My friend Mary and I have known each other for many years. We've shared good times and bad. Because we're both very busy, we don't see each other as often as we'd like, but when the chips are down, she's one of the first people I call, and vice versa. I like to think I know her as well as anyone.

The other night at dinner, she proudly announced that a very prestigious retail chain had agreed to carry her new line of pavé diamond jewelry. I would have been thrilled for her, had I any idea what she was talking about.

"Oh," she said in response to the confused look on my face. "My two partners and I have been working on a jewelry line for three years and it just got picked up. We're being featured in a couple of magazines next month."

She beamed. I sat dumbfounded. I never knew she was involved in designing a line of diamond jewelry; it's not exactly something you'd forget if someone mentioned it. An entire portion of Mary's life was a complete mystery to me, one of her closest friends.

"Congratulations," I said. "Why didn't you ever tell me?"

"You never asked," she replied.

We walk though life collecting the stories of the people around us, and eventually we form what we think is a complete photograph of who each person is, and what his or her life is like. Obviously, there are always little surprises; you find out at a cocktail party that one friend really, really hates olives, and that another went to the same preschool you did. But by and large you progress through life believing that the picture in your mind is a true and accurate representation of the person in question. Then one day, you learn something that utterly reformats your assumptions. It scrambles up that photograph completely, and you suddenly must ask yourself, "Who is this person I thought I knew?"

Before the recent encounter with Mary, my most memorable brush with this phenomenon came at my sister's wedding. I'd always thought of my father as a charming, if stern, man of Dutch-Irish descent who has shown consistent and outright disdain for public displays of affection, enthusiasm, or rhythm. As he and my sister approached the dance floor for the father-daughter waltz, I turned to my brother David and said, "This ought to be interesting." I had never seen my father dance. In fact, I couldn't recall ever seeing him tap his feet.

My dad, suddenly transformed by the music, began spinning my sister around and proceeded to execute one of the finest waltzes I'd ever seen. David and I stood at the edge of the dance floor, our mouths hanging open. "Who the fuck is that?" David asked, pointing at this man formerly known as Dad.

After the dance, I cornered my father. "So, what's up with the Fred Astaire routine?" I asked.

"Oh, I had a girlfriend when I was 18 who was a competition ballroom dancer and she showed me how to dance. We danced competitions," he said matter-of-factly. I reviewed my internal photograph of my father, in which he'd always appeared to be a scowling, passionless guy. Suddenly, the man in the photo was dressed in a white three-piece suit like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever -- and he was winking at me.

Discovering the other side of Dad was a wonderful revelation. But the "who are you?" phenomenon is not always so pleasant. Take, for instance, my dear girlfriend Janelle. One day, Janelle's live-in boyfriend did not return from a business trip. Once the panic subsided and information started to trickle in, Janelle discovered that he, in fact, hadn't held a job in months and was just pretending to go to work. She also learned that he was living with and engaged to another woman in another town. Talk about reformatting the hard drive. The revelation didn't just rearrange Janelle's inner photo of her man -- it incinerated it. It also shattered her confidence in her ability to judge character.

The destruction of faith in one's judgment is the inevitable fallout of discovering a once-unknown attribute (or in Janelle's case, another whole person) lurking beneath a loved one's skin. And whether the revelation is nice or horrible, it always makes you wonder if you're utterly clueless.

So imagine what it must be like to be one of the women who woke up on September 12 to discover that her boyfriend was actually a fanatical terrorist who had just helped fly a plane into the World Trade Center or the Pentagon. These men had created such convincing photographs of themselves that apparently even those closest to them were caught completely unaware. They're stuck carrying pictures that turned out to be complete fabrications in every sense of the word. These women may never trust anyone again; add them to the list of the wounded in our strange new war.

Given how little many of us know ourselves, it should come as no surprise that, in the final analysis, we know very little about one another. Is it because we are so busy trying to figure out our own lives -- as individuals and as a nation -- that we don't really want to know much about other people, other than what's in the photo we carry around? Do we lack time and energy to invest in another? Or is it simply not possible to fully know another person, no matter how many years we study them, love them, or live with them? I don't know the answer, but I am certain of one thing: at best, those photos we hold in our minds are never more than simple line drawings, waiting to be filled in.

Kris Frieswick can be reached at krisf1@gte.net.

Issue Date: November 23 - 29, 2001