Lost and Wanted(11)
Pope knew about her role in the play, of course, and began attending rehearsals, sitting in the back of the theater as if he didn’t want to be noticed. Charlie’s friend Brian, an especially talented classmate who would go on to start his own innovative theater company in New York, was thrilled that one of the foremost experts on Laclos should take such an interest in his production. He would approach Pope after the rehearsals, ask earnest questions about lighting, or the range of implications in the word lenteurs. In the private tutorial Charlie attended in Pope’s office every week, Pope mocked her friend the director’s flamboyant mannerisms, and also told Charlie that watching her onstage affected him so strongly that he had to remain seated for some time after the lights came up. That was the kind of thing he said; the meaning was always clear, but could conceivably be interpreted a different way, if it were someday repeated.
Throughout the semester, Charlie had thought about switching thesis advisors. There was a more junior, female adjunct who had offered to take her on. But because she wasn’t feeling well—was skipping an increasing number of classes in order to save her energy for rehearsals—dropping the thesis altogether was a more attractive option. What Charlie’s immunologist had identified as chronic fatigue syndrome was making it hard for her to complete even an ordinary amount of schoolwork, much less a book-length paper. Without the thesis, her chances at securing any of those postgraduate fellowships were almost nil; but as Charlie reasoned then, she would’ve needed Pope’s approval for the Henry, the fellowship she wanted most. She told me then that no fellowship was worth approaching him for a favor.
Charlie went to L.A. after graduation, hoping to act, but was disgusted by the number of roles that her skin color (what casting agents referred to as her “look”) eliminated. She was living on her cousin’s couch, in a small apartment in Echo Park, hostessing at an Italian restaurant frequented by industry types on La Brea, and in desperation, she told me later, she’d emptied her bank account and checked herself into a hotel (a strategy she would repeat on and off after Simmi was born), where she spent three nights finishing a Law & Order spec script. I could picture her in a modern Los Angeles hotel room, clothes strewn across the bed and the floor, the small space smelling of her perfume, lemon and vetiver, ordering meals from room service and leaving the trays in the hall.
This was the kind of extravagant behavior that had always thrilled and shocked me about my friend, as it seemed to contradict everything I’d ever believed about work and success. As it turned out, that script got her her first staff writing job on a WB drama about teenagers, from which she moved on to one show after another, eventually rising to become a co–executive producer by the time she was thirty-five. And so my doggedness, and Charlie’s daring, returned almost equivalent results in our respective fields, where we were both successful early.
The difference was in the way we responded to the inevitable cooling-off that accompanied our mid-career period, especially after our children were born. I put my head down and worked, taking on committees, evaluations, grant proposals. When my sabbatical came, I chose conferences and workshops carefully, attending only the most prestigious, eliminating anything that might be construed as fun. Incredibly, I believed that this dutiful plodding was one of my strengths, for which I would someday be rewarded. Charlie had no such delusions, and maybe that was the reason why, even before she got her diagnosis, she seemed to fall into a kind of despair.
8.
I went out to L.A. just after Jack was born, to see my parents and to speak at a particle phenomenology conference at Caltech. The conference wasn’t strictly necessary, but I wanted to prove to myself that things wouldn’t be so different, now that I had a baby. I discovered quickly, though, that a simple cross-country trip with a three-month-old required an enormous amount of planning. I had decided to nurse exclusively, and had been stockpiling milk a few ounces at a time in plastic bags in my freezer. Only I couldn’t take any of it with me without risking losing it, either in security or because it might defrost. That meant that I had to get up several times the first night in L.A. while Jack was sleeping, in order to pump enough milk for a bottle to leave with my parents while I’d be at the conference.
Why was I—a single mother with a demanding career—nursing to begin with? Why, for several months at least, did I prepare my own baby food, freezing it in BPA-free rubber trays? I’d read several studies that suggested the immunological benefits of breastfeeding were exaggerated, and the number of nights Jack and I order pizza now has certainly undone any of the good that organic strained sweet potato and amaranth cereal did in his babyhood. I would’ve denied it at the time—would have said something breezy about how nursing was just simpler than mixing bottles in the night—but the fact is that I like doing things the hard way. I’d turned down an epidural at the birth for the same reason: not because I thought the anesthesia would be any danger to Jack, but because I wanted to prove something to myself.
As the date of my trip to California approached, I resisted calling Charlie. The last time I’d heard from her at any length she had been struggling with childcare, and nothing more serious than arthritis; it seemed to me that she had less reason to be out of touch than I did, and that it was just a symptom of the haphazard way she did things. Once she had told me only the day before that she would be in New York for the weekend; could I come down from Boston? It was petty, but I resolved to do the same thing with her, and held out until two weeks before my visit, when my desire to see her took over and I emailed. This time she wrote back right away, with enthusiasm, saying that she couldn’t wait to see me; I should bring Jack and come anytime.