Portrait of a Friendship

From one of my earlier blog entries, I mentioned skipping class at community college to go up into the stacks to flip through art books. I continued this habit of grazing the stacks throughout my legitimate undergraduate studies in between classes or work shifts at the campus library. One of the volumes I found was an epic poem called The Land by an author I'd never heard of, Vita Sackville-West. I was struck by the beauty of her phrasing, and being that kind of girl, also very attracted to the physical book itself. I will never forget it; it was a dull English army green cloth bound book, with an inlaid still darker green vase and a laurel crown hanging askew over it. The pages were yellow with age, especially in the corner, and each page had a small ivy leaf curly thing at the top of each page. It smelled of old library. The book smelled like it had not been opened in many years, and here I was, having found it, feeling quite lucky to have a few hours of grazing ahead of me. And so, I read.
The poem was long... the whole book in fact. Not as long as Milton's Paradise Lost, but long enough to be considered an epic poem. I don't recalll what my major was at the time (I switched from Child Psychology to Political Science, and then Philosophy, but finally realizing my love of literature, ended with a degree in English Lit), but I do remember being conscious of the fact that I found the book I needed to read at that very moment. Bliss.
Talk about focused...Vita's writing was so precise, so descriptive, that, from memory, I would compare her love for the land of her birth and breeding - Kent, the rolling green countryside in England - to the passionate sometimes firey poetry of Walt Whitman, or the poetry of The Beats. All wrote love letters to the physical land they inhabit, where ancestors feet walked, fought and loved, but the peoms, the feelings are for more than earth grass trees and flowers... they wrote in metaphors that paint the joys and difficulties of life.  I became obsessed with Vita and found myself spending hours of time researching her life and writing.
Then one night, I caught on PBS a BBC production of Portrait of a Marriage.  The title was familiar.  I watched the whole thing, nearly 4 hours of the story of Vita Sackville-West's marriage.  Born to aristocracy, Vita lived a charmed life as the only child of her Father Lord Sackville and her Spanish mother affectionately nicknamed Pepita.  Vita was courted and subsequently married Harold Nicholson who was a diplomat and traveled to the middle east on business several times during the war.  Their romance was one of the most  unique I had read about up to that point.  They loved each other enormously.  They wrote letters to each other frequently and expressed their deep affection, admiration and love for one another regularly.  At one point, Vita ran away with her childhood friend Violet.  Vita, disguised as a soldier, escaped with Violet to northern Italy where they holidayed as a young married couple.  The two had an obsessive, relationship and became lovers.  All the while, Vita refused to break up her marriage from Harold, affectionately nicknamed "Hadji".  Hadji also had leanings toward homosexuality and had brief affairs with various gentlemen throughout his marriage to Vita, but the two stayed "loyal" to each other in their intimacy and affection for one another.  Eventually Vita's relationship with Violet was cut off by her showing Vita how truly manipulative she was.  Vita, realizing how unhealthy Violet was for her, devoted herself to her Harold.  Eventually she did have other affairs with men and women, most notably Virginia Woolf, and unfortunately became more widely known for her sexual romps rather than her important role in the literary world.  She wrote a definitive biography of Joan of arc, a treatment on her travels to Tehran with her husband, and her quiet novel The Edwardians caused a whirlwind of controversy for its blatant criticism of  Edwardian aristocracy, which dominated at the time.  Virginia saw Vita as exciting, edgy and someone she wanted to know better.  They began a correspondence after having met at a social event, and eventually Vita became an integral part of the group of artists that Wolf and her husband Leonard were befriending and collaborating with.  Of course the group became known at the Bloomsbury Group.   Virginia and Leonard spearheaded the Hogarth press to publish works by Bloomsbury authors.
 At the time I was reading Anais Nin, Vita Sackville West and Virginia Woolf, I was also very interested in the stories of Long Island's Gold Coast; the days of the Grace/Phipps shipping family whose home has been lovingly converted into a The Old Westbury Gardens. Also the Woolworth's the Vanderbilts and other families whose names I no longer recall all made their money in Manhattan but summered in their "country" homes on the Gold Coast of Long Island. Most of these homes were destroyed by fire, or gave way to developments of modern pre-fab communities of the nuveau riche. The campus where I read The Land on that sunny fall day was indeed the former home of C. W. Post, the famed cereal baron who left his fortune to a perpetual endowment and his estate became the administrative building of the C. W. Post Campus of Long Island University.
The incredible thing is that during this time my research on Vita brought me to find her volumes of writing on gardening.  During her lifetime, she became well known for the impressive gardens that she and Harold created at their home Sissinghurst Castle.  It was in the tower of the castle that Vita did most of her writing.  Sequestered in her tower, she wrote surrounded by the history of Sackvilles that came before her, and overlooked the gardens she created, looking out of her window to watch her two children play and grow.  Despite her many travels, Vita always returned home to Sissinghurst, and it is still a landmark home that is to this day, visited regularly by gardening enthusiasts and literary admirers alike.
A few years after I graduated with degree in hand and no prospects for a job, I decided I would work in a swanky bookstore in Manhasset, in the famed Americana Mall. Another Gold Coast institution. I was so excited to be working among books. These were the days where people no longer interested me, at least not real people. Only characters from novels and philosophers of days gone by. Rizzoli bookstore was a super exclusive. Not bowing down to the public's obsession with discounts and deals, all their books were full price all the time.  Rizzoli was also a publisher of fine art and design books. Large expensive volumes, mostly hardcovers, that were ideal gifts to be mounted on equally classy, expensive coffee tables in only the best homes. Masterpieces of print.  I was in heaven.
Within the first few months of working there, I got to know the employees a bit, and looked forward to working with these interesting quirky characters. There was my gay boss David,  who later became a great freind and confident. There were the stock guys - and if you have ever worked retail you know that stock guys are a very unique breed, indeed. There were some part-time teens working there who were children of the weathy community we worked in. They had little sense of responsibility and even less appreciation for the stock we carried and sold. But then there was Dawn. She was a full-timer who did take her work seriously because that was who she was.  We became friendly with each other immediately.
As the weeks and months rolled by, I looked forward more and more to going to work. Because our store's parent company was Italian (part of the group that owned Italy's two largest newspapers, a soccer team and Fiat Autos), we also carried many Italian books and played almost exclusively Italian and French import CD's. We played this music regularly. Admittedly, some of it was dire...bad Italian and French pop including Celine Dione whose voice still sends shivers (and not good ones) down my spine.
In the back of the store (or front, depending on which side you entered), Rizzoli had a section of the store sectioned off to sell unusual art themed objects. There you could find Michael Graves silver business card holders, Fornesetti scarves and jewlery and t-shirts, and New York City Subway Tolken jewlery, cuff links and key chains, among many other very cool, unique objects. Dawn was in charge of that area. We would spend hours during the lulls that retail experiences, talking and getting to know each other. I remember we connected on how to decorate the windows. She had a gift for that. She shared with me that she was a writer and artist when she was not at work. I also came to learn about her colorful family history and her life and schooling in Amsterdam, a place that seemed very far away.
Our friendship had its roots there, but I don't recall ever being social with her outside of work. We never made plans to have lunch or a drink outside of work hours, but our talks bonded us forever.
When she left Rizzoli, I stayed on and we kept in touch through writing letters to each other. She moved around a lot, and I had my turbulent marriage to deal with. There were periods where we lost touch for weeks, months even, but always found each other somehow, and picked up our friendship where we had left off. With pen in hand I would write to her all my musings, turmoils and joys. She would respond in kind, and share with me ideas for a book she was working on. Eventually our letters were paritally replaced by marathon phone calls. After the birth of her daughter Marissa, and my leaving my ex-husband after one terrifying night of physical abuse, Dawn and I would find time to speak during her daughter's naps.
I was living "upstate" in Brewster, New York, and Dawn was living on Long Island.  She came up for a weekend with Marissa.  So much time had gone by, but seeing her again only brought us closer.  We cooked together, talked all night, and hung out on the porch of the cottage I was renting which was surrounded by trees and not much else.  I remember at night Dawn liked to lie on the floor of the wooden deck and look up at the stars.  She reminded me of another favorite writer of mine, Anais Nin who would take moon baths at night.  Dawn was such a free spirit, seeming to have not a care in the world.  Her quirky ways (never sitting on a chair, always sitting on the floor, forgetting to eat and not understanding American pop culture references because she was raised and schooled in Holland), were frustrating for me to understand, but drew us closer, not further apart. Eventually Dawn's marriage also broke up and things in my life had shifted around.  Eventually I decided to move in with Dawn and Marissa who was just over 2 years old at the time.  By that time I was teaching in New York City and Rizzoli had decreased in size, eventually closing.
Though our time living together was brief, I do remember is how powerful we were together.  We gave each other strength and confidence in ways that I think surprised us both.  It was during this time that we spent hours working on her book.  I was fan and editor all at once.  I mailed her manuscript to dozens of publishing houses only to receive form letter rejections, but I never gave up on believing that there was a place for her work in the literary world.
Since that time Dawn found love and remarried again.  She moved to the mid-west and I began my life abroad.  Lovers came and went, but Dawn and I have remained the closest of friends despite distance, time and very different experiences.  Kindred spirits, they say, are those who feel and think alike.  Dawn and I have always thought and felt alike though on the surface it seems we are very different.  I have always been interested in the workings of relationships.  Powerful feelings connections and thoughts can be present in one moment and gone in the next.
So where is the art in this blog entry?  The art is in the relationship.  One friendship that has sustained time, distance and change.  I have always longed for a love that could last forever.  Funny, because now I see things clearly.  I know that in Dawn I already have that, and have had it all along.