Let's Take the Long Way Home (9 page)

I had first encountered this truth during a vulnerable time in Clementine’s life, when I was trying to make her submit to what is commonly known as an “alpha roll”—a questionable practice often prescribed for unruly puppies, in which the human rolls the pup on her back and contains her until the dog stops struggling. Most puppies will acquiesce within one or two tries; Clementine, whose temperament was both dominant and gentle, was having none of it. I would roll her over and she would struggle relentlessly, then, once released, spring to her feet and bark in protest. Ever conscious of the need to establish my authority, I’d try again. The third time, in the middle of the struggle, I had a bird’s-eye view of what I was doing. Crouched there on the floor, I saw myself as my father, who had been flummoxed and enraged by his daughters’ adolescence. He couldn’t keep us from growing up and away, and so he yelled and threatened
and tried to get us to back down, which had only made it worse.

My mother had asked me once after I was grown what my dad could have done differently, instead of bullying his way through my rebellion. “I wish he’d just told me how much he loved me,” I answered her. “I wish he could have just said, ‘You are precious to me; I won’t let you put yourself in danger.’” This exchange came back to me in a sorrowful flash when I had my small, intractable sled dog on the floor. Did she really need to be convinced that I was in charge? I was ten times her size; I had language, consciousness, and history behind me—my species had been domesticating hers for thousands of years. I was playing master sergeant when there was no need for any standing army.

My agenda disappeared in that moment, and Clementine’s burgeoning temperament was given the room it required. I let her go and hoisted her onto my shoulder, and she fell on me like a kid being carted home from the fair. From that moment on, everything changed between us. Wherever I danced, she followed.

I told Caroline this story one afternoon at the Fells when we were circling the fire trails in autumn. We were talking that day about the realized life versus the external picture of it: the assumptions and projections that we all make about other people’s lives. Each of us had endured complaints from our non-dog friends about our disappearance into the woods, but what our critics couldn’t see
were the glorious recesses of this new place: the colors and smells and hints of sublimity that these walks ensured. Caroline, so often a captive to her own reserve, was now rolling around on the forest floor, laughing and wrestling with the dogs without a shred of inhibition. I was training Clementine off-lead, using hand signals to get her into a down-stay from ten yards away, and she would start to whimper after a few seconds, then break the stay and come charging toward me. Pack of four, we were, planting flags all over the province of our rearranged lives. So much of what we valued was being played out in those woods, in what we were building with the dogs and with each other. And so I looked at Caroline at the end of that fine day and said, “You know—after all this, I don’t think that any man could ever treat me badly again.”

TO PEOPLE WHO
have spent their lives thick with the bounty of other people, attachment itself is complex but assumed. For the introvert, it is a more nebulous territory. I was able to be effusive and warm in my human interactions because I knew when and how they would end: end of day, end of party, end of walk, end of relationship. In the drinking years, the bourbon was the soul mate waiting on the trail, the fixed love object that made me eschew or shrug off others. But walls, whether built by brick or isolation, don’t come down without a corresponding
amount of labor. Without even knowing it, I think Caroline and I coaxed each other into the light. We did this slowly, and with such pronounced attention to the other’s autonomy that neither of us had to move an inch to get away from the other.

I think back now to the small measures of trust gained in that first year of the friendship, the ways we went from mutual caution to inseparable ease, and so much of it now seems like a careful, even silent exchange. I knew about Caroline’s history with anorexia, and on our long excursions in the woods, I would take two graham crackers out of my pocket and hand her one matter-of-factly, without even looking at her. I must have realized, half consciously, that she was too polite to refuse; we were both on the thin side, and so my offering, to the anorectic mind, was relatively unthreatening. Then I started adding small chunks of chocolate to the stash. The primal and mutual pleasure of this act touches me now, though I couldn’t have articulated it, or maybe even recognized it, at the time. After years of struggling with a harsh inner voice of denial and control, Caroline was letting me feed her—reluctantly at first, then with some relief. And I, so long afraid of having anyone need me too much, was foraging around for nuts and berries, bringing them back to the creature I loved.

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment
on Caroline’s face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?”
I would say in the early afternoon, when I called after the writing hours were done and before the walking ones began. “Waiting for you to call,” she would answer, half kidding, and we would dive in: the morning papers (two each), the rowing and swimming ledger (five miles on the water, 1,500 meters in it), the twenty-four-hour chronicle of dramas and annoyances that bookend a day. When we’d gotten to the pond, after the phone call and before dusk, Caroline would link her arm into mine and say, “Sooo …?” as we wound around the reservoir, starting yet another sentence in the infinite conversation. According to the old rule book, men had sports and women had talking; Caroline and I cultivated both, finding that our logging of miles on river or land enhanced the internal ground we covered. And
yet I find now that writing about a friendship that flourished within the realm of connection and routine has all the components of trying to capture air. The dailiness of our alliance was both muted and essential: We were the lattice that made room for the rose.

IF COMPATIBILITY IS PART LUCK AND PART LABOR
, our mettle had been tested by the summer trips we took, together and apart. More than one of those vacations turned into rescue missions. She bailed me out from a miserable, rainy couple of weeks in Truro when she showed up with a tape of
The Sopranos
and a bread pudding from Formaggio. I returned the favor a month later, when she and Morelli were stranded in bad weather in New Hampshire, by sending them a tape of
Survivor—
Caroline’s secret pleasure—by overnight mail. One year when she and Tom got to Chocorua a day or two ahead of me, she called me in Cambridge, begging me to come a day early. “You’ve got to get up here,” she whispered. “The man made me go on a nine-mile hike today. I can hardly move.”

God forbid Tom should learn her limitations; Caroline had nearly pinned him arm wrestling the year before. I was an easier companion, at least when it came to mountain
hikes; we had also learned that we could exist on parallel tracks in silent space. Early in our friendship we had gone to a house of her family’s on Gay Head on Martha’s Vineyard, in late March. The landscape on that end of the island is wild even in high summer; at the start of spring, the place was cold and desolate. It was a hard trip. There were new crops of ticks in the marshes surrounding the house, and after a run the dogs would emerge from high grass looking as though they’d been sprinkled with poppy seeds. Caroline and I bundled ourselves in sweatshirts, armed with brushes and rubbing alcohol, and sat on the floor in the waning light, combing dozens of ticks off the dogs’ coats. I had such a case of cabin fever after two days of rain that I drove twenty miles across island to swim in a hotel pool; Caroline spent most of the time I was gone talking to Morelli on the phone, distraught about the memories the house held. By the time we closed up the house and headed to Vineyard Haven for the ferry, we were both worn out and beyond any efforts at good cheer. An hour before departure, we drove the car into the long ferry queue that is part of Vineyard life, and got out with the dogs to hang around in the parking lot until we left.

Then on the boardwalk across the way, I saw a silhouette that sent my stomach into my throat. A man was sitting on a bench reading
The New York Times
, and I was convinced it was Sam, the man I had split up with five years earlier—whose letters I had never answered, whom I hadn’t seen since that day I left him in an airport in another
city. “Oh my God, Caroline,” I said, “that’s Sam.” She knew all the stories about this piece of pain, including the fact that he spent a lot of time on the Vineyard, and she knew with one look how unhappy I was at the prospect of running into him.

“Hold the dogs,” she said abruptly, giving me Lucille’s leash. “Don’t freak out. I know what to do.” She moved too fast for me to respond, and so I stood there while she marched toward the man on the bench. She got within about ten yards to his right, and then yelled out his name—smiling and waving at a nonexistent person beyond him. She was acting on the assumption that if the man was Sam, we would know it immediately, because he would start in recognition; if I was mistaken and he ignored her, then we wouldn’t have to spend the next two hours dodging ghosts from the past.

The man barely glanced her way before returning to his paper. But everyone else—well, Caroline was hollering and waving while no one was waving back, and she had an audience of sixty or seventy people staring at her. This was a woman so shy she could barely endure any kind of spotlight. But now she had made me laugh until my stomach hurt, and made a fool of herself in public to give me some peace. I had never loved her more than in that moment. She came striding back to where I stood, proud of her antics and glad to see me laughing. “That guy’s about a hundred years old,” she said, shrugging, and took ahold of Lucille’s leash and lit a cigarette.

THOSE CIGARETTES
. I would like to leave them out of this story but cannot. I had learned on the Vineyard trip to grant Caroline the time she needed each day for the
New York Times
crossword puzzle—a sine qua non for which, as the week progressed and the puzzles became harder, she required absolute silence. If you interrupted her focus she would shoot you a look of such withering scorn that it could stop a preacher in his tracks. My rules of togetherness were equally demanding. She could survive a three-hour car trip with me only by chewing nicotine gum; it was a testament to our immediate fondness for each other that I understood her smoking and she tolerated my aversion to it. I had quit four years earlier, and it had taken me years of wanting to quit before I was able, and so I knew that cultivating her desire to stop was far more effective than any threats or scare tactics I could throw her way.

This equanimity didn’t always reign; the closer we became, the less I was able to bear her smoking. I started hollering at her on the phone one day, after I’d been pressuring her about trying to quit and she’d asked me to back off and I couldn’t, and I said something that makes me ache to remember it. “You’re eight years younger than I am,” I cried. “I don’t want to have to bury you.”

I was hardly alone in my worry. Caroline’s mother, before she died, had begged her to stop smoking, and Caroline
told me more than once that she was no match for the coalition of her sister, Becca, and me—with the pressure from the two of us, she knew she would have to quit. But she loved smoking the way my dad had loved it, with his three-pack-a-day habit that went on for decades. I had grown up with the smell of his coffee and his Camels eliciting a feeling of safety, and I knew this attachment could be a tangle of poison and desire. Most addictions, Caroline’s included, are both intricate and predictable. The ever-complicit brain turns the craving into a narrative: The cigarette or bourbon or obsessive relationship becomes the guide rope, the way we navigate the day. Caroline believed she couldn’t write without a cigarette, couldn’t endure a night or an hour within the vast caverns of a tobaccoless world. She tried nicotine gum and tried staring at photos of smokers’ lungs; she researched in-treatment facilities for nicotine addiction. And she finally managed to stop on her own, just before she had to.

It was not a source of trouble between us, but rather of mutual distress. If Caroline and I shared some of the most idyllic times of both our lives, the core of our friendship came from the rougher excursions we endured together. From that first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, “Oh no—I need you” had become an admission and a clarion call—the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count on the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder,
harder moments—discord or helplessness or fear—that we dared to expose to each other.