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Historical Friction

When figures from the past suddenly reappear, it raises the question: Should old acquaintance be forgot?

by Natalie
posted on July 19, 2007

Credits: Zela Lobb

Years ago, I read a book by Kirsten Bakis called Lives of the Monster Dogs that, thanks to a specific passage, comes to mind pretty much every time someone from my past gets in touch: “Those things are always amazing—even the moment before someone calls you, when they’re reaching for the telephone and you don’t know it yet. Those currents just beneath the surface of your life, separating and converging all the time.” Forgive the lapse into book-club discourse, but it’s Ms. Bakis’ attention to the before and after of life-changing encounters that particularly strikes me. She’s right, of course. It’s not necessarily the in-the-moment-ness of big relationships or events that makes them big; it’s often the discrepancy between who you are before and after they hit.

Those words popped back into my head when, while at the Arcade Fire show in Berkeley recently, I received a text from Bill, my boyfriend from college. “I’m in town! You around?” Bill wrote. In light of the fact that I hadn’t heard from Bill in nearly a decade, my gut response was something along the lines of, “Do you still exist?” But instead I wrote back, “Of course! Let’s grab a drink,” genuinely looking forward to seeing him. “I don’t drink anymore. And I’m vegan now. And I’m in town selling soap at the Union Street fair. And I’m engaged!” he replied.

As shocking as his sobriety, occupation and herbivore status were, the last piece of news was the true scandal—especially in light of Bill’s once anti-institutional stance regarding pretty much everything. Bill was the stereotypical college boyfriend: a handsome but greasy, guitar-playing nihilist with a wicked sense of humor whom nearly all of my friends detested and I adored. We broke up when it became clear that I couldn’t get past his ban on shampoo and he couldn’t accept my football-game-going lifestyle. He graduated shortly thereafter and, though we’d broken up on decent terms, rebuffed my proposal to keep in touch—among other things, he didn’t believe in staying friends.

Bill and I arranged to meet the following night at the Grove on Fillmore—I figured he could drink tea and I could order my requisite “catching up with an ex” glass of wine. He was waiting for me when I arrived, and the instant I saw him it was as if no time had passed—he even asked to borrow money for the tea for old time’s sake. Talking to Bill was like speaking to someone in a language I had once been fluent in—jolting at first, but soon it all came flooding back. The conversation morphed into a one-upmanship contest of who could remember the most details about the other person. (“Do you still eat burritos with a fork and knife?” “Do you still think Flaming Lips’ Soft Bulletin is the most genius record ever made? Do you still get stage fright about making hand-to-hand contact when someone asks for a high five?”) Implausible as it seemed to have a rockin’ night out with my sober, vegan, engaged ex-boyfriend, I was loath to say goodnight.

The next day, I filled Sia and Jules in on my blast from the past. “Engaged?” Sia said incredulously when I told her about Bill. “Did you say ‘selling soap?’” Jules asked, confused. I assured them they were both correct. “And suddenly we’re chatting nonstop like it’s the most normal thing in the world!” I told them. “He knows me so well, it’s like social shorthand.”

“He knew you well,” Sia said abruptly. “You’ve changed a lot since then, Nat.” She seemed almost hurt by the suggestion that some guy from college who’d been missing in action for years could be slotted in the same “knowing me” category as she. She had a point, but there was something so validating about meeting up with someone who had once considered me to be his go-to person. I wanted another hit of my memory-lane drug.

We agreed to meet at Café Gratitude the next night, before Bill left town. Having yet to discuss anything recent, I resolved to get to the bottom of his matrimonial turnaround. “It just seems like the next step,” he told me when I pointed out the inherent conflict in his being engaged when he didn’t believe in marriage. I realized it was a very Bill thing to do. Selling soap and not washing his hair, priding himself on grilling a mean steak and becoming vegan—Bill had always been a study in contrasts. “So why haven’t I heard from you until now?” I asked him finally. “I’ve called you and never heard back. What’s that about?” A look of guilt came over Bill’s face. “Because I’ve been so hopelessly in love with you all of these years that it was just too painful?” he asked, knowing I’d never buy it. “Bonnie—my fiancée—pretty much forbade it,” he then said. “She’s loosened up a bit since I popped the question, but she said what’s in the past should stay in the past out of respect to her.” My anonymous classification as “the past” stung at first, but I’d heard this line of thought before—some of my best friends played the Bonnie card, in fact. “So one minute I’m minding my own business enjoying the Arcade Fire, and the next you’re back in my life—all familiar and great and promised till death do you part—and then it’s just radio silence for another decade until you’re in town selling soap at some other street fair?” I whined, reverting to my less-mature college-freshman self. We sat in silence for a couple of minutes, which I remembered was Bill’s standard reaction to potential conflict.

And then it hit me, just as suddenly as Bill’s text had dropped him back into my life: If the me I was now were to meet the Bill he was now, we’d never even have a first date. My tightly edited list of requirements for potential boyfriends (a list begun thanks to lessons gleaned from our breakup) would have counted him out immediately. If my dating life was a bar with a highly selective door policy, Bill had gotten his hand stamped at 5 p.m., before the line had even formed. And I was glad he got in. He caught me at a time before some of the biggest things in my life had occurred—before I even knew to expect them. Thanks to his early timing, he was now guaranteed access in and out of my life whenever he chose. In a weird way, Bill offered a preserved vision of my life as it once was—a personal Pompeii that would erode if revisited too often. I changed the subject, now satisfied in the knowledge that we were at one time significant to each other—and no longer thirsty for proof that that was still true. After dinner, I hugged him goodbye outside the restaurant, and Bill mumbled something he didn’t mean about staying in touch.

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