Best Friends (26 page)

But I couldn't. “Did Sally tell you how I found out?” I told him about the drawerful of dirty magazines in the residents' call room, tried to ignore his eyes twinkling in approval. I told him how I'd actually enjoyed them, until, until . . .

“‘Sexual torture,' that's what you call it?' ” He smiled indulgently, brought his snifter to his lips and inhaled. “Those pictures, Clare,” he said, settling himself in his leather chair, “you've got to understand something. They're not real.”

“What do you mean, they're not real? She was lying there naked, trussed up, there were two men over her with a branding iron, and in the next picture—”

Sid frowned. “You must have gotten ahold of one of those S and M magazines. Was it
Bondage
?
Sweet Pain
? They're kind of a specialty thing.”

“
Sweet Pain,
yes. And I knew it was yours because I saw the name Crown Communications at the bottom of the contents page. It was like—”

“Listen, that stuff is fake. They stage it. S-and-M is very theatrical.”

“It was like a knife to my heart.”

He bent his head and stifled a smile. “You're sounding a little theatrical yourself.”

I was unable to speak.

Sid shrugged, met my eyes again. “Listen, people like that stuff! I agree, it's nasty, it's not what I'm into personally, but people buy it. It's not a big market, but it's—”

I found my voice. I set my snifter on the floor beside me. “Buy it! Sid, the market's not the point. The point is the violence to this woman. To this woman, okay? To this particular woman being brutalized in your magazine and to every woman everywhere in any sort of contact with the kind of sick male who looks at that stuff and enjoys it. Are you crazy, Sid? Is this something you want to promote?”

“Oh, she may not be happy at the moment, but in the end she's ecstatic. That's what these people like, Clare, that's how they get their kicks. Did that woman in the magazine, did she have scars on her arms like she'd been shooting up drugs? These women'll do anything. See, they're masochists.”

He was patronizing me: Big Daddy explains the evil world. “Oh God,” I said. “Don't make me sick.”

Sid threw his hands out, a helpless gesture. “Hey! The pay's not bad. And listen, let me tell you, some of these people don't even want to be paid, they're exhibitionists, you'd be amazed.”

“I brought it out with me,” I said, “to show Sally.”

He glanced up at me quickly. “To show Sally?” Then quietly: “You don't want to show Sally.”

I had him. He was on my hook. My voice was maybe more triumphant than it should have been. “Yes, I brought it out to show Sally.”

Sid didn't speak for a moment. His eyes moved back and forth, a calculating gesture, and I remembered how when I'd first met him, he reminded me of Rumpelstiltskin. “I don't think you want to show Sally,” he repeated, and I wondered, fleetingly, if he meant this as a threat.

“Gratitude is a slippery thing,” Sid said into the air, his voice uncharacteristically soft, making me strain to hear it. “Slippery.” He stood and walked to the bookshelf, where the decanter of brandy sat on its silver tray. “More?” he asked, waving the decanter in the air, and when I shook my head, he poured two fingers for himself. He didn't speak again until he sat down. “I hope you remember all your trips out here, now that you're a rich doctor and can pay your own way.”

I felt my face flush. How many trips had he paid for? Two or three, over the years. And there had been, I supposed, the restaurant bills, the gas and mileage, the movie tickets. I hadn't realized he was keeping track.

“Sally told me you figured something about your father, that he might have embezzled some money?”

It shocked me that Sally had told her father this. But then she told her father everything. “Probably,” I said, making my voice light. “He worked for doctors, remember? And he was underpaid, and he needed money for my college and for my first trip out here. But none of that matters now, because he's dead.”

“Lost him down the aisle at a Kmart.” Sid smiled, resuming his seat in his big chair. “Isn't that what Ben said?”

“He was a good man,” I said, blinking. “He loved me.”

“I love my daughter too.”

We sat in silence a moment.

“Please don't show her.” His eyes met mine. He must have seen a flicker of doubt there, a movement toward compassion. “It's nothing I'm proud of, it's nothing she needs to see.”

“She thinks they're just blue magazines,” I said. “Like, I don't know, some playmate lying in a haystack. The only thing that upsets her is that you cater to homosexuals when you don't like them. She has no idea.”

“Please. I'd do anything for her. She's the light of my life. You know how close we are.”

I should have said: get rid of those magazines. Sell off your empire, shut down your presses, fire your staff. But I couldn't think that clearly, and all I wanted to do was accommodate him and get out. The light shining from the living room beckoned like a path to daylight. “I'll think about it,” I mumbled, standing up.

“You think about it,” Sid repeated from his chair. As I hurried to the door, I kicked over my snifter on the floor, and like a fool, I bent to pick it up.

“I'm at your mercy,” Sid said, watching me as I knelt and cleaned.

“WHAT ABOUT THE BIGGER, better bombs problem?” Sally asked.

“That was a good point, don't you think?”

Oh, Sally. “My mother thinks no source of big money is untainted.”

“Oh,” Sally said knowingly, “your mother.”

I'm at your mercy, Sid had said.

“But when you think about it,” Sally went on, “no one actually gets hurt by what he does.”

“What about the people in his magazines, don't they get hurt? A woman lying there with her legs spread out, isn't she devalued? And why does she do it? To pay her rent, feed some kids, buy some drugs? To please her man?”

“Actually, it's interesting,” Sally said. “Some women pose for the magazines so they can earn more money as exotic dancers. It's part of their résumé.”

“People say anything to make it seem okay, right? But it's not okay. Think about it. You're debasing the whole act of sex. You're taking love and affection out of sex and making it nothing but performance. You're making everyone a voyeur, and then when they've watched a man and a woman and a man and man and a woman and a woman, what will they want next? Two people having sex gets pretty boring. Next they'll want a threesome, and then they'll add whipped cream or something, and then a belt, and when that doesn't do it anymore, they'll want some sexual torture.”

Sally shook her head. “Isn't that like saying if you take a puff of marijuana you'll go on to heroin?”

She wanted “dis-illusionment”—shouldn't she be dis-illusioned? I went to my room, reached into the bottom of the suitcase, went back out to Sally. “Look,” I said, laying the magazine on the table where we'd eaten our elegant dinner. “I found this in the residents' call room.”

I didn't have to show her. She didn't have to know. And I've wondered since why I did it, exactly, what percentage was anger at Sid, what percentage anger at Sally, what percentage my own agony about all I'd suddenly seen.

Sally eyed the magazine warily from across the room, the magazine with its very odd cover, the woman's neck and the rope. “Oh,” she said, her voice pitched unusually high, “that stuff is the extreme fringe.”

“You should look at it,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because it's your father's.”

She took a quick breath, then approached it slowly, timidly, picking up only the lower edge of the front page, as if to open it farther might let out some evil genie.

“Open it,” I urged her. “Just read the table of contents.”

She stared at me. “It's okay,” I assured her, “there aren't any pictures on that page.”

She closed her eyes, holding the edge of the page.

“Sally. You're a grown-up. You should know.”

She nodded, threw the magazine open. I watched her eyes dart through the table of contents and down to the small print at the bottom of the page. Her face seemed to deliquesce, her jaw opening and her eyelids and cheeks sagging. She dropped the page, her left arm shot out and swept the magazine off the table; it slapped against the sliding glass window and fell to the floor. “No!” she was screaming. “Daddy, no!”

 

 

 

IT WAS, FOR ME, not a bad time. Especially when Sally moved from her condo to her bouillon cube of a house, a place that always reminded me of our old house in Oberlin. In Oberlin she'd been separated from her family by two thousand miles, but now she was separated by much more. Both times we had each other.

In August 1985, two weeks after my visit to Sally, I started a practice of general internal medicine in a small town, Lisbonville, not far from Akron, where I'd trained. The Lisbonville hospital owned and managed my practice, hoping I would staunch the steady flow of people going from Lisbonville to the hospitals in Akron. My practice started slowly—I remember standing at the window of my office gazing out at the parking lot for arriving patients—but then a Dr. Faud died suddenly (burst aneurysm) and the hospital sent his patients to me.

Dr. Faud's patients were a mess. Over half of them were on Valium, which was about the only medicine they could be counted on to take reliably, and the other ones were on heart pills, water pills, diet pills, blood thinners, and a bewildering array of “bowel relaxers.” Often neither I nor the patient could figure out—even with Dr. Faud's scribbled notes at hand—why they were taking a given medicine. Their diagnoses were vague in the extreme: nerves, colitis, recurrent arthritis, organic heart disease. When I asked the patients to put on exam gowns, they were shocked: Dr. Faud had always examined them with their clothes on.

In the first months, I found breast lumps, prostate nodules, goiters, lupus, a bevy of anemias, and three curable and two terminal cancers. I strode into each exam room with a mission: I was going to find disease. But after the first flurry of discoveries, uneasiness set in, both for Dr. Faud's former patients and for me. With Dr. Faud, they had thought they were healthy, or at least healthy enough, but with me, they got the truth. Or was it the truth? Was that heart murmur I'd heard really cause for concern? Was it necessary to lower this person's cholesterol? If the arthritis was rheumatoid and not, as Dr. Faud had dubbed it, elderly joints, did that knowledge make a difference? People talked to me about Dr. Faud with a wistfulness that embarrassed them. “He was sure a cheerful fellow—'course he never checked me over like you do.” In the memorial photo on the hospital bulletin board, Dr. Faud was the shape and consistency of a jelly doughnut. “Twinkletoes,” a patient called him. “He fought the battle of the bulge just like me.” Her eyes swept down my body and its unforgiving thinness.

“I have no idea why they miss him,” I told Sally. “He was a terrible doctor.”

Sally gave me the same answer Ted did. “Maybe he cheered them up.” When Sally said it, I laughed; when Ted said it, I scowled.

We didn't talk about her family. We talked about her work, or my work, or the new furniture she was buying, or my mother. We rarely talked about my marriage. There might be a certain hardness in our conversations, a meanness we'd reveal only to each other, but this was something we enjoyed together, nothing that threatened our bond.
No tickee, no washee
, Sally had taken to saying.
Never trust a man who strokes his chin. She who suffers fools suffers foolishly
. In my new job, I had four weeks off a year and money for plane fare. I went to Los Angeles five times in one six-month span. “Why don't you move here?” Sally kept asking. “Think of the good times we'd have.” I would have, but I was married, and I was serving out my three years in Lisbonville. My office practice might be flat, but my hospital practice was booming. The family docs hated to come to the hospital and care for their suddenly sick patients, their therapeutic failure patients, their dying patients. I didn't mind these patients at all. If they got better, I was pleased; if they didn't, I didn't take it personally. I developed my own set of axioms, ones I repeated to Sally.
You don't treat an eighty-year-old with hypotension like a twenty-year-old with hypotension. Sometimes the best you can ask for isn't much. Where there's urine there's life. If a patient wants to die, why not let him go?