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By Root 330 0

to meet her outside the church and together we’d walk to a restaurant to meet David, who was in town for a few days. She’s weaving a little as she emerges from the church basement. She’s wearing a little black dress, a ragged black coat and beret, leaning on her ebony cane, and as soon as I see her I know she’s not all right. But I try to deny it, and take her arm; I try to say to myself, Well, maybe she’s just upset, things have been so hard. Our friendship’s been strained and compromised these months; we are being very cautious with one another. I don’t trust her, she is trying terribly hard to please me, to make a good impression. She takes my arm and we walk to the restaurant together, the Post Office Café, a greasy but basically likable place that’s open all year round, as not many places here are, and there’s David at a table waiting for us. His face falls when he looks at her and sees the shape she’s in; his look says Why am I here? and then almost immediately What’s to be made of this? which is what the faces of those long used to living with alcoholics almost always say: How will we get through this one? Lunch is strained and sad and Lynda’s bitchy and out of focus; he’s come all this way to see her and she’s not only not home but is ugly and sniping. All three of us are just making small talk to try to live through an hour. My friend, whom I’ve loved for years, my adventurer, wonderful poet, survivor, heroine, role model, flash girl, paragon of style and endurance—well, I find I just don’t like her at all.

How can I reclaim her?

It’s 1984, more or less, and I am dancing with a woman in a red cocktail dress, a dashing little number with a large, elegant, and somewhat daffy bow tied at the back of its dropped shoulders. We’ve met at a writers’ conference where we’re both teaching; she’s here with her soon-to-be husband, and we’re drawn together into a fast, immediate friendship fired by a complex set of bonds we’ll be years in getting to know. She’s tiny, fiercely glamorous in a kid-playing-dress-up way; she’s angular, her firm nose casting a sharp shadow, her high cheekbones rouged. We tango, we glide, we conquer the dance floor like born show-queens—more interesting, more endearing because neither of us really knows these dances. We know how to make things look right, understand the playful and delicate work appearances are.

What launches and sparks any friendship is a mysterious alchemy, of course; how often friends predict we’ll adore so-and-so, and put us together at parties only to find that so-and-so and us chat politely until conversation fizzles like a wet fuse. Who can say what makes two people forge a sudden, surprising link?

Though certainly I can say what deepened it. We shared a sensibility, so much so that I can’t help but think of Lynda now as almost a way of seeing, a stance, an aesthetic. (Is that one thing the dead do for us, become a set of codes, an approach to describing the world?) So many things will always speak of Lynda, be redolent of her.

Specifically?

A certain sartorial intersection of glamour and trash, a louche but lovely address at which reside faux leopard anything, cloches, art deco jewelry, silk scarves worn as head wraps, tiny black dresses worn with a black leather jacket. Lynda looked wonderful, and she loved looking unlike anyone else; she wanted her unlikeness to be seen and appreciated. Her style, as her body fell apart over time, through back pains and car accident, became more and more the sort she admired, a panache which triumphed over difficulty without exactly concealing it: she adored Frida Kahlo, Marianne Faithfull, Lotte Lenya, women made more beautiful by a certain broken quality about them, by the acknowledgment of that quality. Thus she loved drag queens not just for their tawdry glamour but also for the way that their illusion was always ultimately doomed to fail. The artifice of making oneself be whomever one liked always revealed the reality beneath, and therein lay both its failure and a good part of its charm. She was a lover of appearances, of performance,