Best Friends (27 page)

“Sure,” Sid had said when Sally went to him with the magazine, “that's one of mine. You believe those special effects?” His tone was confident, casual; the only thing that gave him away was a gnawed cuticle he tried to hide by curling his finger into his palm.

 

 

 

“DIRTY MAGAZINES?” Ted had said. “He makes his living off of dirty magazines?” He laughed. “I wonder how he lists his occupation on his passport.”

 

 

 

SALLY AND I had lunch in a pretty garden restaurant, seated outside under hanging plants. She was wearing sunglasses, and while normally she'd remove them as we ate, this time she wore them throughout the whole meal.

We went to new restaurants, bigger restaurants with smaller, more crowded tables, where men with slicked-back hair and long and slender women in dresses with tulip-shaped skirts approached our table to say hello to Sally. “Expert witness,” she'd whisper as they left, or “client” or “trainer of my client.” She could tell at a glance if a woman had had a face-lift, although she admitted that with the very best ones, you couldn't be sure. She had a new line of steady cases, women suing over bad cosmetic surgery results, and while this wasn't what I thought of as women's advocacy law, I understood why Sally enjoyed it. She was exploring an uncharted territory of aggrievement. She dealt with actresses, models, exotic dancers, the wives of wealthy men. An eyebrow pulled up too far on one side, a dip and bulge in the tummy—to Sally's clients, these new flaws were worse than their old ones.

“Thousands of dollars for an elective procedure,” Sally said, “thousands of buckos for tuckos.” She never used to talk like this; this was something I might say. Traditionally, Sally told me, plastic surgery awards were based on pain and suffering, while she was trying for compensation based purely on the value of someone's appearance. She was cutting-edge, really. A lawyer from Houston had called her for advice. Like it or not, Sally said, looks were a commodity in this culture. A nice face and body might be a woman's only asset.

“Pretty damn sad,” I said.

“It is sad! I tell my clients that it's sad. Sometimes that helps.” She glanced around us at a woman passing our table. “No face-lift,” we said in unison, breaking into giggles.

She fixed me more meals at her home—that is, at her condo, and later, at her house. Chicken cacciatore, tabouli, steaks with a mustardy wine sauce. Sally was becoming quite a cook. “Why don't you try it?” she said. “You open a cookbook and read. It isn't challenging.”

“I need an audience,” I said. “All Ted likes is Mother's Meatloaf.”

Sally's new house was in West Hollywood, on a street off a street off Sunset, in an area filled with gays and a certain type of movie person—set designers and editors and lighting people—who respected a director or two but didn't think much of stars. I thought the area was surprisingly bohemian for Sally, but she liked it because it reminded her of Oberlin, which was accurate, I suppose, although the thing that reminded me most of Oberlin was Sally's house itself, although its market value was ten times greater. Eerily enough, there were also yippy dogs next door, although Sally seemed much fonder of their owner, a Japanese man who had a chain of appliance stores, than she had been of poor Mr. Morgan.

Sally's house was my haven. To me, it was perfect. Ted's and my house had never seemed homey to me; I didn't like my kitchen cabinets or the curtains I'd picked. In Sally's house I could open a cupboard, get out a glass, pour some orange juice, and sit down with the newspaper at the kitchen table, never once meeting with anything that annoyed my eye. I loved the bright rugs and the soft chairs and the well-laid tables. I loved the neat, clean rooms. I loved Sally.

 

 

 

TED HAD A TREMOR. His right hand shook when he lifted a fork or a spoon to his mouth. His hand shook a bit at other times, but most noticeably when he was eating. I thought the tremor was cute when we were dating; I wondered if I made him nervous (although he didn't seem nervous), and then I realized it wasn't nerves, it was Ted, and it pleased me that I'd noticed, because it really wasn't obtrusive, and maybe Ted didn't even know he had it. It was a secret part of him I'd noticed. I was proud to have noticed it, to know.

It came to drive me crazy. There were spills. One night, at dinner with some friends, I told him not to order cabernet. “Isn't that one of the red kinds?” he asked me. “I thought you were supposed to order red wine with beef.”

“I'm trying to keep you from embarrassing yourself,” I whispered urgently, holding an imaginary glass in my hand and shaking it. Ted's face fell. Later he got melancholy, then angry, and finally after trials of medication, biofeedback, and even acupuncture, he took to sitting at my right, where his tremor would be less visible to me. He blamed himself for my not wanting to go out, he signed us up for a wine-tasting course thinking that would please me, he offered to rent some dirty videos if that was something I thought I'd enjoy. Nothing he did, of course, appeased me. At one point I called him “sniveling.”

In every act of willful destruction, there's bound to be a moment when you're in the kitchen, drinking a glass of water, and you suddenly think, my God, what am I
doing
? But then Ted would pick up his fork and scatter rice across the placemat, or drip soup from his spoon back to his bowl, and I was off again.

 

 

 

TED'S PARENTS CAME to visit, and I got home late because of a meeting at the hospital. Ted was a GI fellow then and working almost as hard as I was. He and his parents were eating a meal his mother had cooked.

“How'd it go, honey?” Ted asked. As he lifted his forkful of mixed vegetables to his mouth, he dropped a piece of carrot.

“It was fine. They asked me to be chair next year.”

Phil grunted. “Chair of a committee?”

“Imagine that,” Lizzie said in astonishment. “Are you on any committees at your hospital, Ted?”

“Nope.”

“I can't believe they haven't asked you to be on a committee!” she noted hotly. “You'd be wonderful on a committee! You'd be a wonderful chair. Do you remember being on the bowling team in high school? Remember when you made Eagle Scout?” I thought they'd offer me dinner, but they didn't, and not wanting to fetch my own plate and silverware, I spun out of their orbit and headed for the basement, where I folded laundry meticulously. They were still talking about Ted and the Wonders of Ted and the Sad Underappreciation of Ted when I came up the steps with a stack of folded clothes. “I bet Clare doesn't fold your undershirts like I do,” Lizzie said.

“What do you think, Ted?” I asked. “Do I fold your undershirts okay?” I knew this was a crucial moment, that I was forcing Ted, with both parties present, to choose between his mother and me.

Ted had a piece of meatloaf on his fork, and as he brought it to his mouth, there was a wobble and he had to poke out his lips. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. Ted maneuvered the meatloaf safely into his mouth, then chewed it with excruciating deliberation. He turned to me and smiled. “You do a wonderful job,” he said.

“I have to put away these clothes,” I said in a high-pitched voice. I felt as if I were shaking uncontrollably myself. I tried, but I wasn't a natural at folding, not at all. And it seemed like a dreadful responsibility that Ted had chosen me over his mother.

I didn't want him anymore. I went upstairs and put the clothes away. As I started back downstairs, my mother-in-law's insistent voice wafted up the stairwell. “No,” I said out loud. I went back to our bedroom and curled up on the bed. When Ted came up a couple of hours later, I didn't even open my eyes. I'd thought of several exit lines, and the one that came to my lips came almost randomly. “I mean this partly as a compliment,” I said, “but you're too good for me.”

 

 

 

THE FIRST DIVORCE is okay, it can happen to anyone—too young, too romantic, unrealistic—but the second divorce is different. The second divorce is a stigma. I stood in the little garden outside the courthouse, next to a broken fountain, chips of paint peeling off its basin, and thought, well, I'm a two-time divorcée.

Two times divorced means that another marriage could mean three times divorced, and that's impossible. Three times divorced goes beyond stigma into shame or, worse, comedy. So marriage was out for me now. I realized I'd spent a lot of my lifetime looking for a man, and now my searching days were over. A relief, really. A door closed. One less thing to worry about. Oh, I could live with someone. I could be a soul mate (me?), a lover, a squeeze, even a mother, but never again would I ever be a wife. I was free! I was almost giddy, standing in that crummy courtyard. I walked down the street to the Sugar Bowl and ordered a hot fudge sundae.

 

 

 

“LISTEN TO THIS,” I used to say when some paradox of human behavior came up: “My best friend hates violent movies, she reads ‘The Movie Guide for Puzzled Parents' so she'll know what she can stand to see, and you know what her favorite movie is?
The Godfather.
”

I'd told Sally for years she should see it, just for cultural reference. I mean, hadn't she even heard about the horse's head in the guy's bed, or “make him an offer he can't refuse,” or the Godfather's weird voice? “You don't want to be a Woman with No Cultural References,” I said, knowing the implication would irk Sally. She finally ended up watching the movie on tape, on a Saturday night, in her house where she could hide in the kitchen during the violent parts, and she was so impressed that she watched the whole thing again that night, and one more time the next day. “Good Lord,” I said on the phone, “a Godfatherthon!” By the third time through, she could almost watch the whole scene in the restaurant where Michael Corleone, the Godfather's son, shoots the police chief in the throat, a scene she wanted to see every second of, she said, so she could study Michael's face when he did the deed.

“It's so profound!” she told me. “You see that, more than anything, his father doesn't want Michael in the business, and then he gets drawn into it to protect his father.”

“That's true,” I said. Somehow the way she put this made me nervous. “And the business ruins Michael,” I pointed out. “You have to see
Godfather II
to understand how much.” The tug of fear: Sally wasn't speaking to her father then; I could only wonder what she was thinking. “You've got to see
Godfather II,
” I repeated.

“Can I stand it?” she asked.

“Piece of cake,” I said. “If you can get through the first one the second one's nothing.” That wasn't totally true, of course, but I wanted to be sure she saw it. This wasn't my proudest moment with Sally—I was trying to control her perceptions, the same way, perhaps, her father had controlled them before.

 

 

 

AFTER MY DIVORCE, I moved to a town house, a place I ended up staying in almost ten years. I never much liked living there. I had the place redone at one point by a designer from Decorator Depot (a designer, it turned out, who had never known Roger) in a style which at first seemed California and modern, reminiscent of Sally's house, but later seemed no more personal than a hotel lobby. After a while, I didn't go into my living room at all but went straight to the kitchen to heat up my TV dinner then headed upstairs to the bedroom and my magazines and medical journals and TV. I tried to read books, but between my short attention span and the fatigue that hit me between ten and eleven, finishing a book was beyond me.

 

 

 

THE ANSWERING MACHINE clicked on, and Esther's voice, tentative, searching, scratched the silence in the room. “Sally? Sally, would you please call me? This is Mommy.” There were several seconds of confused silence before Esther hung up her phone.

Sally, at the kitchen table, lifted her hand to her forehead. “All she does is call me, I can't stand it.”

“Did this just start?”

“The last month or so. I don't know what's gotten into her.”

“Do you talk to her?”

“How can I not talk to her? She's pathetic. She misses me, she wants me to come over for dinner, she's worried about Ben, Ben needs a haircut, Ben's surly, Ben's hanging out with a funny crowd again. He has a whole new set of roommates now—all the other guys moved out. And then she always slips in how Daddy misses me.”

Sally still called him Daddy. “What do you say to her?”

“I say, Mother, if I could come over there without destroying every shred of my integrity, I would. But the way things are, after finding out how you and Daddy lied to me for all those years, I'm sorry, but I can't.”

“What does she say then?”

“Oh, I don't know. She cries. She says she understands. They have a weird marriage, she and Daddy. I don't think she's strong enough to get out of it. But she's hardly ever home when he is. She gets in her car and drives. Just drives. She drove up to San Luis Obispo last night and didn't get out of the car.”

A disturbing thing, Sally talking to her mother. I didn't know if I should worry. All those years the phone calls had been to
him.

 

 

 

I HANDED THE NEWSPAPER clipping back to Sally. “Your mother sent you this?”

“I'm sure he told her to.”

It was a long article from a business section about Sidney Rose, complete with a photo of his beaming face. It referred to Crown Communications as “one of the largest publishers of adult books and magazines in the United States, and a dominant player in the adult video market.”