Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  But I never got anywhere trying to get Lucy to wait. Now I wanted her to wait because the city seemed so unstable. Anthrax was popping up like the patternless growth of mushrooms after a storm. If something were to happen, would she want to be recovering from a soft tissue graft? Everyone I knew was set against my going back to take care of her and I stayed in a state of complete indecision as October came to an end. Lucy was sweet about it. “I understand. You don’t have to come,” she said. “You’re totally off the hook for this one.” But in that way life works, once I was off the hook it was easy to make the decision to go.

  I thought it would be hard to go to New York because of the time I had spent there in September or because of the threatened dangers in the city itself, when in fact what was hard was seeing Lucy suffering. The surgery went on longer than she had anticipated and it was almost ten o’clock at night before she came down to recovery. I took the elevator to a floor marked NO VISITORS and went into doors bearing the same directive. I stood in a huge room of beds turned in every direction. It was like a dream I have all the time: I was looking for Lucy and couldn’t find her. “Lucy Grealy,” I said to the nurse.

  “Are you family?”

  I told her she was my sister. The nurse pointed to the bed I was leaning my hip against and still I couldn’t find her. The person in front of me was completely unrecognizable. She looked as if someone had beaten her with a tire iron. Her head was an enormous pumpkin, every feature stretched into someone else. There was blood running out of both sides of her mouth and down her neck, blood running out of her nose. The skin over her eyes had been pulled into shimmering translucence and her breasts were bare. I was crying then, and I stood beside her and held my hand on her forehead the way she liked. Lucy often talked about how it was the most soothing gesture in the world. She wrote about it, being in the hospital as a child and having a nurse or a doctor stop to place a hand on her forehead. When the nurse, who was impossibly busy, told me that it was time for me to leave, I asked her, if she had a minute, maybe she could hold her hand on Lucy’s forehead. “She likes it,” I said, but the woman had already turned away. I went out into the empty hallway and sat on the floor beside a gurney and cried. Not the way I would cry, but the way she would cry. I cried myself senseless. After I left, I found out Lucy’s friend Ben had come by that night and said he was her brother and stood beside her bed and held her swollen hand, and after that Joy came and said she was Lucy’s sister and they let her in as well. But Lucy didn’t remember any of us being there. She said later that when she woke up she was alone. All of New York felt unbearably sad and alone.

  I was back at the hospital at six in the morning and though there were signs posted everywhere about when a person was allowed in the ICU and for what twenty-minute increments, I went in and pulled up a chair and no one bothered me. Lucy still looked horrible, though she was slightly more recognizable as herself. She was also still intubated from the night before, which meant she couldn’t talk and could barely swallow. She was desperate to get the tube out of her nose. Her hands were swollen and tied down with IVs, but she scrawled little notes on a pad of Post-Its I had in my bag.

  “You weren’t there.” The letters were crazy, going in every direction.

  “Yes I was. You were still asleep and then they made me go out in the hall.”

  She motioned for me to give her back the pen. “Tube out.”

  “I’ll ask.”

  I got up and talked to the nurse, who told me they couldn’t do anything until the doctor came by. “It’ll be soon, honey,” she said to Lucy.

  But when the doctor came by, one of the cowboys, he patted her ankle and said she was doing great.

  “When are you going to extubate her?” I asked.

  “Soon,” he said and then cocked a finger at Lucy. “I’ll be back soon.”

  “Stop saying soon,” Lucy wrote. I told them.

  The surgical residents came to take out the tube at eleven. It was good practice on a difficult case. They were afraid that her airway would close up and then they wouldn’t be able to intubate her again. Their plan then was to drop a smaller pediatric breathing tube down inside the larger tube she had in place now and then withdraw the larger tube over it, but somehow the whole thing went wrong and she started thrashing, the wild, terrified jerking of an animal caught. They were hurting her, four of them holding her down to keep her still. I reached for her foot and a nurse kindly shoved me into the hall. When Lucy had a voice again she screamed hoarsely. Both tubes came out—the second tube had gone wrong—but her airway hadn’t closed and so the residents left feeling the whole thing had been a success.

  It was over and almost immediately Lucy was feeling better. I got her some ice chips and washed her face. She was tired and thirsty and sticky with the leftover adhesive of removed tape.

  “You’re such a good friend,” she said dreamily. “What did I ever do to deserve a friend like you?”

  “You’re a good friend to me, too.”

  “Oh no I’m not. Not like you.” She sighed, watching me. “But at least I can make you feel like a saint. That’s what you’ve always wanted.”

  I stopped and looked at her, washcloth suspended. “That’s a terrible thing to say.”

  Lucy shrugged barely, as much as she could move her shoulders. “It’s true.”

  I wanted to walk away from her, go down to the commissary and drink a cup of coffee alone. I wanted to tell her that she could wait for the nurse to wash her face. “I’m not doing this for points,” I said. “I’m doing this because I want to help you.” I hadn’t wanted to come. I would rather have been back in my own house, at my own desk working, but in her fog of morphine Lucy seemed to miss it all. She just smiled at me.

  “My pet,” she said.

  They sent us to a step-down floor, a sort of light ICU in which a circle of beds were arranged around a nurse’s desk. It was a wonderful setup, although the nurse turned me out into the hall regularly and kept the never-ending stream of visitors limited to two at a time. Lucy made progress hourly. By the next day she was off the morphine, and then she was sitting up, and then we were back to walking the halls. She had been on the table for eleven hours and she kept saying she had never felt so well after such a long surgery. No matter how bad things were for Lucy, the hospital snapped her back to her center. In the hospital she understood the rules. She knew how to behave. She also had the proof she needed that she wasn’t alone, and that everybody loved her. It was my job to direct the flow of traffic, to let visitors in and pull the ones that had been there too long away to give someone else a chance. Otherwise they bottled up, chatting around the foot of her bed, happy to see one another as well as Lucy, and then the nurses would sweep through the room and send the whole lot of us away. There were so many friends, so many people who loved her, who had histories with her I had never even heard. People who were smart and funny and accomplished. So many of them. So many of us in love with her. In the evenings Joy took over, performing the same function of the alpha visitor. The only time it was ever quiet in Lucy’s room was early in the morning and very late at night, and that was just the way she liked it.

  “I’m going to write a book about my friends,” she said to me one afternoon after dispatching Sophie and Ben for fresh magazines and a milkshake. “I have the most extraordinary friends. I’ve never really understood why everyone has been so good to me, and now I can interview them, talk to them and see.” Then she added as a gift, “I’ll write a whole chapter about you.”

  “I could write an entire book about you,” I said, and laughed. We each could have, every visitor who filed through with their arms laden with flowers. She could have written a chapter about each of us, but we could have written a library. There could be sequels, indexes, appendixes. We would never run out of things to say.

  “Do you want some time off?” I asked. “I could just stop everyone for a while so you could get some sleep.”

  “Oh no,” Lucy said.
“I want to see everybody.”

  I asked her how Shahid was, the poet with the brain tumor who had visited her before. I wondered if he would be coming by again. Of all the people I had met in the hospital the last time, I found him the most charming, maybe because he was so comfortable being there.

  “Shahid’s dying,” Lucy said. “He’s back with his family now. I think someone told me he was in a coma.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, and then added, “I liked him.” I said it because I didn’t know what else to say.

  “Oh, Shahid was great.” Lucy laughed suddenly, remembering a joke she was too tired to recount. “He was hysterical.”

  I stayed late that night, after all the other visitors had gone, and sat in Lucy’s bed with her to watch My Sweet Charity on the little television. At nine o’clock Stuart came by in a lab coat. He was making rounds. He ran his finger over Lucy’s incisions, read her file.

  “Are you feeling pretty good now?” he said. It was a doctor’s voice, not the voice of a friend who wanted to hang out and watch the end of the movie.

  “I’m okay,” Lucy said, not sounding okay.

  “I think they’ll let you out of here Wednesday, maybe Tuesday. I’ll talk to the doctors.” He snapped her file closed. “You get some sleep.”

  It was just two minutes, and he was gone. It was no longer or shorter than any of the other doctors stayed. Once the door was safely closed behind him, Lucy started to cry.

  “Why doesn’t he love me?” she said.

  “Honey, Stuart is your friend. He’s your doctor and your friend. He’s not supposed to be in love with you.”

  “But he’s single. He wants to go out with me for coffee, he wants to talk about other women, but he would never be in love with me.”

  “Are you in love with him?”

  “I could be,” she said.

  “Oh, Lucy, don’t do this. You really care for Stuart. He’s a good friend. Don’t turn it into this.”

  But now she was really crying, and I wanted her to settle down for fear she’d break something open. “I’m so tired of being lonely,” she said.

  I realized that night that there was nothing in the body I was afraid of. There was no wound I couldn’t clean and dress, nothing that made me feel squeamish or ashamed. Even the pain didn’t make me turn away. With the body I could be tirelessly helpful, but with her psyche, her heart, I simply froze sometimes. Past a certain point I did not know what to say. I wanted to run down the hall and find Stuart, demand that he love my friend and for that love I would give him anything he wanted in return, not that that would have been the answer or that the love could have been enough, but I would have done it just to stop her from crying. It was this suffering I couldn’t stand.

  Lucy called me at five-thirty on Sunday morning to say she wanted a bottle of apricot nectar. I asked her if this was a joke. It was not.

  “At five-thirty on a Sunday?”

  “It’s New York,” she said. “Apricot nectar is out there.”

  So I went off looking and the eighth place I went to, I found it. She was right in this way, there were a remarkable number of stores open, but most of them sold peach nectar or fresh orange juice or strawberry banana shakes and Lucy had made it clear she wasn’t interested in substitutions. When I got there, she drank down a big glass, proclaimed it was exactly what she needed, then threw it up in a pan while I held her.

  Throwing up had been a major ordeal during this surgery because she had had operations on both her stomach and her jaw. I had to sit behind her in the bed and hold her up while she vomited, my legs on either side of her hips like we were doing drills in Lamaze class. Most of the time she threw up a bright green water that looked and smelled alarmingly like Scope, some remnant of eleven hours of anesthesia.

  That Sunday Lucy was getting worse. She was crying and disoriented. She had been moved into a semiprivate room and sometime during the night she had acquired a roommate who cried without stopping. She made horrible, high-pitched wails of pain and desperation that made sleep impossible and sliced through my last nerve. It was still going on, and the woman had put her television on its loudest setting to try and drown out the sound of her own suffering or trying to distract herself, but either way the din was unbearable.

  “I’m so tired,” Lucy cried. “I want to go home.”

  It was a stretch, an eleven-hour surgery on Thursday night and home on Sunday morning, but when the doctor came in, I asked him. He was one of the surgical fellows, a tall, lanky man with a kind face who Lucy claimed to have a crush on.

  “Sure,” he said, looking at her over the rim of his coffee cup, “why not?”

  I was hoping for something a little more medical, but I’d take it.

  “I wanted to ask you about my hip,” she said while she still had his attention. She pulled up her gown to show him the jagged spike of bone that a different surgeon had carved apart for a graft when we were still in college. He had left it as a dangerous, painful-looking point beneath the skin. “I wonder if it can be fixed?” she asked.

  The doctor looked at it and touched it tentatively, as if to see if it were really as sharp as it appeared. “We could have fixed it this time,” he said. “You should have asked. Just remember next time. It’s not a problem.”

  His answer raised two questions: if it wasn’t a problem, why had someone left it behind and no one thought to fix it for twenty years, and also, was there supposed to be a next time?

  We had at least an hour before the paperwork would be ready and we could go, so I put Lucy on a plastic chair in the bathtub and washed her hair and gave her a bath, thinking we’d be better off getting it done here than trying to do it at home. When I got her all dried and dressed, I took her downstairs with her new mountain of gifts. It was considerably harder getting Lucy home this time. She should have stayed in the hospital at least another two days, and on top of that all the morning’s throwing up and then the bath had exhausted her. There was a moment when we were out on the street in front of the hospital trying to get a cab that I thought I had made a terrible mistake, but we were out now and there was no going back. I carried her down the hall to the elevator, up to her apartment on the eleventh floor, and got her settled on the couch. She was too sick to leave alone and so Joy came over to watch her while I ran to the pharmacy to have the new raft of prescriptions filled, Vicodin, Klonopin, antibiotics. I bought the pudding cups and Ensure. When everything was settled, Lucy slept for twelve hours. I set the alarm for every two hours to give her her pills. I kept an elaborate chart of what she had taken and when, so that I wouldn’t forget what I had made her swallow in the middle of the night.

  Because Lucy should still have been in the hospital, we had to play hospital at home. She was sick and crying and throwing up and I was dispensing pills and constantly calling Stuart on the phone for advice. I carried her over to Park to hail a cab for her doctor’s appointments and every time we came back she had a prescription for more pills. I thought she already had every narcotic known to man, but she was trying to fine-tune, find something that was better for the pain. She wasn’t pretending—the pain was formidable and the pills were all faulty in their own ways—but what alarmed me was the sheer volume of plastic orange bottles that were being stacked up in the apartment with no conversations between the doctors about who was assigning what. If she was offered a prescription for something she didn’t like and had too many, she took it anyway, just in case. The next day I took Lucy to another doctor, who turned out to be a surgical fellow she hadn’t seen before. He gave her a prescription for eighty OxyContin.

  If all of the other medications were lacking, OxyContin was the perfect drug. Instead of slowly pulling you up towards relief, peaking, and then sliding you down again, this pill provided a sustained and consistent twelve-hour break from pain. It didn’t make her foggy, emotional, or sleepy. It worked beautifully and was inexpensive, which is why it had become such a popular street drug. All you had to do to change OxyCo
ntin into something sweeter than heroin was crush it up. That destroyed the time-release mechanism, thus giving you twelve hours of pain relief in one startling, beautiful minute. Eighty in the house was like having an unreliable Rottweiler at the foot of the bed. Even the bottle was menacing, huge.

  “What if I took them with me,” I said casually. “I could mail them to you every week.”

  “You’re being crazy,” Lucy said.

  “Then give them to Joy. Give them to Sophie. Let somebody dole them out for you. You can’t keep track of so many pills.”

  “I’ve been doing this my whole life. I know how to take pills.”

  I went home to Tennessee and Lucy went back to Connecticut, this time to go to Sophie’s farm in the country to recover. It was too soon to know if the surgery was a success, but in another week she felt significantly better. She went back to finish her class for the semester. She told me later that’s when she started grinding up the OxyContin and snorting them. When they were gone, she made the simple transition back to heroin.

  Chapter Seventeen

  LUCY HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO BE IN AA. “IT WOULD be such a great way to meet people,” she said. “Plus I’d have someplace I had to go every day.” She had started going to meetings at several points in her life but without any imperative, like being an alcoholic, they always wound up boring her. Meetings bored her now that she was supposed to go to Narcotics Anonymous, or they made her restless. She said there was no point in her going to AA because she wasn’t about to give up drinking if she had to give up drugs. Giving up drugs meant giving up heroin. Period. No more than that.

  And she did meet people, but they weren’t Lou Reed or Marianne Faithful. No one was messed up in a way that was particularly romantic. One night a guy she knew from meetings called her for help, wanting to sleep in her apartment so that he wouldn’t get high again, but when he showed up he was already high, and in the morning she found him shooting heroin in her kitchen. She reported the story to me over the phone the same way she might have had she woken up to find a large cockroach in her sink.