Truth and Beauty

Lucy always said it was better when people just came out and asked her what had happened. A straight question was preferable to the awkward avoidance. “If they have the nerve to ask me, I’ll tell them the truth,” she said. Unless of course they asked her on a bus, in which case she would lean in close and whisper, “Bus accident.” Or “Plane crash” or “Car wreck,” depending on the mode of transportation at the moment.

B——never seemed to mind Lucy’s face. He was giving her a chance she thought she was never going to get, and so she was committed to following his lead. The first lesson was obedience. She came home early most mornings looking rumpled and calm. She would pour a cup of coffee and sit down across from me at the table.

“Bondage,” she would begin patiently, “is not about a desire to be dominated.”

And so began our sexual education, with Lucy attending the demonstrations at night and me reading off her notes in the morning. I would make her a bowl of Cream of Wheat while she talked about pornography, fetish, and whatever had happened the night before.

For two people who didn’t know one another, Lucy and I had a lot in common, not only friends and classes from college and a vaguely stunned feeling about having found ourselves in the Midwest, we also between us had about four hours experience with men. We had both made it through high school without a single date. We both had our first kiss from the same boy in college (a sainted and tender soul who must have made it his business to kiss the girls who would have otherwise graduated unkissed). We were younger than any other twenty-two-year-old girls in the world, still believing absolutely that there was nothing more important, more romantic, than Yeats. Lucy, of course, had lived a larger life than I had, and she had infinitely more flair. Not only had she suffered, she had danced in New York’s finest transvestite clubs, sometimes on the tables, where she was again regarded as a sort of lovable mascot. She had had adventures that, if not sexual, were at least sexy. And now she was having sex.

B——was a cautionary tale about being careful of what you wish for: he was handsome and bright and attentive. He picked up Lucy in his fancy car and drove her into town for ice cream and coffee and all of the other students saw them and talked about it, just the way she hoped they would. According to the reports I heard every day, he liked sex, providing her with as many experiences as there were ice creams to choose from. But B——was never going to love Lucy, and he seemed to take a real pleasure in telling her so. As much as Lucy had spent her college years dreaming that someday someone would want to have sex with her, she was slowly figuring out that wanting sex was knotted together with wanting love. The more B——insisted the two be separated, the more confused and desperate Lucy became. The only avenue she had with B——was sex, and she tried frantically to use it to make him love her. It was a bad habit she established, and it stayed with her for the rest of her life, long, long after B——was gone.

Dearest Axiom of Faith [she would write to me later from Scotland, telling me a story about coming home and not being able to reach either of the two friends she had locally], It was a sorry sight, me standing there by the phone, racking my brain for someone to call. I was seized with a profound loneliness and sense of desperation. My first impulse was to go to bed and feel very sorry for myself, but I forced, and I mean forced, myself to go out to a blues band playing at a bar down the street. I decided that if I was going to feel sorry for myself, I should at least do it in public with a drink in my hand and blues in the background. I ended up being chatted up by this man, D——and we got drunk and ended up trying to have sex on the beach in a rainstorm (unsuccessful). He came back here with me and it was strange. He’s in his mid-30’s and was dumped by some woman he was desperately in love with only a few months ago. He’s from aberdeen but lives in london. He was up here for the holidays, but was supposed to go back already, but kept putting it off because he was too depressed to face his job, which is for a shoe company. The sex part was great—a real missionary sort of guy, but a great body. Oddly, he was like B——in many ways: same sort of body, same body smell, a few of the same physical quirks: I felt like I was actually with B——in a few ways. This was really great for me, for the fact that it’d been so long since I’d had sex, I’d begun to idealize the sex I’d had with B——, and this experience showed me he’s a very replaceable person. I’m not sure the logic of that is too clear, but you can probably see what I’m getting at. The negative part of it was that he told me it wasn’t physical attraction, but because of the conversation we’d had. He’s all into spiritualism in a very new age sort of way, and I have to ashamedly admit I very proudly gave him all the soul-talk I knew. I’m ashamed of this because I took something very very important to me and used it as a device to get sex, and, worst, I talked about it in a way I knew to be (somewhat) false. I’m all for the roots of new-age and all that, but it seems to me too often confused with psychology and emotional happiness and self-awareness by certain types of people who are very sensitive and needy, yet not able to find what they want and need via art or more traditional (and far more demanding and harder) philosophies and/or religions. Personally, I think true spiritualism contains aspects of the above mentioned things, but more often than not it shows you just how hard things are, not how easy (well, you know what I mean). Psychology wants you to adapt to society; spiritualism often tells you that you must not adapt (conform). Oh, anyway, this is all getting too jumbled. He was a very very sweet, very needy guy, who, after three nights, said he couldn’t sleep with me any more because he didn’t love me, and he was in a position in his life where he only wanted to make love, not just fuck. He went back on this when, after disappearing for four days he showed up again (still not having gone back to London) and we had another three nights of sex. I guess he’s finally gone back now, or at least I haven’t heard from him. We had some good conversations, and now he’s gone I’m feeling very lonely, the way I did before I met him. It’s like a big circle. I’ve gone on a get-a-man crusade, but so far it’s been a disaster and I’m feeling as bad about myself as I ever have. I know I’m a great person and all that, a good friend, but I feel like real bottom of the barrel girlfriend material. D——told me I should do “affirmations,” which is when you say positive things about yourself so as to posit them in the astral realm and counteract all the negative things you’ve ever said about yourself. In a weird way it makes sense (not the bit about the astral realm). Anyway, I’m trying very hard to be positive.

Chapter Two

OUR RESPONSIBILITIES AT THE UNIVERSITY OF IOWA were to be teachers and writers. While we had taken our writing very seriously through college, neither of us had ever considered the prospect of teaching. I suppose we knew something about it simply by virtue of having been in the room all those years when other people were doing it, but at the time it seemed it would have been more provident to send us into the fields to husk corn as a means of reducing our tuition to in-state rates. We had utterly no idea what we were supposed to do on the other side of the desk. Lucy and I had both received the same level of financial aid our first year, which meant we taught one section of Introduction to Literature three days a week. There was a week-long class before school started to prepare us for our new job, but the only helpful piece of information we were given was the number of the room where we were to show up. Lucy and I went to our empty classrooms, first hers, then mine, sat on the desks, and swung our legs back and forth. The rooms were scorching hot.

“Is it over a hundred in here?” I asked.

Lucy looked at her shirt, which was already crumpled and damp. “We’re going to have to wear something that doesn’t show sweat.”

Two young girls leaned in the door. They looked like the sorority sisters who marched up and down the sidewalk in front of our house all day singing rush songs, “I’m a Kappa, we’re a Kappa, here a Kappa, there a Kappa, wouldn’t you like to be a Kappa, too?” High blond ponytails swinging to the Dr Pepper beat.

“Are you going to be in this class?” one of them asked.

We looked at them seriously for a minute and then we both started laughing, the impossible thought that we would have anything to teach these girls drove us into a terrifying state of hysteria.

We would have no supervision, no one to make sure that we weren’t robbing the good children of Iowa blind with our ineptitude. We were told to pick a Shakespeare play, a contemporary play, two novels, five stories, and a dozen or so poems and spread them out over the course of the semester, issuing regular tests and paper assignments. I picked works that I knew well, but Lucy saw teaching as a great chance to further her own education. With the exception of the Shakespeare and the poetry, her syllabus consisted of things she had always meant to read.

The idea was, of course, that she would get around to reading them before she had to teach them, but somehow it never seemed to happen. She scanned the assignment while running to class, pages pressed down beneath her fingers. She figured as long as she managed to stay a few paragraphs ahead of the pack, she’d be all right. She maintained a strict policy that no one was to ask about the end of the book before the end had been assigned. “Alice,” she would say sharply when Alice had ambitiously read too far beyond what was due, “it isn’t fair of you to ruin it for everyone else in the class.”

With or without reading the assignment, Lucy could power through a class on the sheer muscle of her oratory. She could talk. She could talk on the nature of truth and beauty for hours, and after all, what novel or poem or play in an Introduction to Literature class couldn’t benefit from a truth-and-beauty discussion? She would often lie on the desk, half curled up, with her arm pillowing her head. She recited the ending of King Lear aloud, “Howl, howl, howl, howl! O, you are men of stones: / Had I your tongues and eyes, I’d use them so / That heaven’s vault should crack. She’s gone for / Ever! I know when one is dead and when one lives; / She’s dead as earth.”

Lucy loved Lear. She would have just as soon spent the entire semester on Lear.

“And then I would speak the two most beautiful words in the English language,” she would tell me on the walk home. “Class dismissed.”

I bought The Iliad and Nabokov’s Laughter in the Dark [she wrote to me from the Bunting Institute at Radcliffe were she held a fellowship years later]. The first is for a class I’m sitting in on, one taught by an absolutely genius professor: he dazzles me. Last week he did “Romeo and Juliet,” which used to be my least favorite play. He changed my mind. He talked about how it’s a play about the arbitrary accidental meetings in the street, arriving or waking up just one moment too late or too soon. From these moments of arbitrary “real” moments are forged by the characters through their own passions, which insist on taking moments in time and conditions of emotion that will eventually pass: anger, grief, and transforming them through actions into “forever,” irrevocable conditions, such as through a curse on a family or a person, or by suicide. I still don’t think it’s my favorite play, but I do have new feelings about it. Monday I’ll just have time for class before leaving for NY, he’s doing the first four books of Homer, so I have to start reading. I’m ashamed to admit I’ve never read any of that stuff, unless you count the one or two abridged pages shoved down my unwilling throat in high school.

My students, bearing up under the weight of my neatly typed syllabus and ironclad attendance policy, were certainly less enchanted than Lucy’s students, but they always got their papers in on time. We were a pairing out of an Aesop’s fable, the grasshopper and the ant, the tortoise and the hare. And sure, maybe the ant was warmer in the winter and the tortoise won the race, but everyone knows that the grasshopper and the hare were infinitely more appealing animals in all their leggy beauty, their music and interesting side trips. What the story didn’t tell you is that the ant relented at the eleventh hour and took in the grasshopper when the weather was hard, fed him on his tenderest store of grass all winter. The tortoise, being uninterested in such things, gave over his medal to the hare. Grasshoppers and hares find the ants and tortoises. They need us to survive, but we need them as well. They were the ones who brought the truth and beauty to the party, which Lucy could tell you as she recited her Keats over breakfast, was better than food any day.

FOR US, IOWA was an abundant sea of time, hours and days and weeks to torch and burn. No matter how careless we were with our mornings and afternoons, there was more time, and then more. We spent hours over breakfast. Friends called and we would languish on the phone. Lucy was off to the gym to lift weights while I went to the pool and swam for so long I should have bumped my head on Cuba. We taught our classes, graded the papers, sat through office hours to talk to the young blond Iowan undergraduates who thought we were wise. We lingered in the hallways of the English and Philosophy building, running into people we knew, leaning against the cinder block walls to talk to them, until eventually Lucy and I would find one another and head off for drinks after work. That’s how we liked to say it, because it sounded so grown-up: home from the office, off for cocktails. Happy hour featured three gin and tonics for the price of one, so that six glasses covered the dark glossy table of the booth. There was time to drink them all, though not before the ice had melted, and certainly someone we knew would see us there and slide in to order three more drinks for themselves.

“You have to wonder if Faulkner, Fitzgerald, and Hemingway knew the pleasures of three-for-one happy hour,” Lucy said, pulling up the straw from her first glass.

“We are either following in a noble tradition or establishing one.”

“Here’s to not having a car.” Lucy raised one glass out of six and I picked up another to clink against it.

Maybe one of us would wander away from the bar for an hour or so, a quick errand, the sight of someone we needed to speak to walking down the street, but when we came back, there the other would be, waiting, trying to read in the dim light of a fake Tiffany lamp. It was most likely to be me, and when she came back, I would look up and smile. “The return of the goose,” I said. Later we would trip home for dinner, arms locked together against the cold, cutting through the park, stopping to swing on the swings. “What do you think?” I said, leaning back to look at the dark pink sky. “Snow?”

“I always wanted one of those ankles that predicted weather,” she said. “Or an elbow. A snow elbow.”

We had invented time, and we could not kill it fast enough. After dinner, dancing, and baths, we read, wrote our poems and stories, brushed our teeth, and tumbled into bed, only to find the next day was exactly the same. We had not moved one inch forward in the night. It was like prison, not in the punishment but in the vast sameness of the days. We were impossibly rich in time, and we lavished the excess on one another.

We shared our ideas like sweaters, with easy exchange and lack of ownership. We gave over excess words, a single beautiful sentence that had to be cut but perhaps the other would like to have. As two reasonably intelligent and very serious young writers in a reasonably serious writing program, we didn’t so much discuss our work as volley ideas back and forth until neither of us was sure who belonged to what. Not that it mattered. Since we didn’t share a genre, we could both find plenty of space inside the same idea. Lucy was always scrawling notes for poems on paper towels in the kitchen. I found a napkin by the phone that said “The Path to the Spiders’ Nest” in her own spidery handwriting. “I love this.” I held the napkin up when she came home. “I want this one.”

“Too late,” she said. “That one’s taken.” It was a note to remember to pick up an Italo Calvino novel I had never heard of before. I told her the plot of a story I was working on, about a magician’s assistant whose magician is able to create the perfect illusion only in her dreams, but before I could finish it she wrote a poem called “The Magician’s Assistant’s Guilty Dream.” I stole it back years later, when I wrote a novel called The Magician’s Assistant.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice,” Lucy said to me one night when I came home from class. I stood in the doorway in my coat, scarf, hat, and gloves, shivering. “At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on the bank of a river of clear water that ran along a bed of polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs. The world was so recent that many things lacked names, and in order to indicate them it was necessary to point.”

“You’re memorizing One Hundred Years of Solitude?”

“I just want to try and get the first couple of pages,” she said.

And so I unwrapped myself from the endless layers of winter protection and lay down on the rug, coaching her while she learned her lines.

I had read Marquez, but I had never tried to commit him to memory. I stayed with fiction and poetry while she went through philosophy and film criticism and the heavy art history books she lugged home from the library. She loved science. She took me to hear Stephen Jay Gould and we sat on the floor in front of him in a packed lecture hall while he made sensible links between fossils and baseball. That was Lucy’s particular genius as well: the ability to take the disparate subjects she read about and find the ways that each one informed the other. I loved to listen to her talk. I was never happier than on the nights we stayed home, lying on the living room rug. We talked about classes and poetry and politics and sex. Neither of us were in love with the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, but it didn’t really matter because we had no place else to go. What we had was the little home we made together, our life in the ugly green duplex. We lived next door to a single mother named Nancy Tate who was generous in all matters. She would drive us to the grocery store and give us menthol cigarettes and come over late at night after her son was asleep to sit in our kitchen and drink wine and talk about Hegel and Marx. Iowa City in the eighties was never going to be Paris in the twenties, but we gave it our best shot.

IF I IMAGINE the artists in Paris, I do not see them dusting. I believe they were probably too engaged in the creative process to wrestle with such lowly concepts as coat hangers. Unlike Lucy, I could never give myself so completely over to my art that I would not notice the half-eaten plate of spaghetti in the middle of the living room floor. After a few early discussions it was agreed that my standard of acceptable cleanliness was something she would never be able to comprehend and I was unable to live at the level of squalor in which she seemed quite comfortable. The fact that she had mopped the floor before I arrived at the house on Governor Street marked her first and last attempt at housekeeping in the time we lived together. The compromise was that I would do all the cleaning and cooking and that neither of us would complain about it, which suited both of us fine. I stayed out of her bedroom, unless all of the glasses and plates had migrated there, leaving us nothing to eat off. For meals I made what we referred to as “Lucy-Food,” a steady diet of things that did not have to be chewed: soft lasagna and half-done pancakes, biscuits and jelly, crushed graham crackers and instant coffee beaten into bowls of soft ice cream. Eating was a constant ordeal for Lucy, who had lost all of her lower teeth and all but six of her upper teeth during the relentless radiation treatments of her childhood. Her saliva glands had been damaged and she needed constant sips of water to get the food down. Her throat was scarred from years of surgical intubation, and that, coupled with her inability to put her lips together, meant she was forever choking on the smallest spoonful of pudding. On top of everything else, she had no feeling in her lower lip and chin and was mortified at the idea of having food all over her face and not knowing it, which was often the case. When Lucy went out to dinner with other people, she would usually sit and sip a beer, waiting until she came home to eat. I would overcook her spaghetti and then she would mince it, crosshatching her knife and fork across her plate again and again and again, the clacking of the metal banging out an assault of cutlery against food. When the spaghetti was pulverized into a totally unrecognizable version of itself, she would begin the long task of eating what she could, which, in light of all the effort, was never much. By the end she was red-faced and sweating, exhausted by dinner. Still, she liked the fact that she always sat at a table and ate with a napkin. She thought it was civilized. Even though she couldn’t have walked down the street eating a piece of pizza, she said she wouldn’t have wanted to.

After the dishes were washed and put away, Lucy put a tape in the little stereo box and we danced in the kitchen. No matter how dismal things seemed, ungraded papers, brutal weather, we could find the energy to spin around the table under the bright fluorescent lights of our apartment. Lucy was a brilliant dancer and I was tireless in my efforts to imitate her. “Just concentrate on the waist down,” she said. “Take it half a body at a time.” But when that proved to be too much for me, she narrowed it again. “Okay, just work the right foot.” I held my arms over my head and rolled my foot to one side and then the other, following her. In college, Lucy had been the queen of the dance marathons, dancing every song in groups, alone, with a circle of people around her, marveling. She moved like water, the embodiment of easy rhythmic confidence, while I hung against the wall. Sarah Lawrence specialized in a mix of talent and exhibitionism that made it impossible for novices to take their place on the floor. Kitchen dancing was the only hope for girls like me who needed to find their way in privacy. On Governor Street we would dance for hours. We laughed so hard and the music was so loud that some nights our neighbor Nancy had no choice but to come over and dance with us for a while. We danced until our hair was damp and our feet ached from the linoleum floor, at which point Lucy would go and get in the tub (Lucy, skinny, was always freezing and could most easily be found in a hot bath). I would sit on the edge, sweaty and exhausted, smoking cigarettes.

“Look at this,” Lucy said, grabbing the outside of her thigh. “Fat, fat, fat.”

“On what planet?”

“You’re not looking.”

“You want to talk fat?” I would throw one leg up on the tub. “Look at this!”

Most people thought that Lucy’s story was in her face, a history in the irregular line of her jaw, but it was her entire body. It had been systematically carved apart for its resources over the years: the skin and muscle taken from her back had left wide swaths of scar tissue; delicate, snaky scars wrapped around her legs because some surgeon had needed an extra vein; one hip had been mined for bone grafts and had left a spiky stalagmite peak that pushed threateningly against the ropy pink skin. In the future they would take her lower ribs and a bone from her leg and the soft tissue from her stomach and pour them all into her jaw, where they would gradually melt away into nothing. But while she was tortured by her relationship with her face and talked about it being ugly, she had a real fondness for her body. Every scar was a badge of honor, and she was always pleased to whip off her shirt to show someone the scars on her back and tell their unhappy story. She had a lack of physical modesty common to many people who had spent that much time naked in hospitals.