Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  After so many years of talking to Lucy every day or every other day, I could now go weeks without hearing from her, no matter how many threatening messages I left on her answering machine. Then she would call and tell me she had been clean for three days or twenty-four hours or a week and that was it, by God, she had been down to the bottom and now she knew she would never do heroin again. These calls were usually made with laryngitis, so that I could barely understand what she was saying.

  “But I thought you were finished.” I always felt two steps behind. I was supposed to be glad she had stopped using when I didn’t know she’d started up again.

  “Last time I didn’t really mean it,” she rasped. “Even as I was telling people it was over there was this tiny part of me that knew….” Her voice petered out.

  “Say it again. I couldn’t hear you.”

  “I said I knew I would still do it one more time. But this is different. This time there isn’t a single part of me that wants to go back.”

  “How do you know it’s gone?” I asked.

  It was gone because she’d taken too much and passed out and vomited while she was unconscious, which accounted for her lack of voice. She was terrified of asphyxiating on her vomit, and she said she’d been careful to pass out with her head hanging over the edge of the sofa. Lucy’s throat was a battleground, stripped and mined by years of surgery and intubation. Without her voice, and with the general physical misery that accompanies the aftermath of a few days of drugs, Lucy would wind up canceling her classes after a spate of using.

  “Are you shooting it?”

  “No!” she said. “That’s disgusting. I would never do that. I only snort it.” In her mind it made her a nicer brand of addict. I asked her if she had any heroin in her apartment.

  “A little. Not much.”

  “Then don’t you think it would be a good idea to get rid of it now?”

  And so we would embark on the ritual of flushing whatever was left down the toilet while I listened on the phone, which I understood was a bit like listening to radio theater. Even if it was gone, it didn’t matter. Her dealer delivered to her building’s doorman, and his number was on the speed dial of her cellphone. She told me that at ten dollars a bag it was cheaper than pot.

  Everything I knew about heroin I learned from the movies, so I thought that if she wasn’t using drugs every day, she couldn’t actually be addicted to them. If she could go six weeks without using, then she could quit them altogether. It wasn’t as if she was out stealing television sets. But heroin seemed to be some sort of invisible leash and six weeks was as far as it would let her go. Then she was back on, then back off, feeling increasingly more miserable as the days and weeks after heroin created a vicious kind of hangover that could only be eased by heroin.

  And maybe it wasn’t six weeks, even if that was what she told me. Maybe it was three, maybe one.

  “It inhibits your body from producing its own endorphins,” she said. “At the very minute you need them the most.”

  “Why keep going back?” I asked. Nothing about it made sense to me.

  “They don’t call it heroin for nothing,” she said.

  Lucy was having the great love affair she had always dreamed of. It was dangerous and rocky, violently depleting, but in the few minutes that it was sweet it made her feel the all encompassing heat of love.

  There would be good days, too. Days in which she called and was happy. She had been seeing a new psychiatrist, Dr. Lindy, in whom she placed great faith. She said she was finally dealing with her past. She was realizing that the enormous sadness of her life had possibly come from a source other than her face and that she had never been able to get completely well because she had always been trying to fix the wrong thing. She had talked Dr. Lindy into giving her two sessions for every one he charged, proving once again that she was the special case. I worried that maybe she wasn’t strong enough to go ferreting around in the dark unhappiness of her past. But as Lucy pointed out, I was always worrying about something.

  One night as I was falling sleep, Lucy called to tell me a long and complicated story about going to see her favorite blues singer Little Jimmy Scott with Andy, and how she had done heroin later that night and how Andy couldn’t get a hold of her, and, thinking she might be dead or dying, called the police to break down her door. She wasn’t dead, of course, just temporarily unconscious. She was furious with Andy for meddling in her business, even if what he had been trying to do was save her life. Somewhere in the middle of it all I cut her off.

  “You’re doing heroin again?”

  “I’m not going to lie to you,” she said. “I’m not going to let this drug make me into a liar like it does everyone else. I do heroin sometimes and you might as well get used to it.”

  “No,” I said. “I’m never going to get used to it. It’s never going to be conversational for me.”

  “Are you telling me I should lie to you?”

  “I’m telling you to get off heroin,” I said, and then I said good night and hung up the phone.

  My old boyfriend Eli called me the next day. He was in from Rome and visiting Lucy in New York. “I’m calling on behalf of your best friend,” he said lightly. “She wanted me to tell you she’s a good person and you should forgive her.”

  “Jesus, you make it sound like I’m pissed off that she borrowed my sweater without asking,” I said. But then Lucy hadn’t told Eli what we were fighting about, only that I was mad at her.

  IN FEBRUARY, after I hadn’t heard from Lucy in a week, Joy called in the middle of the night to say that Lucy had cut her wrists, though not badly enough to need stitches, and had then taken an overdose of heroin. She was on suicide watch at Columbia Presbyterian and Lucie B-B and Sophie were on their way and she didn’t think I needed to come. It was remarkably like the conversations we had around surgeries: who was taking what shift. Joy told me what Lucy had taken and I wrote it all down on a piece of scrap paper and stuck it in the kitchen drawer.

  The next day I called Lucy on the pay phone in the psych ward. Joy had given me the number. It took me a half hour of trying before I got through.

  “It’s just like Yaddo,” I said to her after someone had finally agreed to go and find her for me.

  “You hate me,” she said.

  “I don’t hate you at all. I’ll be mad at you sometime when you’re well, but not when you’re sick. I love you.”

  “I’m sorry,” Lucy said. “I don’t do this to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt you at all.”

  “I know that.”

  “I want to stop. I want to stop this and I want to get better.”

  “I know, darling.”

  “Don’t stop loving me.”

  “I’m always going to love you.”

  “Don’t stop taking my calls.”

  “Lucy,” I said. “Check your answering machine sometime. I call you every day.”

  She should have stayed in the hospital for two weeks and I told her so. All of the friends decided she had to go to rehab and that we could pool our money and send her, but she said the timing was bad. After forty-eight hours she had convinced the doctors that she was no longer in a crisis. Without her being actively suicidal, insurance wouldn’t cover the stay anymore and they discharged her into Sophie’s care.

  Whenever Lucy didn’t call me back, I thought she was off doing drugs. “Hey, pet, it’s me,” I told her answering machine. “I have a terrible feeling you’re high. Please call.”

  But she then would call the next day and say no, not high, just fine, just very busy. I always believed her, if for no other reason than I didn’t know how not to.

  “I went to the Writer’s Room to work today,” she told me over the phone. “It was the first time in ages, and there was a little sign up on the bulletin board about a girl from Sarah Lawrence who committed suicide.” Lucy said her name but I didn’t remember her. “She wrote in the Writer’s Room. I saw her sometimes, we said hello. When I saw that sign I thoug
ht about how easily it could have been the other way around, that she could have lived and I could have died and she would have come in and looked at a sign that said how sad everyone was about Lucy Grealy committing suicide. And Ann, I felt so unbelievably lucky to be alive. I walked outside and the world was just incredibly beautiful to me. I cried I was so happy. I really do want to be alive.”

  Death destroys a man but the Idea of Death can save him, she added on the bottom of a letter. I just read this & I liked it.

  AROUND THIS TIME things in my life were taking an unexpected turn. My novel, Bel Canto, which had chugged along with moderate sales during its year in hardback, had suddenly become a best seller in paperback. It won a prize in the States and then in England. My fourth book made me an overnight success. Over the past few years I had seen many of my friends come to glory. Elizabeth had been nominated for a National Book Award and then won a prize from the Academy of Arts and Letters. My friend Manette had a book that was chosen for Oprah Winfrey’s book club. Adrian’s book that was ten years in the making was published to the biggest avalanche of acclaim I had ever seen and had a front-page review in the New York Times. And Lucy, Lucy had led the way for all of us. Now it seemed it was me.

  Lucy was happy for me. She worked at being happy for me. “It’s not that I’m not jealous,” she said, “but my pride in you is much bigger than my jealousy. Anyway, I called this one. I told you this was your best book.”

  I saw Lucy that spring when I was giving a reading in New York. She was supposed to come with Karl and me to the Museum of Natural History to see the butterfly exhibit that day but she decided at the last minute that it was too impossible to come uptown and she would meet us for dinner. She still had a large band of swelling on her neck and she was wearing a turtleneck sweater. She always wore turtlenecks after surgeries and though I bought them for her all the time, I rarely got the right one. There was a very specific way they had to sit on her neck to be both comfortable and effective for their purpose. “What do you think of my face?” she said.

  We were in Balthazar, near her old apartment in SoHo, which kindly paints everyone in a warm orange glow, but even in flattering light Lucy’s face seemed frozen somehow, as if she were wearing a clay mask. Or maybe it was only that I wasn’t used to it yet. It was such a different face from the one I’d seen the last time. It seemed so immobile. “I think you look good,” I said.

  “Fuck good!” she said. “I didn’t go through all of this so that I could look good. I want to look great.”

  “You look great,” I said.

  “It doesn’t count now.”

  “Please,” I said, “forgive me. You look great.”

  The next night we all went together to an awards ceremony. I was a finalist for a literary prize and Lucy met us at the hotel. Karl took me aside and told me he thought she was drunk or high, but that couldn’t be possible since she had told me she was completely clean. A lot of people were there that night who wanted my attention for one reason or another, but whenever anyone came up to try and speak to me, Lucy would step between us and pull down my head so that she could tap her forehead against mine.

  “You’re such a rock star.”

  “Hardly.”

  “Do you love me?” she asked.

  “I do love you.”

  She put her arms around my neck and hung there. “You’re going to win,” she said. “You’re the best.” If I turned my eyes away from her, she would put her hands on my head and tilt it towards her again. “Didn’t I tell you this was a great book?”

  I lost the prize and my publisher and agent took us out to dinner in a gesture of good sportsmanship. There were seven of us at the table and Lucy sat beside me. Whenever someone said anything to me, she would start to whisper in my ear.

  “Bastards,” she said. “You should have won. You were robbed.” She ordered another Cosmopolitan.

  “It’s okay,” I said.

  She pressed her head against my shoulder and looked up at me. “Do you love me?” She threw one leg over mine and in doing so managed to swallow up all the air in the restaurant. She kept it up all through dinner, through dessert, through the walk down the street to find her a cab. Karl gave her twenty dollars for her fare, kissed her good night, and sent her home.

  A week later she pulled her car into a parking lot in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, on her way home from Bennington in the middle of the night, cut herself with razor blades, drank, took a handful of pills, and passed out. A policeman found her and took her to the local hospital, where she spent the night. Her voice was stripped from vomiting in the car but we talked for an hour, and the next day we talked for an hour again. She told me in a whisper that she was sorry, that she loved me, that she didn’t mean to hurt me, that she could not stand to live in this present state of loneliness anymore. She said everything I knew, and then I told her everything she knew, that I loved her and would do anything I could for her and that if she would just come to Nashville, just for a while, and live in her room, I could at least help her until she was on her feet. I knew that nothing either one of us said could change anything but I was just so grateful to hear her voice, talking.

  “I keep thinking that if I keep doing this someone is going to see how much pain I’m in and they’re going to help me,” she whispered.

  “I can help you,” I said. “Let me.”

  “I don’t know how,” she said sadly.

  When Bennington fired her a month later for missing so many classes, she was a little nervous but mostly thrilled. She said she was relieved to have the pressure taken off, and now that she didn’t have to do all that driving, everything would be easier. “This is going to make all the difference. I already feel a hundred times better.” But her book contract, the subject of so many discussions and extensions, had finally been canceled in December. I wasn’t sure how much there was left to give up.

  I MET HER A WEEK later at the Park Avenue Café for dinner. I wanted to take her someplace nice, but when she looked around she said the restaurant was full of tourists.

  “How can you tell?”

  “Just look at them,” she said. “Look at what they’re eating.” She ordered a glass of wine and I asked her not to, not that a glass of wine made one bit of difference in the world, I just didn’t want to watch her drink it.

  Lucy told me to lighten up. She was in a good mood that night. She was loving without being clinging, she was talkative. She said that being fired was just what she had needed. It opened up so much for her. Now she would be able to go back to work on her book and maybe she wouldn’t even try to get Doubleday to pick up the contract again. Maybe she would sell it for more money someplace else. It might not even be a novel. She might really write the book about her friends. She was also about to be evicted from her beloved apartment, which was a sublet, but maybe she’d find something even better. “I don’t have to worry about it all right now.”

  “What about the drugs?”

  She rolled her eyes, not because I was asking, but as a way of saying those pesky drugs were still in the picture. “I’m working on it.”

  My hands were sweating. Sitting there over a pricey piece of half-eaten fish, I felt as if I had suddenly turned a corner. “Lucy,” I said.

  “Yes, pet?”

  “You know I’ve seen you through a lot of things. I’ve always stuck by you.” I was shaking. I surprised myself by shaking. “But I can’t stand this. I can barely explain it to you, but I feel a revulsion for what you’re doing. All these years I’ve watched these things hurt you, things you had no control over, and now to have to watch you hurt yourself, it’s too much for me.”

  She tilted her head and gave me the warmest, loveliest smile. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  I put my hands flat on the table and stared at the heavy silverware touching my thumbs. I kept my eyes down when I should have looked at her. “I’ll leave you over this,” I said. “I mean it. Someday soon I’ll come to the end of my rope and I won’t
be able to help you anymore.”

  “I know,” she said, and she leaned across the table and kissed me. “I love you for saying this. It means the world to me.”

  I looked at her, blinking. I wasn’t expecting this. I thought she would at least tell me I was wrong about everything.

  “Sophie pretty much said the same thing, and Joy. It makes me love all of you so much.”

  I wondered how Sophie and Joy had felt, if their hands had shaken, too. Lucie B-B was different. She didn’t approve of Lucy’s behavior, but she offered her a friendship that was completely free of judgment. There was no part of Lucy she turned away from. Her love was based on unwavering acceptance.

  Lucy tapped her finger on the back of my hand. “Just don’t leave me yet,” she said. “Give me a little more time to try.”

  I loved her insanely at that moment. There was something about her composure, her little request, that completely broke my heart. I knew I could never draw a line I would not be willing to erase later on. “Of course I won’t leave you yet,” I said.

  I saw her again a few days later at Café des Artistes. Karl had invited some of my friends for drinks before I went to give a talk at Lincoln Center with Renée Fleming. But Lucy was strung out again, scattered and demanding. She hadn’t eaten all day and she wanted a milkshake. She was irritated that the restaurant was too fancy to come up with a milkshake, so Artie and Adrian left the party and took her to a diner down the street to settle her down. It was impossible for me to tell when she was high and when she was coming off being high and when she was just in a foul temper.

  Bel Canto was keeping me out of the house and on the road. It seemed like every third week I was in New York. Sometimes Lucy was awful and sometimes she was good. When I saw her at the end of May, she said she thought she was coming out of her depression. She told me she had been clean for twenty-eight days. She was talking again about going to medical school. Lucy had been premed in college and whenever writing seemed impossible she toyed around with the idea of going back to the love of her childhood. She wanted to be like William Carlos Williams, a writing doctor. Normally the whole thing was a lark, something you say when work was going badly, but this time she was much more serious. She didn’t want to teach anymore. She didn’t want to have to make a living at writing, she wanted to keep it as an art. The discipline of school would be good for her, and she would get to meet a whole new group of people.