Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  “I can believe that you were famous enough to give a reading in Central Park with David Byrne, I just can’t believe that you were so famous that you didn’t even think to tell me about it.”

  Her eyes went back to the television and she bobbed her head very gently to the music. “Yeah,” she said. “You’d think I would have remembered to tell you that.”

  When Lucy felt a little better, she went out to Connecticut to stay at her friend Stephen’s horse farm and have a good, long recuperation. Sophie was coming to pick her up and drive her out to the country. I was free and tired and ready to go home, except for the fact that I wanted to keep Lucy with me, and we both cried when my luggage was packed and it was time to let go.

  Chapter Fifteen

  THE PAIN IN LUCY’S LEG DID NOT ABATE. MONTHS AFTER the surgery, she was still having to stop and take a rest for every block or two she walked. The pain in her face she had accepted—that was part of the package—but her legs had been strong and dependable in a body that had often let her down. She had always gone anywhere she wanted to go without a thought. She pointed out that her left leg was slightly collapsed in the shin, and the scar bothered her. “My leg looks funny now,” she said. “People are going to notice.”

  Who could notice a slight irregularity in a leg, I reasoned. Who would notice a scar?

  As bad as she felt about her leg, Lucy was pleased with the way her face was going. The reconfiguration of her jaw had improved her speech a little, even though she still couldn’t get her lips together. The doctors said that would come after the other surgeries, after the teeth. She tried not to spend too much time dwelling on herself in the mirror. Anything she saw now was just going to change. There was no sense in getting too attached to this face, or wasting time being too critical of it. The deepest part of the swelling would hang around for months, and even if that only meant a subtle change she had to remember that this was not the final product. Still, she asked about it, anyone would have asked—How do I look?

  She was teaching up at Bennington and driving her Saab, a different one now, back and forth between New York and Vermont. She was trying to carve out a little time for writing but the hours were hard to find. The book was all the more overdue and she was quickly falling back into her depression.

  “Why doesn’t anybody love me?” she said.

  “No,” I said. “Wait a minute. You promised you weren’t going to do that. You said that you were going to stop beating yourself up over this until all of the surgeries were over.”

  “I don’t want to go through this alone. It’s too much.”

  “But you aren’t alone. You know that isn’t true.”

  “I want a boyfriend. I’m so tired of being lonely.”

  “Oh, Lucy, please don’t do this to yourself,” I begged. “You’re going to have bolts put in your face in the spring. There’s so much you have to deal with. You have to finish your book. This isn’t the time to wonder about love.”

  “You can’t control these things,” she said petulantly. “You can’t just make a decision not to think about something. It doesn’t work that way.”

  Sometimes when Lucy called she couldn’t stop crying. Other times she called to tell me how she had cried for an entire day. “I thought I knew what it was to be depressed,” she said. “But I never had any idea before this.”

  I always thought of how she cried in Iowa, how she would curl up in a ball on the sofa and weep and sob for hours at a time. I didn’t think she had just discovered depression.

  That summer I had sold my fourth novel, Bel Canto, and in the winter I bought my first house on the street my favorite cousins had lived on when I was growing up, three blocks away from Karl. It had never been my intention to settle in Nashville, but I had. I loved Karl, and with my mother, I shared the responsibilities of taking care of my grandmother, who was in her nineties. I wasn’t going anywhere, and giving up my little one-bedroom apartment was my way of finally admitting that. I moved on the twenty-first of December and Lucy came on the twenty-third for Christmas.

  In those two days, I scrambled to get the house set up. The first thing I bought was a bed for the guest room.

  “Don’t say guest room,” Lucy said. “Say ‘Lucy’s Room.’ ”

  “Lucy’s room, your room, the Grealy suite.”

  “Much better.”

  Sometimes I worried that Lucy saw me as the ant I was, unglamorous, toiling. Sometimes I knew she did. Sometimes I aspired to be a grasshopper myself, to live in the city and go to parties, to have bright conversations with famous people instead of washing my grandmother’s hair and making her grilled cheese sandwiches. I liked to think there was a moment in my life when I could have been a grasshopper and never thought of winter at all, but now I had a house and it wasn’t even a particularly charming house with loads of character that needed fixing up. It was practical, snug, and suburban.

  “I really like it,” she said. “I promise you. I have another friend who was worried that I would think she had become suburban and she had, it was true. But not you, my little Angora. You just bought a nice house so that now I’ll always have someplace to come home to.”

  “Or you could just stay,” I said. “I know you don’t want to live in Nashville, but you could for a while. Just step out of everything. You could get some rest, I’ll make your meals, you could finish your book, save some money. For a little while it might not be such a bad idea. The guest room is bigger than your whole apartment.”

  “Ah,” she said, raising a finger. “The what room?”

  “Your room here is bigger than your whole apartment.”

  Lucy smiled. “I’m going to have another surgery.”

  “Which you could fly up for.”

  “And I need to see Joe and I have a job and I have my friends. I’m not going to leave New York.”

  I still thought she should stay with me. I had a theory about Lucy: at least some of the reason she always felt so terrible had to do with her impossibly awful diet and the fact that she never slept and drank too much. The bigger problems were beyond me to straighten out but if the little things were taken care of, the daily business of keeping the body alive, I thought that maybe the rest would have a better chance for recovery.

  Most years Lucy came to Nashville for Thanksgiving or Christmas, but this year was particularly good. My mother made all of Lucy’s favorite foods and we laid on the floor beneath her Christmas tree while Lucy beat on the ancient family cat, who was beside himself with joy at her return. She bought me a pair of pink pajamas covered in cowgirls and gave me a little leather-bound book full of all the doodling she had done while she was on the phone. I had often admired it in her apartment, the endless pages of curly lines and little stars. On the inside cover she had written her name, her last two addresses, and a set of dates spanning from 1996 to 2000. I thought it was incredibly sweet, but then I saw that it came with an extensive typed treatise written in an outline of what her doodling meant:

  III. How is this?

  A. It is possible to read this “book” as a text. Leafing through it, one can see that different pages speak of different humours. Sometimes, the pages mimic what a book might actually look like (often, I find myself thinking of the ‘book’ written by Jack in Stanley Kubrick’s film, The Shining.) Other times, the ‘book’ seems more visual than textual, a work similar to a drawing. Still other times, the ‘book’ has felt more like a performance piece, something in which the act of doing both equaled and surpassed the notion of a single moment in which a piece is ‘completed.’ The artist Josef Beuys once lived with a wolf in a confined space for several weeks. The only ‘work’ of the wolf piece was that act of conceiving the piece and then following through with the conception, so that the conceptual piece became the ‘real’ through an applied process which was itself invisible (i.e., the concept of the piece was the piece, rather than the instigator of a piece which then required ‘work’ resulting in a final, static, tangible product.)


  b. In any event, the simple presence, here, of pages which must be leafed through consecutively, necessarily creates an active narrative, a narrative as decipherable or indecipherable as the reader may choose. All narratives, even the confusing, are implicitly hopeful; they speak of a world that can be ordered, and thus understood.

  c. I do not know if I understand this. I think that by ‘writing’ in the ‘book’ I am engaging in the active pursuit of my non-understanding of what I am doing rather than using my lack of understanding as a reason to either avoid or be ashamed of what I am doing.

  When I finished reading it, I thought that perhaps my friend was putting a little too much energy into avoiding her novel. “So it’s not just a bunch of squiggly lines you drew while you were on the phone?”

  For a minute I thought Lucy was sorry she had given it to me. I loved the little book, though clearly not for the right reasons.

  OUR DAYS WERE LOVELY. We went to the movies and spent time with Karl or my mother and Lucy was happy. She loved them both, and they spoiled her in different ways. My mother cooked her anything she had ever wanted to eat and sewed a new blanket for her bed, while Karl took her shopping and bought her winter coats and a fur hat. She was like the favorite daughter, celebrated and spoiled at every turn, and she basked in the attention. But in the evenings when we sat in front of the fireplace talking, it always came back to the same things: she was lonely, she was depressed, she wanted a boyfriend, she couldn’t understand why no one loved her. She told me that she often had a couple of drinks and a couple of Percosets before getting in her car after midnight in Vermont and driving a hundred miles an hour over the icy back roads to New York. She said that she wanted to tempt fate.

  “It’s one thing to kill yourself,” I said. “It’s another thing entirely if you kill someone else.”

  “I ran my car into a tree last week and totaled it,” she admitted. “I wasn’t even hurt.”

  “Lucy,” I said, “this is madness! You have to either take responsibility for yourself or admit that you can’t and turn yourself over to someone else.”

  “Do you mean have myself committed?”

  “It can’t be worse than driving into trees.”

  But it could be worse. I remember going to visit a friend once who was locked up and when they took my purse away and locked the door behind me all I could think was, This will never be me. This will never be me.

  “I should tell you everything.”

  “More,” I said sadly.

  “I’ve tried heroin a couple of times. I’m not going to do it again, but I tried it and it was pretty great.”

  I rested my forehead against my knees and struggled to dredge up something relevant to say. I came up empty. “You aren’t some poor kid in the south Bronx with no chances and you’re not some rock star who has everything in the world and I don’t know who else does heroin. We’re thirty-seven years old. We’re too old for this.”

  “I’m not going to do it again.”

  “You’re in over your head. Can I have you committed? Can I become your legal guardian? Your basic human logic?”

  “I want to be better.”

  “I know you do, pet.”

  BUT NOTHING GOT BETTER. She published a collection of essays, As Seen on T.V., but nothing much came of it. She was disappointed not to be reviewed in the Times. Lucy stayed sad, dreading the second surgery that would leave her with a set of bolts in her face for God only knew how long.

  “I’m bound to get the novel finished once I have bolts in my face,” she said. “Where am I going to want to go with bolts?”

  She was still taking painkillers for her leg and whenever she mentioned heroin to me, it was to say she had done it for the last time and was she ever glad to get that behind her. She wanted me to come up for the bolt surgery, but I already had plans to be in California for my father’s seventieth birthday. “Couldn’t you schedule it for two days before or two days after?”

  “It takes forever to get all these people together,” she said.

  “They just gave you the date. If you asked today, it might not be such a problem.”

  But Lucy had never asked a doctor to change his schedule and she wasn’t about to start asking now. “I can’t believe you aren’t going to be there,” she said.

  “Lucy, if you can’t change the date and there’s not going to be anyone there, I’ll ask my father to move his birthday, I really will. But if you want me there because you want everybody there, then you need to let me off the hook.” If it was a test of friendship, I had already taken the test.

  Joy took surgery duty. She stayed with Lucy in the OR until Lucy fell asleep and she was there when Lucy woke up. That was a very fortunate thing.

  It turns out there is only one thing worse than having bolts put in your face, and that’s not having bolts put in your face. When the doctors opened Lucy up, they found that the native bone was too fragile to support the procedure and that it wouldn’t be possible to shape the graft from her leg as was planned. There was nothing to do, and so they closed her up. It was over.

  In our friendship I had spent a lot of time telling Lucy to pull herself up, to get over the past and move on. That was my role, the best of my Catholic education in action, and I didn’t worry about it because I knew that she had other friends, friends who were as close to her as I was, who were more tender. She had practical friends and emotional friends, friends with big houses to crash in and friends who were good for wild fun, and she knit us together to find the perfect balance of what she needed from all of us. But this time I couldn’t do my job. This time I sat on the stairs in my father’s house and I cried with her and never said that this was just a setback and we would find a way to get through it. Instead I told her the truth, that this seemed the saddest thing of all, and I didn’t think there was anything to do at the moment except be sad about what had happened. She was gasping on the phone, she was crying so hard. “What am I going to do?” she asked me over and over again. I didn’t know the answer.

  I WOULD SAY that was when things fell apart, but it would imply the disassembling of a time when things were all together and I couldn’t remember when that time was anymore. Lucy had started making little cuts on her hips with a razor blade. She was doing more drugs. We talked constantly about the possibility of her committing herself to a mental hospital but she kept holding it off, wanting to wait until such a time that committal sounded less painful than the life she was presently living. She kept taking drugs. Joe, her psychiatrist, kept extracting promises from her to stop this desperate behavior, telling her that if she did this or that again he would stop being her doctor. When she kept going, he stayed true to his word and dismissed her as a patient. Lucy, with a failed surgery and a bad leg, had lost the person she was sure was going to be able to save her. The only chance she had to win him back was to show him how serious she was. A little more than a month after the surgery had failed, she brought all of her bad habits together for the weekend: Percoset, drinking, cocaine, and heroin. When she called me on Monday night, it was to say that she hadn’t killed herself, but not for want of trying. She couldn’t get out of bed either. Lucie B-B came to her apartment and they called me at one in the morning, then at two and three-thirty, the three of us talking about what to do. Lucy couldn’t stand up, but she still was afraid of committing herself.

  “What is the choice, exactly?” I wanted to know.

  “I could pull myself together,” she said wistfully.

  “I think it’s much better to commit yourself than to wait until someone has you committed,” Lucie B-B said from the extension in the tiny apartment. “She’s going to do better if she feels like she’s making the choice.”

  “I’d agree with that,” I said. “Has anybody called Stuart?”

  “You have my permission to talk about this with each other,” Lucy said. “But not with anyone else.”

  “I’m not asking for your permission,” I said.

  At six
o’clock in the morning, she finally made her decision. She phoned me back to say she was voluntarily committing herself. Lucie B-B called an ambulance, and the two Lucys rode to the hospital.

  At seven Lucie B-B called me from the backseat of a cab speeding uptown to her apartment. She was exhausted and a little carsick. She told me Lucy was checked in. All she had to wait for was a room.

  But when Lucy called collect from a pay phone at noon, it was to say she still hadn’t been seen. She was sitting in the ER, still waiting for a room. It was Tuesday and she hadn’t been to sleep since Thursday night. She was completely hysterical.

  “Call someone to come and pick you up,” I said, wondering if I could get there in time to do anything myself.

  “They won’t LET me leave. I signed the papers when I came in. I committed myself.”

  “But if you’re in the emergency room, can’t you just walk out the door?”

  “They took my clothes. I’m in a hospital gown. They took my wallet.”

  “I’ll call Stuart. He can get you out.” It was like Alice going down the rabbit hole. All night long I had told her to commit herself and now I didn’t know how to pull her out. It was a mistake, a terrible mistake.

  Stuart came to the hospital, got Lucy out, and took her home on the condition that she would go and see a new psychiatrist in the morning. She agreed.

  We talked every couple of hours, and for a while she slept. But every time we spoke she was worse; whatever she had in her that held things together was crumbling. When we talked the next morning, she was crying so hard she was nearly screaming. She kept having to put down the phone because she couldn’t breathe.

  “I can’t stand this!” she said. “I can’t stand this anymore.” She sounded like she was being tortured. Like she was being burned.

  “Are you going to the doctor?” I said.

  “Why did he leave me?” She meant Joe.