Best Friends (48 page)

I felt a little sick at my last words, guilty that I'd ended with a flourish. I never dreamed I'd tell this story. I glanced toward the window, then back at Aunt Ruby, with the sensation of my eyeballs rolling around in my head like a frightened horse's. She was stock-still, mouth agape, and there was absolute silence until she started laughing.

“That's hysterical!” She was beside herself, wheezing and braying. She threw her head back, she bent over and slapped her thigh. “Sid told you that?” At last she had to stop and take a breath. “That's the wildest story I ever heard.”

“It's not a story, Aunt Ruby. It's true. Sid told me.”

“Killed Ben. Sid killed Ben.” Ruby was shaking her head and chuckling. “I'll tell you, he must have stayed up late thinking up that one. And you believed him? I can't believe you swallowed a story like that. What's that word for people who'll believe anything? Gullible. Gullible's Travels.”

My eyes filled with shameful tears. “It wasn't a story. Ben didn't have AIDS. It's exactly what happened. Sid told me.”

“Oh, horsefeathers. Did he tell you with a twinkle in his eye? You bothered him, Clare. You always did. Sally thought too much of you. Remember when she wouldn't speak to him? That was you. Don't think Sid didn't know that.”

“He took me to the Beverly Hills Hilton. He made me eat breakfast, and he told me.” I was crying now.

“Oh, Clare, Clare.” Aunt Ruby wrapped an arm around my shoulders. “He was an old bugger, you know? That's what he was.” She sounded tearful now. “I sure miss him.” Her head lifted, a light came to her eyes. “When was this, exactly? When did he spin you this tale?”

I told her when: after Sally was married, just after she'd had Ezra.

“See? I rest my case. Sid was jealous of you, Clare. He wanted to get rid of you. Who did he ever have but Sally? And you got in his way. Oh, not just you. That silly Peter got in the way, Ezra got in the way. But you were the one Sid thought he could get rid of.”

Clare
, he'd said on the deck of this very house,
I thought I'd gotten rid of you.

Aunt Ruby stepped back for a moment and stared at me. I fingered Ben's tooth in my pocket. “That AIDS is a tragedy, a tragedy,” she said sighing.

I nodded.

“Do you feel better now?” Aunt Ruby asked gently. “Oh, Clare. It's sweet you believed him, it really is. And I'm sure if he'd been more with-it mentally he would have set you right. But you know, right after he told you, he started losing his mind.”

I nodded. That was true. She could be right.

“You should tell Sally about Ben's disease,” Aunt Ruby said. “You should. She's the only person in that little family left, and she deserves to know the truth. It'll help her understand things. It'll help her grow up.”

I had never before thought of Sally as incomplete, not as adult as she could be. I quickly shook my head to knock the thought away.

“Sid killing Ben.” Aunt Ruby was shaking her head and smiling again. “Oh, Claresy. Sid could no more kill his children than I could break through this ceiling and float up to the moon.”

Her feet were swollen, her thighs as big as turkey breasts. The image of her floating away was so unlikely that I started to laugh.

“Little Claresy,” she said, putting an arm around my shoulders. “Ohio Claresy. How'd you ever get mixed up with us crazy Roses?”

I closed my eyes and leaned against Aunt Ruby's massive shoulder, feeling for a moment so buoyant that I myself could have floated to the moon.

 

 

 

“WHY DON'T WE GO on out to the patio?” Virginia suggested. “It's not that hot out. Come on, Clare. Sit and chat with Sally and me after my hard day at the office.”

Sally brought out plates and glasses of iced tea and chopped vegetables with dip. “Just a few minutes, honeybear,” she called to someone. “The grown-ups need to talk. Teresa will find your Lego man.”

Virginia told me about her three children, her two daughters living near her and her son who worked in Sid's warehouse, about her ex-husband who'd run off and gotten hit by a train, about the bingo games she organized for her parish (she was a church lady!). She told me about her grandsons, one with ADD, one with a multiracial father, one with a genetic disorder that made him slow but musical. After a bit, she reminisced about her early days with Sid. At the beginning, she was his only employee, and she chaperoned while he took photos of the girls. “You couldn't show much,” she said. “We covered up their pubic hair. A nipple was a shocker. We got really high-grade models, nice girls.” The years went by and they got the free spirits, girls not as likely to employ good grooming. By the late sixties anything went; Virginia would have quit but her husband was gone and dead. Things got slow in the seventies, as I'd heard years before, until the gay market opened up.

“The gay market opened up?” Sally repeated, her spoon clanking the inside of her glass. “I thought Daddy went after it.”

Virginia laughed in a nervous way. “Well, you don't create a market, you recognize it. It was hard for Sid at first. He didn't really, you know, like gays.”

“I know.”

“He didn't even want to review the photos, and he always reviewed them, that was part of his quality control. He'd have me look at them.”

Sally murmured and shook her head; I had no idea what she was thinking.

“Didn't matter to me,” Virginia said. “Although I have to say, at first I'd get surprised. Those gay guys, they're creative.” She laughed. “But Sid got used to it. You can get used to anything.

“Boy, I miss him. We used to call him the philosopher porn king. Didn't he have a mind? That's why I can't stand the thought of him lying there drooling. I'm not going to see him, I'm sorry. I want to remember him like he was.”

“You're lucky you can,” Sally said.

“Like he
was
was,” Virginia said, ignoring Sally's comment. “These last few years have been bad enough.” Virginia turned to me. “You knew Esther, right?” I nodded. “Esther and I used to drive to this drugstore in Los Feliz and get strawberry sundaes.” Virginia sucked on her cigarette, then blew out two long streams of smoke through her nose. I hadn't seen that effect since high school; I wondered if Virginia did it to annoy Sally. “I loved that woman. Such a lady.”

Sally said nothing.

“You have some of that, you know,” Virginia said to Sally. Virginia sat up straighter, lifted her chin, turned her head in Sally's direction, held her cigarette far from her with her arm and wrist extended. A pose.

“My mother never smoked,” Sally said. She stood and reached for Virginia's crumpled napkin, then headed inside for the kitchen.

“I shouldn't do this in front of you.” Virginia sagged into her chair again, looking at her cigarette. “You being a doctor.”

“I used to smoke. It was hard to quit.”

Virginia was stressed. She could handle the editorial side, but their customer-service people were having problems with inventory management. “And then Buck's out of commission,” she said.

Buck. I'd never heard of Buck. “What's his specialty?”

“Category management.” I looked blank. “Shelf space,” Virginia explained. “Displays.”

“Is he sick?”

Virginia laughed. “Income tax, the putz. He'll be out in eight months, though.”

It took us several minutes to realize that Sally wasn't returning, and then we heard her laughter through the window of the den. “Playing with the kids,” I murmured.

Virginia said her good-byes from the kichen. “Back to the salt mines tomorrow,” she called to Sally. “See you here.”

“You tell her I can't do everything,” she muttered to me at the door.

 

 

 

“THERE'S A LITTLE strangeness there,” announced Timothy Quiver, the new head of infectious diseases who'd covered for me during my trip to California. Mr. Cotton's mother was standing outside his room, hypervigilant as a prairie dog, watching people who moved past her down the hall. “She thinks her son has cancer.”

“Cancer?”

“The whole family believes that, sounds like your patient drilled it into them in his better days.” Dr. Quiver grinned. “I didn't disabuse them of anything. Be interesting if he has to go to hospice, right?”

I was walking toward the mother just as the accountant approached her. “I'm afraid he won't be able to see you today,” the mother was saying. “He's very weak, he needs his rest, and he's certainly not in any shape to be bothered by financial matters.” I glanced quickly at the accountant's face to see how he took this.

“I'm sorry,” the accountant said. “He's weaker, is he? I'm sorry.” He raised his voice ever so slightly, just enough to be sure I caught his words. “Cancer is a terrible disease, isn't it?”

I looked at him in sudden recognition: another person who could keep a secret.

“Oh, terrible, terrible.” The old woman, slipping from her vigilance for a second, closed her eyes. When they opened, I was in her line of vision, and her eyelids fluttered like a movie heroine's. “Dr. Mann! Dr. Mann is back!”

 

 

 

“CLARE?” SALLY HAD CALLED out one evening. “Come upstairs.” It was after ten; the kids were all in bed, but when we entered the office, Sally closed the door. “Thanks for going through Daddy's things. I can't tell you how I appreciate that.”

She opened a drawer in the credenza and brought out a folder of pictures. “Maybe you can help me with this too.”

Boys. Young men, really, trussed and bound and cowering in positions of submission.

“Oh, yuck, Sally.”

“I know. But you can help me! A new photographer sent me these pictures, and these”—she waved a second folder—“are from our staff photographer. Virginia doesn't know which ones to use, so she's punting them to me.”

“I don't know, use them both.” I turned toward the closed door. “Use them in different issues.”

“Clare. I'm kind of the boss. I have to give an opinion. It's like she's testing me.”

“Why don't you show them to Peter?”

She stared at me, and I could read her mind: After Flavio, I'm going to show homoerotic photos to my husband? “I'm in an awkward position, Clare. Please. I thought you might have some insight.”

“Okay, okay.” I looked through the photos and picked one set. “Here,” I said, handing the packet to Sally. And suddenly—standing in that room with the computers and the closed door, down the hall from Sally's four sleeping children—our lives just seemed impossible, so far from our college days that an outsider could never track the connection, would never dream the two women in this room had started out as ill-matched roommates in a quad.

In retrospect, this whole period was for Sally an extended scream. I didn't see that at the time. I thought I was the one screaming.

“HOW ABOUT THIS ONE?” I asked my mother. “‘Am I, a gay male African-American, any less a person than our president-elect Bill Clinton? Is my good friend Julius, who lives under a bridge and goes through garbage to find food and also items he can sell to earn cash for the heroin that sustains him, any less a person than Bill Clinton? These are the questions we must answer for ourselves. If we are not less, should we let ourselves be so treated?' Old radical Cleve again.”

My mother knitted her brow. “It
is
nice to hear someone angry. I'm tired of people being tired.”

“Me too,” I said, sitting up straighter. I was going to see Sally next month, a long weekend to greet Linnea (Linnea! Peter had picked the name), her new baby girl.

 

 

 

I KEPT BEN'S TOOTH in its little bag, tucked it in a cloisonné pillbox my brother Frank had bought me once for Christmas. I slipped the pillbox in a satin jewelry bag, which I kept in the back right corner of my underwear drawer. For months I didn't really think about it. I should have, I suppose. Out of respect for the dead.

 

 

 

LARRY COTTON DIED, his mother at his side. I never told anyone not to tell her his diagnosis, but there was a silent collusion, and the nurses—all the nurses, on all shifts—never used the words AIDS or HIV.

His mother asked me to the visitation. The line snaked out the funeral home door into the bare trees. Mr. Cotton had died in the prime of life. There were neighbors, teachers, old and current students, family friends. His mother introduced me to his high school girlfriend.