Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  IN FEBRUARY I was going to New York to give a reading at Sarah Lawrence and I asked Lucy to drive down and meet me there. She grudgingly agreed. I thought it was possible that she could come and not speak to me at all, but I had to try.

  In the course of most lifetimes, few people are capable of the kind of enormous changes that Lucy seemed to manage every year. Maybe this ability had its origins in her physical self, the constant state of transformation she went through even when she wasn’t in the middle of a surgical cycle. But it wasn’t just her face that always showed up different. I had known her shy and cool in college, scrappy and James Dean–tough in Iowa, then all decked out in high heels and tiny black cocktail dresses. She had been as sweet and loving as the best child one could possibly know and she had been wild as the worst kind of teenager. She worked constantly on deciding who she would be, her philosophy and approach to life. When I saw Lucy this time, she was right at the start of a whole new phase. She was just becoming famous. There was a light sheen of confidence sitting over her shoulders, the glow of someone whose attention was desired. She was driving a red Saab that she’d bought with her book advance and wearing an artfully distressed leather jacket. She was slightly harried and distracted, as if I had just called her out of a very important meeting. She was affectionate and distant and she made it perfectly clear that her feelings were still sore. She wasn’t so sure that coming here was worth her time.

  “Traffic,” she said, and rolled her eyes to explain her late arrival.

  I had spent the day on campus, teaching a couple of classes, giving a reading, seeing old teachers who had been so unfailingly kind to me. It was wonderful to be back, and now I was here with Lucy in this place where we had started off together. But we were awkward with one another as we walked around campus. The wind was freezing and reminiscing wasn’t enough to sustain the evening.

  Lucy suggested we go to the movies, and afterwards we would go to a nice restaurant, one of the ones we wouldn’t have been able to afford when we were in school. I thought it was a waste to sit in silence in a dark theater when we only had one night together but if the alternative was walking around not saying what was on our minds, then I might as well take it. We drove the scant mile into downtown Bronxville and saw the film of the David Mamet play Glengarry Glen Ross.

  They should have billed it as a horror movie. As the salesmen scraped and begged and lied to keep their lousy jobs, Lucy and I leaned in closer towards one another, the desperation of their lives closing up our throats. We held hands. When the supervisor berated them, we shut our eyes. By the time the lights came up, we were sweating and exhausted and had somehow been restored to ourselves again. We could talk. Even after we got to the restaurant and ordered two glasses of wine, we were still shaken up.

  “My God,” Lucy said. “What if we weren’t writers? What if we had to work like that?”

  “I wouldn’t make it.” The chances I would wind up in sales were about the same as my becoming a prize fighter.

  “But what if we had kids? What if we had a husband to support? What if we were like them and we couldn’t walk away?” Lucy pushed the heels of her hands against her eyes. “What if I never make it?”

  “I think you already have.”

  “If I can write this book, maybe. If anybody wants to read this book once I write it.”

  “Of course people are going to want to read it, and as for writing it, I think you have to now. Otherwise you’re going to owe Houghton Mifflin a lot of money.” I thought of the red Saab. I had a strong suspicion it wasn’t going back.

  That night we slept in the house of a woman who rented out rooms to Sarah Lawrence visitors. It was the same room I had slept in more than ten years before when I had come up to see the college for the first time. Lucy and I tucked into our little twin beds and I clicked off the light between us.

  “Don’t be mad at me anymore,” I said in the darkness.

  She was quiet for a long time. “I don’t like him,” she said.

  “You’ve never met him. Even if you had met him and you really didn’t like him, which wouldn’t happen, couldn’t you just be happy for me because I’m happy?”

  “I wish I was a poet.”

  “You are a poet. It’s just that now you’re something else, too. Now you’re a soon-to-be-famous memoirist.”

  “That’s a horrible word.”

  Neither of us said anything for a long time, and after a while I thought Lucy had fallen asleep. The curtains were old and thin and the light from a street lamp fell in through the window and showed up the small outline of Lucy in her bed. “Okay,” she said finally.

  “Okay what?”

  “I won’t be mad at you anymore.”

  Chapter Nine

  I HAVE NEVER IN MY LIFE KNOWN A WRITER WHO enjoyed the actual act of writing less than Lucy, which is saying something because just about every writer I know sits down to work with some degree of dread. When she started her fellowship at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown in the fall of 1992, she was filled to the top with all good and serious intentions. She was going to write every day. She was going to go to the gym. She was going to lead a quiet life of reflection. Despite having written her Harper’s essay, she felt she was leaving the Bunting Institute having frittered her year away (although in her defense I must say that everyone I have ever known who had a year at the Bunting, including myself, felt in the end that they had frittered it to one degree or another). All signs pointed towards success in Provincetown. First, she had the book contract and an absolute deadline and Lucy was someone who relied heavily on the pressure of deadlines to get anything done. John Skoyles, who had been Lucy’s favorite poetry teacher at Sarah Lawrence, was now the director of the Fine Arts Work Center, and my friend Elizabeth had come back for a second-year fellowship, so Lucy had two friends before she even got there. She also met Joy Nolan, one of the fiction fellows, when she first arrived and Joy became one of the great friends and allies of her life.

  To be in Provincetown in the winter is to be broke. Nearly all of the stores and restaurants closed and life is reduced to a skeleton crew. Most of the people who are left hole up to paint and write while the cold wind blasts down the suddenly empty Commercial Street. With her book advance in her back pocket, Lucy was, by the standards of those around her, well-to-do. She chose not to stay in one of the houses owned by the Work Center, where the other fellows can easily chart a person’s comings and goings. For an extra fifty dollars a month over what her fellowship provided, she rented an apartment in a tall, narrow wooden building that looked directly over the bay. The entire structure rocked and swayed with every storm that blew past. With her Saab and her good view of the water, her friends and her contract, Lucy was suddenly the one with the glamorous life.

  But no matter how hard she tried to stay inside and write, the simple act of being alone was nearly impossible. Lucy could most often be found at the Governor Bradford, one of the only year-round bars, where she tried her hand at pool in the afternoons and talked about how hard it was to live under the pressure of pages owed. She bought her friends beers and punched in songs on the jukebox. At night she went dancing with Joy, favoring the clubs dominated by handsome gay men. Lucy loved dancing at gay bars. If she was ignored, there was an easy explanation for it. Besides, she was such a good dancer she was rarely ignored. Unlike Aberdeen, where it was so hard to get to know anyone, or Cambridge, where all the other Buntings were often busy, there were always people to hang out with during a Provincetown winter.

  But with all the tourists gone and the beaches empty, there were no diversions except the ones you made yourself. Every alley, every house, every bartender, became completely known. The winter days at the end of Cape Cod were breathtakingly long, as if every hour had an extra fifty minutes squirreled away inside it. There were no responsibilities, no place you had to be. The only constant was a steady gray drizzle. Lucy and Joy were forever getting in the car and setting out in search of adventure
, anything to make this minute feel in some way different from the one before and the one that was coming up next. Once on their way home from Wellfleet, they found a horse running loose in the middle of North Truro Center. After a good bit of effort, Lucy caught the horse and then, holding it by the halter, they walked it from house to house until they were able to return it to its owner. Lucy loved the story and she told it over and over again. “She was thrilled,” Joy said, “because she got to be the hero and there was a horse.”

  This is not to say that the days were all bars and horses. Lucy was writing, but it came in short bursts and the bursts weren’t coming often enough to bring her up to the number of pages she needed. In February she threw a “Congratulations, You’ve Wasted Half Your Fellowship” party and everyone came and danced in her apartment and had a wonderful time.

  But more than the writing or the sameness of the days, what took up Lucy’s time was love. She had fallen in love with another painter who was amicable and ambivalent. He was interested in Lucy, they had slept together a few times, but he wasn’t sure what he wanted, and now he thought that maybe he would rather just be friends. I had seen Lucy brokenhearted over men before, but this was in a different category. It was, I think, the first time she had actually loved someone instead of just feeling hurt that someone had failed to love her. Whenever I talked to Lucy in Provincetown, she was crying.

  “I’m ugly,” she said.

  “You aren’t ugly.”

  “I’m ugly and I’m going to be alone for the rest of my life.”

  “Listen to me, pet. What you’re going through is awful, it’s really awful, but it isn’t a judgment on your future. You aren’t ugly and you aren’t going to be alone forever just because things didn’t work out with this guy.”

  On the other end of the line she would cry and cry and I would hold the phone and wait for her to come back to me. “I’m tired,” she said finally. “I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

  I was too far away to do anything more than listen. I had moved to Montana with Mark, where he had gotten a teaching job and I would later start to teach as well.

  The other night I dreamed you called me on the phone to tell me you weren’t going to Montana, that you were coming to P-town after all. I was so happy, and the dream seemed so real that I spent half the morning thinking it was true.

  It wasn’t like Aberdeen, I told myself. Lucy wasn’t alone. She had Joy and Elizabeth. She had dozens of friends. She could walk into any coffee shop in town and find someone she knew who would sit down and talk to her, someone who would stroke her hair while she cried and then make her shake it off and go dancing at the A-House. But I had lived in Provincetown myself and I knew how long those winters could be.

  BY SPRING LUCY was still brokenhearted. Her fellowship was nearly over, and she had passed her deadline for a book that was nowhere close to finished. She extended her lease in order to stay on through the chaotic Provincetown summer, even though her rent skyrocketed to meet the exorbitant standards of the season. In the summer it was a different town altogether. It was as if the first warm day brought 100,000 people pouring in like locusts. The drag queens and Rollerbladers and lesbian bikers packed the narrow streets alongside the sunburned tourists pushing baby carriages. Every shop and restaurant and art gallery was open and stayed open half the night. In the Mardi Gras atmosphere of constant celebration, Lucy finally buckled down and blasted through the last hundred pages of her memoir. For the rest of her life she figured that this was the way she worked best, writing very little through most of the time that was allotted to her and then making a heroic eleventh-hour save. “That’s the way I wrote my book,” she would say, proof that the system worked.

  And of course she was right, it did work, but being the ant, I never understood the pleasure of barely slipping something in under the wire. I had spent the winter out West, methodically chipping away at my second novel, stacking up the pages at my regular steady pace. Both of our books came in at about the same time, but Lucy’s was forever accompanied by a story that made it seem breathless, lucky, magic, while mine was pretty much just a book.

  Lucy loved having a story to tell. It wasn’t enough to have written a brilliant book about surviving cancer and all of its ensuing brutality. Lucy absolutely insisted on the idea that she lived a charmed life, perhaps as a way of counterbalancing the parts of her story when charm had been in such short supply. She wanted always to believe that she was someone who simply fell into things, she was lucky, one of the blessed few who always found the right place at the right time. And because she insisted on it, it did in fact happen for her quite often, though never as often as she needed it to. She needed it to happen about once every eight minutes. For her thirtieth birthday (which she dreaded; she could not abide the business of aging) she went to Greece alone, took up with a fisherman, and they made love on his boat without a word of common language for her entire birthday. Proof, surely, that her life was charmed.

  One of her favorite stories had to do with finding her apartment in New York. She had tried for an entire day to do it like everyone else, with the folded-up real estate section of the newspaper and the phone numbers of a couple of brokers, but she hated it. Pounding around the city from one overpriced, unglamorous place to the next was for losers, clowns. Exhausted and demoralized, she stopped into the Spring Street Bar in SoHo to have a drink for courage. The guy on the stool beside her was older and almost handsome in a broken-down, disheveled sort of way. He had paint on his hands, which meant he could have been an artist or a day laborer. Whoever he was, he was also looking for courage in the middle of the day. He took a sip of scotch and asked her how it was going. She told him in great detail.

  He nodded. “I’ve got a place you could have,” he said. “I’ve been meaning to rent it. I was going to put the ad in tomorrow. It’s right next to mine. We could be neighbors.”

  Lucy didn’t know if the guy really had an apartment or if he was just trying to pick her up, but if it was a pickup then that might not be such a bad way to polish off the rest of the afternoon. Lucy followed Stuart around the corner to Mercer Street, up two extremely long flights of stairs, and into the loft next to his, where she would live for the next five years. The apartment was perfect, but the story was even better.

  I had also found a new apartment. It was about a third of the size of Lucy’s and a fraction of its glamour too small to calculate. The floor was covered in a low-napped carpet that gave shelter to a kingdom of tiny, biting ants that no amount of extermination could dent. I had left Montana for Cambridge, having finally won the Bunting Fellowship I had come so close to in my waitressing days. Once Mark and I were living on opposite sides of the country, we fell apart fairly quickly, so now I was East Coast and poetless, which made Lucy extremely happy. We could see each other every weekend or two, taking the train back and forth between Boston and New York. For the smallest crisis, I could be there in three hours. I had finished the novel I proposed to write during my fellowship a week before the fellowship started and I was at a complete loss as to what I should be doing with myself. Among the innumerable perks of the Bunting Institute is being able to audit any class and the right to eat in the faculty dining room, so I found myself taking courses in the history of architecture and having long, expensive lunches that were charged to my account. Every day I went to Blodgett Pool with a music historian who also had a fellowship. It was the single most regular thing in my life and I often thought as I day-dreamed away the laps that I had been given a prestigious fellowship in swimming.

  Of course I’d drop everything to go to New York. What was there to drop?

  SOMETIMES I WENT to see Lucy every week, but she wasn’t the only thing that brought me to the city. Mark Levine had won a Whiting Award the year before and at the ceremony I met a man I had no memory of meeting. He wrote to me months later to say I had made a real impression on him and he had made it a point to read my novel, which he thought was something very special. B
y then I was in Boston and he wanted me to come to Manhattan so that he could take me to lunch at the Lotos Club and discuss my future. My future was a topic of great interest to me in those days and so I went. Besides, he had what I considered to be a truly remarkable business: he was a philanthropical adviser. He made his money telling rich people to whom they should give their money.

  I felt certain that once I saw him, the memory of our meeting would come back to me, but that wasn’t the case. The man was a stranger, albeit a very pleasant one. He ordered the crab cakes for me, saying they were an absolute imperative unless I was avoiding shellfish for reasons of allergies or religion, which I wasn’t. We ate in the more casual restaurant in the club’s basement, which was very private, wood paneled, and decorated exclusively with oil paintings of naked women. The paintings were quite good, though I thought the place would have benefited from a seascape or two to break things up.

  The philanthropists’ adviser was a man in his middle sixties who had a friendly, avuncular air and a Hermès tie. Before the crab cakes reached the table, he made his point. “I think that you should never have to worry about money again,” he said.

  “There’s a thought,” I said.

  “A talent like yours—” He closed his eyes and shook his head. “You should be protected, taken care of. Your mind shouldn’t be cluttered up with paying bills. You should be free to work.”

  “I’m pretty free now,” I said. The Bunting gave me more money than I had ever made and for the first time in my life I didn’t make it a point to only go to matinees.

  “You’ll get the Whiting Award next year,” he said. “That is absolutely a given. I know the judging committee. Unless something goes very wrong, I think I can guarantee that.”