Truth & Beauty: A Friendship Read online

  “If I’m still here in a year, you’ll come back and get me, won’t you?” she said.

  “With a gun, if I have to.” I gave her the contents of our refrigerator and pantry and hugged her. I knew I was making another mistake, trying to justify the series of mistakes I had already made, but at this point I felt like I was on a train shooting off into the future. Once I was on board, we just kept going faster and faster and I could no longer imagine jumping off. Lucy was still my closest friend, but I couldn’t help but feel like I was abandoning her as I got in the U-Haul with Dennis and drove back down the interstate I’d come by.

  LUCY STAYED IN Iowa City until June of 1988 and then went to teach in a summer writing program for high school students and have another surgery in New York. After that she went to Berlin to live with a college friend whom she adored. It was too far away for her to come back for my wedding. I stayed in Nashville, worked at a bookstore, and got married in June of 1988 at the age of twenty-four. That fall, Dennis and I got teaching jobs at a little college in Pennsylvania. Things didn’t get worse after we got married. I simply lost my ability to bear it, which in truth was never so good in the first place. On the last day of August 1989, I got a ride to the airport and flew back to Nashville a week before I was to start teaching for my second year. In the larger scheme of catastrophes, this one was probably not so enormous. We didn’t have children, money, or property. We didn’t even have a dog. But being twenty-five, Catholic, and divorced was completely devastating. I called my mother from the Nashville airport and for the first time told her I was having some problems.

  I was an unemployed college teacher taking up residence in my mother’s guest room. It was too late to apply for adjunct jobs at other schools, and I was in no shape to stand up in front of a classroom anyway. I started looking for work as a waitress, but I couldn’t get hired. My resumé included a master’s degree and several publications, including a short story in the Paris Review. By the fifth restaurant I figured it out. I gave myself a year of junior college and seven years of solid food-serving experience, operating on the correct assumption that no one ever checks references anyway. I was remade at a TGI Friday’s, where I wore a short black skirt and a white pillbox hat with a net veil. Funny hats were a requirement of the job. Without a hat or a bunch of flowers or a record pinned onto your head, you were sent home from work. It reminded me of going to mass with my grandfather when I was a little girl, and how he would drop his handkerchief on my head if I had forgotten my hat. During a morning shift meeting in my first week of work, the general manager stood up to make an announcement.

  “Today I would like to make a special presentation to an extraordinarily promising trainee. In the history of this branch of the restaurant, she is the first person to make a perfect score on her waiter’s examination. Ann Patchett, will you come forward so that I may present you with the Wow pin.”

  The staff cheered and stamped while he pinned the tiny medal to my collar. It was true, I had studied. I knew the contents of every drink, the expediting procedure for every entrée. It had never occurred to me I’d be better off throwing the test.

  “I want the pin,” Lucy said when I called her that night.

  “You want to wear my Wow pin?”

  “We’ll be pinned, my pet.”

  THE YEAR I TAUGHT in Pennsylvania I was extremely unhappy, but I had pulled it together every morning and gone to work. Aside from my office-mate, Diane, who offered me a lifesaving level of friendship and support, no one had any idea there was a problem in my house. Academia is no place to wear your heart on your sleeve. At Friday’s, though, everyone knew your problems. One waiter was so behind on his child support that he was barely keeping himself out of jail. A cook who called me Little House on the Prairie in honor of my blond braid and notable lack of eyeliner, did go to jail, but only for possession, and we all went to visit him when we could. Regina, my best friend at the restaurant, was a smart black girl who wore a leopard-skin hat and liked to say that one day the management would make a big mistake where she was concerned and from then on out the chain would be known as “Regina’s.” She once called me at five o’clock in the morning for an immediate ride to the airport. She was in trouble, she said, big trouble, and she needed to go to Houston. I drove her there, covered her shifts, and then picked her up three days later, but she never told me what had happened. It was not the kind of friendship I was used to, but it was the kind I needed at that time. I traveled with the transient dishwashers, the all-powerful bartenders. We cried in the kitchen. I ran another girl’s cheeseburger out to a table for her when she could not pull herself together. We kittied our money on hot summer nights and rented cheap motel rooms for the use of the swimming pool. We went to other restaurants after our shifts were over, drank margaritas, and tipped outrageously. We could afford to be generous because we knew this moment would not last. Every single person there believed that he or she was just passing through. We were all going to be something big, something important. I believed it about myself as well. I came back to my mother’s house in the middle of the night and stood in a hot shower until I felt the grease and cigarette smoke run out of my hair, down my back, and into the drain. Then I sat on the bed and counted out my tip money.

  Lucy had hoped to stay in Berlin, but she didn’t speak German and her plans to teach English never materialized. When she was out of money, she went to London to live with her sister, Suellen, and Suellen’s husband, Joel. There she signed on for a temporary secretarial service, first typing reports for a private investigator, then briefly making photocopies at Gillette. Her new plan was to teach English in Italy, though later that switched to Japan and then Prague.

  Lucy’s plans for teaching and travel were put on hold when Suellen read an article in a magazine about a surgeon named Mr. Fenton who was doing revolutionary reconstructive work in Aberdeen. Lucy balked at the idea of going to see another unfamiliar doctor with a miracle cure, but Suellen had written to him and she thought his work sounded extremely promising. To seal the deal, she bought Lucy a train ticket to Aberdeen so that she could meet him. Mr. Fenton explained his plan for a tissue expander and a vascularized bone graft. He thought the whole process would take six months. Knowing that one is always better off doubling any amount of time projected by a plastic surgeon, Lucy figured she would be gone a year. In the end, the cycle of surgeries took nearly three years.

  What surgery meant to Lucy and what it meant to almost anyone else were two different things entirely. For Lucy, a single surgery was more like a fitting for a dress, or the rearranging of living room furniture: it was only a step towards something else. She never gave up believing that there would be a final moment, a last surgery, a point at which her “real life” would begin. The damage that was done to her at ten would finally be made considerably better, if not right. Men would fall in love with her, no one would look twice, unless it was to admire. She would be freed from the greatest burden of her life. If that was the reward, then the pain and inconvenience of more surgery was not an unconscionable price to pay. Also, Lucy was a good patient. She understood the politics and dynamics of hospitals. She could be remarkably sweet and easygoing with an IV tube hanging off either arm. She loved to be told that she was the most difficult case they had ever seen. Of course she was. She was the girl from the medical books. She was the case study.

  Enduring surgery, however, was nothing compared to enduring Scotland. Aberdeen was largely a rig town, which meant that many people worked on offshore oil rigs for several weeks at a stretch and came back fat with cash, looking to stay as drunk as possible until they had to go out again. It was a brutal place for tissue expanders. Lucy had her first one in the hospital. They placed a balloon under her skin and injected it with small amounts of saline solution over the course of about six weeks, giving the skin a chance to stretch out slowly to be used in a future surgery. Lucy, whose face was usually faulted for being too small, now had something that looked like a tire hangi
ng off the side of her head where her jaw should have been. She stayed in the hospital, reading and talking with other patients, not having a particularly bad time. But after the surgeries progressed, it was decided that more skin, and thus a second expander, was needed. This time, instead of keeping her in, they sent Lucy home and told her to report back every day for her injection.

  Nothing seems to be working out for me, and I’m still wracking my brains to figure out where I went wrong. I am very negative about ever getting any sort of luck in writing or in love or anything at all. It’s not just luck, I know I have to make things happen, but in the end you can’t force someone to publish your work, or accept your love. Why I feel so negative I can’t say, but I can’t seem to make it go away. Every day I feel just a bit closer to the edge.

  This balloon in my face is definitely not helping. I have managed to stay out of the hospital, but I have to go there most mornings. I get so self conscious around people that by the time I return I have a terrible pain in my shoulders, neck and head. It will be at least another month before the bone graft.

  One night after work I was sitting on the edge of my mother’s bed, reading her Lucy’s letter.

  “Save all of those,” she told me when I was finished.

  “I save some of them,” I said, but she and I both knew I never was much on saving anything.

  My mother said it again. I was to save them all. “Someday you’ll both be famous writers,” she said. “And these letters will be very important to you.”

  Chapter Five

  This might sound a bit odd to you, but remember how Jan the tarot card reader in Iowa told you you and Dennis would always be together: when you two broke up there was part of me that was happy she was so wrong, because she also told me that I’d never meet anyone long term, never have kids (not that I particularly want kids, but the other part is sort of a harsh thing to hear from a fortune teller). What she said haunted me for a long time, but now I feel much better about it. (I’m sure you’re not taking this the wrong way). The I Ching has been very unresponsive of late. It’s like that sometimes, but then when you least expect it, it comes in right on the mark.

  Well, my little lamp on the wharf, I’ll end here. Please write, please give my love, to your mother, and please please please know that you are my most loved hero now and for always. Lucy.

  Lucy and I wrote each other constantly and much of my tip money went into phone calls to Scotland. More than her face or even her love life, Lucy worried about her work. She was absolutely committed to the idea that writing would be her salvation and that she was obligated to pull herself out of all her present miseries with the sheer strength of her will and talent. Although she was still writing poetry, she was also working on a novel that was modeled after Nabokov’s Secret Life of Sebastian Knight. It was a story about going to search for an elusive brother, a theme that she came back to again when she tried to write a novel at the end of her life.

  We both approached writing much the same way we approached going to the gym in those days: with the belief that regular attendance was more than half the battle. Lucy knew that she could write a novel if she just kept showing up and getting in a few pages a day. She told herself that Scotland could be the ultimate writer’s colony, with financial support and limitless free time. On one side of her was an enormous well of depression waiting to be given over to, the voice in her head that said she was unloved and therefore unlovable, and on the other side was a daily page minimum and the copy of War and Peace she was reading, the belief that work would be her salvation and that the life of the mind would set her free.

  On this point Lucy and I were completely united. We had written in college and graduate school and had our small successes, but we were writing to impress our friends, our teachers, possibly ourselves. Now writing meant something else entirely. Without writing, Lucy was just another patient in the surgical ward, waiting for her tissue expander to fill with the saline and stretch out her skin. Without writing, I was another waitress like all the other waitresses in Nashville who were waiting for their big publishing deal. They wrote songs. I wanted to write a novel. I was starting to see it was all pretty much the same thing. Lucy and I had ceased to be distinguishable from everyone else and every day the ground was getting softer, swallowing us up a little bit more. We had each come to realize that no one was going to save our lives, and that if we wanted to save them ourselves, we only had one skill that afforded us any hope at all. Writing is a job, a talent, but it’s also the place to go in your head. It is the imaginary friend you drink your tea with in the afternoon. In her hospital bed or in her lonesome room back at her flat, Lucy brought out the sentences she knew and twisted them into poems and chapters, the same way I stood in the kitchen every night at the end of my shift at Friday’s and rolled 150 silverware packets, dreaming up characters with problems more beautiful and insurmountable than my own.

  Lucy applied for every fellowship, grant, and contest available. She pursued every possible venue for the publication of her poetry manuscript. She worked on her novel and had written a screenplay that an agent thought was promising. She applied for teaching jobs, artists’ colonies, and sent out endless hopeful batches of poems to literary magazines. Everything went with a self-addressed stamped envelope for replies. I sent her books of American stamps and she used my mother’s house as her return address. She didn’t want people to think that she was living in Scotland and might not be available to claim whichever award should come to her. The process of putting the thing you value most in the world out for the assessment of strangers is a confidence-shaking business even in the best of times. But in Lucy’s circumstances it was sheer heroism, a real sign of her devotion to her art. She was, in a sense, sitting at a craps table with her last stack of chips, trying again and again to hit it big. Rejections came in the form of polite letters, and everything she had dreamed might save her life vanished as soon as the envelope was opened. It did mean that I was the bearer of a lot of bad news, as I was the one who opened all the envelopes and then wrote to tell her.

  Dear ann,

  This is the second letter I’ve written in the last hour to you. I had to tear the last one up because it’s basic premise was how meaningless life was. I’m hoping this one will be a little cheerier, but also I guess it’d be dishonest to try and convince you that everything was hunky dory. I hate it here. I hate my flat, I hate my flatmates, I hate my writing, and most of all I hate myself at this moment. I have just finished consuming three doughnuts, which also makes me hate my thighs and my will power. I hate max garland [because he had just won the Wisconsin poetry fellowship] and I hate B——and I hate Bush and I hate people who step on your toes in the street and I hate women with baby buggies and I hate Scottish weather and I hate kathleen turner because of her legs and the fact that she has sex scenes with michael douglas and I hate television and I hate p-town and the american poetry review and I even hate david foster wallace for being such a wally for complaining about being unmotivated when he’s got two books published…. and I hate all the stupid men here who are short and I hate the fact that all of the above people don’t even give enough of a damn to hate me. So much for the cheery letter, I guess.

  What sparked this tirade is your letter today (not your letter, sweeties, but I mean the bad news that was in it). Four fucking times they’ve said no, get lost. And what ever made me think I could write a novel? What a piece of trash it is. And as for my poetry, well p-town’s [the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown] told me in no uncertain terms what that’s worth. Oh oh, maybe I’d better tear up this letter too. But then it’ll take a week to reach you, and more than likely things will be different by then. Hopefully, this too shall pass. I just feel so baseless, rootless, but externally and internally. I think to myself, well, okay, do some writing, that’ll make you feel better, but it’s not that I can’t write, I can actually sit down (I don’t believe in writer’s block) but that I hate what I write. Really: I’m not just
saying that so people will counteract it, say nice things to me. Maybe I should stop thinking I’m some sort of artist and look at the actual facts of my never having really and truly succeeded at anything. Sure I was a star at college, but how many stories do we know of people who were stars at college only to do absolutely nothing with the rest of their lives? All this surgery business is only delaying the inevitable while sending out some sort of smoke screen that lets people believe I’m doing something brave and strong (ha). The highlight of my day is watching Neighbours.

  In November of 1989, a month before I turned twenty-six, my stepfather bought me a plane ticket to Aberdeen, knowing that time with Lucy was the best chance I had for getting back on my feet. It will go down in my personal history as the nicest gift anyone has ever given me. I took two weeks off from the restaurant and I was gone.

  All through the flight from London to Aberdeen I stared out the window at the rough patchwork of landscape and thought how beautiful it was, how beautiful it would be to live so far away from my mistakes. It was a small plane and we did a good deal of pitching and tossing, but everyone got a nice cheese plate and a glass of red wine and I managed to hold my snack steady. The world that existed in the air over England and Scotland seemed extremely civilized, even sophisticated, and for those moments I thought that Lucy was leading a glamorous life, at least when you compared it to being a waitress in Tennessee.

  SHE WAS CRYING when I came through the gate. She told me later she had come hours early to sit in the airport and wait for me. No one but Lucy ever cried because they were happy to see me, or cried from happiness just at the thought that I would come. When I saw her I had to make sure I didn’t register any surprise. I hadn’t understood about the tissue expander, even though she had explained it to me over the phone. I hadn’t understood about any of it. Lucy’s face was huge; the wide band of extra skin that sat on her neck was pale and fat with fluid. It was as big around as her calf. She was crying and crying and I picked her up in my arms and she wrapped her legs around my waist and we stood there at the arrival gate for a long time, crying together.