100 percent pure to do some good; if we did the right thing for the wrong reasons that would be all right.

In principle we agreed that it was fine for us to disagree as long as we respected each other's reasons for thinking as we did. The problem was that after a little while, every conversation that we had seemed to circle back to this topic whether we meant it to or not. We would go out to the movies and if we saw an American film, he would always be sure to mention how it exemplified our militarism, our belief in ourselves as exceptional, our simple-minded concept of heroism through blind faith and physical exertion. If we talked about the news as it was reported abroad, I always made sure to note the knee-jerk way that America was portrayed as stupid, boorish and brutal. If we went out to a restaurant, if we discussed a book we'd read, if we related an encounter between ourselves and a stranger, everything seemed to come back to this question: good or bad? Are we (Americans) basically good or basically bad, basically better or basically worse than other groups of people? In the end it became difficult for us to speak about anything, and around that time he moved to Holland. We call each other occasionally but not as often as I wish we did now that some time has passed and those concerns, which seemed so urgent at the time, don't seem that way to me anymore.

What I remember most vividly, when I think of him, is none of that. It is a trip we took together in the spring before we graduated from college. We went to France, where it was already spring, coming from New England where it was still cold and dark and snowbound. I remember that we took the train into the city from De Gaulle and emerged from the Metro into the Jardin du Luxembourg, into sunshine and green. I remember that we put our backpacks down on the grass and ran around in circles, waving our arms and laughing madly from the pure pleasure of being together in a place that beautiful.

THE GROUP

When we lived in New York, my husband, who was then my boyfriend, had a group of friends I didn't get along with. What was wrong with them? Nothing was wrong with them. As individuals, I liked them all, more or less; at least I didn't have a problem with any of them. One of them was a gifted composer; another was a well-read student of politics and philosophy; yet another was an interesting, funny and insightful writer about art and literature. But when they were all together, I found them difficult to deal with.

They were very close-knit, had been to the same college and after that they all lived in an old, converted warehouse in Brooklyn where some of them, the ones who were visual artists, had studios. They always spent time together in a big group and they liked to give one another nicknames that the whole crowd would adopt and use whether the person liked the name or not. They liked to go drinking and dancing and talking late into the night, having long, involved arguments about art and politics, making plans, starting projects. Sometimes, when they'd all stayed out too late or drunk too much, they would have disagreements that devolved into shouting and tears and people storming out and vowing never to speak to each other again. But then, like the members of a big, rowdy, extended family, they would usually make up and be friends again before too long—so even that was not really so bad.

But what really upset me about them was how content they seemed being friends with and talking to one another. They weren't always trying to find new and better friends, like most people I had met in that city. When they had a party, all of them attended and they didn't worry about whether there were other, better parties happening somewhere else to which they hadn't been invited. When they argued about ideas, they did so freely and without any apparent sense that other people somewhere else might be more qualified than they to make judgments about the subjects they were discussing. What egotism, I would think, that they believe the things they are doing and saying are actually interesting and possibly original and that they expect these things to be of interest to others besides themselves. Whereas I spend so much time worrying if anyone will ever care about what I do and what I write, and feeling that the bright center of the world is always elsewhere, that wherever I go chasing after it, it departs just before I can get to it.

So I found reasons to stay away from the group, even when my boyfriend (now my husband) would stay out late with them. It caused some problems between us because he would spend time with them and I didn't want to. In the end, we moved away from New York and that solved that problem. In our new city we didn't know anyone and so we spent most of our free time with each other and that's when we decided to get married.

KISS

Our friendship came to an end after he tried to kiss me. It was after we'd been drinking at a bar one evening—we used to like to do that, sit in a corner booth at one particular bar on 17th Street in San Francisco and talk for many hours together just the two of us. Sometimes we would invite other people along, too, my boyfriend, who I lived with, or a girl he was dating. But mostly we liked it best when it was just the two of us. We talked like people who were younger than we were at the time; we were in our thirties already, but we talked like we were still in college, all that enthusiasm, the wonderful, wandering hours of talk about all things, love and books and music and politics. I talked so well when I talked to him; it really felt like we might discover something new.

Looking back, I guess I'd always known that underneath the surface of our friendship was attraction, unacknowledged. It was in the way we looked at each other, in the time we reserved for each other; the beautiful way we spoke together was part of it, too. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised when, one day, when we were leaving our bar to go home, he put his arm around my waist and leaned in toward me, bringing his face down very close to mine before I pushed him away. I remember how his arm felt around my body and how his breath smelled of the whiskey we'd been drinking, not bad just sweet and warm. After I'd put my arms up and shaken him off, he took a step back, embarrassed, and said:

Sorry.

That's okay
, I said.
I know how you feel. I do. But I live with Greg.

Sure
, he said.
I know.
Then again:
Sorry. I'd better go
.

So he went home and so did I and later that night I sent him a message saying that we could continue to be friends only if something like that never happened again. He wrote back and said okay. He said he was embarrassed by what he'd done, that it hadn't really meant anything. He really thought of me as a friend and not romantically at all and he'd hate to lose our friendship over something insignificant like this. I wrote back and said okay, I understood, although I felt obscurely disappointed when I read his message. We made plans to meet the following week as usual.

We did meet up and at first everything seemed all right between us, but after a while I noticed that he was making sure to sit a certain distance away from me on the bench instead of right next to me so that our legs sometimes touched as he had always done before. I noticed that, where before our fingers had brushed when we would hand each other drinks, now he scrupulously avoided this contact by putting the glass down on the table in front of me. We still talked about the same things that we always had, but after a while I realized that I was unhappy. I didn't want him to simply agree that, fine, we were just friends. What is wrong with me, I thought, that he doesn't want to try to kiss me again? What was I lacking that he “didn't think of me romantically”? Wasn't I pretty enough? Wasn't I interesting enough?

Our conversation slowed and we found ourselves sitting there in silence. He tried to restart it a few times, suggesting topics that fizzled after a few sentences. I thought how I'd never noticed how much he liked to talk about himself. I thought how I'd never liked the way he talked about books as though it was a competition to see who'd read the most. I saw him looking at a girl across the room, a girl with black hair and a swirly tattoo showing in the small of her back where her tank top was riding up above her jeans. In the end we said goodbye and he didn't even try to hug me and I thought:
Am I that repulsive?
He just waved goodbye and walked away down the street.

RECIPES

For a long time, I thought of her as someone who had let me down. Some years ago, I had been seeing a man to whom she had introduced me and the affair went badly wrong. He drank too much and didn't really want to stop, and in the end I got tired of dealing with the Jekyll-and-Hyde roller coaster of dating a drunk and I broke it off. I was very sad after that because I was in love with the man in spite of his bad qualities. I felt that this was a case where one person, him, was clearly at fault in our breakup, and that as a result he ought to be shunned by our mutual friends.

When she kept in touch with him and continued to see him, I was angry with her. When she continued to go out drinking with him, in spite of openly agreeing with me that he had a problem with alcohol, I felt it showed callousness and a lack of caring on her part. I was so much more upset than he was and so much more deserving of companionship, yet I was the one home by myself while she and he and others of our circle went out on the weekends. It didn't occur to me at that time that she might be struggling with her own desire for various kinds of oblivion and with the problems in her marriage, which wouldn't last beyond the following winter.

That was years ago. We've been in touch from time to time since then, but not often and not for long and always on my side with a feeling of resentment that I could banish for a while but that would inevitably come back when other things in my life were difficult or felt unfair. Then, the other day, I was looking through a box of books that I hadn't unpacked the last time I moved and I found something she had made for me when we used to live in the same city. It was a book of recipes she'd compiled, chosen by her and handwritten into a hardbound notebook complete with pasted-in pictures and hand-drawn designs to make them look nice. The notebook was full from end to end and divided like a real cookbook into sections: soups, main courses, desserts, drinks. I looked through the book and thought how I had not yet made any of the recipes it contained. I took it out of the box and put it on the shelf with my other cookbooks. I thought how much trouble had gone into making it and how I couldn't think of any time I'd taken that much trouble over something that was meant for just one other person to enjoy. I thought: I should really, really call her and tell her that I found this. So I searched until I found her most recent number, took the phone to a comfortable armchair in one corner of my living room, dialed the number and listened to the phone at the other end start to ring.

COMPANY

My oldest friend and her husband had their first baby last year. I've never been that interested in babies, really. I perceive that they are very beautiful, so beautiful it's sometimes hard to bear. But I don't want one of my own and I'm not sure why other people do. They are adorable when they smile, but when they cry it feels like having your heart removed with a pair of knitting needles and no anesthetic: you'd do anything to make it stop. And then, as well, you can't go out at night, you have no privacy, you have to be an example for someone all the time, etc.

This friend is someone I've known since we were teenagers. In high school, we were always together; we used to have private, extended jokes, some of them not very nice, about the kids at our high school who were more popular than us—which was almost everyone—and this helped us get through those difficult years and feel less miserable and insane. When we went to college, unlike many high school friends, we kept in touch and visited each other.