Best Friends (50 page)

“Not when it mattered.”

“No.” We sat in silence a moment, me watching Cleve Burton, Cleve Burton looking away. When his eyes met mine, he made the obvious statement: “I loved him.”

I nodded.

“We were very . . . anachronistic. The love that dared not speak its name. That was something he felt strongly about, with his job at the school, with his family and the way they—” Cleve Burton waved his hand. “It's not an issue for me, everyone in this office knows, everyone in this city knows, but Larry was extremely private. I believe that's the right word. I don't think he was ashamed. He felt deeply that there were some things other people didn't need to know. And for me, telling people about us was never an issue. I did what he wanted to the end.” Cleve Burton gave a quiet smile. “And beyond.”

I wondered then, as I often had, about Mr. Cotton's will, if Cleve Burton had gotten any remembrance. Cleve held out his wrist. “Larry's watch.”

When I'm “on,” when I'm right there with my patients, I do have a kind of telepathy. I've noticed that. Cleve seemed to have no regrets, and as I thought this, he spoke again.

“You do what you think is kindest. That's what you do for love. Willingly, I guess. Happily.”

“You could teach me a lesson about that.” I thought of Ben's tooth. Why did I keep it?

Cleve smiled. “Look, my good doctor, I'm not a certified financial planner, but I could probably help you with your stocks. Personally, as much as I hate drug companies, I have to admire Merck. Rubbermaid's a nice stock too, and there's a little company called Filenet, have you heard?”

 

 

 

BARBARA KNOCKED ON MY bedroom door and brought a book to show me, a picture book about cats. It was January, and she was wearing her favorite outfit, an iridescent swimsuit with high-cut legs and crisscross straps in the back. You could tell someday she'd be a knockout. All of Sally and Peter's children were beautiful, with tousled gold-brown hair and glowing round faces. They were the sort of children older couples stepped aside for and watched, smiling, as they passed. Barbara sat Indian-style on the floor and showed me the Manx cat, the tortoiseshell cat, and her favorite, the Persian. “Look at this booful kitty,” she said, stroking the fur in the picture. A lovely girl, named for her dead uncle. Nearly three years old. The pornographer's daughter.

I didn't want to take Aury out there. I didn't want her in a house with an upstairs door that was always shut, where she might drink tea at a play group with the polite daughters of Sara, the Countess of Come.

“I've made a decision,” Sally said on my last night there, when the kids and Peter were all at last in bed. “I'm selling out.”

My heart leapt. It's a funny sensation, and I've always been skeptical of that description, but there it was: my heart leapt. I was stretched out on the Oriental rug in the family room next to the kitchen, and Sally was collapsed on the sofa.

“Really, Sally? That's wonderful. I know you'll never regret it.”

“I know I won't. I talked to all the partners today, and it's no problem.”

“Partners? I didn't know you had partners.”

We looked at each other, confused. “Oh,” I said. “You're selling out your law firm.”

Sally gave me a rueful look. “Clare. You know I don't have a decent buyer for Crown.”

“I was hoping . . .”

“It's noise, Clare. Crown is noise.” I lifted my head inquiringly. “Daddy and I were sitting out there”—Sally pointed toward the kitchen and the kitchen table—“and it was maybe his best day, I mean the day he seemed to remember, and he said that what can break your heart is the shape of someone's life. And he said Ben's life was like this”—she made a swooping downward gesture—“and my life should be this”—predictably, a gesture up—“and his life was more bumpy”—a sine wave—“but it ended here”—she dropped her hand to the floor. “But you, he said, meaning me, you lift me up.” She lifted her hand a couple inches above the floor. “Only that high,” Sally said, looking at me. “All I did, and I only lifted him that high.”

“I'm sorry.”

She nodded, stared off into space, as if piecing together something. “Oh, and noise. He said that night that life was basically two things, secrets and noise, and the secrets were all that mattered, because the rest was—”

“Noise,” I finished.

“Exactly.”

She didn't say “eyactly,” I didn't say “amaying.”

“So Crown is noise,” Sally said. She raised her eyebrows assertively. “It is.”

I felt my eyes fill with tears. I'm losing you, Sally, I thought. I come all the way to California to lose you. “Not noise to me,” I said in a small voice.

 

 

 

AS TED TELLS IT, he was dropping off the eldest of his three daughters at a hotel baby-sitting room before a medical conference in March 1993 when he was startled to see another young girl who resembled her. In fact, the similarities between the two girls—one six, one almost five—were so great that one of the sitters asked Ted if they were twins. Ted asked the six-year-old her name and was surprised to find she shared a last name with his ex-wife, also a doctor. Is your mother Clare Mann? he asked the young girl. Yes, the girl said, and she and her mother lived in Akron, Ohio. Ted quickly realized I must be a conference attendee too. It took him several more minutes to realize, on an elevator heading to the venue, that the young girl he'd just spoken to was his daughter.

We'd split up at least partly over not getting pregnant. We'd slept together once after the divorce, and Ted had heard I'd eventually had a baby on my own, but he never, given our infertile years together, thought to wonder if my baby might be his. I'd thought it. I believed it was actually likely, but letting Ted know was nothing I cared to pursue. He was married. He had a new life, his own children.

I was in the hotel conference room seated at a chair behind a long table, surrounded by two hundred doctors; the lights were off, slides were on, and the speaker was droning on about osteoporosis. I was falling asleep, thinking, Lord, nothing in AIDS is this boring, when there was a tap on my back. I thought I must have started to snore. “Thank you,” I said automatically, sitting up and half waving behind me.

There was another tap. A little irked, I swiveled around. It was dim, and I couldn't make him out right away. He was leaning over the table behind me, between two older doctors who were eyeing him with annoyance. “Ted,” I said.

I knew immediately. “I have to talk with you,” he whispered urgently. I nodded and gathered up my papers and followed him out mutely, past the rows and rows of chairs and tables and all the doctors who glanced up without the slightest interest, assuming I'd been paged.

“Why didn't you tell me?” Ted burst out when we got to light.

We were standing in an atrium, an outsize flower arrangement erupting from the table beside us, a green and peach carpet under our feet. I remember that carpet so clearly, and a strange flower that looked almost like a pink pineapple, with hairy brown bands separating each petal.

“Tell you what?”

He told me.

I wanted to touch that flower. I was trying to figure out if the hairy bands were stiff or soft. “So?” I said.

“She looks like my daughter, Clare. Your daughter, Aurelia, looks like me.”

He'd gotten grayer and paunchier, yet the whole effect of him was sleeker than I remembered. I realized he was dressing better. He wore pressed trousers and a jacket, an outfit he might have worn to a wedding, not to a conference, in the years we were together. He still had that tremor in his right hand; he seemed to see my glance and dropped his hand to clutch the side of the table.

“Don't tell me you haven't noticed,” he said.

I couldn't speak.

“Are you married?” I shook my head no. “Are you seeing someone?” No again. “Are you raising her all by yourself?”

I found my voice. “My mother helps,” I said. “She lives with us.” My eyes met his, challenging.

“You hated your mother!” Ted seemed on the cusp of either laughter or tears, I couldn't tell which.

“She's not so bad,” I said quickly. “We've accommodated.”

Ted pressed his lips together. His question, when it came, was less a demand than a plea: “Is she mine?”

Oh, the confusion. The green and peach carpet and the flowers; the air and the chandelier; and Ted's hand, with its graying hairs, gripping the table. If his voice had been less soft, if he'd sounded angry, if he hadn't been so kind. But he was kind. He reminded me, as he always did, of my father.

“Probably,” I said. “You'd have to get genetic testing to be sure, but . . .” I waved my hand at Ted's hand. “She has your tremor.”

We walked together to the baby-sitting area to pick up our children. “How did you end up at a primary care conference?” I asked. “You're a gastroenterologist.”

“We're getting so much managed care that we're starting to worry about losing referrals. My gastroenterology group thought someone should come here to scope out the primary care scene. Find out how primary care doctors think. How about you?”

“I'm getting updated. Pressure from above. I think the hospital wants me to see some primary care patients on top of people with AIDS. I'm resisting it, though.”

“You can't resist forever, not these days.”

We sounded so normal. We sounded like old acquaintances chatting in a businesslike way. Who would have guessed at the web between us.

Aury was the only child left in the baby-sitting area. Ted and I chased the sitter away. “Aurelia,” Ted said. She was sitting at a table drawing—a table she'd shared (although I didn't know this) with her three half sisters until their mother came to pick them up. Aury glanced inquiringly at me. I suppose I looked stricken, my face red and my fists clenched, and for this reason, Aury told me later, she thought Ted was a policeman and I'd been arrested and was going to be taken away.

Ted reached his big shaking hand over the table to pat Aury's hair. “I have three other little girls,” he said, and Aury thought if he wasn't a policeman, he must be a child snatcher come to snatch her.

“Aurelia,” I said, addressing her in a quavery voice, “this is your father.”

She thought I was teasing. “I don't have a father,” Aury said quickly.

It broke my heart. “Yes, you do,” I said. “You have a father, and this is him.”

“You mean this is he,” Aury said.

Where did she learn grammar? I laughed in astonishment, a whooping and out-of-control sound. Ted started laughing too. “Yes,” I said, “this is he.”

Ted left Aury and me at the day care, tracked his family to a fancy toy store, and that evening told Mary, his wife. The next day we adults planned a lunch, right there in St. Louis, our four girls left together—this time as sisters—in the hotel baby-sitting room.

“You know the male determines the sex,” I said to Mary, to say something.

“Pardon?”

“The father. The father determines the sex of the child. He puts in the X or the Y chromosome. And a girl, you know, a girl's XX while a boy's XY. So I guess Ted's really shooting X's. With four daughters, I mean.”

“It's okay,” Ted said, shifting his glass of water on the table, “I warned Mary about your sense of humor.”

“At least he's not shooting blanks!” I regretted this the instant I said it.

“No,” Mary said, “certainly not.” She was tall, elegant, composed, immaculately dressed. In California I felt stylish; here I felt outlandish, overdone. A patient who had seen me in my current outfit—a scoop-necked blouse with bright stripes, bead earrings, and black pants—had asked if I was going to a fiesta.

“To be honest,” I said, thinking I must be truthful, “I'm almost sorry for Ted's sake that I didn't have a boy. But being a single mother the way I have been, it's good I had a girl, because I haven't had to deal with the male role model issue. At least that's what my mother tells me.”

“Yes,” Mary said. I had the sensation of a door clicking shut. “Ted tells me you're a doctor for people with AIDS?”

I nodded.

“How admirable. That must be quite stressful.”

“Oh, I love it. The people are great, and I like people with a real disease.”

Ted touched Mary's hand. “Clare was always the hardest-driving resident in our group. She needs a challenge.”

“It's neat, working with people who are sick,” I said. “They don't sweat the small stuff. People can adapt to almost anything. What do you do, Mary?”

“Mary has a business she runs out of the home,” Ted said. “And our daughters keep her hopping.”

“Really?” I asked. “You have a business in your home? Computers or something?”

“Actually, I design and publish macramé patterns.”

“How interesting!” I couldn't think of a thing to say about macramé. I barely remembered what it was. “You know,” I finally managed, “a lot of my patients are in the arts.”

“So I'd imagine,” Mary said, casting an eye over my clothes.

 

 

 

—“I'M NOT THAT FAR AWAY. We're in eastern Pennsylvania, and you two live just west of Pennsylvania.”