Best Friends (18 page)

Flavio didn't leave his spot beside us for a good ten minutes, enough time for him to eat a sandwich, for me to lose and then regret my suspicions. When he did leave, it seemed perfectly plausible that he was only using the restroom, and he came back in a reasonable period of time. When he sat down, he told us a very funny joke about a man obsessed with breasts.

“Your English is improving, Flavio,” I said.

“Isn't it?” Sally beamed, her mouth full of sandwich. “We practice.”

 

 

 

“SO WHAT'S YOUR COMPROMISE? Flavio gives up coke so he can marry you; what do you give up for him?”

“I told you, Clare, I don't ask. I let him go out for hours in Rio, and I don't ask what he's up to. I'm sure it's nothing bad. And if he wants to tell me, he'll tell me. But he doesn't have to.” She glanced at me and smiled. “It sounds a little hokey, but it works.”

“He doesn't come back smelling of lavender, does he?”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I said.

 

 

LAST, THE MAGAZINE.

Sally and Flavio's condo in Brentwood had only one bedroom but two bathrooms, which seemed typically Californian to me. One bathroom—the master bath—was huge and skylighted and off the bedroom; the other, tiny and windowless but still containing a shower and a potted plant, was tucked off the living room next to the front door. I slept on the living room sofa, beside the coffee table with the lava lamp, so obviously the small bathroom was mine.

One night I woke up to hear a door shutting softly, and in a second I spotted the light under the bathroom door. Someone was using my bathroom. The door to Sally and Flavio's bedroom was closed, and I wondered for a moment if it was Sally, doing some private duty (she had always been fastidious about her bodily functions), but then I heard a heavy rush of urine that was surely a man's. Flavio, I thought, and I rolled away and almost drifted back to sleep. But Flavio didn't come out, no one came out, and after several minutes, I wondered if it really was Flavio, and what in the world he was doing. The idea of a perverted burglar crossed my mind. I rolled over carefully and curled up facing the bathroom, waiting for the door to open.

There were some big breaths from the bathroom, a rustle, a flush, then the light went off. The door popped open quietly. It was Flavio, creeping back to his and Sally's bedroom. Next I heard their bed creak, and in a moment or two I heard murmuring and then the rhythmic thumping of their bed against the wall. Newlyweds, I thought. Then I thought of Mark and how six months ago I'd been a newlywed too. I started to get teary, and then I had to pee in the fiercest way and got up.

I was standing in the bathroom trying to decide if I should flush or not—if the proof of my being awake might embarrass them—when I noticed a rolled-up magazine wadded behind the toilet. I picked it up instinctively—I'm neat, I like to keep even my friends' places tidy—and saw that it wasn't an ordinary magazine, not
People
or
Time
or any of the magazines Sally liked to read. It was a porno magazine, very thick, with heavy pages and glossy color photos, and the photos were of men and men. Doing things, inserting things, sucking on things. I couldn't believe it. I saw myself in the mirror, and my mouth was actually hanging open. I rolled up the magazine and put it back, wadded in the dirty crevice where I'd found it. So this was what Flavio was doing. This was why he'd come out to this bathroom.

I was awake until morning. What had Flavio's father said at the wedding?
We were not sure Flavio would marry.
Ah yes, I bet they weren't sure. What tricksters men were, what liars. Mark coming home smelling of lavender, Flavio smelling of men. Brazilian men, Thai men, American men. Sally wouldn't even notice. She'd be so happy to see him with undilated pupils, alert but not hyperalert, hungry but not ravenous. She'd taken a risk for love, believing she had him figured out. Flavio's looks weren't a problem because Sally wasn't jealous. Sally's money wasn't a problem because Flavio had money too. Flavio's drugs weren't a problem because he had given them up. The only problem was one Sally didn't see.

Should I be the one to tell her?

I'd almost decided I had to when Flavio padded out to the kitchen. I lay still in my sofa bed and spied. Flavio made the morning coffee and sat at the kitchen table reading the paper. His lips moved as he read; after all, he was still learning English. Then he set the paper down and stared toward the guest bathroom, and if he'd looked dreamy or libidinous or even content, I might have told her. But his look was only despair. His face became so clouded it was not even handsome.

Later that day, I flew back home. My only moments alone with Sally were in the airport restroom. “So are you happy?” I asked, waving my hands under the blower.

Sally brought her hand up to her chest and laid it there, fingers extended. “Oh God, yes,” she said. “I can't believe it. After Timbo I never thought I'd really . . . but now. . . .”

She used to be so articulate. “He's everything you want?” I asked.

She nodded. “He is, Clare. He is.”

Before I started down the tube into the plane she turned around. Flavio had his hands in his pants pockets and his head cocked, looking out the windows at the runways, but Sally was waving at me. “Bye, Clare!” she called. “Love you!”

“Love you too!” I called back, wiggling my fingers. Then Sally, in a gesture that broke my heart, kissed the tips of her fingers and blew the kiss to me.

 

 

 

WHEN PEOPLE LEARN that Mark Petrello and I were once married, their response is invariable: Mark Petrello? You were married to Mark Petrello? (Pause) Wow. I can't see you two together at all.

“I was his first wife,” I say, a remark that both pleases and saddens me, because my best memory of Mark is when we first made love, when he cried, literally cried, big fat tears, and I cradled his head on my chest and stroked it. What had his eyes seen? Victims of traumas, accidents, shootings. I wondered how he thought of a head, if it seemed fragile to him, he who had seen it so damaged, crushed, pierced, shattered, while to me, despite my anatomy course, it still seemed like a human head, heavy and substantial. Mark's tears wet my chest. Oh, I loved him. And there's no question he loved me. He wanted to be alive, remember? More than anything, alive. Without qualification. And with me, at the beginning at least, he felt alive.

It's hard to give up a memory. No matter what comes after, it's impossible to forget a small moment of happiness, to admit that it was a fluke, an isolated moment in time with no chance—because our lives are not circular—of reeling around again.

This is nothing I've talked about with Sally—it isn't our way, to share with each other our private moments with men. On the phone, we are very practical. I'm sure Sally has intimate memories of her time with Flavio, and it's because of this that I always cut her some slack. I let her voice catch when she mentions him, I don't say what a waste product he was and how he betrayed her, although he was and he did. A disastrous first marriage no one wants to talk about, a marriage like mine. Still, we're less betrayed by others, it seems, than by our own hopes and dreams.

 

 

 

THERE WERE SEVERAL POOL S at Sally and Flavio's apartment complex, including a small one near their apartment that was rarely used. One Sunday afternoon shortly after my visit, Ben came over, and he and Sally and Flavio went out to sit by the small pool. Sally, tired and jet-lagged, fell asleep in a deck chair. When she awoke, Ben and Flavio were gone—probably inside getting a snack, Sally thought. She was warm and wanted to swim, but there were leaves in the pool, so she went to the maintenence shed to get the pool net. Inside the shed she found Ben and Flavio, snacking, as she put it, on each other.

 

 

 

THERE ARE QUALITIES THAT survive an internal medicine residency, but meekness is not among them. I didn't think meekness survived law school, either, which is why it surprised me when Sally, after her split with Flavio, moved back into her parents' house. Ben had never left. To me, Sally's move seemed like madness; I could understand it only as the message (largely for Ben's benefit, I thought) that family mattered over all.

If I had to pick an adjective for Sally's state then, it would “seething,” but it's hard to say what Ben's was. He was about to finish high school. He had no plans for his life and no apparent interests. When I asked him about his four-by-five camera, he said he didn't know where it was. Most of the time he was holed up in his room watching TV. He was required to come to dinner with the family, a meal Esther produced with little of her past fanfare and one that Ben—making a point, I suppose—pretty much refused to eat. “Is the brisket all right, Ben?” Esther asked, her tone somewhere between despairing and beseeching.

Ben made a disgusted face and snorted.

“Don't talk back to your mother, Ben!” Sid snapped, although Ben had not said a word. “And eat your dinner! Your mother made a nice meal for us!”

Through all this, Sally ate like a machine. She wasn't working, so she was getting chunky. Comments she made about her father reminded me of things I'd said when I lived with my mother after my father's death. “It's not like I'm fifteen anymore,” Sally would say, or “Doesn't he think I can have a night out by myself?” She had developed a new allegiance to her mother, the victim, Sally said, of a dominant man. She told me that once her mother had dreamed of being a U.N. translator, but instead she'd made the mistake of marrying Sid.

I visited the whole brood for a week after I finished med school. It was then 1982. Esther cooked and drank and wrote her letters, Sid came home from work at lunchtime, and Sally and I slept in her old room. It was the same room she'd had since high school, the same Yes posters and velour-covered throw pillows and clown music box that played “You Are My Sunshine.” “Sally,” I said, “you ever getting rid of this stuff?” No, Sally said. Since she wasn't planning to stay here, change would be too much work.

I was relieved that she wasn't planning to stay. She wasn't herself here. She'd let her hair grow to the middle of her back and was wearing it in a ponytail that must have been easy but was terribly unflattering, and even her designer clothes looked sloppy. She wore pants without belts, shoes without socks, sleeves rolled up, shirts with the top three buttons open in a way that, on the right person, might be racy but on Sally looked like lack of effort. Ben looked as bad as she did. His curly hair was matted and his jeans were studded with gray smears where he'd stubbed out his cigarettes. No drugs, Sally assured me, but maybe he missed them.

The Roses had wilted, I thought. They'd become like anybody else, any sad and bickering little family. My magical L.A. nights with them were gone. I remember sitting in the family room one night with them watching
Love Boat
on their huge TV. It was a huge TV, but it was
Love Boat
. Esther and Sid fell asleep in their chairs.

“Welcome to the real world” was Sally's new phrase that year. Had I heard about Ben's psychiatrist and the underwater aversion therapy? Welcome to the real world, Ben. Did I know that Sid expected Sally to move back home permanently, like some socially scarred daughter? Welcome to the real world, Dad. Did I know that Esther believed she didn't drink too much? Welcome . . .

It's not the real world, I thought, not the real world at all. What a luxury Sally had to not be working, to be thinking about her life, figuring out where she wanted to go with the law. I want to go with the law to Hawaii, she said once, to a nice little cabana, I want to stay up late with the law and drink those drinks with the little umbrellas.

“You could do that here,” I said, looking across the patio to the espalier.

“You think this is paradise? Welcome to the real world, Clare.”

Where had this bitterness come from? It was troubling because it seemed mistargeted, not directed against Flavio or Ben, the men who had directly betrayed her, but at her father. I could see that Sid had his faults—he was loud and bossy, he treated Ben and Sally like children (after all, they were both living in his house)—but still, I liked him. “Can you imagine,” I asked Sally, “seeing your only daughter's life ruined by her husband? By her husband having an affair? By that affair being with your other child? By that other child being your
son
?” Really, it was unreal (“a nice turn of phrase,” Sally remarked), and I thought Sid had handled it well. He'd found the lawyer, suggested the annulment (California was a joint property state; a divorce would have meant giving Flavio half of Sally's assets), and brokered a peace between Sally and Ben, a peace that seemed to have backfired, because now his two children were united against him.

“Daddy's no angel, Clare,” Sally said.

“I'm not saying he is, it's just that in these circumstances he's trying, he—”

“He deserves to try,” Sally snapped.