The Best of Friends Read online

  No one reaches their early thirties without enduring disappointment, and Sara and I were no exception. There were jobs we had wanted but were never offered. Men we had loved who had stopped loving us. But we also knew that angst was a temporary state. We had come a long way from that high school stage and, in sacrificing so much, discovered that real gratification is rarely instant. We’d both burned the map a long time ago, forging our own paths in the search for a life we loved. I knew neither of us would give up now.

  14

  SARA (1993–1994)

  HE’S CUTE, SARA. What about him?”

  “He looks trapped, Gin, like he wants to dash out and check his stock portfolio.”

  “Well then, what about that man over there?”

  “Not my type.”

  “Have you ever considered that perhaps your type is not your type?” Ginger retorted with an exasperated sigh that only made me laugh. Decked out in velvet and satin, sipping drinks as we whispered critiques of the guys on the dance floor, I suddenly felt as though we were back at the Tucker High School senior prom, and almost expected to hear the falsetto strains of the Bee Gees’ “Night Fever” instead of the eighteen-piece orchestra playing for the wedding reception of Ginger’s college roommate in High Point, North Carolina.

  “You’re being way too picky,” Ginger continued. “It’s only for a dance, not the rest of your life. If you looked remotely interested, someone might ask.”

  “Well, I just saw that very guy dancing with that woman over there and look at her! She’ll probably never walk again.”

  Ginger shook her head. “I give up. Dad can be your partner. At least all you have to worry about are your toes.”

  Almost in spite of myself I found I was having fun, and couldn’t believe my friend would desert me in two weeks to return to Namibia. Over the past few months I’d come to better understand and appreciate Ginger and her minimalist approach to friendship, especially since I was the beneficiary. Personally I’d always surrounded myself with dozens of people, as if friends were a collection of spices, with this person or that adding just the right flavor to any occasion. But sorrow had shocked me into recognizing that the variety-pack approach was no substitute for a few stalwarts who, like my family, improved the bitter as well as the sweet. By temperament and circumstance, Ginger had proved the friend most able to help me. She’d spent weeks of her trip back to the U.S. as my de facto roommate, introducing me to her New York friend network and reconnecting herself. Then there’d been the invitation to tag along with her family to Kristy’s wedding—an easy decision, as I loved the Mauneys, and Kristy had become my friend, too, since I’d moved to Manhattan.

  Ginger and I seemed to swap friends as effortlessly as we traded clothes. As I looked at her, I realized our taste in friends was actually more similar. Ginger usually wore elegant, understated ice blues or creams, and being a bridesmaid was the only reason she was decked out in emerald silk taffeta. Meanwhile I wore a black velvet dress with a matching jacket trimmed in lots of glittery gold braid, accented by large, glittery hoops. After all, I wasn’t on TV and the wedding was down South.

  “You’ve got to admit there’s something pretty amusing about this,” I whispered to Ginger, snagging another mini ham biscuit from a tray of passed hors d’oeuvres. “Coming to a wedding as a way to recover from divorce.”

  “Maybe tonight will help restore your optimism. Kristy kissed her share of frogs, too, you know—but just look at her.”

  “She’s radiant. And wonderful. But I’m not sure that’s relevant.”

  “It’s only been a few months. You don’t have to fall in love again tomorrow, you know.”

  I was ready to change the subject. “And what about you and Nad?”

  She hesitated, then replied carefully, “We’re working on things.”

  “Well, you know I think he’s great.”

  “He is.” She paused again. “I just want to be certain this time.”

  I understood.

  BUT BACK IN New York, sorrow returned like an illness I couldn’t shake, leaching joy, bleaching hope, and I spent my time alone in an endless round of internal cross-examination. What exactly was I missing? The person my ex could be when he wasn’t with me? How pathetic. Or was I missing being part of an “us,” even an us less than the sum of its parts, because somewhere deep inside I felt like two against the universe was such better odds than me, myself, and I? I was beginning to realize that I’d forgotten how to be single, perhaps even forgotten who “I” was. There was time to figure it out, there had to be. And in the meantime work offered distraction, direction, and, frequently, perspective.

  IN THE LATE autumn of ’93, Haiti seemed to be on the brink of imploding. Former members of vicious death squads called the Tontons Macoutes—re-formed as shadowy paramilitary gangs and now known as the Attachés—had thrown their support behind dictator Raoul Cédras and his junta. President Clinton was debating whether to intervene in an attempt to reinstate the country’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

  I flew from JFK to Miami, where I boarded one of the few commercial flights then still serving the country. We landed in Port-au-Prince, a Graham Greene city, all tropical colors shot through with sharp, poisonous menace. I made it through the shakedown at customs, feigning ignorance as a way to escape blatant requests for bribes, relaxing just a little after I’d managed to round up boxes loaded with tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of gear I’d been assigned to bring for crews already on location. Then the waiting driver took me to the Hôtel Montana, an incongruously lovely mountain retreat overlooking the seething capital.

  In the evenings, cars loaded with gun-waving Attaché goons patrolled, and even by daylight danger lurked, coiled for a premeditated or random strike. One day a cameraman and I turned a corner in the city’s impoverished Cité Soleil neighborhood, a stronghold of Aristide’s supporters, looking for a spot to do a stand-up—the segment in a taped story in which a reporter directly addresses the camera. We practically tripped over a dead man whose body had been tossed into the gutter. I was convulsed by a violent shudder despite the heat, sobered by the sight of a person who’d been thrown away. Who was he? What had happened to him? But the photographer waved me vigorously toward the car before I could voice a single question. “Get in now, Sara,” he insisted. “They may still be around.” “They” made us shiver again a few days later, as we filmed in a remote area outside the city, a strangely lovely place but also, we were told, a killing field. As a breeze stirred the grasses, it was hard to believe that beneath that soil lay the bodies of dozens of men and women slain by Cédras’s thugs, until the photographer pointed to what looked at first like a stick. The wind couldn’t warm the chill that wrapped around my ribs at the sight of a human bone piercing the rough ground.

  At night I’d decompress in the hotel bar with my old friend Linda, who was covering the conflict for ABC’s World News Tonight. But when I flew home, Linda remained. What’s more, she, Ginger, and the rest of my close friends all lived somewhere else, across the country or overseas. Fiona had returned to Scotland, and Julie and her son Tarl had also moved to the UK when Julie’s marriage ended shortly after mine. I was only just meeting people in Manhattan and was always delighted when an old friend came for a visit, as Judith did early in the frigid winter of ’94. Years before, she’d been my first boss, but over the years she’d become both friend and doting honorary aunt.

  “Let’s just nosh, shall we? I’m not very hungry,” Judith said after we’d hugged hello, so we wandered from her hotel to Gino’s, where we snagged a table by the zebra wallpaper and shared olives and a chopped salad, to the disapproval of our convivial waiter. It had been eight years since we’d first dined together in New York, on the trip where I’d reconnected with Ginger, and it felt strange to suddenly be the local. But that wasn’t what I found most disconcerting. Like me, Judith had just lost her husband. Jerry, the father of her two children, the man whose license p
late read “DaBronx” and whose accent never altered despite twenty years in the South, had died a few months before from a swift, rare form of lung cancer.

  “Judith, I can’t imagine what you’re going through,” I said, looking at her drawn face.

  “You know, sweetie, I think we have more in common than you think,” Judith answered. “It’s a loss, either way. And besides, we don’t have to compare.”

  But inevitably we had. We’d shared wan smiles over shedding pounds without dieting, discussed how we sought escape in detective fiction or light novels, and agreed that one of the worst things was being caught off guard by memories triggered by random events—the sight of a car, the whiff of cologne, a familiar profile. Later that evening I’d felt comfortable enough to make a confession. “My biggest fear is that I’ll never find love again. Maybe there’s something wrong with me. Especially since I’m not twenty-something anymore.”

  For the first time that night, Judith looked startled. “Sara, you’re only thirty-three! Of course you’ll meet someone. Even though I can’t imagine a relationship right now, my only fear is the opposite—that I’ll never find anyone I love that much again.” As I trudged home, I couldn’t get our conversation out of my mind. Her loss was far greater, yet she was far healthier than I.

  I’d rented a pretty two-bedroom walk-up on the city’s Upper West Side, but much as I loved it, I hated the silence of living alone. In the Kuiseb with Ginger and Nad, I’d found the evening quiet comforting—the wind stilling, the crackle as the fire popped and died, the cry of a faraway jackal the only punctuation marks. But I was new to the creaks and echoes of the apartment, the clatter of my heels on the wood floor. When Ginger had been in town, we’d filled the quiet with laughter and dinners and parties, with late nights and extra coffee in the morning.

  As I changed clothes and got ready for bed, I almost felt as though Ginger were there, I could hear her voice so clearly in my mind. Unfortunately, I wasn’t thrilled by what she had to say. Sara, you need conversations like the one tonight, and you need this time living on your own—time to reflect. Give yourself a chance to heal, okay? But thinking was driving me nuts. And as anyone knows, just because your best friend is right doesn’t mean you must heed her advice.

  FOR ALL MY traveling, it was only in New York that I felt I needed a compass. I’d once shaken my head sympathetically at Ginger’s tales of dating in the Big Apple. Now I was the one who felt lost. I went out with an orchestra conductor. A doctor. A motorcycle-riding ad exec. But it seemed as if there was some complicated rule book that everyone had read except for me. Take the night one friend and I both met a handsome, well-connected lawyer. Later that night he slept with my friend. The following afternoon he called to ask me out to dinner. Even though I mentioned I’d heard quite a bit about their evening from Our Mutual Friend, he still seemed stunned when I declined his invitation.

  By far my best blind date was with a woman. Our matchmaker was my former Nightside coanchor Antonio Mora, who was now a correspondent for ABC News based in New York. “Her name is Sharon Dizenhuz and she’s the entertainment reporter and an anchor for New York 1. The local cable all-news channel. You’ll love her.”

  I did. Our friendship solidified the night we covered Donald Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples, where the eye-rolling of the press was equaled only by the nudge-nudge, wink-wink of the guests. Sharon was battling her way back from an urban dating disaster and, after years of living in New York, had a few trusty tips for a newcomer to the city’s social scene.

  “Okay, you’ve got a pager, right, Sara?”

  “Of course! For me, getting beeped usually means catching a taxi to the airport.”

  “Right. Well, let’s just pretend you’re actually in New York and you’re going out on a date at, say, eight o’clock with a new man. I’ll page you at eight forty-five, with 666,” she said with a mischievous laugh. “If it’s a disaster, explain that you got paged, head to the phone booth, wait a couple of minutes, and then return to the table and say, ‘Sorry, gotta dash—breaking news.’” She flashed a cheeky grin.

  “People do that?”

  “Look, dating is work.” She lowered her voice conspiratorially. “I confess, my secret hobby is to speculate about all the other couples in the restaurant—you know, is this their first date? Or their last? I remember one night when I thought the check would never come, I noticed that the cute guy next to us seemed to be in the same predicament. So when both our dates headed to the loo, I couldn’t resist asking him, ‘Blind date? First date?’”

  “Sharon, you didn’t!”

  “But I did! Next thing you know, I’m sampling his french fries.”

  “And what did you sample later?”

  “Sara, I’m shocked, shocked! What kind of girl do you take me for?” We both started laughing. “Of course what really happened is that we both saw our dates coming back and that was that.” She paused, and a misty look came into her eyes. “Gives you hope, though. Our guys, they have to be out there.”

  I snorted. “Sharon, I don’t even know how to do this anymore. The whole thing makes me feel like I don’t know where north is.”

  Sharon nodded. “They move it at the Lincoln Tunnel. Cross into New York and—poof—all systems jammed.”

  “Do you get used to it?”

  “Not really. But you have to keep trying.”

  “Don’t you ever want to give up?”

  Sharon slid an arm into her sweater, tightened one of her signature jaunty silk scarves. “Look, a friend of mine wrote an article about the perils of dating in the city. ‘One woman recalls—’ ‘Then there was my friend who was shocked to discover—’ ‘An Upper East Side woman confided—’ Just one horror story after another. But you want to know the worst part? Every story was mine! Every single one of them.”

  I started laughing. “She only used you because you could make a date with Dracula sound amusing. But you still get out there.”

  “I do. Speaking of which. You have to come with me tomorrow to this journalist event. Several thousand of your soon-to-be-closest friends will be there, including some eligible males.”

  “No way. Absolutely not. I say nyet to men.”

  “I’ll call you tomorrow with the details!” With a cheery wave, she vanished into the night.

  THE PERFORMANCE WAS an annual spoof of national, state, and local politics by a New York journalists’ group called the Inner Circle. While the following night would be a black-tie dinner for the rich and powerful, this dress rehearsal was for the hoi polloi. As we threaded our way through the crowd of journalists, Sharon skidded to a halt beside a tight group. “Sara, these are some of my friends from the New York Post.” She smiled her way through the introductions, then stopped. “But you I don’t know. I’m Sharon.”

  “G’day.”

  When the dark-haired man smiled, his eyes twinkled. I was uncomfortably aware that he was tall, good-looking, and of indeterminate age. Perhaps a month or two younger than I. He turned to me, held out his hand. “And you are?”

  “Sara.”

  “What do you do with the Post?”

  “Actually, I work for NBC. I’m a correspondent for our evening newscast.”

  “Well, maybe you can introduce me to Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric. We get the Today show and I think the way you cover news is excellent. Actually, that’s why I’m here—to watch and learn.”

  “How long will you be here?”

  “Only a few months. Then I’m moving to Tokyo to be the Japan correspondent for my paper, the Melbourne Herald Sun, and the rest of Murdoch’s Australian papers.”

  My heart took a dive. I’d finally met someone who seemed interesting and he was from another country and moving to a third. Time to cut my losses. But while I had every intention of wandering off immediately to mingle, somehow Andrew managed to wangle an invitation to watch the second half of the program sitting between Sharon and me, pleading a combination of ignorance of New York City politics and
jet lag. And as the evening continued, I found I’d liked more than his looks. He was observant and plainspoken—if occasionally unintelligible.

  “Where are you from?”

  “Muckleford.”

  “Is that near Sydney?”

  “It’s in Victoria. Way up woop woop.” As I looked mystified, he continued, “Even Australians have never heard of it. I’m off a sheep farm about an hour and a half outside Melbourne. My Uncle Norm was a reporter. One day he landed his TV helicopter in the side paddock on his way back from a story and I caught the bug.”

  “I’ve always wanted to go to Australia. Kangaroos and koala bears sound good, but aren’t there snakes?”

  His eyes twinkled, and he leaned forward and said in a stage whisper, “Koalas aren’t bears, they’re marsupials. And don’t worry. I haven’t seen a snake bigger than six feet.”

  I hated making mistakes—nearly as much as I hated the sound of those snakes. “Sounds delightful.”

  “You’ve gotta be pretty unlucky to get bitten by a Joe Blake. Though I did shoot one once, out hunting.”

  Oh, better and better. I was in danger of falling for Crocodile Dundee.

  At the end of the evening the three of us stood outside the Hilton Hotel to say good night. Andrew shivered in the arctic air, being from a continent where spring attire clearly didn’t include a scarf, hat, or gloves.

  “Thanks, you two. Just so you know, I don’t know a soul here, which makes you two my new best friends. Do either of you run?”

  “I do!” I volunteered with more enthusiasm than sense.

  “Great. Just give me your numbers.”

  AS HE’D PROMISED, Andrew called, and was easy to talk to. But given my schedule with Nightly News and Today, actually getting together proved more difficult, so he joined the he’ll-just-have-to-wait list.

  At Today, I felt increasingly comfortable with Bryant and Katie, but I was just getting to know Matt Lauer, who had recently taken over for Margaret Larson. I was about to get to know him a whole lot better.