This weekend, I went out for dinner and drinks with an old college roommate, S_____, who was visiting the Denver area for a conference. It has been over fourteen years since we graduated from Luther College, and we haven't seen each other since that day because of life -- travel, relationships, work, parents, deaths of people we loved, graduate school, geography, births, adoptions. And anyway: we graduated from college in the days before Facebook and iPhones (though S____ and many of our other college friends, like B_____, who also joined us for dinner, have stayed in touch fairly well). It's mostly me.
I've always had this flaw. Put me in the moment with a person, and I'll be a good, loyal, present friend. Take me out of the moment -- to Alaska, maybe, or Guatemala -- and I'll forget to check in regularly; I'll forget to write. Not even email or Facebook have really helped. Ask my mother.
But what I had to confess to S____ this weekend is that I HAVE talked to her more recently than fourteen years ago, and that our conversation will be in print for people to buy after January 27, 2014. I told her within minutes of hugging her hello, while B____ drove us to Mateo's, where we planned to have dinner. "So. . . S_____, you're a character in my novel!" What a strange confession to hear from a woman you have not seen for fourteen years. S_____ took it well, asked how she'd been portrayed, what part her character plays in the story.
Then we went on to dinner to catch up in real life, as real women drinking real white wine.
As the night continued, I realized just how accurately I had portrayed S____, when I had really just imagined that I had based a supporting character on her. She is truly a sensible, trust-worthy friend with a grounded sense of humor, just like my character Trace. In my novel, my protagonist, Tara, risks talking to Trace about what she's just beginning to understand about herself:
Tara: "But how do you know you're a lesbian?"
Trace: "I just know."
Tara: "But how do you know?"
How would my life have been different if I had figured out I was lesbian in college? So many lives' trajectories would have changed -- not just mine, but my ex-husband's, A____'s, her ex-husband's, their children's. Wouldn't I have gone east, or to a foreign country? Wouldn't the self-knowledge have calmed my restless wandering?
In the real Mateo's, drinking real wine, S_____ tells me that she never guessed I was lesbian in college. "Me, neither," I say, shaking my head. "If I had, it would have solved so many problems." S____ shrugs. "But you didn't know."
I didn't know. That's why I wrote the novel, because I wanted to find out what would have happened if I'd discovered it then, instead of at age 28.
S____ and I never talked about being lesbian in college, though. I was far more ignorant of the world than my protagonist, and I was certainly more ignorant of myself. I had a boyfriend; I had a 4.0; someday, I expected to have a good job and be married with children. I don't remember thinking any further than that.
Does it matter? I could (and will) write a hundred fictional alternatives for my life, and this is still the one I've lived so far. This one, the one in which I raise my wine glass to toast my friend S____ after she listens carefully and gently to the long complicated story of my last fourteen years. In fiction and in real life, she is a damn good person and a steady friend.
And maybe "staying in touch" by crafting fictional characters isn't so different from Facebook. . .
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