STRUGGLING TO TELL his mistress Louise Colet how deeply he felt about her, Flaubert exclaimed, “The language is inept.” I suspect the old boy meant “insufficient,” which, unfortunately, it often is. There ought, for example, to be a word that falls between “talent” and “genius”; and a word between “envy” and “admiration.” The other day it occurred to me that yet another word is needed, this one to describe the relationship that falls between “acquaintance” and “friend.” Last week I learned that a man named Charles Sandusky had died. He was someone I liked a lot, but could not quite call a friend. Yet he was more than an acquaintance merely. I met Charles at the gym where we both worked out. He was a tall man with impressive wavy brown hair and a low hairline, and not all that much gray for a man in his early eighties. Under his aquiline nose lay a serious mustache, of the kind that a bandleader in the 1940s might have worn. He had courtly manners and managed to look dignified even in gym clothes. I liked him straightaway. We first spoke to each other when we discovered ourselves side by side on two rowing machines. I told him the joke about the wealthy woman who has gone on a cruise that simulates the conditions of a Roman slave galley, with the passengers as slaves, and who asks the woman sitting next to her, “When this cruise is over, how much do you tip the whipper?” He laughed, told me a joke in return, and our acquaintanceship was underway. In perhaps our third conversation, Charles told me that on the day of his retirement as a salesman in the cardboard-box business, he had arrived home to find his wife seated in a chair in their living room, dead, of cardiac arrest. “In the same day,” he said, “I lost my job and my best friend.” His wife was central to his life. “She was the playmaker of our social life,” he once told me, hinting at his current loneliness. He was very proud of her. She was a mathematics major at the University of Michigan at a time when women were not encouraged to study anything so difficult. He had a granddaughter doing graduate work in biochemistry, of whom he was also proud and in whom he felt something of his wife’s scientific talent lived on. Charles told me that, after his wife, a relationship with any other woman had proved impossible, though he had tried. He worked out five mornings a week. I don’t know how he filled out the rest of his days. He watched a certain amount of sports. He watched science and nature fare on PBS. He was one of those men who take the news very seriously, seeming almost to brood over it. He thought Clinton clownish and outrageous, but also thought the unstinting degradation of him wasn’t at all good for the country. He thought about the good of the country in a way that suggested disinterest of a sort that has long gone out of style. Worrying about becoming a bore, he used often to apologize for hauling the past into our rowing-machine conversations. But he couldn’t help it. “When I grew up, I not only never met but never even heard about anyone who was divorced,” he would say, or, “It’s impossible to make people understand what it was like during the Depression, how fragile and frightening life seemed.” On a couple of occasions, I told myself I ought to invite Charles to join me for lunch, so that we could have a longer, less interrupted conversation. But I held back. I did so out of a self-protectiveness that I suspect sets in as one grows older. Instead of plunging ahead, refusing to strangle a social impulse, forming new friendships wherever one can–in friendship, the more the merrier, right?–at a certain point one begins to consider the consequences of new friendships. Isn’t one’s dance card already filled with the obligations, not always met, of old friendships? One circles the wagons around oneself. In my mind, I drew a line before Charles: pals at the gym, this far and no further. For reasons too elaborate and boring to go into here, more than a year ago I began to take my workouts elsewhere. I thought of Charles often, though I cannot say that I longed for his company. He had reached his early eighties in such good physical and mental shape that I imagined him making it smoothly to ninety. News of his death gave me a small jolt. Without claiming that his departure marks a great personal subtraction for me, the world nonetheless seemed better with him in it. I don’t exactly feel guilty about not letting my acquaintanceship with Charles deepen into a friendship; I have, alas, greater calls on my guilt. I suspect we all have such relationships, likable acquaintances who could so easily have become dear friends, and who leave one thinking both of the possibilities of life and of its limitations, too. There ought to be a better name for them. –Joseph Epstein
