Best Friends (37 page)

“What's with this guy?” Sid sidled up to me. “Continental Kitty Litter? Ibis Rare Mineral?” Sid had some of his old vigor back. He wore a navy jacket with gold-toned buttons.

The wedding was in May in Santa Monica, at a hotel on a balcony overlooking the sea. A chuppah had been fashioned out of a white wire arch entwined with ivy, and a rabbi officiated, because Peter had converted from humanistic agnosticism to Judaism, a move Sally—to my surprise as much as Peter's—had insisted on. “Fastest conversion on record,” Sid muttered in my ear. “Poof! You're a Jew. Sally had to call eight rabbis. Think this one got a contribution for his troubles?”

Peter wore a woven cotton pullover with an open neck and carried a calla lily, both of which made me hate him more. He had lopped off his ponytail, and the hair at his nape was ragged. Sally wore a blue silk suit with matching shoes and looked like a lady banker or a doctor's wife; of the two of them, she looked infinitely more mature. The guests stood behind them. My eyes were fixed on the ocean because Sally had told me that sometimes from this point you could spot dolphins. The sea breezes did a real number on Peter's wispy hair.

At the end of the ceremony, Sally and Peter exchanged a kiss. Beside me, Sid winced and looked away. Peter's brother took several pictures of the kiss, and later had them pose doing it again. They hadn't hired a photographer, because Peter's brother had a very fancy camera.

How can she stand it? I thought. How can she kiss those lips? They were soft and blubbery, horse lips.

“You do much photography?” I said to Peter's brother at the restaurant afterward. Lobster ravioli, champagne. Maybe I was tipsy. Sid was on my right beyond Aury, Peter's brother on my left at the circular table. Aury was sitting on phone books on a chair, after making herself rigid and screaming, “No baby!” when I tried to put her in a high chair. “Sid can use photographers.”

“Oh, really?” Peter's brother said, cocking an eyebrow. I suspected he wasn't the sort to let a business opportunity go. “You need photographers, Sid? What kind of work are you looking for? I'm not a professional, but I do all sorts of things in Fargo. I've done weddings, advertisements, model shoots. I have a portfolio if—”

Peter was eyeing me warily across the table. “It's wonderful, Clare, that you made the effort to come out for our wedding,” he said. “We'll never forget it.”

“Thank you.” I knew he was being sarcastic: I always came out.

Sid waved his hand dismissively at Peter's brother. “I've got my own crew. Thanks, but I'm not looking.”

Peter's brother stared at his plate for a moment, then perked up. “I can't believe you two are going to San Diego for a honeymoon. Isn't that just military guys and old people? Why not at least go down to Mexico? It's sexier.”

Sally met my eyes across the table. Her brother had been dead less than a year.

“God, Mexico,” Sid said. “Mexico's a black hole. You couldn't pay me enough to go back there.”

“It wasn't
Mexico,
” Sally said, leaning toward her father. “It was me I blame for Ben.”

Peter turned to his brother in explanation. “Ben was Sally's brother who committed—”

“Wait a minute,” Sid interrupted. “Let's blame Ben for Ben. That's accurate. That's realistic.”

Sally looked desperately toward Peter. He brought an arm protectively around her chair. “We're working on that, Sid,” he said. “We're getting Sally past guilt. We're reframing the real.”

Sid raised his eyebrows and pressed the fingers of his right hand to his upper abdomen. “That's pretty,” he said. He turned his face to the side and belched. What if Ben were here? I thought. Would he already have disappeared into the bathroom? Sally's life was truly simpler since he was gone.

What a terrible thing to think about a dead person.

It seemed to strike us all at once that we were inappropriately silent, and Peter's brother lifted his glass with a toast to the bride and groom.

Outside the restaurant, as our dinner broke up and the sun sank into the ocean, Peter finally took notice of Aury. “How old are you, Aury?” he asked. “Are you two?”

Aury stared at him unsmilingly.

“She's eighteen months,” I said. “But she thinks she's eighteen.”

“Do you have a very old soul?” Peter asked, crouching in front of her. “Did a very old soul fly into your body when you were born? I bet it did.”

Aury frowned and looked extremely skeptical.

“Right there.” Peter pointed at her chest. “Right inside there is a very old soul.”

Aury brushed his finger away and looked up at me. “No wike man!” she announced.

“Shhh,” I said, loudly. Out of the mouths of babes. “Be nice to Uncle Peter. He's married to Aunt Sally now. You can call him Unkie.”

“Uckie,” Aury said. I glanced around me to see if this had delighted anyone else, but all I saw was Sid, looking pale, sick, standing beside a fountain with one hand gripping the railing.

“Are you feeling okay?” I asked him. “You look a little pale.”

“I don't know, something came over me, I—”

Oh God no, not another death for Sally. Not on her wedding day.

“Are you having chest pain? Are you short of breath?”

He wiped his brow with his sleeve. “I think it's something I ate.”

“Are you feeling faint, like you're going to pass out?” My thoughts raced. An arrythmia? A blood clot? Sudden cardiac death? I was reaching for his wrist, his pulse.

“I've got to lie down.”

“That's okay, lie down here on the sidewalk. Peter, can you help get him down? I'm feeling your pulse, your pulse is fine. Lie your head down. I'm going to undo your tie here, that's okay, I'm feeling your pulse.”

“I've got to, I've got to—”

Fist on chest, bam Cardiac thump

I swept my finger through his mouth. No foreign objects.

“What are you
doing
? What—?”

I clamped my mouth on his lips. I pushed air in. I had to save him.

Hot, wet vomit in my mouth.

“Clare, I'm breathing, for cripe's sake.” Vomit. “Clare, get off me! I'm not dying, for cripe's sake.” Pushing himself up, shaking his head. “Clare, listen to me. I'm fine, okay? I'm fine. I just had to puke. It was that lobster ravioli, I always puke with lobster. I should have known better than to eat it. My mother wouldn't have eaten it. What, you think I was dying? You trying to do CPR on me, was that it?”

His vomit in my mouth. Tasting familiar, normal, like my own vomit. Her soft arms around me.

“Clare,” Sally was saying, laughing and crying, “oh, Clare, that was so
sweet.
”

 

 

 

THEY SEEMED HAPPILY MARRIED. After only a few months, they sold Sally's house in West Hollywood and moved up to a house in Pacific Palisades. The comments Sally made about the house they had left (“Too cramped”; “That bathrom was an antique!”; “Not exactly a family neighborhood”) rolled around my brain like stones in a tumbler, never getting polished smooth. Sally knew how much I loved that house. I didn't care if I ever visited her new house—her and Peter's new house—with its view of the ocean. Sally said her father was jealous. I was sure the bank had loaned them money based on Sally's earnings.

They ended up a cozy trio. Peter and Sid actually hit it off. Peter was going to write some articles for one of Sid's magazines, and pen a defense of porn he hoped to publish somewhere upscale, like
Harper's.
Sid thought Peter should codify his services and bill on an hourly rate for “consulting.” This love-offering stuff was okay in theory, but it made real businesspeople uncomfortable, and real businesspeople, Sid pointed out—not what Sid called the “flaky fringers”—were the people Peter should aim for. He could put out a series of motivational tapes. He could do seminars.

“SAY GOOD-BYE TO YOUR mommy,” my mother coaxed.

“Mommy go. Bye-bye, Mommy!” I wished it made her more unhappy. I wished there was some sense of her being troubled at my leaving.

“God, I wish my kids were like that,” Lois, my clinic head nurse, said. “They go crazy when I leave. They're screamin' and cryin' and hangin' on me. I can't even comb my hair.”

“So
that's
the problem,” Mr. Ervin, CD4 count of 12, survivor of disseminated legionella and cryptococcal meningitis, said brightly from his chair in the hall.

“I thought you were a nice man,” Lois said, swatting Mr. Ervin's bony head with a rolled-up piece of paper.

“Me? Never been nice,” Mr. Ervin said. “Uh-uh. Not one minute.”

 

 

 

SALLY GOT PREGNANT.
She would be, we agreed, a
very
elderly primip: thirty-four. She cut back on her private-practice hours and did more pro bono work with the Women's Project of Los Angeles County, a legal advocacy group. Peter put out a motivational audiotape:
Making the Best of Your Best.
He was very pleased with Sally's public-service work; through it, she was coming to the attention of wives of film producers and directors who he thought could throw her law firm some business. “It's amazing,” Sally told me, giggling, “he's got an angle for everything. I just sit back and watch.”

I sighed. I asked her what kind of compensation she was getting for loss of beauty these days; had she had any interesting cases lately? But Sally didn't want to talk about her work; she wanted to talk about being pregnant. Had my breasts tingled? Did I sweat more? Did my vaginal secretions increase? I realized I wasn't used to talking about bodily things with Sally. I wasn't sure I liked it. On the other hand, I was grateful she was making trivial conversation. She was back in the world of the living, and if I was honest, I had only Peter to thank.

About this time, I started taking Aury to the parent-child swim experience at our suburban rec center, because I'd never learned to swim and I regretted it. By the second lesson, Aury was floating; in the third, she did a backstroke, which is really, as the teacher pointed out a trifle disparagingly, a variant of floating. Most of the other toddlers were still clinging to their parents' necks. “Your girl's been in the water a lot, hasn't she?” the teacher said. “Oh no,” I said, “never.” The closest we'd been to water sports was turning on the sprinkler in our patch of backyard. It was weird. I could barely stand to get my face wet, and suddenly my two-year-old daughter was swimming. I wondered if this was some genetic trait she'd gotten from her mystery father. But I refused to think about him. I wondered what other surprises my daughter held in store for me.

 

 

 

ALL OF A SUDDEN it wasn't so easy to go off to California: my patients were sicker, more dependent, I worried about them more. The coverage available in my absence wasn't good. One of my covering infectious disease colleagues missed the diagnosis of a pneumocystis pneumonia,
the
basic diagnosis in AIDS, and the patient ended up on a respirator and then dead. He might have died anyway, but a pneumonia diagnosed Monday fares better than one found Thursday.

When I was at Sally's second wedding, an HIV-positive woman who wanted children found out she was pregnant and, in a state of panic, had an abortion. Had I been there, I could have told her to take AZT and keep the baby. Also during that absence, a drug abuser I'd been dosing with methadone ran out of his supply and shot up his partner's suppositories, which turned out to be an antinausea drug and not, as he'd hoped, Dilaudid. No harm was done, but still.

And three new patients waited an extra week to be seen. It's okay to wait a week with hypertension, but my patients needed more. My patients needed me.

 

 

 

SO I TOLD SALLY “I'll get there. It's been unbelievably busy.”

“I'm sorry. I know I'm snappy. Peter says it's hormones. He's a great one for avoiding personal responsibility. Everything is either your immune system or hormones.” Sally dropped her voice confidentially: “Forgiving but vague.”

When Sally had been married to Flavio, she had disappeared—all those trips, the postcards from South America and the Orient—and now she'd disappeared again, this time into a life so determinedly suburban and “normal” that it seemed like a rebuke to me, a single mother with a fatherless child. From the fortress of her four-bedroom house in Pacific Palisades, she hired decorators, took Lamaze classes, worried about her landscaping, and talked about the preservation of shoreline. I had no idea how to reach her. It seemed that I was, like my patients, stuck in strange eddies at the shore, wallowing in tree limbs, reeds, and branches, while Sally rode the central current of American life.