The Art of Friendship

Rakovian Delight

Rakoff & Me

October, 1998.

Walking east on 16th Street from Union Square toward David’s apartment in a swirl of leaves, it’s Autumn, our favorite season, and of course we’ll be cooking for people. A sort of dress rehearsal for our annual main event – Thanksgiving – which we once prepared for sixty. I would cover the turkey, plus the standards – mashed potatoes, stuffing, green beans – and David would make something daring, like Jerusalem artichoke gratin, which always worked better in theory than in practice. An aesthetic take on food, never quite appetizing, nor repulsive: something to make my Midwestern in-laws go, “Huh. So this is what they eat in New York,” as they politely took one small bite.

Up the sweeping steps of David’s brownstone and a zizz on his doorbell, returned by a reply buzz that was supposed to last long enough to get me through both the outer and inner doors, but rarely did whether or not I hurried, which I always did, because it was David and I could never wait to see him. I never had to hide my eagerness to see him, either. There was no expectation to play it cool; mutual fondness and the desire to make each other howl with what are now called “hot takes” was the openly admitted basis of our friendship. Up the carpeted stairs to his second-floor semi-one bedroom (“my alcove,” he’d say, gesturing toward the sleeping nook as if introducing a duchess), my feet thumping on the hollow stairs like a racing pulse, looking ahead and upward as my hand skimmed the smooth mahogany banister, feeling the history of the building and the sense that we were making our own. That’s what one feels in New York.

“Darling!” he’d appear on the landing to greet me with a warm embrace even though he claimed he was not a “hugger.” “Hugger,” he’d sniff disapprovingly, even while hugging. I would already smell what he’d started cooking without me: a duck breast broiled under a pestled crust of fresh rosemary and Trix cereal, something he’d read about somewhere and simply had to try because he loved mixing the highbrow with the low. To David, a Canadian and child of two sophisticated psychotherapists, the Trix was the exotic ingredient. He once made me a parsnip soup so spare it was like something served to Oliver Twist. He was immensely satisfied by it, its nearly clear broth rendered from half an onion and a scant two parsnips, so I pretended to be. He made the austere seem grand, the frugal a platonic ideal. When we ate sushi, he’d consume all of the garnishes on principle: the ginger, the wasabi, even the lemon slice (avec seeds), and would have eaten the fake green plastic grass had it been the slightest bit less artificial.

Once we made an entire meal from food he found at the 99-cent store. The rosé wasn’t terrible. I’d refused to try the monkfish paté because it reminded me of Kozy Kitten, the discount canned food we’d fed to our feral cats growing up in Louisiana (on the label was a crude drawing of a cat wearing pearls: classy). He gamely swabbed it on some seeded flatbread and declared it “more than passable.” Later, he confessed it had taken a week to rid his apartment of the smell.

For dinner parties, we’d push his sofa – his pride and joy, a neutral slate blue velvet, a purchase of solid, adult girth – against the fireplace and pull his craft table out from the wall of windows. There were never enough chairs or table space – people perched on the bed or sat on the floor, which owing to his being Canadian, was spotless and could have been eaten from, as we relinquished our shoes at the door, unless they were absolutely integral to the look one was going for. Everyone – New Yorkers hungry for a familial experience no matter how cramped - happily ate our roast chicken and vegetables, or some indigenous stew laced with spices from Kalustyan a few blocks away. A lentil salad, bruschetta, Alsatian dishes of veal and pork we recreated from our meals at our canteen: L’Acajou, a bistro on 19th Street. A waiter there, Andrew, and David had a not-serious attraction to one another. Andrew was lithe, took our order while smoking (indoors! the 90s!), his feet in fifth position. David would take him in, tapping his own jaw with his fingers like he was playing a flirty piano riff. Nothing ever came to pass between them but it didn’t need to: the yearning was sufficient, an end in itself.

On his mantle were the sterling silver objets I’d brought David from Paris, Rome, Mexico, flea markets, and once, in an ironic gesture befitting my esteem for him, Tiffany & Co.: a drinking straw, a candle snuffer, a marrow spoon. I wonder where the marrow spoon is now. Did his family keep it, after he died? Did they know how many marrow spoon jokes we’d made with it, until we decided marrow spoons were pedestrian and it was better to tell people it was a cervical dilator once owned by a turn-of-the-century French abortionist?

Forget the five dead people you’d choose to have dinner with, we curated our parties for maximum aliveness. Actors and writers, often rubbing each other the wrong way. Our respective friends sometimes did not mix well. Once a very famous public radio personality (not the oxymoron you might think), after I’d told her I’d just found out I was having a boy that very day (I was five months pregnant), said drily, “Martin Amis says finding out the sex of your baby removes you from the experience of your ancestors.” This stunned me into a silence that David swooped in and broke by saying, “So does getting your teeth fixed.” Touché. Always have a friend who will deliver a verbal coup de grace on your behalf, when you can’t, because you’re too hurt.

Mostly, though we were bustling with the food prep and watching our guests the way one puts on a mindless television show that won’t distract from fiddling on your smartphone. (It should be noted that no one – no one – had cellphones then, smart or otherwise). David and I would glance at each other from opposite ends of the room, he saucing the meat and I opening another bottle of wine, taking psychic mental notes of the snippets and snippiness we’d post-mortem later. He called it that – “post-mortem:” the phone conversation we’d have the following morning, both of us early risers despite or perhaps because of the amount of booze consumed the night before. We’d begin with straight reportage – “Journalism” – as in, So apparently, Paul’s first book did so well, they’ve added another to his overall deal. Then we’d segue into psychological “Analysis:” Well, obviously, the reason Meredith mocks 12-step groups is because her own mother died of alcoholism, but she’s so fuckin’ funny. We’d move on to slashing verbal take-downs – too cruel to repeat here unexpurgated - and end with contented sighs, content that our lives were full and we were young but not too young, and talented, and thin, we lived in the best city in the world with the most interesting people who came when we rang the dinner bell: ready to dirty our plates, drink our drinks, smoke our cigarettes, argue across our tables, kiss on our stoops. We were in our proverbial prime and we knew it. And there David remains, while I have no choice but to keep moving forward without him.

David died of cancer on August 9, 2012. I moved to Los Angeles in 2000, but we maintained our friendship through long letters and phone calls and many visits. Once he came to L.A. for a reading and insisted on walking everywhere. I insisted on picking him up at his hotel and driving him to my favorite Mexican restaurant. He surveyed the passing mid-city Los Angeles landscape with a sense of wonderment, saying, “L.A. has done a better job at preserving its architecture than New York.” I had to laugh. “I know you hate Robert Moses, but that’s hyperbole,” I said.

Each visit, spaced out over time and a continent between us, hopscotched to a new, shocking phase in his decline. The second to last time I saw him I was visiting New York with my children, then 10 and 5. We met him at his new apartment in Tudor City. He’d sold the old one because the cancer had weakened him to the point where he couldn’t do the maintenance for his building that he always had: shoveling snow in winter, sweeping the stoop all other seasons. He moved, he said, because he couldn’t tell his neighbors he wasn’t up to it anymore. I was never sure if this was a joke, and even if it were, there is a truth to it. He hated disappointing people.

At that time, David’s head was bald from chemo and his left arm was no longer of use, its nerves severed in his latest surgery, so he would carefully place his hand in the pocket of his jacket, as though it were his keys. We decided to walk through the Tudor City Greens to a nearby sushi restaurant. My five-year-old was at the height of her annoyingness and though David wasn’t super into kids, he was great with them (kind of like hugging). She kneeled on the banquette beside him while he methodically ate his sashimi and then, as usual, all of the garnish, tracing the shadow of stubble on his head with two fingers while humming. He ignored her, which was fine with me, since I was never the type of mother who insisted other adults find my children endlessly fascinating. After a minute or so, her fingers slowed to a stop on the side of his skull and she asked, “Who are you in charge of?” And he said, after one of his magnificently loaded pauses, “I’m in charge of myself.”

She immediately sat down properly and began to eat her udon.

The very last time I saw him was a month before he died. His family was caring for him, inviting small groups of friends to visit for very brief amounts of time. I went with my friends J. and S., David’s college roommate A., and another friend named M. David sat in a comfortable, medical-looking chair next to his bed, his laptop on a tray in front of him. I lay on his bed, the window unit AC blowing up my denim cut offs. It was July and nearing triple digits outside, no match for that unit. I felt compelled to make jokes, probably tawdry ones about my sweaty nethers. We all laughed but there was a tension in the room, as we knew we were awaiting his death, and it wouldn’t be pleasant. It would be wrenching.

The conversation revolved around a fancy designer coffee that had lately been in the news, the beans possessing a smoky musk, as they’d passed through a live civet before roasting. David googled them and read aloud to us, his voice softer and more subdued than ever before, but still laced with an eloquent venom for anyone who’d pay obscene amounts of money for coffee from a wildcat’s ass.

His sister came in the room, kindly but firmly telling us it was time to say good-bye. I’d never experienced a good-bye so literal. We each hugged him – “Sorry, I know you hate this”- and left the building, passing the coat of armor in the lobby that made it seemed like he lived at a private Anglophilic club, something David would never do. The five of us stood on the sidewalk, wondering if we should go somewhere together but knowing it was time to be alone with our individual sorrow. I walked to Grand Central station and moved through the crowds in that stunningly beautiful space, openly weeping. David had been the one to point out its newly restored ceiling to me first, making mention of the dirty bit preserved in one corner, to show just how much gunk had been removed: a reminder of how beauty can lie beneath.

Months later, at David’s memorial service, the five of us gathered like veterans of the same battle, and discovered we’d all gone to Grand Central that day, and cried alone. Another thing I learned at the memorial, through the testimony of besotted colleague after besotted colleague, was that I was not, as I’d assumed, David’s best friend; everyone identified as David’s Best Friend. What David had done for me, he had done for countless others: spackling the cracks in my existence with bon mots and devastatingly astute observations and unwavering loyalty. (He once offered to write the letter to fire my agent; I regret I didn’t take him up on that.) Even when I was clearly in the wrong (I wasn’t, with the agent), he had a way of taking my side that made me see that. Throw in the hand-painted denim jackets and duct-tape wallets for my children, paper linocuts to commemorate my milestones, gloriously constructed homages to Joseph Cornell, batches of chocolate chip cookie dough and jars of homemade pickles, weekly if not daily check-ins to see how my work was coming along - he was doing this for so many of us, all while dying of cancer and finishing his last book (written in couplets!) and maintaining his trademark mixture of effete, grim, and charming. I wondered, who did what he did for all of us, for him? Had we used him up, worn him out?

It was, as David might say with a sardonic lilt, astounding.

He kept so many of us a secret from each other, compartmentalizing his life into tidy little drawers, like his craft supply cabinet: Doll Parts go in here, Scraps of Tweed in this one, Clown Heads here, Glitter, Buttons, Popsicle Sticks. This was a man who once surgically separated a pair of Levi’s, gently teasing their rugged stitching apart with a tiny seam-ripper, then used the pieces as a pattern for making a facsimile pair of jeans, homemade Levis. He was a master of both deconstruction, and reconstruction. He had put the parts of us together as he pleased, according to his own pattern.

Selfishly, these days, I want him here for the slashing take-downs. But we have the internet for that. My better nature, alongside the wisdom that comes with age, understands that he is my model for easeful, generous friendship: be interested, and interesting, as I urge my children. Take care, and care.

Be in charge of yourself.