eleven
A GIFT FOR FRIENDSHIP
Stephen and I looked at each other but didn’t speak when we left Carol’s apartment. We said nothing as we waited for the elevator, heard it ding, got in. Stephen can’t help himself. He talks. He fills silences, but here he was … silent. We crossed the lobby. At the side entrance, all he said was “You should stay here. I’ll get the car and come back.” I handed him my umbrella.
“It would break my heart. It would break my heart.” Carol’s words repeated in my mind as the automatic doors opened and closed, opened and closed, whenever someone came into the building or left or if I stepped too close to them trying to see whether Stephen had pulled up outside with his car, hoping it would be soon. Each time the doors opened, wind rushed in and rain splattered me as I waited with the various bags of Harry’s things. Every blast was an affront, an annoyance, a pang, and made me impatient. It had turned cold. We had parked four or five long blocks away. I knew the neighborhood was a crazy puzzle of one-way streets. To reach the side door of Carol’s building, Stephen’s car would have to be searched at one of the security checkpoints that had been erected at either end of the New York Stock Exchange after 9/11. I understood why he seemed to be taking forever, not why I was so bothered.
How many people would do for another person what Stephen did for Carol? He went to visit her practically every day. He drove her and Harry to my place and back. He worried. He obsessed. He brought her movies and sat with her half the night watching them when she was in pain or couldn’t sleep, brought her food she said she wanted but didn’t eat. And what about Lissa? I had seen the delight on Carol’s face when Lissa arrived with Annabelle. “My little friend,” Carol called the shy girl in her Rockettes costume.
I felt cheated that I had only known Carol for three months. I was jealous of all the people who had been her friends for decades. I remembered the night she’d brought Harry over, that I said, “I wish I’d known you for twenty years.” She replied, “Me too.” I felt cheated that there would be no more years. But we were friends, close friends there and then, and I was grateful.
As I think back, when I was in college and then in my twenties, making friends was like the days getting longer in the spring. No matter how busy I was, there was always more time to talk, time enough to cut through the social niceties, time enough to know someone. I consider the friends I made then some of my closest friends still. They’re the planets in my personal solar system. I know myself by their presence in my being. I feel their gravitational pull, even though I usually only hear their voices now, hollow and far away, on birthday calls. I see their faces in the gallery of mental snapshots I visit, aware that the pictures in my mind are out-of-date.
People get busy. Possibility does battle with routine, and routine wins. Life steals our time. Our days get shorter, our worlds smaller, the way in harder.
I’ve moved nine times since college, from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Grand Rapids, Michigan; from Grand Rapids to Miami; from Miami to Chicago; from Chicago to Atlanta; Atlanta to London; London to Dallas; Dallas to Johannesburg; Johannesburg back to London; three years here, four or five years there, until the last move, from London to New York, where I’ve been for more than twenty-five years. But I travel. It’s the nature of my work. During a dozen years as a foreign correspondent, I was often away from home for months, usually covering wars. For journalists in a war, the language of friendship is storytelling. They tell stories at night in the bar of a press hotel or crammed together in the back of a truck crossing a desert. When people with little in common except for their proximity and their profession have nobody but each other, that’s what they do. In a war zone, friendships are intense, ignited by danger into a bright, hot light. The photographer or fixer next to you when you’re shot at is your friend in a way no one else can be. Seeing the same horrors, feeling the same fear, you know what you’ve shared and don’t have to talk about it. It’s easy to fall in love or think you have. For a time, no other people exist. No other place seems real. And then it’s time to leave. You say goodbye till the next time or maybe forever. That’s it. No more bright light. Like turning off a switch. You go home. Supermarkets and movies and flowers in parks and people hurrying to work are an alternative universe, hard to comprehend, unnatural, a little colorless. Maybe you’re lucky and have a few friends or family members who understand. Or maybe there just isn’t enough time until the next war or the next transfer to find a hole in the loneliness that can surround you like fog.
You snatch at good times, at opportunities to make new friends, because of all the cancellations: quick calls on the way to the airport to say, “Sorry, I won’t be able to go to dinner after all” or “I know we had a date, but I’m going to Iraq” … or Bolivia or Lithuania or Bosnia, East Germany, the West Bank, Libya, Northern Ireland, et cetera, et cetera, fill in the blank. Those cancellations all felt like failure, like loss to me, but those destinations felt like history, and journalists are, after all, in the history business. I knew what getting into that business meant, the price of admission, the risks. I didn’t know how high the cost would be. I wanted a husband and children, lots of friends, a social life, but did I want them enough to give up the opportunity to witness history and write about it? After decades of asking myself that question, I still haven’t been able to answer it. I learned to live with loneliness and treasured my friends and my momentary escapes into normalcy. They felt like coming up for air.
A few months out of college I adopted a big, shaggy shelter dog, who looked as if he were impersonating a lion. No one at the shelter knew his name. People asked me, “What are you going to call that beast?” I called him Beast. He moved with me from Cambridge to Grand Rapids to Miami to Chicago to Atlanta. If loneliness, like poison, can have an antidote, that’s what Beast was. I found people to walk him and take care of him when I was out of town, usually just a few days at a time at that stage of my career. He made demands. He was tricky and sly and occasionally diabolical. I loved him desperately and had him for ten years. He died a few months before I was transferred from Atlanta to London. I can say it now, but couldn’t then. His timing was perfect. He would have had to spend six months in quarantine before being allowed to live in the UK, and based in London, I was away so much, I couldn’t possibly have a dog, or so I thought. But the pain of losing Beast ached on and on. The loneliness came back.
For seven years, I tried not to forget how it felt to touch him and dreamed of having another dog. Then, I was posted to South Africa. I worked late most nights, given the six-hour time difference between Johannesburg and CBS News headquarters in New York but traveled little. I rented a house with a nice, big garden and a shaded patio and had a live-in housekeeper.
I found myself paging to the back of the Sunday newspaper almost every week and allowing myself a glance at the classifieds, under “Pets.” Just looking, I told myself, until I spotted an advertisement for bull terrier puppies and remembered Petrus, the bull terrier at the winery, sitting on my feet. The puppies were squirming around in a big box. I picked the naughty one who climbed over all his brothers and sisters to see what was going on. His registered name was Borrible Napoléon Bone, but I didn’t want him getting any ideas about taking after that other Napoléon. It might be better to call him something else. My vet asked, “What are you going to name that racing pig?” Bull terriers do look a little like pigs, so I named him Piggy. I conveniently overlooked the question of what would happen to him when my three-year assignment in South Africa ended and I was sent back to London. Like Beast, he was tricky and sly and diabolical, which is exactly what I loved about him, from the moment he began to wreak havoc in my household. It occurred to me that if he were a boyfriend, he’d be bad news, exactly the kind of man to avoid.
SO WHY DO we fall in love with animals instantly and forgive them their trespasses but find it so much harder to make human friends? I took it for granted that that’s just how it was, until that Saturday I went to the farmers market with Minnie, and friendship took me by surprise.
THE SLIDING DOORS opened suddenly, and there was Stephen, stamping rain off his shoes, shaking water off the umbrella I had loaned him for the dash to his car. He’s the kind of person who creates commotion wherever he goes. “At the checkpoint, when the dogs smell Teddy’s cushions in the back, they get confused and wag their tails. That’s a signal to the officers that they’ve found something suspicious. My whole car got searched.” We picked up Harry’s belongings and ran through the rain.
The windshield wipers were on their fastest speed, urgent and loud in the dark car, whap, whap, whap. Stephen had trouble seeing where he was going, it was raining so hard. For a while, we didn’t talk. Finally I said, “Carol has a real gift for friendship, I think.”
“She does. We’ve had our fights. There have been times when we haven’t spoken for months, but in the end, we always make up. It’s like that with everybody she knows. My ex-boyfriend, Paul … Paul Number One. I had two boyfriends named Paul. Remember when you used to see me walking three goldens at Chelsea Piers? Two of them were his. Anyway, he had a huge falling-out with Carol. They were going to buy a fancy stationery company together. She blamed him when the deal fell through and felt deeply hurt. They didn’t speak, but now they’re friends again.”
I asked Stephen whether he’d known either of Carol’s husbands. “No, I didn’t even know she was married twice.”
“That’s what she told me.”
“In one of her earlier apartments, she had a very large painting the first one did, his take on rococo style, voluptuous bodies … but refined.” Stephen paused to make a turn. “You know, Fertig is her married name. I don’t even know her maiden name.” Another pause. “I’ve known her for … maybe … thirty years. In that whole time, I don’t recall her ever being in a relationship.”
“What about her family?”
“She has a brother, but they’re estranged. He has a son she got to know when he was at NYU. She’s crazy about him. She had a really complicated relationship with her parents. Her father was an alcoholic. Her mother was … strange. Both dead. She told me recently that she was sexually abused by her mother’s shrink when she was fifteen. She said she repressed what happened for years and finally remembered it … maybe that’s had an effect on her ability to sustain relationships … although she has tons of friends.”
By the time we reached my street, the rain had stopped. Stephen asked to come in and say hello to Harry, who jumped all over him and wagged his tail wildly. He picked up his bowl and ball but dropped them with a clunk when he spotted the shopping bags. He plunged his head in the one filled with his jackets, snuffling loudly. I wondered whether he smelled Carol. I took his picture, head in bag, and emailed it to her.
The next morning, I sent a new picture and another the day after that. I’d been sending her pictures or videos since the first time Harry had come for a sleepover. She emailed back, asking whether I thought he was sad. “I don’t know.” I said I thought he liked being with Minnie and me but hadn’t quite figured out what was expected of him. “I’m sure he misses you, though.” Carol replied, “Maybe I am projecting.”
I realized that many of the pictures I’d sent showed Harry lying down or looking away, not so many videos of the two dogs playing. I found another one, a picture of Harry on his giraffe-print rug looking straight into the camera, his bowl at his feet, and forwarded it. The email I got a few minutes later had no words, only a large heart.
I replied, “A big red heart, like the red, lipstick kisses the dogs get before I leave for work. They don’t show up on Harry as much as on Minnie, but he gets them.”
“I’m counting on it!” Carol followed her exclamation point with an emoji lipstick kiss. The next morning, I sent her pictures of the dogs with red kisses on their foreheads.
I began to worry. Was Harry sad? Did Carol see in the pictures something I didn’t recognize because I hadn’t known Harry long? I felt an obligation to be candid, so I emailed her:
Last night I couldn’t find him. Finally, I noticed one of my dining chairs tipped back, my dog-walking jacket hanging on it. I looked and discovered Harry trapped with his head stuck in my pocket, undoubtedly after treat crumbs. I do think he may be sad. I try to get him to play with his bowl and his balls, but he’ll only do it for a minute.… I cuddle him and talk to him, and he seems to like that, but I think he misses you.… He likes sitting with me on the couch in the den. I just can’t get him to play much. He likes being a bathroom guard in the morning and conks out on the bath mat, when he gets tired of licking my legs and feet. I hope he’s ok. He just isn’t being demonstrably silly.
I shouldn’t have said anything. Carol was alarmed.
From: Carol Fertig
To: Martha Teichner
Oh God Martha I feel awful. If it keeps up perhaps Dr. Farber could put in a few wise words. The only thing I can recommend is lots of love—physical and talking etc. I do think some of this is to be expected. Does he play with Minnie at all? Please keep me posted. Xc.
I felt awful, too. I had upset Carol. I didn’t know what was going on with Harry. Was he pining for her? Did he miss his home? It was Thursday night, November 3. I was unbelievably busy, preoccupied, trying to finish a story summing up the entire presidential campaign for that Sunday’s show, the Sunday before the 2016 election. And I had to fly to Charlottesville, Virginia, that Saturday to shoot a different story. That meant I would be working a succession of fifteen-hour days. And I was worried about Harry. My tongue felt too big for my mouth. I was clenching my teeth.
I got home that night around nine. It was as if the dogs knew Carol and I were turning ourselves inside out. Immediately they started one of their wild romps. Minnie jumped on the couch. Harry snatched one of the pillows. Minnie dashed under the dining table. Harry ran after her. A few minutes later, Harry picked up his bowl and balls and jiggled them enthusiastically. Minnie bowed and growled and pretended she wanted to steal the bowl from him, so that he would chase her. Somehow, I didn’t screw up the video. How could that be? I was thrilled and relieved and suddenly relaxed. I emailed the videos to Carol. In the heading, under “Subject,” I wrote, “I shouldn’t have worried.”
At 3:44 A.M. on Friday, Carol answered, “thank you thank you thank you.”
I saw her reply when I got up and realized she wasn’t sleeping.