Rebecca

Betraying

TELEPHONE. Telegraph. Or Tell Terry.

I have never known anyone who gossiped as much as my friend Terry. I met him in the mid-1980s and learned within hours that any comment I made to Terry would be broadcast to a wide audience of friends and acquaintances and strangers. I can’t quite remember how Terry came into my life: he was the ex-boyfriend of a friend’s ex-boyfriend, I think. What makes it hard to remember is all the gossip: Terry was constantly at war with one person or another in our circle for repeating something he shouldn’t have to someone he shouldn’t have.

I would love to write that there was nothing malicious about Terry’s gossiping, but that wouldn’t be true. There was often something malicious about it; he was the little boy at the party who switches the sugar and salt just to see the expression on people’s faces as they sip their salted tea. But there was also something infectious about it; it allowed us all to partake but not indulge—we could pass on what Terry told us in the guise of another Terry story: Can you believe what Terry did this time around?

Terry’s parties were almost always gossip-worthy. He lived in a 1960s high-rise in the unfashionable far-east Upper East Side of Manhattan and would cram up to a hundred people into an apartment that could comfortably fit thirty or forty. Terry had immigrated to New York from Singapore by way of boarding school in Australia, and he worked in fashion. His friends included Singapore expats, East Village gallerists, Australian rugby players, assistants from fashion magazines, and an assortment of other characters. Terry stood barely five foot five and had a round face, so that even when very thin he looked pudgy. The other feature everyone noticed when meeting Terry was his fangs; he had canine teeth so sharp and prominent that they always seemed in danger of piercing his lower lip.

When I first met Terry, he was sometimes drunk. In later years, he was often drunk. And then he was always drunk. He carried everywhere an enormous satchel, filled with books and scarves and who knows what else. I always suspected that there was at least a fifth of vodka buried within, if not a liter bottle. When I first met Terry, he worked for a fashion house. In later years, he started his own company making the most beautiful vests I’ve ever seen and will ever see, fantastic handmade vests of peacock feathers and colorful woven ribbon, vests that became for a while in the mid-nineties the hot item for grooms to wear at weddings around the world. Then he made dresses for private clients. But the financial crisis made customers scarce. And then I can’t remember him working at all, except to make garments for friends.

Terry loved to talk on the phone. And he called at the worst possible moments: just as a friend was arriving; just as you were sitting down to dinner; just as you were leaving late on your way to a movie. My friendship with Terry predated caller ID, and I signed up for the service partly because of Terry. It allowed me to screen his calls. He would rarely leave a message; I would see on my caller ID that he was calling and would only sometimes pick up. I usually told myself I would call right back. And I often did. But I often didn’t.

Terry’s fabulous life became particularly evident on his Facebook posts. He was an early adopter and took to it enthusiastically. He chronicled foods he was cooking and the ingredients he was using (oysters and uni and monkfish livers and fresh baby-goat ribs); a high-school reunion; his wanderings around his neighborhood; friends asking for too many favors (free alterations being extremely irritating to him); a case of champagne showing up unlabeled and his having no idea who had sent it. He also put up posts about migraines, weight loss, and visitors acting like vultures, all relayed in a funny-bitchy-exaggerated tone. We went from seeing each other every month or so, to every few months, and then to two or three times a year.

The last time I saw Terry it was for dim sum; he showed up early. Terry was always early, especially to a party, and always the last to leave, to the point where you finally had to escort him out, having washed the dishes, cleaned up the room, returned the furniture to its preparty position, and even having brushed your teeth—Terry would not leave a party until you left him no alternative.

I wish I had better memories of that dim sum lunch, but all I remember is that Terry was drunk. It was 10:00 a.m., and Terry was clearly smashed, slurring his words. He proudly announced that he’d had a big night last night and had started the day with vodka, to take the edge off.

After that, we communicated on Facebook for a few months—he liked some things I posted and I liked some he posted, and we messaged each other that we had to get together. And then a few months went by, and I didn’t notice we hadn’t been in touch. And then a friend called and told me that Terry was dead—that, essentially, he drank himself to death. Terry had stopped eating and just drank; by the time he checked into a hospital for an infection, he was too far gone to save and didn’t seem to want to be saved anyway.

The same friend called later to tell me about the memorial service she was helping to organize. It would be in the staid Frank E. Campbell funeral parlor on upper Madison Avenue, on a Saturday—and my husband, David, and I already had plans to be out of town. It was obviously going to be thronged; no one would notice whether we were there or not, so we decided to go away for the weekend, as planned. As we were heading out Friday evening to catch a train, though, we changed our minds. After all, Terry had been a very good friend. So we called our hosts and made our apologies.

The next day found us arriving early at Frank E. Campbell—as long as we were going, we wanted to be sure to get a seat. The chapels aren’t huge there, and we didn’t want to have to stand in the back. David wore a vest Terry had designed for him—black and white satin woven into a broad checkerboard.

The first thing that greeted us was a picture of Terry, wearing the very same vest, looking plump and happy and devilish, as always. And then we walked into the chapel to find twenty or so people sitting in pews that could fit more than one hundred. And we twenty or so were the only people who showed up. A dozen of the twenty were Terry’s family, from Singapore and Washington, D.C. Then there were fewer than a dozen friends, including the two of us. And there was Terry, in an open casket at the front, looking nothing like the Terry I knew and remembered.

In Epitaph of a Small Winner, the narrator (who, as you will recall, is telling the story of his life from beyond the grave) relates the story of the funeral of a young girl, who died at age nineteen. The girl’s father is named Damasceno, and the narrator tells us of a conversation he had with him. Cotrim was the girl’s uncle.

As I have not related the death, I shall also omit the seventh-day Mass. A fortnight later I was talking with Damasceno, who was still deeply sad and inconsolable. He said that the great sorrow with which God had punished him was increased by the sorrow that man had inflicted upon him. He did not explain. Three weeks later he returned to the subject and confided in me that, in the throes of the irreparable tragedy, he had hoped for the consolation that the presence of friends can give. Only twelve people, and three-fourths of them friends of Cotrim, accompanied his daughter’s coffin to the cemetery. And he had sent out eighty invitations. I expressed the opinion that there were so many deaths during the epidemic that one might well excuse the apparent neglect. Damasceno shook his head sadly and incredulously.

“No,” he groaned. “They let me down.”

Cotrim, who was present, said:

“Those came who had a genuine interest in you and in us. The eighty would have come only as a formality, would have talked about the inertia of the government, about patent medicines, about the price of real estate, or about each other…”

Damasceno listened in silence, shook his head again, and sighed:

“But they should at least have come.”

That passage would find me later. But on this day, another graveside speech echoed in my head: Linda Loman’s, from Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman, with her famous phrase, “Attention must be paid,” which she repeats as she mourns the death of her husband and the world that moved past him.

There were only a few eulogies, but they captured Terry. One of the friends, who had stuck with him through everything, as we later learned, talked of meeting him at Evelyne’s, a very hip place in the eighties that was a watering spot for downtown celebrities: the Warhol set, actors, and newly famous East Village artists. Terry had been a waiter there in his early New York years and was legendarily rude. Thus, he became something of a cult figure, with people vying to be served by him and trading stories of what he had said to them. He even barked at Lauren Bacall for keeping her sunglasses on inside.

I think Terry would have loved that this story was told at his service. Or the Terry I first met would have loved it. I realize now that the Terry of later years was too unhappy to get much pleasure out of anything. In fact, the Terry of later years might have been the loneliest person I’ve ever known.

On his Facebook page, Terry listed his favorite films—in the number one spot was All About Eve, a movie beloved for its acid-tipped quips. Also Midnight Cowboy, an ode to urban alienation, and Goodbye, Mr. Chips, made from James Hilton’s moving novel about a beloved boarding-school teacher. For Terry, boarding school was a golden time: he was comrades with everyone, even the most rugged of the jocks. They were a family of friends, and he was the beloved impish young brother.

Terry and I would talk about books from time to time, when we weren’t talking about food. We both agreed that A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry is one of the greatest books of all time. He loved the very eerie novel Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, as do I. Valley of the Dolls by Jacqueline Susann was among his favorites; he quoted from it frequently. That was exactly the book one would have expected him to like: campy, wicked, packed with pill-popping models. On his Facebook page, Terry listed Susann’s classic alongside books by great gay authors: E. M. Forster and Gore Vidal and Truman Capote and Patrick Dennis, famous for Auntie Mame. I wasn’t surprised that he loved Robert Hughes’s The Fatal Shore, a masterful history of Australia. That was in keeping with his nostalgia for his school years. Evelyn Waugh’s achingly nostalgic Brideshead Revisited was another book he adored; he reread it almost every year.

Nor was I surprised when Terry told me that he loved Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier, that sinister romance of resentment and deception. Terry was gothic at heart.

This book was first published in 1938, one year after Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living. But it is a very different response to the uncertainties and anxieties of the time. It’s a book about scheming, duplicity, insecurity, and murder—and it ends in conflagration.

With its famous first line (“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again”), its unnamed narrator (we know her only as the second Mrs. de Winter and never learn her name), and with its whopper of a twist at the end, du Maurier’s novel became one of the bestselling books of all time. Alfred Hitchcock directed a film adaptation, but with a very different ending. It starred Sir Laurence Olivier, Joan Fontaine, and Judith Anderson and won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1940.

Rebecca is a novel powered by jealousy. The most memorable character is Mrs. Danvers, the housekeeper, one of the great underminers in literature. Devoted to the memory of the first Mrs. de Winter, the Rebecca of the title, she is hell-bent on destroying the second. Mrs. Danvers is a baleful presence, and she preys upon the insecurities of our narrator. One of the pivotal scenes involves a dress—Mrs. Danvers suggests to the naïve and trusting second Mrs. de Winter that she attend a costume ball in a gown that the housekeeper knows will enrage Maxim de Winter by reminding him of his first wife, who has been dead for only a year. No surprise that Terry loved a book where a gown is at once a garment and a weapon.

But Rebecca is also a book about loneliness. Loneliness reaches into every corner of Manderley, the de Winter seaside estate. Its endless driveway leads through dark woods to a shocking wall of bloodred rhododendrons, and the stone house behind the wall is described as “secretive and silent.”

Our narrator is soon desperately lonely, lonely enough to try to kill herself. Maxim is lonely, too, though not for the reasons we at first think. And as cruel as Mrs. Danvers is, she is also terribly alone. (Although she is called “Mrs.” and not “Miss,” she has never been married—that was just a convention of the time when it came to housekeepers.) She had looked after Rebecca “for years before she married and practically brought her up.” Rebecca was the great and only love of her life.

Halfway through the novel, Maxim says to the second Mrs. de Winter, “We’re not meant for happiness, you and I.” I suspect this quote would have resonated with Terry, especially in his last months.

Of all the people I’ve known who have died, Terry is the one whose memory fills me with the deepest regret. Did I need to screen those calls? Would it have killed me to answer and chat, even when I was tired or it was a little late? Couldn’t I have seen the desperation behind the blizzard of Facebook posts? I don’t kid myself that I could have saved Terry, but I do know I could have seen more of him.

Part of the reason I suspect that Terry’s service was so ill attended was that he had genuinely hurt a lot of people; his gossip went from being cute when we were younger to quite vicious later, and he caused a lot of trouble. Terry actively alienated his friends. But my sin? A disappearing act. I was there and then I wasn’t, too caught up in my own busy life.

Ultimately, the problem with all our electronic communication is that it is so ill equipped to convey tone. What I read at the time as comic irritation with the world was in retrospect genuine despair. And as for Terry’s nostalgia—embodied by the boarding-school fiction and the posts about his Australian boyhood—I fear that was more torture than pleasant ache. I fear that it was the kind of nostalgia that Mr. Tracy had taught us when we read about Odysseus and his desperate need to return to Ithaca: “pain for home.”

The friend who told me of Terry’s death later described visiting Terry in his last days. He had fallen after checking into the hospital and cracked his head on the floor so loudly that his doctor heard the sound from outside the room. Terry recovered from that, but suffered from nightmares and day terrors, even worse after the fall than before. He continued to refuse to eat and was increasingly jaundiced as his liver failed. The doctor had suggested to this friend that she bring pictures of Terry in happier times when she came to visit. Terry wouldn’t look at them; when she tried to pin them on the wall next to his bed, he cried out for her to take them down.

It was particularly painful for her to see Terry refuse food—food had been one of the joys of his life. He was a generous and talented cook; he would show up at Thanksgiving and cook the entire meal for her family, taking great pride each year in turning out a feast more delicious than the last. Terry loved to explain the science—the role of the bay leaf; how to get the turkey to roast just right. His own dinner parties were epic, course after course served from his improbably small galley kitchen: Singapore Chinese food from his youth, the hearty roasts he had grown to love in Australia, delicacies from Europe on which he had spent massive sums, and whatever was most fresh from the New York Greenmarket.

But in the end he only drank: straight vodka. And he was too sick at the very end to watch television or read. Or maybe he didn’t want to do either.

Books had nothing to do with Terry’s death. But I can’t help thinking that they didn’t help, either—that the books he loved most helped him romanticize his more cutting characteristics and filled him with longing for a time in his life that he desperately missed.

When I think of Terry, there’s nothing I can think of that I would have given him to read. I just wish I had been a better friend.