Best Friends (43 page)

I shrugged.

“It's not like a home, not in my opinion. Wait till you see it. It's decorated within an inch of its life, there's nothing in it from our old house except some pictures, and on top of that, it's falling down the hill.”

I lifted my eyebrows inquiringly.

“The hillside sinks toward the sea about half an inch a year, which doesn't sound like much, but . . .” Sally shook her head, and her hair bounced. Her hair was looser now, less styled, back to its old wedge shape. With two kids, Sally said, a haircut was a luxury.

“Oh, it does. A foot in twenty-four years.”

“Exactly. He's had some bracings put in and several engineers out here; I don't know what he's going to do next. It's not unique, everyone on these hills has this problem.”

“And I'm sure the property's expensive around here.”

“Exhorbitant.”

So Sid was living in a house sliding down the hill into the sea. How appropriate.

When he emerged, he seemed smaller than I remembered, less substantial. It was as if the house were an elaborate carapace and he, inside it, was shriveling away. Maybe I thought this because he didn't scare me. He appeared on the patio silently, wearing a polo shirt, chinos, and sandals made from recycled tires. It was the sandals that threw me. On a man his age—he was in his sixties now—they looked goofy, the sandals of a man desperate to be young and hip. Quintessential California.

He looked at me and said a peculiar thing. “Clare. I thought I'd gotten rid of you.”

“Daddy!” Sally laughed, and he raised his hand as if to silence her. “Where's Ezra?” he asked her.

“Out back with Peter.”

“Oh. How's little . . .” Sid stopped, stared at the baby on Sally's shoulder.

“Barbara's fine.”

“Good. Come on in, Clare, I'll show you the house.”

Nothing was quite accurate. Everything was real enough, the facts were in their way inarguable, but nothing was right. “From the old house.” Sid waved at a basketball hoop hung high on the kitchen wall, and while I did remember it from the house off Mulholland, I didn't remember ever seeing any of the Roses shoot baskets. In the living room, a large chest of drawers—a Biedermeyer, Sid informed me—sat in front of a curving window looking out on the sea; beside it, a folding wooden screen was hung with maybe fifteen photos. The photographs were happy and glamorous—Esther standing in front of the espalier near the pool, Esther in the kitchen, glancing up from a pot. I recognized the kitchen photo: I had taken it on one of my first trips to Los Angeles, in the first flush of my excitement with the Roses. Where had Sid gotten it? Sally must have passed it on. Esther looked shockingly young to me, not far from my own age now, and not passive, as I remembered her, but pixie-ish, mischievous. Her lips were set in a half smile, ready to bubble into a laugh. She was adorable.

Then I remembered she'd been looking at me. She must have liked me, I realized, and this brought up another slight inaccuracy: the implication of the photograph was that it had been taken by Sid. Esther may never have looked so happily at her husband.

“Where's your kid?” Sid asked me.

A glassed cabinet filled with Judaica hung in a hallway. I recognized this only because Sally had told me about: the decorator thought that since Sid had been raised in a religious home, he'd appreciate religious objects.

“You find a new husband yet?”

His bedcover was a Mexican quilt.

“You still working with those sick fags?”

His questions were pure aggression. My answers didn't interest him, he turned away each time before I'd finished. You prick, I thought as I trailed him around the house. You bastard. He'd lost weight, and with it, any padding in his bottom. The seat of his pants was loose. I've seen enough old-men patients that I could imagine his limp and wobbling buttocks.

“So you used a decorator,” I said. “Did you have one for your other house?”

He didn't look at me. “Not there,” he said. “Esther had taste. I don't have taste. I told you, Esther's dad was an art dealer. Look at this.” He had stopped in the TV room in front of a small painting, an industrial scene. A water tower, rocks, a conveyer belt. “Look at that,” he said. “You think that's me?” I peered at the painting closer, baffled by his comment. “There.” He pointed. “The glittering slag heap of my life.”

I was dumbstruck.

He cocked an eyebrow and looked at me aslant, then turned away. “It's not good, but at least it's interesting.”

“You still reading that Bible stuff?” I asked.

He turned around, then, to look at me full-face, and the expression in his eyes was unreadable. I thought of what I knew about him, what he was capable of, what he'd done. He was probably silent only a second, but the time stretched in an agony of suspense. His eyes burrowed into me. “No,” he said.

The house was quite small, all the rooms opening out from the central living area, so it was easy for Sally—on the sofa nursing Barbara, Ezra beside her playing with her car keys—to overhear us as we approached. “I'm interested in other things now,” Sid said, walking in front of me, and Sally, from her sofa, called out: “What's that, Daddy? Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I could,” Sid answered. “Why not? I'm a man.” He turned his head in my direction and smiled. “People thought you were my girlfriend. Remember?”

 

 

 

SALLY HAD TO ANSWER a call on her cellular phone as soon as we got in her new Acura. Hers was the first cell phone I ever dialed myself, her car the first I'd seen with the cell phone installed. Sally wore a beeper, too, like a doctor. Barbara was two months old, and Sally was back at work. “What kind of emergencies can a lawyer get?” I'd asked her. “A lot of them are reassurance and accessibility,” Sally answered. The call tonight was from a breast-reduction plaintiff whose breasts hurt. Sally sat listening, cooed to her for a while, suggested Tylenol and heat.

It seemed to me she took inordinate interest in the call. I could tell the woman on the other end was an idiot. Finally, Sally hung up. She was driving, with Peter in the passenger seat and me in the back between the children's car seats. Sally twisted around to glance at me. “He forgot Barbara's name.”

“What?”

“Daddy. He forgot her name. Didn't you notice? I find that ominous.”

I tried to think of an excuse. “She's a pretty fresh baby. It's a new name for him, names can take a while.”

“It's Barbara.” Sally exaggerated the “B” sound. “Named after Ben. Do you think he remembers Ben?”

My mind flashed to the Beidermeyer chest, the focal point of the living room, hulking like an altar in front of the window that faced the sea. I felt like Abraham up there, Sid had said. Like Abraham sacrificing Isaac. I didn't say anything.

“I'm worried he's getting Alzheimer's,” Sally said.

I hate that term. I hate people saying “Alzheimer's” when what they mean is dementia. Alzheimer's is a specific diagnosis of a certain type of brain degeneration. For accurate diagnosis of Alzheimer's, you need a brain biopsy. Not everybody who has dementia has Alzheimer's, and not everybody who forgets things has dementia. Medications, fatigue, depression, all those things can affect memory. AIDS has its own dementia. I said all this to Sally, sounding harsh even to myself.

I could see the fury in the set of Sally's head. “I figure he has lots of reasons to forget,” Peter said, turning to me. “If he wants to forget, let him forget. Maybe forgetting will get him some peace.”

Sally turned on her husband. “It's not getting me peace!” she yelled. We almost hit an orange barrel blocking off a road repair.

“Jesus and Buddha,” Peter said, “can't you just drive?” Ezra, the happy baby, the baby who never cried, started wailing in his car seat.

“I don't know how he can run a business,” Sally said. “I've been talking to Virginia about it.”

“Virginia?” It was the first I'd heard the name.

“Virginia Luby. She's been with Daddy for years. She used to be his secretary, but now I think she does everything. Ezra, Ezra-honey.” Sally reached back and stroked his foot. “Mommy loves you.” Ezra gulped, stared; his crying stopped for a moment.

“I don't know what he has, but he's not right,” Sally said, withdrawing her hand. “I don't know if it's Alzheimer's or de-men-tia”—she drew out the word, mocking me—“but I hate it, I hate it.”

“Maybe he's got AIDS,” Peter said. “Listen, some of these old guys used to play around. Maybe he used to get it on with the Countess of Come.” I was shocked and thrilled to hear Peter talk this cavalierly about Sally's father. Peter seemed different this trip, looser, angrier. It occurred to me that he might consider himself beleaguered.

“Why don't you and Clare get him tested?” Sally shrieked. I'd once gotten so mad at the ticket agent at an airport, on a long-ago trip to visit Sally, that for a moment I literally could not see. I hoped, since Sally was driving, that this wasn't happening to her.

Barbara awakened with a scream, and Ezra started crying again too. The two babies wailed in throbbing synchrony, Ezra mournful and betrayed, Barbara desperate. Her tiny fists clenched, she turned red.

“And he wouldn't catch AIDS from Sara,” Sally said loudly over the noise of the babies. “She's married with three daughters, she's very responsible, and I'm sure she's been tested. Not that she'd sleep with Daddy anyway.”

There was something disturbing about the proprietary way Sally spoke of Sara Tweedles, the Countess of Come. I remembered her, tall and elegantly dressed, from Esther's funeral. Did Sally consider Sara a friend?

“Can't you quiet them down, Clare?” Sally asked irritably. “You're sitting right between them.”

I hunched over and searched the car floor for a pacifier. I found one and stuck it in Barbara's mouth. She furrowed her brow a second, then stopped crying. Peter glanced back at me between the babies, a gleeful and conspiratorial glance. “There should be another pacifier back there,” he said.

I found the second binkie on the seat beside Barbara's car seat, and popped it in Ezra's mouth. He sobbed for a few moments around it, then settled down. It wasn't until we got to a red light that I learned the cause of Peter's delight: Ezra was sucking on Barbara's pacifier and vice versa. Sally looked back, sighed heavily, stopped the car, and got out to make things right, wiping each pacifier with germicide. “There,” she said as took her place behind the wheel and slammed the door. “Somebody's got to be competent.”

 

 

 

“TODAY'S BEN'S BIRTHDAY,” Sally said.

It was a beautiful day overlooking the sea, a day of breezes and buttery sunshine. I love you, Ben, I thought; I belatedly love you. That wasn't quite true, but I had to think it. We were sitting on the roof of Sally's garage in deck chairs we'd dragged through the second-story windows. “He was lucky he had you,” I said. “Who else would drive to Encino every day and buy him Happy Families?”

“Every other day,” Sally corrected me. We sat in silence for a while. “I can't believe he did it,” Sally said. “I've wondered a thousand times, if I'd gotten down there in time, could I have stopped him?”

My mind was in Mexico, as it was often was, following Ben and Sid up that hill. Sally's words called me back to her and the trunk of her Volvo with its cache of drugs and needles, the rolled-up hundred-dollar bills for bribes. “Sally, if you'd gone down there, you could have been killed,” I said. “What if someone had realized what you had?”

Sally didn't say anything for a moment. Her face twitched. “I don't know,” she said at last.

“Would you want Barbara to do something like that?”

Sally pinched the base of her nose, closed her eyes. “No.”

“What did you do with all the stuff you'd gotten together?” I said, to say something, but as she answered—she flushed the drugs down the toilet, left the needles in a Dumpster—I barely heard her.

“Clare?” Sally said. “Are you all right?”

“Sure,” I said, shaking my head quickly. “Fine.”

“Oh, Clare, I watch you, and sometimes you look haunted. It's your job, isn't it? I admire your doing it, but how do you stand all that death?”

“My job's not that bad.”

“How can it not be bad? I worry about you. I have it easy here, really, the kids and Peter and my stupid cases, but there you are in Ohio with all those . . .”—her voice broke—“those lost causes.” Like Ben, I knew she was thinking.

“You couldn't have saved him, Sally. It was too late.”

She was quiet for a good minute. “You're probably right,” she finally said. “But I wonder.”

We sat in silence on the roof overlooking the sea. “Haunted,” she had said. Yet there was another adjective you could apply to me: proud. A fearsome pride, that I could know something terrible and refuse, out of love, to share it.

And maybe guilty. Because I saw that I had been, in a passive way, just what Sid had said—an accomplice in Ben's death.

“Mommy!” we heard from inside the house. “Maaaa-mee.” It was Ezra. Sally rose to the cry eagerly, but when I heard it, my heart sank. We had so little time alone.

 

 

 

“LOOK AT THIS.”

I did. A Polaroid, a woman's naked torso with her arms above her head.

“You don't see the problem?”