“What does one wear on television?” Lucy said, pushing through her closet.
I started picking up little balls of clothing off the floor and shaking them out. “Can you at least tell me what’s clean and what’s dirty so I don’t have to start sniffing at things?”
She looked suspiciously at the cardigan I was holding. “Dirty,” she said.
I edged inside the closet and began kicking the contents of the floor into the kitchen.
“Don’t bring out everything!” Lucy said.
“How else will we have any idea what you have?” I sat down in a pile of crushed fabric and started going through the dresses. Lucy and I, it has already been established, differed in matters of housekeeping and we entered the whole thing with a stand of no judgment, no blame. I wanted to clean out her closet; she wanted me to clean out her closet. Neither of us pretended it was otherwise.
There was a vast collection of unwashed thrift-store dresses with tiny waists and sweetheart necklines, checks and plaids and sentimental flowers, but every one had a stain or a tear or a hanging hem, and while I could sew, I couldn’t imagine bringing anything up to the standards of television. Lucy rarely wore the dresses anyway. She bought them for the sheer pleasure she took in knowing that no one else could fit into them. Lucy looked good in jeans, but jeans would not save the day. I told her we were going to Barney’s.
“I’m not going to Barney’s.”
“It’s either that or we spend the whole day shopping. This is going to be easier.”
And so we got on the subway heading north. The afternoon was bright and hot and Lucy adored hot weather. Half-dried leaves hung limply on every tree in Midtown. At that moment we were perfect, with everything that was good still ahead of us. We locked arms, walked into the store, and went upstairs to approach the racks. It was for me the place where Lucy slipped into her fame. It was the last time I remember her being nervous about anything having to do with success. Before long a woman came up and asked us what we were looking for. She was older, and seemed both sensible and sensibly dressed.
“I need something to wear on television,” Lucy said hesitantly.
The woman nodded. “What show?”
She did not doubt us for a second and in giving us the gift of her belief, she made everything true. Lucy in her jeans and T-shirt was a perfectly plausible TV guest. She could have been a rock star.
“Today,” Lucy said.
The woman looked at Lucy’s body, appraising her size, and steered her to a dressing room. “I’ll bring you something,” she said.
Many outfits and many cups of coffee later, Lucy left the store with a navy blue silk sleeveless tunic top, some very fitted camel-colored pants, and a pair of chunky brown shoes that showed off her elegant ankles. I thought she looked absolutely beautiful, but she never wore any of it again after the show. By then she had figured out television and how to look both good and like herself. But she kept that outfit. Every time I cleaned out her closets over the years I found it there and she would touch it fondly and remember one of the last times in her life that she didn’t know any better where the media was concerned.
WHEN SHE WAS in the mood, and usually she was, Lucy could be both natural and forthcoming. She had a great ability to be herself, if she was giving an interview or walking down Canal Street, and because of that people flocked to her. The models and supermodels called out to her as they teetered home over SoHo’s cobblestone streets in the small hours of the morning, “Hey, Lucy! Good night!” It was just like Iowa and it was nothing like Iowa at all. Lucy started doing publicity months before the publication of Autobiography of a Face, and she kept it up for more than a year after the book came out in hardback and another year for the paperback after that. She loved all of it. She loved the airports and the hotels. She loved being able to say that the Alexis was her favorite hotel in Seattle and the best tiramisu was at the Four Seasons in Atlanta. She loved the bookstores and the people who stood in line holding her book to their chests, to say how much they loved her. She especially loved being interviewed and having the host confide in her when it was over that she was the favorite, the best. She loved having her hair brushed and her forehead powdered for the lights. She loved producers and stylists and cameras, even though she complained about them all. She loved throwing her suitcase inside the door and saying, “My God, the traffic!” or “This schedule is going to kill me!” or “That flight!” and then she would drop onto the couch, roll her eyes and smile and say, “I love it.”
Lucy was in fashion magazines; she was the subject of an entire article in People. One particularly memorable shoot was done in the country and she had her picture taken draped over the back of a white horse. Then, in full makeup, she shucked off all her clothes and scampered up the limbs of a high tree. She draped herself across a branch, arms and legs dangling, eyes closed, while on the ground the photographer snapped away. For years she had one of those pictures on her refrigerator and it was stunningly beautiful, black and white, somehow Victorian if naked Victorian women ever shinnied up trees. She was playing the part of a sleeping wood nymph in the bend of a wooden arm. But then she brought some guy home one night and while she wasn’t looking, he slid the photograph from its magnet and took it away.
LUCY WAS PARTIAL to Charlie Rose for a television interview and she liked Lenny Lopate on the radio. She was doing such a good job talking about her book that she was also called on to talk about other things. One day she could be discussing the survival of tragedy with Oprah and the next it was America’s obsession with beauty on CNN. The CNN interview played live and when she left the studio and got on the subway to go home, a girl tapped on her arm. Lucy looked up from her newspaper. “Weren’t you on my television ten minutes ago?” the girl said to her. Lucy shrugged. “Probably,” she said.
Lucy didn’t watch herself on television or listen to her interviews. She could be completely at ease when the tape was rolling but when she saw herself played back, she tore the performance apart. It only had to happen once or twice and then she learned the lesson. When people told her she was great, all she could say was, “Really?”
When I listened to her being interviewed by Terry Gross on the NPR program Fresh Air, it seemed perfectly clear why she wouldn’t want to hear it.
“Many of us are dissatisfied when we look in the mirror,” Terry Gross’s introduction of Lucy began, “but that’s different from the extreme anguish Lucy Grealy experienced when she saw her reflection. By most standards her face was ugly, even repulsive.”
Surely the introduction had been taped after the interview and edited in. Surely Lucy had not been sitting in a radio station having to hear the word repulsive applied to her face. I wanted to find her at that exact minute, wrap her up in my arms. Never repulsive, not on her very worst days, not with the tissue expander fully inflated. But maybe Lucy hadn’t heard it. She was so completely easy, funny, unflappable while she talked. She opened up by reading a section from her book. And there it was—her word, not Terry Gross’s. “If feeling like a freak had been more in my mind than in my face at other times in my life, the visage I saw staring back at me was undeniably repulsive.”
“A lot of my suffering was emotional suffering,” she said on the radio. “I mean, there was a definite physical side to it, there was a large physical side to it, but I saw that as rather easy compared to the sort of emotional assault of guilt and shame that I was continuously throwing upon myself.
“[My face] changed weekly practically, which was part of the, you know, the story, the dilemma. My story is really not so much the story about being disfigured, it’s about having a face that changed so continuously that I never really identified myself as connected to it. And the easiest moments in my life, or rather the most damaging moments, have been that easy fall into saying: I’m ugly. Just like defining it and closing the door on it that way, rather than looking at the fact that my face was different, almost continuously, and that I put off developing that sort
of social sense that most people have to come to terms with. On the other hand I was always able to feel special. I never had that familiar adolescent worry of fading into the crowd. I was special, and I tried to use that to my advantage, and I tried to use it as a power almost over other people.”
Everyone had always recognized Lucy, but now there were people who had seen her, heard her, read her. There were people who were attracted to the unmistakable light put out by a sudden celebrity. On a crowded and glorious autumn afternoon, we walked through SoHo laughing, arms around each other’s waists. We had just bought matching leopard-print miniskirts from a sidewalk vendor when a handsome Jamaican man with long braids started riding circles around us on his bicycle. “Beautiful day for beautiful girls,” he said.
“You think this day’s for us?” Lucy said to him.
“I think this day is for you,” he said. He dropped the toe of his tennis shoe lightly to the pavement and kept turning around us. “You two girlfriends?”
“We’re girlfriends,” Lucy said. “We’re not girlfriends.”
“So you still like boys fine.”
“Some of them,” Lucy said, starting to lose interest.
“Those sure are pretty shoes. I saw those shoes when you walked by and I thought to myself, I’ve got to meet the woman who is wearing those shoes.”
Her shoes had long leather cords on them that wrapped around her ankles and were tied in a bow. “So now you met her.”
“What’s her name?”
“I’m Lucy,” she said. “You’ll find me later.”
It was New York, but everyone found her again later on.
LUCY’S FAVORITE rhetorical question was, “Will I ever have sex again?” It was a habit she started in Iowa whenever she was sure she had broken it off with B——for good. It was the first thing she said to practically anyone who walked in the door. “Will I ever have sex again?” In those days she especially enjoyed calling up our friend Jono from college and asking him because she thought as a man he had a better shot of knowing for sure. But it stuck. She had simply gotten into the habit of asking, and whenever she had gone more than three days without having sex, she started polling her friends again. I was so in the habit of answering her that when another friend of mine broke up with her boyfriend and said to me, “May I ask you a question?” I answered her without even thinking, “Of course you’ll have sex again.” She was horrified.
Lucy had plenty of other questions as well: “Do you love me?” “You think I’m pretty, don’t you?” “Do you think I’m a good writer?” But the odd part was they were all so interchangeable. What all of the questions really meant was, “Everything is going to be okay, right?” Still, the sex question was her favorite. Sometimes months would go by in which she would ask me every day.
“You had sex today,” I said. “You aren’t allowed to ask me on a day when you’ve already had sex.”
“But I want to know if I’m going to have it again.”
Sometimes Lucy seemed shameless, which is to say she wasn’t burdened by the same notions of what is shameful and what is moral and what is right that I was. Or maybe it’s that we all have a certain allotment of shame within us and Lucy spent hers on other things. She was ashamed of the way she ate. She felt enormous shame at the idea of having food on her chin or breaking out into a sweat when she swallowed. She was ashamed of her teeth because she could not close her mouth. She was ashamed of her eyelid, which had stayed swollen off and on ever since that surgery in Aberdeen. It drove her crazy and she was certain that everyone noticed it. I told her constantly that those were things she should in no way be ashamed of, that shame should be reserved for the things we choose to do, not the circumstances that life puts on us. But it was all just a matter of opinion. Telling yourself you shouldn’t be ashamed of something rarely got anyone anywhere. Because Lucy was at times ashamed of the way that she looked, she seemed to have no shame left over for sex. For sex she was fearless, and the world seemed able to smell it on her. She could be standing in line in a coffee shop in the middle of winter, wearing jeans and a heavy jacket, a cap pulled low on her head, and sure enough some guy would start to tell her how he had such a strong feeling she was an interesting person and the next thing they knew they were out of the coffee line. If she shared a cab with a man on a corner, they often wound up at the same destination. One night, at the height of her fame, she was putting the key in the front door of her apartment when an eighteen-year-old boy in a doorman uniform tapped her on the shoulder. He told her in mediocre English that she had walked by the building where he worked on the Upper East Side that very night and he had felt an overwhelming sense of love for her. He had left his post and followed her down into the subway, on the train to SoHo, and walked behind her to her door, all the while trying to get up the courage to talk to her. Now here he was, declaring his feelings for her. She thought about it for a minute and then invited him up.
Heriberto came around off and on for the next year. He was a sweet kid, and better than that, he was a great story.
“I hate to say it, but I probably would have called the police,” I said.
“Then you would have missed out,” Lucy said.
SEVERAL MONTHS AFTER the publication of Lucy’s book, when she was the toast of both popular culture and all things literary, my second novel, Taft, came out. In the same way all the rumblings that preceded Autobiography of a Face made it clear that it was going to be a big book, the comparative silence surrounding this novel made it clear that it was going to sink without a trace. It had an awful title (my fault) and an awful cover (my publishers’ fault), and despite getting the best reviews I’d had, it did not seem to be selling outside of my immediate family. When I was scheduled to give a reading in New York, Lucy suggested that we team up, appear as a double bill, and then afterwards she would throw us a big book party at her loft. We had the same publisher and the same publicist and so they were more than happy to oblige us as everyone stood to benefit. She was my best friend, and she was lending me the brilliance of her light in a moment when things were looking decidedly dull for me. It was something we did for one another over the years, depending on which of us had more light to share. At the beautiful and now departed downtown Rizzoli’s, the dozen or so Ann Patchett fans squeezed in among the Lucy Grealy throng of well over two hundred. Not that anyone was keeping score. They had printed up bookmarks with both of our pictures on them. There we were, tucked together inside every book sold at Rizzoli’s that night. The manager hid us upstairs, away from the crowd, so that we could make a sweeping entrance. We crouched together between some bookshelves and listened to the buzz of voices, laughing to think they were all waiting on us. Lucy was famous, and I was famous for being with her.
There was a lot of cancer in the room that night, cancer in the process of being defeated and cancer in the process of defeating people. There were the ravages that cancer, long gone, had left in its wake, including the damage it had done to Lucy. I was able to assess in a matter of seconds that the crowd had not come to hear fiction, any fiction. I was the warm-up act. I read for five minutes, answered two questions, and got back in my seat so that I could see the show we had all come for. Lucy got up and read, her little voice as always reminding me of the girl who had announced the films at Sarah Lawrence. She was a natural in front of an audience.
There was no underestimating the power of Autobiography of a Face. From the moment I had read the essay that would later become the book, I knew that this was the place that Lucy’s enormous heart and great intelligence would dovetail into the piece of art she had always hoped to make. I read the book as a pile of pages, and again for copyediting, again in galleys and again when it was published and every time it had shown me a greater depth. Every time it found a way to move me all over again, not because she was my friend but because it was such a beautiful book.
After the crowd was able to control their weeping after hearing the passage she read about being tortured by sc
hoolboys in stairwells, she opened the floor for questions.
“You were so incredibly brave,” a woman began. “If it were me, I wouldn’t have been able to survive it.”
“Meaning what, you would have died?” Lucy said. “It doesn’t work that way, unless you kill yourself.”
People said it to Lucy all the time. They said it to me about Lucy. It was meant as some sort of compliment and yet it never quite came off that way. It sounded as if by merely living, she had become a conspirator with her fate. My brave and heroic Lucy made it clear to the audience that she had no interest in being anybody’s inspiration. She was not there as a role model for overcoming obstacles. She was a serious writer, and she wanted her book to be judged for its literary merit and not its heartbreaking content. When people raised their hands to ask a question, more often than not the question turned out to be a statement of what they themselves had endured. Lucy refused to let the evening digress into a litany of battle stories.
“Most of the time I forget I even had cancer,” she said. “That’s not the part of the story I’m interested in.”
“When I got my own diagnosis,” a woman started, and Lucy listened with moderate patience. When the speaker was finished, Lucy only nodded and pointed to the next hand that was raised.
“It’s amazing how you remember everything so clearly,” a woman said, her head wrapped up in a bright scarf. “All those conversations, details. Were you ever worried that you might get something wrong?”
“I didn’t remember it,” Lucy said pointedly. “I wrote it. I’m a writer.”
This shocked the audience more than her dismissal of illness, but she made her point: she was making art, not documenting an event. That she chose to tell her own extraordinary story was of secondary importance. Her cancer and subsequent suffering had not made this book. She had made it. Her intellect and ability were in every sense larger than the disease.