Best Friends (41 page)

“What?” I breathed. I couldn't think.

“An accomplice.”

“No.” I recoiled.

“Yup. An accomplice.” Sid sat up with satisfaction, his job done. “Now eat your omelet.”

I stared.

“My treat! Eat your omelet.”

And, believe it or not, I did.

SID DROPPED ME OFF at Sally and Peter's. A typical prosperous California house, wide lawn, curved sidewalk, a huge and ornate front door. Sid drove away, not waiting for me to go inside.

Sally came down the inside stairs all gleaming, eager.

“How was it?”

Ezra curled on her shoulder, his wide neck and fringe of hair.

“Okay.”

“Did he tell you anything? Did he open up to you?”

“Not really.” I hesitated. “No, not really. He talked about Ben some.”

“I don't think I understood how bad losing Ben was for him until I had Ezra. You go through your life expecting your parents will die, but your
child
. . .”

“You lost your brother,” I pointed out.

She smiled at me sadly. “That's true. He was always lost, and now he's”—she stroked Ezra's back—“really lost.”

“Sally, I don't know how you've survived it.”

“I had my black spell, remember? When everything seemed trivial. And then I met Peter, and now, with Ezra, I've been lucky. And I always had this underlying optimism. Even when it drove me crazy that people asked me how my day was, I had a certain optimism. I don't know why. It was just there.”

I shook my head. “You were lucky.”

“Maybe I was raised right,” Sally said. “I was raised to expect good things would happen to me. It's the reverse of paranoia: I think people are out to do me good. Daddy got me thinking like that.” She walked to the living room and sat down in an armchair, lifting her shirt to give Ezra her breast.

I opened my mouth but nothing came out.

“Glom on, Ezra,” Sally said to her son, shoving the nipple in his mouth. “Come on, honey, glom on.”

“We went to the restaurant at the Beverly Hills Hilton,” I said at last. “I had a Mexican omelet. It wasn't bad.”

IT WAS DIFFERENT NOW. Years before I'd been on fire, streaming across the country like a bullet, dying to tell Sally the truth about her father. Now I was inert, immobile, surprised yet unsurprised. Brushing my teeth in Sally's guest bathroom, I felt I was being corroded from the inside, that at some point I'd collapse into a pile on the floor, a totem pole attacked by termites. When I'd first seen Sid's magazines, when I'd first realized how he made his fabulous living, I'd burned with a rage that, even as it scorched me, scorched him; now I was being eaten away, coldly eaten, the way I was sure Sid wanted.

“Eat your omelet.”

“Yes, Sid. Of course, Sid.”

“Eat it all. I bought it for you. Eat it.”

What had Sally said? No loathing like self-loathing? And by what perversity did knowing Sid's secret make me loathe myself?

 

 

 

“DID HE SAY ANYTHING ELSE?”

“No, not really.”

“Did his memory seem okay?”

“His memory? Yeah, his memory seemed fine. Very good, in fact.”

He wasn't quality
.

“I'm relieved. I worry about his memory. He forgot Ezra's middle name.”

“What is Ezra's middle name? I forgot too.”

I was waiting for a sign, any sign
.

“Isaac.”

Ezra was nursing again, eyes closed, hands in intense fists on each side of his head. “Whatever happened to Helga?” I said suddenly. The girl Ben had lived with, the doctor's daughter who owned the hillside house.

“I have no idea,” Sally said, her voice trembling slightly. She hugged Ezra closer to her. “None.”

If she hadn't been through so much. If she didn't have a dead first boyfriend and a dead mother as well as a dead brother. If she didn't make chicken cacciatore and artichoke quiche especially for me each time I visited. If she didn't say, recounting how she left the table one night while her father blubbered mournfully about Esther, “I refuse to wallow.” If she didn't have a dream of growing asparagus in the patch of garden outside her solarium. If she didn't have a husband who'd forget about the real Sally, Sid, and Ben and talk instead about the Mythic Father-Son battle or Sally as the Torchbearer of Truth. Then it would be easy: truth will out!

But I couldn't tell her. No. I wasn't that kind of person. I could handle it. I was quality. And if she didn't notice my sleeplessness, my not eating, the way I sat and stared when I should be listening—well, she was a new mother, devoted to her infant, and these were things I worked to hide.

At the airport, she threw her arms around me. “Come back soon, Clare. You're like my sister. Ezra won't be nursing every twenty minutes next time, we'll have more flexibility.”

“He's a nice baby, Sally. I'm happy for you.”

“He is a nice baby, isn't he? He looks so much like Peter. Bring Aury next time, it's been too long since I've seen her.”

“I will.”

“And come back soon.”

Of course I will, I thought. How could I not?

After passing through the metal detector, I turned around one last time. She was blowing me a kiss, as she had for years whenever I left. “Bye! Bye! Daddy says good-bye too!” I knew she meant Peter, not Sid—since Ezra was born, she sometimes called Peter Daddy—but still, the comment jarred me.

“GUESS WHO IRAN into at the airport after you left,” Sally said on the phone. “You won't believe.”

Mentally I ran through the usual suspects. “Margaret?”

It took Sally a moment to register who Margaret was. “No, not Margaret! Flavio.”

“Flavio?” I had just been thinking about him. I had seen a male model in an underwear ad, and I'd thought, I wonder what happened to Sally's gorgeous and amoral ex?

“Guess what; he was with a woman.”

“Really?”

“A very androgynous-looking woman. The Louise Brooks look, short dark haircut. She does something in fashion.”

“They were . . . an item?”

“Seemed to be. Remember, I told you he was bisexual!” Sally seemed pleased. “They were sharing a carry-on. I didn't even ask where they were off to. They were just passing through. Thank God I had Ezra with me. Gave us all something to talk about.”

“Is he still so handsome?”

“Are you kidding? Even more so. It's depressing that someone dissipated can look that good. He had some crinkles around his eyes that were really, well. . . . I can hardly believe it, but it's been seven years since I last saw him.”

“Did you tell him about Ben?” I thought of Ben and Flavio in the pool house.

Sally hesitated. “I couldn't. He was just passing through, he didn't have any time, I . . . it would have made things too complicated. I might have started crying, and what a fiasco that would have been. I suppose I could have told him about my mother, but even that—”

“I'm sure he'll never hear, you two don't have anyone in common.”

“He said his father wanted to get in touch with Daddy, something about a new product line from the Orient. Remember what Flavio's father did?”

“Probably some new sex toys.”

Sally sighed. “Probably. I'm sick of thinking about these things. I wish Daddy would retire.”

“What, and leave the company to you?”

She laughed, but underneath the mirth, I heard a wariness that caught me off guard. Was his leaving her the company possible? Was this something they'd discussed?

 

 

 

I HAD A NEW PATIENT, Mr. Wahl, who'd just been diagnosed. He didn't yet have symptoms. The guy who had given Mr. Wahl HIV was a flight attendant who'd found out he was infected and set out to infect as many others as he could. Several months after Mr. Wahl had sex with him, Mr. Wahl received a letter, a letter that basically said ha-ha.

“How do you live with that?” I blurted. “How do you stand thinking about what he did?”

Mr. Wahl brushed the air with his hand. “It's not that I forgave him,” he said, “it's more like I was tired of having him dominate my life.”

I sat there a moment, pen frozen in midair. “That's smart.”

“Survival,” Mr. Wahl said.

 

 

 

WHY DIDN'T SID CALL her up from Mexico, bark, “Sally, don't come down here!” She would have listened. He could have scared her. He could have told Sally months before to stop buying her brother drugs. He had power over her; Sally would listen to her father more than she'd listen to me. Why, instead of shooting his own son, didn't Sid ask Sally to change?

 

 

 

I STOPPED EATING. I knewthis was crazy, but I stopped. I ate yogurt at breakfast, yogurt at lunch, and if I remembered, a Lean Cuisine for dinner. I did feed Aury. “You're not eating, Mommy?” she would say. “You take your vitamin?” I felt like an alcoholic mom, sticking my daughter in a caretaking role. Eventually, when my patients starting worrying (“You don't got what I got, do you?” “Dr. Mann! You're not doing a Karen Carpenter on us, are you?”), I forced myself to drink three Ensures a day on top of my yogurts, and from there I gradually returned to the land of food. Sally never realized. She didn't see me at my nadir, and when I next went to visit her, she thought, in her California way, that my weight was just right. She herself was dieting between babies.

AS IT HAPPENED, Mr. Wahl's brother was a lawyer.

“I have a legal question,” I said to him one day. Mr. Wahl had sickened quickly; we were standing outside his hospital room.

“Sure,” he said. “Anything.”

“If a crime happens in another country, and there's no direct witness,” I said carefully, “can that crime be prosecuted?”

He made a hopeless face, and I could see what an impossible question it was. “What country are we talking about?”

“Mexico.”

“What kind of crime?”

I hesitated. “A death, an accidental death.”

He waited.

“A boating accident, actually. The father of a friend of mine—he took his son out boating and didn't know how to operate the boat. His son got hit by a mast or something, and he fell in the sea and drowned.”

The lawyer winced. “Tragic.”

“But there was carelessness involved. I mean, the father really didn't know how to use the boat, he took his son out knowing he didn't know, so even though it was an accident, the father should have some responsibility.”