Lil

A moment in a friendship.

Humphrey Bogart in Casablana

In 2010, a few days before Richard and I visited our friend Lil in New York City, she’d been hosting a woman from Afghanistan and her eight-year-old daughter. Lil had been sleeping on an air mattress in her living room, so the woman and her child could have her bed. The woman was seeking asylum in North America because her husband, from whom she was divorced, could legally gain custody of his male children when they were seven and his female children when they were nine. The woman hadn’t seen her son in six years, and if she returned to Afghanistan, her daughter would be taken.

Lil was working with lawyers to help the woman gain political asylum. Ramsey Clark was taking her calls. So far, she’d come up with nothing. In the States, the divorce laws of Afghanistan were not considered human rights violations.

Lil and I had become friends fifteen years earlier, not long after Gardner died. Gardner had been my person. He was many years older than me. His death was quick from bone marrow cancer. Looking back, it turns out, you never quite detach from the shock of an experience like that. Looking back, in the aftermath of Gardner’s death, I might have appeared to people to be drowning. Or maybe I didn’t.

At that time, Lil was a professor of English literature, and she was painting. She was good, and her work was shown. Did she burn to paint? Sometimes. In 2001, after 9/11, she joined an organization to help women in Afghanistan, and from then on that work became her life and everything else became relatively small to her, including painting and our friendship.

I tried to see things from her perspective, the way you do when you are close to a person involved with something larger than you, something shaking the world. It’s like when Humphrey Bogart says to Ingrid Bergman, sending her back to her husband in Casablanca, “Ilsa, I'm no good at being noble, but it doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Except they do, of course. Love is also the thing they are fighting for as well as against Nazis in the movie and the Taliban in Lil’s life.  

I missed her. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d laughed together or watched a movie flopped on her bed. Or spent a Sunday reading the paper and walking around Soho. She was older than me. I’d told her many times I would be there for her in life, no matter what. Now, she wanted Afghanistan to take care of her.

“I’m not looking ahead,” she said to us on that visit. “There’s no point. I’m not planning to get killed, either.” Then she said, “I’ve never been happier.” I thought it was true. In Afghanistan, she had started a school for children imprisoned with their mothers—women jailed for “crimes,” such as trying to escape husbands who cut off their ears and noses. She was establishing shelters for women and hiring staff to run them. For a moment, the old Lil was back. She laughed softly and said, “You know what I love best about my life? I can boss people around, and no one gets in my way.”

I loved her for saying this. I loved her for seeing the absurd smallness of human beings, going about the business of doing big things. I loved her for knowing the smallness was not only riding in the car with big things but maybe made them possible. It was perhaps in this awareness of mixed up loves, of big things and intimate things unable to be separated, of pain and pleasure unable to be separated, that Lil suddenly asked Richard if, early on in his relationship with me, he would have liked to get out of it rather than tear up his old life.

She was no doubt thinking about the cost of our relationship to Richard’s ex-wife. She was always thinking about the cost of our relationship to Joanie, just as Richard and I were always thinking about the cost of our relationship to Joanie. It wasn’t a light we could turn off. I was making dinner in Lil’s kitchen, chopping vegetables. I could hear her. She knew I could hear her. Richard said, No, he wouldn’t have wanted to get out of it.

This conversation took place fourteen years ago. Looking back, was Lil wondering if she would have preferred skipping her entanglement with me? These are the kinds of thoughts that float in when you are writing, not when you are sloshing around in the sudden downpours of life. These are the kinds of thoughts that probably have nothing to do with things that are true but work in the sense they are narratively true. They work as part of a story. Still, once formed, they assume the shape and density of an ostrich egg. In “The Stranger,” when Mersault is asked at his trial for murder whether he was sad when his mother died, he says, “At one point or another, all normal people have wished their loved ones dead." Seen in a certain light, this remark is funny. Funny because it’s painful and also true.

I didn’t ask Lil why she asked Richard the question. In those days, she was surrounded by the glow and padding of her heroic deeds. What, I’m going to say to a person like that, “You’re being a shitty friend?” Not even I was capable of that, and maybe my restraint in the moment was my tiny contribution to doing good.

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