by Ann Patchett
Had it not been for the smoke I would have seen her in time to swerve back to the kitchen and have someone else bring out the food. It was Lisa Truly, the girl from my high school who had, in my memory, been named the most beautiful, most talented, and most likely to succeed. And to make it worse, we had been friends. It was the problem of leaving your hometown for New York, vowing never to return again and then returning under less than noble circumstances. I held up the heavy metal skillets. The smoke drifted and waned.
“Ann?” she said.
I said hello. Lisa seemed very glad to see me. To her credit, she did not seem to take into account that I was wearing a striped shirt and serving her food. “I heard you were teaching college,” she said.
“I was.”
She nodded, as if there was nothing particularly strange about the progression of my career path. “This is my fiancé, Jason,” she said, and her tall and handsome man smiled. “Jason, this is Ann. I’ve told you about Ann.”
“Sure,” he said nicely. “You’re the smart one.”
Had I been, years ago? “Who gets the chicken?” I asked again. I felt like my arms were going to snap off.
I DID NOT GET the Bunting. Neither of us got the Wisconsin fellowship. Lucy got into an artist’s colony called Yaddo for the summer but the surgeries were extended and in the end she had to turn the residency down.
Dearest Pet,
…it’s late and I only just woke up. I have to be at the hospital in an hour, so once again I’m using this as an excuse not to write. I get so depressed I can’t move, even getting out of bed this morning was only finally accomplished as I finally had to pee. I don’t know how to deal with everything, it’s just too much for me. No mail again either: I’ve been hoping Yaddo would write me back since I told them I couldn’t go, but they haven’t and I’m afraid I’ve blown my one chance to go have a nice time someplace to spend the summer with a balloon in my face. The new yorker sent me back my poems, which I expected, so now I’ve tried the paris review. At least I haven’t stopped trying, and I also know that I will manage to get at least one page of fiction written today, which isn’t the six I demand of myself, but at least it’s something. It’s a continual effort on my part not to feel like a failure. I have picked up again on my correspondence course on getting a TEFL diploma, though I doubt I’ll get to use it any time soon. I’ve really got to go back to the states soon if I don’t want to blow my green card, but it’s so hard to know when all the surgery will be over. I’m so afraid that I’ll have to have another soft tissue graft. What the hell, I can’t even think about it: that would keep me here until god knows when, not to mention how horrible those sorts of grafts are anyway.
Am I complaining too much? It must get sort of boring for you. I’ve got these three cats staying with me who are really over the top. They’re nice and sweet during the day, but at night: werewolves. Up the curtains, in the cupboards, in the garbage, everywhere. I come in in the morning and it’s like a bomb hit the place, so I’ve taken to locking them away in the hallway at night. They’re good company though….
I got a letter back from the film place I sent my screenplay saying they didn’t want it but thought it was well written and showed a lot of talent, and if I wanted to I could send in other stuff and it would get a priority reading. I don’t have another screenplay to send though, probably won’t for some time, but at least it’s some encouragement. For the first time in my life I’ve found myself praying for actual things ; before I only prayed for stuff like wisdom and love and states of mind. These past few months though I’ve been much more materialistic. I want definite action on God’s part. Is this wrong? I worry that I’ll get punished somehow. I need to get out of this mess, but I just don’t know how, so I ask for his help.
Well, I’ll go now. Take care, write, give yourself a bear hug for me.
I read Lucy’s letters sitting on the edge of the bed in the guest room, still wearing my uniform, smelling of French fries and beer. My feet hurt up to my thighs. I was starting to wonder if I was ready to be a writer, not someone who won prizes, got published, and was given the time and space to work, but someone who wrote as a course of life. Maybe writing wouldn’t have any rewards. Maybe the salvation I would gain through work would only be emotional and intellectual. Wouldn’t that be enough, to be a waitress who found an hour or two hidden in every day to write? If Lucy was struggling to find her way under the burdens of surgery, surely I could find it in the comfort of my mother’s guest room. I made my resolve to work for the love of the work, to write for myself, but it didn’t have to last for long. My luck took a magnificent change of course. I was awarded a seven-month fellowship to the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown. I had, in short, been saved.
I had to tell Lucy I was going to Cape Cod without her, our best dream of going together now lost in the wake of my good fortune.
She screamed. She cheered. “That’s brilliant!”
“Really? You aren’t upset?”
“How could I be upset?” she said. “It’s perfect. Now you can go cozy up to the poetry judges and seduce them into voting for my application next year.”
I was flattered that she thought I had the ability to seduce anyone into anything.
That summer I took every shift I could get. In the high-turnover world of food service, I now had enough seniority to work Friday and Saturday nights and Sunday brunch. I counted up thick rolls of greasy dollar bills and recorded the amount on a piece of yellow legal paper I kept at the bottom of my money box. I was once again the ant, putting away every dime for the long cold winter ahead. I scratched my orders on a pad and kept my eyes fixed on the novel I would write. I had until this point only written short stories but now I abandoned them for good. I saw those seven months in Provincetown as my big chance and I felt the need to do something big. I needed to change my fate, and the way I saw it, that was simply asking too much from a little story. Fate like mine would need an entire novel to be reordered and fortunately I had one in mind.
I packed everything I owned into the trunk of my car and said my grateful good-byes to my mother, who had kept me for over a year without a single complaint. I took too many detours and stopped to make too many visits on the way up and so got to Provincetown on October 3, when everyone else had arrived on the first. I had missed all the introductions, the getting-to-know-you beach parties. I moved into my tiny apartment in the cluster of houses the Work Center owned, moved my bed into the kitchen/living room, and set up my desk in the closet-sized bedroom with the nice window. I unpacked my computer, plugged it in, and typed the words “Chapter One,” because everything has to start somewhere. I began to write the story that had been my companion in the restaurant for the past year. It was all in my head and now all I had to do was figure out a way to get it down on paper.
For three days I found the work sustaining, but the fact that I knew no one, really no one, was beginning to overwhelm me. One night well after dark I was talking to a friend in New York, complaining of loneliness. He told me to hang up the phone, go outside, and start knocking on doors. When someone answered, I was to ask him or her, depending on the door, if they would be interested in having a drink with me.
“Are you kidding?”
“Think of it as an assignment.”
I looked out the window. It had already been dark for hours. “It’s too late,” I said. “I’ll try in the morning.”
“It’s nine o’clock. Artists don’t go to bed at nine o’clock,” he said, and hung up the phone.
I had spent a lot of my life trying to find quiet time alone, but I had very little experience with being lonely. Now in the starry darkness of the Cape Cod night it was that loneliness that drove me to follow directions. The fellows at the Work Center are housed in a group of buildings that make a circle around a parking lot. I knew my downstairs neighbor wasn’t home because the floor that separated us was so thin I could usually hear him breathing. I sucked up my courage and knocked on the
first door I came to, but no one answered. I didn’t have any better luck the second time. Lucy would have banged on every door. She would have led all twenty writers and visual artists down Commercial Street in a conga line to the Governor Bradford and talked the bartender into buying every last one of them a drink. I rallied myself to try again. This time a porch light flicked on and the door opened up. A woman with pale skin, dark hair, and perfectly applied red lipstick stepped outside. I introduced myself, explained my situation, and asked her if she wanted to go for a drive. Elizabeth McCracken and I wound up at the Ben & Jerry’s in Wellfleet, having a conversation that would be the start of the next great friendship of my life. It was the best piece of luck I’d had in years.
BY THE TIME Lucy came to visit in December, I had a set routine of reading, writing, and editing with Elizabeth, I had started dating one of the other fellows, a fiction writer named Eli Gottlieb, and I had finished the first hundred pages of my novel. My world was two miles long and a mile wide, I had no money, and I was completely happy. Lucy had come back to the States to ensure the continued good health of her green card and break out of the monotony of Aberdeen for a while. She wasn’t finished with her surgeries, but she had been granted a temporary vacation from them. She came from a whirlwind of friends and parties in New York, planned to spend two weeks with me, and would then go and spend Christmas with her mother.
I’d like to say I re-created the moving welcome Lucy gave me when I arrived in Scotland, but she was planning on taking the bus up from New York and she wasn’t sure which bus she’d be on, when it might arrive, or where it would drop her off. I gave her good directions and told her I’d leave the door unlocked in case for any reason I missed her.
But I was there after all. I heard her bags hit the floor and she yelled, “Pet!” When she bounded up the stairs to my apartment, she was an entirely different version of herself, with a new face to go along with the new outlook. Gone was the tissue expander, the hugeness, and while she was still swollen from a recent surgery, I could for the first time imagine where all of this was going. There was something that was shaping up to look like a jaw. She screamed in pure joy and leaped up into my arms. She was her full and passionate American self again. She was in Provincetown, after all, where even in the winter a handful of six-foot-three-inch drag queens still ruled the streets, their stilettos hitting the pavement like hammers onto nails. No one looked twice at a girl with some lumps on her face when they could instead watch the rose parade of men float by in their dreamy feather boas and dog collars. Lucy was invisible, exuberant, and utterly birdlike in her wild, darting freedom.
“You look amazing,” she said. “Did I tell you that?” She threw off her jacket, a sweater.
“Me? You look amazing. Lucy, your face is really shaping up.”
“Do you think?” she said, and touched her chin lightly.
“It’s all been worth it.”
“I’ll wear it to the party then. We’ve been invited to a party.”
“A party?”
“Some guy I met on the bus coming up. It should be fun, a little dancing. When’s the last time you went dancing?” She kicked off her boots and struggled out of her jeans. “Can I try your sweater on? I like the color.”
I pulled my sweater over my head and handed it to her. “Whenever I saw you last was the last time I went dancing.” I picked her sweater up off the floor and put it on. It was tighter than mine, dark green, very sexy, not entirely clean.
She took my sweater off again and handed it back to me. She was down to her underpants and disappeared inside my closet, looking to make herself over. She was sick of trying to wrap her scarf in the right way, sick of trying to cover up, hunch down, be small. She was interested in being as large as possible now. She pulled my stretchy black cocktail dress over her head at noon. Gone were our insular days in Aberdeen when there was no place to be but together. Lucy put her leather jacket back on and then her boots. I had to say, it worked. “Is it terrible if I go out for a minute? I ran into Marie on the way here. She wanted to know if I could have lunch.”
“Not terrible at all.” I was happy to see her so happy and anyway, I still had pages left to write.
She kissed me hello and good-bye and went out to knock on every door she could find. There was no trace of the morbid duo we had made up in Aberdeen. We were free.
Provincetown is nearly a ghost town in the winter, the faintest outline of its booming summer self. There weren’t many people around but Lucy wanted to know all of them. She made plans to exchange work with the poets and have studio visits with all the visual artists and meet everyone for drinks and a game of pool later on. Because I was never any good after ten o’clock, she made her late-night plans with strangers. All she had wanted was to get into Provincetown and now she was exactly that: in.
I was a little concerned about how Lucy would respond to Elizabeth and Eli, but she was in complete approval of my choices and went on to have great friendships with both of them, especially Eli. Lucy and Eli were a lot alike, something I had never realized until I saw them together. They were both extremely smart, serious readers, great conversationalists, who wanted more than anything to leave their desks and find a party. They each had countless friends from every period of their lives and they liked to brag about their connections. If I wanted to find Lucy during her visit, the first place I went looking was Eli’s, where more often than not they were sprawled on his giant sofa, telling stories and making each other laugh hysterically.
As much as Lucy liked my friends, it was important for her to know at every moment that she was my uncontested favorite. There was nothing subtle in her methodology. When we had lunch with Elizabeth, Lucy would inevitably leave her chair at some point during the meal and come and sit in my lap.
“What are you doing in my lap, pet?” I asked her.
Lucy would lean her head against my chest and turn her eyes up to me. “Do you love me?” she said.
“Of course I love you.”
“Best?”
“Yes best, but you are crushing my thigh.”
Lucy sighed, contented now, and continued her conversation with Elizabeth from the comfortable vantage point of my lap, eating what she could off my plate.
I was a little embarrassed, but only because I was afraid that Elizabeth might not understand Lucy, or understand me for letting her get away with it. I was used to Lucy’s behavior, but when I had the chance to see it from the fresh eyes of a stranger, it looked fairly questionable.
In my furnished apartment there was a funny little foam-rubber chair that folded out into the narrow bed that Lucy slept on in my study, or some nights I slept there and she slept in my twin bed in the kitchen, but in the morning we were always in one bed or the other together, drinking coffee and talking. Now that she was here, Lucy was certain of her destiny: she would go back to Aberdeen for the briefest time and lay down the law with her surgeon, Mr. Fenton, to whom she had become quite close. They would get this business of her face finished up once and for all and then life, real life, would begin. Lucy had felt she had been on the verge of real life several times before, a life with the finished face she would have to learn to live with, but it had never quite happened. There was always one more surgery that was holding her back. This time it was going to be different. It was going to be true. She would win a fellowship to Provincetown, she would have a dazzling life as a writer. She would have friends and fall in love and go dancing every night.
Having Lucy in my apartment those weeks was not unlike having a couple of those revved-up cats from the Scottish Cat Protection League. She ran all over the place, left my clothes tossed over lamp-shades, wet towels heaped under pillows, bowls of Cream of Wheat minus three bites in whatever spot I was most likely to step in them. She came home in the middle of the night wanting to talk or show me some impossibly sexy way the gorgeous gay men were dancing in the club she’d just come from. She made a blood-chilling number of long-distance phone calls
whenever I was in the shower and insisted on sitting in my lap whenever I tried to talk to someone else. I, on the other hand, was writing my novel as if it were a factory job. It was already late December and by the first of May the fellowship would be over. I had figured out exactly what I had to do every week in order to finish on time, because after May 1 I didn’t have one clue in the world what was going to become of me. All I wanted to do was work. Fortunately for both of us, Lucy found plenty of people to play with.
Our plan was to leave the Work Center on the same day. I would go home to Nashville for Christmas and she would go on to her mother’s in western Massachusetts, but when the time came, there were too many invitations to good Christmas parties and so Lucy put her mother off for a few more days and stayed in Provincetown without me. She ate from my plates and wore my clothes and slept in my bed like Goldilocks while the benevolent, lumbering bear went south for the holidays.
WHEN I CAME BACK after Christmas, there was nothing but work. Michael Klein, the poet who lived downstairs from me and had, of course, become great friends with Lucy, was known to open my door and shout up the stairs, “Stop typing so much!” as my computer sat right above his bed and the sound of the clicking keys drove him crazy after a while. I walked on the beach in the morning in the freezing wind and rain, cultivating a kind of insanity wherein people who do not actually exist start talking to you. For the first time in my life, I thought about dying and thought that it would be an awful thing, to step accidentally off a curb and into a speeding car, because if I were to go I would take the entire cast with me. Half a manuscript for a first novel that has no author to finish it is always thrown away. The thought of all of them lost panicked me in a way that thoughts of my own death never had before. I had come to believe in these people, and they deserved their ending. Every chapter I finished I took to Elizabeth, who marked it up for me and gave me a short story in return, which I marked up for her.
