Christopher SchutziusMy old high school friend Mike McClure arrived at Bangkok airport in the late afternoon, weary from the seventeen-hour flight and carrying more luggage than I remembered him needing in our twenties, when every trip began impulsively. At the airport we embraced in the careful way men do when affection is real but not demonstrative. On the drive into the city I pointed things out—new rail lines, a development where a market had been, the way the river bent unexpectedly near my apartment—as though I were narrating a documentary about my own life.
It wasn’t awkward exactly. It was explanatory. After some time in Asia, we no longer shared the same references, so I supplied them.
When we entered the elevated tollway and I ran out of sights to narrate, I asked him about mutual friends and family, searching for some old spark or news that would loosen the conversation. Perhaps it was the jet lag, but he didn’t come up with any notable triumphs or tragedies.
“How’s your sister?”
“Good. Still working at P&G. She’s engaged.”
He might have just had the same exchange with the passenger in the middle seat. It began to look like it might be a long two weeks.
That night we ate at an outdoor café near my place, plastic chairs, metal tables, ceiling fans turning lazily above us. The waitress was young in the way Bangkok waitresses often are, efficient and faintly distracted, her shirt cut lower than necessary—or perhaps only lower than I remembered such shirts being.
I noticed.
Not theatrically. I didn’t crane my neck or turn in my seat. But I allowed my eyes to linger a fraction longer than politeness—or age—strictly permitted. She walked away and I followed the movement without meaning to disguise it.
He watched me do it.
“You think she’s an art student?” he said.
He didn’t smile when he said it. He didn’t have to.
“She could scorch the earth,” I replied, almost before I knew I was going to.
We laughed then—too quickly, too fully for the modest stimulus—and it was the first unforced sound either of us had made since he’d stepped off the plane.
The waitress returned with our drinks, unaware she had reactivated a vocabulary that had been dormant for decades.
I hadn’t heard the phrase in years.
The ‘art student was a girl I’d once tried to hook up with back home. We met by chance, and before we went to an art gallery she insisted upon, she stopped at a restaurant bar, ordered a white wine she barely touched, and, without water, without apology, removed a toothbrush from her purse and began dry-brushing her teeth while studying herself in the mirrored wall behind the bottles. The bristles made a faint rasping sound against enamel.
I remember thinking, calmly and without judgment, that whatever future I imagined with her would have to accommodate that detail.
I also remember deciding there would be no future—though a one-night stand was still on the table, or so I’d hoped. As it happened, she ditched me for a painter, and I went home alone. After I confessed that failure to Mike, his needling was consummate, and that incident provided endless fodder for future abuse at my expense, with any new romantic encounter being compared to that debacle.
“So,” he would ask, “was this one an art lover too?”
Anyway, I had it coming. Sometime earlier he had given a gift to a young woman he was attempting to impress and added a note that read: You are one of the hottest girls I have ever met; please don’t scorch the earth.
Although I have no doubt employed even clumsier phrases myself, after that I frequently would say things like, “So, General Sherman, how goes the scorched-earth policy?”
There was always something disqualifying about these girls, some small fact we both recognized and pretended not to. The drama was rarely about permanence. It was about access. We did not require virtue from one another. Only accuracy.
We were not cruel. We were efficient.
Such is the duty of a best friend. A good one will know just how to torture you until you are properly immunized against the world. And he must cut you down to size when needed.
Once, when I thought he was maybe doing the job a little too well, I protested.
“I have feelings.”
He laughed heartily at my “feelings” protest, knowing intuitively that although my account of some heartbreak might seem perfectly plausible to an outsider, it was, deep down, a farce. The unspoken understanding among true friends is that both are selfish in ordinary ways—motivations usually disguised for the outside world.
We do not admit such selfishness to everyone. To family, colleagues, or strangers we present a version fit for public use. We can shed a tear on cue if needed. Outside our apartments, all the world’s a stage.
I laughed too. I hadn’t even been able to complete that three-word “feelings” line with a straight face.
Our process ultimately yielded more than a few laughs. Mike later became a psychologist—a licensed therapist. A good one.
Years later, when he was in graduate school training to become a counselor, he asked if I would sit for a recorded session he needed for credit. I was home for a few days and agreed without much thought, assuming it would be an extension of the old arrangement, this time with a camcorder.
The room was borrowed and faintly institutional: two upholstered chairs angled toward one another, a tripod stationed off to the side with its small red light already blinking. He adjusted the framing, sat down across from me, and explained that this was practice, that I should answer normally.
Normally meant cooperatively.
He began with work, with travel, with neutral topics that required no excavation. I supplied shaped paragraphs, aware of the camera but not intimidated by it. When he asked about my family, I mentioned my sister.
The loss was not recent. It was something I could sometimes refer to without losing composure. I had spoken of it before in other rooms, in other cities, and usually managed to get through it without much trouble.
“So when you think about her now,” he asked in the same tone he had used for everything else, “what comes up?”
It was a textbook question. He was doing what the assignment required.
I started to answer the way people do when they’re trying to show they’ve handled something. I talked about time, about how things settle, how life fills in around the absence. It sounded reasonable enough while I was saying it.
The camera emitted a low mechanical hum. I realized I had used the word fine more than once.
“I’m fine with it now,” I said again, and as I did felt something in my throat resist the word, not dramatically, but enough that the next sentence stalled before it began.
He did not rescue me. He did not soften the question or move on. He allowed the silence to remain unoccupied.
My eyes watered.
In high school one of us would have filled that space with a joke or a downgrade. Here, he refused both inflation and erasure.
“I don’t really think about the hospital,” I said, and stopped, because I had just thought about it.
He nodded once, as though something accurate had entered the record.
On the tape there is likely a stretch where I look down and do not speak. It was not theatrical. It was simply unarranged.
When he finally reached over and turned off the camcorder, the click felt disproportionate to its size.
“That’s good,” he said.
He meant good for the requirement, good for the hour logged. We both understood the professional meaning of it. Neither of us elaborated.
What he once used to downgrade melodrama he now used to prevent minimization. The mechanism had not changed. Only the stakes had.
At the café in Bangkok, the waitress set down the bill and moved on to the next table. The fans continued their slow rotation.
After a while we slipped back into an old game of ours: inventing biographies for the strangers around us.
The woman at the next table was obviously a vegan yoga instructor. The thirtyish waitress with tattoos and piercings had modeled nude for community-college art classes. The sun-drenched guy sitting alone at the bar watching cricket was definitely an Aussie, but we disagreed on the hometown. Mike played the odds and said probably Sydney. I said he looked too windblown for Sydney—so probably Perth.
None of it had to be accurate. The pleasure was in the quiet certainty with which we delivered the verdicts.
We had played the same game for years—in bars, in airports, anywhere strangers sat still long enough to be studied.
I nodded toward our waitress as she moved between tables.
“What about her?”
He didn’t hesitate.
“Oh, definitely an art student.”Next Story →