dwarfgoose

Can a woman be friends with a man? Really friends? What if he’s married or in a relationship? What if she’s married or in a relationship? Friendships can be passionate. Our friends touch our identity like lovers touch our naked body. We are intimate with a true friend.

Does the phantom of desire, the fantasy of feeling attractive or not attractive pervert friendship with men? I find myself running to the looking-glass before meeting the most platonic male friend. I probably do that with women too because I am vain and French, but, still, I do it more with men.

What could be more attractive than breaking our heart laughing about some ridiculous situation that doesn’t seem so scary because our friend understands? Why does the common humanity factor often stop working in a relationship like a marriage or a de-facto partnership? Sometimes we are something to somebody and they are something to us, but we are not ourselves to each other. Why do we stop confiding in them after a while to turn to our ‘best friend’? Why does a woman fear her husband or partner having a very close woman friend? Why does a man fear his wife or partner swanning off to have heart to heart chat with her own male best friend? I have recently discovered Love my Way, that brilliant series on Australian life. It explores these questions thoroughly. When Frankie and Tom try to continue their friendship, Lewis, Frankie’s husband needs all his humour to cope. Katie, Tom’s girlfriend, has an abortion to take revenge on his deep connection with another woman. Yet the friendship, in fits and starts, in sudden bursts of light, in rantings and epiphanies lives on.

You can see how hard it is, but they do manage it. Friendship seems to be the goal. The inner connection is the elusive pearl that, as Kerouac says, is sometimes handed to us. We never know when, we never know how or who will do it. But we have to accept the gift, however hard the claiming of it is. The Tao says ‘we have a duty to those with whom we have an inner connection.’ This can happen with a dog, a woman, a tree, a particular sky, a child, an old lady and, yes, even a man.

Photograph I took walking on the beach with a friend.

My mother used to say: ‘Man! The hereditary enemy!’ She was part-Spanish, part-Russian, part-French. Man, for her, was part-beast, part-dragon, part-husband and always potential lover. ‘Men’ were described with a different vocabulary that seemed honed just for ‘Them’. She would sometimes say to prove her point: ‘Even a man could understand that!’

I have been living in Australia for 9 years now. Australians treat me like a human being which is the best thing that ever happened to me. And, to my surprise, they treat men like that too.

Men are not treated as wild beasts. They are not seen as tigers on the prowl, burglars on the loose or dangerous maniacs. My mother would not approve. She had gallows humour and was the most un-politically correct person I ever met. Her rules seemed to come straight out of a fairy tale. They pop up unexpectedly in my mind. ‘Never wear a watch after five o’clock! ‘ she would say like the rabbit in Alice in Wonderland. Or ‘Never shake the hand of a woman over seventy-five, always kiss it!’ Or  ‘Remember! A husband is no longer a man!’ and her oldest friend Pilar told me ‘Love, is like the shroud, it falls from heaven.’ Spanish people mix death with everything. Even the French call orgasm ‘the little death’. My mother called a sneeze ‘a tiny death’. ‘Oh, the sneeze, it suspends all our faculties!’, she would exclaim sensually before adding: ‘It startles us out of the world!’ But she didn’t need a sneeze to accomplish that. She was in another world on a nine to five basis. As if it were her business to be single mindedly beyond the pale.

Yet my mother’s best friends were men. One was an alcoholic Jesuit translator of the Ancient Greek philosopher Plotinus, another was a gay film director, another an inexhaustibly cultured hunchback antique dealer, another a very old White Russian guitar player called Mr Shadinov and the last I can remember was an Irish man who could read signatures in a clairvoyant way.

Kiwi and Moa, two extinct New Zealand birds.

Women don’t seem to have that many men friends in Australia. Men, here, are treated with less suspicion but more separateness than in France or Spain. I wondered why. Is it because they refuse to believe Plotinus who wrote that “Man-kind (The hyphen is mine) is poised midway between the gods and the beasts.”

Is it an error to take Men for human beings instead of another kind of animal altogether?  Are women sitting ducks or bowing Kiwi birds (two extinct species) in their company? If women become aware of this, as my mother was, could they have a chance at real communication with the other half of the population on earth?