Stephen Gauer: Requiem for a friendship

REQUIEM FOR A FRIENDSHIP

If I look to the west on my way to work in the morning, I can see the tallest building in Vancouver rising above the skyline in a slim profile of glass. This graceful building was designed by the man who was my closest childhood friend forty years ago. We are no longer close friends, for reasons I will explain, and the demise of our friendship haunts me.

Peter moved onto our street when I was ten, and lived just two houses away. I don't remember how or when we met, but I think I sensed right away that he was different, and that he was alone or lonely in the same way I was. Peter's family was European. They put real candles on the Christmas tree, and opened their presents on Christmas Eve. Their furniture was different, more artistic somehow, and they ate interesting, unusual food. Peter's father told funny stories and commanded the dinner table like a general instructing his troops. Every New Year's Day, he filled the plastic backyard wading pool with water and went for a polar bear dip. Peter's mother was kind, elegant, wise and to my young eyes far more sophisticated than the other mothers on our street. I was always happy to be in Peter's house.

Peter and I shared the usual interests of small boys in the early 1960s: model airplanes and rocket ships, softball in the summer, football in the autumn, ice skating and tobogganing in the winter. We strung wires between our houses and set up our own phone line, swam in Peter's miniature pool, played with firecrackers, built tree forts, raced everywhere on our bicycles and swore secret oaths of allegiance.

When I finished eighth grade in 1965 we moved away, to another part of the city, but our friendship never faltered. Peter and his family moved to Rye, New York, a few years later, and when the draft threatened, Peter moved back to Toronto to board with us. I will never forget our late-night whispered conversations in the darkened living room while my parents slept upstairs. Peter, fair-haired and handsome, played the role of Columbus bringing back reports from that strange new landscape of girls, dating, love and desire. At sixteen, I lived in a world of books, not people; I thought they held the key to understanding life. Peter taught me that you only make sense of life by living it, by taking chances, by engaging the world.

We shared summer jobs and then took long hitchhiking trips across the country. We were an unlikely duo: Peter, the quick-thinking extrovert with a knack for chatting up strangers and making friends, me, the shy introvert who was willing to let him take the lead. We were opposites in ways we understood and I think that frustrated us both, but at the same time we knew that our friendship created something larger than our separate selves. We had a history, and that seemed important, too.

Later, in university, Peter married and then moved to the west coast to study architecture. Through much of the late 1970s and all of the 1980s we lived in different parts of the country and rarely saw each other. I thought this wouldn't matter, that our friendship would always stay alive because it went back so far and because the roots were so strong. But when I moved to Vancouver, to Peter's city, in 1990, I found out I was wrong.

Peter's life was filled with work and family. He ran a busy, award-winning architecture practice. He had a wife and children. He sat on the boards of important organizations. He was successful and I envied that success. I wanted his attention and understanding. He knew me as well as anyone, and I wanted that deep level of knowing, but I also wanted to prove that I had finally caught up with him, and could deal with the world. I hadn't married and raised children, but I lived with an older woman whose strength and love challenged and sustained me. I'd learned, finally, how to disguise my shyness. I could teach, and make an audience laugh. And I had built a business too, much more modest than Peter's, but one that suited my solitary ways.

We met a couple of times but our friendship did not revive. The last time I spoke to Peter was a year ago. His father had died suddenly of a heart attack, in the backyard of his house, on the coast an hour north of the city. I didn't get the news until about a week later, when my mother called to tell me she'd heard from an old friend, a neighbour on the street where Peter and I once lived.

I called Peter's office, and told the receptionist my name. Peter came on the phone at once and sounded as calm and confident as ever. He asked me how I was, how my family was doing, how my work was going. I interrupted his questions to say I was sorry his dad had died. He said it had been hard, but the family had come together and handled it well. They had a burial ceremony at sea because Peter's father was a keen sailor who loved the ocean. I shared some memories of his father, his funny stories, his January splash in the pool. I told Peter I had a sailboat and suggested we might go out together, but even as I was saying it I knew it wouldn't happen. There was a pause, a lengthening silence, and then we said good-bye.

I believe Peter's friendship is lost. I tell myself this was inevitable, even predictable, and reflects badly on neither of us. Besides, I have other friends, for the first time in my life, and I make an effort to spend time with them. I create for my new friends, as we all do, a personal history built from memory, stories that explain my family and my childhood. Because Peter is my co-historian, he owns that younger part of me. And when I see his building on the way to work, I can't help but think back to when I first knew him, when our friendship was at its finest. I want to recapture the intimacy and intensity of that time, understand it fully, and relive it with him. But the friendship is gone. I must let it go.