Amy and Dave were Casey’s art school friends, an easy couple for us to hang out with. They were college sweethearts who moved out to Southern California together after graduation from the University of Minnesota to attend CalArts. They didn’t know me before 2001, so they didn’t come with the social baggage of having to mourn along with me. That was so appealing to me in 2002.
In terms of our backgrounds, Amy and I had nothing in common. She was from the Minneapolis suburbs, and her parents had jobs as a schoolteacher and a pharmaceutical salesman. Even her name, “Amy Asher,” seemed so open and friendly that I never thought to second-guess her motivation for hanging out with me. But now, it was obvious that Amy was always going to be Casey’s friend first, something I hadn’t seen before. “The hundreds of hours we’ve spent together. The walks, the coffee. I was there when your children were born. You were my friend, Amy. Casey cheated on me, but you lied every time you saw me.”
Amy pushed back, “It wasn’t lying. I promised Casey. And Dave. We all thought it was for the best, after your father and everything.”
“Are you kidding me? Did you think it would break me? Am I that fragile to all of you?” The thought of the three of them sitting around discussing what was “best” for me was infuriating, as if their solid Midwestern upbringings, long-term relationships, and commercial art careers had been anything but predictable. They knew nothing about loss. Not a thing. “Don’t pretend you had my interests at heart, Amy. My husband had an affair and there were consequences, serious ones, but you know what? Nobody died. We didn’t lose thousands of people because Casey screwed his assistant.”
She stammered, “Yes—yes, you’re right.”
“Do not mention Casey’s infidelity in the same sentence as my father’s murder in a terrorist attack.” I rarely spoke about my father’s death to friends or to Casey; I had a therapist for that. And I never used the 9/11 card as any kind of emotional weapon, but I was so tempted to let Amy have it, all of it. The shock, the terror, the nightmares. The pictures in my head of my father’s last minute as he realized the horror of what was happening. (Though on my most positive days, I picture him absorbed in the paper, oblivious to the future.) Polite and stoic was the only way I could carry on for the first few years after it happened, with so many public appearances and statements demanded of me. Then polite and stoic became the way I carried on about everything. Did I appear fragile to them instead? Is that how other people saw me—my colleagues, my former classmates—as someone who needed special handling, as opposed to someone who handled the worst and made it through? Jesus, I hope not.
I felt a surge of sympathy for Amy, revealed as a pathetic sheep rather than the vital nonconformist I thought her to be. “You made your choices, Amy. And you all seriously underestimated me, which is astonishing to me. I think you should go.”
“I’m so sorry, Joan. If I could do it all over again . . .”
“That’s not really the way things work. Believe me,” I said, imagining that a month from now, she’d be free of all guilt and be arranging playdates with Will and Oliver in their wreck of a backyard, where I’d spent hours painting with her kids. “Keep the bagels and don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine. Given the circumstances, I think it’s best if you choose another godmother for Frederick.” That’s when Amy started to cry.
“We don’t have to go there yet.”
“I do, Amy. I do.”
I was still shaking from Amy’s visit when I heard the pitter-patter beats of a Skype call coming from my computer. My only digital pal was Polly, my oldest friend, who had made good on all our promises to return to Paris immediately after graduation. Evangeline “Polly” Davis, formerly of Pasadena, was now a glamorous Parisian resident married to a French lawyer name Jean-Michel de La Fontaine. The result was a name with so many syllables I had to snicker a little every time I saw it on her stationery: Evangeline Davis-de La Fontaine.
But she’d always be Polly to me.
Polly was living in the City of Light as a celebrity expat and international blogging sensation, creator of the site Pasadena Meets Paris with over a half million page views a month. According to an article in Elle Decor, it was the must-read blog for Americans abroad, Seven Sisters graduates, and midlife divorcées fantasizing about a year in Paris to rediscover themselves. Shockingly, I now found myself in more than one of those categories.
In high school at Sacred Sisters, Polly and I had been co-editors of the newspaper, an uneasy alliance with plenty of headbutting. We both had strong opinions, but not the same strong opinions, on what could be considered newsworthy stories. Polly broke new ground at the Catholic school by writing an op-ed about Eve Ensler’s Vagina Monologues, pioneering the use of the word “vagina” in the newspaper and picking up the support of the nuns, several of whom had been anti-war activists in the seventies and now mainly sang protest songs with guitar accompaniment at Mass. Polly then made it a point to write about vaginas as often as possible for the remainder of her term as editor. I covered student council meetings; she covered body politics.
By senior year, she had checked out of the editor role once she made the Rose Court, ensuring that she would ride down Colorado Boulevard on New Year’s Day, a mark of excellence and immortality that only a small circle of teenage girls achieved in Pasadena. She was one of the rare Black princesses in that era and made the most of her time in the sun, securing interviews with TV networks, scoring an internship at Seventeen magazine for the summer, and reeling in a debutante escort who went to West Point. After high school, we went off to rival women’s colleges, keeping in touch but not going out of our way to see each other even though we were both in Massachusetts. When we discovered that we were on the same study abroad program, we rekindled our friendship in that way that Americans do abroad, out of desperation to speak English. But over the course of the year, Polly and I reached détente and then genuinely bonded.
After Wellesley, Polly established a thriving freelance career as a beauty and culture writer for a host of women’s magazines with Paris as her hub. To fill the evenings while her then fiancé was studying, she started Pasadena Meets Paris as a personal blog focused on the basic how-tos of relocation, but her proper sensibilities, developed palate, and excellent sense of style quickly became the main focus of her writing. She was in early on the blogging gravy train. Her developed media instincts and unique writing voice, a sort of gushy socialite with warmth and a touch of superiority, served her well in the medium.
As her readership grew, Polly expanded her brand. She gave weekly tours of her favorite Pasadena Meets Paris haunts, spots where the cultured American woman would feel both a little daring and relatively comfortable, at the same time. She created a cottage industry out of her apartment in the 16th arrondissement, selling everything from the decorative pillows to linens to an extensive line of seasoned salt in her online store. Last time we’d spoken, a guidebook and app were on the way, plus she was in talks to partner with Target on a French-inspired product line.
Polly loved all things truly Parisian, especially wildly snobby Parisian, and she discovered an army of like-minded women around the globe. Why shouldn’t Parisians be snobs? They live extraordinary lives, Polly argued. And Polly was cashing in on all that extraordinary.
When my father was killed, Polly delayed her return to Paris for months, essentially moving in with me to make sure I was fed and dressed, arriving at the right memorial service at the right time. It was the single greatest act of friendship I have experienced in my lifetime. This call may be the second. As soon as I picked up, she knew something was wrong. “Is this a terrible connection or does your face really look like that? What happened?”