Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  “They’re good doctors. If they say it can’t be done then it probably can’t be done.”

  It turns out that in the Cupping Room, Karl had spoken to Lucy as a doctor. Lucy and Karl both understood this, but I had thought he was speaking to her as a magician, someone who could make the impossible true.

  THAT NIGHT THERE was an engagement party at my mother and her husband’s house for my stepsister, Marcie, and Robb, her fiancé. Somehow all the guests had shown up forty-five minutes early, so that when Lucy and I came home (we had stopped off at the movies to shake the doctors out of our heads) we were late. We ran through the party and up the stairs to change clothes while the guests made wedding talk and drank wine. I hated being late, and I changed clothes quickly so I could get back to the kitchen and help my mother pass around the trays of canapés. Once I was dressed, Lucy gave me a hard look of appraisal.

  “What?”

  “The skirt,” she said gravely.

  “Too short?” It was short, but I had thought that because it was black and I was wearing it with black tights, it didn’t make too much of a statement.

  Lucy put her hand on my shoulder. “I only say this because I love you, because you are my best friend in the world.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Because if one did not truly love another and feel confident that the love was returned, one could never be completely honest.”

  “The skirt,” I started.

  “That’s family down there,” she said in an instructional whisper, “and you look like a total slut.”

  The skirt, which wrapped over itself in the front and snapped at the waist, came off easily—no doubt part of its slutty charm. I was out of it in two seconds and stepping into one that was gray and wool and discreetly covered my calves. My mother had married again a couple of years before and my relationship with the new stepfamily downstairs was still uncomfortably polite. It was perfectly reasonable to think that they would see such an insubstantial skirt not as fashionable or stylish but simply, awkwardly cheap. I kissed Lucy’s forehead in gratitude. “I love you,” I said. “Once again I owe you my life.”

  Lucy closed her eyes and nodded. “It’s all right.”

  Lucy took a shower while I hurried downstairs into the swirl of family below. Or maybe that wasn’t it at all. Maybe my family was upstairs, taking a shower, and I was walking into a party of lovely strangers. Lucy and I were one another’s history. I would see her through her quest for teeth and she would tell me when I was about to embarrass myself. What constituted family if not that?

  Ten minutes later Lucy came scampering down the stairs looking extremely sexy in high heels, a turtleneck sweater, and my black dinner napkin of a skirt.

  “Gotcha,” she said.

  Chapter Twelve

  LUCY WAS AWFUL WITH MONEY IN A WAY THAT ONE imagines the Marx Brothers or Laurel and Hardy might have been awful with money. There could have been a movie, Laurel and Hardy Go to the Bank, in which our heroes try to bring their life savings in for safekeeping but at every turn find themselves distracted: pretty girls, butterflies, squalling children. All the while the money flutters out of their pockets like a careless trail of bread crumbs. In the sequel, Back to the Bank, they would mistakenly spit their chewing gum into the big check they were supposed to deposit and then for the rest of the movie they would struggle to undo the sticky damage they had done. That was the way it was with Lucy. She had an almost magnetic pull towards poverty. When she had money, she gave it away or spent it extravagantly. She bought a horse. She took a last-minute trip to Morocco. Money, like everything else, needed to be charmed. It should be surprising in its arrival and stylish in its departure. It should not be budgeted or saved, as those were the notions of working stiffs. Money for Lucy arrived in the form of a check for foreign rights, something that showed up like an unexpected guest, just minutes after she had seen the perfect pair of leather jeans hanging in the window of a SoHo shop. I once found $50,000 in checks stuck to her refrigerator with a magnet.

  “I never get to the bank,” she said.

  “But why on the refrigerator?”

  “I just found that check from the Whiting. I thought it would be safe there where I could see it.” The $30,000 prize from the Whiting Foundation came in two installments. The check for the first half had gone missing for more than a month and she was dreading having to ask them for a replacement.

  A few months before, at the height of her fame, she had run out of cash between royalty checks and had taken a job as a receptionist at a gallery where people were forever coming in and saying, “Didn’t I just read your book?”

  It was as if there was an open window in her apartment through which piles of crumpled bills blew in and out like leaves. Sometimes when the tides were running in her favor, she would sock money away in a self-employed pension account that exacted huge penalties for early withdrawal, only to pull the money out six months later and pay the fees. Lucy wanted to have the life of a fictional character, and her constant whiplash between champagne and tap water made her seem straight out of a Fitzgerald novel. Caller identification was invented with Lucy specifically in mind, as it was so effective in helping her dodge collection agencies. There was nothing about collection she liked, though she saw it as part of the role of the artist, like the landlord banging on the door in La Bohème.

  Truly, she wished she had no bills, and there were times the weight of that particular burden pushed her down mightily, but on the other hand, she was very equipped to deal with it. Debt was part of the landscape, a tree or a shrub that added texture to the vista. She had lived beneath the weight of mounting hospitals bills for most of her life. Her student loans were equally monstrous, and while she might have tossed a couple hundred dollars in their direction from time to time to throw them off the scent, she never embraced the coupon booklets of regular payments. So when she finally had some real success, some real money, she decided she was entitled to all of it. She had done without for long enough. She had worked hard and she deserved what was hers. That meant she neglected to pay large portions of her taxes, a debt that increased with every tick of the clock. From time to time Lucy hired tax lawyers to help her sift through the wreckage, but all that did was create a new genre of bills she did not pay: the lawyer bills.

  I gave Lucy money, but so did most of her friends. She rotated her needs among us and never asked anyone for too much. “Just a loan until Thursday,” she would say. “Vogue owes me for an article and I’ll have my check by then.”

  “Don’t ask me for a loan,” I said, and gave her the money. “I don’t ever want to be one more call you avoid picking up.”

  She didn’t give money back, but she gave money to people who had less than she did.

  Of course Lucy had a tremendous ability to earn money; it’s just that she froze every time she came anywhere near it. Magazine editors called her constantly. Not only was she a great writer with a big name, she’d won a National Magazine Award, which gave her yet another layer of clout with which to drive up her fees. But she was better about accepting assignments than she was about finishing them. She could get tied into a knot over a two-thousand-word article for Allure, avoiding the editor’s phone calls as assiduously as the bill collectors’. She loved exotic assignments. She once took a job for a women’s sports magazine in which she rode a horse alone across Ireland through rain and muck and bogs with only a simple map and verbal directions to get her from one farmhouse to the next. But writing the article proved to be torture that took months of editorial harassment.

  “How many people could ride a horse alone across Ireland?” I said in one of my standard pep talks. “You’ve already done the impossible part. Just write it up.”

  But magazine work was just the little fish. What she really needed to write, what everyone wanted her to write for the big money, was a proposal for a new book. She didn’t have to write the book itself, at least not for a while. All she needed to come up with was a little piece
of it, twenty pages. Even less than twenty pages. The world had finally caught on to what I had known since I was seventeen: Lucy Grealy was one of the more compelling people around. People wanted to hear whatever she had to say.

  “I’m going to write a book about tango,” she said. “I’ve signed up for lessons from the same school Robert Duvall studied at.”

  “That sounds good.”

  “The history of tango, learning the tango, tango as metaphor. It’s all very sexual.”

  So Lucy danced. She liked the part when the instructor dominated her, slung her head back until it nearly grazed the floor, but on the next song she wanted to be the one who got to do the slinging. It didn’t work that way. Every time she strapped on her shoes, the book became a little less interesting to her, and after a while she dropped the idea altogether. One night, about a year later, we gave a reading together in Provincetown where we were both teaching in the summer program at the Fine Arts Work Center. We were living together in a big apartment on the bottom floor of a converted barn that was always full of the sand that we tracked in from our afternoons at the beach. “What are you going to read?” I asked.

  “The tango essay.”

  “I didn’t know you ended up writing about tango.”

  “It isn’t really much about the tango,” she said. “It’s inspired by the tango.” She hopped up and stomped out a few impressive dance steps, then she arched her back and raised her hands above her head.

  I read first. If my life had had any learning curve, I knew enough to never try to follow Lucy in anything. I always loved coming back to Provincetown, and I loved reading at the Work Center in a way that I don’t enjoy reading nearly so much anyplace else. It was the place where everything in my life had turned around. It was where Lucy and I had both written our first books. To be there together on a clear hot night in July reading from my third book was complete joy. It was the book I had dedicated to Lucy and Elizabeth McCracken.

  When I was finished, Lucy leaned over and gave me a kiss. When she went up to the podium, I thought how funny it was that I was going to hear what she had written for the first time, just like every other member of the audience. She was wearing a little blue knit top with a white stripe down the center that we had bought that afternoon and she looked like summer, tan and blond. “Hey,” she said to the audience, as if she had just walked into the room and was pleased and surprised to find us there.

  “Hey!” we said to Lucy.

  She read the tango essay, which was, as she had told me, only nominally about tango. It was more about sex, the seemingly conflicting desires to dominate and be dominated. It was about the relationship between Morticia and Gomez Addams, the characters on The Addams Family whose passions were forever sweeping them away into tango. It was about picking up a guy in a bar in the East Village and how they took a Cosmo sex quiz together and how she confirmed that yes, it was true, women could have unlimited orgasms. When he said he didn’t believe her, she took him back to her apartment, sat him at the foot of her bed, and showed him it was possible—seventeen times.

  As I listened I felt, in no particular order, that I couldn’t believe that Lucy had masturbated all night in front of a stranger; I couldn’t believe she’d never told me that it had happened; I couldn’t believe she’d written about it and then read it to a roomful of strangers on a night that we were reading together. Shock is not a particularly sustaining response to literature, but I was shocked by all of it. Like the act itself, the story went from something that was briefly sexy, to something that was grinding and mechanical, to something that was embarrassing and, finally, exhausting. Because we were in Provincetown, where only the night before one of my students had read a story about shaving his testicles while talking on the phone to his mother, I was the only one who so much as blinked.

  “You could have told me what you were reading,” I said to her on our way to dinner. I was angry at her, but my anger only made me feel like a prude.

  “Bubala,” she said, leaning her head against my shoulder, “you’re mad at me.”

  “Not mad,” I lied.

  “I’ve offended your sensibilities,” she said. “Forgive me.” I could tell in the darkness from the lilt of her voice that she was pleased.

  When Lucy published her tango essay under the title “What It Takes” in her collection As Seen on TV, the masturbation scene was considerably shorter and this time took place not with a stranger from a bar but with a friend with whom she had wagered a bet. The change had nothing to do with me or my sensibilities. Lucy was just working on the essay.

  That winter Lucy spent eight weeks at the MacDowell colony in New Hampshire. My residency there had ended the week before hers began and I left my cross-country skis behind for her because the snow had been especially good that year. All she had to do was write her book proposal, twenty pages, this time on aspects of love, but she was sidetracked by the pool table. The coolest people there played pool and she spent her afternoons perfecting her game. She came back to New York eight weeks later without having written a single page, bought herself a professional pool cue that screwed apart and fit into a case that looked like it carried a piccolo, and started hanging out in pool halls. “I did manage to have sex on the pool table,” she said.

  What is easy for one person is impossible for another. I thought the easy money was in magazine articles and the sensible living was in writing books, but those were the things that made Lucy feel positively tortured. She told me she was taking a teaching job.

  “It’s too much work!” I said. Teaching absolutely used me up and turned me out as empty as a candy wrapper.

  “I need the structure,” Lucy said. “It will force me to organize my time. I don’t think all this free time is good for me.”

  She was right, of course. She had taught before and she liked a routine and she liked having people around, two things I never went in for. In the years that followed, Lucy taught at Sarah Lawrence. She taught at the New School. She taught at Bennington and Amherst and occasionally ran a private class in her apartment for which she charged good money. She taught in a low-residency graduate program where the student work was mailed to her in packets and then twice a year she met her students for intensive classes. Some semesters she taught at three different places at once. She taught in summer workshops. She taught for ten weeks in Montana. She flew all over the country giving guest lectures and three-day workshops. She was a huge favorite among high school students and she was forever flying off to some well-heeled prep school that paid her a bundle to stand on a stage and be herself for an hour while the students cheered her as if she were Elvis. In short, she worked. She could mark up student papers for hours without so much as getting up for a glass of water. She helped write a draft of Monty Roberts’s book, The Man Who Whispered to Horses. She spent countless hours listening to his stories and going over his notes. She could make herself write when it was his story she was telling. The publisher said they were happy with her work, but in the end Roberts rejected it, and so she didn’t get the second half of her advance. Once again Lucy tried to turn herself back to her own writing.

  “I’m declaring a State of Emergency,” she said to me over the phone.

  “Meaning?”

  “Six pages a day, and I can’t leave the house unless it’s to go to the Writer’s Room, and I can’t answer the phone until I’ve written my pages. No going to the gym. No going out at night.” The Writer’s Room was a place not too far from her apartment where she had a desk that was only a few feet away from other writers who needed a place to go and work. Her apartment had the bad habit of becoming too lonely after a while.

  “Lucy.”

  “Okay, maybe some going out at night. But only if I’ve written six pages. I’ll only go out if I write a bonus page.”

  The State of Emergency lifted and lowered like a fog until I couldn’t quite tell if we were in one or not. She took my phone calls either way. Lucy looked at writing the way other people
thought about diets, except that she was always pulling for her numbers to go up while everyone else was trying to get their numbers down. She used the State of Emergency for essays she had promised to anthologies and magazines. Writing was always something that was owed, always overdue.

  Then, in January of 1998, Lucy did write a twenty-page proposal, and her agent sold it to an editor at Doubleday who Lucy had never worked with before for a very healthy advance. She had decided to write a novel.

  “You’ll have to help me with the plot,” she said. “The whole plot thing seems like it would be tricky.”

  “I’m sure you can manage a plot, but why not just write it as nonfiction? Wouldn’t that be so much easier?” The story was about a woman with a mysterious older brother. The brother leaves home early and disappears from her life, abandoning her to the task of dealing with their difficult parents. When the parents die, she sets off on a quest to find him. It was not too far a stretch from the story of her brother, Sean, who had died in 1991, years and years after Lucy had last spoken to him.

  “It’s a novel,” she said.

  “Then it’s a novel. Just let me help you, let me read it. We can talk about it.” Lucy and I talked on the phone almost every day, and flew back and forth between Nashville and New York for regular visits, but we hardly ever talked about writing. We talked about not writing, or writing that was due, but whenever I asked Lucy if she wanted to exchange pages with me, she wasn’t interested and I didn’t push the point. I knew that by writing a novel, she felt like she was straying onto my turf. For Lucy it was very important that our professional careers remain separate. When I had wanted to work with her editor, Betsy Lerner, for my third novel, The Magician’s Assistant, Lucy gave me her grudging approval. But after I met with Betsy and told Lucy how much I liked her and how I hoped she’d buy the book, Lucy changed her mind and told me I wasn’t allowed to work with Betsy after all.