by Ann Patchett
ONE NIGHT, when we were in our early twenties and still living in Iowa, we went to the campus theater to see a showing of Cocteau’s Orpheus. We sat with a group of poets, friends of Lucy’s, and together we cheered the scenes in the Poet’s Café where fistfights broke out over the scribbled drafts of a few new poems. I remember it as being a wonderful night. The movie thrilled us, and we walked home in the bitter cold talking about how brilliant Cocteau had been to make a movie in which the poets were the most important and revered people in society. Lucy said she was in love with Heurtebise, who played the part of Death’s driver. She thought it showed a great sensibility on her part to fall for the sidekick, the number-two man, instead of wanting Orpheus for herself, who, with his enormous beauty would have been perhaps too ambitious a choice. I agreed with her completely about the appeal of Heurtebise, although the sight of Orpheus asleep in the sand, his cheek pressed against a mirror, was one that would stay with me for years.
“You should take Orpheus, then,” she said.
“But I loved Heurtebise, too,” I said, and it was true. I did. And I also didn’t want Lucy to feel like she was settling. “He had a greater soul than Orpheus.”
She shook her head. “It just seemed that way because he was already dead. Really, take Orpheus.”
We were two young women talking about which of the dead French movie stars we would have rather gone on a date with. In short, we were very much alive.
After Lucy died, all I could think of was seeing that movie again. It had stuck in my head as the only source of available comfort. After all, who had any leverage with Death except Orpheus? Who had ever been beautiful enough and clever enough to cut a deal? I was remembering the myth, that Orpheus’s love for Eurydice was so great that he went down to the underworld to lead her out, only to lose her again when he broke the one rule: Don’t look back.
But once I saw the film I remembered that that wasn’t Cocteau’s story at all. In his version, Orpheus wasn’t really so interested in Eurydice, who was beautiful and fair and pregnant, the very light of life itself. Orpheus was in love with Death, who was angular and dark, with a waist small enough to be encircled by two human hands. It was Death he was hoping to see when he went back for his wife; it was Death he kissed and made promises to. I had to wonder if that was the part of the story that Lucy remembered. She had a nearly romantic relationship with Death. She had beaten it out so many times that she was convinced she could go and kiss all she wanted and still come out on the other side. Even when she wanted to die she couldn’t seem to pull it off. Lucy, weighing about a hundred pounds, having survived thirty-eight operations, had become officially invincible. She believed that the most basic rules of life did not apply to her, and over the course of our friendship, without me knowing when it had happened, I had come to believe it myself. The sheer force of Lucy’s life convinced me that she would live no matter what.
That was my mistake.
About the Author
ANN PATCHETT is the author of four novels: The Patron Saint of Liars, which was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year; Taft, which won the Janet Heidinger Kafka Prize; The Magician’s Assistant, for which she was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship; and Bel Canto, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award, the Orange Prize, the Booksense Book of the Year Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award. She has written for many publications, including the Paris Review, Gourmet, and the New York Times Magazine. She lives in Nashville, Tennessee.
www.annpatchett.com
Also by Ann Patchett
Bel Canto
The Magician’s Assistant
Taft
The Patron Saint of Liars
Credits
Jacket photograph © 2003 by Holly Lindem
Author photograph © 2004 by Tony Baker
Copyright
The author and publisher thank the family of Lucy Grealy for the use of her letters.
TRUTH & BEAUTY. Copyright © 2004 by Ann Patchett. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
ePub edition April 2004 eISBN 9780061754814
FIRST EDITION
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