Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

  Dearest Pet,

  We had a little mini-blizzard here today. Snowflakes as big as 10p pieces and so plentiful you could barely see across the street. I was in the gym when it started, and rushed myself a bit so I could make it outside before it stopped. Unfortunately I didn’t make it, but still, it was a new aberdeen, and I had fun walking around, thinking Gee, aberdeen actually looks pretty. Then I started thinking, Fuck, it’s cold out, so I went to Café Drummond and sat in the back, drinking tea, reading a book I’d bought earlier. It’s a big expensive book, my christmas present to myself, on the history of cinema, full of all sorts of snooty intellectual theories which I always find so entertaining. Maybe I’m just a common snob, or a pseudo-intellectual, but I really do get a kick out of that long-hair stuff. I left about 3:30, which is when the sun begins to set. The sky was clear, a sort of pale baby blue, and scattered in it were big cotton clouds; it wasn’t just my clothes which were layered: it’s amazing how many things we can think of at once: how pretty it was, how normally ugly it is, the theory of authorship versus genre, what a good workout I’d had, how much I hated my ass, how I wish I could write better, you, B——, David Madole, the other David I’m obsessed with, and, inexplicably, Beth Filson. Only now, as I’m typing this, have I realized the only thing I wasn’t thinking of was how lonely I was. I guess I was my old self for awhile there, my better self. Lately I’ve been completely obsessed by my loneliness: it colors (note I didn’t say colours) everything I see these past few weeks. It’s okay to be lonely, I know that, but I don’t like the way it’s become the thing by which I measure everything else. I can’t seem to try to not be lonely: it only seems to happen accidentally, like this afternoon.

  On the cold mornings that we were both home, Lucy would get up in the dark early hours and come into my room. “Scoot over,” she said, and I would press up against the wall beside my single bed and she would crawl in beside me and wrap her arms around my waist. We would lie in the warm flannel sheets and I would listen to the steady sound of her breathing behind me. “Someday we’ll look back on all of this and we won’t even believe we were here,” she whispered. “We’ll say, ‘Do you remember when we used to live in Iowa?’ ”

  I smiled, warm, already falling back to sleep. I told her, “We’ll say, ‘That happened during the Iowa years.’ ”

  Chapter Four

  I DID LUCY AND MYSELF A GREAT DISSERVICE OUR second year at Iowa and left the house on Governor Street to move in with my boyfriend, who lived in a small cottage behind a larger house a mile away. This act of packing up and leaving home set in motion a much larger mistake that would take years to correct. At the time I thought this was my big chance for love, that I was doing something very romantic and important, but looking back on it now, it all seems part of a very simple equation: I left the house where I lived with someone who loved me to go to the house of someone who did not love me at all. Wasn’t it more important to live with a man, a man who was certain to wake up one day and be happy because I was there with all my good intentions sleeping beside him? Wasn’t that more valuable than staying with a friend who made me laugh, who made me think about everything, but was, in the end, just a girl? I shouldn’t have had to choose between them. Lucy was devastated that I was going and she let me know it in no uncertain terms. I left her all my furniture and continued to pay my half of the rent for months until she could find a place of her own, but it didn’t make any difference.

  Of course, Lucy and I still saw each other all the time. Dennis had a television set and a VCR and the second he left the house I would call Lucy and she would come over so that we could do Jane Fonda videos together. It was the eighties, after all, and we were crazy about Jane Fonda.

  Pettest of my pets, There is a crisis in leadership. Rumours had been circulating, but I’d staunchly refused to believe them, but now I have had them confirmed by a reliable source (T.V. a.m.). Jane Fonda has had ribs removed, a la Cher. Is this true? I can’t bring myself to believe it. What ramifications does this have for us? I am so terribly disappointed in her, though I also understand the mania twixt this ribectomy comes. After all, I’m about to have a sizable chunk of my pelvis carved off. Not the same thing, yet the same thing: spock would understand this logic even if no one else would. She had it all: the bod, the bucks, the film contracts: why did she resort to this madness? Is she afraid of something? What could it be? Are we afraid of the same thing, the same sort of thing, whatever it is? Promise me you will never let me have a rib removed, and I swear the same unto you. I forgive her til the end, yet something is different. Jane is as fallible as us: she always was, I know, but…. a pair of ribs! They don’t grow on trees, you know.

  Lucy didn’t just come over when Dennis was gone, she came over when we were both gone. She had a key to our house and if we were away for the night she usually managed to bring someone over to have sex in our bed. She always managed to tell me about it.

  “Stop it,” I said.

  “We just came over to water the plants,” she said innocently. “I didn’t know it was going to happen.”

  EARLY THAT SPRING, Lucy and I went to have our fortunes told by a young, heavyset woman named Jan who lived in a duplex out in Cedar Rapids with her three small children. She had a reputation for getting things right. We decided I would go first and she dealt out my tarot cards on the orange shag carpet of her small living room while Lucy and I sat cross-legged on the floor, waiting for the future. Jan carefully studied the bright pictures of cups and swords and moons, and when she had it all figured out, she smiled at me. “The man you’re with now is the greatest love of your life,” she said. “You will stay with him forever.”

  I was more than a little surprised but I took it as a good sign: things in my relationship would have to improve. Then Lucy scooted forward and Jan reshuffled the deck. Lucy cut the oversized stack and Jan dealt them out again while we looked at the framed pictures of her children set out on end tables. She was quiet for a long time, calculating the cards, their directions, and then she told Lucy their meaning. “You’ll never find love,” she said slowly, deliberately, as if she were a surgeon coming out to tell the family the bad news. “You’ll never have children and you’ll always be alone.”

  I couldn’t understand it. Tarot readers don’t tell you you’re going to die in a car accident next Thursday. Wasn’t a loveless life worse than that? Lucy walked out of the house without asking the question she was entitled to. I settled our bill. I should have said something to Jan, but what was there to say? Please take back the last five minutes?

  I found Lucy sitting in the driveway next to a small inflatable swimming pool, crying. “Bullshit,” I whispered in her ear and pulled her up to her feet.

  I WAS TEACHING an undergraduate fiction workshop and babysitting five days a week for two of the poetry professors and coming up with just enough to scrape by. I know that I must have written a couple of stories that year, but all I remember is that when I wasn’t worrying about money, I seemed to be over at Lucy’s apartment, the two of us complaining about love. “Love and money,” my mother said to me over the phone one night, “that’s pretty much all anyone writes about anyway.” No matter what the tarot reader said, I knew I had made a mistake almost as soon as I moved in with Dennis, and now I had to find a way to fix that mistake without the embarrassment of breaking up with him and moving again. In short, I had to make it work. Lucy’s new apartment on Bowery Street had wood floors and high windows and a wraparound porch. It was more than what she could afford but she decided to go with it anyway. She got herself a couple of cats and an early-morning job at a bakery to supplement her teaching income. Living on her own, she had even more friends, more adventures, while my world narrowed considerably. After a year in Iowa City, Lucy had the same kind of fame she’d had at Sarah Lawrence. Everywhere she went, people knew her. It was always amazing to walk down a street with her, everyone waving as if she were gliding past on a rose-covered float. People stopped and wanted
to talk to her. When she got on the bus, it was, “How are you doing today, Lucy?”

  “How do you know everyone?” I said after the fifth person had called her name. “I must be the most socially inadequate person in the world.”

  “I don’t know any of these people,” she said. “They know me. No one forgets my face.”

  And then, of course, I realized that Lucy had never disliked me in college. She simply had no idea who I was. People made an effort to find out the details of her life. They knew her story and mistook that for actually knowing her, exactly as I had done. So many people thought Lucy was rude because she made no effort to return all the familiarity that poured down on her. It had gotten to be too much at some point years before I met her, and now she simply let it go. We walked past a bank with a drive-up window. A teller sat alone in a little glass box and watched the world go past her. “Hello, Lucy!” she called into her microphone.

  Lucy looked at her, sighed, and then looked back at me. “That’s not even my bank,” she said.

  ONE DAY, in an attempt to take my mind off my romantic problems, Lucy took me horseback riding with a friend of hers named Sally. Sally might have been having trouble with her love life, too, and Lucy was always up in the air about hers. It was a good excuse to get away for the afternoon. I had grown up on a farm outside of Nashville where we had a couple of horses. Most of the riding I had done in my life had not involved saddles. We drove out to a stable and after talking to the manager there, Lucy picked out our horses. I knew from the stories about the years she spent working in a barn during adolescence that she was completely in her element, but I had never seen her ride before. The backup plan in life, if things didn’t work out with writing, was to break and train ponies. “You can get a fortune for a well-trained pony,” she said. When they brought Lucy a horse to ride, she pulled down the reins so that the horse’s nose was touching her nose, then she slid her fingers up under his upper lip and scratched his gums furiously. It was like finding that magic spot on a dog’s stomach that sends them into fits of leg-thumping ecstasy. The horse now belonged to Lucy, and she swung up top to ride.

  In my first winter in Iowa I discovered that if you wrapped your scarf too high around your face, the condensation of your breath would crystallize on your eyelashes and freeze them together in the time it took to blink. By July it was clear that the summers were so desperately hot, there was nothing to do but stay as still as possible and pant. But I had also found that there was a very brief time in between the freezing and scorching when the whole place was beautiful, thick and green and spotted with wildflowers. The day we rode our horses was one of those days. Lucy was out front, taking us fast through the trees while we whooped and laughed and pretended our lives were free and full of possibility. She was a beautiful rider, no bigger than a lark perched high up on a horse’s back. Whatever she did, we followed her. She was like Willie Shoemaker, but lovely, all blond hair and sunlight. If you really stopped and thought about it, it would have been impossible to understand how someone so tiny managed to dominate something so huge, to dominate not only the horse she was riding but the two that were following behind her as well. But when you saw it in action, there was no question that such things happened. In those woods in Iowa, Lucy ruled the horses. Lucy ruled the world.

  “You’re a maniac!” I screamed when we finally raced back to the barn. I fell into her, sweating, thrilled.

  “You’re the king of all horses!” Sally said.

  We had been gone for two hours. Lucy bought a Coke from a machine and poured it over her hand, letting each of our horses lick off her fingers.

  It was such a good trip that I went back the next week and brought Dennis. I asked for the same two horses Lucy and I had, but when we were saddled up, we couldn’t make them leave the corral. We stood in our stirrups, duded out in jeans and boots, and tried to talk them into taking a single step forward. They wouldn’t budge. Finally someone who worked at the stables got on a horse and led us a quarter mile down the trail, but once he turned back, our horses only dipped down their heads and began to mow the grass beneath them. No amount of pulling or digging of heels could persuade them that there were human beings on their backs. If I ever thought I knew a couple of things about horses, I could now see that I was completely deluding myself. These same animals who had been such a joy the week before when Lucy was at the head of the pack were now complete strangers to me. I may as well have been sitting on top of a refrigerator. When they had eaten their fill, they ambled back to the barn, where a young man took the reins and asked us if we’d had a nice time. Dennis was furious and insisted that they refund our money. But we had been gone for an hour, and it wasn’t their responsibility if we didn’t know how to ride.

  LUCY LOOKED FANTASTIC in those days. She spent an inordinate amount of time at the gym and was trying to eat a better diet. Eating was so difficult for her that the victory was never good food, but any food at all. Often all she managed to choke down were a couple of chocolate creams and half a doughnut. Now she’d discovered the weight lifters’ secret of protein shakes and powdered vitamins that could all be thrown into a blender. She clipped down the streets in short skirts and perilous heels and took every catcall from a carload of frat boys as a badge of honor. The problem was her face. The last surgery she’d had in college seemed to be going the way of all the others. It was melting back into nothing. Due to the extensive radiation treatments Lucy received as a child, the reconstructive surgeries never seemed to last. If that problem wasn’t devastating enough, she was facing an impossible insurance morass. She couldn’t have another surgery done in New York, where she was no longer a resident. The alternative was then to do it at the University of Iowa Medical Center, where the doctor proposed a traditional pedestal surgery. Lucy would spend six weeks with her wrist sewn to her stomach to establish blood supply for a tissue graft. Then she would spend six weeks with her wrist sewn to her face while the graft grew onto the side of her jaw.

  I was constantly forgetting that Lucy had a set of problems that were different from everyone else’s, or that her suffering extended beyond the usual limitations of love and money. She didn’t like her boyfriend, she was lonely, she was broke, she had a crush on a guy who only wanted to be her friend. Maybe her complaints were slightly louder, slightly more enduring, but they were basically the complaints of every woman I knew. And then she was there in my living room, pale and breathless, saying it again and again because neither of us could completely understand. “They want to sew my hand onto my face,” she said.

  “To hell with that,” I said, and got up to get us both a drink.

  I got home from the hospital today to find my Saint Lucy medal waiting for me: I have always wanted one of those. Thanks pet: it’s just so amazing to me how good you can make me feel, more than anyone else (sounds like a pop song, I know.)

  My eye is still swollen, not so bad as Friday, but it’s still a real problem aesthetic wise. Monday Mr. Fenton came round and said there wasn’t really anything he could do, that I was stuck with this problem, that maybe it would get better, maybe it wouldn’t, and in the mean time I had to decide did I want any more surgeries as that would surely make it worse. He was so flippant about it; short and curt, as if he were telling me anything other than this has been a total flop. It really upset me, what he had to tell me and the way he told me. I spent the night crying uncontrollably, all the nurses trying to console me. Finally, the head nursing sister came and talked to me and she said she’d let him know how upset I was. The next day he was supposed to come talk to me, but in the end he didn’t have time, so now I’m supposed to go back on Monday. I just don’t know, Ann, I just don’t know. Sometimes I feel real calm and wise and accepting and other times I’m totally on edge. When I wear the guise of alienated poet I do okay; everything seems if not actually good, then at least placable. When I try and wear the guise of a woman, it’s a disaster.

  Lucy used to say she was like a piece of modern art:
“I’m finished when I say I’m finished.” But at this point she wasn’t anywhere close to being done. She could turn down the pedestal, but she couldn’t turn down surgery in general for much longer. Her face was sinking, which meant, among other things, it was getting harder for her to swallow her food. She would just have to wait until she got out of Iowa before she could go back for another round.

  WE TYPED UP our theses with the proper margins and they were bound and sent to the library to sit on the shelves with the theses of all the other writers who had graduated with a master of fine arts degree. The Writers’ Workshop had been nothing but a wonderful stall, a place to go for two years when we had no idea what to do after college, and now that it was over, we were utterly adrift. I published a few stories at Seventeen and kept on babysitting. Lucy had her job at the bakery. I felt considerably less certain of my place in the world than I had upon leaving high school.

  In the winter of 1987, I left Lucy for the second time. Dennis believed all our problems were in Iowa, and that once we left, we would be fine. Lucy stayed on in her Bowery Street apartment. I came to say good-bye.