Best Friends (34 page)

ONE DAY WHEN I drove home from the hospital, there was a cop directing traffic around a lump in the center of the road. After a moment's hesitation, I stopped.

“I'm a doctor,” I told the cop. “Anything I can do?”

The cop snorted. “I doubt it.” He nodded at the lump, a body covered with a blanket. “Want to see him?”

“No, that's all right.” I walked back to my car quickly.

After I got home that day, Aury, in a pink gingham sun hat that tied under the chin, was sitting in her stroller and watching me water the sunflowers in the tiny backyard of our town house. The phone rang and it was Sally. Ben was gone.

“What do you mean, gone?” A phrase swam into mind: What, he vanished down the aisle at a Kmart?

“He's dead, he's drowned!” Sally was hysterical. “In Mexico. He left the house Daddy rented and walked to the top of a sea cliff and jumped off!”

Another suicide. “Clare! Clare!” he'd said years ago. “Watch me do a cannonball!” His little feet rattling the diving board. His head on my knees, his arms wrapping my legs, his hair under my hand as wiry as a terrier's. I glanced out the window at Aury strapped in her stroller, trying to grab her toes so she could suck them. Innocence gone smash, I thought. I saw Ben do the cannonball again, the waves surging around him.

 

 

 

IT JOLTED ME to see her walking toward me down the concourse. She looked so ordinary, dressed in a polo shirt and jean shorts, her mouth half open and sagging, her stomach a little bulgy. “Sally!” I called from behind Aury's stroller, and Sally looked around in confusion, not seeing me right away. “Sally!” I called again, but softer, walking into her line of vision, trying not to make her feel foolish—because it was clear to me, for the first time, that she was capable of feeling foolish.

I'd never known that. I'd thought whatever she did was done with absolute confidence, loony confidence, which was what made her buying heroin for her brother bizarrely threatening and even funny. But here she was, a blister on her toe, legs incompletely shaved, bending to cluck over Aury before she had the nerve to face me.

I grabbed her and hugged and hugged her.

One excuse for my behavior during this whole period was that I was shell-shocked from dealing with AIDS. I hadn't developed the requisite hardness. The rashes, the tongues coated with fungus, the eyeballs blossoming with virus all disconcerted me. I had changed my career, convinced it would be interesting, that I would be useful. It was interesting, I was useful, but the tragedies were realer than I expected. I had weird dreams. In one I was the doctor for Neil Armstrong, who had nothing but a simple cold, and I couldn't save even him.

I had a male patient then, an actor who'd come home to Ohio to die. “Oh, really?” I said, “which James Coburn movie?” I rented it on video. It wasn't a big part, but there he was on my TV, casting a quick glance over his shoulder, bringing a cigarette to his lips, turning to regard a girl. In the movie he was gorgeous. Now purple Kaposi's lesions sprouted all over him like psychotic mushrooms, his belly was hollowed as a bowl, and his cheekbones, which you could see had been an excellent feature, now were grotesque in their protrusion. I couldn't help but think that he'd been doomed by his good looks. His AIDS had been transmitted casually and sexually; in his day, he said, everybody wanted to sleep with him. In a way, Sally was lucky, because in the end Ben died quickly, and she didn't have to watch him wither away. Not that Ben had HIV (he didn't, amazingly enough; Sally's fresh-needle program worked), but the natural course of a heroin addict was decay. And Sally had tried to subvert that.

I guessed the death was a suicide, at least that's how the local Mexican doctor—who was also the coroner and who had, admittedly, his own interest in the affair—characterized it. North of the town there were sea cliffs, and early one Thursday morning, Ben had climbed to the top of the highest cliff and jumped off. His father, walking on the shore, looking for the son missing from his bedroom, saw him falling. He recognized Ben's orange T-shirt. The sea was too noisy for Sid to hear the thud as Ben hit the rocks, but Ben's body bounced twice, maybe three times, and as Sid ran toward him, the waves rushed in; Ben, swept into them, disappeared. Because the body never was found, there was no autopsy, no toxicology report; Ben had been in Mexico with his father almost five weeks then, the Mexican doctor tapering his narcotics, and by the time of his death, Ben was supposedly on a stable dose of methadone.

“I don't know,” Sally said. “Maybe. I do know he was desperate. We'll never know.”

We were talking about the possibility that Ben had taken drugs before his fall.

“I never should have let Daddy take him down to Mexico.”

“But he wanted to go,” I objected. “You told me that. You thought you were giving him everything to make him happy, and all of a sudden he wanted to quit.”

“He wanted Daddy to accept him. He didn't really want to quit the drugs. He agreed to go so Daddy would accept him. The way I see it, I sent Ben down to Mexico to die.”

I was learning, with my patients, not to rush right in with questions, but to let a person's thoughts unfurl.

“I might as well have taken a gun and shot him.”

“Sally. That's nonsense.”

“It's not. I knew when Daddy took Ben down there that he was trying to get him away from me. There was the rehab angle, yes, but that wasn't Daddy's prime motive. His prime motive was to get Ben away from me. Daddy gave up on Ben years ago. Right after I found out about Ben and Flavio. I remember Daddy standing in the doorway of Flavio's and my old apartment. ‘I've given up on him, Sally,' he said. ‘Your mother won't, but I have.' It was awful. Like Ben died right then and there for him. So when Mom died, I felt an extra responsibilty. Because she always looked after Ben, and Daddy looked after me.”

I thought of Sid's frantic phone calls, his worry about Sally's being found out. I tried to remember if he'd expressed any concern about Ben, or if Sally was his only focus. “He was frightened someone would find out about your trips to the Chinese place. Your safety, your career, your future—”

“God, my future. Who cares about my future? I'm representing women with screwed-up face-lifts, basically. How rewarding is that? After Mom died, I tried to think what she would do for Ben. You know how she handled the marijuana. Keep him in a controlled environment, she said. If I'd kept taking Ben what he needed, he'd be alive today.”

“Well, maybe today, Sally, but tomorrow? Or next month? Your father was working with a doctor. He was keeping Ben on maintenance—”

“Maintenance! Think about that word: he was maintaining him. That methadone stare. Like their eyes are
pinned.
Would you want to spend your life maintained?”

I said nothing, waiting.

“He called me. From Mexico. Ben called Monday night and said he was going crazy. ‘I've got to get out of here.' Well, easier said than done. Daddy kept the car keys and the money. I asked Ben about taking a bus, but he never learned Spanish. I don't know how, growing up with Patricia and the gardeners, but he didn't. And his confidence was shot. A normal person could take a bus without speaking the language. But Ben . . .” She hesitated. “I said Ben, give me three days. I'll start down there Friday morning. I'll bring you what you need and we'll deal with Daddy later. It took a little doing, but I did it. They didn't trust me totally, I hadn't been buying for weeks and it was a big order—I had to order twenty Happy Families—but they gave it to me, finally, and I got my partners to cover my cases for a week, and I loaded up the Volvo and I was just at my office tying up loose ends when all of a sudden Dr. Ramirez—that's the doctor down there, the do-it-all detox doc—is on the phone to tell me about Ben.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, trying to understand, “you planned to drive down to Mexico with heroin for Ben? Is that what you were planning to do?”

Sally nodded impatiently. “I was only going down. Where they're looking for stuff is coming up. And I had cash for”—she rubbed her fingers together—“you know,
la mordida.
Bribes.”

“That's incredible.”

“It's credible! I was almost there, Clare. I almost saved him. I had a whole suitcase—drugs, syringes, alcohol pads. When Dr. Ramirez called, I thought something had happened to my father. ‘I am sorry to say this, but there's been a death in your family.' I thought, Daddy's had a heart attack! But then Dr. Ramirez said, ‘Your brother fell from a cliff.' I couldn't believe it. I thought Ben, Ben, why Ben? He's innocent, why not me? Why not Daddy or me?”

It took me a moment to get my bearings. “What are you talking about, Sally? You think it would have been better for you to die than Ben? Ben wasn't innocent, he was a drug addict.”

“He had a disease. A disease!”

“You told me he was HIV-negative—”

“Not AIDS! He had an addiction disorder! First he was addicted to sex, then he got addicted to drugs. He never chose to do the things he did.”

“Oh, come on, Sally.” I heard that sort of thinking about drug abuse all the time, but more from family members than from the abusers themselves.

“You tell me it's not true.”

“It's not exactly true. There's a tendency for some people to get drug-addicted, yes, but no one nabs them walking down the street and sticks a needle in their vein.”

Sally shot me a quick and bitter glance. “You make it sound so easy.”

 

 

INEVITABLE, SID SAID.

Look at his flaws, Sid said.

Disrespect of his body.

Disrespect for his family.

Self-absorption.

Greed.

“Greed?” I objected. “He never was greedy. He didn't want material things. He wanted a good high, he wanted love, he wanted to know who he was. Sid, for years he didn't know if he was gay or not. Can you imagine?”

“He was gay,” Sid said flatly. “I don't care if he lived with that Teuton or not. And three days before he died, he asked Sally for drugs. He called her up and told her to bring him heroin. Just flat-out told her, like she owed him or something. And she was going to do it!”

“I know,” I said. “Sally told me.” A thought struck me: “How did
you
know?”

“I heard him on the phone. I eavesdropped. Listen, I had to eavesdrop! He was always calling people asking them for things. He called that girlfriend of his and asked her for drugs too, but she wouldn't bring them.”

Lack of respect for others.

Lying.

Ingratitude.

“Helga didn't love him like Sally did,” I said.

“You call potentially destroying your life for someone love? I call it insanity. Wait a minute, that's not true: you can potentially destroy your life for someone grateful, for someone who deserves it—like for your child, say—that could be okay.” A hardness set into Sid's face. “But to destroy your life for a drug addict—no. That's unacceptable.”

 

 

 

SALLY BLINKED BACK TEARS. “I can't believe it, I'm so disappointed in him. It's as if he thinks Ben deserved to die. I could stand someone else thinking that, but Daddy . . .”

Back then, what was Sally's joy? She was so concerned about Ben's joy, but what was hers? If I'd been more perceptive, I would have asked her; as it was, the question didn't cross my mind. I could have told her my own joy: leaving an exam room and hearing someone say to his companion: “She's nice, isn't she? She treats you like a real person.”

“It's the day-to-day stuff that really wears you down,” Sally said years later, biting her thumbnail. She was caring for her father then, besides her, the one remaining Rose. The remark hit me in the chest: she was right. At some point, I hadn't faced that with her, I hadn't asked her: Is there anything you'd like to do today? How well are you sleeping? What's your favorite thing to eat? So when she reconfigured her life without Ben, without her mother, she didn't leave much space in it for me.

 

 

 

IT WAS A SMALL FUNERAL. Helga came, but I, stuck in Ohio with my patients, didn't arrive till four weeks later. In his office off the parking lot, in a room fillled with pictures of trees and rivers, the son of the funeral director who'd done Esther's funeral tried to console Sally. She had her suspicions of him already; she'd noticed his eyes following her at her mother's funeral. When he saw her again, his voice quivered, as if he couldn't believe the luck that death had brought his way. “You should have heard him, Clare! He doesn't have to rend his shirt, but this he's-looking-at-you-from-the-trees-and-flowers stuff is a travesty. This was a young man. This was a tragedy. ‘His spirit is joining the great life source.' Excuse me? My brother
dies,
and he still has no dignity? I'm supposed to be consoled to think he's coming back as an evening primrose?”

“Oh Sally,” I said. I'd never felt such compassion for her. I felt as if my chest were breaking, all the love I felt gushing out and over her. I hoped she knew I felt this way. I hoped she could feel my love.

 

 

 

A MONTH LATER, Sally came to Ohio to visit me. I thought she needed to see me, but when she arrived, I realized she had needed to leave home.

We were seated in a restaurant, and behind us, people were meeting each other. “Frank,” someone said.

“Nancy!” Frank answered. “How's summer school?”