Best Friends (61 page)

“Ball of ambivalences would be more accurate.”

Ted's mouth dropped open; he looked at me in exasperated affection. “You're your daughter's mother, that's for sure.”

“It is sure.”

Ted, smiling to himself, looked down at the table. “Ambiguities, ambivalences. You're the sure one. And I'm nothing but a big ball of ambis.”

“Don't you love me anymore?” My words popped out before I thought of them. He'd said he'd always love me, always, even if our physical relationship didn't continue. Had he been lying? Did his withholding his body from me mean he'd lost affection for me? I loved him more now that we weren't sleeping together. Not sleeping with him was pain added to love, a sort of sacrifice. I glanced around us, suddenly sheepish, but there was no one close enough to hear.

A spasm that looked like anguish crossed Ted's face. He reached over and briefly cupped my cheek in his hand, as if I were a child. “Of course I love you, Clare,” he said. “When will you believe that?”

Now, I thought. Tears came to my eyes. Now.

I LOOKED IN CLEVE'S mouth, listened to his heart and lungs, poked at his belly. Nothing really new. So far, he was okay. Every day he took six capsules of AZT.

But he seemed edgy, uncomfortable. “I've been on the Internet,” he said. “They're out there, protease inhibitors are out there.” A new class of anti-AIDS drugs, soon to be tested in clinical trials. I was a little surprised Cleve had heard of them, but why should I be? Cleve kept up to date.

Cleve cast a glance around my new office: the plants, the pictures, the commodious exam rooms. I had to produce here—see enough patients to pay my salary, and more—or the group wouldn't keep me. I was seeing plenty of possibles.

“Get me one.”

I didn't understand what he was asking. “Get you what?”

“A protease inhibitor.”

I took a big breath. “Sure, I can try,” I told him, “but since I'm not at University anymore, it might be harder to get in studies, and since protease inhibitors are study drugs, not drugs actually on the market yet, I might not—”

Cleve stared at me. “Then I'll go to the doctors at University.” I recoiled. What was Cleve saying? I was his friend. “What good are you,” he said, “if you can't get me something better than AZT?”

“You don't necessarily know it'll be better,” I managed weakly.

Cleve shot me a skeptical look. And he was right, the Internet had told him, as my conferences had told me, that the buzz about these new drugs was wonderful. People with AIDS might live if they took protease inhibitors. Of course, there had been promising treatments before.

“I'll try, Cleve. No promises, but I'll try.”

“I'm not going to sit here and let you let me die. Don't think you can get rid of me that easy.”

Well, he was an angry man. I knew that. That was something I loved about him.

“I'll get some for you,” I promised, not knowing how I'd do it. “I'll get it.”

I flashed back to Sally and me driving down Rodeo Drive years before, dangling Ben's essential heroin in the little box of Chinese food.

 

 

 

“HE WON. I've never even met him, and the bastard won. He's a maniac, they say. Hires people Wednesday and fires them Friday. But he won, there's no question about it. You know what his lawyer told me? ‘We've got you by the short and curlies, Mrs. Newcomer.' Can you imagine? It's actually a clever expression. But I have reasons to console myself. The kids are excited, they'll each have their own room. And of course there's a computer room, which is thrilling for them, or it will be when we have something to put in it. And the indoor pool will be great, although it's empty now and the doors are locked and I'm trying to hide it from Linnea until she's potty-trained. So it's not a disaster. I did it for love, I keep telling myself. I did it for my kids. I'm sure Peter won't leave Idaho now. He loves our old house. He designed that house. I think his dream was always to live there with Laurie. Oh Clare, when I think of living in a house with a cedar-shake roof . . . I never dreamed. Can you come out here?”

“I can't take the time off, not now.”

“Should I send you and Aury a ticket?”

“Not now. Let me get a few months of steady billing, then I'll come.”

But I saw her within weeks, at Sid's funeral.

He died on a Thursday afternoon in August 1995, several days after Sally's last visit. Rose, the aide, walked in to turn him and found him dead. Rose the aide found Rose the patient dead: everyone noticed this coincidence. When Sally got to the nursing home, he was propped up in his bed, a sheet smoothed across his chest, a crucifix stuck in his crossed hands.

“I wanted to throw it out the window,” Sally said, “but I just laid it in a chair.”

“Poor baby,” Rose said. “Poor sweet baby.”

Sally had the body flown to L.A., where the junior rabbi from Sally and Peter's former temple agreed to officiate at the funeral. She had me flown to L.A. too, so I was waiting at the airport Friday afternoon when she and Ezra and Barbara arrived; the younger children were in Idaho with Peter. We stayed in a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel, certainly more hotel than we needed, but Sally had arranged the accommodations. “Daddy would want us to enjoy ourselves,” she said. She seemed eerily calm, like someone on tranquilizers, although I knew she'd be shocked to hear this. We were within miles of Sid's old houses, of Sally's houses, but she said she had no urge to see them, and besides, we shouldn't drive on Shabbos. I felt as though we were on our own little island, far from anything we knew. We spent most of our two evenings together talking about my new practice. We got room service and played with the kids in the pool.

“What'd the rabbi say?” I asked at one point, after he had phoned.

“He asked me what Daddy's dreams were. I didn't know.” Sally shook her head. “He wanted to be big, but in the end he got so small.”

The funeral was Sunday afternoon, in a lavishly treed cemetery next to the graves of Esther and Ben. At the last minute Sally called up Teresa, who now worked for an old neighbor of Sally's, and asked her to stay at the hotel with Ezra and Barbara during the funeral. “I don't want to scare them,” Sally said.

We drove to the cemetery in our rental car with the windows down, and I realized how happy I was to again be in L.A. I liked everything about the air: the warmth, the breeze, the brightness, even the smell of exhaust.

Aunt Ruby came, and Uncle Freddie, looking surprisingly well, and a man who turned out to be Uncle Freddie's brother visiting from Boca Raton, and a temple contingent of men in dark suits whom the rabbi had phoned to be sure there'd be ten men—a minyan—in attendance. I wondered if there'd been an obituary in the Los Angeles paper; if Virginia Luby (who should now be on probation, having served her months in prison; her son actually served longer, having been on probation before) knew, or the mysterious Buck. At the last minute, a tall woman with her face draped in a mantilla arrived: Sara Tweedles, corporate lawyer.

“Good to see you,” Aunt Ruby said to Sally, squeezing my elbow. “Doesn't my Freddie look good?”

The service wasn't very long. We all stood. There was a lot of Hebrew, which meant nothing to me, and the rabbi flailed a bit with the eulogy, and then it was over and the rabbi was nodding toward the shovel and the pile of dirt, but Sally didn't move.

“Sally?” Aunt Ruby whispered. Sally ignored her. “Well, okay then,” Aunt Ruby said, and she stepped forward, lifting the bottom of her skirt and mincing around the grave. She took a shovelful of dirt and dropped it on the casket, and the sound was as dreadful and final as I remembered from Esther's funeral. “Freddie?” she inquired, holding out the shovel.

Freddie dropped two shovelfuls, then Freddie's brother took a turn, and then there was an awkward pause—the temple men looking at one another—before Sally stepped to the far side of the grave. She wore a navy suit with a zippered front, really a very businesslike outfit, and she kept her face down and her lips set as she worked. She dropped in the first shovel of dirt—thud—and the second, then the third, and then she kept shoveling, over and over, one load of loose dirt after the next, until her forehead was gleaming with sweat and it was clear to even me, a nominal Presbyterian, that what she was doing was well beyond custom. The thuds began to sound less hollow once the top of the casket was totally covered with dirt—and more like splatters, or swishes, and I'm sure it wasn't only to me that their tone changed, taking on a quality at first rancorous, then deranged. “What is she doing?” Aunt Ruby said. “Has she been drinking?” The whole tiny congregation seemed to draw together in alarm and look to the rabbi for help. He seemed too wispy to have much authority, but when he crept up beside Sally and spoke in her ear, she immediately stopped.

 

 

 

“A KOSHER KITCHEN isn't hard if you're a vegetarian,” Sally said. It was before seven A.M. on a late-October Sunday and she was bustling, celery and onions on the stovetop, rice steaming. The kitchen was the one room in her new house that seemed fully occupied. She always liked to be one day ahead on her meals.

“But you're not a vegetarian,” I said automatically. Then I thought of the things Sally had turned out to be without my knowing it. “Are you?”

“Not totally, no,” Sally answered. “I can't imagine Passover without brisket. But we don't need a lot of cookware for meat. One roasting pan, one casserole.”

Passover? Brisket? Sally had never mentioned either to me, but now she spoke of both like inalterable traditions.

“You don't need a special dishwasher for the meatware?” I was being facetious. Sally, in her new kitchen, had separate cupboards for dishes to use with dairy products and dishes to use with meat. This was the essence of a kosher kitchen: separate plates, silverware, serving dishes, pots and pans, and utensils for meat and dairy dishes. Cookware apartheid, Sally called it. A rabbi from Salt Lake, she told me, had offered to come blowtorch her stove to make the kitchen truly kosher. “But that seemed too extreme,” Sally had said.

“I'm glad you have limits.”

“See, the reason you do this,” Sally had said, “is to make a point of eating. If you keep kosher, you can't just grab something and pop it in your mouth. It makes eating an intentional act. A religious Jew does things with intention.”

“And complication,” I had added. Sally had plenty of room in this kitchen. There was a cupboard devoted entirely to children's toys. Despite its top-of-the-line appliances, the kitchen had a sort of virginity: Sally didn't believe the lower oven had ever been used. Laurie microwaved her meals.

“We wash the meat plates in the sink. We don't use the dishwasher for the meat plates.” Sally wrinkled her nose. “I'm not sure that's technically necessary, but it's what we do.”

“Oh, brother.”

Sally turned to me, affronted. “It's tradition! I don't mock anything you do.”

Tradition. How did you fit a dishwasher into tradition? “I'm not mocking you. I just wonder where this fervor comes from. You used to have a Christmas tree.”

Sally frowned. “Used to, what's used to? People change! You used to sleep with a different guy every—” Sally stopped, seeing the insult she was heading into. “Year,” she ended weakly. We both laughed.

Sally sighed and wiped the faucet with a rag. “Your needs,” she said.

“Yeah, my needs. And you know what? Except for Dan Trimball—you remember Dan, the chemistry professor—and Mark Petrello, for about the first week we were married, I never really enjoyed sex with anyone. Never. Not until Ted came back.”

“You two should have stayed married.”

“I know. But we didn't, and it was my fault, and now it's too late. I sure miss sleeping with him, though.”

“Mommy,” came a small voice from the door, “my nose isn't working.” Gabriel, in his blue footed p.j.'s, blanket clutched in his hand, was standing in the cavernous family room adjacent to the kitchen. His little voice echoed in the almost empty room.

“Oh, lovie,” Sally said, “you don't know how to blow your nose?” It turned out to be quite a feat to teach him, and by then other children were awakening, and Sally and I were hurled into the day.