When I was in eighth grade, I got sunburned so badly I couldn’t wear clothes for
three days. I lay under soft cotton sheets that nonetheless felt like steel wool and, in order to take my mind off my discomfort, read Gone With the Wind for the first time. I was transported, as you can imagine, and one of the many scenes that always stayed with me is that of Scarlett going to visit her aunt in Atlanta. I loved reading about the continually hysterical Miss Pittypat, with her heaving bosom and fainting spells and perfumed hankies and trembling sausage curls. But mostly I loved the idea of a woman under duress going off on an extended visit to another woman’s house: the letter of intent, the packing of the trunk, and the transport from here to there, both physical and metaphysical.
Thus it was that I made big plans when I got an email from a friend of mine I’ll
call Laura, saying that her husband had essentially deserted her (again) and could she
come to Chicago to visit me. And because I have purposefully made room in my life for such things, I said of course. Come, I said, and I thought, I’ll put flowers in her room, a well chosen tussy-mussy. Chocolate. My best embroidered pillowcases. A pocket-sized journal and a pen, resting under the lamp on the little table next to the chair in front of the window.
Some background. I met Laura when I was nineteen years old and a nurse’s aide,
and she was a twenty-six-year old woman who had been hospitalized with a severe
infection. I helped take care of her. She was one of the most beautiful women I’d ever
seen, and one of the most cultured, too. Also, she was an actress, which made me think
that I could unpack myself and she would see everything, and in this assumption I was
right. We charmed each other. We became friends quickly, and deeply. It was Laura who gave me Madame Bovary to read, and it was she who told me that when my dark moods came upon me, I might consider going to the art museum for a specific kind of relief. It was she who showed me how, if you chose the right color and curtain rings, you could make burlap curtains look good. She spoke French, she was a wonderful cook, she wore makeup in such a subtle way you couldn’t really see it, and men were helpless around her. She came from dramatic circumstances: she was a little girl who was called upon to drag her drunken father out of bars; and her mother manipulated her shamelessly until the day she died.
Laura divorced twice and got married three times, for good reasons, so far as I
could tell, though there was one day when she was considering divorce number two and she called me. In the background we heard her very young son and her husband at the piano, singing Christmas carols together. “Oh!” I said, when I heard them, and Laura said, “I know,” and began softly weeping. I knew she wished she could stay in that marriage, but she couldn’t.
Her third husband is an artist, and their marriage is filled with passion of the
enviable sort and the not-so-enviable sort. He left her once before, but then quickly
returned to the condo she had bought to make a home for herself and herself alone. It was crowded when he returned, physically and psychically, but they adapted: coffee together in the mornings, holidays with the grandchildren. Now, he was restless again, in a type of mourning for himself, and he needed to move to
somewhere else, to just go. At first, he invited her to come along with him. When he had finished packing, she looked in the car and said, “But there isn’t any room for me,” and then the elephant in the living room trumpeted. Her husband left, and she thought, Huh. Maybe I’ll leave too, and she e-mailed me about coming to stay for four days.
The moment I picked her up at the train station, we began talking, and except for
sleeping, I don’t think we stopped. And we did a lot of different things. We went out to
breakfast at a diner called George’s and lunch at a hippie café called The Blue Max and
dinner at a funky place in Bridgeport called Polo Café and Catering where the chef left
his kitchen to bring us to his banquet facility right next door so that he could play us a
song on the gigantic organ he keeps there. One night for dinner I made white bean soup and crostini with roasted red pepper tapenade and she said “Damn this is good soup; you must give me the recipe,” and of course I did. We went to a play, we went to the Cultural Center with its Tiffany domed ceiling to look at a display featuring the architecture of Louis Sullivan and we went to the Art Institute. There, we split up. She went to gaze in awe at the vast collection of the Impressionists: I went to the Thorne rooms to look carefully at each display of miniatures: the Japanese living room with its ebony and rice paper, the English drawing rooms and French boudoirs, the cathedral with its mighty chandelier, the 1930s New York apartment where you expect a miniature Noel Coward to come bursting through the door demanding a martini, a long white scarf against an open black cashmere coat. I’ve seen the Thorne rooms lots of times, but have always felt the press of time moving me along too quickly to fully appreciate each scene. But on this day, I took the time to look around the corners of the rooms to see the landscapes outside. I leaned in to look at the ceilings of every room, too, and saw the deliberateness of the angles with which the chairs were stationed in corners, or at tables, or behind desks. I saw how light can suggest weather, or a time of day, or a mood.
Laura and I watched an episode of In Treatment and offered each other the same
comment afterward: Hmm. One afternoon we went to high tea at the Drake hotel, sat in a banquette in nests we fashioned out of our coats, listened to a woman in black dress and a black velvet cloche hat play the harp, ate many finger sandwiches and many pastries and proclaimed to each other that this was the way to live, sister. We had talked about our ongoing search for a kind of spirituality in our lives, and so on Sunday, we tried two churches, but abandoned both within minutes because of what we saw as false advertising. We went to my favorite stores and looked at beautiful fabrics and soaps and dishes and jewelry and dresses. We took walks around the neighborhood and I looked at the stark architecture of the trees and thought they were exactly the right thing for Laura to look at: bare of their leaves, revealed and elemental-looking.
Once, her husband called, and I heard her talk about all she was doing. I hoped
she wouldn’t talk to him too long, because I knew she would be sucked back into the
vortex of needing to abdicate herself in order to take care of him. I know about such
things, having been victim to them myself. But she didn’t talk to him too long. “I’m
going to hang up, I can’t hear you well, you’re breaking up,” she said, but she told me
later he wasn’t breaking up. She just wanted to hold on to the newborn idea that her needs mattered as much as his. After she hung up, I said, “I heard you telling him about all the things you’re doing.” She nodded, smiling. “He said that what he had done was go to a movie. Which wasn’t very good.”
We talked early in the morning, over coffee, in our robes. We talked late at night,
when we were really too tired to talk any more. A lot of our conversation focused on her husband leaving her, we were like two people who had come upon a strange object in the road and were examining it from all sides. At one point, I said I thought one way to look at the situation was to say that it was clean and honest and brave, her husband’s admission that he had lost himself and needed to go off to recapture some sense of worth.
This kind of thing happens all the time to both men and women. The problem is that it
doesn’t happen conveniently, or at the same time to each of them. So there is the guilt
and remorse of the one leaving, and the hurt and the shame of the one left behind. But
why can’t a person talking time off for themselves be a good thing for both parties,
especially if each is free of children or work obligations, as my friend and her husband
are? It seems an ironic truth that only a free person is able to successfully bond with
another. “Two trees, separate, but the roots are bound together,” a friend of mine’s
grandmother used to say, of what a marriage should be. I told Laura I had an idea. I
suggested she buy a tube of paint for her husband, and send it to him. It would be a
statement that, though this was difficult for her, indeed for both of them, she supported him in it. I said that such a loving gesture might free both of them to discover what they needed to talk about, so that they could come back together again—reborn, in a way.
Things change, in relationships. If you don’t change with them, everything dies. And
anyway, to stay angry at someone hurts you more than them. It takes a toll on your spirit.
But to forgive? That lets light enter a dark place.
Laura liked my idea. We spent a long time in an art store, and she found the
perfect tube of paint, a blue color she knew he would love. She bought it and she bought a card, too. She showed it to me, asking if I thought she should send it, too. It was a “thinking of you” card that spoke about hope. It had butterflies on it. Butterflies were a special thing to Laura and her husband; they had conceived their first son in a field full of butterflies. I told her I thought she should honor her own impulses; if she wanted to send the card, then send it. She brought the tube of paint along with her to every other place we went that day. She didn’t want to leave it in the car, where it might get too cold and become damaged.
When she left, she was in a good place, as they say. She was smiling and happy
and stronger. She had been told to meet her husband in California on the day he expected he’d arrive; she’d been expected to fly out and meet him. But now she said that perhaps she wouldn’t go to meet him quite yet.
I got an email from her shortly after she got home, thanking me for my
hospitality, and saying she’d gotten another call from her husband and had stayed on too long, and also she thought she had talked too much and said the wrong things. But then after a few more days, I got a letter from her. She told me she’d decided not to go to California at all. She told me about a movie she’d seen and very much enjoyed. She told me she’d made that white bean soup. She said she’d gone ice skating with a girlfriend after not having skated for so very many years. “And I didn’t fall down once,” she said.
The letter was written on the butterfly card.
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(Damn Good) White Bean Soup
2 T olive oil
¼ cup chopped pancetta
½ yellow onion, chopped
1 each carrot and celery stalk, chopped
3 garlic cloves, minced
3 15-oz. cans cannellini beans, drained
5 cups rich chicken broth
¾ tsp. finely chopped thyme
½ cup grated best quality Parmigiana-Reggio cheese (Spend money on this cheese. You
only need half a cup. It’s worth it.)
Kosher salt and freshly ground black pepper
Put an Italian opera on your stereo. In a large Dutch oven over medium heat, warm 2 T. olive oil. Cook pancetta for five minutes. Add onion, carrot and celery; cook 8 minutes.
Add garlic, cook one minute. Add beans, broth and thyme. Simmer over low heat for ten minutes. Off heat, puree with immersion blender (if you don’t have one, let soup cool and
puree it in a blender) until smooth. Stir in cheese, salt and black pepper. Serves 6
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