This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage (17 page)

“You just wait,” a cop from Utah tells me. “Wait until you're in the Academy. It's like this every day. This is what it's all about. There was a girl in my group who couldn't finish a run once and me and another guy came up on either side of her and hooked her arms and we ran carrying her.”

I know that there are many different jobs on the police force, many positions better suited to women, but at this moment I am of the opinion that only men should be cops. They're built for it. They can carry people while running. They can vault the walls.

We go back to the picnic tables to wait for our scores. Everyone comes by to congratulate me. A man named Jim, from Larchmont, New York, tells me he bought out his father's insurance company last year, that he has a wife and two kids and a good business and he has come here to try out for the Academy. That was all he wanted to do, and his wife was supportive. I ask him why he didn't go to the NYPD.

“Not a chance,” he says. “They're all fat. LAPD is the only place to be a cop.”

There are two types of people in the world: those who want to be cops more than anything and believe that everyone else secretly wants to be a cop as well, and those who cannot imagine it. Twenty-nine of the first sort are in my PAT group, and one of the second. I feel like I'm betraying their optimism and good nature just by being there. I pass the test with a score of 288. Most of those who have passed have scores well over 300, one at 360. I run to the pay phone and call my father to come and get me. By the time I get back to see my group again, everyone has left. Desrae is drinking lemonade at a picnic table with some other people from personnel. I thank her, and tell her she gave me my test yesterday, too.

“Yeah,” she says, “sure.”

I wait for my father near the guard shack at the front entrance. A young black man from my group is also waiting there. He must be six feet six. He sailed over the wall like a gymnast clearing a vaulting horse. He asks me how I did.

I shrug. “Passed,” I say. “Not great, but I passed.”

He tells me that's all that matters.

I ask him where he's from, and he tells me Jackson, Mississippi. He tells me he graduated from Mississippi State and got into law school at Ole Miss but he wants to be a cop in L.A. “My parents want me to go to law school, but I'm doing this for me,” he says. “I was going to be a cop in Mississippi. I almost dropped out of college, but I didn't. I stayed in. Now I'm going to do it here.”

I want to tell him to listen to his parents, but he's having a good day and doesn't need my input. We congratulate each other, wish each other well. Then my father is there to pick me up.

What I have learned today is that I couldn't get through the Police Academy. I am not made of sterner stuff. Later, I will be less clear on this point. I will not remember my fears and inabilities so well. Later, I will remember only that I passed. Other people will tell me I could have done it but chose not to. Still, driving back home that afternoon with my father, driving down through Elysian Park, I know the truth. Not a chance. Figuring there is no time like the present, I tell him so.

“Wait and see,” my father says.

But after I take the longest shower on record and eat the breakfast he's made me, he says he has something to tell me. “If you really aren't going to do the job, if you won't be a cop, then I think you shouldn't go through the Academy. I'm only saying this because you said you didn't want to go, but I don't think you should take up the spot of somebody who wants it so badly.”

“But I told you I was never going to be a cop. I told you it was all for writing.”

“I didn't believe you,” he says.

Later that afternoon my father gives me two presents, a medal of the Virgin Mary given to him in school by his favorite nun, and his wedding ring from his marriage to my mother. “There's a lot of good metal in there,” he says. “You could melt it down and make something nice out of it.”

H
ow could my father have believed that I didn't want to be a cop? It was all he ever wanted. My father tried for three years to get into the Police Academy. Time after time he appealed and was denied because of a heart condition. When he finally found a doctor who would slip him through, he never gave them an opportunity to ask him to leave. He went thirty-two years without taking a sick day because he was afraid of having to get a doctor's note in order to be able to go back to work. That's what it meant to him. Why wouldn't he think I wanted his job?

For some time after I took the test, I felt as though I'd failed—although I'd passed, and my oral exam score came two weeks later and it was a perfect 100. My father said he'd never heard of that happening before. I didn't have what it took to make it through the Police Academy, to do what my father had done, and even if I had, I could see now that the book I had wanted to write would have been impossible. When I thought about the people I had taken the tests with, about their deep and abiding desire for this job, I knew I could never have followed Officer Crane's admonishment to report any misconduct, especially not in writing. I was an insider, even if I wasn't a cop, and my affection for the institution was inextricably bound to my affection for my father. My father was never in favor of my telling any story that didn't have a happy ending.

And so I put my notes away, finished up my time at Radcliffe, moved back to Tennessee. I went back to writing novels. Other than occasionally jumping over a six-foot wall, a skill I have maintained, I remembered this experience as something I didn't do, a book I didn't write. But in 2007, an editor for the
Washington Post Magazine
asked me for an essay about something I had done one summer, and so I said I would write a piece about the summer I tried out for the police academy. Sifting through the notes I had taken years before, I remembered the basic point behind my intentions, and all these years later that point has never changed: I am proud of my father. I am proud of his life's work. For a brief time I saw how difficult it would be to be a police officer in the city of Los Angeles, how easy it would be to fail at the job, as so many have failed. My father succeeded. He served his city well. I wanted to make note of that.

(
Washington Post Magazine
, June 24, 2007)

Fact vs. Fiction

The Miami University of Ohio Convocation Address of 2005

I
'VE MADE A
point of not giving talks about
Truth & Beauty
. When it was first published, I didn't go on a book tour or give interviews the way I would have with a novel. It's not that I mind talking about Lucy, or that it upsets me; it doesn't. In fact, I love to talk about Lucy. But I didn't want to go around telling the same stories over and over again until they felt worn-out and common, like part of a routine you use to sell books. I decided to come to Miami of Ohio because I was so glad that you wanted to read our two books together. I've always pictured them traveling as a pair, the same way Lucy and I were a pair. Still, I can't help but think how nice it would be if Lucy were around to do the speaking instead of me. It would be a better arrangement, since writing made Lucy especially miserable. In the best of all possible worlds, I would write the book and she could go out and give all the talks. She adored being up onstage. Lucy would accept any invitation to speak for the price of a plane ticket. She had a remarkable ability to connect to people. Everywhere she went people loved her and she was able to soak up all that love. Then again, she often missed her flights or forgot what time she was supposed to show up to give a lecture once she had arrived. I'm sorry to say you've gotten the less colorful, more reliable member of the team, which I suppose is a mixed blessing. Had I been the one to die first I feel certain that Lucy would have wanted to write a book about me. I'm just not entirely sure she would have gotten around to it.

I knew Lucy for years before she knew me. The first time I saw her was the first day of our freshman year at college. I don't remember any one person telling me her story but still I knew it, the same way you know intimate details about the lives of movie stars. You don't go looking for them, they just seem to enter your consciousness by osmosis. Lucy had had cancer as a child. She had lost half her jaw. She was one of the first children to have chemotherapy. She had very nearly died. I watched her from a distance, curious but not wanting to intrude. During those first few weeks of classes she was often alone, a tiny thing with her head bent down to hide her disfigurement beneath a long curtain of hair, but very quickly she became the center of attention. She cut her hair off. She moved in the middle of the most popular students, older students who asked for her opinions and laughed at her jokes. Even though part of her face was missing, I thought she was glamorous. Without ever realizing I was doing it, I made up a story about Lucy, and then that story took the place of knowing her. I made her into a brave and glamorous girl. She was like a character in a novel who brushes up against her own death and then walks away stronger, forged in the fires of her own experience. I would say hello to her sometimes when I passed her in the cafeteria, and she would look at me as if we had never met and say nothing at all.

In fact, we hadn't met, but I forgot this in the wake of knowing so much about her. Later on, when we did become friends, I was surprised to find how much of her story I'd gotten wrong, and equally surprised by the ways in which I'd gotten it right. When we went to graduate school together in Iowa, Lucy was a poet and I wrote short stories. The poets and the fiction writers would play softball against each other in the fall, before the snows covered over the field. Lucy and I would sit along the baselines, the only fiction writer and poet who sat together. The poets always won and the fiction writers never minded. The poets may have had a stronger pitching style, but their lives would be harder. Poetry is not a business that anyone would recommend if what you're hoping for is a living wage. After we left Iowa, Lucy decided to take a crack at telling the story of her life, the story that so many people had so freely told for her for so many years. First, she published an essay in
Harper's
Magazine
about the freedom that came with wearing a mask on Halloween. That essay led to a book deal, and that book was
Autobiography of a Face
. Lucy burst onto the literary scene just as she had always planned to; the only difference was that she did it with a memoir instead of a book of poetry.

People used to ask Lucy and me if we were competitive with one another. We were both writers, after all. We attended the same schools, won many of the same fellowships; at times we had the same publisher. Could best friends wind up on the same playing fields again and again without having some tension over who was going to win? Certainly there were some things we could be competitive about: who was actually getting more work done or who looked better in a certain pale-green dress we shared, but we were never competitive when it came to the external markers of success. After all, what we did was so different: I was a novelist; I drew from my imagination. Lucy was an essayist, a writer of nonfiction; she worked from her experience. In short, she told the truth, and I lied.

L
ucy was my closest friend for seventeen years. She was the person I knew best in the world, and she was certainly the person who knew me best. She was an extremely complicated person: needy and brilliant, demanding and affectionate, depressed and still the life of every party. I knew that I would never be able to hold her in my mind exactly the way she was. I knew that every year she was dead her memory would become simpler, and I didn't want that to happen. Very soon after she died, I wrote a magazine article about her. I thought that if I wrote it all down, the story of the two of us, the story of friendship and what we had done together, that I could remember the truth about her. In the same way it had happened for Lucy, my article led to a book contract, and I was grateful for that. There was still so much I wanted to say. People kept asking me, “Are you feeling better? You seem better today.” But I didn't want to be better. I wanted to stay with Lucy, and writing the book was the way I could do that.

So now there are three stories: the one I made up about Lucy before I knew her, the one she told about herself, and the one I told about her after she died. And in between those three there are three hundred more: stories Lucy told to guys she met in airports, stories that were written about her in fashion magazines, stories Lucy told me that I wouldn't tell and the things she never told me at all, gossip-laced-with-fact stories that her students told to one another or that fans wrote about her on websites. Every one of them was a portrait of a brilliant, complicated woman, but no two described exactly the same woman. All of which would lead a person to ask,
What is the truth?

Lucy wrote the truth. I am a novelist. I make stuff up.

What exactly is a made-up story? I used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that people who read my novels, even all of my novels, wouldn't really know anything more about me or my life at the end of them than they had known when they started. I've written novels about unwed mothers in Kentucky and a black musician in Memphis. I wrote about a gay magician in Los Angeles and a hostage crisis in Peru. The amount of real knowledge that I had on any of these subjects would weigh in about as substantially as an issue of
People
magazine. In my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own. I think this is probably true of most novelists. The bright-green space alien with three heads and seventeen suctioning fingers in the latest science-fiction novel may be unrecognizable as a human, while in fact having the same emotional composition as the author's mother. One of the things I've discovered in life is that no matter how vastly different our experiences are, the emotional responses to those experiences are often universal. That's why we can relate to the story of a child suffering through the ravages of cancer and the humiliations and cruelty of the life that followed. We've all felt humiliated at some point. We've all felt that we weren't attractive enough or attractive in the right way. We've all felt misunderstood. We've all wanted a bit more love. So, even without the cancer, we can feel what Lucy felt. That is the hallmark of her art: she was able to take something impossibly specific and make it universal.

Do I make up the dialogue between fictional characters? Of course I do, but I truly believe that those are the words these people would say to one another in that moment. Did Lucy make up dialogue between her characters—real people who were there for real moments in her life? Absolutely. Who can remember what everyone says?

Who makes things up? Who tells the real story? We all turn our lives into stories. It is a defining characteristic of our species. We retell our experiences. We quickly learn what parts are interesting to our listeners and what parts lag, and we shape our narratives accordingly. It doesn't mean that we aren't telling the truth; we've simply learned which parts to leave out. Every time we tell the story again, we don't go back to the original event and start from scratch, we go back to the last time we told the story. It's the story we shape and improve on, we don't change what happened. This is also a way we have of protecting ourselves. It would be too painful to relive a childhood illness or the death of your best friend every time you had to speak of it. By telling the story from the story, instead of from the actual events, we are able to distance ourselves from our suffering. It also gives us the chance to make the story something people can hear. There were plenty of things Lucy left out of
Autobiography of a Face
, mostly how relentless and long her illness was, how violently, boringly sick she would be for weeks and months at a time. She understood exactly how much the reader could stand without turning away. She didn't write the story of what she had had to endure; she wrote the story she thought the reader could endure.

Just as every story we tell bears our own distinctive slant on the experience, every story we read bears someone else's. Whether it's a story in a newspaper or a chapter in a history textbook, the writer has made the decision of what to include and what to leave out. It doesn't mean he or she isn't telling the truth; it simply means that events can't be recorded exactly. They can only be interpreted. Even a photograph reveals only part of the picture. The frame is defined by its own four edges. Whom do you choose to leave out of the portrait? Whom do you choose to include?

It was a subject that fascinated Lucy. Making art was much more important to her than making an accurate record of fact, especially since she understood that that was something that could never be fully accomplished. She wrote about it in an essay entitled “My God.” She wrote,

Vincent van Gogh, in his letters to his brother, Theo, outlined a life filled with the tangible. Vincent loved to look, to touch, to smell, and to taste the world about him. Most of all, he loved to look, and then
feel
, with his hands grasping the charcoal or brush, what he had just seen. His hands roamed all over his mind, trying to decipher the different grains of thought and emotion, the thin line between the actual and the imagined, between light and the things he saw with light. Though he never lived to hear of either wave or particle theories of light, Vincent understood that one doesn't just simply “see” a chair or a table, but rather that one's eyes are actually caressed by the light that bounces off them. Color, while being the most visible thing we can know about a tree, is also created by that part of light that the tree has cast off. The tree absorbs all the other light waves of color, welcomes them as part of itself; the green we see is the negative, the reflected-off reality it wants no part of. Where its definition of itself ends, our definition of it is just beginning.

There are two kinds of educational experience you can have in college. One is passive and one is active. In the first, you are a little bird in the nest with your beak stretched open wide, and the professor gathers up all the information you need and drops it down your gullet. You may feel good about this—after all, you are passionately waiting for this information—but your only role is to accept what you are given. To memorize facts and later repeat them for a test might get you a good grade, but it's not the same thing as having intellectual curiosity. In the second kind, you are taught to learn how to find the information, and how to think about it, for yourself. You learn how to question and to engage. You realize that one answer is not enough and that you have to look at as many sources as are available to you so that you can piece together a larger picture. With
Truth & Beauty
, I have not written the definitive truth about the life of my friend, because that would never have been possible. I told one version of her complicated life. She told another, her family tells another, her readers tell yet another. Everyone adds a chip of color to the mosaic and from there some kind of larger portrait begins to take shape.

I hated high school. I spent a great deal of every class period imagining myself jumping out the first-floor window and running and running until no one in high school could ever find me again. Part of this had to do with my frustration at the one-question, one-answer, no-discussion method of education that was deemed appropriate for southern girls in a Catholic school. Part of it was feeling misunderstood, alone, and vaguely persecuted, a state fairly common among teenagers. When Lucy and I became friends and started spending long nights discussing the unhappinesses of our youth, she was thrilled to find out that I had hated high school too. To her, this was a great bonding point, something important that we had in common. I, on the other hand, felt my teenage angst was a trifle in the face of what she had experienced. Of course she hated high school, filled as it was with savage mockery and cruel exclusion. When she complained to a teacher that none of the other children would let her sit with them at lunch, he said she could take her sandwich to his office and eat by herself—which she did, for years. But even though our circumstances were dramatically different, the emotional outcome was very much the same. This was a great help to me as I started writing fiction. I might not have experienced what happened, but chances were at some point in my life I had felt the emotions.