Truth & Beauty: A Friendship Page 3

  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 fr
eezing 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 i
n 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.”