Best Friends (12 page)

I nodded. It didn't sound so terrible. They had an apartment. They ate. It crossed my mind that Sid had no idea how sparely I'd been living these last few years.

“My father had one pair of shoes. One pair. I remember shining those shoes up. I had to have them done by the Shabbos, Friday night at sundown. If I didn't have them done right, he'd beat me, but he'd wait till Shabbos was over. You imagine me sitting in shul all day Saturday, knowing that when services were over, my dad was going to beat the crap out of me? I was the only one didn't want services to end.”

“It's hard to imagine you were beaten,” I say. “You treat your kids so—”

“I know. Jews don't usually beat up on their families. We're not known for that. My dad was an exception. Of course, most Jews don't drink, either.”

“What about your mom, did she try to protect you?”

“It was like she wasn't there.” Sid's eyes bored into me. When I didn't look shocked or sympathetic, he sighed and sat back in his chair. “She was nice, don't get me wrong, but she was scared. Women didn't resist back then. You were married, that was your lot.” He shook his head and smiled. “Old days. Long ago.” He peered into his drink, shaking his ice cubes, and when he looked up, his gaze was almost shy. “Sally tell you I set up a scholarship fund, help some of the kids who work for me pay for college?”

“You did? That's wonderful, Sid.” Now that I was older, I saw a point in virtue. A year before, I would have thought the scholarships were something Sid did for himself. But so what if they were? I thought of Rabbi Hillel's famous comment, which Sally had taught me: “If I am not for myself, who is for me?”

“Sally didn't tell you?” Sid asked, his tone chastened. “Not that money will save them. Money helps, but it's not the end of the world.”

“If I am only for myself, what am I?” Rabbi Hillel had gone on.

“I thought she'd spread that around.” Sid pouted. “It's a good deal. Three full scholarships last year. I'll have to remind Sally to start bragging on me.”

Rabbi Hillel's final question: “And if not now, when?”

“She always brags on you,” I said, and at the time, I almost didn't register the quick and hopeful glance Sid gave me at those words.

I don't know, looking back, what happened to me each time I got to Los Angeles. I don't know why I, a legend in my own mind for my intelligence, became mute and stupid. But I did. I remember telling Sid about all the fishing magazines I'd noticed in a store. Trout-fishing magazines, fly-fishing magazines, bass-fishing magazines.

“Oh, everything.” Sid laughed. “You name it.”

“It amazed me that people buy these magazines. I mean,
American Fly Fishing
?”

“I figure on some of my products I've only got only five thousand customers, but if a magazine can sell for twenty-five bucks a pop, and if I target the right five thousand . . .”

I was already calculating, oblivious to the unlikelihood of any magazine I'd ever seen selling for twenty-five dollars.

 

 

 

BEN HAD BEEN a kid when I met him. My brothers got taller and taller and gawkier and gawkier, then, suddenly, overnight it seemed, they turned into men. But Ben never became a man. He never made that click where the knob turned and the adult came into focus. Each time I saw him, he looked not less boyish but less centered. His parents had a darkroom built in the corner of his room, and then one year, he had a four-by-five camera, one of those little boxes the photographer has to peer into with a cover over his head. He looked so thin and serious, hunched over his camera. He made his own prints, and then he made his own prints not in silver but in platinum, which had a fragile aged quality. That year he persuaded me to pose for him, because, he said, I had the most beautiful wrists he'd ever seen.

Sid hooted across the den. “Wrists? Benny, did you say wrists?”

I was turning red. I had never thought of little Ben as a sexual being. I kept glancing at my wrists, wondering what he saw in them. I'd never really noticed them before.

“They're beautiful,” Ben said urgently, and for a second, I thought he was going to take one in his hand and fondle it.

“You really want to take a picture of my wrists, Ben?”

“I want to capture them.”

“They are nice wrists,” Sally said, now beside me looking down at them. “Sort of bony.”

“Wrists,” Sid said. “Think there's a market?”

Something about their attention made me uncomfortable. “Of course they're bony! Whose wrists aren't bony?”

“So let him take a picture,” Sally said, and her intonation, flat and weary, sounded exactly like her father. I can't tell you how many times and in what circumstances—years later—I was to imagine Sally's father saying those very same words.

 

 

 

“YOU SPENT THE WHOLE weekend in bed?” Sally said from California. “That's not good.”

That was a time when living seemed like too much work. “Oh,” my mother had said at Thanksgiving, “I suppose your life seems important to
you.
”

“Come out over Christmas again,” Sally said. “I'll talk to Daddy. I'll make it happen.”

Make it happen:
Sally's California-ese.

“I feel guilty spending his—”

“Clare, he can afford it. And he likes you. He loves for you to come out. And if you're there, it'll take the heat off me.”

“Tell him I owe him one, okay?” I realized my eyes were watering. I was speaking words my dad had used to me.

 

 

 

“I DON'T KNOW,” I said at the Roses' dinner table, “this has been a rough year for me. It's been two years since I lost my father, and still—”

“What,” Ben said, sniggering, “he vanish down the aisle at a Kmart?”

Ben? This was sweet little Ben? It took me a moment to absorb his words. Had he really said them? He was well aware my dad was dead. I thought of Ben five years before, running down the hall, laying his head across my legs as I sat beside the pool. He still had the same curly hair and dark eyes, but he looked different, with black jeans, a black shirt, a dangling earring. By then the room was in an uproar.

“You have no idea,” Sally's mother said to Ben, clutching the edge of the table. “You cannot imagine.”

“My own son,” Sid said. “May God strike me dead right now if I ever, ever thought I'd hear my own son talk like that.” He raised his hand as if to strike Ben but ended in an strange collapse.

“Benny?” Sally implored. “What are you thinking? You can't have meant such a cruel thing.”

I never thought of Ben the same after that. I was less angry with him than his family was. His mother was right in saying that he had no idea. He didn't. I don't think anyone who hasn't had a parent die can really know what it is to lose one. Why should Ben even start to understand? He was fifteen years old, he lived in a house the size of a department store, his family was healthy. He hadn't been through anything, really. I should have been direct, I should have said “My father died” instead of saying I'd lost him. I'd always hated euphemisms—why did I use one?

If anything, Sally and her parents thought more of me afterward. Because I didn't blow up or disintegrate or any of those things. I handled it. They all apologized, even Ben. I remember his exact words.
Sorry, that was a butthole thing to say.
That's exactly what he said the next morning. Between me and the family, there was no rupture. Now, between Ben and his father—that was the rupture.

“What, he vanish down the aisle at a Kmart?” And what, exactly, was so frightening about that remark? The scary thing about Ben's crack was not its disrespect to me, its disrepect to death. Nor was it the vague class-consciousness of where I might have “lost” my father. The disturbing thing about Ben's crack was that, in nineties lingo, he dissed the father—mine, ostensibly, but the real insult was to Sid. It would mean nothing to me, Dad, Ben was saying—or they
thought
he was saying—if you, you old guy, just walked away. Disappeared, vamoosed, vanished without a trace. Good-bye.

“HE HAD TO BE taking something, don't you think?” Sally's aunt Ruby leaned forward in her deck chair and looked straight at me. “Young people are bound to experiment. I'm sure he didn't mean it. Ben's a good boy. What did you take, Daphne, was it LSD?”

Daphne, perched on a deck chair and naked except for a glittery bikini bottom and an ankle bracelet, was bent over painting her toenails. I had never before seen anyone sunbathe topless, and certainly not in front of her mother. Daphne's brown breasts grazed her knees; it was hard not to stare. “It was psilocybin, Mom. Mushrooms.”

“Oh, that's right. Mushrooms.” Aunt Ruby rolled her eyes. “She was very odd. Came walking into the family room saying she was stuck inside a toaster. She thought the sofa was a giant heating element. Oh my! And then you brought home that boy.”

“I've managed to almost finish law school without taking drugs,” Sally said. “Does that count for anything?”

“Oh Sally, you're an innocent,” Aunt Ruby said. “You have the innocence of springtime, may it never leave you.”

“I don't think I'm such an innocent,” Sally snapped. I looked away from her, out of tact, and was surprised to see Daphne rubbing a cheek with the back of her hand, smiling at me with an air of conspiracy.

 

 

 

AFTER HIS APOLOGY, Ben followed me to the kitchen. That day he wore a bandanna knotted around his forearm and a white T-shirt with the sleeves rolled up.

I smiled to show him I accepted his apology. “You have more looks,” I said, nodding at his bandanna.

“I'm aesthetic,” he answered, dropping his wrist.

I knew there were gays in the world. At college they'd held gay dances, in high school I'd gone to a David Bowie concert (the “Ziggy Stardust” tour—Ben was impressed) where two nuzzling guys in front of me had blocked much of the view. But it hadn't yet struck me that people I didn't think of as gay could be gay, and so I missed Ben's inference totally. I thought he was talking about himself as an artiste. “Better aesthetic than athletic,” I said.

“Are you an aesthetic supporter, Clare?” Ben asked in a plaintive tone.

“Oh, absolutely,” I said. “I read a poem a day.”

Ben looked at me dully, then turned away.

When I left L.A. the next week, he was in the adolescent drug and alcohol rehab unit of a hospital. Drugs of abuse, the intake form read: alcohol, amyl nitrite, marijuana. Sally was incensed that her parents hadn't suspected. “He's at home with them every night,” she fumed. “Don't they watch him at all? Don't they look to see who his friends are? I can't be the only one in the family who looks after Ben.” It struck me that in the past she would have been angry only with her mother, but now she blamed her father too.

Sally and I stopped to visit Ben on our way to the airport. “I'm afraid this visit hasn't been the respite you needed,” Sally said, and I said well, that's life.

“What do you think of my institution?” Ben asked, drawing out the “u,” nodding at the walls. He smoked unfiltered Parliaments and touched his tongue, in a gesture that was surely practiced, to remove bits of tobacco. By that time I had quit smoking, and it startled me that Ben had started. Behind his smoke cloud, he looked as sweet and young as ever. He was only fifteen. His chin, I noticed, was weak. I had lost my father, and now Ben's family was losing their son.

 

 

 

I FLEW BACK TO OHIO, Ben got out of rehab, the Rose family minus Sally went to counseling. “Daddy says she seems like a sharp therapist,” Sally said. “She doesn't do any weird stuff.”

“Weird stuff?”

“Oh, you know, past lives, acupuncture, hypnosis.”

Oh my, I thought. California.

“I'm going home this weekend,” Sally said.

“How can you go home? Don't you need the law library?”

“I'll study more next week. What else can I do? It's
family.
”

And later in the conversation: “It's one of those adolescent things, I'm sure. He'll snap out of it.”

How can you know that? I thought. I knew adolescent things, binges and slamming doors and long car rides with friends talking about idiot parents, but I had been through that. I had rebelled. Sally hadn't.

When she hung up, even the click was brisk. It's
family.