Basting Tape

Here’s my favorite line from First Comes Love—Marion Winik’s horrific yet touching memoir of marriage to an openly gay man who, between being diagnosed with AIDS and his eventual death several years later, stops working and starts skimming cash from Marion in order to support his drug habit: “There was a letter from the bank saying I should come in immediately and deposit $999,744.26 to cover my recent withdrawals. I reread this astonishing sentence several times . . . [and] arrived at the bank shortly afterward sans the requested million.”

I read Winik’s book when my own life was teetering, and I laughed so hard at parts I lost my breath and tears rolled into my gaping mouth. When you’re down and out and a little bit ragged, somebody else’s unthinkable misfortunes can seem hysterical from a safe distance.

The distance is what’s key. The rutted, weedy stretch of dirt road between my life and somebody else’s is often the geography I find most interesting, most inspiring. The company of others whose realities are starkly different than mine is revelatory and oddly motivating. That’s part of what I love about Julie and Sean, two of my closest friends. Both are single, childless, never been married, and also smart, attractive, educated, employed, and hilarious. Julie’s about my age, and Sean, since he is a man and can have his exact age revealed, is a crisp 39. I’ve tried all sorts of voodoo to get them to fall in love—since both of them really ought to, and besides, Julie longs for children—but so far, no dice. Fortunately, though, they enjoy each other’s company enough to hang out with Jon and me and the several thousand children who populate our blended family most Saturday nights.

Coming over here is for Julie and Sean something like riding a unicycle on a congested street in India. There are big kids with filthy socks wheeling back and forth on the Total Tiger abdomenizer on the living room floor and pounding up and down the stairs and listening to music, and there are small kids with filthy socks toting rodents in pockets and begging the grown-ups to play Twister and have a disco party, and there is chaos and noise in wild excess. But it’s the contrast we revel in on Saturday nights as the kids drop off to bed and we sit around the dining table, talking over wine, laughing at ourselves and each other, swapping genuine secrets, and huddling in a weird helpless way against the menace of this awful war slithering under the locked door, unstopped by our protest signs and pink buttons and marches.

The balm of shared history is powerful at these times, especially since Jon and I face the awkward and often funny task of sewing together biographies that were well into adulthood before they merged. Julie and Sean are a bit like basting tape, criss-crossing the widest seams and filling in historical gaps with fresh perspectives. Jon’s known Sean since junior high, they went to college together and remained friends through all of the years since, while Julie and I go back a decade and a half. We’ve watched each other’s lives unfurl in opposite ways, nonetheless beset with the same essential challenges of ambition, loneliness, stagnation, and change. You can’t hide yourself from someone who’s studied you for so long.

I met Julie 14 years ago, when I was practically another person, a classified advertising sales manager at a weekly paper. Two or three months after returning from my maternity leave, baby Sophie in tow, I hired Julie to sell ads in my department. She was highly caffeinated and articulate and awfully pretty.

On her first day, I was showing her around the office, when suddenly her face squished up into this horrible expression. She was staring straight at my breasts. What could I do but carry on? But when Julie’s face didn’t unsquish and her eyes kept returning to my chest, it struck me that something terrible was happening, because I was thinking of Sophie, asleep in the vinyl port-a-crib in my office across the hall. I looked down, and there was a dark wet spot the size of a half dollar slowly expanding around my nipple, as leaking breastmilk turned the crimson fabric of my dress a dark burgundy. What could two women do but blush, laugh, and become friends?

Since then, several million other things have happened to each of us. And on Saturday nights, in a house warm with kids and candlelight, we open the wine and spill the events of the past week and year and lifetime onto the table and pick through the curious contents, laughing and commiserating over the serious hilarity of it all.