Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

by Ann Patchett

  Sitting on her couch in SoHo wearing my most professional-looking outfit, feeling like a complete idiot, I said, “But I asked you. You told me I could.” What I didn’t say is, Why am I asking for your permission in the first place?

  Lucy just shrugged. “I changed my mind.”

  There were plenty of people in the world writing novels. It was in no way something I imagined myself to own. But I was the ant, and the thought of Lucy taking so much money for something she didn’t know how to do filled me with panic. It was my panic though, not hers, so I kept it to myself.

  The early flush of the Doubleday contract was a good one. Lucy had money again, and what’s more, she had a plan. After years of failing to come up with a proposal, she had finally been successful. She made deals with herself about the organization of her time. She was still teaching at two schools, but now she was determined to carve out regular hours for writing. Lucy and her friend Joy swore to e-mail each other a certain number of pages every week that they also swore never to read. In doing this they had the obligation without the judgment. Whoever failed to meet their weekly quota was committed to clean the other’s bathroom.

  One day I called Lucy and she told me she had written well all morning and was feeling good about life on earth.

  “Read me what you’ve got,” I said.

  “Someday I will.”

  “No, today, now.” I brought the phone over to the sofa in my study and pushed off my shoes. “There,” I said. “I’m lying down. Read to me.”

  And so she did, and I closed my eyes. She read a scene in which the narrator worked as a translator in a hospital, and how she came home to find a spiderweb in her kitchen.

  “That’s enough,” she said.

  “Not enough. Keep reading.”

  The part about the spiderweb was very long and very beautiful and I thought about Lucy as a girl at Sarah Lawrence, reading her poems at the coffee shop, and Lucy at Iowa the night she read at Prairie Lights Bookstore, and in that spider’s web were the poems she wrote out by hand in the surgical ward in Aberdeen and sent to me in thin blue envelopes. Her writing was beautiful and compelling and every time she said that was all, I told her more, and she read more.

  “You’re a poet,” I said when she read me everything she had.

  “I want to be a novelist.”

  “You’re a novelist, too. Don’t worry about that.” I believed at that moment there was nothing to worry about. Her writing was gorgeous. She could write a novel as long as she could find a way to stay in her chair.

  Chapter Thirteen

  “I WAS TALKING TO A WOMAN I KNOW,” LUCY SAID TO ME, “and she has a really great husband and she loves him and they have a great kid. They have what seems to be a perfect family. It’s her idea of a perfect family, but she says she can’t enjoy it because she’s so unhappy about her writing. She can’t get anything published and she hates her job. She works in an office and it’s boring. She was saying that I was so lucky because my career was going well, like that was the only thing that mattered. And then I thought, remember when I used to want to be a writer so badly? I forget about that all the time. I think it’s been this way forever, but I used to be so worried I wasn’t going to make it. I wonder if I had found the perfect man and fallen in love but had never been able to get anything published, would I be just as miserable as I am now?”

  The question of love was a dark hole into which Lucy swam daily. She claimed to be alone, alone, alone, and bringing up the legions of friends who adored her was only an irritant. “It’s not the same,” she said pointedly, as if she was being given an apple when what she had asked for was a pony. She was also not interested in having you point out the fact that she had more sex than all of her close friends combined and that often it was, by her own accounts, really good sex. She had also had two serious, longterm relationships since she had moved to the city from Provincetown, one with Stephen and then later with Andy. All of her friends liked both of these men. We liked that Lucy wasn’t so lonely when she was with them. But she said in both cases the relationships were too flawed. Stephen was a painter who worked construction, made little money, and didn’t think about the future. Andy was a painter who was often frustrated by trying to balance his art and his successful cabinetry business. Lucy felt that he was more interested in talking about his problems than hers. She believed that both of them were ultimately holding her up from meeting the better men who were out there.

  “Who has a perfect relationship?” I said to her on the phone one night. “It’s always going to be something. It’s just a matter of whether or not you’re going to stick it out and work on it.” She wanted to break up with Andy. She had long since broken up with Stephen but he was often around and a reconciliation wasn’t out of the question. I was extremely fond of Stephen, who was a real sweetheart of a guy, but I wanted Lucy to stay with Andy. Andy drove her crazy, and she could be viciously unkind to him, but the very fact that he struggled with problems of his own forced her at times to assume the role of the responsible party, and that was good for her. Andy was incredibly loyal to Lucy and made heroic efforts to help and protect her. Even though she was often exasperated, she was also happier and less depressed with Andy than I had ever known her to be. He was romantic. He paid attention to details. He had a fine intelligence and she respected him as an artist. When things were going right between the two of them, they spoke of getting married. I figured if the formula worked, no matter why it worked, she was better off sticking with it.

  But Lucy had been alone too much of her life, and in her loneliness she had constructed a vision of what a perfect relationship would look like. Love, in her imagination, was so dazzling, so tender and unconditional, that anything human seemed impossibly thin by comparison.

  Lucy’s loneliness was breathtaking in its enormity. If she emptied out Grand Central Station and filled it with the people she knew well, the people who loved her, there would be more than a hundred people there. But a hundred people in such a huge space just rattle around. You could squeeze us all into a single bar. With some effort you could push us into a magazine shop. If you added to that number all the people who loved her because of her book, all the people who admired her, all the people who had heard her speak or had seen her on television or listened to her on the radio and loved the sound of her odd little voice, you could pack in thousands and thousands more people, and still it wouldn’t feel full, not full enough to take up every square inch of her loneliness. Lucy thought that all she needed was one person, the right person, and all the empty space would be taken away from her. But there was no one in the world who was big enough for that. She believed that if she had a jaw that was like everyone else’s jaw, she would have found that person by now. She was trapped in a room full of mirrors, and every direction she looked in she saw herself, her face, her loneliness. She couldn’t see that no one else was perfect either, and that so much of love was the work of it. She had worked on everything else. Love would have to be charmed.

  When she was alone again, she decided to be proactive. She would not be one of those women who sat in her apartment feeling miserable without trying to do anything about it. She took on being single the same way she’d taken on being a writer when she was sick in Aberdeen, with action and tenacity. She would go out. She would meet men. She placed an ad in the New York Review of Books, a place where a friend of hers had found true and intellectual love. She listed herself as a successful author who was not interested in dating other authors. As for her physical appearance, she said that she was “fetching.” The letters came in and she went on several dates with mixed results. One guy was bad in bed, another had a very hairy back. Then she got a letter from George Stephanopoulos.

  “What!”

  She read me the note, which said he might be disqualified because he had written a book (which he did not mention was currently on the New York Times best-seller list) but that he was not primarily a writer. He said he had been intrigued by the wo
rd fetching. It wasn’t a word you saw much anymore. “It’s on a note card that has George Stephanopoulos embossed on the top. It’s a nice piece of stationery.”

  “I’m speechless.”

  “But what if it’s a hoax? What if someone I know is playing a trick on me?”

  “That would be kind of an elaborate trick, to have stationery printed up.”

  “Who would have thought that George Stephanopoulos read the personal ads?”

  “Who would have thought he answered them?”

  “You can’t just say George,” Lucy said. “There really is no point. You have to say George Stephanopoulos.”

  She was right, and so we said the name over and over again.

  George Stephanopoulos was teaching that semester at Columbia and so was living in New York. When Lucy called his number and got his voice mail, she again considered that someone might be playing an extremely ambitious trick, but when he returned the call and she saw ‘G. Stephanopoulos’ pop up on caller ID, she finally had the hard proof she needed that he had answered her ad. He was funny on the phone and seemed smart and slightly, appropriately, nervous. They made a date.

  It was the summer of 1999. John Kennedy Jr. was married, paving the way for George Stephanopoulos to be the most eligible bachelor in the Democratic Party, and Lucy was meeting him for drinks. I was on my way to Provincetown to teach again in the summer program and she wanted me to swing by New York on the way to help her decide what to wear. I was only too happy to oblige. The truth was, even though I was in a fine relationship of my own, I envied Lucy her date. All her friends did, and that was the thing that made it so wonderful for her. She wanted to be envied. She wanted to go out with someone who wasn’t available to the rest of us. No one was more excited about all of this than Karl, who was a big fan of both Stephanopoulos and Lucy. He got on the phone and begged her to let us get a table on the other side of the restaurant where we could watch. “I promise we won’t say a word,” he said. She told him no.

  In the end we decided on a silvery raw silk cocktail dress that was very Grace Kelly: fitted in the waist, a full skirt, and showed off her pretty arms. It was too dressy for any other blind date in the world but for this one it seemed completely appropriate.

  “I don’t think he’s going to fall in love with me,” she said. “So if I only get to meet him once, I want to look good.”

  I met up with Karl in Provincetown and on the night of the date we walked around with his cellphone, waiting for reports. She called once on her way to the bar, once from the restroom (but the reception was very poor) and a third time when she got home.

  “He’s a very nice guy,” she said in the same tone she might have used at the end of any blind date. “Very smart. We had a great talk about politics.”

  “And?”

  “He’s cute, but definitely no sparks. It just wasn’t there. I’d love to be friends with him, though. He’d be a great person to talk to.”

  “Mutually no sparks?” I was on the street in Provincetown at ten o’clock on a summer night and it was nearly impossible to find a quiet space behind a tree. Every sentence Lucy said, Karl wanted me to repeat.

  “No sparks all around,” she said.

  LUCY WAS QUITE good at keeping other people’s secrets, but she was lousy with her own. She had decided that it would be the gentlemanly thing to do not to mention the date since no one had fallen in love, but the problem was before she had gone out with him she had told everyone in the world, so now she was forever taking people aside and whispering over the details. “But don’t tell,” she would end the story every time.

  “I went to a party sworn to secrecy about Lucy’s date,” our friend Artie told me, “and then when I got there every single person told me in confidence that Lucy had gone out with George Stephanopoulos.”

  That was the payoff for the date—not love, but the right to confide the experience and see the disbelief and then the thrill played out over and over again. It was a good story until the night she told it at a party to a group of people and an unpleasant writer we knew said, “Well, did you tell him about your face when you made the date? He did know about your face before, right?” And after that it wasn’t a good story at all. Lucy, breathless, left the room. She said she felt like she had been punched. Of course that must have been the thing that everyone was thinking, everyone she told the story to. Did you tell him about your face?

  After that she asked me constantly, “Why didn’t he call me again?”

  “You said that he wouldn’t. You said mutually no sparks.”

  “It’s because I’m ugly,” she said. “I know why.”

  YEARS BEFORE she wrote from Scotland,

  Dearest Axiom of Faith,

  Your letters always have the most pronounced effect on me, it’s really incredible. I’ll admit I was feeling a little sorry for myself, my box has been empty so often, but your letter came today and changed everything around. I wonder if this is a little stupid on my part, but never mind that, I won’t ponder that just now.[…]

  I’ve been thinking, Ann, I seriously think you ought to go “play the field” a little. Unless I’m wrong, it seems to me that all your relationships have been real heavy-duty type ones: I really do believe that you should go out and learn that there are, as Leonard Cohen sings, “many sweet companions, many satisfying one night stands.” There aren’t really, of course; all relationships cause trouble of one sort sooner or later, but there is this level in which you can be with people and it can be sweet and nice and temporary. I mean, hey, you’re young, you’re a looker, and you’ve got (believe it or not), a sensible little head screwed onto your shoulders. It’s funny—I think for me it’s time I finally had a serious sort of relationship, and here I am advising you to go out and sew your oats. Maybe it’s little inconsistencies like this that make our friendship work so well. And I don’t know, maybe this is really bad advice for you, maybe you want to be loyal, maybe you don’t think it’s right to “use” men in the first place—but think about it, if only so as to reaffirm all the reasons why you wouldn’t. For me, I always wonder what would have happened to me, to my way of thinking about sex, if I’d never met B——. I think he brought out the user in me, the part that is willing to use men purely and simply for my own ends, which is ultimately perverted as my end is to feel less lonely, and for all the men I’ve had, I’ve never felt lonelier. Shit, that word comes up a lot, doesn’t it? (In all the various spellings I give it.)

  Okay, it’s Sunday now, and I’ve been giving serious consideration to giving you a call. It’s late in the afternoon and I’ve just been dawdling about all day, feeling a bit useless, and came back here determined to write, yet somehow seem to have gone back to this letter instead. I’ve been thinking about how writing, for me, is an intense mixture of self-hatred and self-love. I went to see Mr. Fenton, my surgeon, yesterday, and he was very kind, very apologetic that it’s all taking so long. Of course, it’s best to take one’s time, but it is all turning into real palaver. Things are much improved appearance wise since my last op five weeks ago (or so), but it will be three more months before he can do anything major appearance wise again. In the meantime I’ll go in “shortly” (I guess next week or the week after) for a little work neatening up the left side. Sort of an appeasement operation, I think, something to keep me busy. In the meantime, there are a few things going through my head. One, that I’m a bloody lazy pig and should get a job instead of sponging off the government, and two, that as my face gets closer and closer to completion, I’m going to have to start dealing with disappointment, with the reality that I will never be beautiful—something I could always dream of when there were still so many operations to go. In truth, I’m pretty average, perhaps a bit less so because of the scars and all. I look at myself in the mirror at least a hundred times a day (maybe I should stop this), trying to figure out what I look like, and I can’t. I have absolutely zero idea of how I’m perceived by joe butterscotch on the street. Sleeping
with this D-guy did help, but it did some damage as well. I feel sort of like I should talk to a psychologist or something about it, but they don’t do stuff like that here, there is no local friendly community health center; you have to ask your GP, who’d send you round the local loony bin for a consultation, and since they’re really big on drugs here, you’d probably just walk out with a prescription. I guess what I have to do is write, work out, and pray for something to happen next year, something good.

  For a while Lucy saw a psychiatrist named Ellen who encouraged her to limit talking about her sadness to her twice-weekly office visits. “I’m not going to talk about being lonely or depressed,” Lucy said. “I’m not going to ask my friends if they love me or if I’ll ever have sex again. I’m not going to talk about being ugly. All of that I save for her.”

  “So how do you feel?”

  “I feel pretty good,” she said tentatively, “but I have to wonder if it isn’t a false kind of feeling good.”

  Lucy did seem happier to me when she was with Ellen, but maybe it was just wishful thinking on my part. I’ve always been a believer in repression.

  Lucy’s next psychiatrist was Joe. While Ellen might have had a point and possibly even made Lucy feel better, it was Joe whom she loved, and Joe, from her reports, was extremely impressed by Lucy. She said she was enjoying a full-blown transference. It was important to Lucy that she was the favorite patient, the most fascinating case, and once again she was. When she was running perilously low on money again, Joe proved his devotion by cutting his rate while adding on an extra session as well.

  Not only was she the most fascinating case psychologically, she still posed a physical challenge. She was choking more and more often and having regular bouts of pneumonia. She went to NYU Medical Center and had a swallowing survey done that showed that ten percent of everything she ate or drank went into her lungs. Lucy’s lips no longer came together unless she used her fingers to hold them, and this inability to create an oral seal was the main cause of the swallowing problems. It also meant she had problems kissing, which drove her crazy. She could open her mouth a smaller and then smaller amount, and she was having more facial pain. The grafts that had been done so successfully in Scotland had begun to reabsorb and bit by bit, the lower half of her face was shrinking again. She also continued to hold on to the dream of getting teeth so that she could eat more easily. Lucy’s weight hovered around 100 pounds and she seemed to live on mashed potatoes and cans of Ensure.