Because Rose had landed a backyard on Carroll Street while the rest of us still felt lucky to have stoops to sit on, and because she wanted to share what she’d lucked into with people she liked, she’d dedicated herself to throwing parties in which Saturday nights turned into Sunday mornings, parties that attracted so many people that, standing in the backyard, it felt as if you were in the middle of a public pool. People are still married to the people they met for the first time in that backyard. I thought, and still think, that these parties had the same value as books—they made people feel less alone and distracted them from their troubles.
But I would never say that out loud to Rose, who had not yet published one herself. Though not for lack of trying. The two of us would sit in her backyard for hours, Rose riffing, me transcribing, the two of us thinking that if she talked her ideas out with me, to me, they might end up more alive on the page, and might take the form of a something that could be called a book proposal, but whenever she read back over the document I emailed her at the end of these sessions, the words never felt as urgent to her as they did when she spoke them out loud. I wished I didn’t see what she meant, and I wished I didn’t suspect that while she might be a fearless reporter, she might not be cut out for writing books—but I could never say those words out loud to her, either, and didn’t want to. She would have to be the one to say them.
What I did say, one afternoon when she seemed particularly dejected:
Do you think that you might be holding whatever this book could be to some higher standard because the first—
Yes, she said. That’s occurred to me more than once.
That was the last afternoon we spent trying to make something out of nothing. She told me later that hearing me say what she’d been thinking liberated her to give up and stop forcing herself, for the moment, to write a book. It would come when it would come, she said, and she threw herself into pitching with renewed purpose. If she resented me for publishing a second book that fall while three different editors at places she’d been trying to break into took stories she pitched and gave them to writers with more name recognition, with two out of the three editors claiming to not know what she was talking about when she called them up in a rage, and the third suggesting he might change his mind if she did him a few sexual favors, she was an even better actress than I gave her credit for. Her disappointment and fury, which I felt almost as keenly as she did, and which dimmed her lights for a good few months afterward, made me hide my own joy over getting better reviews and in better places than the first time I’d published, and keep small bits of good news to myself unless she asked, and when she did ask I hated it because I knew she was forcing herself to do it. It was obviously costing her something to fulfill the role of the caring, involved friend, but it did not cost me anything to avoid these topics, or so I thought at the time, and when Rose told me that she was going to look into getting a job as a music publicist at a firm run by someone who used to know us when, I noticed I felt the same kind of relief I’d felt when she told me she was marrying: I would not have to feel the pain that could come from watching someone I loved keep trying and failing, or the burden of carrying a kind of survivor’s guilt if I ended up succeeding as she failed.
What I should have noticed, by this point, was that for all Rose’s talk, she was the real pragmatist here, and in the long run her decision to give up on what she’d spent her girlhood dreaming of was not going to torture her the way it would torture me.
She and Peter threw a party to celebrate that second book. She gave a speech, one that, it seemed, she made up as she went along. Charlotte Snowe is a gift to womankind, she told the yard. She will bring you cheeseburgers when you are hungover and you are calling her up in pain. She will type breakup emails for you when your fingers are too angry to protect your dignity. She will read your articles ten times in a row, and she will know what the problem is within two minutes, and she’ll never block your email when she sees draft number eleven attached. She won’t dance much, but she will bring the records, and those records will leave you weeping in a heap, crying for your mother, by the sweaty empty cooler of beer in that scrappy patch of grass where everyone went to smoke. She will buy you ten dresses for ten dollars at the Salvation Army just because. She knows how to make a fantastic bouquet from bodega flowers. She knows more than you do about nearly everything but will never rub your nose in it. She won’t march in the street, but she’ll be the sniper on the roof. Her book will make you want to kill yourself, it’s so good. Read it! Read it, people!
When she finished, Peter popped a bottle of champagne and the crowd cheered while I cried.
How did you like the free jazz? she said, as we hugged. Pretty good, right?
You can’t have meant all of it, I said, still crying, holding her tighter. Some of that must have been for effect.
Later that night, Peter and I stood together drinking and watching Rose, in the middle of the yard, wearing a red halter dress from the seventies, with a green dragon embroidered along the right side, as she told a story under the branches of the pine tree, which we’d threaded with lights. She was repeatedly tapping her finger on the chest of the friend of the man I’d brought to the party. The friend laughed and shook his head. I wondered if Peter was going to say something about Rose engaging in what could be narrowly interpreted as flirting, but instead he said Sometimes I think she wants things so badly it’s going to hurt her.
I remembered Karl, years ago, saying the same thing. Thought about Rose, throwing steak knives at her kitchen wall, one by one, as if she’d spent all her life in a traveling sideshow, after she got off the phone with one of those editors. What I wanted to say, and did not say—If we could turn it off like a faucet, don’t you think we would?—sounded like a weak defense of the fire that had burned inside of us since childhood. What I also wanted to say but did not: And because you are cool where she is hot, one day you are going to lose her.