Best Friends (30 page)

“How can he not know,” my mother said. “He must know. He's just not telling you. He's embarrassed to be a homosexual.”

“He's not embarrassed by anything.”

“Then he's trying to please his father,” my mother said. I wondered if she'd mind my doing crazy things if she thought I did them to please her.

 

 

 

I DON'T THINK the ideal birth experience involves being coached by your mother, but she offered, and how could I turn her down? The exact delivery date was too unpredictable for Sally to come. My mother stayed with me two weeks and three days waiting for the baby, and then she stayed two more weeks to help me with the baby, rushing to pick her up from her crib before I could get there. In truth, my daughter was happiest in my arms. Eventually, my mother and I reached a point of mutual exhaustion, and I stood at the door of my town house madly waving the baby's tiny arm at her, hoping to hurry her off. After that, the baby and I were fine, as the birth itself had been fine, although it was a revelation to me that labor really hurt (I thought there had been some cultural exaggeration), and in the process of labor, my usual coolness in front of my mother broke down. I screamed at her that she always got me upset, and why did she have to be like that? You're exhausted, you're exhausted, she soothed, and I realized that coaching a daughter through childbirth was hard on a mother too. When she tried to feed me ice, the chips fell off her shaking spoon. That made me think of Ted's tremor and the useless end of my marriage, and despite my best efforts, I started crying. My mother gaped, and I realized she'd never, since I was maybe four years old, seen me cry. For some reason, this made me cry more.

My mother was visibly relieved when my baby was a girl, because—as she'd mentioned many times, both before and during my labor—a girl wouldn't need a male role model.

I named her Aurelia Roger Mann. I sent out birth announcements with no mention of a father. I was thrilled.

Sally was the first person besides me, the obstetrician, and the ward clerk who knew I was pregnant. I phoned her. By the time I called, the evening after my doctor's visit, I was over the biggest part of my shock and was excited.

We were at an awkward place in our friendship, and I hoped the news would lure her back to me.

“So,” I said, “are you ready to be an auntie?”

She was confused. I kept her dangling for a moment, then spilled it out.

“Who's the father?” she said.

“Sally! Do you think it matters? It doesn't matter.”

“Are you going to raise it by yourself? Aren't you even going to contact the father?”

“Sally! The father is superfluous. I promise you, the father didn't plunge in there hoping for fatherhood. This is my baby.”

A pause. “Every child needs a father.”

She was back with hers. They went out to dinner, talked about Sally's office furniture, browsed together at bookstores. “You've bought into that whole father mythology,” I said in what I hoped was a cheerfully complaining way. “Bought into”: true California-ese.

“It's a true mythology,” Sally answered in a serious tone. “It echoes because it's true. Everybody wants to be in touch with their origins.” Then an afterthought: “Do you
know
the father?”

“I know the possibilities. Maybe it'll look like one of them. At least they're all white.” I meant this as a joke, but Sally didn't respond.

“How many possibilities are we talking about?”

“Three.”

After a moment Sally said quietly: “Oh, Clare. I guess your needs were overwhelming again, right?”

We both laughed, she less heartily than I. “Does your mother know?” she asked.

“I haven't told her yet. You're the first nonmedical person to know.”

“Thank you,” Sally said in an odd, flat tone. Then she brightened a bit. “Well, a baby is what you wanted, right?”

 

 

 

PEOPLE ASK ME how I ended up in AIDS, and I can tell them exactly. “I didn't want the ambiguity,” I say. “When you do AIDS, you know your patients are sick.”

It was during my last year in Lisbonville, on a Thursday afternoon when I was eager to get home to Aury, that I realized what I needed.

“I had about all I can take,” a Mrs. Hopps, not my favorite patient, said when I walked into the exam room. What did she mean? Was she hurting somewhere, feeling sick? Had she missed her disability check last month? (A frequent complaint.)

“I had about all I can take, is all,” she answered, and glared at me from her station on the exam table.

I got no more help from her than that. She denied all specific complaints and answered my questions with angry impatience. “I'm just not right,” she repeated. And then, maddeningly: “You're the doctor.”

I examined her. Nothing. Everything I could think to check was normal.

“So what are you going to do with me?” she demanded as I sank onto my stool.

I sat there, pen in hand. I couldn't stand it. Mrs. Hopps was driving me crazy. She could be dying. She could be depressed, she could be manipulative, she could be totally normal and having an off day. Dear God, I thought, give me some real disease.

I answered her with the usual doctors' stall: “We'll do some tests.” They were normal, of course, but people can have normal tests and die the next day. Another ambiguity.

Shortly after, I heard about the doctor-with-an-interest-in-AIDS job at University. They wanted a physician both to see people with AIDS in a clinic and to supervise their hospital care. The doctor who had previously done these things had quit. He was a young rheumatologist who had hired on with the expectation of injecting joints with steroids and managing patients with lupus, but when AIDS hit and the cretins in the infectious disease department punted management of the disease to rheumatology (because AIDS was a problem of resistance, not virulence, and who could be sure it was infectious; why deal with those patients if you didn't have to?) the burden of the AIDS-stricken had fallen to him, the most junior rheum physician. Nobody blamed him explicitly for leaving, and infectious disease didn't jump in to say the next AIDS doc must be an infectious disease person. In retrospect this was crazy, but at the time that was how it was. And I had been reading, I was interested. In fact, during my six weeks of maternity leave, on our way to California, Aury and I spent two days at an AIDS conference in Chicago, where I was not only one of the few women attendees but the only breast-feeding mother.

When I heard about the possible opening at University, I phoned one of my former professors.

“They're looking for someone,” he confirmed.

“Do you think they'd consider a general internist with a special interest?”

“Why not? There's nobody beating down the door. Infectious disease docs who want to do AIDS stay on the coasts, and any ID person who comes to the Midwest is trying to avoid it.”

“Interesting.”

“Call Dunswater, the new medicine chief, he's the one you need to talk to. You have a good reputation here; you could have a chance.”

So now I do AIDS. There is no doubt, not one jot, that each of my patients has the disease. It's impossible to get into my practice without a positive blood test for HIV. By the early nineties, I wasn't even seeing partners or possibles. Other doctors could see them. My criterion was so strict, my practice in its way so exclusive, that when people were referred to me, they felt as if they'd won a prize. I kid you not. People with AIDS came to me from as far away as Toledo. I don't know if I'm the best AIDS doctor around, but I have my advocates. Patients like me because I'm thorough, I move quickly, I'm writing orders for tests and medicines while they're still reciting symptoms. I'm very up-to-date; I read everything. I can look someone in the eye and discuss their death. I can tell relatives to mind their own business. For my chosen patients, I'm a protector, a doctor who's in some way fierce.

 

 

 

I HADN'T REALIZED Sally had such a thing for babies. “May I hold her?” she said the second Aury and I were off the plane.

She held her, rocked her, cooed to her our whole trip. Several people took Sally for Aury's mother, which shouldn't have bothered me but did. I began to nurse Aury more frequently in public, to prove I was the mom.

“They really called you an
elderly
primip?” Sally asked. An elderly primipara is a woman over thirty having her first baby. We were thirty-one.

 

 

 

CANDY MET AN ELECTRICIAN who'd done work for Lionel Richie and she left Ben, but when I went to visit Sally, he had a new girlfriend, a girl he'd met in line for an Iggy Pop concert. Her name was Helga and she looked like a Helga, although she was from San Diego. Her father was a doctor, and he rented her a house in the Hollywood Hills, where she lived with three female housemates. Ben stayed at that house a lot, so Sally and I took his groceries there.

It had struck me that Ben should be capable of shopping for food himself, but I didn't say this to Sally. The stuff she bought him was touching: good healthy food like milk and yogurt, a few steaks because, as she said, men like steaks (“men”—was Ben a man?), top-of-the-line frozen entrees for convenience, and, just for a treat, candy bars and chips and salsa.

“Hey, Ben's sister,” one of the housemates said as she answered the door, apparently forgetting Sally's name. She called into the house behind her, “Foodmobile!”

All four housemates were home, peculiar in the middle of a weekday. Two were sunning topless by the pool, the girl who answered the door was walking around munching on a Pop-Tart, and Helga was lying on a sofa watching TV. She was wearing a man's shirt (not Ben's; he was far too thin for this shirt) and no apparent pants, and one foot was propped up on the back of the sofa. I clutched Aury to my shoulder, a little ball of warmth.

“Sal,” Helga said, not moving, “Ben's at work.” The house stank of smoke and something else distasteful, even though the glass doors were open.

“I didn't think he worked Thursdays.” Ben was still employed at the video store.

“I don't know, someone called off or something. I had to get up early and drive him.” Helga swung her leg off the back of the sofa and sat up, reached for a cigarette in a pack on the table. Sally turned away and walked to the kitchen, her heels clicking disapprovingly. “My house, Salster,” Helga mumbled, rolling her eyes in Sally's direction, then sat up and hunched over her cigarette, the shirt bunched between her legs. She looked at me: “You guys get Doritos?”

“I think so.” I clutched little sleeping Aury tighter. The girl who'd answered the door hadn't even noticed the baby, nor had Helga. I wanted to leave Helga's presence, to follow Sally to the kitchen, but the kitchen was dark and probably even smellier than the rest of the house, and here there was at least fresh air and a touch of breeze. I thought about these things now that I had a baby.

“God, I hope they're real Doritos and not the fucking store brand,” Helga said. “I hate those store brands, they taste like absolute shit.”

You ingrate, I thought. I couldn't think of a single thing to say out loud.

“What kind of baby's that?” Helga said suddenly.

“A sweet baby,” I said. Helga gave me a blank look. “She's a little girl, if that's what you mean. She's five weeks old. Her name's Aurelia. It means ‘golden.' ” I held my hand behind Aury's head to tilt her back and show her to Helga, but she wasn't looking anymore.

“I wouldn't mind having a baby girl,” Helga said. A chill ran through me at the thought: Helga and Ben having a child. What a doomed creature that would be. “She'll be hell on you when she gets to be a teenager, though,” Helga noted, nodding sagely.

“You'd know about that,” I said.

Helga threw me a quick appraising glance. I smiled blandly. Satisfied, Helga leaned back on the sofa, brought an ankle up on her knee, and started rubbing her toes. I glanced out to the pool area, thinking I'd step out there, but the topless girls' breasts jutted out so aggressively I didn't dare.

The girl with the Pop-Tart appeared. “He said he'd call, that shit-for-brains said he'd call!”

“Get over it, cupcake,” Helga said. “You can't think you're the only one.”

Cupcake: I knew Sally hated that expression. I wondered if she might have heard. I could hear her laying into Helga, listing things one two three, telling Helga exactly what she thought of her scuzzy life.

The Pop-Tart girl made a disgusted sound and disappeared again.

Helga yawned. “She's crazy for Axel. Everyone's crazy for Axel.”

“Who's Axel crazy for?”

Helga smirked. “Himself.”

Where does Ben meet these people? I thought. And why am I meeting them? I wasn't a prude, but these were people I didn't have to meet. I remembered something Baxter used to say about needing a shower after talking to certain people. I stroked Aury's back, ran my finger down the bones of her tiny spine.

Sally came back, clutching a handful of empty grocery bags. “Do you save these bags, Helga? Where should I put them?”

Helga waved her hand. “Just get rid of them, I don't know. Take them out to the garbage or something.” There was a bong sitting on the coffee table, and Helga's eyes lit up as she reached for it. “Hey, gals, you know what this is?” Helga said. “This is a sixties sort of thing. You remember it?”

“We were in grade school in the sixties,” Sally said. I felt excited, thinking she would say more, a purge of invective and anger, but she didn't say another word. Instead, she put her free hand on my back and pushed me toward the door.