The Lopsided Building: A Story

Randomly assigned as roommates our college freshman year, Ethan and I developed a friendship that I thought would last our lifetimes. We were both involved in the arts, he as a visual artist, I as an actor.

I’m not receptive to abstract art, Ethan’s specialty, but I marveled at his occasional landscapes and portraits. He had a gift for capturing the feel of a place or a person’s essence. The look of a prominent building on our campus bothered me, though I couldn’t explain why. Ethan depicted it as a lopsided behemoth on a featureless plain, unlike its actual setting in a row of nineteenth century edifices. As far as I could tell, the real building didn’t lean. But in Ethan’s representation, it was all alone and appeared somehow alive.

“What do you think?” he said, watching me appraise the painting.

“He frightens me.”

“He?”

“That building’s an animal. I feel like he’s about to burst out of that canvas and come for me.”

During college I acted in several productions. People said I conveyed confidence, which I saw as a side-effect of the out-of-body experience that acting was for me. No matter the nature of the role, comedic or tragic or somewhere in-between, I couldn’t help secretly mocking my character. Did this guy really think he was funny? Was this other guy so self-important that he really believed his little problems lent him gravitas? Actors typically claim they give themselves wholly over to the role. I believed my partial detachment enabled me to see a little beyond my dramatis personae, giving them an extra three-dimensionality.

“Congratulations,” Ethan said after one of my performances. “I wouldn’t have known you were you. Big improvement.”

Ethan and I often had dinner together in the college’s dining hall. Neither of us was a sports enthusiast, but we went together to football and ice hockey games when our friends were playing. Encountering me on my own on campus, an acquaintance would invariably ask not only how I was doing, but also about Ethan.

Today I am a retired corporate consultant leading a comfortable suburban life. I never made it to a corner office, but I wasn’t interested in glory or status in that world. The money sufficed. The biggest sacrifice I made on my life’s journey was that acting career. I’m sure I would feel more fulfilled today had I gone on to make a name for myself on the stage or in film. But to fall short of getting name recognition as an actor is to spend one’s life eking out a living. It was fear of falling short that led me to a career in finance.

Unlike me, Ethan had the courage of conviction in his talent. During the years following graduation, when we both happened to live in the New York area, he found a place for himself in a community where artists looked after each other, depending on who was prospering at any given time. He got semester- and year-long positions as adjunct art teacher. Small-time galleries showed his work and sold paintings for modest sums that helped keep him going. A handsome bastard who wore his hair in a ponytail, he was never at a loss for the company of women.

While I was establishing myself at my firm, Ethan fell head over heels for Annabelle, a woman from a wealthy family who had seen an exhibit of his work at an East Village gallery. She’d grown up on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, in London’s Mayfair and at least one rich people’s tropical retreat. Association with an actual, real-life artist gratified her.

I sensed as much in her when Ethan invited me to a restaurant dinner for just us three. In the old days, a writer would say a person had “hauteur.” Today we say something like, “acted haughtily,” meaning not just arrogantly, but arrogantly in a royal way. Annabelle had that way about her (after all, her mother was English), but it was softened by a lovely smile and light brown hair that she kept brushing away from her eyes.

“I envy you,” I told her.

“Why? Because I’m rich?” she said, with a wicked smile.

I knew I was blushing when I replied, “Because you appreciate art without a compulsion to create work of your own.”

She sighed. “It’s true. I’m Ethan’s groupie—just one more infatuated girl.”

Ethan jumped in. “You’re way too modest. My work is better for your critiques.”

“I mean it,” I said. “For someone like me, art is about self-gratification. To be open to other people’s art for its own sake is a laudable quality.”

One of the many things I liked about Ethan was that he didn’t act possessively with his girlfriends. For much of that dinner, all the talk was between Annabelle and me. She was charmingly besotted with my friend.

They got married in the Hamptons. I want to say, “of course,” because where else would Annabelle have had that life-changing ceremony unless it was on some semi-remote Caribbean island where guests flew in at her family’s expense. Maybe by writing that, I unwittingly confirm that streak of envy Annabelle thought she’d detected in me.

For two or three years after that dinner, Ethan and I stayed in touch only off and on. I met Jane, who would become my own wife, and we bought a house in Montclair, New Jersey. I lost myself in business and suburban married life. I did follow Ethan closely enough to know he was working on one project after another, leading not only to gallery exhibits, but also to an avant-garde film and joint projects with other artists seeking to “beautify” (their word) local towns. He would send me ads and other promotions for his events. Once in a while I’d stay late in the city for dinner with him, and Annabelle and he twice came out to see us in Montclair.

Then Annabelle’s father died. Her frail English mother, who had split her time between America and England, resumed full-time residency in the country of her birth. Annabelle resolved to live near her. Ethan was given little choice: Join her or stay behind. He never revealed to me how he felt about the move beyond a show of support for Annabelle’s wishes, but I couldn’t picture him living in England. His New Jersey accent marked him not only as ingrained American, but as American working class. I thought he’d be as out-of-place there as the lopsided building at our alma mater’s campus that I vividly remembered in his painting.

Actually, all seemed to go well. Their home was in a suburb of the county of Hertfordshire, with easy public transportation connections to London. Gallery owners gave him as much attention there, it not more, as they had in New York and Long Island. He made new friends and was a regular at one of the pubs near their home.

By now, Jane and I were raising two girls and a boy, while Annabelle and he had a boy and a girl. As they all got older, Ethan and I exchanged photos and videos showing our children’s always “amazing” leaps forward. Although their children encountered some anti-Americanism at school, other children were drawn to them and their foreignness. Afterwards, I was to note the absence of any mention of Annabelle in his emails.

Several years later, my wife and I took a vacation to London and Paris. My mother-in-law gladly looked after our kids on the rare occasions we took trips. Luckily our kids were fond of both grandparents. I’d been to London on business early in my career, but never explored it at leisure. It was the first for Jane. Ethan came to our hotel after our first night and gave us a thoroughly entertaining, well-informed tour of his adopted city. I was delighted to have my old friend back, and Jane was won over all over again.

What I expected to be a highlight of our trip was the visit he arranged to his Hertfordshire home. I looked forward to becoming reacquainted with Annabelle and to meeting their children. Ethan came back into London to escort us to the suburbs. “Dinner at the pub. You’ll get a feel for the real England.”

As we left the Underground station, Ethan called Annabelle on his cell, and when we came into view of the house, the two children and she waved to us from the entrance. The twelve-year-old boy and fourteen-year-old girl still had their American accents, if muted, but they’d acquired the demeanor I imagined was typical of English children, standing straight and speaking with a winning politeness. The boy had Ethan’s warm smile, while the girl was going to be as pretty as her mother. We shook hands with them in a formal manner that had me grinning.

Unlike her children, Annabelle hesitated when I extended my hand before she graced it with a light touch. Her hair, reaching only the nape of her neck, was tied back in a short ponytail, and no longer threatened to fall in front of her eyes. Her accent was much more English than I remembered. Glamor was still there, but now tinged with severity.

Ethan had told us she would join us, but she said she wasn’t feeling well and that she’d make dinner for herself and the children. “Anyway,” she said, “a pub wasn’t the right place for kids.”

We had a lively time with Ethan at the pub, yelling over the noise to banter with his English friends. I said nothing about Annabelle’s coldness, and Ethan didn’t apologize for her. I respected him for that. He was too sensitive not to have noticed.

On reflection, although I’d insisted Jane and I return to our hotel that evening, Ethan’s half-hearted effort to persuade us to stay over was a sign that things weren’t right at home.

More years passed. Time played that mean trick of plonking us into our late sixties before we realized youth had deserted us. I got a call from Ethan. How were the kids? Great. Grown up and showing tons of promise in their young careers. How were ours? The same. How was Annabelle?

“We’re divorced.”

All I could think to say was, “I’m sorry, Ethan.”

He said it was a long time coming. She’d been cool to him for at least ten years. He hated how she alienated his friends, an indirect apology for the reception she’d given Jane and me. But clearly we were hardly alone in getting the ice treatment.

“So,” I said, “are you still living in that suburb, whatever it’s called?”

“Can’t afford it. I’m in a flat—you know, apartment—in a part of London no tourist ever sees.”

Ethan hadn’t contested the divorce and hadn’t hired a solicitor, as they call that kind of lawyer over there, to look after his interests. As the inheritor of a nice fortune, Annabelle controlled their finances. The money he’d made in the past had been deposited into their joint accounts. Time had also moved fashion along, and Ethan was no longer the pride of the galleries. His work wasn’t selling, and he wasn’t producing much work to begin with. I never grasped the British version of Social Security, but it seemed that while he’d accrued enough credits to receive some income, it wasn’t exactly generous. For that, he’d needed to have enrolled in the system long before he emigrated to the UK. All he got from the divorce settlement was Annabelle’s commitment to give him enough to live in squalor.

I guessed the answer even before I asked: “Why, Ethan, didn’t you take yourself seriously enough to get your fair share?”

That’s when I told me he’d been having an affair. Not the first. Annabelle had suspected other dalliances in the past, but this one was so flagrant that she couldn’t pretend it away. Or else, which seemed more likely to me, this time she chose not to.

I said, “You’re saying guilt stopped you from taking care of yourself.”

“I was thinking from the heart. I should have put money first. It’s the difference between you and me.”

“You lived your dream,” I said.

His tone of voice took a dark turn. “My father would tell me, ‘Your friend there has talent but he also has common sense. Why can’t you be just as sensible?’”

I was, as they say in England, gobstopped. I’d had no clue that all those decades ago, my career choice had come between us. While Ethan was pursuing his dream, I was already compromising, faintly disappointed in myself and interested in my business major because it paid the bills. Ethan could get dejected, naturally, but fundamentally he was happy and energized. Which of those two lives would any halfway intelligent person have chosen?

Perhaps had I known about his father’s comment at the time, Ethan and I would have had one of those long college discussions that cleared the air. Maybe thanks to such a conversation, he would have brought me back in to his life years later when Annabelle and he were contemplating divorce. Surely I could have convinced him to hire a lawyer to look after him better than he was willing to look after himself.

I could hardly sanction Ethan’s infidelity. But, stepping away from that #MeToo morass, Ethan should have asserted himself during the divorce. He’d participated in the upbringing of the children. He’d contributed his share to the family’s income for many years. He’d brought the luster of fame to Annabelle, who couldn’t achieve it for herself but was glad to share in the limelight. But he’d been guided by his heart his entire life and couldn’t conceive that it would betray him, least of all at a time in life when he could do little or nothing to recover.

There is such a thing as planning for the future. Obviously, I get that—it’s guided my entire adult life. But there’s also living in the moment. As we migrated from college to career, I sacrificed the moment for the future, Ethan the future for the moment. Today, a contest judge would deem me the victor. But we hadn’t been competing, and there was no victory. In the end, is there ever victory?

We both had calling plans for free trans-Atlantic phone calls up to a certain number of hours each month, and we talked more than we’d done since college. I urged him to return to America, where I wasn’t his only longtime friend and he had relatives. Understandably, he was set on staying near his children. Although prejudiced by their mother’s assessment of their father’s faults, they remained loyal to him. Still, his choice came at a cost. He now had few friends, and I had no sense they could or would give him much help. Perhaps he didn’t let on to them how dire his predicament was, though I would have thought it obvious.

With Jane’s approval, I sent him enough money to help pay for some urgent home repairs and to keep him going for at least a few months. It lasted less time than I’d expected, really, less than it should have. Jane and I discussed whether to send him more.

“If he’s a spendthrift like that,” she said, “it will be sending good money after bad.”

I did send him another installment, but I warned him it would be the last.

“No problem,” he said. “Something’s coming up next week. Keep your fingers crossed for me.”

He’d tell me about a possible job, and for weeks afterwards, I’d persist in asking about it. He said he hadn’t yet gone for the interview, but he’d set one up soon. “When?” I demanded, hearing myself sound more like a probation officer than friend. “Tomorrow. Tomorrow.” I heard ice clink against glass. A friend whose integrity I’d never questioned had become a habitual liar.

I stayed in touch with Ethan increasingly out of sympathy. Pity might be the better word. At times I felt I was relying on my rusty acting techniques to get me through our phone chats. I continued to agonize over the calls with Jane, who talked about how badly she felt for him. Her worry and affection for my old friend helped to keep me going.

But during a heated phone call, Ethan accused me of lying and misleading him, a Donald Trump-like trick of turning one’s own failings into one’s opponent’s. At long last, my frustration erupted and we got into a heated argument, with Ethan repeating slogans like “You lied to me,” and me denying and parrying. Feeling a kind of supernatural calm, I told him I couldn’t take it anymore. I disconnected and never called him again.

Ethan is more or less alone now. His remaining relationships are either compromised, such as with his children, or relatively recent. How I wish I hadn’t felt compelled, for the sake of my sanity, to be cruel.

Still, I wonder. In my harsh repudiation of a treasured friendship, had I turned into the savage beast I saw in Ethan’s lopsided building, coming not for me, as I’d imagined, but for its creator?