by Ann Patchett
A few days after the swallowing survey, Karl and I came to New York to go to the opera. I bought three tickets for both nights. Lucy and I had taken in a lot of opera together over the years. She did an extremely impressive imitation of the Queen of the Night and was always trilling as we walked past the fountain at Lincoln Center. But this time she was depressed and wouldn’t sing. It was March and freezing and Lucy looked nearly lost inside her big leather jacket. Before Tosca, we had dinner at Mr. Chow’s and she talked to Karl about her medical options. She wanted him to explain the survey in a way that the doctors hadn’t had the time for. It was early and we more or less had the restaurant to ourselves. When the food came, she couldn’t eat any of it. Everything we’d ordered had turned out to be too spicy or too chewy. We said we’d be glad to go someplace else, but Lucy shook it off and ordered another drink. Her eyes were damp and red and she wiped at them with her fingers. “I’m just so tired,” she said. “I’m not sleeping.”
Lucy had recently gone on antidepressants, but every one she tried kept her up, and then she tried sleeping pills. “It’s a work in progress,” she said.
After the opera Karl went back to the hotel and Lucy and I went for drinks at a bar near Lincoln Center. We had been there once before with my mother when the three of us had gone to see La Bohème. Lucy had asked for a glass of sherry. The bartender brought my mother and me our drinks and then set down a plate of strawberries and blueberries in front of Lucy.
We looked at the fruit, completely unable to make the connection, and then it dawned on us. “Sherry,” she said. “Not berries.”
The bartender, never looking at her, whisked up the plate and set it in front of a pretty girl sitting alone on the other side of the bar. He leaned over and whispered something to her, which made her laugh. A minute later he came back holding another plate. “For you,” he said. He set down a plate of maraschino cherries in front of Lucy.
“SHERRY!” she said.
He looked at her as if she had just wandered in from Uzbekistan and demanded a goat.
“SHERRY!” I said, ready to tear him apart. “It’s a DRINK. Give her a glass of sherry.”
“There is no such thing,” the bartender said, and turned away.
Now we laughed about the sherry-berry-cherry story, and then when we were finished laughing Lucy told me how badly things were going. She was lonely, she wasn’t writing, and she couldn’t bear living without teeth anymore.
“I’m going to have a fund-raiser for my teeth,” she said. “I’m going to call it Let Her Eat Steak.”
“I could get people to sponsor individual teeth. For $1,500 you could be a tooth fairy. Between the two of us, we could come up with a whole mouthful. We could even get tiny donor plaques to attach at the gum line. ‘This tooth is brought to you through the generous contributions of Ann Patchett and Karl VanDevender.’ ”
“A little plaque on my teeth?” Lucy said.
Even though we could come up with ways to get the money, the implants were still unobtainable. The plastic surgeon Lucy saw in Nashville was right; there simply wasn’t enough bone to sink them into. She had started talking to other surgeons, all of whom had completely different ideas about how to tackle the project. The idea she’d heard that seemed most promising was to remove the fibula from her leg and graft it into the jaw. Lucy told me this and then took down a glass of Jack Daniel’s in one unbearable swallow that made her choke and weep all over again. Lucy really couldn’t tolerate alcohol and so she always gulped instead of sipped. She made the nicest drink look like she had accidentally downed a glass of insect repellent, then ordered another.
Once she stopped coughing, I asked her, “So the idea is you’ll be able to chew but not walk?”
“That’s what I thought, but it turns out that the fibula is the appendix of the skeletal system. It’s really doing next to nothing down there.”
“I don’t know, pet, that sounds a little too abusive to me.”
But the plan was even more abusive than I thought. The first surgery was to remove the bone from her leg and then graft it into her face. After six or eight months there would be a second surgery in which a series of external bolts would be placed on her jaw that would be tightened regularly over a period of several months, thus melding the implant to the native bone. (“I’ll have a little key,” she explained. “Like roller skates.”) Finally there would be a third surgery where the bolts would be removed and some shaping would be done, and maybe there would be a fourth, just a small one for touch-ups. Lucy reported this in her normal, cavalier way, but I felt absolutely weak. I took a long pull off my own drink and closed my eyes. “There has to be another way.”
“There’s not.”
That night I kissed her in the cold rain and put her in a cab. I would see her again the next night for Porgy and Bess, but in between I wouldn’t sleep. I stayed up worrying about Lucy, something I had long ago promised myself not to do.
After I was home, Lucy talked to Mr. Fenton in Scotland, who was also not in favor of the surgery. He thought it was too new, and there were no studies about how people managed without their fibulas longterm. He thought it was possible she could eventually wind up crippled.
“He’s in Scotland,” she said. “They’re just behind.”
Why did I feel like I was trying to talk Lucy out of dating a dangerous man? The whole thing had such a romantic coloring to it and now that she had decided to place her trust in these surgeons (it took two to do such a procedure), there was nothing that could dissuade her.
“At least wait until you’ve finished your novel,” I said. “I just have a terrible feeling that this whole thing is one spectacular stall from working.”
“I have to have the surgery.”
“I understand that you have to have surgery, but if you do it now or a year from now it’s not going to make a huge difference. Once you write the book you’ll have money again, you’ll have your career back on track, you won’t have to worry about owing anything to anyone. The book will bring all sorts of new people into your life. There are a set of problems that will be corrected by surgery, but there’s an even bigger set of problems that are going to be solved by finishing the book.” I never lost sight of how much Lucy loved her fame and I thought that if it could come back to her full force, some of the happiness would return as well.
“I can’t wait another year for the surgery. These will be the last surgeries I ever have to have and I need to be finished with them. I’ve got to put this behind me so I can get on with my life. I’m not going to be forty and still having surgery.”
In Autobiography of a Face, Lucy talked about how she spent her childhood thinking that real life would start after the surgeries stopped. I thought she was being ironic this time, dredging up an idea she’d relied on for so many years. There was no irony.
We kept going around about it but I wasn’t going to talk her into waiting any more than I’d ever been able to talk her into anything else. Her book was overdue and the advance money was long gone. There had been some rumblings that her contract could be canceled, but she told her editor she needed an extension for medical reasons and she got one. The surgery was scheduled for the end of June, 2000.
EVEN IN THE BEST of times, Lucy wasn’t so good about opening the mail. Like the phone, it was a constant reminder that she was in debt, behind, pursued. But when she got depressed, she gave up on it altogether. She kept a giant Hefty bag by her front door and when she walked in, she simply threw the contents of her mailbox into the trash bag. It wasn’t trash exactly—she didn’t throw it out—but she kept it there as a reminder of everything that was wrong. She had moved to a beautiful little apartment in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park the year before and now picked up her mail from the large boxes behind the front desk as if nothing was wrong at all, but in her apartment the ever-growing bag plagued her.
“Send it to me,” I said one day not long after I had seen her. She had been telling me about how d
epressed the bag was making her.
“I can’t send you my mail,” she said.
“Hang up the phone, walk to one of those mailbox stores, and send it to me. Don’t look in the bag, don’t think about it, just do it.”
“I’m too embarrassed.”
“Look, pet, you have a lot of terrible problems I can’t help you with, but at least I can do this.” I could feel myself starting to worry and I needed something tangible to do.
Lucy sprung for Federal Express and so the box came the next day. I have to say, it was larger and more terrifying than I had expected. When I turned it over on the floor of my apartment, it made an avalanche of unopened white envelopes, hundreds of letters sliding over each other like uniform flounder, each demanding attention and reply. The very sight of them depressed me and I tried to imagine how much more depressing they would have been were they actually mine. I got a knife and started to open them one by one, throwing the envelopes away, putting everything into stacks, trying to bring order to chaos. Once everything was spread out in front of me, I found that it wasn’t really as bad as either of us thought. These weren’t hundreds of new bills, they were hundreds of dunning notices for the same handful of bills. Lucy, thank God, was never able to get a credit card because of her unpaid student loans, and she had her regular phone and cellphone bills taken directly out of her checking account. Sometimes a twenty-dollar charge from a doctor had twenty repeat notices. For a few thousand dollars, I was able to pay off all of it except the student loans and federal taxes. I forged her name on a couple of overdue publishing contracts and typed up polite thank-you notes for fan letters and forged her name on those as well. I paid off the swallowing survey.
A lovely thing about Lucy was that she responded so well to practical assistance. It really did cheer her up. We talked for an hour that night and laughed about what had really been inside those envelopes. It was like having a bad dream in the night in which a parent comes and flips on the light in the bedroom to show you that there was never really anything under the bed that was planning to eat you alive.
Chapter Fourteen
IN THE FALL OF 1999, AT THE AGE OF THIRTY-FIVE, I got a bad case of chicken pox, which was itself a fairly minor medical calamity, but those chicken pox, for no reason anyone could figure out, tripped me into a case of hives that stayed with me on and off for a year and a half. Unlike the chicken pox, the hives were a disaster. Every day I would wake up in a reconfigured body. Some mornings my back would be a solid red welt, and then slowly over the course of the day the welt would break into individual lumps that would march in a clockwise circle and take over my chest. Some days my right eye would be swollen shut, and then the left, and on days with no luck it was the right and the left. My lips turned inside out if I so much as knocked against them with my toothbrush. Then the hives would leave my face for a while and go into my joints, swelling my ankles up to hot grapefruits until I couldn’t pull on any of my shoes, or they would get into my wrists and I couldn’t write.
“You should set up a camera on a tripod,” Lucy said, “and then every day at the same time take off all your clothes and take your picture, front and back.”
It was a good idea, but I was unwilling to believe that they would ever stick around so long or so dramatically. If I had known, I would have taken her advice and bought a camera.
In June of 2000 I took my hot, itchy, lumpy self to New York. My plan was to spend a few days with Lucy and help her get everything organized before the surgery, then I would go to Provincetown to teach for a week, then I would come back and help take care of Lucy after the surgery. Lucy wanted to purge her apartment, thinking that once she had a bone taken out of her leg, it wouldn’t be the time to start dragging trash bags down the hall.
“I have a sudden mad desire for order,” she said.
“And we all know who to call when the urge for order strikes.”
We worked for days, going through stacks of papers and file drawers. We took every last thing out of her closet and I made her try on her clothes and look in the mirror and tell me if she ever planned to wear the outfit again. There was the navy tunic from the Today show, all of her riding boots, a half dozen pairs of jeans, a never-ending parade of thrift-store cocktail dresses and a few dresses from Prada, purchased when the cash was running high, all knotted up together on the floor of her closet. We went through her books, which were stacked on top of each other, stacked on the floor in front of the bookshelves, stacked perilously high on the tiny bookshelf behind the toilet. We boxed away the ones she never planned to read and the ones she liked but would never want to read again and the ones she didn’t like. She found a used bookstore that was willing to make pickups. An accurate reading list compiled from her floor would tell half the story of her life. She had read every word of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Chekhov, Nabokov and Marquez and Mann. They were still there, scattered in with Das Kapital and Calculus Made Easy and The Freud Reader and a book of Lucian Freud’s paintings. The narrow space around her mattress in her sleeping loft was crowded with Heidegger and Derrida, Debord and Foucault. Postmodernism; or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism was beneath her copy of The Matrix. There were musty thrift-store hardbacks, William Maxwell’s They Came Like Swallows, and something called The Last of the Peshaws: A Tale of the Third Maratha War. The old book on French cinema was beside a tape of Groundhog Day. There was a stack of “Idiot Guides”: The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Buddhism, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Tantric Sex, The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Learning Italian.
“Why do you buy these things?” I said, tossing them off to the discard pile.
She pulled them out again. “I like them.”
We dusted the books off, separated the good from the impossible, and boxed. She was happy to get rid of novels, even good novels, because she wouldn’t read them again, but she wouldn’t go through the poetry. “It’s bad luck to throw a poetry book away,” she said.
We went through the CDs and found six copies of Ambient 1: Music for Airports (“I always think I’ve lost it,” she said). I had the supreme pleasure of putting all the discs back in their correct cases. When we had the place scrubbed down and reassembled and had dragged the last giant bag of trash away, we took showers and went for sushi. We were victorious, featherlight, blissful in our exhaustion. Lucy and I did the twist on the sidewalk waiting for the Walk sign to turn green. I think I felt more relieved by the cleaning than she did. I know I was more worried about the impending trip to the hospital. I was leaving in the morning and when I came back, the surgery would be over.
“I’ve decided I’m not going to worry about finding love until all three surgeries are finished,” she said. Her voice was cheerful and full of resolve. She was too thin but her arms were tan and strong. She sounded like she meant it.
“I think that’s brilliant,” I said.
“There’s just no point wondering why someone isn’t falling in love with me when I’m going to be in one state of surgical disrepair or another for the next year. I’m either going to be recovering from a surgery or getting ready for one. I’ll have bolts in my face. I need to forget about love for now.”
“If you could just let yourself off the hook,” I said. It was the single thing I wanted most for Lucy, to have a minute of peace from her relentless desire to understand why she hadn’t found True Love.
“Exactly. I’m going to have enough on my plate for a while. I don’t need to beat myself up over that, too.” She had talked it over with her psychiatrist and together they had come up with the plan. “Joe and I decided it’s the most sensible approach.”
Then God bless Joe, I thought.
“I’m going to write during my convalescence,” she said. “I figure if they take a bone out of your leg, it’s a good opportunity to chain yourself to the desk. Think of all the extra time I’ll have if I’m not having to wonder why nobody loves me. I’ll order lots of take-out and friends will come and visit me. It’s all going to work o
ut perfectly.”
“It’s a drastic way to get work done.”
“You’ll see,” she said, trying to make me feel better about things. “It’s all going to be great.”
LUCY HAD SPENT too much of her life alone in the hospital. She checked in alone, had surgery alone, and awakened in recovery without anyone she knew to smile at her. Yet even the most impossible things become routine if you repeat them often enough. And while she had spent her life telling others not to worry, she was fine by herself, she had realized in therapy that it would be nice to have some people around; that she, in fact, expected it. She worked out an elaborate schedule of who was to visit when, and then issued an open call for people to come and see her. Lucy had her surgery on Thursday while I was still teaching in Provincetown and I returned to New York on Saturday. I had thought I would be more useful later when she was ready to come home. At home, I thought, is where she would need someone to take care of her, whereas at the hospital I would only be another visitor.
I made it to the N.Y.U. Medical Center at five o’clock on Saturday, having gone right to the airport after my final class. Lucy’s friend Lucie Brock-Broido was there, as was Andy. Lucy was tiny in her hospital bed, a pale slip laid out on white sheets. She was bleary with pain and drugs but I thought she looked remarkably good. Even at this early hour I could tell her jaw was lower. Maybe I had been wrong about all of it. She wasn’t bandaged or especially swollen and she cracked her eyes open a little bit, wiggled her fingers, and threw up. Lucie B-B, as she was known in the company of Lucy Grealy, was standing by with a slender suction tube and suctioned her out with the efficiency of a surgical nurse. Because Lucy could neither lift nor turn her head, it was imperative that someone be there to suction her and it clearly wasn’t going to be anyone on staff. It seemed there were only two nurses on the entire floor and they raced by the room without looking in. We washed Lucy up and changed the pad beneath her shoulders, and all the while Lucie B-B made enthusiastic girl talk, as if she and Lucy were alone in a West Village coffee shop. “You look fantastic LuLuBell,” she kept saying. “You are the envy of the surgical ward.” Lucie B-B was a tall, slim woman, very striking, with waist-length hair. She was dressed entirely in white, as if she thought she might be able to pass herself off as a nurse instead of a poet, but the nurses were all wearing pink-and-blue scrubs.