The Best of Friends Read online

  I wasn’t the one who had lost a child, but interviewing this young mother left me feeling unsettled, queasy. She was so raw and vulnerable. I knew how vulnerable and uncertain I still felt, and all I’d suffered was a recent divorce. Was I guilty of exploiting a grieving woman, preying on her pain? I didn’t think so. She had chosen to talk about her sons, and her poignant story would make viewers understand all that had been lost that day in a way that the dry, sterile facts and figures of a disaster never could. The faces of Colton, Chase, and the others who were killed would make this story real. But still I couldn’t help but wonder if that was merely a rationalization to make it easier for me to sleep.

  I thought about Ginger. I remembered watching the rough cut of her film, quizzing her about missing scenes, scenes I knew she’d witnessed of her beloved baboons tearing each other apart, dying. Scenes she admitted she’d never filmed because they were too painful, too raw. She’d sacrificed material that would have made her film stronger to keep her integrity. But had that been the right decision? After all, she’d watched those very baboons dying of thirst and chosen not to give them water. Science. Journalism. Who made these rules?

  And what about me? True, there were the pressures, unstated but clear, for any reporter anywhere. You had to cover the story and in this story people had lost their lives. But what was the line between good journalism and exploitation?

  I found I was thinking about Andrew, wishing I could see him, even just hear his voice. But what a foolish thought. I had a boyfriend who lived thousands of miles away.

  Late that night, as Marsha, Lisa, and I looked through videotape at KFOR, the NBC affiliate which had become our temporary base, I confided, “I don’t know how much more sadness I can take.”

  “I know what you mean.” Lisa nodded.

  Marsha paused. “I have two boys myself,” she said. “This is tough.”

  Lisa and I looked at her. We were both single and neither of us had kids.

  “They’re about the age of Chase and Colton. I gotta tell you, I just want to get home. Hug them. Hold them.”

  We sat there for a few minutes.

  “But we have got to finish this story,” Marsha continued. “That’s all we can do, for her, for anyone here.”

  And suddenly I knew she was right. We had met civil, dignified men and women, and we’d been entrusted with the stories of those they had loved, and lost. As the night rolled into morning, and as we agonized over the right shot, the right line, the right tone, something happened. We shed inhibition as well as tears, and began to share our own stories. And as we walked out of the station in that pale hush between starlight and dawn, I discovered that two women I’d barely known had become friends, overnight.

  17

  GINGER (1995)

  AGAINST THE CRUSH of New Yorkers window-shopping on a Saturday afternoon in SoHo, I braced myself, remembering the first time I’d returned to Manhattan after leaving for Africa. It had been four years earlier, Sara was still living in Charlotte and Kristy had moved into a new apartment at East Forty-seventh and Second. After a thirty-hour journey through seven time zones and countless cultures, I’d dropped my bags on Kristy’s living room floor and turned back to the bank of elevators. I had longed for fresh air, to walk the streets of New York, to see the city through different eyes. Yet when I stepped out onto the sidewalk, I’d nearly passed out. Overwhelmed by rotting garbage, car exhaust, and fresh flowers in the bin at the corner store, horns honking, neon signs flashing, pizza baking, crushed ash and tobacco, a beggar muttering, and, rising above the tide, the nasal, strident voices of businessmen in an animated exchange. Blindsided by excess, my senses had been attacked, suffocated. Before I’d reached the corner of East Fiftieth, I turned and ran back to Kristy’s. A hot shower and an hour later, I was fine. It was a quick acclimatization, and one that was getting quicker with each trip home.

  This was my fourth trip back to New York City since I’d moved to Namibia, and one of the joys was seeing how Kristy and Sara had connected. While both were busy, they’d become friends, too. And now another old friend from Richmond of both Sara’s and mine, Beth Worrell, had joined us. Strolling the streets, Beth and Sara walked ahead of me, their heads tucked together in intimate conversation. I lingered, eyeing a brocade coat and long, buttery leather boots with four-inch heels on display in a shopwindow. I remembered how I’d once been able to run in high heels. Back then, stilettos had felt natural. But after years of walking barefoot in the sand, my feet had spread. They might be tough enough to trek across hot dunes and over thorns, but they were no match for a pair of Manolos.

  The crowds drifted past, a backdrop dressed in black, breaking up the image, and then I got a good look at myself. Suntanned in the middle of a New York fall, skin lined after years in the desert and with more than a few scars underneath, but eyes opened wide to take in a city I couldn’t see clearly when I’d left six years before.

  I had planned to be away from the U.S. for a year. My life in Africa was an intermission, nothing permanent. It was meant to be an interlude, an adventure, maybe I’d find strength, purpose, maybe not. Either way I’d return home. Now I wasn’t sure where the bush ended and my soul began. Yet as much as I needed the peace of the wild, at times I craved the pulse of the city, a dichotomy that was at once confusing and invigorating. I found I needed the extremes. My body craved sand, heat, wind, adventure, but at the same time it needed a dose of that parallel reality—a world where people talked about an executive producer’s style and ate food that wasn’t covered in sand. A world in which I cuddled up with my niece to read her a bedtime story, and where friends weren’t voices on a crackly international line, but a warm, wonderful presence.

  “Hey, Gin, what do think?” Sara waved, a New York Yankees baseball cap dipped over her eye. I ran to catch up with her and Beth.

  “Looks great. Beth, how about a Mets cap for you?”

  She scanned the tables and laughed. “Don’t they have anything from the Richmond Braves?”

  The street vendor stared, then, with a flash of recognition, grinned. “Braves, Atlanta, yes?”

  “No,” we laughed, pulling each other further down Bond Street.

  In a city of 8 million, we only needed each other. When night fell, we headed for the China Grill, ate scallops, drank champagne, including a round sent by a group of smiling men at another table, and laughed until our sides hurt. We never glanced at the clock. When we got back to Sara’s apartment, it was 4 A.M.

  “That blond one was really cute, wasn’t he?” I giggled.

  “Yeah…cute, rich, and oh, Gin of the Jungle, you had better be careful!” laughed Beth, the sole married one among us. She’d left her two children, Elisa and my godson Trent, at home with their dad, our old friend and her high school sweetheart, Danny.

  “No, don’t worry. I just haven’t seen another man in years…does it show? Anyway, it’s fun, and remember, I’m engaged.”

  “Engaged, sure,” added Sara. “I’ll buy that. But married? That’s the picture that gets blurry when you’re here. I think you’d better watch out.”

  “Yeah, and where did you disappear to for an hour? Please don’t tell me you were on the phone the entire time.”

  A look of disbelief passed over Sara’s face, followed by a mischievous grin.

  “Oh no! Sara, do you get some sort of special rate to Tokyo from a pay phone?”

  “He called me back!”

  But I’d successfully changed the subject. “I think you’re the one who’d better watch out.”

  Lying on the floor in Sara’s living room in our pajamas, mugs of tea and a bag of cookies at our elbows, we could have been thirteen again, back at that long-ago slumber party, telling secrets. Only a few wrinkles gave us away. But who was counting? Certainly not us. Old friends know precisely which lines appeared during a stressful time in a relationship, which are reminders of too much time in the sun as kids, and know, too, the other lines that appear as time slips away. But
good friends also know that you wouldn’t trade most of them. Especially the laugh lines, which we added to during that wonderful weekend in New York.

  “I can’t keep my head up. I think it must be noon in Namibia.” Kissing them on their heads, I said, “Good night, you two.”

  As daylight crept through the curtains, I drifted to sleep to the sound of Sara and Beth’s quiet laughter.

  The next day, after hugging Beth good-bye at the train station, Sara and I walked back to her apartment. Those fifty blocks gave us plenty of time to scheme ways to continue the fun. It wasn’t hard. Invitations, miniskirts, and desire—what a potent combination. With Sara’s confidence restored and her television star ascending, I found myself on the fringes of a very glamorous world, even if sometimes that meant not going to bed at 4 A.M., but getting up then.

  “Gin, the car will be here in fifteen minutes. Are you coming?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it. I’ll be quick.” Sara was dressed in a deep red suit; her hair was wet, her face freshly scrubbed, freckles showing. I tumbled out of bed, slipped into my jeans, and followed her to the chauffeured car. She was filling in for Katie Couric on the Today show, and it was my chance to visit the studio. For me television programs came in blocks of three-year projects; now I would have a chance to see it live. No bits of film spliced only to fall on the floor, no forgotten sequences, no mistakes. Backstage in a whirl of hands holding blow-dryers and makeup brushes, Sara sat unfazed, reading the latest news and story updates for the show from a tiny computer. A final fluff to her hair, a smack of brick red lipstick against tissue paper, and we were off to the set.

  During a commercial break Sara came out of the lights to where I was standing in the back of the studio.

  “Gin, I’d like you to meet Bryant Gumbel.”

  “Hi. Sara tells me you live in Namibia. Never been there, but I was in Kenya last weekend, playing golf. Great place.” Though he spoke of his trip in modest terms, I could only imagine the first-class travel, five-star safari lodges, and pristine golf courses. How different his Africa must be from mine. We watched Sara deliver a story directly to camera, her eyes bright, brimming with intelligence and warmth. It was clear that in the past two years, while her heart had healed, work had helped to soothe and complete her, as my life in the bush had for me.

  But I found that life in Manhattan could be both exhilarating and utterly disorienting. I’d left New York with only two thousand dollars in the bank and no sense of myself. But now when I came back, I found that I had some sort of weird cachet. Not only was I accepted, I was treated like some rare bird that had flown in from Africa to tell stories of her exotic life. People listened, especially men.

  “DON’T LET HER fool you,” Sara laughed. “Gin’s life isn’t all about chasing elephants and sunsets. Tell them about the time you nearly drowned.”

  Several men, some wearing gold cuff links, others leather jackets, clean-shaven or sporting the latest in facial hair, edged closer.

  “Oh, Sara, it wasn’t that bad, more ridiculous really, given the fact that I was sucked into a whirlpool in a river that rarely had water.” And yet, though I had no intention of admitting it, I had been terrified. But in the middle of Manhattan, the agony of waiting for water, and the relief I’d felt when the floods finally arrived, a relief interrupted by fear when I’d been pulled below the surface in a whirlpool, was impossible to explain. It would seem exaggerated, if not pure fantasy. But I remembered it clearly. Underwater, holding my breath, for how long I have no idea, but long enough to think of my parents, my sisters, how much I still wanted out of life, and then to have my very rational thoughts about life and death fuse into one important question: Would the whirlpool push me out onto a bank of sand or throw me violently against a jagged wall of rocks? I shook the memory from my mind, doubting that this group of urbane, sophisticated men with soft hands and padded pockets could begin to understand my life in Etosha, much less the years I’d spent living with a bunch of baboons.

  I started to raise an empty glass to my lips. “Wait,” said one man, lightly touching my elbow, “let me get you a drink, then finish your story.”

  Sara raised her eyebrows. I knew what she was thinking.

  I looked at the collection of men in the room. Advertising executives, independent filmmakers, and company presidents, each more handsome, more successful than the next. These were the men I had once wanted to define me, and now they were attracted to me. Or at least the image of me—a baboon-grooming, sand-surfing, lion-stalking filmmaker. It all made for good dinner party conversation and a great deal of temptation. In my wallet there was a business card from a handsome television executive who, handing it over, said, “If you need any help, any contacts at stations or with distributors, just let me know.” He paused a second, gave me a sly smile, and added, “I just wondered, how long are you staying?”

  For the first time, I acknowledged a question that had been brewing for the past two months: What if I did stay? I wasn’t the same injured girl who had run away to Africa. I was stronger, tougher, and, dare I say it, more marketable. There were options that hadn’t existed before. After six years away, was the pull of family, of friends, and of the possibility of new adventures here stronger than the pull of the bush? My head was spinning, so was Nad’s, and Sara became the lightning rod, the unwitting focus of his fears.

  I knew that Nad liked Sara, but “like” is such a benign, misleading word. He respected her talents, was awed by her ambition, and appreciated all that she had done to help my career. But was he jealous of our friendship? Was he threatened by the lifestyle she shared with me when I stayed with her in New York? Was he afraid that ultimately the combined allure of big-city glamour and our close friendship would tempt me away from him? I think, at times, the answer to all these questions was yes. I could hear it in his voice. And yet he never said a word.

  It had been three months since I’d packed away my cameras, put the Land Rover keys on the kitchen counter, and left Etosha. Three months since Nad and I had decided to get married. In Namibia this had seemed right, the sensible next step, but now that I was back in the U.S., it was beginning to feel horribly wrong. The wedding invitations sat untouched on my parents’ dining room table. My mom looked at the calendar and shook her head, but was willing to give me more time than southern etiquette allowed. I took full advantage, ignoring the invitations and focusing on work.

  Six weeks before our wedding day, I took a train from Richmond to Washington, D.C., to formally pitch the baboon film to National Geographic Television. The screening was like stepping back in time. Images of Cleo dancing down sand dunes, SP reaching out to touch her kidnapped baby, and finally the flood restoring life in the riverbed and completing our film. The room was dimly lit, but still I watched the faces of Keenan Smart, the head of the Natural History Unit, Alexandra Middendorf, an associate producer who had become a friend and an advocate of the film, and Jenny Apostle, the head of acquisitions, while they watched the film. They laughed and sighed deeply at all the right moments. As the end credits rolled, we talked about what additional footage we hadn’t included which could be used to bolster important scenes, how to involve their host in the program, and how the film could be marketed. They even asked me how much money—real money—I wanted for it. The meeting ended with their pledge to talk to the executive producer of Explorer who would make the final decision, but everything seemed to have gone so well that when I left their offices I pinched myself, thinking I just might have my dream of becoming a National Geographic filmmaker.

  A month later, two weeks before I was supposed to get married, I picked up the phone at my parents’ house to hear that word had come back from the executive producer. It was quite simple, really. “Thanks, but no thanks.” My dream had been destroyed with one phone call.

  And the dream of marrying Prince Charming was shattered, too. A life I’d lived and loved suddenly became a commitment that seemed too much. I felt like I was being asked to give up every
thing—to choose Nad was to choose his world, his life, his continent. Although part of my soul had belonged to the bush from the first moment I stepped on African soil, being home had reminded me that the other half was firmly rooted in America. For Nad there was no division, no confusion. He was complete. I felt completely torn. Saying yes to him would mean giving up part of my identity. I’d done that once with Kevin and it had nearly destroyed me. I didn’t think I could survive it again.

  A flurry of international phone calls followed, but even with the direct line, there were still so many mixed messages. Yes, no, I don’t know, maybe…I couldn’t commit to the time of day. Nad seemed to be the only one with resolve. As far as he was concerned, we had made plans and we were going to keep them.

  During long sleepless nights between days full of fittings for my wedding gown, selecting the right color roses for my bouquet and the menu for the reception, I dug deep, trying to get to the core of my discontent. Undoubtedly there was the continental divide—feeling pulled away from my family, my history, and my identity—but there was more, and it was closer to the heart of falling in love. No degree of tossing and turning altered the fact that Nad was a wonderful man. But I feared that by marrying him, I would never again feel that extraordinary rush of falling head over heels in love.

  I remembered Sara telling me about a friend who, though excited to get married, lamented, “I’ll never again have a first kiss.” I knew what she meant. My stomach no longer tightened when Nad walked into a room; my skin didn’t tingle at his every touch, feelings that had started to stir during some of my more reckless nights away from him in the city. Nad made me feel secure where once he had made me feel giddy. Our love had changed, shifted onto safer, more predictable, and less exciting ground. I should have been mature enough to realize that this was a natural evolution and accept it thankfully. Yet in the middle of the night, I found myself wondering if this was what Kevin felt when he said, “I love you like a sister.” I loved Nad, but I panicked at the thought of standing up in front of God and my family and making a pledge I feared I could not keep.