Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  “He said he couldn’t help you. You’re the star case. If a surgeon didn’t have the skill to operate on you, then you would want him to admit that and step aside.”

  “But he left me!”

  “Even the worst surgeon should find a better surgeon,” I said. “I can come up today. I can be there in three hours.”

  “Wait,” she said, and put down the phone again. In Nashville I listened to her cry.

  Lucy went to see a new psychiatrist that morning and they called me together from her office. The two choices Lucy had were to be committed at another hospital or to place herself in the custody of a friend immediately. Could she come to Nashville right now?

  I said there would be a plane ticket waiting at the airport.

  An hour later I had a call from Stuart. “She really isn’t well,” he said.

  “I know that.”

  “I want you to check and make sure she doesn’t have any drugs with her, and I want you to not let her drink, and don’t do any drugs with her.” His voice was stern and serious.

  I laughed, but then Stuart didn’t know me. “Do you have any idea who you’re talking to?” I asked.

  For years I had been going to Lucy’s apartment, sleeping on her sofa and pretending that I was like her. Now things were bad and she would come home to me and pretend that she lived the life of the very straight.

  Whenever I’m in the Nashville airport, I am looking for Lucy. I feel my life is marked by the moments I came to meet her. When I saw her come through the gate, I thought that everything I had heard on the phone was an aberration. Nothing was so bad. Look, there she was, her arms stretched out to me. She was tiny, a spring twig in black jeans and a T-shirt, her hair cropped short and dirty, no luggage, but oh, how she flew into my arms and stayed there, holding me.

  “I’m such a fuckup,” she whispered in my ear.

  “You’re fine,” I said, her tiny rib cage pressed to mine. “As long as I can keep an eye on you.” Hold tight, keep her close. It was May, and so pretty that I thought by the end of the week I might be able to sell her on the charms of living in Nashville after all.

  When we got in the car, I laid it out for her. I thought it was best to say whatever needed to be said while we were still in the airport parking garage so that if she couldn’t bear it she’d have a way to leave. “Here’s the plan,” I said. “No drinking at all. No drugs, I guess that goes without saying.”

  “Can we smoke?”

  “Absolutely. I’ve been thinking about starting again anyway. We’ll get a pack on the way home.” I leaned over in the car and took her hands. She didn’t look any different. She was still Lucy, still my life. “What’s happened is a big deal. It’s not like breaking up with a guy. It’s serious, it’s medical, and I’m sure I’m out of my league in trying to help you solve what’s wrong. So what I want to do is try and make you happy. I just want to have some fun, put your worries behind you for a while, you know? It’s not going to solve anything, but maybe it would be good to lighten up.”

  Lucy lifted her eyebrows. “I think that sounds promising.”

  “Good. Then let’s go get some doughnuts.”

  We went to the Krispy Kreme doughnut factory where the Hot Doughnuts Now sign was burning its pink neon light. From the other side of a glass window we watched the doughnuts roll down the conveyer belt and then drop into the boiling channel of oil where they bobbed, little doughy life preservers, and then were scooped up and rolled through the wall of liquid sugar. They came steadily, in a slow and orderly fashion, sailing off on a higher belt, rounding the corner out of sight. The life cycle of doughnuts was enormously comforting. We watched them for about half an hour.

  “God,” Lucy said with a sort of reverence, “imagine how great this would be if you were stoned.”

  IT TAKES A certain amount of effort to be miserable and another kind of effort to be happy, and I was willing to do the work of happiness. I figured even if I couldn’t make Lucy deeply happy, I could very likely make her cheaply and immediately happy. I could provide the kind of happiness that would seem hollow if we had had the money or the time to stay in it too long. It was the same as carrying her. I couldn’t do it forever, but I could do it for a while. I booked Lucy a massage and had her eyelashes dyed. I took her for a pedicure. I bought her the best pâté I could find in Nashville along with Spaghetti-O’s and Hungry Jack biscuits and everything else I knew she liked. We went to a bad movie and then stayed for a second bad movie. I took her shopping and bought her whatever she wanted. And she was happy, and I was happy.

  The only time I caught Lucy crying was when she would sneak off to call Joe. As soon as she heard his voice on the phone, she would start to sob.

  “I don’t think I can take away your telephone privileges, but I’m asking you please not to call him.”

  “I have to know why he left me.”

  “Maybe you do have to know, but not now. Just give yourself a little break. Whatever the reason is, it will still be true later.”

  The centerpiece of the rehabilitation was our canoe trip down the Little Harpeth River. Our plan was to figure out more of a plot for Lucy’s novel, and while I paddled she sat in the front of the canoe taking notes.

  It had been a dry spring and the water in the river was lower than usual for May. About every five minutes, I had to get out of the canoe and lift it off the rocky bottom to get us moving again. It was the middle of the week and we didn’t see anyone else on the river that day, just the ducks, who made better time than we did, and the turtles sunning themselves on the rocks, and the snakes who held their heads out of the water like periscopes as they swam past.

  “The parents were musicians,” Lucy said, smoking a cigarette and staring up at the rocky cliffs on either side of our little boat. “They were lazy, self-involved, selfish. They wrote one very successful song when they were young and they lived their whole lives off that.” She thought about this for a minute and then decided it wouldn’t generate enough income for the kind of wretched excess she imagined for them. “They had family money, too, but they spent it on drugs. They did nothing for the children. They neglected them, abused them.”

  Lucy went through all the characters in detail and each one was more despicable than the one who came before. When she told me the narrator, the abandoned sister, was wildly promiscuous and drank too much and probably has sex with the character of the nephew, I suggested she ease up a little.

  “We’ve got to have someone we care about,” I said. “And it helps if that person is the one telling the story. You can write a novel in which every character is despicable later, I just think it’s a bad idea for a first novel.”

  We came up on four fat geese standing on a shoal. They looked at us with nominal interest and then turned away. Lucy nodded. “I can see that.”

  But what was the family secret? What had the father left his son as an inheritance? That was the thing we tried to figure out.

  “You know, pet,” I said with some hesitation, “I could write it for you.” I sliced my paddle in and out of the water, trying to avoid the rocks, the snakes. “We wouldn’t have to tell anyone. I could write it and then you could rewrite it so that it sounded like you.”

  “Dear God, let’s hope it never comes to that.”

  “But if it does. If it’s putting too much pressure on you.”

  Lucy shuddered. In trying to come up with a new way to be helpful, I had identified the lowest point to which she could possibly sink. “It will never happen,” she said.

  I didn’t have any better luck trying to talk her into living with me, even though this time I tried harder.

  “There isn’t a reason not to now. You could start seeing a new psychiatrist here. I know you don’t want to stay here forever, I don’t want to stay here forever, but for a while it would be good for you.”

  I wanted to keep her as much for myself as for her. We had a wonderful time that visit. Even when Lucy was devastated or difficult, she was
the person I knew best in the world, the person I was the most comfortable with. Whenever I saw her, I felt like I had been living in another country, doing moderately well in another language, and then she showed up speaking English and suddenly I could speak with all the complexity and nuance that I hadn’t even realized was gone. With Lucy I was a native speaker.

  But Lucy was never going to live in Nashville. Even if it might have saved her life, it wasn’t the life she wanted.

  Dearest Anngora, my cynical pirate of the elusive heart, my self winding watch, my showpiece, my shoelace, how are you?

  Chapter Sixteen

  MY EDITOR, ROBERT JONES, DIED OF CANCER IN August of 2001, and I went to a small memorial service at his home in Sag Harbor a few days later. In September there was a larger service in New York and Robert’s assistant, Alison Callahan, asked me along with many of the writers he had worked with, to say something about him. I loved Robert enough to think that such a task would be completely beyond me, but in the end I decided to give it a try, thinking that if I broke down there would be enough people who were crying anyway that no one would really notice. And I was right, both that I would cry and that no one would mind, and when the service was over, and the memorial reception and the memorial dinner, I went back to Lucy’s, exhausted.

  THE TELEVISION MOVIE that had been made of my first novel years before was playing on cable and we sat in bed and watched it, cheering for the two seconds my name flashed across the screen. We both agreed that the movie was significantly worse than we had remembered.

  Early the next morning, we met Adrian LeBlanc downtown at Le Gamin. Adrian and I had both put Seventeen long behind us. She had spent the last ten years working on the book that would be Random Family and now that book was close to being finished. Lucy, who was still carless since driving her Saab into a tree, had to catch the train to Vermont to teach her first class of the semester at Bennington, so she made do with one cup of coffee and a few bites of my breakfast. She kept looking at her watch.

  “I really, really should go,” she said. She kissed us both good-bye and was out the door. Two minutes later she was back.

  “Come look at this,” she said. “A plane’s hit the World Trade Center.”

  The waiter followed Adrian and me outside, along with the handful of other diners in the restaurant. Both of the towers were on fire and we asked a woman in the street how that had happened. “The flames jumped,” she said. She didn’t seem alarmed. No one did. The waiter looked at us suspiciously and I promised him that we had no intention of skipping out on the check. The other patrons went back inside to eat their breakfasts.

  Lucy looked at her watch. “Now I’m going to miss the train if I don’t take a cab.” She waved and ran off, but after we wandered back to our table she came back again. “You have to see the view of it down the street,” she said. “It’s amazing. Go look.”

  History is strangely incomprehensible when you’re standing in the middle of it. Lucy, Adrian, and I all made the wrong decisions that morning but none of us could have seen it at the time. Lucy rushed on to Penn Station and made her train, which turned out to be the last train to leave New York, and Adrian and I decided to go down to the World Trade Center to see what had happened.

  To say it was a beautiful day would not begin to explain it. It was that day when the end of summer intersects perfectly with the start of fall, so it was warm but the breeze was light and nearly cool. The sky would have been empty, cloudless blue, were it not for the smoke that was billowing out towards Brooklyn. While there were people on the streets looking puzzled, no one seemed to be afraid. There was a huge mass of people walking up the West Side Highway, mostly men in suits, and they were talking on their cellphones, talking to each other, their jackets hooked on a finger and slung over their shoulders. They wore sunglasses. They smiled at us. We were outside on the beautiful day, with no radio or television coverage, strolling south against a tide that was strolling north. We thought that maybe someone had had a heart attack and flown a little plane into one building, and then the fire had jumped to the other, the way we’d been told. In light of everything that happened, it seems impossible that we ever thought that, but we did. A lot of people did.

  When we were about three blocks away, we stopped and tilted our chins up to watch the fire, which was the point at which I had the strangest, smallest inkling that something truly cataclysmic had happened, which was the point at which the first tower collapsed.

  Lucy, locked on a train to Vermont, had a much better understanding of what was going on because she had found someone with a portable television set and was now watching everything with a voiced-over explanation. Adrian and I were running, hands locked together, with the thousands of other people who were running away from the building. We got to her apartment on Sullivan Street, climbed the five flights of stairs, and stepped out onto the fire escape, into the dream, in time to see the second tower collapse.

  I couldn’t leave the city and Lucy couldn’t come home as the island had been shut down. Oddly, I would have been the first to admit that it was a worse deal for Lucy than it was for me. As awful as it was to be in New York, it was also, for the moment, a strange center of the world. There were no cars allowed below Fourteenth Street and people sat on their stoops and talked to one another until late in the evening while kids went down the empty streets on bicycles and roller skates wearing paper surgical masks. There were candles everywhere, and the constant acrid dust of fire. I walked to Lucy’s apartment but I couldn’t stay there, I couldn’t sit still. I walked up to Eightieth Street and spent the night on my friend Erica’s couch. All I did was walk for days, both agitated and somnambulant. I wanted to remember everything, as did Lucy, who was stuck in Vermont.

  But when she managed to get back in a few nights later, she was a hellcat. Lucy, still Irish, had a virulent anti-American streak that surfaced from time to time and the wave of patriotism that had taken hold of the country and, worse yet, New York City, both revolted and enraged her. We met Stuart for dinner at an Italian restaurant around the corner from her apartment and she spoke so strongly and loudly against the sudden showing of paper flags in windows and the sentimental posters that people around the city had made (speaking of God and love and country or God and revenge and country) that I actually worried the diners at the other tables might pick her up bodily and pitch her into the street. Then I worried that I might throw her out. We got into a terrible fight over dinner, while Stuart spent most of the meal standing on the sidewalk, arguing with his ex-wife on a cellphone. I understood, as Lucy pointed out, that the United States had committed heinous acts on foreign soil throughout the world and had suffered no repercussions, but I was spending half my days reading the flyers put up by the families of the missing. That was still how people thought of them then: missing. So as for her diatribe of American evils, I didn’t want to hear it. When Stuart came back looking as flustered as we were, Lucy was recounting her story about being in a bar in Vermont and how everyone was watching the news and talking about how we were going to go over there and kick some ass, just like the Bible said. She was going a million miles a minute.

  “ ‘Where does it say that we’re supposed to kick ass?’ I said to this guy and he said, ‘In the Bible—an eye for an eye.’ And I looked at all of them in this redneck bar and I said, ‘Fuck the Bible!’ And I left. I didn’t pay for my drink.”

  Lucy had probably been waiting to say, “Fuck the Bible,” her whole life. Now she had her moment. “You weren’t here,” I said in a low voice. “You went to Vermont. You don’t know how it was.” It was the meanest thing I could say to her, because Lucy couldn’t stand the thought of being anywhere other than exactly in the middle of where everything was happening.

  When we were walking home, she softened and maybe felt a little sorry for making a scene, if only because she knew I hated scenes. She twisted her arm around mine. “Don’t listen to me,” she said. “I just get going sometimes. You know that.?
??

  “I do.”

  She pushed her head into my shoulder. “And you still love me?”

  I was still mad at her, furious with her, but that wasn’t the question. The question was did I love her. And I always loved her.

  10/15/01

  Dearest Angora,

  How strange & sweet to be writing a card the old fashioned way. I just wanted, really, to let you know that this card represents a learning—your own relentless, good natured attempts at being a best & dear friend are rubbing off. I feel that you have in so many ways taught me—through action—what it means to be a truly great friend.

  I just got back from Florida which turned out to be fun—actually got myself into the ocean, though I did, for the first time in my life, find myself fearful of sharks. I’ve also noticed a subtle re-alignment in other fears/ responses. At one point we were driving along and there were two large towers smoking. Turns out they were only huge smoke stacks, but…Same with loud noises. My relationship to loud noises is changed forever.

  While in Florida I bought you a trinket, a jewelry roll-up bag, at a street vendor. I liked the thought of you traveling with all your—my good god, I can’t remember how to spell jewels (jewles? No.). Jewels. Anyway, now of course it seems like a dumb gift, and ugly, but part of learning to be a good friend is not giving into fears that are ultimately narcissistic. So here, a roll up jewelry bag: if I could fill it with its namesake.

  My darling pet.

  Love, Lucy

  A month before the world fell apart, Lucy had scheduled another surgery for November 1. The same surgeons had come up with a revised plan, something that could be done in lieu of the bolts that included, among many other things, a soft tissue graft from her stomach and shortening the bone in her upper jaw. Lucy’s upper jaw had never been operated on before and she thought this might be an innovative solution to her problem of closing her mouth. Again, I couldn’t for the life of me understand why she wanted to go ahead with it. In Scotland she would have called it an appeasement surgery. She would have to take at least two weeks off of work. Wouldn’t it be better to wait until the summer?