The Best of Friends Page 9

  “There’s Grin. He’s the alpha male,” I said, pointing to a huge baboon sitting under the tree, shifting through the sand for pods and then putting them behind his sharp canine teeth to break them open with his molars.

  “And that one with the white hair on her shoulder, that’s Patch.

  “Over there, the one nursing her little baby is Bo. She’s also Cleo and Smudge’s mom.

  “Oh, and don’t look now but that ugly one, climbing down the tree, that’s Constance.” I’d written to Sara about my loathing for Constance. How I hated her so much that Nad and I had debated killing her. We had good reason. Constance was a kidnapper. She wasn’t alone. Amy also snatched babies from the arms of their mothers. Neither Constance nor Amy had ever had a baby of their own survive more than a week. With high rank and what must have been a pathological desire for a baby, they started kidnapping the babies of lower-ranking females. They groomed the kidnapped babies, allowed them to nurse, but they never had milk and every kidnapping ended tragically. Within three days each kidnapped baby had died. We knew of seven cases where natural mothers had watched their babies die in the arms of one of these two baboons. It was heartbreaking, and a clear sign that in their struggle to survive in the desert, the desert was winning, causing the troop to self-destruct. These devastating facts made this horrible behavior important to Nad’s study and our embryonic film project.

  Even so, if Constance was the kidnapper, we packed up our cameras and left the riverbed. As long as we were around, Constance would remain on her guard and the natural mother would never have a chance of reclaiming her baby. Sadly, it didn’t seem to matter. The mothers might reach out and touch their infants, but they never held them while they were alive again. We would disappear for days, but always return to find drag marks in the sand, wretched signs of death.

  As if on cue, Constance looked up at us and barked, a warning call.

  “I wish she’d shut up.”

  The others looked up, saw us, and then ignored Constance. After two years the baboons accepted me completely, and so, despite Constance, they accepted anyone who was with me, including Sara.

  “Gin, what a gift. Thank you.” Sara knew through my letters that we hadn’t just strolled up the riverbed one day, shaken hands, and made friends with the baboons. It had taken four long months of hard work and frustration. Slowly, with our presence alone, giving them nothing as a bribe, we waited for them to accept us. At first they didn’t even accept our Land Rover, scurrying over the canyon walls at the sound of the engine. We spent days in the river without ever seeing them, just following their tracks in the sand, searching for clues that would provide some insight into their lives. Finally they accepted the car, but only if we stayed inside it. After a few days Nad tentatively got out of the Land Rover and began walking behind them. At first he had to stay at least twenty-five feet away or they would flee. Then the gap became fifteen feet. A few days later, another milestone, Nad could get to within ten feet of the baboons.

  Then one day Cleo, the sweetest little girl baboon, turned and walked toward us. Her mother, Bo, barked, the others screamed, but Cleo just kept walking. With a twinkle in her eye, she circled the Land Rover where I was sitting and ran back past Nad to her family. How brave! And how very lucky for us that the next day Cleo’s mates, Smudge and Pandora, followed her to greet us. With Cleo’s acceptance, I could now get out of the sweltering-hot Land Rover, too, and within two weeks we were walking with the troop. Without the inquisitive nature of the young baboons, I doubt this ever would have happened. Emboldened, they broke down other barriers. Pandora flirted wildly with Nad. Using his slender, thickly padded fingers, Bamuthi groomed my hair. Smudge pulled thorns out of our sandals, and then Cleo crossed another critical boundary of understanding and survival.

  One afternoon after we’d been with the baboons for about a year, we were resting on a cliff with the troop. Slowly, as the day cooled, the baboons climbed down from the solid shade of the canyon to start their search for food in the riverbed. One by one, they walked by us. Cleo scurried down the canyon past me, but when she reached the bottom of the cliff she froze directly in front of Nad. She looked down at his feet, then up into his eyes, and barked. To make sure he got the message before she scampered away, she looked down, up, and barked again. We knew the call, a bark rarely used and only when a baboon had seen a dangerous snake.

  Nad got up slowly, took two long strides, and put five feet between himself and the black spitting cobra hidden in the rocks below where he was sitting. Cleo, sweet girl. The fact that she trusted us to understand her language still amazes me. No wonder she remained my favorite baboon. Without her so many wonderful moments, flashes of insight and discoveries about the troop and ourselves, would never have been possible. We would never have known their story, nor would we have been able to share it with friends.

  “I can hardly believe it. They are real,” whispered Sara, her eyes riveted to the action in the trees.

  “Look behind you.” Sara turned, moving slowly so as not to startle the baboons. Standing just three feet away from her and gazing up in awe was Smudge.

  “Looks like you have an admirer.”

  As delighted as she was, a look of sadness swept over her face.

  “If only it were my husband.” Then the truth finally spilled out.

  “Gin, the harder I try, the worse it seems. During the week my life is upside down: when I come home, he’s heading out. On weekends I switch my hours completely to spend time with him—like if I pretend everything is normal, it will be, right? But it isn’t. I think it’s me. I’m not right, at least not right for him.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, thinking, Why wasn’t I there? Isn’t that what friends are for—to be there when you need them, when you are in crisis? Friends don’t disappear into a remote desert thousands of miles away when they are needed most. Since my circle of friends has always been small and extremely tight, I usually have a strong sense of when I’m needed. I don’t have to be told. Why this time, of all times, did my instincts fail me, and, worse, let Sara down?

  “I couldn’t. I suppose I thought it would make the problems too real. Every time I thought about writing, I convinced myself that by the time you got the letter everything would be fine, so why worry you. I talked to Linda, and she thought a vacation might help, but if anything I think it’s just made me see the fault lines more clearly.”

  Thank God Sara had Linda, a friend I didn’t know but loved just the same for being there. Though I wished I’d been close enough for Sara to reach, the fact that she confided in me made me feel part of a greater circle of friends who would bind together to protect Sara no matter what.

  Up until two days before, I’d thought Sara had the perfect marriage—strong, supportive, and equal. On paper, it looked like it should work: both of them were smart, talented, ambitious, and in love enough to say “I do.” I’d never been married, but I’d learned a lot from those years when I’d polished someone else’s trophies.

  “You know, if I learned one thing from Kevin, it’s that the scales often favor the partner who cares the least. I felt like the more I tried to reach him, the further he pulled away. In the end, he walked away with his dignity while I tipped right over and landed flat on my face.”

  “You’re suggesting perhaps I shouldn’t try so hard?”

  “Maybe, but I also know that’s a lot easier said than done. And I really do believe it will be okay.” The words sounded trite, yet I believed them. Relationships naturally ebb and flow, love changes, but Sara and CD had made a commitment, one they both took seriously. And just as Sara had decided not to write to me, believing that things would improve, I decided not to say anything more. When their relationship healed, I didn’t want our friendship wounded by anything I might have said. I pulled her close and started walking. “Come on, let’s get back to camp.”

  On their last night with us, we returned to the research station. Searching through half-empty cupb
oards, Sara and I scrounged up the ingredients to make an orange poppy seed cake. That evening we lit candles and sang “Happy Birthday” to CD. I looked at them together, against the black emptiness of the desert, an all-too-fitting backdrop for this stage in their relationship.

  The next morning, as they drove away, Nad asked me, “Why can’t they just be happy?”

  “They will be. Sometimes getting there is just plain hard.”

  “It doesn’t have to be.”

  “You’re right, but don’t forget, not everyone was lucky enough to grow up in a cave.”

  “A sad truth.”

  We laughed at our inside joke, which reflected Nad’s ability to see life on a scale most of us could never imagine. As a child, he’d spent weekends and holidays helping his father, Bob Brain, excavate early human and animal remains at Swartkrans Cave in South Africa. Digging down into the earth and back into time, they’d uncovered secrets from the past, discovering clues as to when man mastered fire, and who retreated to the safety of the cave, the hunter or the hunted. For Nad, two million years ago was like yesterday, and today would survive as a blink of the geological eye. Our lives were short, fleeting, and, in the scheme of things, not that important, so lighten up, have some fun, don’t take it all so seriously.

  Nad took my hand, saying, “Maybe on their next trip we’ll go to the caves.”

  “I’d love that, but right now I just want to get back to the baboons.”

  8

  SARA (1992)

  SOMETIMES WHEN YOU least expect it a dream comes true. What a cotton-candy phrase. But what no one tells you is that the dream comes with a contract, one you don’t remember signing, full of “whereas’s” and “in return said party will refrain from’s” and other snaky phrases and ambiguous language you only notice when you can’t remember why the dream was so important anyway. Or when it’s been superseded by the next dream, or the one after that. When you’ve learned that a dream, like a home renovation, costs 50 percent more than the original estimate and that you never pay in cash.

  It was Columbus Day, 1992, and the morning after the first round of presidential debates between Republican President George H. W. Bush, Democrat Bill Clinton, and a folksy billionaire from Texas who’d thrown everyone for a loop. Back then, the freckled face looking back at me in the mirror looked alert and fresh even in fluorescent lighting—even at 4:46 A.M.—a perk of being barely in my thirties. I did a quick time conversion: it was nearly noon in Namibia, and Ginger and Nad would be taking a break from shooting, sitting on those rugged, snake-infested cliffs watching the baboons. Not that Gin would know the exact time. As I’d discovered, in the African bush a day wasn’t measured in hours, but in ancient segments: daybreak, sunrise, morning, noon, afternoon. Then came the golden hour—that fleeting wash of honeyed light so crucial for photography—followed by sunset, twilight, night. Minutes were necessary foot soldiers creeping from now to then, but invisible as molecules.

  I looked back at the clock. Just five months after visiting Ginger in Namibia, I was about as far from her world as it was possible to be. And not just by a distance of more than six thousand miles. While Gin lived and toiled under the searing sun today, I sat in a small windowless room in Rockefeller Plaza. While she wore a sarong to work, I was decked out in a red dress, hose, and heels. While she never wore makeup, someone was applying mine. And while she didn’t even have a tent, much less a bathroom, I was having my hair blow-dried even as I typed away on a computer. Ginger had become the queen of do-it-yourself, while suddenly I was the one pampered like a duchess.

  But there was one thing we shared. We’d both discovered something we loved. And while Ginger had found her calling in a remote desert, I’d found mine in a skyscraper so large it had its own zip code. After months of feeling anguished and uncertain about my marriage, work had come to the rescue, and I’d discovered with a start that I was happy. But what a milquetoast word for such a fierce, untamed emotion. I hadn’t known happiness in so long I was wary of its appetite. What did you have to feed this beast? Your firstborn? All I knew was that I would pay almost any price to hold on to this astonishing, unfamiliar sense of elation, to prevent it from loping out of my life as unexpectedly as it had arrived.

  “There!” A voice broke my trance. Anna Febres, the hairdresser, fired a last salvo of hairspray, admired her handiwork. “Girl, were we ready to get our hands on you! No offense, Sara, but you oughta fire whoever does your hair and makeup in Charlotte.”

  “She’s right,” offered Bobbie Armstrong, the makeup artist. “That blush—”

  I cleared my throat. “Actually…I do my own.”

  “So that explains it!” Anna marveled. “Well, this is the network, chiquita, and you gotta look good to sit on the sofa with Katie. And you’ll meet Stone Phillips, too. He’s filling for our man Bryant.”

  My stomach flop-flipped. Margaret Larsen was on vacation, and there I was, in New York, about to serve as her replacement on the Today show news desk.

  Jeff Zucker poked his head around the door. In three-inch pumps I could almost look him in the eye, but the Today show’s executive producer had a swagger that matched his keen gaze and carnivorous grin. His competitive appetite was already legendary and it was easy to see why he dated a string of beautiful women. “How ya doing, Jamesey? They treatin’ you okay?”

  “It’s unbelievable!”

  “Ah, come on. It’s just like Nightside, right? Except for the millions of people watching. Hey, don’t tense up. I watched you on the overnight, you can handle it. That’s why you’re here now.” He sidled over, massaged my shoulders like a prizefighter’s coach, gave me a smack on the back, and headed back out the door. He might call me Jamesey, but his nickname was “Doogie Howser TV”—a reference to the hit TV show about a doctor who was just a kid. Zucker was just twenty-six—the youngest EP ever to run a morning news show—and Today was number one. Bryant Gumbel and Katie Couric, two of the best anchors in the industry, not only worked with Zucker but respected his judgment. If he believed in me, perhaps I could make it in this town after all.

  Even though the broadcast didn’t start for another fifteen minutes—an eternity in television—the “on air” light was already flashing as I pushed through the scene dock and waded through the arctic studio air toward the news desk. I wanted to have time to meet the crew, get hooked up. I ran into a blizzard of introductions and instructions.

  “Hi, Sara, I’m Jimmy. Can you drop this IFB cable down your dress?”

  “Sara, I’m Mark, I’ll be the floor director. Let’s go over the cues for a countdown to tape, okay?” The smiling dark-haired man promptly bent one arm at the elbow and made a fist. “Here’s the signal for thirty seconds”—he then swished his arms into a cross in front of his chest, hands fisted—“this is fifteen”—then, holding both hands up, fingers extended, began folding his fingers down one by one—“the standard count from ten down to one, and of course the hard wrap. Got it? Same as Nightside?”

  “What do you take to drink?” I turned my head as someone else said, “I’m Lou.”

  “Sara, can you just look straight ahead so I can set the camera? I’m Ropes, by the way.”

  Suddenly I jumped as a voice in my ear said, “Sara? It’s Alex in audio, can you hear me?”

  “Yes, I can, Alex.”

  “And this is Bucky,” another voice drawled. “I’ll be directing the show, so ignore everyone but me, right?” Another chuckle.

  “Sara, have you decided what you want to drink?” Lou again. Or was it Mark? I was fast losing my composure and trying not to show it.

  “I’ll have tea, thanks.”

  “Sara, here’s your copy.” Thankfully, this time the person speaking was someone I’d already met. Jim Dick was the senior producer in charge of the news cut-ins on the Today show. He handed me a sheaf of lead-ins to taped pieces and voice-overs that I’d already read and edited, most of them stories about who’d scored points in the previous night’s debate.
What a change from the overnight show in Charlotte, where Antonio and I were all but alone in the studio.

  Just then Stone sauntered in, gave a friendly wave. “Hi, Sara. Welcome to New York.”

  A few minutes later, just before airtime, Katie zoomed in, flashed a big smile. “Hey, Sara! I hear you’re another Virginia gal! We’ll chat later.”

  I mumbled an attempt at hello. It wasn’t just the sheer number of people that overwhelmed me but their competence. How exhilarating to work in this league. It had taken me nine years to get here, but it had been worth every minute. Now if I could just avoid being sent back down to the minors.

  “Two minutes to air, folks, two minutes to air,” said Mark.

  Even though Stone was also a fill-in, he and Katie seemed to chat easily as they drank coffee and read through their scripts. But for me, the faint flutter of butterflies had turned into great swooping owl wings beating against my chest. To be here. To be here with them.

  I tried not to think about all the times I’d watched this show from the newsrooms in Tupelo, Richmond, and Charlotte. I tried not to think of all the fill-in anchors I’d critiqued while drinking my morning coffee over the years—too smiley, too stiff, no good at ad-libs, too flippant, or—the worst failing of all—didn’t seem to know what they were talking about. But what would people think of me? How impossible it seemed that I would be here, in this chair, about to read the news.

  “Hey, Sara.” In the now quiet studio this calm, steady voice was audible to no one but me. I looked up, nodded slowly to the camera. “Take it easy, Jamesey, breathe. You’re gonna be fine. You can do this. Now just have fun, okay?!” Jeff Zucker made it sound like a requirement and a prediction. I took a deep breath and grinned. And later, when Katie said, “Let’s get caught up on the news. And for that we welcome Sara James of the NBC news program Nightside,” I didn’t bobble my “Thanks, Katie” as I turned to face the camera. “The political heavyweights jumped into the ring in St. Louis last night in the first round of their presidential debate bout. George Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot failed to land any knockout blows.” To my surprise, the nerves settled and I was having fun.