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simple, really. When I would call her last year, which admittedly I didn’t do very often, she did not sound happy. Her voice on the other end of the line would be flat and uninflected, not lively and pleased to hear from me like certain of my other friends’ voices when I called them. Hi , she’d say. Not: Hey! How are you doing? Nice to hear from you! Just: Hi . Then she’d stop talking and wait for me to continue, to step in and carry on the conversation. It was as though there was something she was expecting me to say, some problem that I ought to know about, something I had done wrong for which I should apologize.
    I did know, at least I thought I knew, what was wrong. It was that I hadn’t called more recently, that I didn’t call more often. For several years, there had been an imbalance in our friendship that we both felt but did not talk about. She felt, at least I think she felt, that I did not call enough, did not make enough time for her, that I held her at a distance. I felt that she expected me to call too often, that she wanted too much from me as a friend and that she didn’t appreciate the attention and time I did give her.
    A year or so before, she’d been going through a difficult time, a run of misfortune and disruptions that seemed to build on each other: there were problems at her job, which made her depressed and then, in part because of the depression, her partner left and then because her partner left, she decided to quit the job she disliked so much but then she couldn’t find another one right away. She was the kind of person who would pick up the phone immediately if something in her life went wrong, to talk, to share her distress. She would call me, sometimes late at night, and we would talk, sometimes for a long time, about the difficult things that were happening to her. And each time we would talk in this way, I would feel like I’d paid into an account, fulfilled a requirement, and that now she could not accuse me of neglecting her. Because I am—I’ve always felt I am—a person who keeps her distance from people, who doesn’t return phone calls right away and who doesn’t like to see people too often in case I run out of things to say to them.
    On the other hand she would feel—or so I can infer from her behavior—that with each of these conversations we were getting closer and more intimate, becoming better friends. And so she began call more frequently, to talk about what was happening in her life, to get advice, to find out how I was doing. But even though her phone calls were more frequent, I was still returning them at the same rate, with the same couple-of-days delay. Only now it seemed like I was returning them more slowly, like I was pulling away from her, retreating, even though in fact my behavior hadn’t changed. She made more phone calls than I returned whereas before she had made fewer phone calls and I returned a higher percentage of them. After a while she came to resent the fact that she was calling me more often than I was calling her and her voice, when we did speak, took on that flat, resentful tone that came to characterize it during the last months of our friendship.
    As I said, we never talked about this. But last year, when things were going very badly with me—I was separated from my husband for a while and my new job was not all that I hoped it would be—I would think periodically that I really should call her, that it had been too long since we’d spoken, and I would sometimes get as far as starting to dial her number. But then I would anticipate how she’d sound when she answered, and the prospect of hearing her lack of enthusiasm or pleasure, of encountering yet another person that day to whom I was a problem or a matter of indifference, would stop me; I would hang up the phone and I wouldn’t call.
    In the end, it had been so long since I had called that I thought if I