Best Friends (6 page)

 

 

 

SALLY'S AUNT AND COUSIN—Mr. Rose's younger sister Ruby and her daughter Daphne—dropped by to meet me. Ruby had been Ruth, and Daphne was Danielle, but (this was a family secret) both had changed their names on the advice of a numerologist. Aunt Ruby and Daphne wore great clouds of perfume and clothes that looked expensive and fluffy, like Barbie outfits or the clothes Eva Gabor wore on
Green Acres.
They yoo-hooed, walked in, then skittered around kissing cheeks. Even I got kissed. I found it peculiar to be kissed by an unknown eighteen-year-old wearing makeup. I told Sally I could picture Aunt Ruby in translucent robes with feathers at the neck and cuff, mules on her pink-toenailed feet. “You're not far off,” Sally said.

Later we visited, with Mr. Rose, Aunt Ruby's terrifying house. “It's like walking into a jewel box,” Sally warned me. The carpeting was cream, and almost every wall had a painting of a nude or an Oriental screen. The ceiling in the TV room was covered with bronze paper. The canopy bed was huge. The husband, Dr. Fred Finkelstein, was skinny, with a hangdog look and a preposterous wardrobe that included platform shoes and an astrological medallion on a chain around his neck. He was a successful dermatologist. “What a nar,” Mr. Rose said out loud when Uncle Fred left the room.

“What's a nar?”

“Yiddish,” Mr. Rose explained. “A nar's like a dummy, a lunkhead.” I was shocked that Mr. Rose was telling me this in Dr. Finkelstein's own house.

“But he must be a good dermatologist,” I said, glancing around the living room, hoping the doctor wasn't hiding in one of the halls. “He must have a big practice.”

“Listen, you'd have to be one lousy dermatologist to not make a go of it here. This town lives on skin.”

Uncle Fred was a Pisces. As we drove back to Sally's, I said that he was obviously fishy. “Fishy Finkelstein!” Mr. Rose said. “I love it.” Sally chuckled too. I was pleased but embarrassed—pleased to be pleasing Mr. Rose, embarrassed that I should want to.

 

 

 

“
I HAD TO GET
my own towel this morning,” Mr. Rose told his wife. “You've got to let Patricia out of the kitchen.”

“I have lunches to think about now too,” Mrs. Rose said. “With the girls here.”

“Let the girls go out to lunch! Let them go down to the Tail o' the Pup and get a hot dog.” He turned to me. “You want to eat at a real L.A. landmark? Hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog?”

My eyes darted from Mr. to Mrs. Rose. But he was the force in the family.

“Why not?” I said.

“Sure you do,” Mr. Rose said at the same time.

 

 

 

“HE'S SO KIND, ” Sally said. “Did you know he once sewed a button onto my coat? I was busy studying, and he took out my sewing kit and sewed it on.”

She was talking about Timbo. I was trying to figure out when this had happened, how I had missed it.

“I really miss him,” Sally said, turning her face to the sea. We were on the Santa Monica pier eating ice cream, and this was the one moment that marred my day, like the half hour or so each night I roamed the patio or leafed through magazines while Sally talked to Timbo on the phone.
Time, U.S. News & World Report, McCall's
—for a magazine distributor, Mr. Rose didn't keep his home very interestingly stocked.

When I was old and rich I'd get subscriptions to, I don't know, thirty magazines. Anything that interested me slightly. And I'd buy hardback books, not paperbacks.

 

 

 

“DO YOU LIKE BASKETBALL ? ” asked Sally's little brother, Ben. He was ten years old. He ran up and down the tiled hallway, dribbling. “Do you like snakes? I have a pet snake, Charlie.” And later: “Do you like ambulances? Do you like to swim?” His little tan face, his sharp nose, his deep brown eyes. It seemed to me he was a ball of eagerness with skin. When he ran, he reminded me of Reddy Kilowatt, a stick figure of electricity, arms and legs sizzling. I wondered if my brothers had been like that before they grew up and got self-conscious. “Clare! Clare!” Ben would shout beside the pool. “Watch me do a cannonball!”

He really liked me. Once he got out of the pool and came over to my chaise, sat down on the concrete beside me, and lay his head across my legs. I ruffled his hair, feeling awkward, thinking how absurdly unaffectionate my family was. Ben's hair was surprisingly coarse, like a terrier's. “You have hair like a little dog,” I said.

“Arf!” Ben said, smiling. “Want a soda?” he asked, and sat up. “I'll get us both a soda!” He scampered to the fridge in the pool house.

“What a cute kid,” I said to Mr. Rose. It amazed me to hear myself saying this, sounding disgustingly adult. I was only twenty.

“He's a pistol.” Mr. Rose shook his head. “Sometimes you hate to see them grow up.”

“Mountain Dew or Fresca?” Ben asked breathlessly, running up to me. He was already handing me the can. “I think girls like Fresca,” he confided to his dad.

“Are you expanding your business?” I asked Mr. Rose. Sally had mentioned that her father was expanding. My father always wanted the doctors to hire more doctors.

“Sure,” said Mr. Rose. “I've had my seven fat years, so now I got to stay big enough to swing the seven lean ones. That make any sense to you?”

I smiled politely. It did make sense, vaguely.

“You read the Bible at all? Or did you give that up when you gave up Shabbos?”

I looked away, embarrassed.

“Joseph,” Mr. Rose announced. “Remember him? Joseph of the coat of many colors? He had those dreams, seven fat cows, seven thin cows, seven fat ears of corn, seven thin ears—this ring a bell at all?”

It did, sort of. I rallied. “So you've been having dreams, huh?”

Mr. Rose threw his head back and laughed. “I don't dream,” he said when he'd calmed down. “Not my nature. I don't dream, I scheme.” He tapped the side of his head with his index finger. “I've always got a plan. Remember that, Clare. I've always got a plan. Seriously, you and Sally are smart girls, you both should read the Bible. Great stories. I even read the New Testament, you know that? Not that I like a God that wishy-washy.”

“You leave a copy in my nightstand?”

Mr. Rose laughed again. “No wonder my daughter likes you. You've got spunk.”

IN THE MORNINGS, Mrs. Rose sat in a robe at a table in the big master bedroom with an array of pens and stationery in front of her. Ben rolled around on the king-size bed, did a somersault off it, rolled himself up in the abstract-patterned bedspread and asked if we could find him. “Wild child,” Mrs. Rose said calmly, working on a letter. “Come out, wild child.”

She had pen pals she'd been matched up with through a pen pal service. That day she was writing her friend in Ireland. “She lives in a house with a dirt floor,” Mrs. Rose said. “They just got their first refrigerator two years ago. They don't call it a refrigerator; it's an icebox. It can hold”—Mrs. Rose raised her eyes as if reading something in her memory—“two pints of milk, a couple pounds of cheese, half a chicken, and a wee bit of butter. They're thrilled with it.”

“Have you been to visit her?”

“I'd love to visit her,” Mrs. Rose said. “But the problem is getting away.” Her eyes cast around the room in a sort of helplessness, settling briefly on Ben. “How could I get away?” she asked.

It was poignant to me that she thought of herself as essential, when everyone else barely noticed she was there.

For dinner the evening after our hot dogs, we ate Caesar salad, bouillabaisse, and pecan pie with two nut layers. “Your mother's an unbelievable cook,” I told Sally as her mother went to the kitchen to supervise the coffee.

Sally looked pleased. “She's good, isn't she? She does have a lot of help.”

“Your wife cooks like a gourmet chef,” I told Mr. Rose over brandy.

“She should,” he said. “She has enough help.”

“You're a good cook,” I told Mrs. Rose in the kitchen.

“Thank you, dear,” she said, twisting off a bit of green herb and sniffing it. “The kitchen's sort of
my
place, do you know what I mean?”

“Let's go out tomorrow night,” Mr. Rose said, bursting through the kitchen on his way to get a can of soda. “Enough of this home-cooking crap. Aren't I a man of simple tastes? I want a steak.”

Later, he asked me, “What do you think of the sofa, you like the sofa?”

“I do.”

“And the granite in the gate, you notice that? That's Italian granite.”

“I'll have to notice it.”

“It's not just any granite. It's not just veneer granite. It's an inch thick. You believe that? An inch!”

“Impressive.”

“You like the art? Esther picks the art. I don't know from art. But Esther's daddy was an art professor, he was one of those German Jews, know what I mean?”

I stared back blankly.

“Snobs. Intellectuals. German Jew girl marries a Pole like me, the parents go apeshit. But Esther wanted me. Anyways, she picks the art. It's good art. Museums want it.”

“Really?”

“I don't scrimp on quality. That's what my mother used to say, don't scrimp on quality. In the end you get what you pay for, right?”

“So I hear.”

“Yeah, it's a decent house,” Mr. Rose admitted. He leaned back in his chair and intertwined his hands behind his head. Something sexy in that gesture, dangerous. He crossed his legs, his ankle on his knee. Could guys at Oberlin ever look like that? Or my brothers? Mr. Rose narrowed his eyes. “It's not a perfect house, though.”

“What would make it perfect?” I asked, and took a sip of Scotch.

“View of the sea. I mean a real view, not some blueness in the distance. I grew up in Brooklyn, my family lived in an apartment building with a shower down the hall, but you could climb on the roof of our building and see the Atlantic.” Mr. Rose reached under his shirt and scratched his shoulder. “Next house.”

I tried to imagine what had kept him from getting a view of the sea this time. Surely not money—a house by the sea couldn't cost more than this. In fact, the seaside places Sally and I'd seen were surprisingly small.

“But this is a nice neighborhood,” he said. “Good place for a family. Some of those beach places are a little . . .” He held out his hand, palm down, and rocked it back and forth.

I thought of Venice, where Sally and I had walked the boardwalk, dodging street performers. Racy, I thought. Druggy. Loose. I nodded.

“Earthquakes,” he said. “Fires. Landslides. You're safer farther inland.”

 

 

 

FOR ALL THE HOURS Sally's father was reputed to work, he was spending a lot of time away from work this week; only three or four hours a day at the office. He was taking a breather, he said; he liked to meet his daughter's friends. When he went to work, he wore knit shirts and big-buckled belts, the same things he wore at home. He was the boss, Sally said, he didn't have to dress for work. He didn't even have to go in every day.

Cocktails around back, outside the living room, on the wide flagstone patio with a low stone wall around it, overlooking the city.

We were talking about Oberlin and Sally's psychology course. Mr. Rose, like Sally, was anti-psychology. “All that explaining, that analyzing. I hate that. It's like no one understands anymore that what is
is.
Why try to explain it? It's like what turns people on. You can never tell what'll ring your bell. It's a mystery, a human mystery. I like people being mysterious. I wouldn't want it any other way.”

Sally looked at me and grinned.

“So, I don't know,” he continued. “The stuff you're reading, it's okay, but it's too analytical. But it's typical, I've got to say, it's typical of your school. All those Oberlin pansies you got there staring at their navels.”

“Daddy! They're not pansies.”

Sid winked at me. “I love it when she argues. Are you arguing with me, sweetheart? You're not, you're disagreeing. I want an argument, okay? I don't want a simple denial, I want counterpoint.”

“I don't know why you call the men at Oberlin pansies. You don't even know them.”

“How about that goofy professor of yours? What was his name, Mr. Biff? The one who drooled over your papers. What was his favorite poet? Hart Crane.” Sid lifted his fingers in his air and twittered his fingers—“ ‘Oh the youthful exuberance, the wordsmithing, the exquisite curiosity Hart Crane brings . . .' Listen, I talked to my educated buddy: Hart Crane was a fruit. That Mr. Biff 's not married, is he?”