Best Friends (35 page)

“I can't stand it anymore,” Sally said. “I can't stand all the stupid superficial things people say to each other.”

“It's life, Sally,” I said. “It's people exchanging pleasantries.”

“You don't care about me at all, do you?” Sally said.

A strain of heartlessness had settled into her. She no longer had sympathy for anybody else's woes. Minor travails—traffic jams, an extra ten pounds, disagreements with in-laws—she greeted with irritation, as if such silly things only proved how worthless the complainer was. She weighed more major traumas—asthma attacks or wayward children or sick friends—against her own and found them wanting. How could a kid getting drunk one Saturday night compare to a dead brother and a mother dead at forty-nine? A man in the supermarket checkout line told us about his sister with multiple sclerosis, who wore diapers and was confined to a wheelchair. “At least she's alive,” Sally said. With Teresa, her housekeeper, who was despondent over her own mother's illness, Sally was unforgiving. “I can't understand her. It's like she expects her mother to live forever. Her mother's eighty-nine! Does Teresa think she should never die?”

I wondered then what Sally thought of me. I'd think of my father's death, his embezzling, my divorces, my pelvic infection and miscarriage, and wonder if Sally thought they were worthy of any respect. Then I'd get angry, thinking of course I'd suffered. Every day I suffered. One of my patients, a sportscaster, had histoplasmosis in the sack around his heart. I didn't give him two weeks. Another of my patients, a prostitute, had a sinus infection that had eroded her facial bones and was pushing out her eyeball. Did Sally think I went through my days untroubled?

It was during this visit that Mark Petrello made his difference in my life. Sally and I ran into him at the hospital cafeteria. He was as wired and skinny as ever, piling his tray with potato chips, pop, two slices of pie.

“Mark,” I said. “This is Sally. Remember my friend Sally?”

Mark rubbed his hands on the hips of his scrubs and looked surprised. “The famous Sally,” he said. “All those phone calls. You visiting from L.A.?”

Sally said yes. “Nice to meet you finally,” she said; I was relieved she was polite.

“Yeah,” said Mark. “Me too.”

“Care to sit with us?” I asked.

Mark made an apologetic face. “Can't. I got two codes coming in by squad. I just got this to . . .” and he waved at the food on his tray.

“Same old Mark,” I said.

He moved ahead of us in line, paid, took the food from his tray, and trotted halfway across the cafeteria before he turned around and headed back to us, his snack foods bunched like bouquets at the end of his sinewy arms. “Hey, Sally!” he said when he was ten feet away. “Just wanted to tell you: Clare was my best girl. By far.” He was on wife number three by that time, with innumerable girlfriends in between.

“She's a lot more than that,” Sally retorted, but Mark was already scampering away, and I barely registered Sally's comment, riding as I was on a wave of pleasure—of pride, really—over what Mark had said. I was his best girl. Of everyone, of all Mark's women, I'd been his best girl.

But by the middle of lunch, without Sally saying another word, my view of my life had changed. What drove me to do things? I picked Oberlin as a college, thinking it would still have demonstrations; I had Aury because I liked to picture myself carting around a baby; I chose to work in AIDS not out of scientific curiosity or altruism but simply so I'd know all my patients were sick. When you came right down to it, my major life decisions—even my marriages—had been based on whim. But when Mark Petrello's measly compliment sank in, something inside me rebelled. If the best I was was Mark's best girl, how could I not want to be more?

We finished lunch without mentioning him at all. “You know, this is a disease,” Sally said, touching her cheeks with her hand. “This redness. One of the plastic surgeons I work with told me. It's called rosacea.”

Of course. But rosacea was a trivial thing, something I'd never dream of worrying about in my patients. “It's not a disease,” I said quickly. “It's a malady. A disorder.” I struggled to find another word. “A distinction.”

“He gave me medicine for it.”

“Are you using it?”

Sally frowned. “I'd look better if my cheeks weren't like a clown's, don't you think?”

Oh, Sally, I thought. My apple-cheeked girl.

 

 

 

I WENT BACK to California in November. The stock market had crashed, and Frank, who'd been buying stocks on margin, was in trouble. Baxter, too, had woes: a “friend,” it turned out, had been sharing the cabin and set it on fire when he moved out. Baxter, busy rebuilding before the winter, told my mother he had no plans to press charges. He said he didn't blame the arsonist.

“It's hard losing a parent any time,” I hazarded to Sally, trying to arouse a little sympathy for her maid, Teresa.

“You don't know,” Sally said. “Your father was different. He was young, he died before his time. That's what's hard. I can't see mourning a mother who dies at eighty-nine. Where's Teresa's perspective?”

“You sound like a doctor,” I said.

She didn't seem to hear me, or maybe she took it as another of the thinly veiled insults I was making—I admit it—more frequently those days. I don't know, she irritated me. She wasn't the only person in the world with a difficult life.

I feared for Teresa's job—Teresa, who was always so kind to Aury. I was especially nice to her that week, making my own bed, carefully rehanging my towels after each use, carrying my clothes to the laundry room rather them leaving them in the hamper. It was there that I found Teresa weeping, curled up against the washer in a pile of sheets. I tried to convey my sympathy, but language was a problem. She didn't look consoled. She cried more. We parted in confusion. The noise she made followed me down the hall, through the walls and vents, and I can describe it only as keening. It clung as fiercely as lint. By the time I reached Sally in the backyard I knew exactly how my friend felt. “Maybe you should fire her,” I said.

 

 

 

ON A CLOUDY SUNDAY afternoon, we went to visit Sally's father.

He was in the same house off Mulholland, behind the same gate, surrounded by the same vegetation and trees. All the plants looked as I'd remembered them, and the espaliered tree beside the pool seemed not to have grown at all. Sally and I talked as we went in: it had been almost two years since I'd been here for the reception after Esther's funeral, and ten months before that, I'd been here with Ted.

Now the front door, Sally said, was rarely used, so we entered through the garage. Once this garage had held four cars—Sally's little Kharmann Ghia, Ben's green Gremlin, Esther's Cadillac with the white leather seats, and an earlier incarnation of Sid's Mercedes. Now there was only Sid's car.

That near-empty garage hit me with what Sally had lost. The floor was carefully swept, tools hanging neatly from pegs on a wooden railing. The gardener would have done this, I was sure. Against the far wall, a plastic bin filled with games had been shoved under a cabinet. Twister was on top, and underneath, Green Ghost and Monopoly; a glimpse of a basketball was visible through the bin's webbing.

“Daddy!” Sally called as she pushed open the door to the kitchen.

This house had been so tantalizing to me, so extreme and glamorous and unattainable. But now it had lost its luster. It was only a rich person's house, a house made exceptional by the money poured into it. Nothing was new. The microwave had an analog clock. The peach dining room table looked dated and sad. The house could have been a museum, a painstakingly preserved piece of the seventies.

“Clare. You're back.”

He didn't remember, I realized, that I was coming. He looked awful. His shoulders were hunched and his face was gray, and as he descended the long staircase from the second floor, the staircase I'd stood on the first time we met, he leaned against the railing as if a knee or ankle hurt him. A break in the clouds sent light streaming through the wall of windows and made all of us squint.

He hit the bottom of the stairs and winced. I gestured at his legs: “Hurt yourself?”

“Old war injury,” he answered, which was surely a joke, and Sally and I obligingly smiled. “Actually, I fell off a ladder,” he said. “I was trying to clean some stuff out of Ben's closet.”

“Oh, Daddy,” Sally said, her voice breaking, “you're not already going through Ben's . . . ?”

“It's a room, not a shrine! Have you been in there lately? It's a mess.”

Sally's face clouded. “Are you throwing anything away?”

“Sure,” Sid said. “Believe me, there's not a lot worth keeping. I just tossed out a bunch of underwear.”

“Why don't you let me go through things? It must be too painful for you.”

I glanced at Sally: too painful for Sid? It would be far more painful for her. But maybe she wanted the chance to preserve—or inspect—Ben's things.

“It's not painful. Listen, as far as I'm concerned, I lost my son ten times before he actually died. The actual death crap was a formality, as far as I'm concerned.”

Sally blinked quickly. “Ben had a lot of pain in his life, Daddy. He was always looking for joy.”

“Joy.” Sid gave a bitter shrug. “Whatever.”

We left not long after that, shutting the door to the garage, hurrying past the bin of games and the navy Mercedes, past the pool, past the espalier which Carlos still, after all these years, tended like a child, past the tubs of flowers hanging from below the windows. “God,” Sally said as she got in the car, her right hand shaking so much she had to steady her wrist with the other hand to get the key in the ignition, “it's like I don't know my own father anymore.”

 

 

 

BACK IN OHIO, I woke up suddenly in the middle of the night, thinking of Sally. I called her, since it was only midnight in California. She was awake.

“Sally, I worry about you. I don't want another person in your family gone.”

“I worry about me, too,” she whispered.

She sniffed. “Can you stay on the phone?”

“Sure.”

“You don't have to talk. Maybe I can fall asleep if I just hear your breathing. God, if I could only sleep. Clare? You can fall asleep too. That wouldn't hurt my feelings.”

“Okay. I'll put the phone right beside me on the pillow.”

And I did.

 

 

 

I DIDN'T LIKE HIM, never liked him, and years later I liked him even less. But if I'm honest (and I try to be, as Sally does) I have to admit that Peter saved Sally's life. I had a supporting role, but he was the one who saved her life.

A new man. A newcomer, Peter James Newcomer.

“Newcomer? That's his name?”

“Newcomer.”

“How appropriate.” I realized I didn't want a newcomer. “He doesn't look like Flavio, does he?”

“No. I am capable of learning from experience.”

I could almost hear her smile on the phone. “Sally,” I said, astonished, “you sound almost normal.”

She laughed. Laughed! “Almost normal?”

“What does he do?”

“Do? He knows people. You'll see.” She had met him in the basement of a Methodist church, when the AA session before her grief recovery group had run late. Was Peter in AA? She sidestepped the question. “Serendipitous,” Sally said. “That's how I meet all my men.” “All her men” meant Timbo and Flavio, not a huge number. Now she was meeting a man at a twelve-step program. How California. How modern. Peter Newcomer.

I MET THE NEWCOMER a couple months later. Sally was right, he looked nothing like Flavio. He had thinning brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, an inverted tepee of a goatee, hands that waved when he talked, and intense gray eyes. I distrusted his eyes; Sally thought they were his best feature. So what did he do, exactly? I understood that the previous summer he'd gone with a client to the Harmonic Convergence at Chaco Canyon. And how was it? He shrugged. “Fine. Why not? Peace love groovy.”

He'd been trained as a social worker, U.C. Berkeley. Early on he'd been into community organization. “So are you working as a social worker?” I asked.

“I have a client base,” he said.

“What does that mean? Is it like I'm a doctor, so I have a patient base?”

“I suspect you're thinking about this too conventionally.”