None of this Ever Really Happened (7 page)

And she didn't, by the way. Lydia was the one person I
knew at that age who had done virtually everything for herself
if only by default, if only because her parents were such emotional
cripples. When she was fourteen, Lydia started taking
orders in a pizzeria and saving for college, even though when
her father got wind of her plans, he told her, "Don't expect
me to help." She didn't. Without her parents even knowing it,
she applied to a good private high school and got a scholarship.
All through high school she worked thirty hours a week
as a waitress in an IHOP. She got a full ride to Bennington,
and when her parents expressed an interest in attending her
graduation (they had never even seen the school), she asked
them not to. She didn't give them an explanation because
she didn't owe them one. That's one of many things I learned
from Lydia Greene. Never offer an excuse, even if you have
a good one. When she called in sick, she never coughed or
wheezed or made her voice sound weak or faint; she just said,
"I'm taking a sick day and won't be in today." Back then Lydia
was self-sufficient in every way I could see, and that's what
really made her attractive to me; she was maintenance free.
Now she wasn't anymore.

I got up and made myself another cup of tea. When I sat
back down, Lydia had turned over and I could no longer see
her face. I began to think about Lisa Kim, and I realized that
I knew what to do next. In the morning I called her old high-school
friend Annie Pritchard, who had wanted me to send
her Lisa's letter. I apologized for not having done so. "Been so
busy, and I thought maybe I could hand it to you. Maybe I
could buy you a cup of coffee or a beer or something."

I did not show my photocopy of Annie Pritchard's graduation
picture to her; she would not have liked it. If she had
ever been that pretty, she wasn't anymore. If she hadn't, the
photographer had done her no favors; she could only look at
it and remember what had never been.

We met in a bar near Lincoln Square. She was sitting at a
cocktail table, her long legs crossed beneath, sipping a glass
of white wine that I would discover later she had not paid
for. She was tall and emaciated. Her arms were uniformly
thin and without definition; you could probably touch thumb
to finger around both her wrist and bicep. I sat across from
her as she read the letter carefully and slowly. Then she put
it in her purse and said, "They were very much in love. They
were going to move in together. Lisa even said that they had
talked about getting married, although that would have been
so unLisa. I will see that Peter gets this. I think he'll want it.
Thank you."

"He doesn't want it," I said. She looked up. "I saw him. He
wasn't in love with Lisa Kim. They had a brief fling a while
ago. So I'm just curious; why are you making this up?"

"I didn't make it up," she said without embarrassment.
"Lisa did. It was for her family. You know, they're so conservative.
They wanted her to settle down, blah blah blah. She
thought if she had a boyfriend, they might get off her back."

"It seems like kind of an elaborate lie. I mean, how do you
explain the letter? Did she plant it to be found? And would
she want her mother reading stuff like this?"

Annie Pritchard took the letter back out and read it again.
Her eyebrows went up her forehead, and she began to smile
slightly. She tossed it on the table between us. "Peter," she
began slowly, "what do you really know about Lisa?"

"Very little, really."

She put her fingertips together and looked above my
head. A waitress took our order, and Annie Pritchard waited
until she was gone. "Lisa Kim was brilliant. Lisa Kim was
trouble. She was brilliant trouble. She was the most natural
actor I've ever seen. She created the role of Lucy Fantisima in
Gangbusters.
That's her masterpiece, and it's all hers. Everyone
who has played it since her has done nothing, nothing
but imitate Lisa, even Mandy Mejias. They're still imitating
her on Broadway right now. Did you see the film? Same
thing. Lisa should have had that part, but she was just too
damn much trouble." Annie Pritchard had a way of watching
you for your reaction before you had one. It struck me as
adolescent. "Trouble was, she never stopped acting. It was all
a performance, and you could never say 'scene.' She wouldn't
stop. It drove you fucking nuts. She was the manic without
the depressive. She was always on. She was like a drug; the
first few minutes were exhilarating, but she got old fast."

"You know," I said, "I didn't know her, and I never will,
but 'P' did, and he may have loved her, and I'd like to find out
who he is and give him this letter. That's all. I just thought
maybe you'd be able to help me . . ." I started to get up.

"Hang on," she said. "Listen, this stuff is not about love.
It's not about Peter Carey. What it's about, it's about drugs . . ."
She was watching me like that again.

"Drugs?"

"It's about heroin. It's all in code. 'Our little friend.' Get it?
Thanksgiving is a euphemism for the rush you feel. That shit
about music; when you're high it's like singing a song, holding
a note."

"Are you telling me that Lisa Kim was a heroin addict?"

"Don't be so Katie Couric. The trick with heroin—the
real thrill—is to control it and not be controlled by it. And
people do. Katie doesn't want you to know that. People use
it for years, decades, their whole lives."

I looked up at her. "Do you use it?"

"We all use it," she said, defining a group, as if to point out
that I wasn't and would never be part of it.

"Well," I said, "it doesn't sound as if Lisa was very much
in control of it."

"No," she said.

"You're amused. Wasn't Lisa your friend?"

"My friend? I knew her a long time. We spent time together.
But if you mean were we blood sisters, did we pledge
our fidelity—she caught the waitress's eye as she passed and
ordered another glass of wine—did we promise to always be
there for each other? I'll tell you what we promised. We promised
to do whatever we could to feel the most alive. If that
was being 'true' to each other, so be it. If it was being untrue,
fucking each other, betraying the other person, okay, too.
We don't believe in friendship in the cheesy, conventional
meaning of the word," she said a little proudly. "Let me put it
this way: Lisa and I were part of each other's experience. In
that sense, we were part of each other."

"Then I suppose you don't believe in love, either?" She
just stared at me. "And my trying to track down this 'P' is just
silly. Or maybe he doesn't even exist."

"Oh, he exists, all right. He's a drug dealer. That's who 'P'
is. That's who Peter Carey is."

Annie Pritchard disgusted me, drinking my wine while holding
me in contempt like a teenager to a parent or that certain
type of late-century wife who resented the hell out of
her husband
while maxing out his charge cards. Her story
sounded as if she were making it up as she went along. She
managed to order one more glass of wine before I paid for the
drinks. Leaving the bar, I thought about dropping the whole
thing, and I crumpled the letter and tossed it in a garbage
can on the street, got in my car, drove around the block, and
plucked it out again.

It wasn't going to be that easy. Besides, I didn't want to
drop it. It had somehow become too important to me (I ignored
the creeping fear that that was because nothing else
was), but again I didn't know what to do next, so again
I waited. Then one blustery Saturday morning a couple of
weeks later, between the hardware store and the grocery
store, I bought a paper and stopped at Caféé Express to read it
and put something warm into myself. Other people had the
same idea, and there were no empty tables. I was waiting for
one to open when I saw Tanya Kim, and she saw me. Perhaps
I was looking for her; we both lived in Evanston, only a few
blocks apart, and Café Express was exactly the kind of place
she'd hang out. At any rate, she had an extra chair, so she
beckoned and I sat down. She seemed pleased to see me, as
I was always pleased to run into my older brother's friends
or girlfriends. And even though I was neither one of those
things, I was happy to see her; we had a funny little bond,
the two of us, that wasn't based on friendship or affection but
rather on shared trauma, and it invited us to be confidential
with each other, if shyly, even though we were strangers.

"How you doing?" I tried to sound as if she didn't have to
answer if she didn't want to.

"Better," she said. "It gets easier." I studied her face; you
would have picked them out as sisters anywhere. Tanya had
all of Lisa's features, but they were put together a little differently.
She wasn't nearly as pretty. Whatever the intangible
thing is that defines beauty, she just didn't have it.

"And your parents?"

She said her father was permanently sad, but her mother
was "being more Asian about it." When she asked about me,
I had a chance to tell her the truth, but I didn't. "I'm okay,"
I said.

Then she asked unexpectedly, "You know what the worst
part of it is? Now they're afraid of losing me. I have absolutely
no freedom. For years they were too busy to even notice me;
now they're all over my ass. And once a week I have to go up
there and worship at the shrine of the sainted Lisa. I'm sorry.
I'm sorry. You're catching me at a bad moment." She got up
to go to work, pointing through the plate-glass window at a
camping-and-hiking store called Outfitters across the street.

"I thought you were still in school," I said.

"I work weekends. Look, I shouldn't have said anything.
It's just that they've turned her into something she wasn't.
I'm sorry; I know you say you loved her, but to me she was
a selfish bitch. She never remembered a birthday. She never
called unless she wanted something. She was a bitch who
slept around—I'm sorry—did drugs, a fact we have conveniently
completely blocked out, and didn't give a shit about
anyone but herself."

"Did Lisa do a lot of drugs?" I asked.

She cocked her head. "Why are you asking me? I rarely
saw her. None of us saw her, really. If anyone should know,
you should. Did she do drugs?"

"Not with me."

"Well, she did with someone. You really didn't do drugs
with her? See, we were right about you. Honest to God, I
think you could have saved her."

"Oh, don't say that." I could just imagine Lydia and Steve
cringing. "No one can save anyone," I said, and if I believed
that, I also believed that I was somehow involved in something
that was inevitable. "And what do you mean, 'someone
did'? Did you ever see her doing drugs? Do you know this
for sure?"

"Yes," she said finally, firmly.

"If you didn't see her much, may I ask how you know?"

"No. I don't know. I gotta go." She stood up.

"Tanya, you're really leaving me hanging. I mean, it's not
as if I asked. You kinda brought it up. Can't you tell me?"

"I don't know. What's your phone number?" She punched
it into her phone.

It saddens me that with virtually everyone in this world looking
for someone to love, so many of us can't find anyone, or
find the wrong person, or find too many people. Love is so
damn hard. Falling in love isn't. Falling in love is easy, but being
in love is hard, and staying in love is harder.

Falling in love is easy and fun. I do it all the time and
always have. As soon as I sit down on a plane or in a ball
game or restaurant, I look for someone to fall in love with.
And every year I fall a little bit in love with one or two high
school girls. Sometimes they are in my class, sometimes they
are just kids in the hallway, but every day I look forward to
seeing them. They are like lovely watercolors or wistful little
tunes you can't get out of your head. Life is more interesting
when you have a little crush on someone.

But being in love. Perhaps the only thing harder than being
in love is not being in love. I saw somewhere the other
day that a crab boat was missing in the far north Pacific, and
I thought of Bobby Quinn. He was a terribly shy, terribly
lonely boy I met in Thailand at Christmastime who worked
on one of those boats and had come halfway around the
world looking for a girl to take back to Unalaska Island
with him, to take to sea with him. He had found her, too, he
thought. Her name was Sahli, and she was as shy and desperate
as he was. She would have to have been.

Sahli was a prostitute. I often wonder if she went back
with him. For some reason, I picture her squatting on her
haunches as Thai women do on the deck of a ship cooking
something over a burner. The images are as incongruous as
was their odd little love. I hope they weren't on that ship that
was lost.

After seeing her sister, I had a second dream about Lisa
Kim. This one was an erotic dream. Actually it was a wet
dream. In it Lisa's hair ran through my fingers over and over
like cool water. I touched her cheek with the back of my forefinger.
It was as soft as a breeze. She was squirming toward
me. Squirming and squirming. I couldn't get hold of her.

When I woke up, Lydia was lying on her side looking
right at me. She rolled onto her other side turning her back
toward me. I started to touch her shoulder, but I didn't know
what to do or what to say, so I didn't do or say anything.

"Why don't you want us to write stories about love?" asks
the girl whose hair has turned purple.

"It is just that they are hard to write, that's all. Hemingway
said to write about what you know; write about events,
things happening, things you've seen happen. A fight. An
argument."

"Are you saying that we don't know about love?" asks
someone else.

"I'm saying love is an enormously complex thing. I'm not
sure that anyone who is eighteen knows enough about it to
write about it very well."