The Best of Friends Read online

  One afternoon as I was heading to Broadway to meet Sharon for a matinee, I got the New York City taxi driver from hell. Despite my protests, the wild-eyed lunatic darted and weaved through traffic, and ultimately slammed into the taxi in front of us. He was clearly, unambiguously in the wrong, so what else could he do? Like any self-respecting psychopath, he leapt out to blame the other driver.

  “You a crazy man!”

  “What? You rammed my car, you idiot. I’m calling the cops.”

  Late for the play and steamed, I did something I’d never done before. I got out without paying, prompting Psycho Driver to turn his wrath on me. Suddenly I had what’s known down South as a hissy fit. “I will not! You are demented and it’s your fault we crashed. You’re just lucky we’re not in the hospital! I’m not paying you one damn cent!”

  As I turned to make good my escape, I discovered a traffic jam had built up behind us. My anger fizzled instantly, replaced by southern discomfort, and I was just grateful no one had witnessed my tantrum. That’s when I spied a cute guy gesturing me over to share his cab. “Sara?” the Knight in Shining Armor asked in surprise as I got closer. Oh my God. Mortification.

  “Matt! Hi! Um…thanks for coming to my rescue.”

  “You looked like you were having a little trouble. What happened?” As I tried to explain, his grin got broader until I realized that I’d been the one who must have looked like a New York psychopath. When he dropped me off at the theater, I mumbled thanks, to which he replied kindly, “Don’t mention it.”

  I badly wanted to reply, Actually, if you wouldn’t mention it, that would be even better. Instead I said, “See ya tomorrow at the show.” Of course, it took Matt less than twenty-four hours to spill the beans about the entire awful episode for the viewing pleasure of millions. As I’d just learned, nobody can deliver a good-natured on-air ribbing like Matt Lauer.

  A FEW DAYS later Andrew called again to see if I could meet him for a run. A run led to dinner, then another dinner a few weeks later. I liked his easy manner, his warmth, his accent, his amusing anti-establishment rants. I also enjoyed having a man as a friend. I’d never bought Ginger’s theory that men and women can’t really be friends. Nevertheless, she wasn’t my only girlfriend who pointed out I was on the rebound and consequently needed to be grilled.

  “Does he have E.B.?” asked Lynne Dale, a Dateline producer.

  “No, I’m sure he doesn’t! What on earth is that?”

  “Excess Baggage. You know—an ex, kids, diploma from a twelve-step program.”

  “Oh no, nothing like that.”

  “G.U.?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Is he Geographically Undesirable?”

  “Well, he’s from Australia.”

  She gasped. “That is a 10! Now listen carefully. This is not Mr. Right. He’s Mr. Right Now.”

  THEN THERE WAS the other nagging question. Andrew had dropped a few hints that he might be younger than I. One night as we met for dinner with Sharon and a few other friends, I cozied up.

  “So enough of this dancing around the age question, Andrew,” I said, wagging my finger at him playfully. “How bad can it be?”

  He gave his broad, lazy smile and pulled out his driver’s license. The date seemed to glow neon.

  “Oh my God!” I pulled my knee away from his knee under the table and gulped. Too shocked to be witty, I muttered, “At least you had the grace to be born in the sixties.”

  “Oh, come on, it’s not that bad, I’m over twenty-one.” His smile was as charming as ever and the lashes around his eyes were implausibly thick, but when he moved closer I pulled back. Unbidden, I suddenly pictured myself as Barbara Stanwyck with red nails, mules, and a breathy, dangerous voice. A divorcée. The kind of woman any mother wants kept as far away as possible from her son.

  “Andrew, you are twenty-four!” I shouted at him as loudly as was possible in a whisper, anxious not to turn this into a source of conversation for the entire table.

  “Yes. I’m aware of that.”

  “Well, don’t be ridiculous. It’s impossible.”

  “What’s impossible?” His grin got larger. I flushed.

  “You are.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “WOW, SARA, THAT’S nearly a decade” was Ginger’s first comment some weeks later.

  “Nad’s younger than you, Gin.”

  “Only three years. But age isn’t the point, remember how you were going to take it slow—”

  “Hey, you guys!” interrupted my cousin Lynn Templeman, who’d joined Ginger and me on this safari, first around Namibia and now Zimbabwe. “Look, look!”

  I turned my head to see hippos cavorting in the shallows and wanted to pinch myself yet again. We’d been dazzled by “the Smoke That Thunders,” Victoria Falls, transfixed by rainbows spun hundreds of feet in the air. We’d browsed open-air markets, purchasing elegantly carved wooden giraffes and woven baskets. And now we floated lazily down the Zambezi River, watching a wildlife spectacle. “Actually, let’s give that family some room,” Ginger suggested, paddling toward the bank. “Hippos can actually be dangerous.”

  But while it was easy to skirt hippos and even more menacing crocodiles, it proved harder to avoid questions from my friend.

  “Remember what we talked about at Kristy’s wedding?” Ginger continued. “That was less than a year ago. You’re still on the rebound, whether you think so or not. And I remember what that’s like.”

  “I know, Gin,” I reassured her, “but we’re older and wiser.”

  Not that those were the first two adjectives that might have been chosen to describe us late that night at a Vic Falls bar where we recklessly entered the karaoke contest.

  “Wild thing!” we belted out, tentative at first, then getting into our groove. “You make my heart sing!”

  And suddenly Ginger let out a sound, part purr, part growl, which ended in a howl that brought down the house, and we wiped tears from our eyes as we laughed our way through the big finish, “You make everything groovy!”

  And as I flew back to New York, still smiling, I held on to that line. Everything would be all right. I’d fall just far enough for this guy and no further. Because even if your best friend is right, you don’t have to heed her advice. Do you?

  15

  GINGER (1993–1995)

  GINGER, HEY, GINGER, are you getting up?”

  “What? What is it?” Through the fog of sleep, I thought I was dreaming until Nad rolled over and pulled half of the blankets off me.

  “Wait a minute. I was just up.” I rolled in the opposite direction and fumbled for my watch. The yellow glow of hands pointed out that it was 3 A.M. Sara was probably out on the town, dressed in chic black, dancing and dining with the new man in her life. And me, I was babysitting. Not exactly what I’d dreamed I’d be doing at thirty-three.

  “Okay, I’ll get up.” I looked across the thin bedroll. Nad was already snoring again.

  Six months after Nad and I had said good-bye to our life with the baboons in the Kuiseb River, we’d moved four hundred miles north, to Etosha National Park, where Nad had taken a position as the park’s only veterinarian. A park the size of Switzerland, Etosha teems with wild animals and wide-open spaces. It is dominated by a vast white shimmering pan—an ancient dry lake bed—fringed with seeps of water and etched with game paths. During the dry season, hundreds of animals file into waterholes to drink. Giraffes approach tentatively, scanning the horizon for one of Etosha’s fabled lions. Sometimes it takes hours before they are confident enough to spread their long legs and lower their heads to drink. Herds of elephants approach silently while zebra and wildebeest bray and kick their way to the water’s edge. Springbok spar, jackals dart among the other animals, and tiny black-winged plovers stand guard over their eggs. It is live theater at its best. Etosha was where Jen and Des Bartlett made their classic film The Lions of Etosha, which I’d seen as a teenager on television in Richmond. One day I hoped to make a film her
e, too. But right now I just hoped to make it through the night.

  We’d taken on a new, rather noisy project—one sick and very hungry baby rhino. At the familiar sound of pounding, the uneasy beat of his head or feet hitting rotting old board, I eased out of the blankets, tossed an old sweatshirt over my shoulders, and tiptoed across creaky floorboards into the next room. “Shh,” I whispered, “I’m coming.”

  Reaching for the matches with one hand, I rubbed the tiny stub on our baby rhino’s head with the other. One day its horn, actually a dense mass of hair, would grow long and thick. Once the rhino’s protection, it had become the rhino’s curse. Decades of civil wars in Africa had created a downward spiral where guns were more plentiful than jobs, where an AK-47 could be traded for a sack of maize meal, and where a bullet and fifty dollars would buy you a life—human or animal, particularly an animal whose horn was desired as an aphrodisiac in the Far East and worn as a sign of manhood in the Middle East. When a desperately poor villager was given the option of taking the life of one rhino in exchange for enough money to feed his family for a year, the choice was tragically obvious.

  I lit the gas cooker, turning up the blue flame, and its gentle hiss broke the stillness. While the water warmed, I mixed one cup of maize meal, a cup of milk powder, and a vitamin supplement in an empty old two-liter Coke bottle. Next I filled it with hot water, attached a huge plastic nipple, and gave it several strong shakes, the pounding of the rhino’s head hitting the floor keeping the beat.

  “Hey, stop that racket. Your food is coming.” I sat beside him, lifted his head, and placed it on my lap. The nipple was awkward, large and floppy, but he wrapped his pointed lips around it and sucked greedily. Closing my eyes and stroking his head, I leaned against the termite-riddled wall of our temporary bush house where we were staying in a remote part of the park and wondered: How do mothers do it? Every two to three hours for the past five days I had been feeding our baby rhino a concoction of vitamins and protein, but every day he grew weaker. At first his heavy feet had shuffled behind me as we walked around the garden, then he had stumbled. A day later his legs had folded under his weight. After that it took two of us to lift him, and since we couldn’t hold him up all day, we’d built a sling for him to stand in. Two long steel poles rested on two 44-gallon drums with a thick green plastic sheet stretched between them and under the rhino. We’d hoped he would be able to place some weight on his legs, to walk the length of the poles and gain strength. It hadn’t worked.

  Nad had tried drips, drugs, and massages. He’d called a wildlife sanctuary in Kenya, friends from Namibia’s Save the Rhino Trust, and dozens of other vets in Africa hoping someone might be able to help. Every day he reached deep into his black bag full of medicines hoping to pull out a miracle. Every night we heard the same desperate pounding.

  I felt the weight of the rhino’s head in my lap. “What are we going to do with you?” I asked, stroking his thick skin. This little rhino was only a year old. If all had gone according to plan, he and his mother were supposed to be moved to another game farm as part of a progressive conservation program of custodianship designed to protect and ultimately restore the population of this endangered species. Though still in its infancy, the program had been a huge success, with many black rhinos relocated and small satellite populations established on safe, secure private land. This time, sadly, the plan hadn’t worked. Snatched out of her natural environment and confined in a small holding pen, the rhino’s mother had become so stressed that she’d started pushing her son around, hammering him against the walls and not allowing him to eat. By the time Nad was called to the scene, the baby rhino was dehydrated and nearly dead. Drips, injections, and constant attention brought him back, but all too briefly.

  Finally I slept through the night. No more pounding, no more sounds of struggle. Before I opened my eyes I knew that sweet baby was dead. Tears spilled onto my pillow and still, as much as I hated her, I sympathized with his mother. I too felt stressed, trapped in a beautiful though alien world with no one to beat on but myself.

  When we’d arrived in Etosha National Park, the first question I was asked was, “What are you going to do here, Ginger, because idle women cause trouble?” With his government-issued Land Cruiser and office at the Etosha Ecological Institute, Nad’s role as the new veterinarian was clearly defined, but as a filmmaker without a film, I was—the girlfriend. What I had sworn would never happen again was happening.

  Ironically, in 1993, easing into our thirties, Sara and I had both been thrust back into worlds we thought we had escaped. Sara was living alone, navigating the dicey dating scene in New York City, while I had returned to a small town, to a world dominated by men. She had her promising career for security, for sanity. From my vantage point, she also had freedom. I didn’t even have a permit to be in the park. Everything was tied to Nad—his job, his income, his position. I was nearly thirty-three years old and still making the same mistakes. After I had sweated it out in the Kuiseb for nearly four years, the baboon film remained unfinished. I had no job, not even a résumé, nothing except the feeling of being trapped.

  Instead of the space and freedom of the Kuiseb where Nad and I had drifted naked down the flowing river, wished upon shooting stars, and claimed fierce possession of thirty miles of desert sand, here we’d been assigned a house, “the vet’s house.” Number 3918-B, one in a row of large, unimaginative boxes, each a carbon copy of the next. Paint was peeling off the walls, the ceiling was stained, and a previous resident’s attempt to add a homey touch, a dado of flowers circling the bathroom wall, looked like Martha Stewart gone mad.

  Next to the park’s main tourist camp at Okaukuejo with a post office, convenience store, and petrol station, we were living in a small town with all the good and bad that implied. Etosha had stunningly beautiful plains and kind people, but I was having a hard time looking past the bad—the constant stream of people asking for work, the suspicious neighbors, the dreadful party-line telephone. And sometimes the bad were looking back. Two men came to us separately, in confidence, warning that the other was the camp’s Peeping Tom.

  Nad and I were prime targets. Living “in sin,” and frowned upon in a circle of conservative couples, I’d never felt so alone. When Nad put on his crisp khaki uniform and went to work, I stayed in the house writing wildlife and travel articles for a local magazine at thirty dollars a pop, taking comfort in wearing my torn sarongs from the riverbed. Rubbing the thin fabric was akin to shining an Aladdin’s lamp. Powerful gems flooded back, like the memory of Nad tying half of this material around my burning feet while we watched my sandals drift down the riverbed with the flood’s headwaters. Or how Cleo and Bamuthi used to play tug-of-war with the material now tied around my waist. But I’d wrapped myself in memories only to be told by the neighborhood children—who had no doubt heard it from their parents—that I “dressed tatty.”

  Clearly I was being tested, and never more so than one night. On our way to Kaokoland, a rugged, mountainous area on the Kunene River bordering Angola where Nad and a few of his colleagues had planned to scout locations for relocating black-faced impala, we pulled into Opuwo, a small, dusty town populated by geologists, road workers, and the stately, ochre-stained, indigenous Himba people. We planned to spend that night at Chris Eyre’s house. Chris was the chief nature conservator in the area, and someone with a deep respect for the land and the local people. The next day he’d take us further into the mountains.

  When we opened the door to Chris’s house, I was hit by the sour smell of rotting flesh. Turned out Chris had an elephant skull soaking in his bathtub. When I asked Chris about it, he said, “Yeah, found the old girl lying in the bush. Need a good look at her teeth to accurately age her. She’s been in my tub so long I’ve nearly forgotten about her.”

  Obviously Chris had been living in the bush a very long time. Rotting skin floated in coffee-colored water and the eye of the elephant was glassy, vacant. But the stench wasn’t the only thing that hit me. I
looked around Chris’s grimy kitchen, the table now half littered with empty whiskey and brandy bottles, and realized I was the only woman there.

  While Chris was welcoming, not all of the men were. As the rowdy party continued, some of the looks I got became increasingly hostile. I felt more and more uncomfortable, and possibly sensing this, one of the men picked up a panga, a long, thick knife designed to hack through the bush, and handed it to me. “Here, Ginger,” he smirked, gesturing to the huge solid block of ice on the table, “cut us some ice,” certain I couldn’t do it.

  Mad as hell, I picked up the panga, staring him down as I stroked the two-foot-long blade. Then, with one deft quick stroke, I cleaved off a chunk of ice that went flying from the main block and slid across the filthy concrete floor. I picked it up, placed it on the table, and halved it with another blow. Retrieving the splinters of ice and dropping them noisily into battered tin mugs, I covered mine with whiskey and smiled before looking him in the eye and declaring, “You don’t need a penis to cut ice.” I might not have known their rules but they didn’t know me either.

  Nad tried not to laugh. He winked at me and I winked back. Then I thought of Sara. She would have loved it.

  In between trips to Princeton, Port-au-Prince, L.A., and London, Sara always found time to call, battling to reach me through our phone exchange. Undeterred by the fact that others could be listening, she implored, “Tell me the truth, how are you?” knowing that I wouldn’t be “fine” until the baboon film was finished. Without that visual résumé, letters to commissioning film editors went unanswered, phone calls unreturned. A finished film was my only hope of kick-starting a stalled career. While Sara’s calls would lift my spirits, there was little she could do from so far away. When relief finally arrived, it came from two unlikely sources—the 1995 Miss Universe pageant and a stranded elephant.