Letter to My Daughter - Maya Angelou [12]
I smiled and said, “That is certainly Marilyn Marshall. She looks great.”
Bruce gave our table the grin of a proud groom.
As we were leaving, Bruce caught us at the front door. “Marilyn is on the phone and she wants to speak to you.”
I held the earphone tight on my ear, hoping that the voice would offer cognition.
I said, “Hello,” and was truly disappointed. I didn’t recognize the voice.
She asked, “What are you doing in California? Why didn’t you let me know you were coming? If we didn’t live so far, I’d come to the restaurant right now.”
Hurriedly I said, “No, we are already finished. What about tomorrow? Come around one o’clock for lunch at Decca Mitford and Bob Treuhaft’s. I’ll make a quiche.”
She said, “I’ll be there.”
When I told Decca that I needed her to be present, she said, “Not for a minute.”
I asked, “What will I talk about?”
Decca said, “You have the quiche, talk about that.”
I put a quiche Lorraine in the oven and tried to imagine the next two hours.
At exactly one o’clock the doorbell rang, and I opened the door to a woman I had never seen in my life. She was petite and pretty and surprise was plastered on her face. “Hey, how are you?”
I said, “Wonderful. What about you? Come in.”
She did.
I told her the quiche was ready and she said so was she. We sat together knowing that neither had any idea who the other was, or how to extricate ourselves from the awkward situation.
After lunch we had a long conversation on making quiche Lorraine. We took our wine to the living room.
Marilyn said, “Guess who I saw up in Tahoe?”
I said I couldn’t guess.
She said, “Charles Chestnut. He acted as if he did not recognize me.”
She half expected me to know the name and also not to recognize it at all. I was not as courageous as she. I said nothing.
Marilyn continued, “I spoke to him and he kept looking at me quizzically. I thought, the bastard. As hard as you and I worked in his campaign.” Again, I had no response.
Marilyn said, “I walked up to him and said, you’re pretending not to know me now, wait until I see Louise Meriwether.”
Aha. Here was the answer to my questions.
“Marilyn, I hate to tell you this, but I am not Louise Meriwether.”
She shouted, “I didn’t think you were! I didn’t recognize your voice last night on the telephone.”
She was standing in the middle of the room. “And when you opened the door I thought, that’s not Louise unless she did something drastic to herself.”
I asked, “Why did you think I was Louise?”
Marilyn said, “Bruce told me that Bob Treuhaft told him that you, Louise, were visiting from New York and he knows how much I care about you, I mean Louise.”
She asked, “Please tell me, who are you?”
I said, “Maya Angelou.”
Marilyn said, “Oh hell, listen I’ll just go, I’m sorry.”
I said, “No, please, this is just a new way of making a friend. Let’s figure out what happened.”
She said, “Bob called Bruce, hoping to get a reservation. He said they had a friend staying with them, an African American writer from New York.”
Bruce asked, “Is she tall?”
Bob answered, “She’s six feet.”
Louise Meriwether is six-feet tall, black, and a writer.
And Bruce said, “That’s my wife’s dear friend.”
Obviously there was only one six-foot tall black female writer in New York.
Marilyn and I shared a laugh of delight at the expense of men who know everything and at ourselves who nearly pulled off a non-visit between strangers.
She was a psychologist and a writer. I saw that she was my kind of person. Smart, funny, and tough-minded, and she became a friend to me in a way I could not anticipate.
My beloved brother Bailey had fought heroin for control of his life. The battle still raged but he told me he sincerely wanted to be drug free. I offered to pay for sessions with two of the leading black male psychologists in the area, but he refused.
I talked to him about Marilyn Marshall and he picked up one of her