Karyl and Me

We first met—that’s not the right word, I first became aware of her spectacular existence—at a seminar on film in Aspen in the late 1960s. She was sitting in an upper row, stunning face with high cheekbones, dark hair, rapt expression, and I was more aware of her than of anything of supposed importance that was being said. I didn’t know who she was or anything about her, and it’s been so long now that I don’t remember how it happened that we first spoke or how I learned everything.

Her name was Karyl Roosevelt. She’d been married and divorced twice, the second time to a grandson of one of our greatest presidents, FDR, and she had four children. All this by the time she was barely thirty. She told intriguing stories about herself, some, at the beginning, not entirely true. She’d had intercourse with her second husband only eight times during their marriage, she said, and had gotten pregnant after three of them. She’d been born, she claimed, in Leadville, Colorado, and had an aunt who’d fallen in love, on a trip to Italy, with one of Mussolini’s aides. It ended unhappily and the aunt tried to commit suicide by drowning herself. The creek, however, was only two feet deep.

What I didn’t realize immediately was that her stories were the stirring of something hidden and unsuspected: literary talent. It turned out she was a born writer, but more of that later.

My real friends have always been men. I don’t know how it could be otherwise. I went to boys’ schools, was in the army, then married. My preference is for men—in a certain sense I never encountered a woman in the same life as mine.

The question is, what constitutes friendship? Some is nothing more than companionship, some is only a practical matter, some just lengthy acquaintance. Friendship is more than knowledge and intimacy. It belongs to the order of things that cannot be weighed, like sorrow, honor, and hope. It is a form of love. It lies in the heart. You can name certain of the essentials: trust, a shared view of the world, admiration, understanding, and something I value, a sense of humor. All of these are a part of it but none of them define it.

It all began with Karyl when she took the job of typing my manuscripts, I think for a dollar a page. She was a good typist and, at first, coolly efficient, but then she began to offer a comment or two. I learned that she liked to read. It was not just a quick dip into reading to make herself more interesting, she was avid. Still rarer was her taste; she knew what was good and why. I don’t know at what point in her life this power to discriminate came into being. I somehow could not picture the ravishing high school girl she must have been, already focusing her life on men, as a serious reader. Somewhere along the way, however, what was latent emerged. I like to think it changed her life or at least prepared her for the second and third acts. Beauty is a great accomplishment, but knowledge—or should I broaden it and say culture—is at least as seductive.

We became friends in part I think because we did not become more. Is the other more? In the short term, yes, of course. In the long term, yes also, providing there is something additional. It was this additional we shared.

We have been friends for nearly thirty years. She has almost always been in someone’s arms, not promiscuously but reliably. It’s a quality I like. I recall an evening in our kitchen with the dishes. There we were amiably, Karyl, my wife, and I. A friend who had dropped by was curious. “What’s Karyl doing here?” he took me aside to ask.

“She’s living with us,” I said for no real reason. I wanted to see his reaction.

“You must be out of your mind,” he whispered.

She was always tremendously attractive, but youth at last made its exit. She moved to Chicago and for a time, for a novel almost, worked for Saul Bellow. Then she moved to New York. Our lives—this was in the 1980s—became even more closely entwined. She reviewed books. She was social secretary to a woman on Fifth Avenue. She worked for the ASPCA. Her stories were irresistible. The man who came in and said, “You got any snakes?” He wanted a real good one.

“A good one?”

“I wants to make a wallet,” he said.

I called her there once and the phone rang for a long time. Finally it was picked up and someone went to get her. “They must have been killing cats,” I said.

“Yes,” she said. “They were killing the best dogs in the place.”

It may not have been true but it was typical of her stoicism and contempt for what the world had become. She more or less believed, as Kazantzakis wrote, that nobility, harmony, balance, the sweetness of life, happiness, are all virtues and graces which we must have the courage to bid goodbye. They belonged to another age.

I had not been surprised when, before this, she had given me stories she’d written. Her letters—I judge a great deal from letters—had always been exceptional. You cannot teach someone to write any more than you can teach them to be interesting. Her writing was very good, it had her voice and tone. The sad thing was that she never believed in it or even in herself. She lacked the ego to persevere, ego strengthened by the knowledge that there is nothing else, it is write or disappear. I encouraged her with all my heart, as if we were swimmers far from shore and I had the endurance to make it but she did not. I understood why I had loved her and why she was immediately drawn to two close friends in New York I introduced her to. She fit right in. She belonged. Food, drink, gossip, scorn, travel—we breathed the same air. She turned to writing plays. A few were staged but not with great success. She was disappointed but you would never know it.

In the end we became—we have become—almost like stepbrother and sister. I was attracted to her in the beginning as a woman, but now her being a woman is significant mainly for the clear view she brings from the other side. The news, you might say. Her friends are women for the most part, and what she knows about them, sometimes marvelously wicked, is the attraction. A friend of hers, she said, decided to make a list of all the men she’d ever gone to bed with. One of the entries was Tall Norwegian and, beneath it, His two friends.

To me she once wrote, Without you, my own life would have been much smaller and darker.

I think of the lines of Robert Burns in one of his most famous poems, written two hundred years ago. “John Anderson My Jo, John” is the poem. Jo means “dear.” We climbed the hill together, Burns wrote—I am simplifying the Scottish tongue—and many a happy day, John, we’ve had with one another.

Now we maun totter down, John,

And hand in hand we’ll go,

And sleep together at the foot,

John Anderson, my jo.

After all the years, that is Karyl and me.

Modern Maturity

April–May–June 1997