Best Friends (33 page)

“This is the most fun I've had on any heroin delivery,” I said as we pulled into Helga's drive. “Really, Sally, we should do it again.”

“And have old Madame Chiang Kai-shek peering at you? She'd better not tell me not to buy there. Every other day,” Sally said. “I'm more reliable than the mailman.”

“Mailperson,” I corrected her. “This is the eighties.”

Sally drew herself up in mock offense. “No,” she said, “I'm a mailwoman.”

The front door swung open before we could reach it. There was someone there, blank and skeletal and hairless, leaning on the doorframe, engulfed in an orange T-shirt and shorts. I thought at first it was another of Helga's female roommates. I almost said to Sally, sarcastically, Now
there's
a woman for you.

It was Ben.

“Ben, what did you do, you . . .” I faltered; there was no way to ask him anything without letting on how bad he looked. He'd lost his job at the video store—accused of stealing, Sally said, although why should he steal? Sally took care of all his needs—and now spent all day in the house. One of Sally's campaigns was to get him out and walking; a little exercise would do him good. “You shaved your head,” I noted limply.

He looked right past me to Sally. “You got it?” he said.

I saw lots of addicts in my new job. One of them had told me that the only thing important to an addict was the high. Nothing else mattered—not family, not friends, not honor or health or safety. “They be seeing you, they be talking to you, and they be thinking: How I get this doctor to give me some
stuff
? Or say it's my sister that's the addict, my sister be thinking: How I use this weasel brother of mine to get me some
stuff
?”

“Yes, Ben, I have it,” Sally said.

He held out his hand. “Lay it on me.”

“Ben, wait at least until we get inside.” She pushed her way past him into the door. “You don't want anyone seeing you from the street.”

“I don't care.”

“You may not care, but I care, and if you want me to keep on procuring for you, you'll need to put up with my quirks.”

“Malarkey,” Ben said.

The word startled me. He was correct, of course: Sally would “procure” for him forever. Did Ben really have a sense of humor? I eyed him with fresh appreciation, and when he looked back, we exchanged a smile.

Absurd to think I thought he was all right, considering how he dug in the rice container with his fingers, spilling rice all over the foyer floor, how he grabbed for Sally's purse for the fresh needles, how he scampered away toward the bedroom without even a thank-you. But I did. I thought maybe he wasn't an addict like other addicts. I thought Ben appreciated Sally, I thought she was giving him—just as she said—a shot at joy. Maybe her buying heroin for Ben was precisely what she thought it was, an act of love. All this was on the basis of a single word—malarkey. I realized later why that word had consoled me: my father used it. It took me back to my childhood, to sitting in the backseat of the car, to the clean pure world where hope was possible.

“Are we going to see your dad at all?” I asked Sally as we drove home.

She shot me a surprised look. “Do you want to see him?”

“Not really.” I was thinking about his charge to me, his demand that I come out here and talk some sense into Sally. I could imagine him talking to me, getting bigger and bigger and closer to my face, saying, “Well? Well?”

I had to admit, there was symmetry to it. Sally tolerated her father's publishing pornography, but not pornography with violence against women; Sid tolerated a son addicted to drugs, but not a daughter who delivered those drugs to her brother. With both of them, there was a malfunction of their moral barometer, an inability to calibrate certain decisions. At some point, after all, wrong is wrong. Isn't it?

I thought about this as I flew home, Aury on my lap. It was a long ride. If I held Aury on my shoulder, she squirmed, if I held her on my lap facing out she cried, if I held her sitting looking at me she grabbed my earrings and laughed. I couldn't understand why she was so keyed up.

“Aury, please, Aury. I'm very tired.”

I wasn't very comfortable holding her. I wasn't a natural, like Sally would be, a child slung on her hip, bouncing happily through zoos, supermarkets, airports. I'd imagined I would be like that, my daughter and I contentedly together, complete unto ourselves, the envy of anyone who saw us. But no one envied us. I wore a frazzled look; Aury's big diaper bag knocked people's arms and caught on doorknobs.

When I'd phoned Margaret after Aury's birth, she said wasn't I lucky, I'd created my own friend—a nice idea, but it wasn't like that. My mother had told me I was a problem baby, which I found surprising considering her experience, but as she pointed out the babies before me were boys, “and they're different, they're programmed to love their mothers.”

“What are you saying?” I objected. “Aren't girls programmed to love their mothers too?”

“I rest my case,” my mother said.

“But you wanted me to have a girl! You were excited because you thought a girl wouldn't need a father figure!”

“Of course she needs a father figure. Every child does. You're the one who wants to dispense with the father.”

I held the phone away from me and looked at it, realizing there was no way to respond to this coolly.

“I do hope you'll reconsider letting the father know,” my mother said. “It would be a benefit to all three of you.”

“So sayeth the great swami,” I said, slamming down the phone.

 

 

 

“IT'S AMAZING,” Cliff said, laughing. “My wife won't eat processed flour, and your best friend's shooting up heroin.”

I was shocked. “Cliff! What are you talking about? Sally would never use drugs. She just buys heroin for Ben.”

He was still giggly, titillated. “You don't think she sets aside a few bags for her personal use?”

“Cliff,” I said. “Get off me.”

“Oh come on, sweetie”—he was going limp now, I could feel it—“don't be mad. You can't think a thirty-something woman who's putting out major bucks for drugs isn't going to use them.”

“Major bucks?” I pushed him off me. “Major bucks? You really think she's worried about major bucks?”

Cliff looked hurt. He propped himself up on an elbow and stroked the side of my face. “Oh come on, lover, if she's buying heroin three, four, times a week, she's putting out thousands of dollars.”

I hated that “putting out.” “She's from an extremely wealthy family. What's major bucks to you would be minor to her.”

Cliff smiled. “That may be true. What's the money from?”

“Pornography. And anyway, Ben's money is in a trust fund from his mother. It's not Sally's money, she's the executrix.”

“Pornography?” Cliff repeated, his mouth open. I could see he'd missed everything I'd said after that word. He ran his hand down my body, obviously excited. “What kind of pornography?”

“Get off me.” I squirmed. “You disgust me.”

“Hot pornography? Dripping pornography? Is your friend in the pictures? Do you two do it together?”

I've given a lot of thought as to whether what happened next could technically be called rape. I never would have made that charge publicly, because after all, I was already in bed with the guy, but I think that's what it was. “I'm going to disgust you,” he said, pinning me down, “I'm going to disgust you all over.” Stop it, I kept saying, stop it, and I fought him some, but that excited him more. After a while, I just lay there. He was in every orifice. When he was done, he collapsed on his back and closed his eyes, saying God, that was fantastic, God, you are a sex machine.

I fell asleep. When I woke up, Cliff was gone, a note I refused to read left on the bedside table. I tore it into twenty pieces, put on a nightgown, walked into Aury's room, and sat in the rocker beside her crib. She was lying on her back with one arm stretched out over her head, a position so trusting and confident it filled me with a kind of awe, and as I sat there, her easy breathing calmed me. She was a good baby. I'd done something right. I could hardly believe how tarnished I felt, partly because of Cliff but even more because I'd made my stories of Sally into cheap entertainment.

I wrote Cliff a letter. I told him we had to stop seeing each other; since I was a mother now, I was thinking about the morality of seeing a married man, and I hadn't liked our last encounter. Cliff took it fairly meekly; he knew he'd gone over the line. I still saw him almost every day. We worked together for over eight years. As a department chair, he did all my performance reviews and approved my raises and bonuses. At one point, he backed me up in getting special nurses for my patients. “I owe you one,” I said then, and he raised his eyebrows slightly and kept writing. I had to smile. Even after all we've been through, I like the guy. He improved markedly after his third daughter was born, when his wife came down with breast cancer. She was treated at our medical center, so everyone got to see Dr. Dunswater in husbandly action, and he did astonishingly well. His wife did too. People do change, I thought, transfixed; and then I wondered if our affair had simply brought out the worst in him. His older two daughters are now adolescents, and Cliff and I occasionally have coffee together and commiserate.

“God, how can you complain!” he'll say. “Your daughter's an angel!”

“That's the problem,” I retort.

He could take this as suggestive, but generously, he doesn't. “She's doing it to get your goat,” he points out. “They're geniuses like that.”

I snort and roll my eyes. Cliff, having spared me an obvious comment, now thinks he has me softened up. “Listen,” he says, “that old friend of yours, the one who used to buy heroin supposedly for her brother, whatever happened to . . . ?”

I shrug and glance away. “That was ages ago, Cliff.”

“What? Eight years? It wasn't a lifetime.” Then he seems to remember his wife, the chemo, his daughters with their bouts of rebellion. “Jeez, it seems like a lifetime, doesn't it?

 

 

 

“DID YOU TALK TO HER?” Sid bellowed over the phone, his voice almost hurting my ear. “Did you explain to her what she's doing to her future? I'm going crazy here. Did you make her see she's acting like a madwoman?”

“It's a terrible situation for her, Sid. Here she is responsible for a person who's not responsible for himself, and all she wants is for him to have a little peace and—”

“But did you talk to her?” he interrupted. “What about her career? What about her reputation? What about her morals, for God's sake?”

“I can't say it's ideal, Sid, but I understand it. I understand exactly what she's doing.”

“Let me get this straight,” Sid said. “You think what she's doing is normal?”

“No, not normal, but . . . understandable.”

“You didn't talk to her.” His voice was muffled.

“No. I'm sorry.”

“What am I going to do?” His voice was barely audible, the sentence less a question than an exhalation.

I bit the inside of my cheek. “You could take him away, Sid. You could get him into a facility somewhere where Sally wouldn't have access to him.”

“He won't agree to a facility.”

“Do you know any judges? Is there any way you could get a court order?”

“
He's
not the person out there buying.”

I pressed my eyes closed with my hand. An impossible situation. “You need a deserted island somewhere,” I said, imagining Ben being dropped on one.

“That's it, I'm taking him out of the picture.” Sid's tone was full of sudden resolution. “You're absolutely right. I've been thinking about this a long time, but talking to you makes it clear. I'm taking him to Mexico.”

“Mexico!”

“One of my buddies has a house down there on the west coast. I'll take Ben down there and dry him out.”

“I don't think you can just take a heroin addict and ‘dry him out,' Sid. Can't you get Ben to a detox facility? Or a hospital?”

“There's a doctor down there, Clare. I've been talking about this with my friend. Don't you think Mexico has doctors? My friend has a friend who's a doctor in this little town where his house is, and this doctor said he could get Ben on methadone and wean him down. I've got to get him away from this whole environment. I've got to get him away from Sally.”

“Sid, I'm not an expert on drug addiction, but someone who's been shooting up thirty-five, forty bags of heroin a week is—”

“Let me handle my own children, Clare, okay? You've been great to talk to me, don't get me wrong, but I don't see you being very helpful. I hope someday that little girl of yours doesn't break your heart.”

“I'm sure she won't.” I wasn't sure of this at all.

“All I can say is, thank God I have Sally.”

The length of time I knew that Sally delivered heroin to Ben wasn't long, only a few months. But sometimes knowledge makes a month seem like a year.

Aury was six months old. She reached each of her milestones—smiling, rolling over, crawling, sitting up—just slightly ahead of schedule. Her progress was spectacularly steady. Most parents say the first year of their baby's life goes by in a flash. Aury's first year lasted forever.