Best Friends (22 page)

Sid made a disparaging face and rolled his eyes toward the backseat. “Oh, come on. You've seen those vacant friends of Ben's. You think any of them have an internal life? You think they think about anything more than their next screw? That buddy of his from the other night is no higher than an octopus. I think that guy's nothing but a nervous system with skin.”

I winced. It seemed pointless to argue.

“You and Ted think there'd be any future to the human race if we all were gay?”

“There are a lot of fine gay people,” I said.

Sid didn't seem to hear me. “I can't believe I ended up with a fairy son. You think it's genetic? I used to, but I tell you, those genes can't be mine.” Sid's voice dropped. “We've got to get him back in rehab.”

Pathetic, I thought, how in thrall to his son Sid was. I thought of my mom and all the money she gave my brother Eric through his divorce. You'd think an adult my mother's or Sid's age would have learned how to let a child go.

“Look,” Sid whispered, glancing into the backseat, “he's asleep.”

Ben was out. Benzos or narcotics crossed my mind. I wasn't hugely sophisticated about the effects of other drugs—when we got an overdose at the hospital, we drew blood and waited for the tox screen. “You never stop being a parent,” Sid said. “You'll see. Why can't Sally find someone like Ted?” I smiled a little for Sid. I felt bad. When we reached Spago, a valet opened the door for Ben, and he fell out.

But it was California, so the valet scooped him from the ground and propped him back in the car.

 

 

 

IN A RESTAURANT near the zoo in Columbus, Ted and I sat near a baby with a mother so simpery and self-satisfied that I had to leave the table. In the bathroom, I wondered if Ted's mother had been like that. There were limits.
My little darling, my bonito baby, Mommy's sweet mushroom.
Mommy's sweet mushroom: really. I wasn't even sure I wanted a baby anymore, but now I wanted one more than ever, just so I could be better than that moony woman. My baby would be better-looking too. “Come on,” I said to Ted when I got back to the table. “We don't need to eat. Let's go do it in the car.”

He was shocked. “But it's Sunday!” (We were still on our alternate-day schedule.)

It had struck me that the reason we weren't getting pregnant was that there was no spontaneity, no lust. But now we were going to have lust. “Listen,” I whispered, reaching over the table and grabbing him by the front of the shirt, “be a real man. Give it to me hard and fast.” And he did.

 

 

 

MY FRIEND ROGER with AIDS came back in, admitted to my team. He'd been doing relatively well, keeping his weight up, warding off the pneumonia, but a week or so before his admission, he came down with diarrhea. “You can't decorate with diarrhea,” he said. “You can't do
anything
with diarrhea. I've lost twelve pounds.”

The intern I assigned to Roger was afraid of him, so I spent a lot of time with him myself. It turned out Roger had an intestinal parasite called cryptosporidium and there was medicine to treat it, but even so, Roger's diarrhea didn't slow down.

“What do they look like, the little beasties? The cryptosporidia?” Roger asked. “Are they round or blobby or what? Do they have eyes? I'm visual. I think if I could see them, I could get over them. That's what I did with the pneumonia, those little teacups”—Roger had had pneumonia from pneumocystis, a parasite that indeed looked like a teacup—“I used to picture them breaking. Every teacup just sort of splitting in half.”

And so I robed Roger, put him in mask and gloves, and snuck him to the lab in the middle of the night so he could see his cryptosporidia. “Wow,” he said, peering in the microscope. “Far out.”

“You going to visualize their destruction?”

“Of course. I think I'll picture them exploding.”

It had always amazed me that Roger had gotten over his pneumocystis and that he hadn't gotten it again. I wondered if his visualization technique really worked. “You may think I'm crazy,” he said primly, standing up from the microscope table, adjusting the tie of his mask over one ear, “but we all have our ways.”

 

 

 

TED BOUGHT THE SPONTANEITY theory. He pursued me, grabbed me from behind in the shower, leaned me over the trunk of the car in our garage, rolled me off the sofa downstairs. “I'm an animal!” he'd bellow. “An animal!”

For my part, I was visualizing a nice round egg and hundreds of happy wiggling sperm.

One night I beat Ted home. “We got some photos from Sally,” I told him when he walked in. I didn't want to tell him my other news. We were three weeks home from our vacation, and I thought the photos would make us both happy.

“God, California,” he said, shaking his head, leafing through the rest of the mail, “what a bunch of lost souls they are, huh?”

Who was Ted to be a moralist? His mother was as lost a soul as I'd ever encountered. She called Ted to ask about his dental appointment; did the new shirts she'd bought him fit, did he really think the blue was a nice color? “You get your sperm count yet?” I asked.

Ted gave me a look. “I forgot.”

“Well, stop forgetting, honeybuns,” I said. “I started my period today.”

“Shit!” Ted banged the kitchen table with his hand. Up until now he'd been remarkably forbearing about our reproductive woes, but now he was starting to fray. I knew it hurt him that his animal instincts had gone bust.

“So much for spontaneity, huh?” I said. So much for visualization, I was thinking. We both had our disappointments, but I wouldn't have said what I said next if he hadn't made his crack about my Californians. “Listen, Ted. I have my periods like clockwork, and I have Mittelschmerz”—the medical term for the pains some women get when they ovulate—“so I'm ninety-nine percent sure I have eggs.”

“And that's supposed to mean?”

“Just get your sperm count, honey.” How baldly did I have to put it? I've been pregnant before, you idiot, I thought—not that it was Ted's fault he didn't know. It was far too late to tell him about my lost pregnancy, and now I was stuck with my lie. I
can
get pregnant, I thought. But I also knew that might no longer be true, that the infection might have left its scars. I could never mention this either.

“Listen.” Ted was breathing fast. “Every obstetrician I've heard of says to try for a year before you get worried. And we haven't tried even eight months!”

I waved my hands. “I guess I'm in a hurry, Ted.”

Ted shook his head. “You're unbelievable,” he said. The words he used to say to flatter me hit me like a blow. Ted knew not to look at me. He was peering around like he was looking for an exit arrow on the floor.

 

 

 

THE NEXT TIME I was on call, late at night, I walked into Roger's room to find a picture done in pen and ink sitting on a little easel. I shot Roger an inquiring look, then bent over to look at it. Irregular purple spheres, blotchily stained: a drawing of cryptosporidia.

“How perverse,” I said.

“Would you expect anything less?”

“What's that gray stuff in the background, fecal matter?”

“Exactamundo. I think it looks like paisley, don't you? And you know”—he threw up his hands—“paisley is the moment!”

“You are too much,” I said, knowing this would please him.

“You flatter me, darling.”

What a strange little man he is, I thought. It struck me, suddenly, the effort he must put into his cheerfulness. I was walking down the dark hall away from him when I was overwhelmed by grief, realizing he would die.

 

 

 

“COULD WE JUST FORGET about this for a while, this child stuff?” Ted asked. “I think it's hurting our marriage.”

I looked at him. He was haggard and worn, not at all the happy man I'd married.

“You're right.”

Relief flooded his face. “Oh, God, Clare, I'm glad you said that. I thought if I had to drive in one more time to the hospital to, you know”—he could never be explicit—“I thought I'd go crazy or something.”

I smiled. “It's that bad, huh?”

“Oh, no, not that it's bad, it could never be bad, not with you, but it's so enforced. It's like there's a gun to my, you know.”

I snorted ruefully. “I know.”

“It's not joy, you know? It's not normal.”

“I know.” I felt as if my heart were actually breaking, blood filling the spaces around my lungs. He was right, we must stop it, for the sake of our marriage, our sanity. Yet at the same time, it hit me with an overwhelming certainty that I would never miss my period, or vomit in the mornings, or waddle, or clutch at Ted's arm during labor. I'd had my chance at motherhood, and I'd blown it. I'd slept with a carrier of disease, a man I'd never seen again. I would never have a child.

“YOU MUST HATEUS patients with AIDS,” Roger said. He was still in the hospital.

“Why?” I said, startled. “It's just a disease.”

After a pause, Roger spoke. “That's a very comforting thing you said, although I doubt you realize it.”

I thought he was being sarcastic. I had been flip. I remembered the woman with syphilis whom I'd offended. “It's a horrible disease,” I corrected myself.

“No, no, darling, what you said first was ideal. It's just a disease. You're very matter-of-fact about it, and I and all my fairy friends appreciate it deeply. I was talking to Mr. Fender down the hall.” He was another gay guy with AIDS, also a patient of my team's. “My, he's in a sad state, isn't he? He must weigh under ninety pounds. As I said, I was talking to him, and we agreed that you have a knack. Maybe you should specialize.”

“In AIDS? I don't think there's an AIDS specialization.” I have to admit I was distracted, trying to figure out how Roger could have heard about, and talked to, Mr. Fender, when both of them were supposedly in isolation. “Well, maybe infectious disease. But I have to do my three years in a rural area.” I'd taken federal government money for med school, and working in an underserved area was my way to pay them back.

Roger smiled sagely. “We'll wait for you,” he said.

 

 

 

“THAT ROGER, that guy with AIDS, he told me I should be an AIDS doctor.”

“An
AIDS
doc? All those gay guys? All that death?”

Ted was going into gastroenterology, cut-and-dried and incredibly lucrative. Peering down a little tube at ulcers, tunneling up a colon to snare polyps. While he did his GI fellowship at University, I would be in practice in the boonies, where I'd been wooed by an eager hospital. We had bought a small house in the far suburbs, from which we could both commute.

“I actually like it.”

Ted gave a shiver.

“You can be useful. Those people are kind of . . . they're embarrassed, in a way, and they're sad and they're angry, they know they have something bad but they don't want to be isolated like lepers, they're . . .” Ted was looking at me with something like astonishment. “Well, they're lonely,” I finished.

“How can you be lonely when you've had sexual congress with two hundred people? Have you seen the numbers of those gay guys' estimated contacts? They're incredible.”

“You sound like Sid.” I hesitated a moment to let that sink in, to both myself and Ted. I remembered the ladies who'd brought me my meals when I had my pelvic infection, the way they'd circled far around my bed. “You can be lonely,” I said. “You can have sex ten times a day and still be lonely.”

“Well, that's true,” Ted said. We were lying in bed; his arm was wrapped around me. “That's true,” he repeated, and he sighed.

 

 

 

I STILL LOOKED AT the magazines in the call room, but they were changing. A raw element was slipping in. The women were less beamingly healthy, their poses more demeaning than seductive. Actual sex acts were depicted, in ways that did not always look consensual. I opened up one centerfold and saw bruises. I hurled the magazine back in the drawer. Who was responsible for this? Which one of my fellow residents was supplying this room? It seemed to me that all men did was cause pain, and it struck me then that Ted was angry, angry with me, and the magazines could even be his. Couldn't they? Some fantasy of a bruised and battered woman to make up for the way he saw me.

But Ted wouldn't like that stuff. Not Ted.