The Books They Gave Me

Capote.

Nessa and I bonded during our junior year of high school over books (we couldn’t keep our noses out of them) and shared dislike of our boring rest-stop of a town (a dozen gas stations and fast food joints split in two by a rushing freeway). Every day on the bus we’d talk about the books we were reading, and the boys we liked, and how badly we wanted to escape Nevada and head out to New York City.

Not just any New York City. Truman Capote’s New York City, the city of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”. For a solid year she and I took turns checking out our library’s copy, a beat-up edition in a faded coral jacket, crumbling inside its scuffed library sleeve. We loved the movie, too—who doesn’t?—but as memorable as Holly Golightly was, it was the story of Fred, the young writer, that we really loved. Nessa and I wanted to be writers. We cherished the book as a How To manual of sorts. More than that, it was the Rosetta Stone of our friendship.

Somehow Nessa and I lost touch after we went away to college. I moved to California, she went to Massachusetts. Life got in the way: the usual.

Ten years after I graduated from high school, on a trip home to visit my parents, I was going through my things and got to feeling nostalgic about the few good parts of those mostly horrid years, and particularly my friendship with Nessa. I tried to look her up but didn’t get anywhere. Where was she? What was she up to? I figured I’d never know, since she wasn’t the high school reunion type. But I wanted something more to hang on to than a few faded memories.

I drove to over to the high school to pay a visit to the library. In my bag was a brand new copy of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” I’d just bought to offer the school as a replacement for the original I wanted to bring home with me. The librarian smiled and said I was too late: a woman had called her a year earlier and bought the book by mail, replacing it with a new copy, just as I was trying to do. I asked and sure enough, the mystery woman was Nessa! My head was spinning. She’d had the same idea!

Then I had another thought. She must have left an address or at least a phone number, right? The librarian hesitated, but a quick look in the yearbook verified Nessa and I were classmates, so she got out an old message book and copied the number for me. I nearly gasped when I saw Nessa’s phone number. It was preceded by the magical numbers “212”. Nessa had done it. She’d made it to New York City.

I called her shortly after, hoping the number still worked. It did. Sally Tomato didn’t answer, but Nessa did, and she was thrilled to hear from me. We talked for hours, recalling memories of our bookish high school years and trading stories about what had happened since. She was living in Manhattan, married to a lawyer, and while she’d never been published either—though there was a touch of real triumph in her voice when she told me two of her stories had been “strongly considered” by The New Yorker—she was happy with her life. We traded contact information, said goodbye, vowed to speak again soon, and that was that.

At Christmas I got a package in the mail. I think I knew what it was before I opened it, but even so I couldn’t hold back a few tears when I opened the padded envelope and found our original, nicked-up old copy of “Breakfast At Tiffany’s”. A brief note was inside: “You should keep this”. Not a chance. I placed it on my bookshelf, an honored guest only until the next Christmas, when I sent it back to her with a note of my own: “I hope I haven’t incurred late fees”; I also tucked in a short letter and a few photos of my newborn son.

Nessa and I have now exchanged “Breakfast At Tiffany’s” every year since 1999. Joint custody. One year on, one year off. Every time the book crosses the country it has a letter and some photos tucked away in it. We talk from time to time on the phone, too, but I think we say so much more through the book: there’s now practically a second book in there, between penciled-in margin notes and scraps of Post-Its we add to point out the passages we love. Once or twice, early on, I thought Nessa sent me the book as a token of pity: she’d made it to New York City, so she didn’t need the book anymore, while all I had to cling to was the musty old dream. But no, I don’t think so. The beloved city of Fred and Holly will always live in my imagination, but Nessa knows that when I hold our book in my hands, I’m only thinking of her.