Best Friends (21 page)

 

 

 

“ I BELIEVE IN NATURAL consequences,” the well-groomed woman whose wayward husband had infected her with AIDS said to me years later. I was hit with a flash of recognition: I believe in natural consequences too. It was a credo I'd always known, articulated for the first time.

“Natural consequences,” I said. “Yes.”

“My ex's time will come,” the woman pointed out, “and he'll be all alone. Me, I'll have plenty of support.”

She was right. She died in a hospice surrounded by her children, her obituary listing AIDS as the cause of death. Her husband was found dead in a motel room with no identification, and it was three weeks before a daughter claimed him. And now Ted, the man I married back in the infancy of the eighties, is a happy man, with four daughters and a thriving wife, but to achieve this independence, this adulthood, his mother had to step aside.

BEN' S SOBRIET Y DIDN' T LAST. He ran into an old friend in West Hollywood and resumed his druggie ways. One night he was sitting with Sally at a restaurant near his apartment, talking about megavitamins, and six days later someone dropped him on his parents' doorstep, passed out, with a note pinned to his shirt saying he should be checked for seizures. By then the gay producer had fired him—reluctantly, over the phone, via Esther. Sid's internist, like me, didn't know what to make of the seizure comment. The internist ordered an EEG. He suggested several rehab facilities, three of which Ben had already been to. A friend of Esther's had a friend whose daughter, a former prostitute and heroin addict, was now a floral designer in a fancy shop. Esther and Sid sent Ben to her rehab.

 

 

 

THE WAY TED AND I planned it, I'd get pregnant within three or six months and have the baby either at the end of my third and final year of residency or just as I started in practice, when my workload would be light and a baby manageable. It was unspoken but understood that when I did get pregnant, we'd move near Lizzie and Phil, or they would move near us, so I could practice medicine and have a reliable sitter. But we'd been married seven months and nothing was happening, my periods arriving every fourth Monday as always. We started timing things, and since I'd read that sex every other night was more likely to result in pregnancy than sex every night—something about the sperm counts dipping with too-frequent sex—we were now on a schedule of sorts, which was difficult with our varying calls spent overnight in the hospital. Some nights I'd drive in from home to the hospital, or Ted would, and we'd have ourselves a quickie in the senior call room—a private room with a lock on the door and one twin bed changed daily by housekeeping. It started to seem like I spent a lot of time in that call room, waiting for Ted, waiting for sex, half hoping my beeper would go off and interrupt me; as I said, lust was not an issue with Ted. In fact, with our new every-other-night-need-it-or-not schedule, lust was even less of an issue, and I began to wonder if I wasn't getting pregnant because I wasn't lusty enough. I knew this was hardly scientific, but the thought nagged. So it felt like fate one day when I opened the third drawer of a bureau sitting in the corner of the senior call room and discovered a cache of dirty magazines.

There were a bunch of
Playboy
s, many
Penthouse
s, and a few specialty magazines devoted to breasts. Some of the magazines were musty and missing covers, all looked well thumbed, and every once in a while, a new issue would show up, stuffed surreptitiously into the center of the pile. It was mildly titillating to think that the magazines had been around for years, and about what they'd been used for, and to wonder which of the other residents, presumably male (I was one of only three women in my group of fifteen), knew about and replenished them. I wondered if the male residents ever mentioned them to one another, a kind of open secret, and I wondered if Ted knew, although I didn't want him to know I knew. I wanted him to think my increased lustiness was due to his appeal alone. It seemed like I'd jinx my chances for pregnancy if he knew what I'd been reading before he showed up.

It was the reading I found interesting. The pictures didn't do much for me, being mostly busty women, but some of the
Playboy
articles were sexy, and the
Penthouse
letters, detailing all sorts of sexual adventures, were my favorites. I loved the deliverymen arriving and the girlfriends surprising girlfriends and the cucumbers and the swing apparatus that lowered a woman up and down. I wondered how I'd gone so long without reading more of this; boy, what I'd been missing! The last magazines I'd seen like this had been when I was ten or twelve and stumbled upon my brothers' stash, and magazines now were much juicier. On the nights I was to meet Ted—and on other nights—I started to go to the senior call room early, and I hated to be beeped away.

 

 

 

TED AND I WENT to L.A. to visit Sally. I had only three months left in my residency. It was 1985, and I was thirty years old. I was still, despite the magazines, despite the schedule, not pregnant. Ted had never been west of Chicago, so this was a big trip for him. He seemed to me ridiculously worried about what to wear. He didn't want to look like a guy from Ohio, so he bought a pale yellow sports coat. As we headed out the door to the airport, I noticed he wasn't wearing socks. “You have to wear socks,” I said. “I'm not going to California with a guy who doesn't wear socks.” Instead of arguing or glaring at me, which I would have accepted, Ted went sheepishly to put them on.

When we got there, it rained and rained, which disappointed me, because I wanted Ted to be as taken with Los Angeles as I was. I wanted him to dream, as I did, of finishing our residencies and moving here. Into the sun, far away from Phil and Lizzie; or, of course, they could move to California too. I had to stop myself sometimes from pointing things out. In California they: all have pools; hate cigarettes; call one another by their first names; have numerology shops just sitting there, like beauty parlors; don't wear sundresses in the winter, even though it's warm. I also had to stop myself sometimes from lapsing into California-ese, which was less a vocabulary than a delivery, a deadpan yet showbizzy way of speaking, filled with pauses for imaginary double takes, zoom-ins, applause. The hotel clerk at the Beverly Hills Hilton spoke in California-ese when I pointed out that we wouldn't pay more than we'd promised for the room. “You're right,” he said. A intense gaze into my eyes, a pause. “We'll make it work for you.” Another woman approached him to ask directions to the pool. The clerk held up his hand in her direction. “Momento,” he said. “Please stand by.” He could have been talking to me or to her. He was a pro, he knew how to work both cameras.

 

 

 

ON OUR SECOND NIGHT in Los Angeles, we left our hotel and drove to Brentwood to pick up Sally (she lived in another condo now and had a new Mercedes sports car too small for three), then on to Sid and Esther's to pick them up for dinner. It was dusk and drizzling, and at first the house seemed empty, but suddenly Ben was in front of us, standing in the darkened living room. His hair was tied back in a stubby ponytail, and he wore jeans with a pressed fold down the leg and a black T-shirt that read in gray script DON'T YOU WISH. He clapped his hands over his head and swung himself around in a circle, announcing: “Say it proud, I'm gay and I'm loud.”

“I don't think that's quite right,” I whispered to Sally.

“It's right for him,” Sally replied. She told us that Ben was three weeks out of rehab and had recently been taking a designer drug of some sort, which he viewed not as a drug but as a “reality alternative.”

“Looks like he needs a reality check,” Ted said.

Watching Ben dance, I realized that another person was present, a small white face looking out of the corner. The friend got up and starting dancing himself. He had a whole row of studs in each ear. He and Ben danced separately and silently, oblivous to each other.

Eventually, Sid and Esther arrived, and we stood around talking about heading out to dinner while Ben and his friend continued to dance. I was disappointed that Esther didn't cook anymore; I'd wanted Ted to experience one of her meals.

“Is Ben coming with us?” Esther asked, glancing at him and the friend in a troubled way.

Sally shrugged. “Ben, are you coming?”

Ben didn't answer. “Of course they're coming!” Sid said heatedly. “I can't leave them here! What kind of things would they do on my rug?”

We did all get to a restaurant, but the evening was strained, and midway through, Ben and his friend went off to use the restroom and never reappeared.

 

 

 

SALLY LOOKED FROM ME to Ted in confusion. “But it's only been seven months.”

“Eight periods,” I said.

“But Clare, that's . . .” She blinked in a way that irritated me, because she was not stupid.

“Do me a favor,” I interrupted. “Don't judge until you've been through it. Really, Sally. Don't ever judge.” I realized my voice was shaking. Ted, frowning, reached for my hand.

 

 

 

DO WHAT YOU LOVE, they say, and what did she love about it? Oh, everything: the phone calls, the demand letters, the negotiations, the poster she'd made that reduced the defense lawyer to tears, the frizzy-haired clients sitting on the edge of their seats and bouncing as they poured out their woes. “Sometimes I think I'm the only one who listens to them. The only one. Not their husbands, not their mothers, not their best friends—nobody listens but me. It's kind of moving.”

I thought of Roger, my patient with AIDS. What do you think? he'd asked. Honestly. Are we talking one year, two years, no years? “I feel that way too,” I told Sally. I thought of my female clinic patients sitting on the exam table with their gowns open, exposing a breast as casually as an arm. “Isn't it amazing what people will tell you? You can ask them about their sex lives and everything.”

Sally laughed. “You hear more about sex lives than I do. I hear about money.” But then we said at the same time,“That's just as private.”

That was probably the best conversation we had. The rest of the week Ted and I waited for her at her office, or waited for her at a restaurant, or wandered around on a short leash as she talked into her portable phone. “She used to be fun,” I told Ted.

“She's pretty consumed with work,” Ted said.

“It's her brother,” I corrected him. “He's draining her.” I thought of Ben as a boy. Between then and now there was a world of loss. “And she feels bad for her parents. She thinks they've worked hard all their lives and had a lot of hope for both her and Ben, and now . . .”

“It's tough to lose a brother,” Ted said, reminding me that his brother was actually dead. “I don't care if it happens like it did to me or if it's seeing him turn into a drug addict or what. It's tough.”

“We'll be lucky if we get a son to lose,” I mumbled.

“What?” Ted asked sharply.

I don't remember my response, but I do know we missed making love that night, which upset me because I wanted to be pregnant. At that point, not being pregnant was making me tense, tense, tense.

 

 

 

“ I WAS THINKING,” Roger had said. “Thousands of years of sexual repression, ten years of fun, and now this.”

“At least you had the fun in there somewhere,” I said.

“True,” Roger conceded. “But I hoped for more fun.”

 

 

 

OUR LAST NIGHT IN L.A., Ted rode to Spago with Sally in her Mercedes convertible, and Sid drove me and Ben. We were visiting the restaurant because Ted had heard of it. I sat in the front with Sid while Ben lolled in the back.

“You think this new disease is some sort of a punishment?” Sid asked me. “You wouldn't tell me, would you? You can guess what I think. Even the Israelites, when the Sodomites wanted to have sex with their men, the Israelites sent out a young virgin instead.”

“That's true?” I said to Sid. “They sent out a virgin?”

“Jesus,” Ben interrupted, “can't you guys shut up and let me sleep?”

“Read your Bible. God made day and he made night. He made man and he made woman. Opposites, two sexes. That wasn't our decision, okay? That was God's thing. He made opposites, and two guys, I'm sorry, two guys aren't opposites.”

“Can it, Daddy-o,” Ben said in a weary voice.

I'd realized increasingly in the last three years that, as a doctor, I had authority, and sometimes I took it up in ways that surprised me. “On the face of it, two guys aren't opposites,” I said, thinking this was the first time I'd disagreed out loud with Sid, “but maybe sex—by that I mean gender—is really a superficial characteristic, and what's more important is the internal—”