How to be a Friend

The romance of a mystery.

Irene Maiorino and Alba Rohrwacher in season 4 of My Brilliant Friend (HBO)

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My Brilliant Friend

The final season of My Brilliant Friend (HBO) has begun, and immediately we’re thrust into the smells and substances that stick to women. Immediately, the focus is their secrets, their plans, the cracks in sidewalks that trip them up. And the focus doesn’t drift.

There is Elena, now played by Alba Rohrwacher, the actress who’s been the voiceover narrator of the series. We’re picking up from the end of season three, a season we watched what seems like years ago. You have to piece together a distant visit to a foreign city. What’s the name of the hotel where we stayed? Where did we get those orange cocktails?

Elena—sometimes nicknamed Lenu—has gone off with Nino (Fabrizio Gifuni), a flashing light in her mind from the time she was a girl. In a scene in bed together, he tells her a secret he’s kept. She had written a piece for the school magazine he edited, and he’d decided not to publish it because he was jealous of her talent. She thinks he’s sharing something vulnerable that deepens their intimacy. Oy. Wake up, girlfriend. She cannot wake up, and who can blame her. She’s in bed with her love. He’s saying he’s still jealous, not only of her talent as a writer but as a person capable of telling the truth.

That ability is part of her impulse to write in the first place. She’s writing what Ferrante winds up writing, a story about the impossibility of romantic love between men and women because of the unfairness of their lives. The unfairness of their lives in every moment shows the girl how the world works and puts the mind of the boy to sleep. The boy may know in his heart that his freedom to lie isn’t really any kind of freedom, but it’s the life the world allows him, and he swims in it with no place else to swim.

What is Lenu going to face in this episode? The confused rage of her two daughters whom, for two years, she leaves in order to be with Nino. The violent rage of Pietro, her husband, who’s been shown she never really loved him. The physical and verbal hatred of her mother, who feels the meaning of her life stamped into mud by her daughter’s refusal to duplicate her role. And in the last scene, the news delivered by Lila (Irene Maiorino) that Nino has been lying to her all the time they have been moving from rendezvous to rendezvous and making plans. He has not left his wife and children. He’s still living with them in Naples.

He’s not in love with Lenu the way she’s in love with him. He never has been. He’s not made of that material. Even so, he’s the means for her of living out her erotic life and her erotic imagination—neither of which is the same as love.

Lila delivers the news in a café. Lenu has dreaded running into her. Maybe she knew what Lila had to tell her. The thing that rises off this world is that Lenu is alone, really. The females in her world, even Lila, have not assigned themselves the part of comrade. They aren’t looking out for her. She’s too aberrant, too independent, too much a sign of how life could go for all women if they refused to keep saying they are fine when nothing for them is fine. Lila and the other women want to give Lenu pain as much as they want to clue her into facts she needs to know.

In that final scene in the café, we’re not sure about Lila’s life. We’ve been told she’s working to aid the people of her class, who are poor and pushed around. They are the people of Lenu’s class, as well, and the other thing we know as we watch Lenu’s face register disappointment about Nino and we see her connect again with Lila—the brilliant friend who first gave her a sense of what she could become—is that she’s more at home in the world of her poor, brutal origins and the dialect they speak than she is anywhere else. That, too, is romance, even if it’s a bitter one. It’s not only a bitter one.

Sculpture by Undine Brod, sprayed copper on metal

Twelfth Street

I’m on 12^th Street, waiting for the light to change, on a little island, and cars are whizzing fast. A young man is beside me in a hoodie. He sidles close and says, “How can I get money off you?” There’s a little hole in my mouth. A crown has come off, and I’m on the way to my dentist to get it cemented back on. The young man stands closer and says again, “How can I get money off you?” I look at him. He’s beautiful. There are little tattoos on his face and hands. Blond corkscrew curls peek out of his hood. His skin is the color of caramel, and there’s a tribal thing happening with his jewelry and the whole look of him. I say, “Sweetheart, you’re beautiful, and that’s no way to start a conversation with a stranger.” I’m carrying a yoga mat. A shy smile slowly forms on his face. Maybe he’s stoned and isn’t sure what’s happening. I’m not sure how I’ve become a different person. It’s his beauty, or maybe the boredom of the way a thing like this is supposed to play out. I say, “Let’s start again,” and I hold out my hand, and he takes it. It’s my favorite thing about New York.

That Day, 9/11

I saw the second plane hit while watching a channel where the stock prices dance along. That morning, I was supposed to start teaching a theater workshop at Sarah Lawrence. A bunch of the gym rats who worked out during the day showed up, and we watched the news on the monitors in front of the StairMasters. One of the gym rats was my friend for a few decades in and out. It's impossible to know whether you want too much or not enough.

The last time I passed him, he saw me first. I was near where he lived. He smiled as if we were meeting on purpose and said, “Hello, Laurie.” I pulled out my ear pods and said, "Hello. I heard your mother died.” He waved his hand and said, “Yeah, it went on way too long,” as if she'd overstayed her expiration date and I shouldn't spend my show of good manners on this turn in his life. I hadn't said it to be kind. I'd said it to annoy him. You can tell I miss him. I miss everyone I've loved.

Hummus

It was 2019, and the night before a flight to Phoenix, I took half an Ambien. In the morning in the kitchen, I found my knives fanned out in a tub of hummus. According to Fitbit, I’d slept for three hours and been “awake” in the middle of the span.

My first thought was a rodent has done this, and I tried to picture a rodent strong enough to move the knives and restrained enough to leave the hummus uneaten. Have you ever committed an act you were not present at? This happens to Richard in extreme low blood sugars. Sometimes, as he slips down, the sensation is pleasurable, like the drug they give you for colonoscopies.

Working back from from the evidence of the scene, I remembered sleep that was a boat in a storm. This was the last flight I’d take to Arizona before we drove across the country to start another life.

The knives were Henkels and Woesthoffs I’d bought from a man who was moving from New York to Hawaii. I also bought his Breville kettle that I use every morning to make tea. I can see this man in his apartment near mine on the Upper West Side. He was young, a runner with strong legs. We’ll always be connected in the airport lounge in my mind, one of us departing and the other one arriving.

The next ZOOM Conversation for Paid Subscribers is tomorrow, SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 14 from 3 to 4 EST. There is still time to RSVP to: lauriestone@substack.com.

What is a collage piece of writing? What is hybrid writing? How do you know what to include in a collage and what to leave out? How do you know when to enter and exit? What is the satisfaction for the reader of a piece without a plot or a narrative arc? Does the reader supply a narrative arc, somehow, on their own? What does it mean to hear the music in a piece of writing as you're developing it? If writing operates in some ways the way music does, what are techniques of amplification and deepening with language? What's the deal with repetition and echoes?

We’ll talk about these topics and anything else you have thoughts about concerning your own writing practice or about the stack posts. Everyone is welcome to send ahead a question about their own projects.

Working together one-on-one for Paid Subscribers.

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A Mrs. Eilene dahlia grown from a tuber given to me by my friend Jeanne from Philmont.

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