Truth & Beauty: A Friendship Read online

  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. Tha
t’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.