Ann Patchett
truth & beauty

A Friendship

Copyright

4th Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate 2004

Copyright © Ann Patchett 2004

Cover image © Reilika Landen/Arcangel

Ann Patchett asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Dedication

LUCINDA MARGARET GREALY

JUNE 3, 1963–DECEMBER 18, 2002

Pettest of my pets

Epigraph

NOTHING LASTS, AND YET NOTHING PASSES, EITHER.

AND NOTHING PASSES JUST BECAUSE NOTHING LASTS.

—Philip Roth, The Human Stain

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Note to Readers

Dedication

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

About the Author

Praise

Also by Ann Patchett

About the Publisher

Chapter One

THE THING YOU CAN COUNT ON IN LIFE IS THAT Tennessee will always be scorching hot in August. In 1985 you could also pretty much count on the fact that the U-Haul truck you rented to drive from Tennessee to Iowa, cutting up through Missouri, would have no air-conditioning or that the air-conditioning would be broken. These are the things I knew for sure when I left home to start graduate school. The windows were down in the truck and my stepsister, Tina, was driving. We sat on towels to keep our bare legs from adhering to the black vinyl seats and licked melted M&Ms off our fingers. My feet were on the dashboard and we were singing because the radio had gone the way of the air conditioner. “Going to the chap-el and we’re—gonna get mar-ar-aried.” We knew all the words to that one. Tina had the better voice, one more reason I was grateful she had agreed to come along for the ride. I was twenty-one and on my way to be a fiction writer. The whole prospect seemed as simple as that: rent a truck, take a few leftover pots and pans and a single bed mattress from the basement of my mother’s house, pack up my typewriter. The hills of the Tennessee Valley flattened out before we got to Memphis and as we headed north the landscape covered over with corn. The blue sky blanched white in the heat. I leaned out the window and thought, Good, no distractions.

I had been to Iowa City once before in June to find a place to live. I was looking for two apartments then, one for myself and one for Lucy Grealy, who I had gone to college with. I got a note from Lucy not long after receiving my acceptance letter from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She said that initially when she heard I had gotten into the workshop she was sorry, because she had wanted to be the only student there from Sarah Lawrence. But then our mutual friend Jono Wilks had told her that I was going up early to find housing and if this was the case, would I find a place for her as well? She couldn’t afford to make the trip to look herself and so it went without saying that she was on a very tight budget. I sat at the kitchen table and looked at her handwriting, which seemed oddly scrawny and uncertain, like a note on a birthday card from an elderly aunt. I had never seen her writing before, and certainly these were the only words she had ever addressed to me. While Lucy and I would later revise our personal history to say we had been friends since we met as freshmen, just for the pleasure of adding a few more years to the tally, the truth was we did not know each other at all in college. Or the truth was that I knew her and she did not know me. Even at Sarah Lawrence, a school full of models and actresses and millionaire daughters of industry, everyone knew Lucy and everyone knew her story: she had had a Ewing’s sarcoma at the age of nine, had lived through five years of the most brutal radiation and chemotherapy, and then undergone a series of reconstructive surgeries that were largely unsuccessful. The drama of her life, combined with her reputation for being the smartest student in all of her classes, made her the campus mascot, the favorite pet in her dirty jeans and oversized Irish sweaters. She kept her head tipped down so that her long dark blond hair fell over her face to hide the fact that part of her lower jaw was missing. From a distance you would have thought she had lost something, money or keys, and that she was vigilantly searching the ground trying to find it.

It was Lucy’s work-study job to run the film series on Friday and Saturday nights, and before she would turn the projector on, it was up to her to walk in front of the screen and explain that in accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal, exits were located at either side of the theater. Only she couldn’t say it, because the crowd of students cheered her so wildly, screaming and applauding and chanting her name, “LOO-cee, LOO-cee, LOO-cee!” She would wrap her arms around her head and twist from side to side, mortified, loving it. Her little body, the body of an underfed eleven-year-old, was visibly shaking inside her giant sweaters. Finally her embarrassment reached such proportions that the audience recognized it and settled down. She had to speak her lines. “In accordance with the New York State Fire Marshal,” she would begin. She was shouting, but her voice was smaller than the tiny frame it came from. It was no more than a whisper once it passed the third row.

I watched this show almost every weekend. It was as great a part of the evening’s entertainment as seeing Jules et Jim. Being shy myself, I did not come to shout her name until our junior year. By then she would wave to the audience as they screamed for her. She would bow from the waist. She had cut off her hair so that it was now something floppy and boyish, a large cowlick sweeping up from her pale forehead. We could see her face clearly. It was always changing, swollen after a surgery or sinking in on itself after a surgery had failed. One year she walked with a cane and someone told me it was because they had taken a chunk of her hip to grind up and graft into her jaw.

We knew things about Lucy the way one knows things about the private lives of movie stars, by a kind of osmosis of information. I do not remember asking or being told. It was simply passed through the air. Not only did we know about Lucy’s childhood, her cancer, her bravery, everyone in school knew that Lucy was the poet. Better than a very good college poet, she was considered by both teachers and hipsters to be a serious talent. She was always picked to give readings in the coffee shop on Parents’ Weekend. People pressed into the little room to listen, her voice as small as it was when she directed us to the emergency exits on Friday nights, but more self-confident.

“When I dream of fire,” she read, “you’re still the one I’d save / though I’ve come to think of myself / as the flames, the splintering rafters.”

As I sat in the audience, watching, I believed we had something in common even though I wrote short stories. People liked my work but had trouble remembering me. I was often confused with another writer named Anne who was in one of my classes, and with a girl named Corinna who lived downstairs from me. Unlike Lucy, I had a tendency to blur into other people. I had come to Sarah Lawrence from twelve years of Catholic school where we were not in the business of discovering our individuality. We dressed in identical plaid skirts, white blouses, saddle oxfords, and when we prayed, it was together and aloud. It was impossible to distinguish your voice from the crowd. There is an art to giving yourself over to someone else and as a group we mastered it. While Lucy had discovered that she was different from all the other children in her grade school because she was sick and was different from all the other children on the hospital’s cancer ward because she continued to survive, I had discovered I was so much like every other little girl in the world that it always took me a minute to identify my own face in our class photo. Still, I thought, in my shyness, my blurriness, it would not be so unreasonable to think that the famous Lucy Grealy and I could be friends. But when I waved to her in passing or said hello in the cafeteria, she would look at me blankly for a minute and then turn away as if we had never met. Once I stopped her at the window where we returned our trays and dirty dishes.

“My father and stepmother live in Los Angeles,” I said. “They invited a couple of the midshipmen from the Naval Academy over for Thanksgiving dinner and it turns out one of them went to high school with you. His name was Bobby something.”

She stared at me as if she could not possibly imagine why I was speaking to her. I made another stab at my story. “I guess Sarah Lawrence came up and they figured out we both went there, so he asked my parents to ask me to tell you hello.” I gave her a little smile but it went nowhere. “So, hello.”

“Okay,” she said, and walked away.

Lucy Grealy was much too cool for the likes of me, a girl from Tennessee who did not go to clubs in the city.

I graduated from college early and went back home to Nashville. When I got Lucy’s letter, I never considered telling her no, she could find her own place to live. Lucy had the pull of celebrity, and while she had always ignored me, I was flattered to be asked for help. Besides, she would be the only person I knew in Iowa. I borrowed my mother’s car and drove up in June to look at the cut-up houses and makeshift rooms used to store graduate students through hard winters. I quickly found that there was not a single apartment Lucy could afford, nor was there a single apartment I could afford. There were very few that we could have managed if we pooled our resources, and so I rented the only practical thing I could find, half of a very ugly green duplex on Governor Street for $375 a month, where we could at least have our own bedrooms. When I got home, I wrote Lucy and told her we would be roommates. It was not one of the options she had given me, but the numbers spoke for themselves. Neither of us could manage more than $200 a month.

I never thought that there was anything brave about moving to another state to live with someone I barely knew and yet suspected didn’t like me, any more than it would have seemed hard to be broke and in pursuit of such an unlikely profession. Because my life had no shape, I was willing to accept whatever happened. If Tina had turned to me in that scorching U-Haul and said, Let’s keep the truck, let’s drive though Canada and take the Alcan Highway to Alaska, I probably would have been thrilled. Tina was good company and I very much wanted her to stay with me, but she was planning on her own adventure, riding her bicycle across America as soon as she dropped me off. Besides, by the time we made it to Iowa City, we were tired of the truck. We were sticky from sweat and all the candy we had eaten on the way. As we turned onto Governor Street, Lucy pulled up in the passenger seat of a gorgeous antique convertible driven by a handsome man. She waved ecstatically. “I’ll be right there!” she called, and then they zoomed away.

I thought that things must be going well for Lucy.

The front door of the house was open wide. The living room was completely empty and the linoleum floor was shining wet and smelled of Pine Sol. I walked into the room, leaving a trail of footprints behind me.

“Did it look like this when you rented it?” Tina asked.

It looked like a storage unit. “I think it got worse.”

We weren’t there five minutes before Lucy was back. When I turned around to say hello, she shot through the door with a howl. In a second she was in my arms, leaping up onto me, her arms locked around my neck, her legs wrapped around my waist, ninety-five pounds that felt no more than thirty. She was crying into my hair. She squeezed her legs tighter. It was not a greeting as much as it was a claim: she was staking out this spot on my chest as her own and I was to hold her for as long as she wanted to stay.

“What happened?” I said, and I put my arms around her back. There was never such a little back, and I felt it heave and sob. A bird in the hand. I thought something horrible must have happened. Only something truly outside of my understanding of bad things could drive this girl into my arms.

She pulled back to look at me. She kissed me and smiled and cried again. “I’m so glad you’re here,” she said.

I do not remember our love unfolding, that we got to know one another and in time became friends. I only remember that she came through the door and it was there, huge and permanent and first. I felt I had been chosen by Lucy and I was thrilled. I was twenty-one years old and very strong. She had a habit of pitching herself into my arms like a softball without any notice. She liked to be carried.

Dearest anvil [she would write to me six years later], dearest deposed president of some now defunct but lovingly remembered country, dearest to me, I can find no suitable words of affection for you, words that will contain the whole of your wonderfulness to me. You will have to make due with being my favorite bagel, my favorite blue awning above some great little café where the coffee is strong but milky and had real texture to it.

Lucy had mopped the floor three days before in honor of my impending arrival but the air in the duplex was so hot and humid and utterly motionless that the water and Pine Sol had simply puddled and stayed. For three days she had been waiting for me in the dampness.

“I thought you were never going to get here,” she said. She was still holding on to my arm, even though her feet were now on the floor.

“How long have you been here?”

“Weeks, years. This place is horrible.” She didn’t say it unkindly, just as a statement of fact.

“Horrible,” Tina said, nodding in sympathy.

“It was all I could find,” I said, but I still felt guilty. “I’m going to get some things out of the truck.”

“No,” Lucy said. “We have to talk. There’s too much I have to tell you.” It was as if I were her oldest friend in life, just stumbling in through the door after ten years lost in Borneo.

The three of us went and sat on her bed on the floor. This was the story she told: On her first night in town she had gone to the local auction, where farmers who were going bust came to sell whatever they had left. She bought a futon mattress, a rug, a rickety table with chairs for the kitchen, and a grocery sack full of Harlequin Romance novels from the fifties, whose covers she planned to tear off and use to paper the bathroom. Then she promptly ran out of money.

“You’re going to paper the bathroom in romance novels?”

“No, no, listen to me,” she said, her voice high with excitement. “I met somebody. The guy in the car. I had sex.”

B——was twice her age and drove her home from the auction in his antique Jaguar convertible, whose turn indicators were two small flags that shot up from either side of the car and waved to establish the driver’s intentions. Such charming turn indicators, coupled with a little attention, was all the reason Lucy needed. After a brief courtship in which he lent her several interesting books, they had sex. She was twenty-two and thrilled to be relieved of the burden of her virginity. In fact, she told me and Tina, it hadn’t just been losing her virginity, it was solid experience. She had managed to sleep with him regularly since then.

“We’ll go to the auction,” she said. “I’ll introduce you.”

We went in the U-Haul, which didn’t need to be turned in until the next day, and parked in the rutted grass. In a long barn there were cafeteria-style tables set out with boxes. One contained seven dolls with plastic heads and matted hair, four chipped cups, a coil of rope, pulleys, and two spades. The next had a toaster and a thick stack of record albums, half a dozen extension cords, several packs of playing cards, countless forks. Every box was an inexplicable collection of items that had to be purchased as a unit. There was no picking out what you wanted. Past the boxes were chairs and blankets and paintings of birds, an impressive assortment of Crock-Pots. Farmers and wives and children made slow loops around the tables, carefully studying what was available. They only raised their eyes from the merchandise to gawk at Lucy.

GAWKING IS A LOOK stronger than a stare. The gawk was full of brazen curiosity, pity, and fear, every unattractive human emotion rolled into one unflattering facial expression. If she saw them, and she must have since this was not a discreet spy job, she didn’t let on. She had on shorts and a little red bowling shirt, dingy Keds. Up and down the aisles she held my hand. She was happy to be in Iowa, happy that Tina and I had arrived, happy she had a lover, even if we saw no sign of him that night. But I couldn’t stop seeing those people. People who, had you set them down anywhere on the island of Manhattan, would have received some vicious gawking themselves. I would stop and stare at them until they noticed me. I would hold their eye for the seconds it took to make their faces warm and then watch as they scuttled outside to look at the heavy machinery. It was a trick I learned a long time ago, when I was nine years old, the year my sister and I were in the car accident. I remembered what it was like having people double back in the grocery store to get another look. Until the gawkers swung by for the third time, and then the fourth, I hadn’t really understood how badly I’d been hurt. My sister, Heather, had been seriously injured and stayed in the hospital for another month after I was wheeled out to the pickup area. My problems, I had been told by family and doctors, were mainly cosmetic. My nose was broken, my lower lip had been torn through and reattached, my long hair had been cut off because it was too matted with blood, my face and neck were solid purple and green. I had a fractured wrist and a fractured skull. Shards of glass worked their way out of my head and through my hair for months. I was forever pricking my finger when I reached up to scratch my scalp. But sharp sudden headaches could not compete with the people who were looking at me. When I went back to a plastic surgeon at nineteen to have my nose rebroken and set again and the lower half of my face dermabraded off to lessen the scars (a second accident had sliced open my right cheek), I had not accounted for the fact that the world’s tedious curiosity would be mine all over again, that it wasn’t only battered-looking children that gawkers settled on.

Oh, people like to say when they hear this part of the story, this is why you and Lucy are so close. You went through the same thing. But nothing could be farther from the truth. I read one slim volume of the available information. Lucy read the library. My experience only left me smart enough to comprehend my own stunning lack of comprehension. When, as a child, I returned to school after a two-week absence, one of the older nuns took me aside to tell me that they were still offering the mass for my sister every day. Her superior grades had merged with her superior injuries and while she was plugged into a respirator she seemed to be a candidate for beatification. “God knew she was stronger than you,” the nun told me. “That’s why she was in the front seat. Because she had more grace, she was allowed to endure more pain.” In short, it was God’s love that had crushed my sister’s larynx and His disappointment in my weakness that had let me off with comparatively so little damage. Even in the third grade I found this reasoning suspicious. I wasn’t in the front seat because my sister was three and a half years older and had never let me sit in the front seat, not once, when she was in the car. There was no lesson there about God’s love.

THE FIRST WEEK we were in Iowa, another student in the fiction program finally got up her nerve to ask me the question she had been wondering all along: How I could stand to look at Lucy every day? “Lucy’s great,” she said, “but I’d find it too upsetting. I’d always be thinking about her face.”

I told her I had no idea what she was talking about and then I left abruptly, hoping she would feel horrible for having said it. But then I wasn’t a good person to ask. I had stopped noticing Lucy’s face years before, seeing her in the cafeteria or walking up the hill to class, always in the center of the most popular students. Or I saw her onstage, saying her lines, being cheered for her poetry or her introduction to The Wizard of Oz. And even though I didn’t know her then, I had seen her face change significantly over the years. I thought it had improved. Her lower jaw had been a ledge falling off just below her cheekbone when we started college, making her face a sharp triangle, but now the lines were softer. She couldn’t close her mouth all the way and her front teeth showed. Her jaw was irregular, as if one side had been collapsed by a brutal punch, and her neck was scarred and slightly twisted. She had a patch of paler skin running from ear to ear that had been grafted from her back and there were other bits of irregular patching and scars. But she also had lovely light eyes with damp dark lashes and a nose whose straightness implied aristocracy. Lucy had white Irish skin and dark blond hair and in the end that’s what you saw, the things that didn’t change: her eyes, the sweetness of her little ears. In Iowa she wore a four-by-four gauze pad, folded once and taped to the left side of her face, and while it was strange at first, it actually gave her a nice balance. It made it look like whatever was wrong was temporary, in the process of being fixed, when it was in fact part of a synthetic prosthesis that had worn a hole in her skin and was poking through. I asked Lucy countless times to let me see, but she wouldn’t. The pad stayed fixed in place.

Lucy always said it was better when people just came out and asked her what had happened. A straight question was preferable to the awkward avoidance. “If they have the nerve to ask me, I’ll tell them the truth,” she said. Unless of course they asked her on a bus, in which case she would lean in close and whisper, “Bus accident.” Or “Plane crash” or “Car wreck,” depending on the mode of transportation at the moment.

B——never seemed to mind Lucy’s face. He was giving her a chance she thought she was never going to get, and so she was committed to following his lead. The first lesson was obedience. She came home early most mornings looking rumpled and calm. She would pour a cup of coffee and sit down across from me at the table.

“Bondage,” she would begin patiently, “is not about a desire to be dominated.”

And so began our sexual education, with Lucy attending the demonstrations at night and me reading off her notes in the morning. I would make her a bowl of Cream of Wheat while she talked about pornography, fetish, and whatever had happened the night before.

For two people who didn’t know one another, Lucy and I had a lot in common, not only friends and classes from college and a vaguely stunned feeling about having found ourselves in the Midwest, we also between us had about four hours experience with men. We had both made it through high school without a single date. We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed). We were younger than any other twenty-two-year-old girls in the world, still believing absolutely that there was nothing more important, more romantic, than Yeats. Lucy, of course, had lived a larger life than I had, and she had infinitely more flair. Not only had she suffered, she had danced in New York’s finest transvestite clubs, sometimes on the tables, where she was again regarded as a sort of lovable mascot. She had had adventures that, if not sexual, were at least sexy. And now she was having sex.

B——was a cautionary tale about being careful of what you wish for: he was handsome and bright and attentive. He picked up Lucy in his fancy car and drove her into town for ice cream and coffee and all of the other students saw them and talked about it, just the way she hoped they would. According to the reports I heard every day, he liked sex, providing her with as many experiences as there were ice creams to choose from. But B——was never going to love Lucy, and he seemed to take a real pleasure in telling her so. As much as Lucy had spent her college years dreaming that someday someone would want to have sex with her, she was slowly figuring out that wanting sex was knotted together with wanting love. The more B——insisted the two be separated, the more confused and desperate Lucy became. The only avenue she had with B——was sex, and she tried frantically to use it to make him love her. It was a bad habit she established, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life, long, long after B——was gone.

Dearest Axiom of Faith [she would write to me later from Scotland, telling me a story about coming home and not being able to reach either of the two friends she had locally], It was a sorry sight, me standing there by the phone, racking my brain for someone to call. I was seized with a profound loneliness and sense of desperation. My first impulse was to go to bed and feel very sorry for myself, but I forced, and I mean forced, myself to go out to a blues band playing at a bar down the street. I decided that if I was going to feel sorry for myself, I should at least do it in public with a drink in my hand and blues in the background. I ended up being chatted up by this man, D——and we got drunk and ended up trying to have sex on the beach in a rainstorm (unsuccessful). He came back here with me and it was strange. He’s in his mid-30’s and was dumped by some woman he was desperately in love with only a few months ago. He’s from aberdeen but lives in london. He was up here for the holidays, but was supposed to go back already, but kept putting it off because he was too depressed to face his job, which is for a shoe company. The sex part was great—a real missionary sort of guy, but a great body. Oddly, he was like B——in many ways: same sort of body, same body smell, a few of the same physical quirks: I felt like I was actually with B——in a few ways. This was really great for me, for the fact that it’d been so long since I’d had sex, I’d begun to idealize the sex I’d had with B——, and this experience showed me he’s a very replaceable person. I’m not sure the logic of that is too clear, but you can probably see what I’m getting at. The negative part of it was that he told me it wasn’t physical attraction, but because of the conversation we’d had. He’s all into spiritualism in a very new age sort of way, and I have to ashamedly admit I very proudly gave him all the soul-talk I knew. I’m ashamed of this because I took something very very important to me and used it as a device to get sex, and, worst, I talked about it in a way I knew to be (somewhat) false. I’m all for the roots of new-age and all that, but it seems to me too often confused with psychology and emotional happiness and self-awareness by certain types of people who are very sensitive and needy, yet not able to find what they want and need via art or more traditional (and far more demanding and harder) philosophies and/or religions. Personally, I think true spiritualism contains aspects of the above mentioned things, but more often than not it shows you just how hard things are, not how easy (well, you know what I mean). Psychology wants you to adapt to society; spiritualism often tells you that you must not adapt (conform). Oh, anyway, this is all getting too jumbled. He was a very very sweet, very needy guy, who, after three nights, said he couldn’t sleep with me any more because he didn’t love me, and he was in a position in his life where he only wanted to make love, not just fuck. He went back on this when, after disappearing for four days he showed up again (still not having gone back to London) and we had another three nights of sex. I guess he’s finally gone back now, or at least I haven’t heard from him. We had some good conversations, and now he’s gone I’m feeling very lonely, the way I did before I met him. It’s like a big circle. I’ve gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it’s been a disaster and I’m feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I’m a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material. D——told me I should do “affirmations,” which is when you say positive things about yourself so as to posit them in the astral realm and counteract all the negative things you’ve ever said about yourself. In a weird way it makes sense (not the bit about the astral realm). Anyway, I’m trying very hard to be positive.

Chapter Two

OUR RESPONSIBILITIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA were to be teachers and writers. While we had taken our writing very seriously through college, neither of us had ever considered the prospect of teaching. I suppose we knew something about it simply by virtue of having been in the room all those years when other people were doing it, but at the time it seemed it would have been more provident to send us into the fields to husk corn as a means of reducing our tuition to in-state rates. We had utterly no idea what we were supposed to do on the other side of the desk. Lucy and I had both received the same level of financial aid our first year, which meant we taught one section of Introduction to Literature three days a week. There was a week-long class before school started to prepare us for our new job, but the only helpful piece of information we were given was the number of the room where we were to show up. Lucy and I went to our empty classrooms, first hers, then mine, sat on the desks, and swung our legs back and forth. The rooms were scorching hot.

“Is it over a hundred in here?” I asked.

Lucy looked at her shirt, which was already crumpled and damp. “We’re going to have to wear something that doesn’t show sweat.”

Two young girls leaned in the door. They looked like the sorority sisters who marched up and down the sidewalk in front of our house all day singing rush songs, “I’m a Kappa, we’re a Kappa, here a Kappa, there a Kappa, wouldn’t you like to be a Kappa, too?” High blond ponytails swinging to the Dr Pepper beat.

“Are you going to be in this class?” one of them asked.

We looked at them seriously for a minute and then we both started laughing, the impossible thought that we would have anything to teach these girls drove us into a terrifying state of hysteria.

We would have no supervision, no one to make sure that we weren’t robbing the good children of Iowa blind with our ineptitude. We were told to pick a Shakespeare play, a contemporary play, two novels, five stories, and a dozen or so poems and spread them out over the course of the semester, issuing regular tests and paper assignments. I picked works that I knew well, but Lucy saw teaching as a great chance to further her own education. With the exception of the Shakespeare and the poetry, her syllabus consisted of things she had always meant to read.

The idea was, of course, that she would get around to reading them before she had to teach them, but somehow it never seemed to happen. She scanned the assignment while running to class, pages pressed down beneath her fingers. She figured as long as she managed to stay a few paragraphs ahead of the pack, she’d be all right. She maintained a strict policy that no one was to ask about the end of the book before the end had been assigned. “Alice,” she would say sharply when Alice had ambitiously read too far beyond what was due, “it isn’t fair of you to ruin it for everyone else in the class.”

With or without reading the assignment, Lucy could power through a class on the sheer muscle of her oratory. She could talk. She could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours, and after all, what novel or poem or play in an Introduction to Literature class couldn’t benefit from a truth-and-beauty discussion? She would often lie on the desk, half curled up, with her arm pillowing her head. She recited the ending of King Lear aloud, “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for / Ever! I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth.”

Lucy loved Lear. She would have just as soon spent the entire semester on Lear.

“And then I would speak the two most beautiful words in the English language,” she would tell me on the walk home. “Class dismissed.”

I bought The Iliad and Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark [she wrote to me from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe were she held a fellowship years later]. The first is for a class I’m sitting in on, one taught by an absolutely genius professor: he dazzles me. Last week he did “Romeo and Juliet,” which used to be my least favorite play. He changed my mind. He talked about how it’s a play about the arbitrary accidental meetings in the street, arriving or waking up just one moment too late or too soon. From these moments of arbitrary “real” moments are forged by the characters through their own passions, which insist on taking moments in time and conditions of emotion that will eventually pass: anger, grief, and transforming them through actions into “forever,” irrevocable conditions, such as through a curse on a family or a person, or by suicide. I still don’t think it’s my favorite play, but I do have new feelings about it. Monday I’ll just have time for class before leaving for NY, he’s doing the first four books of Homer, so I have to start reading. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read any of that stuff, unless you count the one or two abridged pages shoved down my unwilling throat in high school.

My students, bearing up under the weight of my neatly typed syllabus and ironclad attendance policy, were certainly less enchanted than Lucy’s students, but they always got their papers in on time. We were a pairing out of an Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

FOR US, IOWA was an abundant sea of time, hours and days and weeks to torch and burn. No matter how careless we were with our mornings and afternoons, there was more time, and then more. We spent hours over breakfast. Friends called and we would languish on the phone. Lucy was off to the gym to lift weights while I went to the pool and swam for so long I should have bumped my head on Cuba. We taught our classes, graded the papers, sat through office hours to talk to the young blond Iowan undergraduates who thought we were wise. We lingered in the hallways of the English and Philosophy building, running into people we knew, leaning against the cinder block walls to talk to them, until eventually Lucy and I would find one another and head off for drinks after work. That’s how we liked to say it, because it sounded so grown-up: home from the office, off for cocktails. Happy hour featured three gin and tonics for the price of one, so that six glasses covered the dark glossy table of the booth. There was time to drink them all, though not before the ice had melted, and certainly someone we knew would see us there and slide in to order three more drinks for themselves.

“You have to wonder if Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway knew the pleasures of three-for-one happy hour,” Lucy said, pulling up the straw from her first glass.

“We are either following in a noble tradition or establishing one.”

“Here’s to not having a car.” Lucy raised one glass out of six and I picked up another to clink against it.

Maybe one of us would wander away from the bar for an hour or so, a quick errand, the sight of someone we needed to speak to walking down the street, but when we came back, there the other would be, waiting, trying to read in the dim light of a fake Tiffany lamp. It was most likely to be me, and when she came back, I would look up and smile. “The return of the goose,” I said. Later we would trip home for dinner, arms locked together against the cold, cutting through the park, stopping to swing on the swings. “What do you think?” I said, leaning back to look at the dark pink sky. “Snow?”

“I always wanted one of those ankles that predicted weather,” she said. “Or an elbow. A snow elbow.”

We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough. After dinner, dancing, and baths, we read, wrote our poems and stories, brushed our teeth, and tumbled into bed, only to find the next day was exactly the same. We had not moved one inch forward in the night. It was like prison, not in the punishment but in the vast sameness of the days. We were impossibly rich in time, and we lavished the excess on one another.

We shared our ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership. We gave over excess words, a single beautiful sentence that had to be cut but perhaps the other would like to have. As two reasonably intelligent and very serious young writers in a reasonably serious writing program, we didn’t so much discuss our work as volley ideas back and forth until neither of us was sure who belonged to what. Not that it mattered. Since we didn’t share a genre, we could both find plenty of space inside the same idea. Lucy was always scrawling notes for poems on paper towels in the kitchen. I found a napkin by the phone that said “The Path to the Spiders’ Nest” in her own spidery handwriting. “I love this.” I held the napkin up when she came home. “I want this one.”

“Too late,” she said. “That one’s taken.” It was a note to remember to pick up an Italo Calvino novel I had never heard of before. I told her the plot of a story I was working on, about a magician’s assistant whose magician is able to create the perfect illusion only in her dreams, but before I could finish it she wrote a poem called “The Magician’s Assistant’s Guilty Dream.” I stole it back years later, when I wrote a novel called The Magician’s Assistant.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” Lucy said to me one night when I came home from class. I stood in the doorway in my coat, scarf, hat, and gloves, shivering. “At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“You’re memorizing One Hundred Years of Solitude?”

“I just want to try and get the first couple of pages,” she said.

And so I unwrapped myself from the endless layers of winter protection and lay down on the rug, coaching her while she learned her lines.

I had read Marquez, but I had never tried to commit him to memory. I stayed with fiction and poetry while she went through philosophy and film criticism and the heavy art history books she lugged home from the library. She loved science. She took me to hear Stephen Jay Gould and we sat on the floor in front of him in a packed lecture hall while he made sensible links between fossils and baseball. That was Lucy’s particular genius as well: the ability to take the disparate subjects she read about and find the ways that each one informed the other. I loved to listen to her talk. I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but it didn’t really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot.

IF I IMAGINE the artists in Paris, I do not see them dusting. I believe they were probably too engaged in the creative process to wrestle with such lowly concepts as coat hangers. Unlike Lucy, I could never give myself so completely over to my art that I would not notice the half-eaten plate of spaghetti in the middle of the living room floor. After a few early discussions it was agreed that my standard of acceptable cleanliness was something she would never be able to comprehend and I was unable to live at the level of squalor in which she seemed quite comfortable. The fact that she had mopped the floor before I arrived at the house on Governor Street marked her first and last attempt at housekeeping in the time we lived together. The compromise was that I would do all the cleaning and cooking and that neither of us would complain about it, which suited both of us fine. I stayed out of her bedroom, unless all of the glasses and plates had migrated there, leaving us nothing to eat off. For meals I made what we referred to as “Lucy-Food,” a steady diet of things that did not have to be chewed: soft lasagna and half-done pancakes, biscuits and jelly, crushed graham crackers and instant coffee beaten into bowls of soft ice cream. Eating was a constant ordeal for Lucy, who had lost all of her lower teeth and all but six of her upper teeth during the relentless radiation treatments of her childhood. Her saliva glands had been damaged and she needed constant sips of water to get the food down. Her throat was scarred from years of surgical intubation, and that, coupled with her inability to put her lips together, meant she was forever choking on the smallest spoonful of pudding. On top of everything else, she had no feeling in her lower lip and chin and was mortified at the idea of having food all over her face and not knowing it, which was often the case. When Lucy went out to dinner with other people, she would usually sit and sip a beer, waiting until she came home to eat. I would overcook her spaghetti and then she would mince it, crosshatching her knife and fork across her plate again and again and again, the clacking of the metal banging out an assault of cutlery against food. When the spaghetti was pulverized into a totally unrecognizable version of itself, she would begin the long task of eating what she could, which, in light of all the effort, was never much. By the end she was red-faced and sweating, exhausted by dinner. Still, she liked the fact that she always sat at a table and ate with a napkin. She thought it was civilized. Even though she couldn’t have walked down the street eating a piece of pizza, she said she wouldn’t have wanted to.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Lucy put a tape in the little stereo box and we danced in the kitchen. No matter how dismal things seemed, ungraded papers, brutal weather, we could find the energy to spin around the table under the bright fluorescent lights of our apartment. Lucy was a brilliant dancer and I was tireless in my efforts to imitate her. “Just concentrate on the waist down,” she said. “Take it half a body at a time.” But when that proved to be too much for me, she narrowed it again. “Okay, just work the right foot.” I held my arms over my head and rolled my foot to one side and then the other, following her. In college, Lucy had been the queen of the dance marathons, dancing every song in groups, alone, with a circle of people around her, marveling. She moved like water, the embodiment of easy rhythmic confidence, while I hung against the wall. Sarah Lawrence specialized in a mix of talent and exhibitionism that made it impossible for novices to take their place on the floor. Kitchen dancing was the only hope for girls like me who needed to find their way in privacy. On Governor Street we would dance for hours. We laughed so hard and the music was so loud that some nights our neighbor Nancy had no choice but to come over and dance with us for a while. We danced until our hair was damp and our feet ached from the linoleum floor, at which point Lucy would go and get in the tub (Lucy, skinny, was always freezing and could most easily be found in a hot bath). I would sit on the edge, sweaty and exhausted, smoking cigarettes.

“Look at this,” Lucy said, grabbing the outside of her thigh. “Fat, fat, fat.”

“On what planet?”

“You’re not looking.”

“You want to talk fat?” I would throw one leg up on the tub. “Look at this!”

Most people thought that Lucy’s story was in her face, a history in the irregular line of her jaw, but it was her entire body. It had been systematically carved apart for its resources over the years: the skin and muscle taken from her back had left wide swaths of scar tissue; delicate, snaky scars wrapped around her legs because some surgeon had needed an extra vein; one hip had been mined for bone grafts and had left a spiky stalagmite peak that pushed threateningly against the ropy pink skin. In the future they would take her lower ribs and a bone from her leg and the soft tissue from her stomach and pour them all into her jaw, where they would gradually melt away into nothing. But while she was tortured by her relationship with her face and talked about it being ugly, she had a real fondness for her body. Every scar was a badge of honor, and she was always pleased to whip off her shirt to show someone the scars on her back and tell their unhappy story. She had a lack of physical modesty common to many people who had spent that much time naked in hospitals.

What she mulled over most nights in the tub, staring down at herself through the soapy water, was the state of being flat-chested. She took a wet washcloth and laid it over her ribs, pulling either side tight under her arms. “Nothing,” she said. “Zip.” I wanted to say it was otherwise, but I couldn’t argue with her. There was no room for disagreement.

“There’s nothing wrong with being flat-chested,” I tried.

She sighed and hoisted herself out of the tub. “Spoken like a person with breasts,” she said.

Lucy had had radiation to her torso as a child and it had frozen her there forever, a permanent record of her eleven-year-old self. Since she had cut off her hair in college, she often passed as a young boy, her shoulders rolled forward, hands shoved deep in her pockets, the collar of her ratty leather jacket turned up. But the pose always fell apart when the ticket taker at the movie theater said, “Yes, sir,” and “Thank you, sir.” Then she came home crying. Lucy didn’t want to be a boy; she wanted to be a girl who would be seen as especially sexy in her boyishness. She wanted to be Jean Seberg, la gamine. B——was suggesting that she should perhaps consider cultivating a different kind of sexiness, something more feminine and traditional than the James Dean look.

Lucy started doing a kind of superfast jogging in place in the living room that made her look like she had plans to try out for the Hawkeye football team.

“What’s this about?”

“It’s what the girl in Flashdance did and she had the best legs,” she said, panting but not stopping. “I figure ten minutes a day.”

Lucy didn’t work out in the living room for long. She joined the fancy gym in town. She went to the mall and bought a pair of black stockings and a garter belt. A few days later we went back for a pair of high heels and a short skirt. Then some shorter skirts. Despite her grousing about her upper thighs, Lucy had wonderful legs, and it wasn’t long after her initiation into femininity that she made the decision to get some wonderful breasts to go with them.

MY FAMILY, like every family, had its own particular set of insanities about money, but we had enough. In certain instances, we had too much. I don’t remember anyone ever crying over stacks of bills. My family paid for me to go to college and then I said that I would make it through graduate school on my teaching assistantship. It was a point of honor, and my stepfather, who was thrilled that I wanted to be a writer, was actually irritated with me for not letting him pay for this new degree. At the end of every month I was down to about forty-five cents, and while I didn’t call home to ask for money, I could have, and that knowledge made all the difference. Lucy, on the other hand, had grown up in a whirlwind of financial crisis. She believed she was poor and that she would stay poor and for the most part she didn’t worry about it. Her past was littered with hospital bills that would never be paid. She had taken out huge student loans as an undergraduate, figuring they would probably go the way of her hospital bills. She took out loans for Iowa, which gave her more of a cushion even though she also had a teaching assistantship. So when she decided that breasts would be the best accessory to go along with her new skirts and heels, she simply took out another government loan.

“You’re a poet,” I said. “How do you think you’re going to pay this off?”

“I’ll worry about it later.”

I followed her through the apartment and into her bedroom. “You’re going to be swallowed alive by debt.”

Lucy sighed at my stupidity. “You don’t pay off what you borrow. You cut some kind of a deal with them. You tell them what you’re going to give them and they take what they can get.”

Was it possible that people worked out the details of how they were going to shirk off their debt before they ever borrowed the money?

Lucy knew I didn’t get it. I didn’t get the envelopes she never opened, or her stories about going up and down the halls at the Plaza Hotel in college and taking food off of room-service trays, a hobby born out of a peculiar sense of down-and-out glamour rather than actual hunger. I did not get her occasional habit of sticking a book of poetry under her jacket when we went to readings at the local bookstore late at night. I was of the bourgeois world of regular payments. Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me that I would be held accountable not only for what I did, but for everything I considered doing. Twelve years of beating cancer had taught Lucy that she was invincible and that nothing, none of it, was ever going to catch up with her. She had a sense of superiority where money was concerned. She believed that not having any had made her worldly and wily, in the same way she believed that coming from the suburbs had branded me forever as naive.

“The difference isn’t who has what in their checking account,” she said. “The difference is the safety net. If you bottom out, you have people who’ll rescue you. If I bottom out, it’s a free fall.”

I shook my head. “That’s completely stupid. You have the exact same safety net that I do. You have me.”

When the loan came through, there was only enough for saline implants, not the fancier silicone ones she had hoped for, but Lucy accepted the compromise. The waiting room of the plastic surgeon’s office in Cedar Rapids was small and dark with pine paneling and we watched the fish swim back and forth in the tank because the magazines were bad. Based on my limited personal experience, I had thought it was a given that plastic surgeons had good magazines. After the examination, the doctor said he would have to order special implants for Lucy, something smaller than the smallest size they had. Lucy was pleased. Something smaller than the smallest meant she was special, a patient unlike any of the other patients who were probably just greedy anyway, people who already had breasts and now wanted bigger ones. “They should be tasteful,” she said.

That was the first surgery I went through with Lucy, the introductory course, and it was a breeze, a fairy story of getting what you dreamed. She came home feeling fine, her chest swaddled like a newborn. She shook her bottle of Tylenol III and smiled. For a couple of days she was careful not to lift her arms too high or pick up anything heavy. When she took off the dressing it was more like an unveiling, and everyone was welcome to come over and see. We all agreed they were dazzling, the perfect breasts of a slim fifteen-year-old, the very ones that jaw cancer had inadvertently cheated her out of years before. She was hopelessly in love with them. This was plastic surgery: a wish, a government loan, a dream come true. All of those other surgeries, the painful, wretched failures of her childhood, were not the absolute rule. Sometimes things work out exactly the way the doctor says. Now there was proof. “The best part of my student loans,” she would say for years, cupping one small breast in each hand. “The best thing I ever got out of graduate school.”

We were in the habit of borrowing cars in those days; usually it was Nancy’s, whose vacuum cleaner I also relied on heavily. But on the day the stitches were to come out, Nancy had an appointment and so I borrowed an old Toyota and Lucy and I headed back to Cedar Rapids. When we had made it half of the way there, the car died on the interstate. It started to snow, a light dust blowing over the blacktop, and then it snowed harder. We set off walking backwards, thumbs out, trying to hitchhike to the postoperative breast augmentation appointment, perhaps a first in the state of Iowa. There were very few cars on the road, and the one that stopped for us was the least promising of all, a rusted-out 1970 Honda Civic that had probably been red at some point and had long since turned the shade of dried blood. It shivered beside us on the road as the woman in the passenger seat rolled down her window and asked us where we were going. The driver, a man too large to have squeezed into the car in the first place, leaned around her, his dark beard flecked with sugar.

“The hospital,” Lucy said. She was still wearing the gauze pad taped to the missing side of her jaw and it gave our request a kind of gravity that the truth would have lacked. The woman nodded and leaned forward so that we could crawl into the tiny backseat. It was full of white Styrofoam flats covered in wisps of Saran Wrap, half-eaten jelly doughnuts flattened inside. We tried to keep from sitting on the doughnuts and instead sat on the empty trays. Lucy and I held hands and pressed our knees together, both of us wondering if we had just made a very serious mistake.

“Awful cold,” the man said. The woman scooted down in her seat.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“You girls pick up hitchhikers?”

“I do,” Lucy said, meaning that if she had a car she certainly would.

He nodded and we watched the back of his head, his long ponytail caught up in a greasy knot. “I tried to hitch from Chicago to Cedar Rapids one time,” he told us. “Didn’t have enough money for a bus ticket. I started walking on the interstate and not one person stopped for me. Nobody. Ended up having to walk the whole way. It took me three days and I’ll tell you, it was cold. Not one person cared if I needed help.”

We were all silent. I didn’t know whether or not I should apologize, since I was sure I wouldn’t have picked him up either.

“You got to stop for people,” he said, punctuating every word. “That’s what you owe me for this ride. You have to pick somebody else up. Do you understand me? Pick them up no matter what they look like.”

Chapter Three

WHEN LUCY WAS FOUR, HER FAMILY CAME TO America from Dublin with her two sisters and two brothers. Her father had been one of the first television journalists in Ireland and his popularity there had landed him a good job with a major network in New York. Lucy’s father died of pancreatitis when she was fourteen, and she kept a black-and-white photograph of him on the wall in the living room. He was wearing a trench coat and smoking a cigarette and he looked straight ahead at the camera. He managed to cut a figure that was at once both dashing and endearing. His eyes were Lucy’s eyes. She was in no way sentimental about her family, but the picture was there like a soft spot.

Grief isn’t something to ‘be gotten through.’ It has no life of its own like that, it’s just plain and simply there. It’s one of the things which tells us we’re human. It’s funny, but I’m always forgetting I had cancer. It seems like a different person that happened to. I can never relate what I’m going through now with cancer either, even though it is the only reason I am here, in aberdeen. Lately the past haunts me a lot. It seems a day does not go by in which I do not remember the chemotherapy, even though once again it oddly doesn’t seem to be connected with cancer. I guess I just never really accepted having it, never thought about it. I look back on that part of my life and I was in a continual state of despair, yet I remember it the same way you would remember any objective detail. I wore a red dress. I was in a state of despair. It wasn’t me at all.

It’s much the same with my father. Like the chemo he comes back to haunt me all the time, but it’s often a detached sort of haunting. Or it is very emotional, very joyous. That might sound odd, but often I feel better able to live and love life through remembering my father. James Tate has a wonderful poem about his father called “The Lost Pilot” (also the name of the book); have you ever read it? It’s about the advantages (I don’t mean to be crude, using that word) of his father’s early death, how now as an adult he realizes his father would already be dead, or very old and decrepit. I have a very pure image of my own father, one that is almost a myth. It has more to do with me than with him.

When she got a call from a film producer in Ireland who had been a friend of her father’s, she was very pleased. It was someone who knew him back in the days before they moved, back in the days that Lucy didn’t exactly remember herself but believed marked a better time in the history of the Grealy clan. The producer knew about her story, the cancer, the surgeries, and he wanted to come to Iowa with a film crew to tape a short documentary about her life, the life of a twenty-two-year-old Irish girl who had overcome insurmountable odds.

“Are you serious?” I said.

“They told me the theme was ‘The Triumph of the Human Spirit.’”

“That’s you all right.”

“The Triumph of the Human Spirit.” She leaned forward and put her head against her skinny arms. “Oh my God, what have I done?”

Lucy didn’t want to be known for her face. She wanted to be known for her poetry, for her ideas. Still, there was part of her that looked forward to the film crew. She liked the attention, she liked the fact that they were coming from Ireland. She liked the thought of meeting someone who knew her father.

The film crew, when they arrived, consisted of three overly large men with cameras and bags and lights packed into a small rental car. When they unpacked their gear, it was impossible to imagine they could have squeezed such an enormous amount of flesh and equipment into such a tiny space or how they would ever cram it all back in again. They were driving around the States putting together as many stories as they could find before going home. They stood awkwardly in our living room, which contained a single chair and a tiny foam-rubber love seat that was completely unsuitable for anyone weighing more than 130 pounds. The producer looked at the picture on the wall and tapped the frame. “Ah, your dad was a great guy,” he said. That was all. Even I was hoping for something more. They were all looking hard at Lucy, not just her face, but all of her. Would she be enough to fill up a television screen?

“Come ride around with us,” the producer said. “Show us the sights.”

“There aren’t a lot of sights,” Lucy said, but they all piled in the car and drove away. I waved to them from the door, a worried mother sending her daughter off to the prom with three dates.

When she came home late that night, she was quiet and tired. She’d had dinner with the film crew and a couple of beers and then they dropped her off on Governor Street and drove away.

“So,” I said. “Are you going to be a movie star?”

Lucy left her coat in a pile on the floor. She fell down on the couch and put her head in my lap. “I couldn’t do it.”

I brushed back her hair with my fingers and asked her why not.

“Oh, it was the whole Triumph of the Human Spirit thing. Every time they talked about it, I couldn’t stop laughing. It doesn’t matter. I don’t think they wanted me anyway. I don’t think I was what they had in mind.”

I couldn’t tell whether or not she felt bad about it, and I don’t think she could tell either. It would be nice to be on television in Ireland, but not because of her face.

A few days later I went along with her to a lecture Jim Galvin was giving on Faulkner and in the middle of the class I tore a corner off a piece of paper, printed the word TRIUMPH, and slipped it over to Lucy. When she read it, she started to sputter a little, then giggle. She tamped it down for a minute or two, but then it came back. At first she had a hold of it, but then it got out of hand, a little kitchen fire that suddenly rears back and swallows the house whole. The laughter was bigger than she was and there was simply no fighting it. By now the class had stopped, Galvin stopped, and we watched her as she choked and wept and laughed. “I’m sorry,” she said, but she could barely make the words. She pulled her books together and left the room. I followed her. She tried to berate me but she couldn’t stop laughing.

LUCY, NOT A TELEVISION STAR, occasionally a triumph, went back to work on her poetry, leaving drafts around the house the same way she left her scattered clothes. She gave me xeroxed copies of the poems she read and loved. She ripped pages out of literary magazines and taped them to the refrigerator. Poetry defined her, saved her. There were times it seemed to be the only thing around that made perfect sense.

I’m getting really dependent on art, ann. That might sound pretentious, and it might very well be due to the fact that I’m in the midst of a bit of an emotional abyss at the moment, but it seems to be the only place I find any meaning. But the amazing thing, the most extraordinary thing to me, is that this meaning I find is itself totally undefinable. Just now this is especially true with painting. I’ve always in the past been a bit hot and cold about contemporary painting, yet in the last year or so it’s begun to have a real effect on me. Painting styles I would have scoffed at before can now grab my attention and give me a real sense of … importance? (Not my own, theirs). I bought this giant book of contemporary american and german painting at a big discount, and I’m loving it. It makes me wish I were a painter. But poetry too, that’s been really important to me lately, redefined, as it were. I could never stand John Ashbery before, but now I’m reading things of his which I love (though admittedly I still have great trouble with the bulk of his work). The whole point I’m trying to work up to is that I think, I am sure, that this new importance poetry and art in general is having for me has to do a great deal with my precarious emotional state. Does this raise or lower, then, the everyday importance of art? Does something which exists on the edge have no true relevance to the stable center, or does it, by being on the edge, become a part of the edge and thus a part of the boundary, the definition which gives the whole its shape? I would like to believe it is the latter, but does wanting to believe in something make that something valid? (Didn’t they used to use this argument for the existence of god back in the olden days?)

Had we managed to keep our lives focused on art, I think we would have lived in a state of brilliant happiness, but no one can stand in front of a painting forever. By the spring I was dating a fiction writer who was in love with another woman who had recently dropped him. He was very sad and would clearly benefit from my enthusiastic bolstering. It wasn’t a good relationship, but at least I could now contribute to the morning’s discussions of sex. Lucy kept on with B——, but they broke apart and came back together so many times they were like a plate that had been dropped on the floor repeatedly: more glue than china. Lucy tried to get out of it, but she could never quite bring herself to believe that B——wasn’t better than nothing at all.

“He’s insane,” she said. “Everything he says is insane, it’s absolutely clear and I’m sure of it, but then he’ll say one little thing that is so completely true that it undoes me. The true thing catches you off guard, and then everything starts to unravel, and you think about all the insane things he said and you start to wonder if maybe they were true too and maybe you just didn’t want to believe it. That’s what he’s always telling me anyway, that I didn’t believe the rest of it because I couldn’t face the truth.”

She told me the truth according to B——was that she was always going to be alone, that no one would ever love her, and it wasn’t because of the way she looked, it was because of who she was as a person.

Like any sensible friend, I told her not to listen. “The point isn’t to hear it and then reject it. The point is to cross to the other side of the street when you see him coming.” I told her what my father always said: if you don’t want to engage with someone, don’t engage with them, ever, on any level, and they will go away. But she was so hungry for attention and interpretation she would take it wherever she could get it. Lucy read her horoscopes studiously. She threw pennies on the kitchen floor and asked the I Ching for solid advice about her life.

One day B——came and sat down with me at the Great Midwestern Ice Cream Company, the store from which he had brought us quarts of blueberry ice cream in the early days of his courtship with Lucy. He asked me how I was doing. I was doing okay. He and Lucy hadn’t seen each other for a week or two at this particular point and I knew what she would want: she would want me to sit and listen. She would want me to go on a fact-finding mission. While B——and I had been in the same room on many occasions, we had always been with Lucy, and I was curious to see what he would say if we were alone. I thought I could figure him out, break the code. I would take some necessary piece of information back to Lucy that would show her she should ditch this guy once and for all.

If B——had been an actor, he would have been cast in the role of the handsome lobsterman. He had a straight nose and straight sandy brown hair. He was slim and well exercised and his convertible had left him with a casual glow of health, a little pink on top of his tan. He asked me how my work was going. He said that Lucy had told him I was dating someone. “Don’t let it get in the way of your writing,” he said. “That’s the most important thing. That’s the reason why you’re here.” B——had been a student at the Writers’ Workshop years before and he gave off the easy confidence of someone who had the inside track. He wanted to know how much I had written. Did I work every day? “It’s got to be every day,” he said. “If you don’t turn out pages every day, you’re not really a writer. You’re just playing at it. You’re wasting your time.”

I didn’t want to talk about me. I wanted to know what he had to say about my friend. I was not the topic of conversation.

“Oh, but you are,” B——said, as I took another nervous bite of ice cream. “If you’re interested in being a writer, if you’re for real. But you won’t be for real if you don’t write the pages. Then you’re just like everybody else. A lot of talk and nothing ever gets done. All promise, no delivery, am I right?”

“I write,” I said.

“Sure you do. Everyone does. You have some little story in your head that you’re going to get around to. This town is full of those people. I see them come in wanting to be writers and winding up as waitresses. The Workshop practically manufactures waitresses. What makes you think you’re going to be different from anybody else? Are you different? Are you special?”

“I’m not special.” What were we talking about?

“It’s hard to say.” He wagged his finger at me. “But it doesn’t sound like you’re doing the work. That guy you’re seeing, he’ll figure you out, too, then he’ll drop you, because he’ll know that you’re not ever going to be the thing you say you’re going to be, because you don’t do anything, you aren’t anything. You aren’t the girl with all the promise, the girl who’s going to be the real writer. He’ll see that you’re nothing, you’re just something to fuck. Then he’ll drop you, too.”

At some point I stood up and walked out into daylight, leaving my ice cream there to melt on the table. I felt panicked, not that B——would follow me, but that what he said would follow me, that his words had somehow attached themselves to me and were working their way into my clothing, burrowing down towards my skin like nettles. At twenty-two I felt like I had just received the worst tarot card reading in the world and I hadn’t even asked for it. What if he was right? What if I was nothing? What if someone else had seen it?

When I got home I told Lucy everything, and she loved it. It gave her real comfort to know that I had seen him the way she saw him, and that it had scared me half to death.

B——BERATED LUCY for her lack of sexual experience. He wanted her to sleep with other men, and so she did, half to get away from him and half in hopes of getting him back. Seduction was a quest, a skill, and a full-time job. The question was never whether or not Lucy wanted the man, the question was only whether or not the man wanted her. It was her truest hope that everybody wanted her. She had affairs with other students in the program, students outside the program, and one of the undergraduates in her literature class. In the course of a year she had gone from believing that she would die a virgin to thinking there was lost time to make up for. What she wanted was love, and the best way to go looking for it was through sex.

But it never worked that way, and the sex just made her lonelier. I understood that, as it had made me lonelier too. I couldn’t ever remember being lonely before, certainly not in this way, until I had seen the edge of all the ways you could be with another person, which brought up all the myriad ways that person could never be there for you.

A FEW WEEKS later we went to see Peggy Sue Got Married at the mall downtown. Lucy and I were shameless about movies. We would see almost anything that allowed us to sit in the dark air-conditioning of a theater. The night had been fine when we went in, but now it was late and the rain was beating down in dark curtains. We sprinted across the street to a sports bar and took up a little table in the back, ordering drinks while we blotted our hair with thick stacks of paper napkins. There was some game playing on the ten television sets that hung down from the ceiling of the bar, and though there were very few women in the room, no one noticed us at all.

“My God, that was a bad movie,” I said. “Nicolas Cage. What was he thinking?”

“I didn’t hate it,” Lucy said.

“Really?” I was going to tease her, but suddenly she was crying. “What is it?” I said quietly. We could have both sobbed out the darkest corners of our grief and no one in that bar would have known.

“They were together,” she said. “It wasn’t perfect, but they were together.”

“Pet, it was a very stupid movie.”

“I am always going to be alone,” she said. Her hair was still wet. Her cheeks were wet. “I am never going to find someone.”

“You’re going to find someone.”

“You don’t understand.” She folded her arms on top of the small table and put her head down to cry.

Lucy tried constantly to find and fully participate in any joy that was available to her, but still she was pulled into scorching bouts of depression. Her grief about feeling ugly and her desire to be loved in a way that would be huge enough to meet her needs would regularly roll her into a little ball and paralyze her. She would cry for hours and then for days. Lucy’s sadness terrified me, in large part because it made such perfect sense. No matter how anyone argued for the virtues of her talent and her friendships, the many jewels of her life, there was no denying the fact that what she had been through and what was still ahead of her seemed insurmountable. The damage to her face was a fact, but over the years she had cemented that fact to the idea that she was unlovable. She would tell me that she would give it until winter, then she would go out to the cornfields wearing a light jacket at night, drink a bottle of whiskey, and lie down in the snow.

I put down my head as well and she turned to show me her wet blue eyes. “Listen to me. You will find someone. You always find people. You haven’t found the right one yet, but no one has. You aren’t going to be alone. You’re going to have me.”

A unified roar went up in the bar. A necessary point scored by the favored team, I could only assume. I put my hand on Lucy’s back and felt her uneven breaths, the tremor of her shoulder blades. I was stunned by the rawness of her pain. I came to understand that night in the sports bar, safe from the blinding rain, that I could not worry about Lucy anymore. I knew then it was just too enormous for me to manage and that worrying about her would swamp me. If I was swamped by worry, I would be useless to her. It was even possible that I would desert her, and that was the thing that could never happen. I decided that night I would take all the hours of my life that could so easily be spent worrying and instead I would try to help her. I had been raised by Catholic nuns who told us in no uncertain terms that work was the path to God, and that while it was a fine thing to feel loyalty and devotion in your heart, it would be much better for everyone involved if you could find the physical manifestations of your good thoughts and see them put into action. The world is saved through deeds, not prayer, because what is prayer but a kind of worry? I decided then that my love for Lucy would have to manifest in deeds.

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.’”

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