Secrets

By TAD BARTIMUS

A friend and I were sitting together at a party talking about the good food and interesting people. The conversation was light and polite, the sort of chitchat universal to a neighborhood gathering. Then, without warning, my companion turned to me:

"My confidante has moved away and now there's nobody here who knows my secret. Can you keep a secret?"

One of the worst things about moving to a new place is that you don't know anything about anybody; one of the best things about moving to a new place is that you don't know anything about anybody (they don't know anything about you, either).

I believe in Divine Intervention. At that moment a guest walking past us tripped and spilled red wine all over my outfit. I escaped to the bathroom with a borrowed tee shirt and a roll of paper towels to scrub at the stain and wrestle with my conscience. What are the boundaries of friendship? How close is too close? When do you move from casual to intimate?

A little refrain kept going Œround in my head: "Be friendly but not familiar," my grandmother used to say, invariably adding, "familiarity breeds contempt."

I am worn out with familiarity. I didn't ask to know about O.J. Simpson's brutality against his wife. I didn't ferret out details of Roseanne's dysfunctional family. I never intended to follow Madonna's quest for a father for her child or Michael Jackson's search for a mother for his. And the Clinton mess? Who even wants to think about it? But we live in a tell-all time. Even the MIR space station gets CNN.

The peccadilloes of other people's sins always confuse me: this week I'm on her side, the next on his. As for movie stars' soap opera lives: never, ever get in the wrong grocery line, you know, the one where the checker's tape jams. It's like popcorn, you can't help yourself. Forget that old excuse "but there was nothing else to read." Try the back of a cereal box, it's got more fiber.

Everybody's got dirty linen. The difference is, in grandmother's day if you aired it in public the audience was extended family or maybe, for a big scandal, the county. Now it's on the world wide web. You can even rat on yourself with your own home page in cyberspace. If your secret is scummy enough scouts for Oprah, Murray and Jerry will rate you on their scandal meter. Maybe they'll book you this week, publishers will flock next week and, in a month, you'll be a made-for-TV movie and have your own talk show.

One of the worst things about moving to a new place is that you don't know anything about anybody; one of the best things about moving to a new place is that you don't know anything about anybody (they don't know anything about you, either). The older I get, the more I like it that way. My old friends have sorted through my soiled laundry with me. I don't have to tell them who I am, they watched me get this way. A few who knew too much fled; many drifted away with time and distance. A precious handful are in for the long haul.

I decided not to help my friend from the party carry around his dirty linen. I don't want to know he's embezzled from his partner or cheated on his wife or does cocaine. I don't want to look at his smiling face and see duplicity. I don't want to become a co-conspirator or confessor. Been there, done that, learned from it.

Instead, I bought him a diary and suggested he find a church. But I also warned him to stay away from the likes of Bakker, Swaggert and Tammy Faye.

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