Best Friends (36 page)

“Wait a minute,” I said. “I'm lost.”

“Don't you have patients whose lives you know you could improve? Don't you have patients you'd like to take to the grocery store, help buy a new wardrobe, sit beside when they talk to their in-laws? Aren't there people you know you could do a lot for if you had the time and the access? Well, I have the time and the access.”

I was stymied for a moment. “How do you get paid?” I finally blurted.

“Oh, I get paid. Not in a conventional, sixty-bucks-an-hour way. I get paid what people think I'm worth. Yesterday one of my clients, a record executive, gave me twenty thousand dollars. Now, taken as an hourly rate, that's excessive. But I gave him the confidence to make a multimillion-dollar deal. Looking at it as a percentage rate, you could say—and I will, I assure you, the next time I see him—I was underpaid.”

I tried to imagine Peter, His Manginess, in the company of a record executive. But then I remembered the father of Ben's friend, long before, burrowed in his chair in Malibu. Record executives probably looked something like Peter. “Do you have an office?”

Peter opened his hands in an expansive gesture. “I stayed with clients in Provence last summer. My office is the world.”

“That's very odd.”

He smiled. “Clare. You've got to release your mental boundaries. Be a global free thinker.”

“That's pretty hard for me,” I said, “being from Ohio.”

He took me seriously. “Don't worry,” he said consolingly. “I'm from North Dakota.”

I looked desperately from him to Sally, trying to find a chink between them. But Sally looked calm, adoring. Her bare feet sat in his lap. I felt sick. Where are you, Sally? Where's the woman who drove our Oberlin neighbor behind the house with fear? Who had the defense lawyer blubbering over her poster? Who drove every other day to Encino to buy her brother drugs? Sally, where's your gumption?

But she was just as sure about Peter as she'd been about any of those things. And I was just as unable to ask her why.

Was he expecting Sally to pop up with a big gift? Would he call her up the next day, say: “You know, I'm really worth more”?

“I don't know why it surprises me,” I said to my mom on the phone, “she's never had good taste in men.”

 

 

 

SALLY LEFT US ALONE in a restaurant while she used the restroom.

A setup, I thought. I've sat like this before with Sally's men. I appreciated her giving me the chance to talk to them alone but wondered why she felt she had to.

“Sally's a great g—” Peter started, then quickly corrected himself: “Woman.”

“I'm glad you think so,” I said curtly.

“She really loves and respects you. Says those nights with you on the phone kept her going, through some very rough times.”

I looked at him in surprise, not expecting his appreciation. “They
were
rough times.”

But he was already moving on. “I haven't met her dad yet. It's interesting, I'm nervous about meeting him, and I've met lots of dads.” Peter grimaced confidingly. “Sally's different from my other lovers. She's deeper, she's natural, it's like she gets her strength from the deep motherwell, if you know what I mean. Everything about her is feminine, but not weak-feminine, strong-feminine. You think that's her Jewish heritage? She's like the original woman. She's Eve. While all the other girls I've met out here are—”

He was ten thousand times worse than Flavio.

Peter hesitated, shot me a quick glance, smiled a colluding grin. “I can say this, you're a doctor.” I braced myself. “It's just so great to feel breasts without implants. Man”—he hunched over the table, his fingers spread—“I tell you, it's like touching God.”

 

 

 

COULD SHE LOVE HIM? Who was I to say she shouldn't? Maybe he was perfect for her; maybe being perfect didn't matter, and all that mattered was Sally's having another of her definite feelings: a woman who loves not wisely but well. The pornographer father, the onanist, the bisexual, the drug-addict brother. While I, with all the (relatively normal) people around me—my mother, brothers, two husbands, even my own child—was a miser of love, pinched and crabbed and dry.

I thought of Sally at her mother's funeral, wrapping her arms around her father, making him safe. Her strong soft arms.

Where was my excessiveness? My suitcases filled with heroin? What could I do, what grand and foolish gesture had I ever made for love?

 

 

 

AURY GREW. At her one-year checkup, she weighed twenty-nine pounds. She was putting words together: Eat now. Me up. Mommy go. The pediatrician was delighted at her speech. “You've got a bright girl there,” he said, smiling a secret smile. “Bright girls can be quite an adventure.” I remembered that his daughter had gone to Washington to receive some science award when she was in high school. I asked about her. She'd quit college, the pediatrician said, and was on a Greenpeace boat in the North Sea tormenting whalers. This didn't seem to displease him.

 

 

 

“HOW'S AURY? ” I said from California. This trip she stayed home with my mom, who had become her usual sitter, driving forty minutes daily to my town house. I paid her; I would rather pay my mother than Wee Ones Happy Haven. My mother was financially strained these days, since her school system had forced her, at age sixty-seven, to retire. Whatever savings she'd built up after my father's death had disappeared, probably (although she never said this) on Eric and his two families and the drive-in-restaurant-slash-money-pit he held on to for three desperate years.

My mother answered, “I've finally met a child more stubborn than you were. She screams ‘No go bed!' when I try to nap her, and she'd rather starve than eat a lima bean. And just try to keep her away from the stairs! There's Aurelia's way and the wrong way. You know about that.”

“Me? Moi?” I answered. We laughed. My mother and I laughed together.

I'm not so horrible, I thought as I hung up the phone. I'm not unlovable.

 

 

 

“CLIENTS, HA! It's like he's a guru to them.”

“He's been through a lot,” Sally said.

“What? His marriages?”

“Well, that, yes, but he had a horrible childhood. His mother was chronically depressed, and his father used to drink and beat him up. He used to take Peter's head and bang it on the wall and say, ‘Look how hardheaded you are.' ”

A gasp inside me, I swear. But I said, “There's a lot of child abuse in the world. I hear about it all the time from my patients.”

“It amazes me Peter's turned out so well. He's loving. He wants children. He says that years ago, he might not have been able to trust himself with them, but now that he's pulled himself out of himself, he really wants them. He thinks it would complete one of his life's tasks to raise children successfully.”

“Huh.”

“Clare, I know you don't like the wording, but he's talking about real things. You know that.”

I shrugged, conceded. “Is he quality?” I asked.

Sally sighed. “I think he threatens you, Clare.”

“Come on, Sally, now you're talking like him! He doesn't threaten me. He reminds me of that guy back at Oberlin who sat on your bed and mooned over you. Remember him? The bicyclist. I saved you from him! There you were lying in that bed, blanket up under your chin, looking at him like Little Red Riding Hood. Remember? That was the start of our friendship. Peter reminds me of that guy.”

“Lars Little.”

“Actually, are you sure Peter's not the same guy, just grown up fourteen years?”

“His name was Lars Little. He was in the Oberlin magazine last issue. He was killed in a biking accident.”

“You're kidding. Peter doesn't bike, does he?”

Silence.

Silence.

Silence.

“I defend you so much,” Sally said.

“What do you mean?”

“All the time, to everybody, to Peter, to my dad, to Teresa, to my mother when she was alive. I'm always defending you. She's hostile, they say. She wants you all to herself, they say. Even Ben said that. She doesn't hug her daughter. She was supposed to talk some sense into you, but she folded. All that stuff. And I'm always, always defending you. That's why it hurts so much when you attack me.”

I could barely speak. “I'm not attacking you.”

“Of course you're attacking me. My judgment, my insight, my whole way of living. Don't you think it hurts my feelings?”

She was looking me in the eye, firmly, steadily, and I had to look away so I didn't cry. “I just don't want you hurting yourself, Sally. I don't want you to—”

“I want to be part of a unit, Clare. This is my chance to be part of a unit. Peter's a good man. He can love me.”

 

 

 

“SHE IS SUCH A fount of practical knowledge. She had my stock holdings diversified in two days. I didn't even think about that sort of thing!”

“So what do you teach her?” My questions were tentative, cautious. I felt I was being listened to and watched, even the moments when Sally wasn't there.

“Oh, I teach her about life. About uncertainties, pain, instability. Embracing the gray.”

“Embracing the gray?”

“There's a lot of gray to the world. I'm helping Sally to appreciate that.”

Another time I would have smirked. Now I felt too beaten.

“You should embrace the gray too,” Peter suggested.

I frowned, then spoke softly. “You know what my job is, don't you? I think that's pretty gray-embracing.”

“Gay-embracing?” Peter smiled at his joke. “Sally told me something interesting. She said you couldn't stand not knowing if someone was really sick. But now you know all your patients are sick. Seems like you cut out the gray, didn't you?”

He was not stupid.

“That's true,” I said.

For a moment His Manginess looked surprised. Then he attacked again: “Have you ever wondered if Sally's father's business had anything to do with your choice of a specialty?”

“How so?”

“You know Sid's audience.”

I was starting to get angry. “Not personally. Are you part of his audience? I'm not into porn myself.”

“Gay men!” Peter said, exasperated. “Your past and future patients. Gay men! Come on, Clare. If you take any sort of sexual history from your patients—and you do, don't you?—you know porn's a big player in gay men's lives. In a lot of people's lives. Sally says you hate it, that you convinced her for a while her father was an evil man. But listen, my good doctor, I told her porn is wonderful. It's direct, it's messy, it's life-embracing. It makes you horny! What's a more basic human feeling than horny?” Peter winked. “I'm trying to get Sally to watch some hot flicks with me.”

Suddenly I knew who Peter reminded me of: Sid. The same self-confidence, the same big statements about “life,” the same bland assurance in speaking about Sally, as if she were a quaint yet priceless possession.

“Sally says in college you were a regular hot tomato,” Peter went on. “You had ‘needs.' ”

My face colored. I looked back at Peter's grinning face and perky shirt, and the first thing I thought at him was: You know too much. How could Sally tell him those things? Didn't she respect my privacy? Then I remembered Cliff Dunswater and the stories I'd told him about Sally and Ben: how the follies of the people closest to you can be used as a kind of currency to buy your own allure.

 

 

 

“I BOUGHT THAT flavored cream you like,” Sally said, lifting her tea ball from the steaming cup. “You want a full cup?”

That trip to California, in the late winter, was a treat: Peter was accompanying a client on his yearly retreat to an ashram, so Sally and I were alone. The ashram visit was a triumph for Peter; the previous year, his client had taken a mistress.

I sat in a big plaid chair, a more muted plaid chair than the one at our house in Oberlin, but still. It was raining. “Of course,” I said.

“He's a little afraid of you, Peter is,” Sally said, approaching with my coffee. “You know me too well.”

I smiled. “I know what you think of Anaïs Nin.”

“And Martin Luther.”

“And white noise.”

“And barking dogs.”

The coziness of lamps set on low tables, the echoing timbre of our words, reminded me once again of our old house. “You know me too well, too,” I said.

“I know about your Sabbath.”

“The demonstration I went to.”

“I know about your needs!”

We looked at each other and laughed. In that instant, I had no fear that I would lose her. We had—we would always have—our past. We'd grown up together, in a way.

“You knew Ben,” Sally said quietly. “You knew my mother.”

 

 

 

I BROUGHT AURY to the wedding. She and I and Sid and Peter's younger brother, who sold penny stocks out of a brokerage in Fargo but wouldn't at all mind relocating to L.A, were the only guests. The brother had several stock suggestions for me—cash or check or credit card, whatever—each of which he offered with a nudge.

“I don't want stocks,” I said. “My brother is hurting from stocks.”