Love and all that razzmatazz
Lucy.
Chapter Eight
WHEN I WAS YOUNG AND DECIDED TO BE A WRITER, my understanding of the job description came straight from La Bohème. There would be a drafty garret, cold nights, little food, a single candle. On the upside, I, like Puccini, imagined the garret would be in Paris, which would give the poverty a glamorous edge. When Lucy left Aberdeen in 1991, she left a true garret, one that was isolated, depressing, and utterly bereft of singing bohemians. From there she stepped into that other truth about the writer’s life, the one we had heard so many rumors about: The Gravy Train. For writers looking for care, feeding, and companionship, there are a myriad of options, and after all our countless applications we had finally cracked the code. We were in, and in the years to come we would systematically work our way through just about every perk that was available to us. Lucy was spending her late summer at Yaddo, where I had spent August two summers before. Yaddo is a capital M Mansion in Saratoga Springs, New York, complete with Tiffany windows, elaborately carved banisters, formal gardens lined with white pillars, fountains, and a pool. There are trails to walk in the woods and rules that say if you pass someone during the day you may simply drop your gaze to the path as a signal you are thinking seriously about your work and do not wish to engage in conversation. Nor is your creative process disturbed by household tasks: your sheets are changed and towels arrive in big, fluffy stacks. Breakfast and dinner are taken in the enormous formal dining room, but lunch comes in a pail to be eaten in your study or by the pool, depending on the weather. It was a world so far away from tissue expanders and hospitals that it’s hard to imagine a plane could get you from one place to the other. It seemed that there should have been a decompression tank, some sort of halfway house to live in for a month that was moderately nice so a person could come up slowly to avoid getting the bends. The bends in this case were a sort of eight-year-old giddiness that made one want to run up and down the red-carpeted stairs late at night, banging on every door on every floor, wanting to look and see who had the best bedroom.
Dearest Pet,
It’s raining here today, the first time since I’ve been here. Finally yesterday I got a brand new poem going, but today it’s harder to keep up with it. I’m amazed, though, how conducive this place is to working. I think I was really afraid of the idea of being locked away, but it’s just the opposite. The fact I know I only have a month is motivating too, yet at the same time, since each day seems like a week, it isn’t frightening either.
Last night Miriam Kuznets (Sigman’s ex) and I went for a walk around the grounds, that dirt road which takes you past the lakes. I guess I don’t have to go on and on about how wonderful it is here, as you already know. The only thing missing is you, but I’m sure we’ll be here together if not next year, then the year after. I guess they don’t let people in over and over, year after year, but I take a lot of comfort in knowing that, unless something really drastic happens, I’ll get to return again; it relieves me of that awful oh-my-god-I’ve-got-to-cram-it-all-in-right-now feeling.
I lost a dollar playing poker last night. About six of us played, and Tom was the only male. I hate men when they know they’re the only one, but Tom seems fairly oblivious to it. He seems like a very laid back kinda guy. Michael Ryan is here; he on the other hand is perfectly aware of his status as male. He’s a really nice man, but something about him…. or maybe I’m just jealous, because he seems to flirt with everyone except me. I’m having all the same ego and self-esteem problems that I’ve always had, but I think I’m doing a good job in not letting it interfere with my work. I’ve decided I’m going to go get into some kind of therapy when I get to boston. Last night, or rather the night before, a whole group of people were sitting around talking about how therapy “saved their lives”; it was all a bit hokey, but hey. It’s become sort of the regular thing here to go to the Adelphi bar each night at ten forty-five, as reward for working from after dinner until then. There aren’t any drinkers here, not the ones of yore anyway. In fact, I seem to drink the most out of anyone.
Before the days of cellphones, receiving a call at Yaddo was a big event. There were two pay phones in the hallway leading into the dining room and while you could call out anytime you liked, incoming calls could only be received during the dinner hour. Getting a call through was not unlike dialing in for a radio contest. Some nights I would punch in the number for a straight hour and get nothing but a busy signal. (Was it better to keep dialing the same line? Did switching back and forth increase your odds?) You had to hit it exactly, the moment someone set the receiver into the cradle, because everyone who knew anyone in that dining room was dialing just as frantically as you were. Ah, but when it rang, I could see it all so clearly in my mind. I knew that some skinny poet dressed in black jeans would have to get up from his dinner and go down the hall to answer. He takes his time, ten rings even though it was busy ten seconds ago. (People who had just hung up the phone never wanted to pick it up again.) “Yaddo,” he barks, or if he is very clever, he says, “Pay phone.” I would ask him politely, “May I speak to Lucy Grealy?” And with that he drops the phone with the full force of his disappointment that it is not, in fact, for him. I listen while the receiver bangs against the wall. He returns again to the dining room and for a second everyone looks up, hopeful, perhaps, that the call will be for them. “Lucy,” he would say, “it’s for you.” She pushes back her chair and rises into the pool of evening light coming in from the leaded windows. Somewhere, someone behind her mutters, “It’s always for Lucy.”
I called every night. I wanted to talk to Lucy and Lucy wanted to be the kind of person who got the most calls. The phone booths were unbearable, hot and narrow as upright coffins, so we never talked for very long, but it meant that when she went back to her seat, everyone would look up again and someone would ask and she could give a little lopsided smile and shrug. “Just a friend,” she’d say mysteriously.
What she told me was that she was depressed because she’d made a pass at Tom, who rebuffed her and then made a pass fifteen minutes later, right in front of her, at a pretty girl who had already received three passes that night. Yaddo was summer camp the way summer camp is represented in movies, with intrigues and crushes and sex. A few nights later Lucy told me that her friendship with an older painter was taking an interesting turn. He adored her and paid his undivided attention to her in the evenings when everyone sat on the back patio to smoke cigarettes and watch the bats dive for mosquitoes. He held her in his arms and talked about Russian literature. He pointed out the sparrows from the bats. Then he started taking Lucy to bed. The cuddling had progressed to different variations of kissing and nibbling and touching. But no actual sex.
I wanted to know why in the hell no actual sex?
“He has a girlfriend.” Lucy sighed. “And he has to be faithful to her because he’s a good person. He has to be true to her and true to himself.”
“Oh, for Christ’s sake.”
“Maybe he’ll change his mind. Maybe he’ll fall in love with me.”
“For three more weeks? Why put yourself through the heartbreak? This is not a good person, Lucy. Good people don’t do this sort of thing.”
“He is good,” she said. “Call me back tomorrow and I’ll tell you what happened.”
“Shouldn’t you eat dinner every once in a while?”
“Most of the time I can’t eat what they have and even when I can eat what’s offered, I’m usually too intent on not slobbering it all down my chin and lap that I barely get anything into me. I think one or two of the women here suspect I’m anorexic or something.”
“So try and eat. No one is going to care.”
“I get frozen yogurt in town,” she promised.
So every night I called and got the new installment on the non-affair. They progressed to sleeping chastely naked in one another’s arms. Then on the first of September he left summer camp, happy in the knowledge that he ha
d never cheated on his girlfriend. And Lucy was left to cry over him for six months.
WHILE OUR PLAN was always to land the same fellowship at the same time, it never worked out that way. We won the same things but our good luck was always slightly out of sync. I was a finalist for the Bunting Fellowship at Radcliffe while she was on the waiting list at Provincetown. Two years after Lucy had her Bunting year, I had mine. Two years after I was a fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Lucy got to go as well.
With her fellowship at the Bunting Institute, Lucy was given money to live on, an office to work in, and a group of extremely smart women to interact with, although she groused about the fact that they were always too busy working to go to the movies during the day. Lucy had spent enough time alone working in Aberdeen. What she wanted now were people to go out to lunch with. Her need to surround herself with friends was enormous, and she diligently tracked down everyone she ever knew who had landed in Boston. Her letters were full of notes on who she had tried to call so far that day and who had yet to return the call and what a good conversation she had had with someone else. In Scotland she had braced herself for loneliness which was, after all, as abundant as rain. There wasn’t much she could do about it. But in Cambridge she didn’t want to be alone for a minute. She decided to give up her apartment and find herself some roommates. She also decided to follow through on the decision she had made at Yaddo and sign on with a therapist.
I had a very interesting time with that shrink yesterday. She can’t see me for much longer, it’s the way the system is set up, but she’s going to try and find me someone who can see me on a regular basis. What was interesting about yesterday is that I had an actual insight, the sort they say you’re supposed to have in therapy but of which I’ve always been a wee bit dubious. It wasn’t an overwhelming insight, simply that although I was aware of it, I’ve never noted the significance of the fact that 90% of the men I’ve slept with, I’ve slept with almost immediately and then gone on to become friends with them, rather than allowing it to progress the other way. From this we got into the negative self-esteem thing and she said this extraordinary thing: I can stop it. I don’t have to feel so bad about myself all the time. This struck me because I remember speaking with Michael Ryan at Yaddo, he was telling me about his whole life spent looking in the mirror and hating himself, and now he doesn’t do that any more. I was sort of flabbergasted in the way both he and the woman yesterday just so categorically said Yeah, we can fix that. Like it was an infection or a bad tooth or something. It was the objectifying of it that startled me, and I’m attracted to it, to thinking it’s something you can change, though of course I don’t believe it, yet that, according to Michael and the shrink, is part of the problem, a bona fide symptom of it. Curious, very curious.
While Lucy was in Cambridge, returning phone calls and making lunch dates, Patricia Foster, a friend from graduate school, asked Lucy to write an essay for a book she was editing called Minding the Body: Women Writers on Body and Soul. It was exactly the push she’d been waiting for. Lucy took the semiautobiographical short story she’d been working on and turned it into an autobiographical essay. Nonfiction about herself. It was a piece about her cancer, pain, chemotherapy, teasing and longing and shame. It was about the wonderful freedom of Halloween masks and getting to walk around like any other kid in the world for one night a year and the horrible oppression of a world full of reflective surfaces. I read the manuscript sitting at my dining room table in Murray, Kentucky, and felt like Lucy had just slipped a knife into the ground and sliced open a diamond mine. The writing was stunning, better than her best poems. Not only had she found her story, she had found all the room that prose allows. Her life was no longer a metaphor for something else. It was a narrative that was itself as powerful and magnetic as she was a person. After spending so much of her youth trying to turn people’s attention away from her face, she now pulled the light directly onto her jaw, her childhood, her humiliation. It was a decision that sent her in another direction entirely.
Since the essay was written for an anthology, Lucy had the chance to place it in a magazine first. It was accepted by Harper’s, Lucy’s first choice—we believed, in those days, anyone’s first choice. The publication won her a National Magazine Award. Because the essay was so clearly an overview of a complicated and compelling life, it also won her an agent, who got her a book contract with Houghton Mifflin. Then she finally won the fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown she’d been trying to get for so long. The following year she’d have someplace to go and write the book. Lucy Grealy had come to glory.
She was also furious with me. In November of 1991 I’d moved to Murray, Kentucky, where I would be teaching for one semester starting in January. The first night I was there, Mark Levine dropped by to introduce himself while I was unpacking boxes. He taught poetry and would have the office down the hall from mine. There wasn’t a lot going on in Murray. It was a dry county with a Wal-Mart, a Dairy Queen, and one excellent doughnut shop. A new girl in the English department was a fairly big event for other members of the English department. Mark had gone to Iowa after I did and while we had never met before, we knew a lot of the same people. He stayed for hours, sitting on the floor and talking to me while I unloaded books into a bookshelf. It wasn’t too long after that I was dating a poet.
“No,” Lucy said.
“I’m not asking permission.”
“You can’t date a poet.”
Lucy had never met Mark, but she hated the very idea of him. He’d won the prizes at Iowa that she had wanted but didn’t get. He had been a favorite of Jorie Graham, a powerful and brilliant poet whose favoritism Lucy had greatly courted over the years but had only rarely received. Even if they hadn’t overlapped in the program, even if it had all been years ago anyway, she saw him as direct competition. He had published poems in the New Yorker, and in her mind he had taken up the space on the page that was destined for her.
“Do you like his poetry better than mine?”
“Lucy, this is insanity! I’ve only just started going out with him.”
“Do you think he’s a better poet than I am?”
I was sitting at the top of the stairs in my new apartment and the lights were off. I leaned against the wall and tapped the receiver on my forehead. “I’ve only read a few of his poems.”
“So you think he’s better.” She had made everything into a contest and there was no sense in me trying to tell her it was otherwise.
“Of course I don’t think he’s better. I think you’re better.”
“Do you love me more?”
“Of course I love you more, even though I believe it’s perfectly possible to love more than one person and to love different people in different ways but if we’re talking straight-on comparative love with no adjustments for circumstance then, yes, you win hands down. I love you more. In fact I don’t even love him. I’ve only been going out with him for two weeks.”
“I love you, too,” she said, but she said it in a wretched voice.
Lucy called three or four times a day with the sole purpose of reminding me that while I was in the middle of nowhere Kentucky teaching four classes and being buried alive by student papers, I was ruining her life.
“I’m all alone,” she would start.
Standing at the kitchen sink, I put down the potato and the peeler and braced myself to go again. “You’re not all alone. You have a ton of friends in Cambridge. You go out every night.”
“I don’t have a boyfriend. Nobody loves me.”
“For God’s sake, Lucy, I love you. Everybody loves you.”
“It isn’t the same. You wouldn’t understand.”
I wouldn’t understand because I was dating a poet and thus committing the ultimate act of betrayal. “Listen, pet, everything is going your way right now. You have a piece coming out in Harper’s, you’ve got the greatest fellowship in the world, you’re living in Cambridge. I’m living in rural Ke
ntucky and teaching my ass off. Why am I the one trying to cheer you up?”
“You have a boyfriend. You have a book coming out.”
“You have a book contract! You can’t feel hurt because I have a book coming out. You’re going to have a book coming out, too.”
“I haven’t written a word of it. It just hangs over my head. I spend my entire life feeling guilty that I’m not writing and I don’t actually write anything at all. Your book is completely finished. You have nothing to worry about.”
“So start writing,” I said. “A page a day. You used to write every day in Aberdeen. It’s not as if you’ve sold a book and you’ve never written before.”
Then I could hear her tearing up over the phone. She sniffed and choked and the sadness was as real as anything. “Will I ever have sex again?” she said.
“Probably tonight,” I said. “Probably before I will.”
Two or three hours later she’d call back and we’d do the whole thing over again.
The fact is I had a great deal to be happy about in those days, but then so did Lucy. I couldn’t understand how she could present so much misery to me when so many of the things she had dreamed about had come true for her: she was out of Scotland, her face was greatly improved, she had an important fellowship at Radcliffe and a book contract and a large circle of devoted friends. It was true, she didn’t have a boyfriend, but that wasn’t reason enough to overlook everything else. Of course it also occurred to me that Lucy might have been doing pretty well, but to allow me to think so would be letting me off the hook for my most egregious breach of our friendship: the poet.