Best Friends (11 page)

 

 

 

ON THE FLIGHT BACK to Ohio, I discovered Dunhill cigarettes. Back then you could smoke on a plane. There was a half pack left in the seat pocket on the plane, and I opened it and savored the remains. They were in a long maroon box, the cigarettes arranged double file with gold foil folded over them. On the outside was an “In Service to Her Majesty the Queen” seal. I felt so adult pulling out my pack of Dunhills, tapping out a cigarette, and lighting it with my abalone lighter. I imagined how I looked: cool, aesthetic, the tiniest bit jaded. I looked L.A.

Before I left, in a bar in the airport, Sid told me he had forgotten I was from Ohio. I was looking like a California girl.

“Really, Daddy?” Sally had said, turning to me with a grin, and I waited a moment for him to elaborate. When he didn't, I had to ask: “Why do I seem like a California girl?”

He shrugged. “You know. Charming but neurotic.”

What a relief to be in California, where neurosis could be charm. At home they seemed to think I was insane. “Maybe I'm a little neurotic.” I was happy he found me charming.

“And there's more than that,” Mr. Rose said after a pause. He was newly full of these dramatic pauses, like Marlon Brando playing the Godfather. “A good shopper.” Me? I thought. Shop? I shopped thrift shops.

“A nice dresser, looks after her appearance. A worrier.” He took his longest pause, brought his fingertips to his forehead with both hands: “
Aspirations
to deep thought.”

Now this was insulting. I laughed a little falsely. “Aspirations, huh? Not the real thing?”

Mr. Rose gave me a sly grin. “It's good to aspire.”

Idiot, I thought. Creep. My eyes met Sally's across the table, and very clearly, I saw my own father, reclining on his hospital bed, reaching for a glass of Coca-Cola. My strongest urge, suddenly, was to be home.

 

 

 

EIGHT YEARS LATER, at the end of my residency, I took a course in the management of a medical practice. One of the speakers depicted for us the typical medical-practice embezzler: a trusted employee with more than seven years in the firm, someone you'd never suspect, someone with access to money and records of money, someone who feels extra money is justifiably owed him, someone with extensive family debts—a sick child, kids in college, a new house.

My father, I thought. My father embezzled the money that got me to California.

Everything from those distant days suddenly made sense: my father's passivity in the face of his firing, his taking a job at Sears instead of looking for another practice management job, Dr. Danforth's cool behavior toward me in the supermarket, my mother's angry stoicism. My father was long dead by that time, so I didn't hold my new knowledge against him; he had more than atoned. Ah, I thought, another packet of corruption. Then I got frantic. Is the stain really everywhere, in everybody? Is everyone impure? Even my wonderful, gentlemanly father? I remember getting up from the meeting, notebook under my arm, beeper heavy in my white coat pocket, avoiding all the residents I usually palled around with. I felt the same stunned way I had when my father's nurse touched me on the shoulder to awaken me, when my first thought was to close my mouth because I must be drooling. It wasn't until I shut my mouth and swallowed that it sank in. “I'm sorry,” the nurse said. My father's back was quiet, quiet.

“Oh my God,” I said to nobody, eight years later. I stumbled to the door of the conference room. As if my father had died all over again.

I asked my mother about it once. “I was just thinking about something from years ago. Remember when Dad lost his job at the doctors' office? Did the doctors at the group think”—I was careful how I phrased this—“did they think Dad had taken any money?”

“Maybe there was some talk about that,” my mother said, her spine suddenly stiff. She was stirring something on the stove. “It was just that, talk.” She splashed the contents of her pot into the colander, steam rising up around her. Her jaw clenched in an angry way. “They never proved anything.”

“It was like talking to your mother about cats,” I told Sally later (Sally's mother had a phobia). “Verboten.”

“Oh, Clare. If he did it, he did it for you.”

 

 

 

I'M WELL AWARE that some people hate cottage cheese. I think it's the lumpy texture, the little curds floating in their not-quite-milky sea. Me, I love the stuff. In fact, for my first two years of med school, it was almost all I ate. That and lettuce and—but only in season—tomatoes. A typical dinner was a bed of lettuce topped with a scoop of cottage cheese, drizzled with lemon. Occasionally, I topped this with sprouts. That was a typical lunch, too, and I didn't eat breakfast. Grocery shopping took me minutes. I did take a vitamin pill. It never crossed my mind that my eating was a problem, and when I got on the wards in the third year of med school, I started to get hungry; once again I ate hamburgers and spaghetti and chicken, the things people usually eat. Looking back at pictures from my first years of med school, I realize I was terribly thin, thin even by Los Angeles standards. Although Sally lived in Sacramento then, she never mentioned my weight to me—she watched, with perfect equanimity, as I made my low-fat salad during my visits to her house (in her honor, I would eat plums from the tree in her yard), and I didn't recognize my thinness as suspicious. It's my underlying belief that over time the human spirit tends toward sanity, just as the human body tends toward health, so minor aberrations are rarely ominous and only mildly interesting. And major aberrations are just that. Major.

I spent a year in that little apartment with my mother, watching my father die, and when that ordeal was done, I was twenty-three and resolute. I was going to med school, no matter how I had to swing it. By then the only schools I could possibly afford were state schools in Ohio; I was also truly poor, so sources of funding opened up. Scholarships assume virtue in destitution. I used to tell people, in all honesty, that 80 percent of the money I'd made waitressing had gone to pay my father's medical bills, and this fact had an effect on medical and hospital people. I don't think I ever felt so wanted. I remember one woman in an admissions office putting her hand on top of mine and squeezing. “Don't worry, we'll get you there,” she said. “We'll get you your dream!”

Golly, I felt like saying, me? Gosh darn, what'll they think back in the holler!

Which is not to say I wasn't grateful.

 

 

 

AT SALLY'S LAW SCHOOL in Sacramento, there was a large women's restroom near the main teaching auditorium, and one day early that fall, Sally walked in and found a cluster of her women classmates hunched around a sink over tiny mirrors, fingers at the sides of their noses. What in the world? she thought. She knew what they were doing only because Daphne had explained how it was done, and my God, why oh why did these law students,
law students,
think they were immune to the laws of the land or even the laws of natural consequence? Didn't they know cocaine would make them stupid? Or, if not exactly stupid, then careless? Daphne and her boyfriend, high on cocaine, had once walked out of a Sambo's restaurant without leaving a tip.

“Right there,” Sally said. “Right in the middle of the bathroom, not even hidden in a stall.”

“You should come to Ohio,” I said. “I've never seen anything like that in med school.”

“It's si-ick!” Sally said. “I can't use that bathroom anymore. I'm not going to stand there and be an indifferent witness. I have to use a restroom upstairs by the administration office.”

“You'll know it's bad when you find someone doing coke in that one,” I joked.

Sally didn't laugh. “Si-ick!” she repeated. The tiny house she was renting was far from the school, on the edge of some farmland. It was her haven. She felt so alone. She couldn't wait for me to visit.

 

 

 

I DID WELL the first two years in med school in Akron—the academic years, the years of histology and biochem and physiology. My grades were the best. I was known as the weird chick who threw off the curve. Several of my professors encouraged me to try research. But I wasn't interested in cannulating the ureters of rats. I wasn't interested in doing what I knew I could do well. I was looking forward to my third and fourth years, in the hospitals and with patients. I'd never been a people person, but I wanted to be a people doctor. This desire was only partly in memory of my father. I wanted to be able to sniff at someone and tell—as I'd heard was possible—that his diabetes was out of control; to feel a breast lump before anyone else knew it was there; to say the one true thing a patient would always remember.

“You sound like King David,” Sid said when I explained this. “He wanted something more.”

“King David, huh?” I said drily. “Nothing like a little self-aggrandizement.” I remembered his insulting remarks to me in the airport.

“There's nothing wrong with self-aggrandizement,” Sid protested. “Keeps you thinking big!” He wagged his finger at me. “You think I could keep growing my business if I didn't think big?”

 

 

 

I MADE TWO FRIENDS in med school, Andy Braverman, who was stationed at the body catty-corner from mine in the anatomy lab, and Gillian Watkins, who actually pursued me as a buddy because she liked the way I asked questions.

Andy is now a private-practice general surgeon somewhere in West Virginia—we've lost touch—and Gillian took an even loopier route to ambulatory AIDS than I did, starting out in pediatrics and then doing medical missionary work in Zaire before coming back to the U.S., moving to San Francisco, and opening up her own practice. Not pediatric AIDS, although she is trained as a pediatrician, but adult AIDS. “Why don't you do the kids?” I asked her once. It wasn't because the kids were too depressing; the kids had enough advocates, and she wanted to deal with the promiscuous and the drug abusers, patients people blame for their disease. “It's like lepers, you know?” she said. “I would have loved to work with lepers.” Religion may be involved here: it's not something Gillian discusses. We see each other at various conferences. After Zaire, she says, the AIDS in San Francisco seems so tameable. “I mean, God,” she says, “at least you've got antibiotics. You've got support groups. You have hospices! No one gets left beside the road to die.”

 

 

 

I WAS IN LOS ANGELES so often the visits blurred. One trip I took a bus out; one trip Mrs. Rose stayed in bed with the flu; several trips were paid for by Sid or Sally. I went to Sacramento too, visiting Sally's little house, but that was a duller, pallid California, one that seemed suspiciously Midwestern.

There was a record producer whose son was a friend of Ben's, whose dim and narrow Malibu house (brown curtains on all the windows, letting in the narrowest chinks of sun and sea) Sally and I visited one year around Christmas. We were picking up Ben, who must have been about fifteen, from a visit. The producer's wife was in hot pants baking cookies—there were baking sheets cooling around the kitchen—and the producer (whose name I'd heard, whose acts I knew) sat in the living room in a special chair that surrounded him with music. His wife, to get his attention, had to hit him on the knee. Neither one of them knew where their son and Ben were. “Maybe they're in the cabana,” the wife said. “Honey, would you check the cabana?”

“Can't you check it? You're the mother.”

A timer went off in the kitchen. “Oh!” The wife threw up her hands. “Duty calls.”

The producer scowled and uncoiled from his chair. I smiled at him, showing him we were grateful.

“We'll wait outside,” Sally said, and announced, “I don't like them,” as we sat in the car, our windows rolled down and the sea breezes wafting through. You could smell the sea, hear it, but not see it: the producer's house and the houses flanking it formed a sort of wall.

I had my sunglasses on, as I always did in California. “What's not to like?” I said—Sid's expression, my own little joke.

“I'm sure the parents use cocaine.”

I was shocked. Parents, using cocaine? At the same time, I was struck by the naïveté of Sally's language. Any with-it person would say “snorting coke” or “doing blow.” Still, she had recognized something I'd never thought to look for. “How can you tell?”

“The way they act. They don't even know where their son is! He's their only child, it's not like they have a gang of them. And their house is always dark and the husband's always brooding and the wife's always . . . up. In a weird way. I was over here last year, and she was making angels out of paper cups and cotton balls.”

“At least she's industrious,” I hazarded.

“Well. In a useless way.”

Sally seemed less happy that year—less easy at home, less enthralled with her family and life. She said several times that she was eager to get back to her house in Sacramento and the stray cat she'd adopted.

“A cat!” I exclaimed. “What does your mother say?”

“Does she come visit?” Sally retorted. She had not found any soul mates at law school. I hated to think of Sally as a young woman needing a pet. I vowed that I would never get one.

 

 

 

SID SAT ON HIS throne, the big maroon leather chair in the den. The TV was always on now, usually sports. Sally wasn't there. Maybe I had a Scotch. Later I switched to brandy. “You imagine what it was like growing up in a place like that?” Sid said. “We had nothing. Not even a closet. My mother's clothes used to hang on a nail on the back of a door.”