She Matters

by Susanna Sonnenberg

  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.

  I knew I’d put her on the spot, presented a scene that demanded response. I wanted to apologize. “Come on,” she said, taking the glass from my hand, setting it somewhere. She turned off the warm lights of the kitchen and we went upstairs together. On her landing, the floor below mine, she wished me well for sleep. Into the following year, I called on many friends, closer and fonder, better known, who understood my family. I called on their varied ways of giving me a home in the world, but in that new orphaned hour, sheltered in her house, Connie gave me a last, firm look before going to bed and made me feel instructed and very strong.

  The Four Seasons

  Marlene suggested the bar in the Four Seasons. I would have said yes to any plan. In the two days since my father had died, I’d wandered, trailed, traipsed my city, had put my children on a plane home to their father, who’d returned from camping. I’d stood alone at crosswalks, sat down in unexpected parks, unable to change this; gathered with friends who loved me; I’d drunk a lot of white wine for the chill in my mouth and the softness of mind and muscle that followed the alcohol. I couldn’t handle the hiss of the subways and the muddle of close, heated bodies, so I’d been riding the bus, staring from the window, consuming details that meant little of streets I once knew deeply. They told me nothing of myself. My city was changed. I didn’t know where to go.

  Marlene wrote, “Oh Susy,” a cry. She’d known me as Susy. In her note, she encouraged me to call, and I did, having to concentrate on the sequence of numbers as I copied it from laptop screen onto a notebook page. Paper, the contents of my bag, standing up—every action, every object required exhausting focus. I made the call in a gray stretch of hot shadow against a building on the Upper West Side. It was one of the short streets between Broadway and Central Park, where the neighborhood wedges itself into an awkward triangle, conceding briefly the true topography of the island. I’d never thought before of the island as terrain. If I faced west I could watch the double avenue, sense the Hudson’s expanse, and, turning east, I saw the spark of green from the park’s trees. When Marlene answered I said, “It’s Susy,” and I was, and we fell straightaway into comfortable, miserable speech. I strained to hear above the churn of air vents around me, exhaust pipes, the high-pitched, rhythmic pierce of work trucks in reverse. When Marlene spoke my name, I felt thirteen and liked it, my age when my father started seeing her. She said, “Can we meet, I really want to see you.” I said, “Just tell me where, when.” I had nothing I was meant to do.

  • • •

  When I was in eighth grade my father’s MS started to worsen, and he stopped driving. He could still cook, deliberate gestures, his hands shaping the ground lamb, his fingers able to pluck at the little hill of chopped parsley, the coarse grains in the salt dip, but he could not rely on reflex, fast changes, and he had to give up the car. One weekend, Marlene drove my father and herself up to my school in Connecticut, her black terrier on his lap the whole way. My mother, as it happened, had introduced him to Marlene. Her best friend, Bev, brought Marlene to a party my mother gave, and they conspired to throw this young reporter at him. They watched from across the room. When he asked the reporter out and took her out several more times after that, my mother was furious, excluded. The intentions of the adults were mysterious, and I could not get a grip on who wanted what. My mother seemed excited one minute, dismissive the next, loved to tell people what good friends she and my father were, such a progressive divorce, but she wasn’t pleased when he stopped flirting with her.

  I got into the back of the car, behind my father, glad to avoid his gaze, which could stun me. Marlene slowly drove the road that wound through the campus, and she asked what’s that, what happens there, so I could point out what mattered to me, using the arcane terms of segregated life. She and I hadn’t done much together. Once, she’d taken me to a movie, R-rated but not shocking; and she’d given me The White Album, pressed in white vinyl, when I still didn’t get the Beatles. The undeniable cool of this present informed my view of her.

  In the backseat I was dreaming, gone. The night before—how many hours, I counted backward—a boy had kissed me. It was my first French kiss—the phrase itself delicious—and I replayed it: tiptoe on the steps of my dorm, aware of curfew minutes away, and the broadness of his upper body, the dry taste of boy, the colliding textures on his face of smooth lips, scratchy cheek. His hands were too heavy on my shoulders. I reviewed the tiny moment of last air, right before his leaning in became his mouth on mine, which had sent an addictive charge into my body. In the car, the charge again coursed, a devastating, honeyed sensation. I was lost to an erotic spell as Marlene and my father debated dinner, her sweet voice teasing him.

  I was bursting to announce, to just let this out, but my father would mock me, ruin it. He took too great an interest in my crushes, managing to be both prurient and belittling, and I had to keep this from him. It must have shown, though, my body alight—does it show, can’t you see my lips are different? Am I discovered? I scanned the campus for the boy, who was nowhere to be found.

  They stayed in a motor court, as my father insisted on calling it, and Marlene unlocked the door and threw it open, guiding me inside. I walked the dog from the parking spot, amused by her trot and tug. I sat on one of the beds. My father despised attention as he worked his slow legs, so we’d left him to get out of the car alone, and I talked to Marlene, dropped a hand over the side of the bed to find the dog’s ears and nose. It was casual, without moment. Starving for good women, I loved her.

  “You know what?”

  “What, Susy?”

  “I had my first French kiss last night.” The boy himself was less and less relevant.

  “What happened?” Marlene said, a spark to her. She wanted to hear me tell. Before my father made it inside the room, I confided the strangeness and excitement.

  “But don’t tell him,” I said.

  “I would never tell him.”

  That weekend, I had an easy time with my father, Marlene coaxing his good moods. I was still afraid of him, no one could wipe that out, but it was a novel fear, loose rather than vigilant, relaxed by the new instinct that being his adult daughter would be better than being his child. We’d been estranged, as I, age twelve, had renounced his swift lacerations and undermining indifference. I took two years off from him, protecting myself. I credit Marlene with a crucial thaw between us. They weren’t together very long and when they ended, over what I never knew, I was bitter. “Why didn’t you marry her, I didn’t want her to go,” I said. He said she wanted someone healthy instead of ill, but he always spoke of their romance with deep affection. She had introduced him to something in himself. To me she was a necessary, wonderful mercy.

  • • •

  I’d never been inside the Four Seasons, had just a notion of its status, the midtown anchor of opulence. New York, that day, those days, was breaking apart into two pieces, the familiar and the disconcertingly unknown. The very familiar Lenox Hill Hospital, home in childhood to my mother’s back surgeries and overdose revivals, and then last week reknown with the dowdy repetitions, the day after day le
ading to my father’s death. In contrast, the aggressive sheen of corporate retail confused me, a false overlay that obscured my historical markers.

  For the first time in days, with the hotel ahead, I felt composed. I could rise to the occasion, after being submerged. My eyes were lined with a steady hand, my lip touched with pale color. Just enough to be pulled together. Today, which bore no relation to the day before, I knew the contents of my bag and where my wallet was. I knew which pocket held my cell phone. These seemed like fundamental miracles, after the earthquaking of my heart. I moved amidst the cars, the bicycles and food carts, the wandering and the hurry, people with their lively bodies. I had to be careful with myself.

  I was swept off Fifty-seventh Street into the theatrical magnificence of the lobby, where I was meant to be overwhelmed by architectural decision, trains of fabric, and acres of high ceiling, and I was. A dose of Asiatic lilies drugged the air. The unoccupied couches and empty carpets in stately greens and browns. A rise led to the elevated restaurant that looked out over the lobby, and a solicitous man in well-cut black showed me to a table by the window. His cuff snapped as he indicated my seat. The window was its own dramatic residence, primped with sheer muslin and velvet, layers of enclosure. Beyond the glass, the sunlit street had become a prop, an adornment. Filtered through white tulle, sun fell on the tablecloth, a warmed spot, and I sat on a tightly upholstered armchair, scattering my loose self, as my sunglasses, phone, wallet, pen, notebook, all found a separate place on the table. I could live in this coached oblivion. I asked for Sancerre, the wine that had become my friend this week simply for its pretty name, which I didn’t need to think about when I ordered.

  In thirty years, I’d seen Marlene once. The year before my book came out, but when I’d finished it and felt an unflappable confidence, Christopher and I went for drinks at my father’s, where Marlene and her husband were expected. I was terribly nervous to see her. The girl-me loved her forever, as she was. After she and my father split up, she’d married and moved to the country. She had sons, grown men now. My father still—well, not today or yesterday, not anymore—talked to her frequently, sent e-mails and token books, thought of her and told her so, still flirting. But she wasn’t in the regular circle. My stepmother did not like to admit the women who had mattered.