I RESTED MY HEAD against the window of the Boeing 747 and pulled the thin blue blanket up around my shoulders. The air was stale, dim light from the movie screen enveloped the seats in a gray cloud, a baby cried, a man snored. Unable to sleep, I tried to remember how many times in the past eleven years I’d made this flight across the Atlantic between Africa and the U.S. It must have been at least eight. Each trip marked either the beginning or the end of an event, a chunk of time dedicated to a project, a relationship, a dream, one that was vital and, though I might not have known it at the time, would turn out to be defining.
By now I was old enough and my friendship with Sara deep enough that our lives were connected in so many ways, in a series of circles—some sad, others crazy, others maniacally wonderful, plates spinning round and round as if in a juggler’s act. They might crash, wobble, and come to a slow stop or they might spin forever, but they didn’t break. The circles connecting our lives were stronger than that.
For me this trip home was bittersweet for many reasons. For one, it marked the end of our time with the baboons. Rains had finally fallen in the highlands and the Kuiseb River had flowed. One last time we raced the headwaters, swam, and filmed. We felt a strong sense of relief, but it was impossible to feel joy. Cleo and Smudge had survived the long drought, but Bo, their mother, was dead. Pandora had been alive the day before the flood, but we never saw her again. We’d scanned the trees, the cliffs, and then we started counting. Of the fourteen baboons we had come to love, only six survived. Six baboons left to groom, to fight, to mate, to have babies, and to rebuild a troop. They would be doing it alone because for us, this chapter was closed. But at the same time, my trip back to the States would also mark a new beginning. I would try to find funding to finish the film, to complete this circle.
And then I thought about my other reason for coming home. Sara. She had filed for divorce. Another circle completed, time to move on. Too many times I had been far away when she needed me, but not this time. I had been there at the beginning when she said “I do,” and I’d be there at the end.
TWO WEEKS AFTER arriving in America, I walked up to Sara and her husband’s perfect white Victorian house. Outside at the top of three stories was a widow’s walk. In the hundred years that the house had been standing, I could imagine all those who had paced there, watching and waiting, at times in vain, for a loved one to return. With so much history inside those walls, this was just another sad chapter.
Stepping into the house was disorienting. Inside, Sara’s grand piano stood untouched against the living room window. Lining the long hallway with its high ceiling and graceful arches were boxes marked “den,” “books,” and “kitchen,” as if Sara and her husband were still in the process of moving in. Stacked neatly on the dining room table were place settings of china and crystals, those that happy, expectant brides select, but now they were divided evenly into two piles. His and hers, all right. It was eerie, surreal, and so damn civil that I wanted to smash everything in sight.
I smiled at Sara. “So where do we start?”
Her lips parted as if she wanted to speak, but in the end she nodded and I followed her upstairs. CD stayed downstairs, quietly out of the way, but his presence was everywhere. It clung to the clothes in the master bedroom; we stepped around it in the bathroom as we picked through toiletries; it was there as we thumbed through the titles lining the bookshelves. To escape it, we delved into Sara’s past.
Reaching up to the top of the armoire, Sara pulled down a grass basket full of scarves.
“Oh no!” She laughed for the first time that day. “Look at these. How awful!”
“Sara, I remember that one. You wore it the night we had margaritas in Charlotte.”
“Did not!”
“Okay. Maybe I saw it on the billboard.”
“Oh no you didn’t. I’ve never even seen it before. These things have reproduced and their offspring are hideous. They aren’t mine. I swear!”
“Don’t lie to me. You are a closet member of the Junior League!”
It felt so good to laugh. From girlish giggles to lusty, knowing laughs, laughter has always been present in our friendship. In fact, it is one of the keys to our friendship. When Sara’s eyes flash with a certain sparkle, I know what she’s thinking and I laugh. When I toss my hair, she laughs, knowing there’s trouble ahead. Our friend Luca Babini, a gifted photographer and filmmaker with a thoughtful, probing eye and a sharp sense of humor, shakes his head, claiming we even laugh alike. Sometimes we laugh through our tears and sometimes we laugh until we cry, but mostly we laugh because we always have so much fun together. But on that day, we laughed in spite of the situation.
In the midst of all those ugly scarves we lay on the bed, spent with laughter and emotion. It was quiet for a moment, then Sara spoke. “Gin, I have no bearings for this. No references. I don’t know what to think, what to feel, except failure.”
“Sara, you didn’t fail; you tried. And you know what? I’m sure he tried, too. But no one is immune. It just happens.”
“It” was divorce, and because we had been friends for so long, Sara didn’t have to explain that in her family there were only seemingly perfect marriages. No raised voices, no broken china, and certainly no divorces. In a play she’d never seen, she’d been asked to speak lines she couldn’t begin to know. An understudy thrust into a part she wasn’t prepared for.
“It’ll be okay. Soon. Sara, you couldn’t go on like this, and after tomorrow, you won’t have to.”
After Sara went to bed, I walked downstairs to the den to talk to CD. In this huge house, against the backdrop of what should have been such a happy home, he looked sad, lonely. We talked for a while, tentatively, more like strangers than friends. He asked me about the baboons and the desert. We talked about filmmaking, all safe topics and passions we shared. We had a lot in common. Clearly, he still cared for Sara, just as I did, and ached to see her in so much pain. But there was one difference: I loved Sara and, sadly, he did not.
If this had been a movie, the next morning would have been raining, that steady drizzle through gray skies, the kind of rain that makes you cold, sad, melancholy. But it wasn’t. It was beautiful, clear, and crisp, the kind of day you want to celebrate. Instead we loaded boxes. Sara pointed the movers away from what was staying to what was going. Before we climbed into the front cab of the moving truck, Sara and CD hugged each other good-bye. The big, burly moving men and I looked away. The driver made a lame joke as he started the truck, but at least he tried. I gripped Sara’s hand and CD stood alone outside that beautiful white house while we drove away, headed for the city, through the tunnel to her new life.
Somehow Sara stayed calm, at least outwardly. At night, in the apartment she’d rented in New York City, I sometimes heard her crying herself to sleep in the next room. By day we each tried to get on with our jobs. I counted my pennies to buy a subway token; often she got picked up in a limo. I fumbled with a mascara wand while Sara had her makeup done for her. Producers didn’t return my phone calls; Sara had them lining up outside her door. Maybe, at some other time, I would have been jealous, but it was impossible to be envious of someone so desperately sad.
All too soon I would be headed back to Africa, to a life and a man I loved, but I hadn’t sold the film. I had no new work and even less money, while Sara had an amazing career and a life full of possibilities. The only problem was, life, faced alone, seemed to terrify her.
Nothing I could say or do would take Sara’s pain away. But I’d known her a long time, and knew she was resilient—that soon her spirit would rise, and she would begin to heal. As for me, I struggled to negotiate my way through a professional trough. I had heard “no” many times. Though rejection hurt, I believed in the baboon film, and felt certain that one day a television executive would also believe in the film. The baboons’ story would air, and when it did, I knew I’d make another film. I, too, needed time.
No one reaches their early thirties without enduring disappointment, and Sara and I were no exception. There were jobs we had wanted but were never offered. Men we had loved who had stopped loving us. But we also knew that angst was a temporary state. We had come a long way from that high school stage and, in sacrificing so much, discovered that real gratification is rarely instant. We’d both burned the map a long time ago, forging our own paths in the search for a life we loved. I knew neither of us would give up now.