In the fall of 2009, I was staying in the West Village, near where my old friend Evelyn lived, and I hoped I would run into her. It had been a couple of years since we’d seen each other. Sometimes, we showed up at the same feminist event. She’d say my name, her voice rising as if seeing a ghost. I’d be happy to see her, always happy to see her Russian cheekbones and creamy skin.
I called our mutual friend Albert to see if I should get in touch with her. He said, “Call her if you like, but I don’t think it’s going to do you any good.” I heard an intake of breath. He said, “My dear, you have faded from her thoughts.”
Still, as I crossed Washington Square Park, I wondered if her number was in my phone. It was blustery out, and the paths were pasted with yellow ginkgo leaves that smelled like dirty socks. Girls in tights and short skirts and boys with stubbly faces and baggy pants were rushing to classes at NYU. Evelyn used to say to me, “You’re brave.” She meant I surrendered easily. I didn’t have her number in my phone, but a combination came into my head. I called it, and there was her voice on a machine. I said I was in New York and asked if she would like to meet.
When I think about Evelyn, I think about Gardner. In 1990, when Gardner was in the hospital, dying of bone marrow cancer, I was with Evelyn in a coffee shop as he took his last breath. Evelyn and I were at a table with silver squiggles in the Formica. I was 44, and she was 56, and her voice had taken on a sandpapery rasp, as if experience had left on her tongue the bitter taste of broccoli rabe. She propped her elbows on the table and narrowed her eyes. A little smile lifted the corners of her mouth, as she said, “You’ll have a chance, now, to loosen your grip on men.”
One afternoon while Gardner was in the hospital, I sat beside a fountain on Broadway that muted the wheezing of buses and the shrieking of horns, and I became aware of other people who were alone, reading or looking out. I was reading London Fields, by Martin Amis, and I came to a passage where the narrator observes that masturbation is almost never described in fiction. Solitary pleasure, it struck me, is seldom portrayed in literature. Aloneness is something we’re supposed to be spared if we live right. Aloneness is a referendum on our fitness for love, I think everyone believes a little. I think I did.
Evelyn and I became friends in 1978, when I was 32. I was writing for the Village Voice, where she had gotten her start. She’d moved on to writing books, and I wanted my life to go the way her life was going. I don’t think I ever said this to her aloud. I don’t think I needed to say anything aloud to Evelyn. She could hear my thoughts, and she could see through me. Everyone more or less can.
She wasn’t in a relationship at the time, and for a number of years I was a friend she could rely on. Evelyn, Albert, and I were a threesome, especially on weekends when Gardner was in East Hampton with his kids. Albert was a gay man who spent more time with women and straight men than he did with other gay men. The three of us were active in the women’s movement and in gay liberation. Albert and Evelyn were a couple, and I was their niece or third wheel. Evelyn and I were sisters. I didn’t see my actual sister Ellen much in those years.
In Evelyn’s mind—the way I saw her, anyway—she was every intelligent woman who had been sold short in the world because she didn’t come from money and maybe didn’t have the best haircut. Basically, she was Jane Eyre, looking off at the hazy hills from Thornfield Hall, yearning to be recognized as a creature of “spirit and mind.” If you asked her what she meant by the word spirit, she would narrow her eyes and say, “How can you not know?” In her mind, too, there was always a fabulous dinner party she hadn’t been invited to, where people with the most mind and spirit carved the world into pieces they could digest. Susan Sontag was at these dinners. Susan Sontag was at the dinners because she wasn’t a feminist. She wasn’t a feminist because feminism wasn’t a glamorous position to hold and feminists had no social power. In the 1960s and 1970s, the feminists I knew weren’t looking to get to the party. They were looking to bust up the party.
Evelyn created her own salons, mixing feminists, leftists, gay activists, theater people, and artists. Her parties would be noisy and fluid, 50 or 60 bodies crammed into her two rooms, and sex would be bouncing off the walls, the kind of sex that rises up from excited conversation and the feeling of being in the place where everything you care about is going on. At two in the morning, a group of us would settle in the living room. Someone would introduce a topic, and then, like a jazz improvisation, others would build on the ideas. At three or four, Albert and I would help clean up. We were always the last to leave. Evelyn’s place had to be in perfect order before she went to bed, so she could wake up the next day and face her work.
Several times a week Evelyn and I walked the city, miles and miles with my dog, Sasha. We went to movies and plays, hung out at book parties. Weekends we’d hike in the hills near a tiny cottage she’d built in upstate New York.
In July of 1982, my father died of liver cancer, a mere five weeks after learning he was ill. During the month of August, Gardner and I rented a house in East Hampton, where I worked on an article about the Right to Life movement. Directly following my father’s funeral, I drove to a Right to Life convention in Cherry Hill, N. J., where I inspected a closet full of fetuses in bottles. Shelf after shelf, their giant heads pressed against the glass. It was as if a child had gone berserk and drowned all her dolls. The shock value of such props is that we can’t detach from the sad pickled beings, and the grotesqueness of all that death, on one side the womb and on the other the grave, was funny in a way I think of as Jewish.
Evelyn was this kind of Jew as well. One spring, at an artist colony she stayed at, she became friends with a painter, and when I asked her what the woman looked like, Evelyn said, “A monkey.” We had a mutual friend in the women’s movement whose face, I thought, also had a simian aspect. I said, “Like Helena?” Evelyn said, “No, a different kind of monkey.”
The August after my father’s death, she came to stay with Gardner and me in East Hampton. She wasn’t fussy about sleeping arrangements or food, just very fussy about conversation. In her honor, I threw a dinner party and invited as many accomplished people as I could find out there, but that night she got into a fight about literature or politics, her almond eyes narrowing. She fought in the style of the cafeteria and stoop. “That’s not true,” she would say before the person could finish a thought. “What are you talking about?” she would come back, her mouth twisting. It was like watching myself, only on speed.
I stayed out of the fray, slipping from the kitchen, where I chopped things, to the table, where I served pasta and salad. I knew that Evelyn was spoiling the party, but I didn’t want to blame her. I was worried she wasn’t having a good enough time. Looking back at this moment, I love that I cared so much. It’s the best thing in life to look back at a time when you had this much feeling for another person.
After dessert, a group of us piled into Gardner’s station wagon and drove to the beach, but as the moon cast shadows and the surf whipped against the black jetties, Evelyn continued to drive home her points, as if arguing was keeping her warm in the cool mist. When we got back to the house and people headed for their cars, I saw that Sasha wasn’t with us. How could this be possible? I went everywhere with the dog. I was the dog.
Gardner and I sped back to the beach. I was terrified Sasha had run away or been hurt, and if that had happened, I’d deserve it. He was in the parking lot, pacing back and forth in the place where he’d last smelled us, his eyes glowing in the headlight glare. He had a black terrier face with a white body, a plumy tail, fluffy knickers, and the legs of a goat. He dived at us when he saw us and looked at me as if to say, “What was that?” I said, “Evelyn.”
On December 17, 1990, I arrived at Gardner’s hospital room early. At two o’clock, a doctor said Gardner would die that day. The only sign of life was one of his ears twitched when I said his name directly into it. His body was swollen with fluid. He was running a fever of 105, and a cool blanket had been ordered. A tube leading to his stomach had been suctioning out blood for days, pint after pint. How was this possible? His blood pressure was low, although his pulse was steady. When his pulse either slowed down precipitously or sped up very quickly, it would signal he was dying.
People had been arriving at the hospital all day. It must have been five when Evelyn poked her head into Gardner’s room and darted out again. She said she didn’t want to see him this way and asked if we could go get coffee. Everyone said to me, “Go with her.” A little while later, my friend Carrie, who was at the hospital, searched the café where Evelyn and I were sitting, but oddly she didn’t see us. Maybe my back was to the door. I was probably leaning in toward Evelyn.
She was seeing a man after a long time of being on her own. They had sex, and they argued, was basically the report. As I listened, I remembered there was a world outside the hospital. Years ago, she’d discarded me as an intimate friend. It was my fault. (I think I cause every rift, and to a degree I’m right.) It was no one’s fault. She had started a reading group I wasn’t invited to join. I learned about it from a writer she’d included. The man sat beside me at a bar and with an embarrassed smile mentioned the group to me. I asked why he thought I hadn’t been included. He was a well-published novelist whose work I admired, balding and beginning to stoop. He said, “Maybe she doesn’t think you’re intellectual enough.” I thought: Well, anyway, you think that.
All of this aside, Evelyn was here now—out of attachment or obligation—and I held onto the balloon of her, rising up, and I saw my life with Gardner, and we looked like ants scurrying along. We looked like comrade ants. Night after night of walking and holding each other. Sitting across from Evelyn, her eyes narrowing as she talked, I remembered the surprise party she and Gardner had thrown for my 35th birthday. Back then, I had believed she was my special friend, and her presence now, at this passage, made me hope for her again. I felt the future rushing in, a tunnel of cold air in which voices whispered excitedly about solitude and loss. A waiter kept refilling my coffee cup, and then I saw that an hour had passed.
I raced back to the hospital, back to the elevator, with its familiar smell of disinfectant and fear. When the door opened, the head nurse was waiting for me with a box of tissues. She said Gardner's pulse had suddenly slowed. “There was hardly any warning, which is odd because his heart was strong.” She held out the tissues and said, “This always happens. People sit for days, and then they step away for a few minutes, and the person dies.”
I went to him, now free of machines. A cotton bonnet was tied over his head to keep his jaw from slipping to his chest. I kissed him. His face was still warm. His hands felt the way they had in life. I sat by his side, and for a long time there wasn’t much difference between the way he’d looked before death and now. I have not forgiven myself for letting him die alone. I never will.
In the fall of 2009, as I reached the border of Washington Square Park, Evelyn called my cell phone and invited me to her apartment. As I made my way there, I thought about the many times I’d passed her building over the years, glancing up at her windows and wondering who she was talking to. How many years had it been since I’d stood before her elevator, with its worn patch of carpet, and strolled down the hall to her door? She opened it. I said, “You look beautiful.” She said, “So do you.” I said, “Well, of course.” We laughed.
She sat in her old armchair, and I took the couch, and as her face grew animated, she was as beautiful now as ever with her slanted eyes and smooth skin. In a corner of the living room was a glass-topped table that Gardner had made for me and that I’d given her after he died. A vase of red amaryllis flowers reflected off the glass.
Evelyn’s apartment was orderly and calm, and several books faced out of the shelves— The Second Sex, Native Son, and My Dog Tulip among them. She said, “They comfort me.” Her affair with the arguing man had fizzled out some years ago. She said, “Loneliness is a sickness. You don’t say, ‘I’m lonely’ casually, the way you do, ‘I’m hungry’, or ‘I feel like taking a walk.’” She said, “These days, when I go out, I look for a stranger I can help with something. It makes me like myself more.”
I thought about the difference between loneliness, which deadens you, and aloneness, the condition we need for work. I felt peaceful in her apartment and asked what she was planning to write next. She thought for a moment and said, “I’m considering a memoir of my friendship with Albert.” I said, “Do it.” She said, “Why?” I said, “We need books about friendship.”
In the early days of the women’s movement, we all believed friends were family, but friends are not family, not really. Friendship is more delicate. You have to be careful with friends. She said that in order to write the book she would need to locate her love for Albert. She said, “When we’re talking and laughing, I feel connected to him, but afterward I don’t trust that the feelings are real.” She said she and Albert could rely on each other, but she worried they didn’t hold each other in the tender, excited regard she was always looking for. I thought she was right about writing with love. We always need to feel love for the subjects we take on—or else how can the reader care?
She had recently written a piece about anarchism and had come to believe there was such a thing as an anarchist temperament. She thought there were people who burned all the time in an oven of rage, and sometimes the rage became attached to a social cause. She thought the disposition might be genetic. She asked me what I’d written lately, and I told her it was an essay about Swimming in a Sea of Death, the memoir by David Rieff about his mother, Susan Sontag. I said Rieff felt bad about giving his mother’s death a bad review, and Evelyn laughed.
Light was draining outside her windows that looked over the zigzagging streets of the West Village. A sliver of river glinted through condos that had risen up over the years. Twinkling streetlights were coming on, and Evelyn looked cozy in her chair. Stacked on the coffee table were books she was reading for research and for assigned reviews. She didn’t own a TV.
She’d heard I’d met a man who taught in Arizona and that I was spending long periods of time with him there. For many years, she’d taught in Tucson, feeling like a Chekhov character exiled to the provinces. She looked at me kindly, as if to say, Rejoice in this connection. It’s the best reason for being alive. She said, “You are doing the right thing. Of course you have to be there.”
I felt our old rhythm returning a bit, and I wondered if a friendship that had died could be revived again if you adjusted your position a little, or felt more compassion for the people who are on fire. Maybe heaven, hell, and purgatory are metaphors for the impressions we leave on other people, the more happiness we produce for them, the larger our reward.
I felt the distance between us, too. We didn’t know each other’s stories any longer. Sometimes it flashes on you that you have traveled far or someone has traveled far from you. You think you know where you live and where the shops are down the street and who will ring up your groceries, and then one day you wake up in a different city and the light is unfamiliar. Cold doesn’t sting. Heat doesn’t burn. The air smells like a tree you don’t know the name of. You don’t know if you have come to a better place or to a worse place, but you know you have moved on.
I often think about the story “Happy Memories” by Lydia Davis, in which the narrator considers what makes a happy memory. She says it requires feeling warmth toward a person who will retain you happily in their thoughts, too, and then afterward nothing happens to reverse the good will. I looked into Evelyn’s office. On her desk were neat piles of notes, and tacked on the wall was a schedule of future projects. I’d read her books over the years and been struck by how, increasingly, she found ways to appreciate her subjects, even when she was critical of them.
That night I had a dream I’ve written about elsewhere, and I’ll tell it to you here. I was a young man in an asylum, intense and nervous, and my name was on a list of people who would die. I circulated among the more mobile patients. One of these patients was a man with feathery hair, shorter than me and muscular, a real man I depended on because he seemed to know about the world outside. I was shivering on a road and rain was dripping down my neck. We were buying clothes on St Mark’s Place, and clerks began to whisper about us. We ran out of the store. We ran to the countryside and threw ourselves backwards into a field of snow. It was our only escape, and we held our breath under a whiteness that was almost like death. Then the snow became a sea, and we swam to an island. If I stayed there long enough, everyone from my past would show up. There wasn’t a person, living or dead, tender or wounding, I didn’t want to see.
The next ZOOM clinic meets on Saturday December 13 at 3pm to 4pm EST. This session is full. You are welcome to RSVP for a place on the waiting list and to be high on the list for future ZOOM clinics on creative writing. At the clinics, writers are welcome to bring questions about their specific writing projects and publishing interests. The ZOOM events are for paid subscribers. If you would like to place your name on a list, please RSVP to: lauriestone@substack.com
Dottir Press
The feminist press Dottir Press is offering a special price for my latest book Streaming Now, Postcards from the Thing that is Happening of $16 and free postage through the holiday season with this special link: https://www.dottirpress.com/dottir-press-store/streamingsale2023
Welcome to new readers! To you and to all, please let a friend know about the stack, and please help attract new readers by reacting to the three buttons at the bottom of every post: “like,” “share,” and “comment.” I love hearing your thoughts, and I’ll be interested to hear your response to a memoir of a friendship.
Laurie,
You have a way of cutting right to it. Thank you. I am writing about 80s New York right now for a project , though I lived there in the 90s, so it was nice to go back in time with you. I miss the blizzards, walking around the East side on trash day, picking up magazines I couldn't afford from stoops, and running my dog around Gracie Mansion. It was easier to meet people back then, because we had to look at each other and not our phones. It was the best. I was an actor then, was doing a downtown show and Susan Sontag and Annie Lebovitz ended up in the front row of the audience. I was terrified. God it was a terrible show, and I'm SURE my performance was lacking. LOL
Two months ago, my husband and I were in Paris, and stumbled upon Montparnasse Cemetery where Susan is buried. It brought me back to that other lifetime. Thank you for sharing this piece. After I finish my draft, I'd love to book a session with you to make sure I got that time period right, it's a very specific world I'm writing about, and I know you would have much insight.
Beautiful and profound piece, Laurie. Friendship, time, loss. It's amazing how you make all these connections resonate with one another like a piece of music.