We never knew how she got to Memphis or what it was that drew her to this dusty
town we always claimed
we wanted to flee from. So much easier getting to know people in those days, but I
remember her saying
“Give yourself two years to make friends once you’ve unpacked in a city,” and from
the sound of it she knew
what she was talking about. This much was right: we make our friends, we build
them from the words we’re waiting
to hear given breath. It sometimes seemed like I was reading lines from a play
staged in her mind, not yet off book, still reaching
for my character. The plot had something to do with how our disparate pleas and
gestures were related and might converge
into an elegant composition, the closest thing to the truth. We were all of us
starting careers of one kind or another, but we still lived
like artists in our rented rooms waiting for her to throw the next party. We
protected her, the same way she kept something
alive in us—hard to say exactly what but we knew it to be fragile and pure, as real
and awkwardly beautiful as a piece of her jewelry
made from radio parts and piano wire and other objets she’d trouvéd out of the
trash. We were the mismatched furniture
she arranged around the room to some subtle effect. Then, as if to demonstrate
the tragic possibilities, she paired off
like the rest of us, moved in with someone who called himself a filmmaker, and
immediately his bungalow took on
her personality. She espaliered the climbing roses to the porch piers and even they
became bohemian, torqued against their will
into something existential. The house and grounds were lit with lamps she’d
fashioned from river driftwood. Her parties got larger
and louder, and it grew difficult to sort out what was revelry from what was more
like desperation. But the ugly scenes
and harshly declaimed words had a satisfying and dramatic flair to them. Good
dialogue always at first feels so much
less hurtful than the common epithets of the unselfaware. When do we begin to
let each other down? From the very first minute
of affection, or do we wait? We have a genius for going back on our words, these
promises which start to come undone long before we see
the first dull light through the opening cracks, long before we stop believing a
wardrobe choice might have changed something. One night I saw her
sitting alone on the steps by the roses, no tears but there may as well have been.
Sadness will eventually require of us
such mastery that it becomes artless, a perfect authenticity anyone can play
without recourse to method or technique. Towards the end,
we fled like furniture flung from a burning house. We didn’t look back and
shamelessly left her to her own devices. Not quite
shamelessly. Our lives were losing drama, and we would soon be exchanging
Christmas cards, all with the same snowy scene. Everyone said
they missed her. We used to get word occasionally—I heard she moved to
Brooklyn. She will have made friends by now.