She Matters (27 page)

“I have these old friends, from college, they're letting us stay,” I told Christopher, but in Brooklyn their furnishings, framed posters, book collection, spoke of nothing more personal to me than catalog content. I couldn't say to Christopher, “Yeah, Connie's always loved Italian pottery.” I didn't know her, hadn't even seen her since an indifferent, mass good-bye at graduation nine years before. She worked ferociously, profusely, had some unnerving drive, and I'd heard that Jim took care of their son and everything else. What to make of it, the aggressive reversal: the woman doing this and the man that? The woman seizing wide latitude. Something felt faintly dangerous, an unnamed treachery, uncomprehended,
but—Thank you for the house! We slept in their bed, ground our coffee in their grinder and washed towels in their machine, where Jim had taped up a kind note of instruction. We kept their keys in our pockets and ran up and down their red Brooklyn stoop as if, for ten days, we were them. What if
we
made Hollywood money? What if these magic towels and rugs belonged to us? At the end, we bought a bottle of excellent wine (one we'd never have purchased with our real dollars) and put it on their dining table. I left the bright, literate note you write to people you don't plan on knowing. By the time we boarded the plane, we'd dismissed our unuseful fantasies.

• • •

On a ravishing day when the wind was high and all the air cleaned, I drove up and up into the Pacific Palisades. I'd come to LA with baby Daniel to visit my friend Steffie, who said she loved babies, and really did, welcomed mine. She'd borrowed a high chair for our visit and squeezed it into her small kitchen. Such friends had principal status in my straitened life. Most of my old friends, men especially, did not disguise their boredom, and they expected me and us to talk about them. I didn't have the energy. Steffie, raised in the Midwest with brothers and sisters, who doted on new nieces and nephews, was actually interested in what my son would eat, or if he sunburned easily. She was unbothered by where I changed him, and she spoke to him. We had often laughed at our disparate upbringings—my urban sarcasms and entitlements, her lakeside summers, family weddings—but now I felt, in stupendous, unsayable terms, grateful for her plain faith in bonds, for her example of loyalty. I felt I was becoming someone she recognized, that she liked me better than ever this way. At the same time I faced the rough problem of diluted identity.

That morning Steffie needed to work at home, and I was touring around Venice with my agitated baby, his collapsed stroller in the trunk of the rental car. Our disrupted routines—nap
now
instead of then, read now, nurse now—left me anxious and exposed in a colossal city, where my friend glided, stony muscles revealed by workout clothes or backless dresses, her penned eyeliner in place all day, a velvet thread. Once, I'd lived in LA, some other me, had had the low Hollywood assignment of D-Girl. I had sped on and off the freeway arteries, eaten Asian salads at outdoor tables, my fruited iced tea always refilled. This was after the playwright boyfriend, and then the banker boyfriend, when I was trying on independence with a mania fueled by my first significant salary. Steffie and I had lived together in Santa Monica, a stucco bungalow. We threw a party, and people came, which seemed to us, the morning after, like the real miracle. They came for us. We were noticeable. What did I matter now, beyond the range of my baby's adamant reach? The identity of mother had stolen up behind me, made me renounce plans, ideologies, wardrobes, allowed me no time to shape new ones.

I know!
I thought, and called Connie's house. Old friends could show me something of my origins. Unflappable Jim said,
Come on over,
as if I'd be petulant not to. I drove and parked, disbelieving at the address, the trail of numbers part of California's big arrogance. The rosebushes in front of the house were perfect, the hard breeze brightening them. The white fence at knee height was movie-set perfect, almost suspect. Connie as the woman with flowers in fat bloom? I couldn't even picture her outdoors, our briefly mutual life limited back then by classrooms and temporary quarters, rehearsal spaces dark with stage black. Here was her husband, who tended the baby and baked and was wonderfully calm, who commented with no malice on the idiocies of Hollywood and
sudden wealth, and on the funny sorority he shared with mothers at the playgroups. He enjoyed the shock of his splendid house. Their son was at a playdate, and Jim was giving his own solitary hours to us, to someone else's baby. He took me from room to room, and he joked about the length of the tour, the numerous closets with their recessed bulbs, the soft wool carpeting upstairs. The baby was heavy and hot in my arms, his skin stuck to mine by sweat. Jim brought us into the stylish kitchen and poured us apple juice, ice cubes from a dispenser. It was a house to make you sick with envy, if it belonged to your best friend, who'd achieved that much more than you had, while you both pretended neither of you noticed her rewards. But Connie and Jim were not my best friends, not even close friends. I just knew them. They were information.

Connie, said Jim, was supposed to get back but was still at a script meeting, or something with producers, and I said, Ah, right, but felt wan. He drove us to the beach, where we followed my son in the sand. I didn't see Connie that day, but I saw her goods and spoils, the whimsical chandelier and tall wineglasses, the oversize couches and terra-cotta floors, her windows gaping over the open valley toward the sea. The evidence of Connie's achievement roared, but the woman, engaged by work and absent, didn't smell or move like anything. I couldn't remember her voice, the gestures of her shoulders or hands. A few months later she dropped a note. She'd liked a piece I'd written; and the star on her TV show, she said, so
difficult
. In a day otherwise dull with routine, I felt flattered. Ten years went by after that.

• • •

“You're really something!” Connie wrote after I published a book. “When's your reading? I'll come if I can.” I'd lost track of her,
unaware of her many plays, collected essays, her Tony nomination, esteemed prizes and Pulitzer consideration, and felt embarrassed. I should have kept up, battled my provincial absence from New York. But she didn't seem to care. When I saw her in the city she hugged me with might, surprisingly fraternal. She was more expressive than I remembered her being, what, twenty years ago? Had I forgotten a better friendship, memory's focus too keen on that disappointing boyfriend? She urged me to come over, see her house (a different brownstone), meet her kids, and
write more
. She took a piercing interest in what I thought.

I readied for closeness, my way with women, what we did. We'd go in now, wouldn't we, divulge our hearts' hurts, our marital pleasures and discords, we'd talk about what we'd hidden in college, held back? But we did not, a bafflement to me. We did not get soft. When she called, or I called her, we'd be in our respective studies, mine above the carriage house, hers atop her brownstone. Our husbands cared for our families and left us alone to work. We talked of writing, the nagging challenges and small breakthroughs. With appetite, Connie recounted the insults and idiosyncrasies she witnessed, described the notorious playground of the entertainment world, unfair with male antics. Her voice tightened as she argued her rights, her resolutions, and her firm intention not to be fucked over. She pushed back against every oppression, and I agreed and agreed, even though she didn't wait for me. Connie and I made the money, supported our families. Fuck, yeah, I thought, as Connie turned out play after play, book after book, as she sought my input and championed my efforts. We did not hide talent or dim our confidence but delighted in them, used them. We didn't dwell on the word
woman
; we were beyond that.

• • •

My next time in the city I stayed with her, a bed made up in the sunny, brick-walled office where she worked. It was wonderful in there. Comfortable and good taste, enough room to sprawl pages and magazines. A cluster of petite Orangina bottles stood in the little fridge so you didn't have to run all the way downstairs. She brushed off thanks. I'd come for the release of her novel, peer solidarity as distinct from friendly support. The first afternoon, me ragged from flights but pumped up by the city, we stood in her kitchen, Jim's thriving garden visible through glass walls. Jane came—a producer or screenwriter? From London?—and the room filled, charged by three women in righteous, amiable conflict. Jim had set out banana bread, the warm loaf unpanned and divided in thick slices. He came in briefly and put out cheese, went back to his own work. We leaned on her counter, into the evening, and drank steeped black tea—Connie was particular and interesting about its preparation—and then wine, then vodka. Our mutual urging seemed to spark the darkening room and sharpen our passions, which grew more intense as Connie—Jane called her C, I could, too—dove into education, art criticism, Broadway economics, the Catholic fucking
Church
. We shouted, we trumpeted. We barely mentioned our children.

In my copy of her novel, Connie wrote, “To Susanna Sonnenberg you have the key to my heart! Many many thanks for your constant wisdom and clear-eyed love. It is my friends who make me feel at home in the world. I am truly grateful that you are among them.” The mix of formality—my whole name, we were not sisters—and sudden effusion, a spring fleetingly revealed. I was taken aback and gratified that she assessed my “wisdom,” “clear-eyed love,” qualities I hoped others saw, but about which I was always unsure.
My friends make me feel at home in the world.
Yes. That one I got, the scaffolding of friends. We'd never discussed it, too
intimate. Not everything, Susanna, has to be discussed, dissected, investigated. Just being is a possibility, being and going along and making an example. I was touched by this unfamiliar warmth from her, the glimpse of her heart, to which, she'd said, I held a key.

• • •

My father was dying suddenly. The afternoon my stepmother called, Christopher was camping and unreachable. Harsh and strange, my stepmother made it clear the boys and I couldn't stay with her. I phoned C. Could we sleep there, could my boys be absorbed into the summer activities of her family while I did whatever this was? It was a lot to ask. “Yes, of course yes,” she said, “don't even worry about it.” But I worried a little. I was not one of those people who could rally naturally in spontaneous crisis, and I didn't want to be witnessed discombobulated by a woman so directed and industrious. Nor was I easy with asking, nervous as usual about uneven power, tallied debts. I felt already all that I owed her. A couple of months earlier, she'd invited me to join a group of writers at her house in the country. Two houses, actually, the small one across the road from the other, her own pond, her own fish. She had come to my door as I unpacked.

“Do you like your room?”

“I love it, C. Thank you for everything.”

“Oh, good. Well, then.” She left the doorway, on to the next guest.

Each evening the writers assembled, dropped down into roomy chairs and plush couches. The playwrights, as they all were, passed around the day's pages, held readings. We made loud suggestions, peppered each other with convulsive jokes and broad, witty insults. When I read, they listened. Connie had cleared a space for my work, as if I were an oracle. Her respect was an unpronounceable
gift to me, a tremendous encouragement. Then we made dinner, the men, the women, the kitchen a tight hive of bodies, some of us at the oven door, some with wine bottle and corkscrew, or mixing together greens and chèvre and diced red pepper. Magnificent noise came from blue stories, elaborate epithets and curses, rabid opinion, and from laughter in bursts so loud and shared, sometimes none of us could speak over it. Connie ruled us, her fervent topics instruction for the evening: theater! health care! poverty! honor! The generosity of our benefactor was too great to describe, although we tried, eight of us, night after night, in our toasts. She branded me with her lion-like faith. I was thriving in her kindness.

Now I was standing in her kitchen, again, beautiful Brooklyn, ample brownstone. She'd waited up, and she hailed me as I opened her gate with the key she'd given me. “The boys are asleep,” she reported. “Everyone's fine.” A glass of wine? She poured, we almost drank, my phone rang. I stepped apart from this friend and her version of me, unsure who this call would ask me to become. My sister said our father had died, not this moment but the moment before, in the hospital room I'd left forty-five minutes earlier.

I closed the phone. A black tunnel came for me, narrow focus, blank hands.

Connie stood, not drinking, a high pitch to her attention.

“He's dead,” I said and tried to exhale, a vain grab at normal. “My father died.” I lost contact with her, my vision pinned on the butcher-block countertop, the orange tiles of a house-cleaned floor, the fresh dishtowel in a folded square to the side of the sink. Each detail stung in how meaningless it was, how absent animation. I couldn't look up; I hardly knew her. Nothing in our history had primed us to bear a moment such as this.

“I'm sorry,” she said, in a slow, soft voice I'd never heard her use. She reached both hands and picked up her glass, handed me
mine. “Hey.” Slow, soft. “To your father.” I echoed her, raised the numb glass, tipped its first sip in, must have swallowed.

She will always be in this, my altering moment. She wasn't a best friend, but Connie is fixed, salient in my history of friendship. Perhaps that left us both awkward, the unplanned intimacy so florid we knew we'd have to mark it, calculate the entwining. She asked if I was okay, courteously. “Yeah, okay,” I said, a lie. Each sentence, each sandwich, each tap turned on, in the next months would be that same lie, the pronounced betrayal of previous certainty. I would forget ambitions, come apart. Anger was already starting: I looked at her and thought,
your
father is not dead. No one is dead, except my father and part of me. Neither of us imagined, two decades ago at someone's birthday party in an Indian restaurant in Somerville, that I'd transform before you in your Brooklyn kitchen, that you would be the unforgettable friend. We never agreed to be sealed this way.