Affinity

by Affinity- The Friendship Issue (retail) (epub)

  I have also been terrible at establishing friendships with people I have been linked with romantically. Mostly I have had little interest in doing so. With us, the fact that we were friends first helped and also that we both did work at it. In the years we came back together we gave each other a lot of room.

  As you look back on your life things shake out some and you see who you really loved, who really loved you, also who the people were that you had deep connections with whether it worked out or not. About ten years ago, I remember this started to happen to me and it was at first painful, as I had to be honest about how often I had thrown away love.

  I want to say again that while the period we are writing about was one of the hardest in my life, I was a single mother with a toddler and writing financially is not the most stable career in the world, it was also a time of great beauty. I ached a lot, not just in my mind but in my body too. But I did a lot of things I am very proud of besides getting our friendship back on track, I bought a house in Lefferts Gardens, I started my memoir, Easter Everywhere, I learned to play the guitar, I got a spiritual director, a small, intense Episcopal nun, named Sister Leslie. I realized all the ways my life had been false and I tried to make it better.

  It’s interesting to me how several times in this conversation you have mentioned worrying about how faith will seem to your readers, you worrying and also your publisher too. This is something I have thought about lately a lot. All my writing has to do in one way or another with my faith and doubt and interest in the spiritual realm and I do think this fact has maybe hurt the trajectory of my books some. I know we have Marilynne Robinson, I like some of her work a lot, but I also feel though she lives now at this time she is more involved in an older 1950s type of faith. I am interested in how to be a person of faith and also love Sonic Youth and David Lynch films, and also Kathy Acker. Did you know that when I interviewed Kurt Cobain for Spin (when In Utero came out) he was reading Kathy Acker and he said he got ideas for guitar riffs from her prose! Anyway, this question is not really a choice for me, I always write about a person pushed around by the spirit.

  Do you remember at our very first reading for Joyful Noise, after we read, a young woman stood up, she had dyed black hair and was punkish. She asked us “How did you find the courage to talk about God?” This has always stuck with me. And frankly, to my mind, is enough reason for the whole project.

  It was a joy to be in Oxford together, a place I love so much. I remember Richard Howorth, the owner of Square Books, coming up to you in the bookstore when we were there and saying, “Rick, I have always wanted to have you in the store.” And I loved the idea that having writers in a bookstore sort of makes the store more holy! Also, we got to go to Faulkner’s house and it’s fixed up now but then it still had like Faulkner’s crappy plastic shoe rack and his handwritten numbers above the phone in the kitchen. I am not big on going to writers’ houses, but there was such a feeling of anxious unease in that house that is so familiar to me. It’s the general mood of the writer’s life.

  I don’t think of meeting my current husband Mike or marrying him as affecting our relationship. But that is my side of things. I had been single for maybe five years when he came to stay with me, as a friend; he had once written a story about me for the Roanoke newspaper and we had kept in touch. He was on a story. He had ridden up from the South with a bus full of people who had gotten bad mortgages and who were going to bust into the Citibank board meeting. So that was pretty exciting to me, to hear the story of this from a serious investigative reporter. We got married six years ago and I understand now, in my second marriage, why people do it. I do think that new intimacies change and shake up and maybe even supplant older ones. And maybe this did happen some with us.

  What I like about our friendship now is that while we don’t see each other a ton in person, we are sort of always in touch, connected in a loose but firm way. We check in. I have called on you in the last years when I had trouble with a romantic stalker and also when I was having trouble with my novel Milk, I remember we met and I told you the whole arc of the book in very overreaching thematic ways and you looked at me and said, OK, just tell me the story. And your focused attention really helped me, just that little exchange got me out of my grandiose ideas and back on the fragile human story.

  Love,

  Darcey

  January 18, 2016

  Hey Darce,

  It is the new year and again I have been very slow. I have been thinking about the meaning of this exchange. I’d been working on a mass, I might have told you, with composer Daniel Felsenfeld, which premiered on December 30. It went well, and it was one of those things (they don’t happen often enough in the creative life), where the only problem with the project is that it ends. Then I never know what to do with myself afterward. Anyway, in the audience was that priest from Old First Presbyterian, Daniel Meeter, his name is. For whom you and I did that panel discussion, which must have been maybe four years ago or so? I’m guessing here. Daniel Meeter came to the premiere because he knew both Danny and me.

  The Rev. Meeter had a profound reaction to the piece. He was crying a little bit, I think it’s fair to say, and he sort of got right up in my face and said something like: “You can’t possibly know how important these words you’ve written are!” Of course I agreed, because it would not have been sporting to disagree, although I work hard to try to know exactly how important (and unimportant) my words are most of the time. I was just glad the piece happened, but I also did think about the words, you know, a little bit. Anyway, I bring him up because for me the really important night with you, in the period of our trying to put our friendship back together, when I really knew that I had let go of most of the preconceptions I had about you and me and all that went before, was that night that we did the panel for the Rev. Meeter at Old First Presbyterian. We went out for dinner beforehand, and that’s when I finally told you that my first marriage was over with. And you looked at me in this way that I sort of took as a mime-world synonym for “I’ve waited for this announcement for a while.” I’m not sure it was judgmental, I didn’t take it that way, but more just a recognition that something long delayed had happened, and that you had suspected it would happen.

  There’s a way that some social things are never understood, the value of social things is never understood, until in the nexus of friendship. Or: the meaning of what we do, in the world, is never really clear until it is discussed. The language is the way that events begin to mean. And there was every reason for you to have feelings on this subject of my marriage, long ago, but what I thought that night was that there was this way that our friendship was sort of solving the problem of my marriage, that night, and I felt some real gratitude for you for letting me take as long as I took, but also for your telling me the truth about my life. It was a powerful feeling of gratitude that I felt then.

  You can go a long way as a fiction writer trying to describe these things, and still not get them exactly right. A burden was removed, I suppose, from our friendship—my delusion about my relationship. But also enough time had passed for that burden to no longer be quite so burdensome. I had the feeling that I have had since: of how much I owe you and how much I care about you. And it was moving because it didn’t have anything to do with eros, even invoking eros is rude at this point (though I’m trying hard to get the words to do exactly what I want them to do to describe the particular surfeit of human emotions), but really just what I imagine friendship is, now, in my galloping toward old age, just knowing someone for a really long time, and really meeting them periodically where they are, and not where you need them to be, and feeling powerful feelings of contentment that your friendship is still going and that you can still do things together and see each other, and that many of the failed parts, the parts that you personally have fucked up, can in some way be forgiven, or at least set aside, and you can go on, somehow relying on a person. Like when Melville visited Hawthorne when he was consul in England. It was Engl
and, right? And it had been years since they were so close (so close that some people think they were lovers), and Melville came to visit him while abroad, and it was strange, because time had passed, and there had been misunderstandings, but also a recognition of indebtedness and mutual impact, a recognition of friendship.

  Maybe part of what we’re describing here is reconciliation. At St. Paul’s Chapel, where I go these days, they used to bring out this cross from Coventry Cathedral every week, and remind us all about reconciliation after WWII. (This in part because St. Paul’s is across the street from the World Trade Center, where reconciliation is much needed.) I often found that cross really moving (and Hazel, my daughter, often did too). But that doesn’t mean in the really vexing difficulties with people that I easily feel, Hey, let’s figure out how to work this out! We can do it! We’re adults! I do not always feel that way. Sometimes I feel like it’s not my fault, and I don’t feel like it’s all my responsibility, the reconciliation. But what’s a blessing, I guess, is when you don’t have any doubt about wanting to repair the past, when you just feel a big uncomplicated tidal surge of love, and you know that you don’t give a shit about all the trouble, or the friction, and you know you want to find a way. I have had that feeling with you a lot. I was looking at some interview we did together, not long ago, in Bomb. I just stumbled on it, and I thought, My God, I just really love that Darcey Steinke. I mean, this does a disservice to the feeling, because it wasn’t expressed in facile language, but just a tremendous warmth at all we have done together, and still do together, when we can, despite all that happened, and despite our busy lives now.

  What is friendship then? It’s that arrangement in which love really is, from this vantage point, unconditional, and in which everyone blows it at some point, and no one is perfect, over the course of many, many years. It’s unconditional love + time.

  Maybe you should get to have a last word, if you like!

  Love always,

  Rick

  Rick:

  It is the day after the big snowstorm. Snow, like lace, covers my kitchen window where I write to you. I just got back from DC and the National Zoo where I met a sixty-eight-year-old elephant named Ambika. I wanted to get to know her for a book I am working on about menopause and killer whales. Because elephants are so wrinkly and droopy, it was hard to see her as old, but when her keeper pointed out her frayed cabbage-leaf ears and how her forehead was more pronounced, I could tell she was an elder. In hearing about her life, how she was born in India, captured, and made to work at a logging camp, before being shipped to America and then driven around the country in a truck to visit elementary schools, how when she finally came to the zoo fifty years ago, she was chained by the leg in a small cement room, it all made me think of the length of a life—an animal life, a human life, which is also an animal life.

  Your last response really moved me. I knew about your mass, yes, you sent me the text and I thought it was very beautiful. Your mass tried to get at what we are talking about here, the pain and the love and the disappointment and the joy and how these things are all connected, not separated out from each other. It’s like human tissue connects them all. It’s not so much I was waiting to hear about your marriage ending but that I wanted more for you. I did not at that point want anything romantic at all, but I still wanted more for you as to what love is and can be. We differed on this subject early on. I really believed in the soul-to-soul connection when it comes to romantic love, that it’s a singular thing between two people and that sex is also most meaningful taken in these terms as well. For me the movement forward in our relationship was that night but also this summer when I heard from you, after you read the Bomb interview. I knew when I heard from you that, because of the love you have now with Laurel, you are able to see what happened between us more clearly. That’s what I was trying to get at in my last installment, that as time moves forward you are always seeing your life and relationships in new ways, you are realizing what actually took place. This is one of the best things about moving through time, telling yourself your own story in different ways, forgiving yourself and others.

  This is also why friendship is so sacred, you carry a love for someone through time. And I do feel this about you. I think ultimately our staying connected was the most important thing about us. It was hard to figure this out at first, what we meant to each other, in what configuration we were supposed to be.

  Whenever I see you I always think of that scene from Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather. A priest, who is the main character, hears that his friend, a Native American chief, had lost a child. The priest rushes to his friend. When he arrives the chief comes out and says, “My Friend Has Come.” There is such gratitude and need in that line. We need each other so deeply sometimes it’s hard to bear. I feel sad when I see you sometimes, the sadness of the past, of so much time being gone, but I also feel our hard-won connection is visceral, is real. I am FOR you. And I know you are FOR me. This is no small thing. I am grateful.

  Love,

  Darcey

  From Huck Out West

  Robert Coover

  HUCK AND TOM IN MINNYSOTA

  It was up in Minnysota that Tom made up his mind to give over cowboying and take on the law. Becky Thatcher was the daughter of a judge and maybe she give him the idea how to set about doing it. Before that him and me was mostly adventuring round the Territories without no thoughts about the next day. We run away from home all them years ago because Tom was bored and hankered to chase after what he said was the noble savages. At first they was the finest people in the world and Tom wanted to join up with them, and then they was the wickedest that ever lived and they should all get hunted down and killed, he couldn’t make up his mind. Some boys in a wagonload of immigrants we come across early on learnt us how to ride and shoot and throw a lasso so that we got to be passing good at all them things.

  That story turned poorly and we never seen what was left of them afterward, but ending stories was less important to Tom than beginning them, so we was soon off to other adventures that he thought up or read about in a book or heard tell of. Sometimes they was fun, sometimes they warn’t, but for Tom Sawyer they was all as needful as breathing. He couldn’t stand a day that didn’t have an adventure in it, and he warn’t satisfied until he’d worked in five or six.

  Once, whilst we was still humping mail pouches back and forth across the desert on our ponies, I come on a rascally fellow named Bill from near where we come from. He was also keen on adventures and he was heading back east to roust up a gang of bushwhackers in our state to kill jayhawks over in the next one. The way he told it, he had a bunch of swell fellows joining his gang and he wondered if Tom and me might be interested. With the war betwixt the states starting, there were lots of gangs forming up and making sport of burning down one another’s towns, which seemed like sure enough adventures, not just something out of books, so maybe we was looking in the wrong place. But when I told Tom about it the next time we crossed up at a relay station, he says he reckoned he’d just stay out west and maybe get up a gang of his own, because he couldn’t see no profit in going back. But I knowed that warn’t the real reason. The real reason was he couldn’t be boss of it.

  It was while we was on one of his adventures in the New Mexico Territory that Tom got the notion to go watch the hangings in Minnysota, a notion that would change everything. The Pony Express company had suddenly gone bust the year before when the cross-country tellygraph come in. We never even got our last paychecks, so we paid ourselves with ponies and saddles, which was how I got Jackson. I’d named Jackson after an island in the big river where my life took a change because, with me and Tom setting out on our western adventures, it was a-changing again and I wanted to mark that.

  Jackson’s Island was where me and Jim met up when we was both running away, so naming the pony Jackson was also a way of remembering our grand adventures on that river all them years ago. The last time I seen Jim was one of my sorrowfu
llest days ever, and I seen more’n a few. We’d brung Jim out west with us when we’d left home, Tom and me, but when we hired on as riders for the Pony, we didn’t know what to do with him. The war had not yet started up, and though Jim was a free man, the bounty hunters didn’t always mind such particulars. Sometimes we had to pretend he was OUR slave, and we always had to be on the watch-out he didn’t get stole.

  The Pony Express Stables, however, was hiring only skinny young white orphans, and though Jim was surely an orphan, he come up short on the other requirements. The station keeper said if we wanted the job, we had to get rid of him. I says we have to look for another job, but they paid fifty dollars a month, which was more money than a body could tell what to do with, so Tom said we didn’t have no choice and he sold him to a tribe of slaveholding Indians. “It’s the right thing to do, Huck,” Tom said after he’d gone and done it. “Jim’s used to being a slave and he’s probably happier when he has someone telling him what to do. And besides, they’re more like his own kind.” Tom was surely right as he most always was, but it made my heart sink into my bootheels to see how sad Jim was that day. I waved at him and he looked at me like he was asking me a dreadful question, and then he was gone, with a rope round his neck. Tom bought us new riding boots with the money.

  We was both broke, money just falling out of my pockets somehow, whilst Tom was spending his up shipping long tellygrams back to Becky Thatcher. He wanted all his adventures wrote down like the ones he’d read in books and she knowed how to read and write and was the sort of cretur who would be impressed by his hifalut’n style and not have nothing else to do, so she got elected. She couldn’t write back to him because there warn’t nowheres to write to, but that warn’t no matter, there warn’t nothing she’d have to say that would interest him.