Also true, at the end of that year's Thanksgiving vacation,
I had spent an idiotic blotto evening sloshing around
on the chilly water bed of Esmé's workshop boyfriend,
an Alabamian named Jeremy Fletcher,
whom I generally regarded as a blowhard.
The worst thing I ever did in my entire life,
betraying not only my friend, but also
Will off in Italy at the time.
A thoroughly ridiculous person, that was what I'd been.
Amazingly enough, neither Will nor Esmé learned of that
drunken mess, and shortly afterward,
Esmé became pregnant and Jeremy Fletcher declared he could not
write "up North" and the two married and left for Mobile.
How lucky I felt in that period of reprieve, maybe 18 months,
in which Esmé wrote me long letters bewailing her inability
to find a friendship even close to ours,
but also reported pleasure in her new life as a southern wife
and then a mother.
On behalf of her baby, I learned to knit
and-- a Madam Defarge of repentance--
created an afghan of a turquoise so remarkably
pale that it looked like something you
could blow away with a sigh.
"Hated tearing open your brown paper package tied up with
string," Esmé wrote to me in her charming letter of thanks.
"It looked like the greatest hot cross bun of all time,
but the contents were even finer, you dear girl."
Then, her letters stopped, no explanation.
I assumed that Jeremy Fletcher had
confessed to his and my evening on his waterbed.
My guilt festered.
I excoriated myself for not confessing.
If you had been brave, you rat, she
would not have married that man, who, by now, she probably
realizes is a rat too.
I grieve, but after a year or two,
finally gave up writing letters that never received a response.
They had started to feel bizarre.
I never could include an apology, after all,
since I didn't know what Esmé knew,
and I did not want to cause a marital disaster where one did
not exist.
Yet, now, here stood my old friend on my front steps,
smiling what remained the most glorious of smiles.
The big, white-toothed Esmé Cole smile that had told me,
to my confusion, more than any other smile I'd ever known,
that I was better than OK, I was somebody special.
That smile.
Her familiar scent of cigarette smoke and L'Air du Temps--
my throat constricted with emotion,
inconceivable that I had betrayed my friend.
Though I sensed that grabbing her in a remorseful hug
might be too much.
A husky "Esmé" did escape me while I threw open the screen
door.
Esmé herself, stepping over the threshold
and into Will's and my front hall,
appeared to be in a mood more jolly than nostalgic,
imitating Billy Crystal's fulsome '80s parodies
of Fernando Lamas, she said, "Charlotte, dah-ling,
you look mah-velous!
Absolutely mah-velous!"
Actually, I'd carried out only basic hygiene,
wore a pair of sprung yoga pants and one
of Will's flannel shirts.
"While I," Esmé continued, "I, it must be said immediately,
am a whale."
She raised an index finger to stop me from contradicting her.
"But let us not tarry, Eliza.
Repeat after me: in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire,
hurricanes hardly happen."
The perfect handling of that awkward moment.
It was Esmé who had introduced me to the old Broadway musicals
adored by her favorite aunt, one of them being My Fair Lady.
And I was more than glad to take up the role of the H dropping
Eliza Doolittle.
"In 'artford, 'ereford, and 'ampshire,
'urricanes 'ardly 'appen."
Some history, 11 years before Esmé's arrival at our front
door, the same semester that Will had finished a postdoc
at the University of Minnesota, the two of us had the good
fortune to win tenure-track jobs at the University of Arizona,
Will in art history, myself in creative writing.
The week we packed for our move to Tucson,
we took a break one night to attend a fundraiser
at Minneapolis's Walker Art Center.
Will stepped off to get a glass of wine
at the bar set up for the event, and I, wisely,
if gloomily abstaining, went to say my goodbyes
to Chuck Close's giant Big Self-Portrait.
Goodbye, bespectacled drooping eyes, each as large as a head,
shockingly gorgeous black and white bits
of ash on a colossal cigarette, hanging so tipsily from pillow
sized lips, goodbye.
While I stood there so full of admiration for Chuck Close
and rubbing my arms to stay warm in the museum's air conditioned
tower of brick and glass, I sensed a body
detaching itself from the cluster of attendees
near the bar and sidling my way.
A moment later, from behind me, abrupt and loud as a honk,
a voice said, "Charlotte Price!"
It was a poet I'd known slightly during my Iowa Writers'
Workshop days.
Her height threw me initially-- she had on 6 inch heels--
and I couldn't think of her real name,
only the one that Esmé had given her, Queen Turd,
in honor of her supercilious airs and the slippery looking
tawny braid that, back then, she'd worn coiled on top of her
head.
"I'm a reformed poet now," she declared with a great ha-ha.
The woman always had impressed me
as someone who viewed herself as a kind of celebrity,
and I sensed that, like an interviewer,
I was supposed to ask her to explain the "reformed poet"
business.
Of necessity, had she given up poetry the way
I'd given up alcohol?
Or was reform poetry perhaps a movement?
From the retro hippie look that she'd favored in the '80s--
Birkenstocks and Third World cottons--
the poet had moved along to those towering high heels,
sleek charcoal knits, tony earrings
made up of alternating strips of gold and anchovy cans.
Gone the turdish coil, replaced by a jet-black bowl
cut above a swath of skull shaved to a high maintenance
smoke.
She swigged the amber drink in her plastic cup,
then squeezed my forearm and said, "I hear
you've published, Charlotte."
Her squeeze, I admit, it stirred me.
I was a sucker for a warm gesture,
but before I could reply, up went her eyebrows
like window shades sent flying and she
added with another ha-ha, "anything I should read?"
I was almost 30 years old by then,
but my party skills remained on par
with those of a cuckoo clock.
I could count on coming up with a little something only once
an hour or so.
Defending another person, I'd lost a triangle of my two
front teeth after jumping between two unmatched boys
in my high school cafeteria.
I was good at that, but could be rendered perfectly dumb
by a personal remark.
With an arch smile, the poet swiftly shifted
the conversation to gossip about Workshop people,
some of whom I remembered, some of whom I didn't, who'd won
prizes, who hadn't.
I am half deaf--
19 riding a bike with my blood alcohol at three times
the legal limit, I went flying over
the pickup truck of an unfortunate hog farmer
and did serious damage to several parts of my body--
and in the hubbub raised by the art patrons,
I missed a lot of what the reformed poet said,
but after I mentioned that I was about to start a job in Tucson,
I did hear her exclaim "but that's where my Workshop friend
Esmé Fletcher lives!"
Esmé lived in Tucson?
Old guilt, grief, and fear had swamped me.
What would happen if we ran into each other?
And then a bit of jealousy showed up too.
When and how had Esmé and this woman been friends?
It was Esmé and I who had sat up until all hours singing songs
from A Little Night Music and creating Cindy Sherman-esque
tableaus and discussing whether or not we had the right to call
ourselves writers before we published our first books.
Esmé declared a vehement no.
I, an equally vehement, yes.
It was Esmé and I who could recite poems to each other,
or even in tandem, because before we met,
both of us had memorized some of the very same work.
"To be born woman is to know--
although they do not speak of it at school--
that we must labor to be beautiful."
And so I elbowed in, "sad that Esmé and I lost touch given
that we were roommates and all."
A sharp look-- the poet set her index fingers
on the stark beginnings of the black wings
of her dramatic eyebrows, traced the fingers along the eyebrows
to their ends stopping at her temples.
I had the queer sensation that she was preening,
using me for her mirror.
I should have excused myself, walked off,
but I was flummoxed in the way that I--
a hick, the only student actually from the state of Iowa
during our years at the Workshop--
regularly had been flummoxed by people there.
"Roommates?" the poet murmured, then demonstrated that she knew
all kinds of up-to-date things about Esmé that I did not.
I knew that Esmé had the one child, of course,
and that he'd been given a southern sounding name,
Rob Roy, which I'd supposed was Jeremy Fletcher's choice.
The poet knew not only that there was a second boy, Daniel,
but what sports the boys played.
Esmé, the poet said, had become a real estate broker after
the boys started grade school.
My surprise at the idea of Esmé as a business woman must have
shown, because the poet laughed, "oh, yes, unlike some of you,
Esmé and I have to work in the real world.
She's doing well, though.
Jeremy sells advertising I think and maybe he
does some journalism?
But Esmé brings home the real money."
So Esmé's life was good.
The news gratified me.
For a moment I even thought, suppose that in Tucson, she
and I wind up friends again.
A notion quickly followed by a firm mental correction--
no.
While the reformed poet talked about the resort, La Paloma,
at which she'd stayed on a visit to Tucson,
I scoured the Walker's crowded lobby for a sign of Will.
There, the back of his dear, shaggy head.
The band of skin exposed between the collar of his blue work
shirt and fair hair suggested that he
was talking to someone of a more average height.
At 6 foot 5, Will regularly had a sore neck after such events.
Oh, he was patient, Will was.
Even if a person happened to wax on about Will's specialty,
Italian futurism, Will listened, made a correction
only if an error were truly egregious.
I hope the person he spoke to was a male.
Often, Will did end up talking to the best looking woman
at a party.
"She came up to me," he would say in his own defense,
and, true, he was not flirtatious.
In fact, I'd assumed he thoroughly disliked me
the night we met, which had not prevented my
being flattened by his loping, lanky Abe Lincoln good looks.
Blond, but his dreamy blue eyes had looked out
from under a ledge of caveman's brow.
His big and knobby wrist poked boyishly
from the too-short sleeves of his flannel shirt.
Both from pride--
I remained astonished that he'd chosen me--
and to change the subject, I said to the poet,
"you remember Will Ludlow?"
"The art historian," she said, "of course!
Mystery Man."
I had not heard the nickname in years.
It was something dreamed up by certain female graduate
students at Iowa who had found Will's desire for privacy
both annoying and tantalizing.
I pointed across the crowded lobby, "over there.
He and I are married now."
"Charlotte!
Congratulations!"
The poet held up her free hand for a high five.
Easier to go along than leave my hand hanging
looking like a party pooper.
She rattled her plastic cup of ice cubes at me,
"trip to the bar?
A toast?"
A familiar voice told me that running a fire-hose blast
of vodka around inside my brain would scour away
the edgy crap filling my head, but then the voices
of people from the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings
to which I too infrequently dragged
myself reminded me, girl, you and alcohol never
ever are going to get to hang out together again,
be any sort of pals.
"I think I'll just wander around a bit," I told the poet.
We started to move off in different directions,
then I steeled myself and turned back and called, "hey,
you wouldn't happen to have Esmé's address with you,
would you?"
Later, I would flush when I noticed that the address that
the poet had copied onto her cocktail napkin was not
for Esmé's home, but for the brokerage firm where she
worked.
Did the poet know about Jeremy Fletcher and me?
No matter.
I felt certain of my next step, and the very next day,
dropping by the English department at the University
of Minnesota to deliver grades for a workshop I'd
taught there, I nabbed a sheet of letterhead
from the front desk and carried it with me
to the lunch table in the break room.
There, with a fountain pen--
a fountain pen with blue-black ink can sometimes fortify me--
I wrote, "Dear Esmé."
That was as far as I got.
The expanse of good ivory bond beneath "Dear Esmé"
and the handsome university insignia had opened before me
as vast and daunting as Death Valley.
I did not see how I could survive
crossing all that space.
And suppose that Esmé took the stationery as showing off.
Was it showing off?
Or paradoxically trying from insecurity
to let her know that I had value?
Both?
"Curiouser and curiouser," as Alice
said when she found herself telescoping taller and taller
and worried that her feet, now far out of sight,
might no longer be willing to carry her
where she wanted to go.
I tore the sheet of letterhead in half, threw it in the office
recycle bin, and headed back to Will's and my duplex,
which was stuffed with the cardboard boxes
we'd scavenged from behind liquor and grocery
stores for our move to Tucson.
I located and slid open an already taped shut box
labeled Charlotte's desk.
It had held bananas and released a sharp stink,
while from its strata of smaller boxes and bins,
I removed a pretty postcard of the Ponte Vecchio
at sunset that I'd rejected repeatedly over the years
as its message area was so crowded
with historical information.
In what now appeared a blessedly tiny space, I wrote,
"Dear Esmé, Will and I are moving to Tucson teaching at U
of A."
Will and I had purchased a house on a chockablock three-day trip
to Tucson in early June, and I included its address
before I closed, "it would be great to see you
after all these years!
XO, Charlotte."
My exclamation point, "it would be
great to see you after all these years!"
Maybe it was simply the writer in me,
but I worried about the exclamation point
that time and later.
Suppose she found it fulsome?
It made her want to vomit?
Suppose I'd left it off, and she'd written back
and everything had turned out differently?
After Will and I had been settled in Tucson for a month
or so and Esmé hadn't contacted me,
I'd driven my car north into the foothills of the Catalina
Mountains.
I had enough sense of the town by then
to know that the brokerage firm she worked for
must be upscale as it sat in Casas Adobes Plaza.
In suave black script, the firm's name
scrolled across the creamy canvas
awning that wasn't doing much for the scorched tropicals
out front, but still conveyed a sense
that the people within had class.
I drove by the office twice, but I could not
make myself stop to say hello.
Not too long after that, however, I did telephone,
albeit very late on a Sunday, when I felt certain
that no one would be in, and I'd be able simply
to leave a voicemail.
Even so, I was incredibly nervous.
Please, please, I found myself praying as soon
as the telephone phones started to ring.
Please, shoulders tight up around my ears.
Let the next voice I hear be a recorded one.
It was.
The reprieve allowed me to sound genuinely cheerful
and enthusiastic when I left my name and new telephone number
and a closing, "it would be wonderful to see you, Esmé."
I must clarify, I did believe that it would have been
wonderful, in the best of all possible worlds
as the optimists had sung on Esmé's CD of Candide.
I would have stayed on the line if Esmé had picked up
the telephone.
I would have been happy as a clam if she wanted to see me,
but those waiting prayers of mine
made it painfully clear to me that my call and earlier
postcard had been above all preemptive strikes.
By putting myself out there, pretending that never
in a million years would it occur to me that Esmé Cole
Fletcher would be less than pleased to see her old pal,
Charlotte Price, I meant to lay a path for civility.
I aim to create a world in which I would not feel obliged
to jump, heart thumping, behind a telephone pole if I saw Esmé
coming down a Tucson street, to duck into a restroom
or an alcove at a literary event, bookstore,
gallery opening.
Above all, I wanted to make it possible to act surprised
if Esmé gave me the cold shoulder in front of Will.
If she gave me the cold shoulder,
Will would want to know why, and he never could know why.
I think I'll stop there.
[APPLAUSE]