Truth & Beauty: A Friendship

by Ann Patchett

  “Young people,” I said. “Very young people.”

  “They have students my age.”

  She had met with the people in the intensive premed programs at Hunter and Columbia and they were encouraging. The woman at Columbia had read Lucy’s book and was anxious to help her.

  “What about the money?” I said.

  “It’s $20,000. I could write a few articles to pay for the classes.”

  “But what about the money for medical school?” After all, she was still being hunted down for both her graduate and undergraduate loans in addition to back taxes. I didn’t think the government would come through for her this time.

  Lucy waved me off. “That’s the least of my problems. If I find a way to do this and I get in then I’ll just get somebody else to pay for it.”

  I was wondering if she meant me. Do they let suicidal heroin addicts into medical school, I wanted to ask her, but I kept my mouth shut.

  When Lucy finally lost her apartment in the National Arts Club, she was thrown off track again. Without the Bennington job, all she could afford was a place she found in Brooklyn and even though it was close to Joy’s, she considered her move to the boroughs as an exile to Siberia. Her sister Sarah and Sarah’s husband Bob had been working hard to unsnarl the financial knot that Lucy lived in, and had cosigned their names to her lease, as Lucy’s credit history was like a cautionary tale of how everything can go wrong. Lucy hated the place. She complained about all the walking she had to do and her leg was giving her no end of pain, for which she had no end of narcotics. She blamed herself for her leg, thinking that she had embarked on surgical folly and had wound up worse off than before. She was completely, wretchedly miserable, but then told me after the fact it was because she had been on a huge heroin bender before she moved and decided that she would quit cold turkey when she got to Brooklyn. But I didn’t know that at the time. I pictured her world as she described it to me: a mile from the subway, no grocery store, no hardware store, nothing but endless buildings that all looked exactly the same.

  The apartment she left in the city had a furnished kitchen and out in Brooklyn she had neither spoon nor coffee cup to her name. The move and the drugs had used up her money and energy and she sat on the floor, surrounded by boxes, and cried.

  “I can set up your kitchen,” I said. “At least I can do that. I’ll order it. I’ll have it shipped. You don’t even have to go outside.” I wouldn’t give Lucy money anymore, but I’d buy her things or send an emergency rent check directly to her landlord. After we talked for an hour, I went online and bought her everything I could think of: pot holders and vegetable peelers and plates and pans. The order came in six different shipments. I bought her Tupperware. It was my own special brand of insanity that made me think the trials of Lucy’s life could somehow be eased by the order of Tupperware.

  One day in the middle of the summer, Lucy’s doctor, Stuart, called me. As soon as I heard his voice, my heart froze in my chest. I leaned my head back against the wall where I stood and closed my eyes. “Lucy’s dead,” I said.

  “What!” Stuart said.

  “There’s only one reason you’d call me.”

  It turned out there were two reasons: Stuart and his girlfriend were coming to Tennessee on vacation and he wanted some advice about places to see. We laughed about it because everything was fine, but for the rest of the day I felt cold.

  I started hearing from Lucy less and less again. She wouldn’t return my calls. The worse things got, the more she avoided me: I was too judgmental; she hated to disappoint me; both things were true. When she finally surfaced again at the end of the summer, she had been using for two months solid and was just coming out of it. The difference was, this time she knew for sure: it was over. You couldn’t pay her to use heroin again. Before she had never been absolutely positive, but this was something else entirely.

  SHE LEFT BROOKLYN. She had been fired from her job in the low-residency graduate program and was out of money and anyway, she hated Brooklyn. She said she had gotten the dates of the premed program wrong and so she’d already missed the first two classes. She thought it was better to wait and start in the winter term. She moved out to a farm in Connecticut to live with her childhood friend, Stephen. He also kept a tiny rent-controlled apartment on the Upper East Side and it gave Lucy a place to go when she wanted to spend the night in the city. In the autumn she went there and left a message on Lucie B-B’s answering machine. She was going to kill herself by taking an overdose of heroin. Lucie was in Cambridge when she picked up the message from New York, but she called Sophie, who remembered the phone number at Stephen’s apartment and so with a little bit of fast Internet work was able to figure out the address. Since neither of them was in the city, they called Lucy’s friend Ben in the middle of the night, who rushed over to find Lucy sick and high and wide awake, the door unlocked, shooting heroin.

  Joy was the one who called me. Joy always got stuck with the psych ward duty. She had lost a sister when she was five, two of her best friends had died in accidents, and her father had died the year before. She sat in Lucy’s room at the hospital and told her that she just wasn’t up to having to sort through another dead friend’s things.

  “I kept telling her, I can’t believe I’m sitting here, having this conversation with you and you’re going to be dead,” Joy said to me over the phone.

  “Lucy’s not going to die,” I said. Suddenly I was angry. “These are candy-ass suicide attempts. She may wind up homeless. She may alienate everyone she knows, but she isn’t going to die. Lucy will be the last one of us left standing.” Life had been conspiring to kill Lucy since she was ten years old and life had failed. At every turn she wrestled with death. She always won.

  “She looked me right in the face,” Joy said. “She told me she wished she’d succeeded.”

  The next night I talked to Lucy from the pay phone for a long time. It was cold and bright in Nashville and I stood outside in my backyard and looked up at the stars. Lucy told me she was going into rehab in Connecticut. In the middle of all the talk about fresh starts and new jobs, we started talking about Nabokov, and then we were talking about the night sky, the different sides we saw from New York and Tennessee, and then about the metaphysical process of sight. She told me she had just found out that stevensite was actually named for a man named Stevens, who had discovered it.

  “I don’t even know what stevensite is.”

  “It’s a mineral,” she told me.

  “Who will I talk to if you keep going like this?” I wanted to know. “Who will there be for me to talk to?”

  “I’ll get over this,” she said. “We’ll look back and call these the heroin years. We’ll say, ‘Do you remember when Lucy was a heroin addict?’ ”

  “We thought it was very serious,” I said.

  “We thought she was gone for good,” Lucy said, “but then something happened, no one ever knew what it was, but one day she straightened back up. When you look at how wonderful her life is now, you can hardly even believe it was really her.”

  Chapter Eighteen

  LUCY STAYED IN REHAB OUT IN CONNECTICUT FOR A while and then went back to Stephen’s to do the rest of the program as an outpatient. She was as sullen as a ninth-grader sent to summer school to repeat algebra.

  “I’m not like those people,” she told me. “I’m not an addict.”

  “For God’s sake, if you won’t even admit that you’re an addict, then why are you doing this?”

  “For my friends,” she said. “So my friends will trust me again and get off my back.”

  “You don’t do rehab for your friends.”

  “Well, I guess it’s possible since that’s what I’m doing. It’s complete bullshit, even the whole twelve-step thing, ‘We believe in a higher power.’ I just said to them, ‘You can’t expect me to believe there’s a God just because you tell me there’s a God.’ I’m supposed to put aside a thousand years of philosophy just because some social worke
r tells me that there’s a God?”

  “So now you’re the smartest person in rehab.”

  “I’ll quit using drugs because I want to quit.”

  “Have you quit?”

  “Of course I have,” she said. She was furious. We were both furious. She got pneumonia again and wound up in the hospital but checked herself out a day later against doctor’s orders. They were Connecticut doctors. They had no idea what in the hell they were talking about.

  “I have to move back into the city,” she said. “I need to be back with my friends.”

  “You can’t move back. You don’t have any money. You’re in terrible health. You’ve got to just lie low for a while, take care of yourself.” I thought of Andy, who was desperately trying to keep Lucy out of the city, away from her dealer. He thought there had to be a place in the world where she wouldn’t be able to get her hands on drugs.

  “I can live in Stephen’s apartment. It’s less expensive to live in the city if you know what you’re doing.”

  I was always telling her no. No and wait and stay where you are. No had become my habit with Lucy and it seemed like especially good advice now that every step forward looked like it was straight off a cliff.

  I WAS COMING to the city in December to go to a movie premier and the Christmas party at the New York Times. I didn’t tell Lucy because she would have wanted to come and if she had come, she would have ruined it for me. Karl and I were only going to be there two nights, and I wanted to have some fun. It would be the first time I had ever gone to the city and not told Lucy I was there. A few hours before I left, she called me.

  “I got you!” she said.

  “Have you been trying to get me? I’ve left you a dozen messages and you never call me back.”

  “I don’t like your answering machine,” Lucy said. “I won’t talk to it.” I had just gotten a new machine with a standard electronic voice instead of my voice so that the crazy strangers who had started calling me would be unsure as to whether or not they had the right number. I explained this to her but she didn’t care. “I’m only going to talk to you in person until you change your message.”

  I almost told her, I’m coming to New York today and we can meet for dinner tonight, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I was thinking of coming to Nashville for Christmas,” she said.

  “I’ll be in Atlanta.”

  “Then maybe I’ll come and spend Christmas with your mother. I’d like to hang out with your mother.”

  “You can call her,” I said, “but Christmas is two weeks away.”

  “It would probably be hard to get a ticket,” she said sadly. “But I miss you so much.”

  “The important thing is you’re getting better.” It was a mean thing to say. I didn’t miss her. And I needed to pack.

  “Are you saying you don’t miss me?”

  “Of course I miss you.”

  “I love you,” she said wistfully, sweetly.

  “I love you, too,” I said. I did, though at the moment it was a rushed sort of love.

  There was a pause on the line and then Lucy sighed. “Okay, then. I guess I should go. We should talk more often. We should start talking every day again.”

  “We should,” I said. “We’re better when we talk every day.”

  After I hung up the phone, it rang a minute later.

  “You think I’m talented, don’t you?” Lucy said.

  “Of course I think you’re talented.”

  “Okay. I was just checking. Good-bye again.”

  And then she was gone.

  For some strange reason birds keep crashing into my window [she had written to me from Aberdeen in 1990]. The second one just bonked into it while I was sitting here, and two did yesterday also. Maybe it’s an omen (didn’t I write a poem with birds crashing into windows once?) I remember it now: it was a bad omen in the poem. Do you ever have premonitions? I have black empty ones all the time, not of a bad future, but of no future. It scares me a great deal, I can’t describe it, but it feels so certain. I like to think it is only my imagination, a result of my depression.

  We came back from New York on December 18, 2002, a Wednesday afternoon. When Stuart called me at ten-thirty that night, I was already asleep. This time he was calling to say that Lucy was dead. His voice was surprised and afraid. He wasn’t sure of the sentence himself. “Ann,” he said. “Lucy’s dead.” When I hung up the phone I gave myself a few minutes in the dark to lie in bed and pretend I had been dreaming. He still had my number programmed into his cellphone from his trip to Tennessee, so when he heard from the medical examiner, I was the first person he called. I called Joy, who called Sophie, who called Lucie, and from there the phone calls made their rounds. When the phone call reached Stephen to tell him Lucy was dead, he said he knew because he was sitting on the bed with her body and the police were there. It was Stephen who had gone looking for her when she didn’t return his calls and it was Stephen who had found her in his little apartment in the city.

  At three o’clock in the morning, I drove to Karl’s house and when I woke him up and told him what I knew I started to cry, because I had just begun the second half of my life, the half that would be lived without Lucy.

  WHEN THE CORONER’S REPORT came back weeks later we were told that while she had heroin in her system, it was not a lethal dosage. There was food on the table, and she was in bed. She had not asphyxiated, as everyone had thought at first. All I knew for sure was that she was dead. What combination of things brought that about would be impossible to say. Still, I took a little comfort thinking maybe she was not so terribly unhappy in that moment. Maybe she was sleepy and full and pleasantly high and had just crawled beneath her blanket to sleep. Her death was ruled an accidental overdose.

  I can manage to conjure up all sorts of alternate scenarios, my favorite being the one in which I take her with me to the parties in New York. She wears the silvery silk cocktail dress with the full skirt and everyone is so glad to see her and she has a wonderful time, so she thinks she’ll put the heroin off for a little while because, after all, I’m around, and so she lives for another week, and because she is feeling stronger, she lives for the week after that as well. She goes on for a month, and then a year. I try not to be greedy. I try to tell myself not to ask for more than a year, and then I wonder who it is I’m asking. She is dead, and I have nothing to ask for at all. The truth is I would have settled for a week. In that time I would have found my patience again. It had come back to me a hundred times before. That was part of Lucy’s genius in having so many friends. We all lost our patience with her, but never at the same time. If one of us was tired, there was always someone else to pick up the lamp and lead her home. It would have been me again, I know that. There was a time, just a moment that night in the Park Avenue Café, I had thought I could let her go. But now I know I was simply not cut out for life without her. I am living that life now and would not choose it. If Lucy couldn’t give up the heroin, I could not give up Lucy.

  Most nights I dream of her. I am in a strange city and I see her sitting in a café, drinking coffee and writing in a notebook. She is frail beyond anything I could have imagined, barely able to pick up her cup with two hands, but she’s happy to see me. I run to her, kiss her, and she pulls herself up in my arms to sit in my lap and curl against me like a little bird.

  “I thought you were dead,” I say, joyful because there she is, still alive, still mine. I wrap my arms around her, her forehead pressing into the curve of my neck. “Everyone thinks that you’re dead.”

  “I had to try to get better one more time,” she says, her voice tired. “I just didn’t want to put everyone through it again, me trying to pull myself together, me failing.” She tells me she is in a very secret rehab. It is only for people who everyone thinks are already dead. There is only a fifty-fifty chance of her making it, but if she got through the program she would be clean and well forever. “I figure this way if I die no one will know it, no one
will have to go through all that sadness again, and if I live I’ll be absolutely better and then everyone will be so happy to see me.”

  “We’d be happy to see you no matter how you are.”

  “Trust me,” she says, touching my wrist.

  In the dark bar, which might have been Café Drummond in Aberdeen, she is on my lap and I am tearing up tiny bites of croissants filled with almond paste and feeding them to her, when I suddenly remember something. “Oh my God, Lucy, I’m writing a book about you being dead.” I feel embarrassed somehow, as if this proves I had lost faith in her ability to still be alive. “I’m so sorry. I’ll throw it away.”

  Lucy shakes her head. I could feel her in my arms, just the weight of her bones, the brush of her head against my cheek. “Go ahead and write it,” she says. “I’ll probably die. Even if I don’t die now, I’ll die sooner or later, right?”

  Night after night after night I find her, always in a public place, a museum, a restaurant, on a train. Every night she’s glad to see me and she folds into my arms. But each time there is less of her to hold on to. I could see her kindness in letting people think she’s dead. It was going to be horrible to lose her again. As time passes I see her less often in my dreams, though she would still call me from the secret rehab. They weren’t letting her out anymore, she tells me, but she’s allowed to call me since I already know the truth. In this little way I am allowed to visit my dead.