Best Friends (17 page)

My oldest brother, Frank, visited for a weekend; he had a new sales job and traveled around the state. Friday night Mark got home late, smelling of lavender. Saturday I worked half the day and Mark, who was supposed to be home with my brother, disappeared. “Gotta do some errands,” he called, swinging out the door. He got home hours later with no packages, no explanations.

“You take care of those errands?” Frank asked Mark levelly, and there was a cool eye-to-eye between them.

The next day Mark was working. “Are you sure you want to keep living in this situation?” Frank asked me as we sat in the kitchen eating bagels, and then he infuriated me by saying that no one in my family expected my marriage to last.

“That's because I didn't invite anyone to the wedding,” I said.

“No,” Frank answered patiently. “It's because you don't sound happy on the phone.”

“I sound happy.”

“Listen to yourself,” Frank said. “Do you sound happy? Even Baxter's worried,” he added.

We sat in silence for a while. “Why didn't Baxter tell me if he thought I'd made a mistake?” I finally said.

“You know how you are, Clare,” Frank said. “What can anybody tell you?”

It struck me, suddenly, that Mark lived his life the same way he practiced medicine. Single didn't work, so he tried marriage. Marriage didn't work, so he tried Leslie. If not A, B; if not B, C. Those quick decisions, that desperate confidence.

“Honestly, I'm surprised,” Frank said. “I never thought you'd listen to me.”

 

 

 

MARK CAME HOME with news, a tidbit he dropped on me as he twirled his finger through a jar of peanut butter and nibbled from it. “Remember that guy who'd fallen and shredded his face off? You remember him, don't you? It was right when we met.”

I felt suddenly sick. This would not be good news. “Sure,” I said, sitting down on a kitchen chair.

Mark turned toward the refrigerator. “We got any of that marshmallow cream? You finish it?” He was often like this after work—wired, hungry.

“You know I don't eat that stuff.”

“Oh yeah, right, Miss Cottage Cheese.” He was coiled over the open fridge, hands braced on one of the shelves. “Anyway, they brought him through in a body wagon today.” Deaths at home were brought by van to the emergency room, so a doctor could declare the person dead. “I declared him. Suicide. Guess what he did?”

“I don't want to guess.”

“Come on, guess. It was appropriate.” Mark opened a bottle of pop and lifted it to his lips.

“He shot himself in the head.”

“He shot himself in the face. Right below the chin and pointed up.” Mark lifted his finger and jutted out his jaw to illustrate.

“God.”

Mark's eyes narrowed. He hated it when I went wimpy; which to him was a kind of moral flaw, a failure of nerve in the face of obstacles. He had often said that he'd want to be alive as a paraplegic, as a retard, as a disembodied head sitting on a table. What happened to the body didn't matter, it was the alive that counted. “
I
don't really understand it,” Mark said, pointedly emphasizing the “I.” “He was home, he had a mouth, he had an eye left. The plastics people had all kinds of plans for him.”

I thought of the guy the way I'd seen him. What kind of plans could the plastic surgeons have? How many operations? What peculiar results? “Maybe he just couldn't stand it anymore.”

“Guess not, sweetheart.” Mark swung his leg over a chair, wrapped his arms around the back of the chair, and faced me.

“I want a divorce,” I said.

For a split second, Mark Petrello looked surprised. Then he took a swig of pop, and in the time it took to lift and lower his bottle, his swagger had come back. “You're right,” he said, shrugging. “Sorry.”

“Me too,” I said.

I don't think I emerged from the marriage much different. A little sadder, maybe, a little more bitter, but not essentially changed. It was years later, when I was a practicing doctor, single again but this time with a new baby, that Mark Petrello made his difference in my life. At that earlier time, I realized only that I'd experienced one of those disastrous marriages people refuse to talk about. I didn't know then that Sally's marriage to Flavio would be the same.

 

 

 

WHEN I WAS VISITING Sally and Flavio just after my first divorce and their only anniversary, Ben Rose hit me with a confession. We were sitting by the pool at Sally and Flavio's apartment when Ben leaned over, whipped off his sunglasses, and looked me in the eye. “Would you think it was awful if I told you I think I'm gay?”

I was so startled by his removing his sunglasses (was that his idea of sincerity? how California) that I'm afraid my response was flip. “Awful you'd tell me, or awful you are?”

Ben blinked. He still looked very young. Although he was almost eighteen, his beard wasn't fully formed, and I often wondered if he really had to shave. “That I am.”

“Are you?”

Ben nodded. “I think so.”

“I can't say I'm surprised, Ben.”

“You're not?”

“No.”

“You're really not?”

“No.”

“Not a little bit?”

I could see he was disappointed, which irritated me. Did he think that my being “nice,” my being from Ohio, precluded any knowledge of the world? “I've always had the notion that normal people can be gay, Ben. I mean, it's always been possible to me that anyone I know could be gay. And on top of that you seem, well, you seem gay.” I thought of Ben's friend Ray at Sally's wedding and Ben and Ray's behavior.

Ben frowned and put his sunglasses back on. “I seem gay?”

“The clothes. Your friends. Like Ray at Sally's wedding. Remember, I met him?”

Ben nodded solemnly, brow furrowed. He gazed out over the pool. “I've always wondered how people know,” he said.

“People just know.” I remembered the bandanna tied on his arm. “It's a style thing, don't you think? And, well, a person has to think that somebody might be gay. It has to cross their mind.”

“It doesn't cross Mom and Dad's mind,” Ben said, his voice forlorn. He turned to me again. “Can I tell you something else? This is so weird. I don't know if I should tell you. I mean, you're Sally's best friend and all, and . . .”

“What?” I said, shrugging. “I'm open-minded,” I said. “I'm almost a doctor. I'm divorced. You can tell me anything, I won't be shocked.”

“But this is so weird, man, it's weird. I just realized it myself, and it's so weird.” Ben was fidgeting, twisting in his beach chair.

“What? What can be that weird?” I kept my tone light, making sure he'd tell me.

“You know Flavio, Sally's husband? He's gay too.”

 

 

 

I WASN'T HAPPY with their apartment. There were objects in it that I blamed on Flavio: a bed with a wrought-iron headboard recycled from an old fence, a triangular table with painted leopard-spotted legs. Hipper-than-thou furniture, Sally used to call it. I remembered the crack she'd made about the parents of Ben's Malibu friend, that their white cat was less a pet than an accessory. And now she had a lava lamp in her living room. Isn't it interesting, Aunt Ruby said, laughing, when I mentioned it, love's blind and it's tasteless too. Didn't I know that?

“I never thought I'd see you with a lava lamp,” I told Sally.

“Oh”—she rolled her eyes—“it's camp. You know.”

Of course I knew. “Did Flavio even have lava lamps where he grew up?” Wherever that was, I was thinking.

“Buenos Aires. We were there two months ago. Sure he did. Buenos Aires is incredibly cosmopolitan. There were stores open at two in the morning.”

“Stores full of lava lamps, no doubt.”

But Sally didn't laugh. Her marriage, she seemed to be saying, was no laughing matter. When she spoke again, her tone was light but cautionary. “It's a minor compromise. And that's what marriage is about, right? An endless string of accommodation and compromise.”

It escaped neither of us that I'd been divorced twenty-nine days.

 

 

 

OF COURSE BEN had no proof. I made sure of that right off, asking for details, confessions, sightings, anything. But there was nothing, only Ben's vague “feelings.” “That's a horrible thing to say without proof, Ben,” I said. “I hope you don't ever say it to Sally.”

“Why is it horrible?” Ben whined. “You're the one who said normal people could be gay.”

“Jesus, Ben,” I sputtered. “Not normal married people. If you're gay, you should never get married. It's too confusing. You're potentially hurting your mate too much.”

Ben sank peevishly into his chair. “He wears very gay-looking shirts.”

“He's European!” I burst out. “Or whatever he is. It's a different style.”

“You said that was how you could tell. It was a style thing, you said.”

I understood, for the first time, how maddening Ben could be. I understood Sid wanting—as he had the day Ben asked about my father disappearing in a Kmart—to strike out at his son.

 

 

 

“SO WHAT DO YOU think of Flavio now?” Daphne asked, blinking, and I wondered if she was the last person in America to wear false eyelashes. Daphne had recently been dumped by a boyfriend. She was in her mid-twenties, still living with Uncle Freddie and Aunt Ruby.

“He's okay,” I said. “Actually, he reminds me of Chad in
The Ambassadors.
” This was true—I'd never trusted Chad—but I immediately regretted saying it, because why in the world would Daphne know anything about Henry James? It was surprising enough that I did.

Daphne blinked again. I felt guilty. “
The Ambassadors
is a novel by Henry James,” I explained. “Chad is a character with lots of charm.”

“I don't read,” Daphne said sadly.

“Oh, Daphne, only English majors read Henry—”

“Self-help,” Aunt Ruby broke in, “you read self-help.”

“See?” I said, trying to bolster her. “That's better than reading pornography or something.”

Daphne broke into a high-pitched laugh. “Not on this side of the family!”

I wondered if Uncle Freddie's family was into pornography.

“It's all videos anymore, that's what Sid says,” Aunt Ruby announced. “It's a different thing, what people will watch in the privacy of their own homes.” She wiggled her fingers in the air beside her head. “He's always thinking, that brother of mine.”

I tapped my head with my index finger, imitating Sid's habitual gesture. “He always has a plan.”

 

 

 

I STARTED LOOKING for clues. First, the money. “I don't know, some friend of his,” Sally said. The plan was to buy a block of apartments in Punta del Este, a resort area in Uruguay, then sell them in Europe as time-shares. South America was a hot destination for Europeans. “It's a big investment,” Sally said. “I'd have to talk to Daddy about pulling something out of my trust fund. I asked him, ‘Can't we at least go down and look at the apartments?' But Flavio doesn't want to go, which is ridiculous, because we go everywhere. He's got some old Israeli friend down there, and Flavio thinks this friend could manage the property.” Sally shot me a skeptical look. “Right now this friend is maître d' at a beach club. It's not like he has management experience. And you know how these real estate deals can be.”

I didn't know, but I nodded. “And you'd be absentee landlords,” I pointed out.

“Extremely absentee. I'll tell you, it makes me glad Flavio has money of his own, because if he didn't, I might worry about why he married me.” Sally's matter-of-factness surprised me, but she'd always been a matter-of-fact girl. The interesting thing was the way she said it, as casually as if she were mentioning the threat of a plane crashing into her house.

 

 

 

“I'M VERY AWARE of compromise,” Sally said. “I never told anyone this, but Flavio had a drug problem.”

My head shot up. Sally nodded. “Before we got married. That was part of the deal: if I married him, he had to give up drugs.” She looked at me calmly. “And he has.”

“What did he do?”

“Mostly cocaine. He was a significant user. He could afford it.”

“And he just . . . gave it up?”

Sally nodded again. “Completely. It hasn't seemed to bother him. Sure, he's lost touch with some friends, but—”

“And you trust him, you're sure he's—”

“Of course I trust him. He's my husband. And my part of the deal is I can't ask him about it. Oh, I could, that's nothing we've articulated, but I won't. I don't need to.”

“You're that confident in him.”

Sally smiled and shrugged. “I married him, right? I married him.”

And I married Mark Petrello.

 

 

 

SECOND, THE SWIMSUIT. We went to the beach at Santa Monica, not the classiest beach in the world, but one Flavio seemed to like, and he found us a spot. He stripped off his shirt and revealed the skimpiest of black swimsuits. His buttocks were clearly visible through the fabric, and his genitals hung overtly. He lay on his side, resting one foot on the other knee, his equipment spilling across his thigh. Sally had packed sandwiches and was unloading the cooler, prattling on about the string bikinis they'd seen in Brazil and the topless bathers other places, while Flavio, stretched out on his side, ignored us—or indulged us, his sunglasses on and his legs obscenely spread. A balding man in sunglasses and a swimsuit walked slowly past. Flavio rolled onto his stomach. The man walked back past us. I didn't want to look, but it seemed as if Flavio was watching him over his shoulder. The man passed us a third time, this time lifting, ever so slightly, with the tip of a finger, his sunglasses from his nose. I turned to the cooler and started burrowing in the sandwiches, afraid to see if Flavio had lifted his sunglasses too.