Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

by Ann Patchett

  I took a sip of wine to push back whatever little yipping noise I might have been inclined to make. The Whiting Award was $30,000. This was no small piece of news.

  “But there’s also a discretionary fund,” he said, tenting his fingers. “My discretion. I can write you a check for ten thousand dollars this afternoon. It would disqualify you from winning a Whiting, but ten thousand would mean you wouldn’t have to worry about anything for now.”

  “I’m not worried about anything,” I said. “I have money.”

  “Come back to my office,” he said. “I’ll write you a check.”

  I remembered when I was sick as a child and got to stay home from school watching game shows in my mother’s bed. The core dilemma of Let’s Make a Deal was that to have a chance at the big prize, you had to risk the smaller prize you already had. Everything was a risk to be calculated. Of course the other catch was that you had to humiliate yourself in some way to catch the attention of the host, dress like a chipmunk or a toilet bowl.

  “I’ll wait and see if I win the Whiting,” I said.

  He smiled at me as if I had passed the first test. “Smart,” he said, and I was pleased to think he was proud of me.

  The philanthropists’ adviser thought I was a genius, an American original. He had never met anyone like me and he told me so. Not only did he want to come up with a plan by which my brilliance would receive a lifetime of funding, he wanted me to be his talent scout. Who did I know who deserved fellowships? What institutions would I like to see doused in cash? Could I come back to the city next week for lunch?

  I would like to think that had it just been me, I might have caught on to the game a little bit sooner, but the idea that I could be the philanthropists’ adviser’s plucky mole made me absolutely giddy. I dropped my bag off at Lucy’s and rushed uptown. When I went to the Lotos Club the next week with my address book, the attractive woman at the front desk remembered me and said, “Hello, Miss Patchett.” I had plenty of friends who needed money, friends whose brilliant work might never be realized without a little help with the rent. Over a nice salad Niçoise, I turned over their names, addresses, phone numbers, work samples. I told him about Lucy and Adrian and Elizabeth. I arranged for him to meet with the head of the Bunting Institute because they could use some extra funding themselves. The philanthropists’ adviser called me on the phone in the evenings after work to go over his notes. He wrote me letters and confided in me about the problems he had with one of his sons. He said he thought of me as a friend and what a lovely surprise that was for him. He was lonely and I understood him. I was honored to be able to understand him.

  BACK IN BOSTON, Lucy called me late one night. “Come to the city,” she said. “I’m pregnant.”

  “Ah, hell,” I said, sitting down on the bed.

  “I really didn’t even know I could get pregnant.”

  “Seems like a bad way to have to find out. Do we need to have that talk about birth control?”

  “No, it was just an accident.” Lucy had a steady boyfriend then, a sweet guy of the sort who would accompany his girlfriend to an abortion clinic.

  “He isn’t going with you?”

  “I want you to go,” she said. “If anything happened, I’d be better off with you.”

  The next morning I was on my way out the door for an early train when the phone rang. “I need you to come to the city,” the philanthropists’ adviser said to me with a fair amount of urgency. “I need you to come today.”

  I told him that in fact I was coming in today.

  “Were you not planning on telling me?”

  “I wasn’t actually, no. I’m coming in to see a friend.”

  “I just read your galleys,” he said. “We have to talk about this book.” It was my second novel. He had been very anxious to read it, so anxious that I wondered if a large chunk of my fate was hanging on his opinion of the work. I had gotten him an advance reader’s copy from my publisher. I told him I would call him when I got in.

  When I arrived, Lucy said she had scheduled her abortion for the next morning. There was a book party for Dennis McFarland at six and she wanted to go. “Meet me there,” she said. “He’s a great guy and he has the greatest kids.”

  “I have to meet with my philanthropist.”

  “Oh,” she said dreamily, “your philanthropist. You promise that you told him all about your talented friend?”

  “Everything.”

  “Go have a drink with your philanthropist and then meet me uptown.”

  “I don’t know Dennis McFarland,” I said. “I can’t crash his book party.”

  “You won’t be crashing, you’ll be with me.” She wrote the address down on a piece of paper and we promised to meet at six. Then I called the philanthropists’ adviser to make our plans.

  “Meet me at the polar bear cage in Central Park,” he said. “I’ll bring a thermos of martinis.”

  “What?”

  “The polar bears.”

  “No,” I said, feeling something dismal bloom in my chest. “I need to be on the Upper East Side. We’ll just meet at the Lotos Club.” We always met at the Lotos Club.

  “No,” he said quickly. “They’re painting the bar. We’ll go to the Polo Club. Have you been to the Polo Club before?”

  I had not.

  “That’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll have your martini waiting for you.”

  It was not an unusual story or even an interesting one, but when the punch line came it devastated me nevertheless. No one was in the Polo Club at four o’clock in the afternoon except for the bartender and the man waiting to meet me. When I walked in, the philanthropists’ adviser kissed me on the mouth and I knew the fun was up. He took my hand and told me that he could neither eat nor sleep, that I had destroyed his sense of equilibrium, his happiness. My new novel had revealed to him how completely we were soul mates. Had I ever been to Tanzania? He would take me there. We would go there immediately. We would go in the morning. I scooted down the banquette towards the next table and he dragged along behind me, clutching my arm. Didn’t I see what I had done to him? Didn’t I know that this was completely my responsibility?

  “No,” I said.

  He drank his martini. He drank mine and ordered two more. The drinks were delivered two tables down from the one we started off at because I kept inching away from him and he kept inching behind me. “Is the problem Tanzania? Do you not want to go to Africa? It will always be there. We can go to Africa later. I’ll take you to Vienna, then. You told me you loved Vienna.”

  I stood up and he pulled me back to the table. “You cannot leave me. I won’t let you. I will follow you for the rest of my life.”

  I was not an American original or a genius or even a writer. I was a moderately pretty woman of thirty who was a good listener and for that it seemed there was a different class of philanthropy. “I’m going to go to the bathroom,” I said. “I am going to stay there until you leave.”

  When I got up he was red-faced and crying and the crying made him look much older. I locked myself in a stall of the women’s room at the Polo Club and cried myself for being such a terrible idiot, for being so vain as to have ever thought that things could have been otherwise. I stayed locked in for more than an hour and when I came out he was gone.

  I called Lucy from the pay phone to tell her I couldn’t meet her, but there was no answer. I was supposed to be at the book party in twenty minutes. If I simply didn’t show up, she would worry and so I checked the address in my purse and went even farther uptown, still blurry with anger and shame, thinking I would simply walk in, whisper the facts of my situation to her, and leave discreetly. As I raced up Madison, I remembered every lavish compliment I had received from the philanthropists’ adviser and wondered how stupid a person could be to believe such things. I remembered the dress I was wearing the night we met at the Whiting Award and I thought of my friends who would never get funded now. Lucy! For all I knew, she could wind up being blackballed, too.
She wouldn’t have locked herself in the bathroom of the Polo Club. She would have polished off her own martinis. She would have seen the whole thing as a ridiculous adventure, an opportunity ripe for the taking. She’d be halfway to Tanzania now, having managed to ditch the philanthropists’ adviser at Kennedy Airport, while I stood there wringing my parochial hands, feeling cheapened.

  I arrived at the party at six o’clock, exactly on time. It was the sort of enormous and elegant brick building I had walked past for years but had never actually been inside of. The doorman sent me up to the twelfth floor in the quiet hum of the wood-paneled elevator. I rang the bell.

  Lucy wasn’t at the party. It didn’t take long to figure that out as there weren’t more than a dozen people gathered. I explained the applicable bit of my circumstances: Lucy Grealy had invited me to come with her, we were meeting there, she would arrive in just a minute.

  The hostess let me in and introduced me to Dennis McFarland and his family and the few close friends who were there to celebrate the publication of his second novel, which I had not read. They looked at me with polite skepticism and offered me a drink. I accepted with real need. “She’ll be here any second,” I said. “I called her. She must have already left. The subway this time of night—” But there was no sense in finishing the sentence.

  After twenty minutes I asked politely if I might use the phone and called her again, and I tried again twenty minutes after that. Neither Lucy nor her answering machine picked up. My head was reeling with philanthropy. I was wondering if he could ruin me. I was wondering if he had ruined anybody else. I remembered a day we had lunch at the Lotos Club. He was putting an attractive young woman in a taxi just as I was walking up the street. He did not introduce us and she did not look happy. My lifetime ability to make polite conversation had completely abandoned me and I concentrated on killing Lucy the minute I got back to her apartment. After an hour and three glasses of wine there was nothing to do but beg forgiveness and slink towards the door. “I’ve made some terrible mistake,” I told the hostess.

  “It’s fine,” she said with real kindness and patted my arm. It was clear I hadn’t pocketed any of the expensive silver knickknacks that were sitting out on the side tables. I was free to go.

  It was nearly midnight when Lucy came home. She slammed the door and threw her body back against it. “What a day!” she cried.

  “Tell me you were kidnapped,” I said from my bed on the sofa. “Nothing else is going to fly with me.”

  “I wish I’d been kidnapped, it’s worse than that.”

  “You didn’t go to the party.”

  “The party?” She clutched her head. “That was the least of my problems.”

  It was, I realized, the least of my problems as well, but I was still furious about it. Then Lucy told me she had been on her way out the door to meet me when a friend called to say she was going to commit suicide. What could she have done? She spent the whole evening on the phone and once things had calmed down a little, she had gone to her friend’s apartment to try and soothe her. So I couldn’t be angry after all. Suicide threats trump everything, book parties and philanthropists’ advisers’ advances and even pregnancy. We stayed up half the night telling our stories.

  “The bastard,” Lucy said again and again. “The bastard.”

  WHEN THE PHONE RANG at seven it came as a real surprise. It felt like we had been asleep for fifteen minutes. Lucy’s friends were famous for calling at three and four in the morning, hours I perceived to be unreasonable, but they didn’t call at seven. “It’s for you,” she cried sleepily.

  “We’re going to Tanzania,” the philanthropists’ adviser said. “The car is downstairs.”

  “How did you get this number?”

  “Don’t worry about packing. Don’t worry about anything. Just walk out the door. I’ve bought your clothes for you. I’ve arranged for a passport.”

  “I didn’t tell you where I was staying. How do you know where I am?”

  “Just come downstairs. I’m in the car. I’m right outside. We’re ready to go.”

  “You’re bluffing,” I said. “You don’t know where I am.”

  “I will always know where you are,” he said gravely. I hung up the phone.

  “That’s very creepy,” Lucy said. She was still holding the extension.

  Immediately the phone started to ring like an alarm clock and I told Lucy not to pick it up. In fact my phone would ring for months after that, sometimes every hour on the hour until I finally unplugged it and put it in the closet.

  “Pet, look at the time.”

  “Take your shower first,” she said. “I have to go back to sleep.”

  I crawled off the sofa and took my shower and then shouted up the ladder to Lucy’s loft. “Get up! We need to get going.”

  “I’m too sleepy,” she said. “I can’t.”

  “Get up!”

  “Forget it,” she said. “I’m tired. I can’t. I’ll have the baby.”

  “Get up now or get up for the rest of your life.”

  Lucy moaned and dragged herself out of bed and crawled down the ladder. “That sort of puts it in perspective.”

  In the days before Roe v. Wade, I doubt that many American women were wracked with guilt over having abortions. They were too busy wondering if they were going to be butchered. So when luck went their way and they made it through the procedure safely, it was a cause for celebration rather than remorse. What legalized abortion brought to this country, along with safe medical practices, was the expectation of shame, the need to wonder if you were doing the right thing even though you knew exactly what you’d do in the end. We could have our abortions but we had to feel horrible for the decision we made, even if it was hardly a decision at all. So while social decency compels me to say that on the train uptown we cried and cursed fate and wondered what life might be like with a baby, the truth is we did not. I could not imagine Lucy looking after a baby for an afternoon, much less a lifetime. She did not try to imagine it at all. She was a little worried it might hurt. She was wondering when she would be able to have sex again. She was excited because this was also the day she got to go and pick up her book jacket cover.

  We went to the fourth floor of a good Park Avenue address and filled out the endless paperwork, then paid in cash. Lucy, so used to being the star in any medical setting, was simply told to take her number and she would be called. The waiting room was large and nonde-script. It was full up with guilty-looking teenage boys who wore baseball caps pulled low on their foreheads and kept their eyes fixed on the television. I found it touching that they had come at all.

  When they called Lucy’s name, she went to the door and then turned around and came back to me. I had never even considered the possibility of second thoughts. “Go to Houghton Mifflin and pick up the cover,” she said. “That way it will be here when I come out.”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “But don’t look. I don’t want you to see it before me.”

  “I won’t look.”

  She kissed me and then stopped again at the door to wave good-bye. It was only one more sad medical procedure, one more needle sliding into her blue vein.

  It was still impossibly early for all that had happened. I decided to walk to the publishers’ offices on lower Park Avenue. Lucy’s editor gave me the cover in an envelope. I didn’t look. I took it back to the abortionist’s, where I was told that Lucy was fine and that she would be out in a little while. There had been a turnover in the waiting room as the girls started drifting out, pale and wobbly, while new boys filed in with new girls who kept their eyes on the floor. Lucy came out looking nearly translucent, a lavender jellyfish, and I took her in my arms.

  “It’s a factory in there,” she said. “They showed us a movie. We were all lined up on gurneys. And it hurt.”

  I held up the envelope. “I got the cover.”

  “Don’t open it here,” she said, pushing down my hand. “That would be a bad association.�
�

  So we walked out onto Park, where the sky had turned overcast and gray. We sat on a low wall two buildings away and Lucy opened the envelope. It was gorgeous. There was her life, Autobiography of a Face, with a picture of a little girl on the cover holding a piece of cellophane across her face. It could have been Lucy.

  We screamed for the sheer joy of what was to come, for the beauty of what we held in our hands. Lucy, woozy from the medication, kept one arm around my neck and I kept one arm around her waist and we stumbled down the street like a pair of morning drunks, glancing up for taxis, staring at the jacket of her book.

  “I wrote a book,” she sang. “I wrote a book!”

  I didn’t win a Whiting Award the next year, but Lucy did.

  Chapter Ten

  “COME OVER,” LUCY SAID, AS IF I LIVED DOWN THE street. “I’m going to be on the Today show and I don’t have anything to wear.”

  I had never seen what fame looked like up close. I had met a few people who had had it for a while, who had already figured out a comfortable way to wear the suit and make it look smart, but I had never seen it gearing up before or heard the rumble of the machinery that made the wave. I had also never really thought about how abundantly prepared Lucy was to be famous. It was as if the part was written for her. Of course. Now instead of everyone thinking they knew her, they actually would in a sense. She would be recognized not just for her face but for her work. She would land a sea of invitations. There would be possibilities to do interesting things and have heated conversations and drink champagne and be on television and never, never be alone again. It made such perfect sense I couldn’t believe that there had been so many years when she hadn’t been famous.

  But god damn it, I want to be famous, I’m determined. That’s the great thing about writing, as a lifestyle I mean. You can be real down and out but still have some sort of dignity—if you do keep writing that is. Okay, that’s it; I’m stopping this letter right now to get some writing done. I love you.