Best Friends (45 page)

“It's hard to watch,” I said quickly. I hated people with Alzheimer's, I hated their families, all those brimming eyes and meaningful looks behind the victim's back. We get old, we deteriorate, we die. The heart, the liver, the kidneys go. That's accepted. Why should the brain be sacrosanct?

“Oh, Clare, it's awful to watch. I think: Is this the end of the daddy I knew? Is he dying by inches?”

I thought of Sid that distant morning at the Beverly Hills Hilton, snapping at me to eat my omelet, pulling out his tiny plastic bag. Had he been losing his mind then? A newborn dementia, possibly. Disinhibition, they called it.

And maybe Ben's murder was the act that opened Sid's mind to deterioration. Come on in, Sid's mind said, destroy me too.

The body doesn't lie.

Of course this is a personal, not a medical, opinion.

“If it's Alzheimer's, it'll get easier for him,” I pointed out. “After a while he won't realize there's anything wrong.”

A pause. “Yeah,” Sally said softly. Then more directly, more the Sally I knew: “I'm going with him to the doctor.”

“Good,” I said. “Ask that doctor. Make him tell you the truth.”

They didn't give him a biopsy; his diagnosis was confirmed by a PET scan at UCLA. This was kind of exciting: as I told Sally, there were only a few centers in the country with a PET scanner, and she was lucky to know for sure. My words didn't console her. “Alzheimer's!” she said. “I don't even know if he's eating. I went through his refrigerator and found cream cheese that was six months old.”

“Are you going to start taking
him
groceries now?” I asked.

She didn't catch my implication at all. “I may have to,” she said. “Every time I go over there, he's sitting in the living room in his sandals and shorts with no shirt on, staring out the window. And anything I talk about, he'll stop me and say, ‘You know what you need?' ‘What, Daddy?' I say back. And he taps his finger on his head and says, ‘You need a plan.' Every time I go over there! I had a bad time at the office today, Daddy. Peter found a leak in our roof, Daddy. Barbara said Mama today, Daddy. Whatever I say, it's the same answer: ‘You know what you need?' Tap, tap. ‘You need a plan.' When I'm driving over to his house, I start to sweat. It's all I can do to make my car turn up his drive. You know what I did the other day? I started north on One, but then I drove up Sunset and went up Topanga Canyon and crossed Mulholland and drove down into the Valley. I drove seventy minutes through the Valley, putting off arriving at his house.”

I squeaked in incredulity. “You drove in the Valley?” Sally hadn't driven in the Valley since her days of Chinese food.

“The Valley,” Sally said. Her voice on the phone was suddenly light, pleased as always at our private jokes. We were best friends. We knew each other better than anyone. “Can you believe it?” She laughed. “It makes me crazy enough I'm driving in the Valley.”

It was only after we hung up that I realized something more. She'd driven up Topanga Canyon, past the stone gate where her mother died.

 

 

 

“YOU KNOW WHAT WE NEED?” Sally told her father. “We need a plan.” A vacation, she called it. A holiday. She and her father made a deal: he'd stay with her and Peter until he was stronger. She moved some of Sid's things into a bedroom and hired a male companion to stay with him during the day. The companion was a young man named Troy, and Sid didn't like him.
Fegala!
he called Troy—fag! in Yiddish—probably accurate, and one day Sid locked himself in his room and wouldn't come out. The next day Sally briskly had the lock removed—“What can I do? What if he fell and he'd locked himself in there?”—and when I visited in September, Troy was still there, wearing white pants and a white shirt with short sleeves and a high collar like an attendent in a mental hospital, carrying Sid's medicines on a little metal tray. His outfit was preposterous, a costume, and then I thought with a vengeful frisson of Ben and his gay friends and how Sid hated them. From the back, Troy looked a little like Ben, the same flat rear and dark curls.

 

 

 

AURY KEPT GROWING. She continued to play with Brittany almost every day after kindergarten, reading aloud (Aury was reading by five) when Brittany got restless with videos. I'd come home sometimes to find them heaped together on the floor, asleep, sharing Aury's favorite blanket and a pillow, a book splayed open on the floor, my mother reading a newspaper at the kitchen table. “I didn't want to bother them,” my mother would whisper. I would wake up Brittany and walk her next door to her mother, then sit on the sofa with Aury and hear about her day.

Aury lost one tooth, then another. I called up the Tooth Fairy Hotline while Aury was in the room, requested a gift rather than money under the pillow. “What does the Tooth Fairy do with all the teeth she collects?” Aury worried. I talked about the great Tooth Pit in Iowa, how corn grew beautifully over a layer of fertilizing teeth. Aury nodded sagely. “That's because teeth have roots,” she said.

 

 

 

ON MY NEXT VISIT to L.A., I was sitting at the kitchen table after dinner with a cold cup of coffee, the children upstairs with Sally and Peter, when a shadow fell across the table. A strangler, I thought suddenly, irrefutably, and swung around, my arms raised to push the invader away.

It was Sid. He was smiling, his face as blank as a jack-o'lantern.

“You scared me,” I said. Sid's smile broadened. He sat down at the table beside me, close enough that I had to push my chair away. “Troy looks a little like Ben from the back, have you noticed?” I asked, aware that in saying these words I was trying to scare him back.

Sid's smile faded and his eyes rolled lazily in my direction. “Ben?” he said.

The ceiling fan clanged over and over. Around and around it went, uselessly stirring the air.

“You erased him,” I said, a hopeless awe filling my voice. Sid's breathing, my breathing. We were alive, both of us were alive. But only one of us remembered. “You erased him,” I repeated.

“No,” Sid said.

I must have looked hopeful then, I must have turned to him with something like avidity. Repentance, confession, fear of God, fear of death—any of that. Instead:

“You know what you need?” he asked.

I waited for him to go on. When he didn't, I prompted, “What, Sid?”

He tapped the side of his head with a finger. “You need a plan.”

“You know about plans,” I said. “So, did you plan to lose your mind?”

Sid looked at me a trifle less blankly. There might have been a thought there, a shadow moving behind his vacant eyes. He turned away from me and looked at his reflection in the glass door to the patio. He frowned, leaned over the table, sat back up. He stole another glance at his reflection, looked at me for an instant, then slid his eyes back to the mirror Sid. Who is that? I knew he was thinking. Is that someone I should know?

 

 

 

“LISTEN TO THIS,” I said to my mother, reading from the local gay and lesbian newsletter. “ ‘My brothers and sisters: we live in a country where the government spends millions of dollars—millions!—every
year
for toilet paper to wipe our dirty asses, yet refuses to spend one dime for the clean needles that would save a recreational drug user's life. Is this justice? Is this proper? My brothers and sisters: we must change this country around!' Cleve Burton. What do you think?”

My mother sniffed. “A bit excessive for my taste.” It was 1992, and she'd moved in with me and Aury. She could no longer afford her apartment, all her savings having mysteriously disappeared, probably (although she never admitted this) on my brother Eric's latest venture, an emu farm (emus! Eric had never even owned a parakeet) that had succumbed to avian infighting and an invidious molting disease. In exchange for room and board, my mother now looked after Aury and the town house, although because she was concerned about the immorality, not to mention the power issues, of unpaid labor, I gave her an hourly rate for evenings after six and any weekend time she spent alone with Aury. People to whom I mentioned this arrangement seemed shocked that my mother expected payment at all, but it seemed normal enough to me, knowing my mother. My weekly payments created a perennial clean slate between us.

“I get a kick out of Cleve,” I said. “He writes a column every week. Supposedly he stations himself in park restrooms on weekend nights and passes out condoms. He's a black guy. Actually”—I grinned—“he reminds me of you.”

“Of me!”

“In your rowdier days.”

“I'm not saying I don't respect his social consciousness,” my mother admitted, “but the lifestyle issues!” Lust for her was always suspect. Still, her interest was a tiny bit piqued. “Have you met him?”

“Never, and he's a local figure. I don't even know what he looks like.”

“Let's hope he doesn't end up as your patient,” my mother said primly.

 

 

 

MY NEXT TRIP TO L.A., Sally looked exhausted—worse than after Flavio left her, worse than after Ben died. “He knows me, and he usually knows the kids, and he knows Peter if Peter's with me, but it's like he's a baby again, we just float in and out of his vision and he doesn't have a clue why we're here, or what we're doing, or what kind of effort we're making for him. Last week he missed the toilet, and when I met him coming out of the bathroom into the hall, he looked at me and said, ‘You'll need to clean that up.' Just like that, like my cleaning up his urine was the most normal thing in the world. He can't go to the office anymore.”

He still had his office in the Valley, and a cadre of people, led by the mysterious Virginia, who apparently kept his business going. I didn't ask.

“And some days he's almost lucid; some days . . .” Sally sighed; she was blinking back tears. “He can say terrible things. Memories, or—” She stopped, sniffed, wiped her nose on the back of her sleeve. “He thanks me sometimes. He thanked me last week, as a matter of fact. I can't even tell you, Clare. These sweet and terrible days.”

It surprised me that Sid's disease was progressing so quickly, but sometimes Alzheimer's did. The medicines they'd tried had done nothing for him. “What does his doctor say?”

“Not much. He says it's progressive, and I need to think whether he'd want to be resuscitated if his heart or breathing stopped. What do you think, Clare?”

“If his heart stops, I'd let him go.”

“But Clare, his heart is strong. And he never gets sick, not even a cold. He could live like this for years.”

“If a dementia's really progressing, people may stop getting out of bed, stop eating. If you don't put in a feeding tube, they sort of fade away.”

“Starve to death.”

“Well. They have no interest in eating.”

“I can't let him starve to death, Clare. I can't do that.”

I nodded. She probably couldn't.

“You remember how he used to study with me? He always wanted to learn. That's how I met Timbo. Remember? He thought I was a twin.”

A moment of silence in honor of Timbo.

“And now I have twins.”

Onan spilled his seed in the desert. Another great biblical moment. Another scene for Sid's movie opus.

What happened to Cain after he slew Abel? I looked it up. God was mad and made Cain a ceaseless wanderer on earth. Eve had another son, Seth, so all mankind wasn't condemned to be descended from a murderer.

Another scene in Sid's apocryphal movie.

And how brutally unjust, really, that Sid should get a disease that let him forget, that cast its long shadow on Sally, whose only crime was being his daughter.

 

 

 

“I COULD RETIRE.” Sally had just turned thirty-seven. Her husband barely worked. She had four kids.

“You could afford to?” I blurted. The twins were upright now, peeping over the seats of kitchen chairs. Ezra, wearing a paper crown and a cape, was drawing monsters. He was three years old and seemed to have artistic talent; his monsters were recognizable as monsters. Barbara lay on the floor with her feet propped on the wall, inspecting her glittery shoes. Staggering, to retire at thirty-seven. Had Sally's law firm been that successful?

“Not without what I get from Daddy.” Sally gave me a rueful smile. “Lots of green in those blue movies.”

“Right-o, sister.” I smiled back. Blue movies. There was something quaint and innocent about that term, something almost endearing. A lie, like any euphemism. But Sally could live with it, and who was I to deny her the smallest sliver of comfort? Her mother and brother were dead, her father disappearing.

“I just don't want to do law anymore,” Sally said. “I don't know, I've lost my killer instinct.”

“Wook at this one,” Ezra said zestfully, holding up his picture. “Wook at his big teeth.”

I saw Sid, arm outstretched, approaching Ben. A green hillside, wind, sea, rock. I flicked a Cheerio, which skittered across the table and hit one of the kitchen chairs. “Not such a bad thing to lose.”

Sally drove her hand into her hair. “No,” she said. “I think not.” She looked around the table cluttered with bowls and placemats. A twin—Joshua, I thought—had dropped back to his kness and was now under the table trying to suck on my toes. “You think I could stand being retired?”

I drove in every morning and put my plastic card in the meter to open the gate to the parking lot, crossed the pedestrian bridge to the clinic, walked up two flights of stairs and through a metal door. There the pasty-faced, the cachexic, the splotchy all awaited me. Could I stand being retired? Probably not.