Best Friends (7 page)

“Mr. Gifford,” Sally said. “No, I don't think he does happen to be married, but you have no proof—”

“No poof? No poof?”

“Daddy!” It was the same two-toned intonation as her “si-ick,” high-pitched then low.

“A lot of professors aren't married,” I said. “That doesn't mean they're not normal.”

“Point,” Mr. Rose conceded.

“So what if Mr. Gifford is homosexual?” Sally asked, changing her tack. “Is a person's being homosexual relevant to what he thinks or teaches or does?”

“Better point,” Sid said. “I like that.”

“You were making an inflammatory statement with no inkling of what you really wanted to say. You were teasing me. You were leading me on.”

“Moi?” Sid reached for a carrot stick and chomped on it. “What do you think of this kind of conversation, Clare? You think it's at all interesting or useful?”

“Socratic method, I guess,” I mumbled, feeling foolish.

But Sid was pleased. “That's exactly right, Socratic method. We learned about that last year in Intro to Philosophy, right, Sal?”

“What I can't figure out is if you want your kids to argue and question things, why'd you send them to Catholic schools?” I asked.

Sid raised his eyebrows. “Excellent question. Two reasons: first, the teachers are better, and second, I like the discipline. Children require discipline until they're old enough to decide things for themselves.”

“So Sally's old enough now. Being at Oberlin.” I couldn't think of a more nonreligious school.

“Of course. Sally's an adult.”

Sally shifted in her seat, looking flattered, and took another sip of Scotch.

“Now, getting back to your English professor—excuse me, your
poof
essor—let me try this one on you. I personally believe that a homo can't in an essential way understand the world. Because the world is heterosexual. Yin and yang. Black and white. Not—” he paused, his face screwed up, a fleck of carrot at the corner of his mouth—“not
gray.
”

All cats are gray in the dark, I thought. I didn't say it. “It takes some intelligence to argue,” Mr. Rose had said the night before at dinner. “Any idiot can disagree.” I didn't want to to sound like an idiot.

Patricia arrived with drinks and a tray of food. “Señora Rose made these specially,” she murmured, pointing to the stuffed crescents.

“I should be nicer to fruits,” Sid said, stretching out his arms and cracking his knuckles, “I really should. It's just I deal with so damn many of them in my business.”

“In magazines?” I said, surprised.

“Oh, God, they're all over magazines,” Mr. Rose said. “You wouldn't believe.”

I frowned and ate a pastry. I loved magazines, I read them all the time, but I had no idea homosexuals were big in magazines. I wondered if I'd be able to pick out which articles they'd written.

“What do you think of this Timbo guy my daughter's in love with?” Mr. Rose asked suddenly. “He quality at all?”

“He's quality,” I said, so quickly I surprised myself, and when I looked at Sally, she was beaming.

 

 

 

“WAIT A MINUTE, wait a minute,” Mr. Rose said. “Both of you, lean in.” He staggered a couple steps closer to us, the camera over his face, knees and hips flexed, toes out. Sally and I were seated at a table on the patio, the espalier behind us. Instead of “cheese,” Mr. Rose exclaimed, “Big future!” We grinned. The flashbulb sizzled. Sally and I were frozen in the moment.

“Great,” Mr. Rose said. “That's a keeper.”

That evening Sally and I stayed seated at the patio table, our only light what seeped out through the windows, and talked about life and got plowed. We had a bottle of vodka, an ice bucket, and a pitcher of fresh orange juice, and when the orange juice and the ice were gone, we drank the vodka straight. We talked about Sally's major (English; she was thinking about law school), my major (English too, but what was I going to do with it?), the guys I'd known, my brothers, Sally's brother, how our parents met. The air was warm, there was a wonderful planty smell, and the shadow of Timbo barely touched me—he was at home in Kentucky, only a name, not a presence. It was Sally and me, me and Sally. Revelations bumped and brushed in the night air. About two A.M. we wandered across the patio to look at the city below, and I remember wanting to push myself over the low wall and fall, fall—not that I was suicidal, not that I would hurt myself, simply as a form of immersion in the night and in the place. The night was perfect, and I had such faith: enough faith to believe, even fleetingly, that the air would enfold me.

The next day I flew home to Ohio.

 

 

 

“THE MAIL'S SLOW. We didn't get your postcard.”

“I didn't send one.”

“Surely you noticed the smog.”

“Smog?”

“Is he a millionaire? From the looks of that house, he surely is.”

“I didn't think to ask him, Mother.”

“How much help do they have?”

“Enough to keep the grass mowed.”

“Are their servants legal? Do they have their green cards?”

“Green cards? I don't know what color their cards are. Their uniforms are light green, does that count?”

“You know what they say! Behind every great fortune, there's a great crime.”

“Mother, please? I'm trying to read the paper.”

I could close my eyes and summon up that magic world, Sally and me in her Kharmann Ghia driving down one of those famous canyons, windows open, music spilling from the car. I could close my eyes and summon up that world.

 

 

 

IN LATE AUGUST 1975, ten days after I returned from Los Angeles to Ohio, Timbo was killed by a drunk driver. Sally flew to Kentucky for the funeral. Timbo's mother, it turned out, was odd. “What do you mean, odd?” I asked over the phone. Oddness to me was positive, but clearly Mrs. Timmey's oddness wasn't good.

“It's a funny thing,” Sally said. “You talk to her and you realize she's odd, and that makes you think, what is odd? What is it about a person that makes them odd?” Sally sounded exhausted, her voice raspy and soft with an undercurrent of tears. I could picture her swollen eyes, her damp cheeks. It was the first time, I realized, that Sally seemed adult to me.

Timbo's mother had never stopped talking, about anything that popped into her head. There was no internal censor. “George really liked you,” she had told Sally. “Although maybe it's better you two never got any further, because you're Jewish, aren't you? That wouldn't work with our family. And you're from California, the godless state. People go to naked encounter groups in California. The sin.” What was she saying? Sin was everywhere these days. You had to throw yourself on Jesus' mercy for forgiveness. Timbo's family wasn't going to press charges. Who knows? Maybe George's death was God's punishment.

“Punishment?” Sally had said, incredulous, goaded into speech.

“Don't you know?” Timbo's mother had said. “Didn't you hear?” George had a rubber ring around his privates. His fly was open. He was driving down the road fondling himself when the other car crossed the center line and hit him. One drunk, one onanist. Didn't it balance out? Never, never did George's mother think her family would come to this.

“Oh my God,” I said, shocked. I don't think I was very consoling. “Sally, that's so weird.”

Our first night back at Oberlin, Sally said, “I should have slept with him.” We had the same room we'd had the year before, the bathroom and phone still steps away.

“Sally,” I pointed out, “would it have made any difference? You sleep with him in May, he wouldn't be masturbating in August? Maybe he'd be masturbating more.”

“But that ring . . .” Sally said.

I too found the ring an icky touch, although unlike Sally I had heard of such things, from my brothers and their jokes.

I thought of my sweet friend Sally, her memory of Timbo sullied, and Timbo's stupid mother talking, talking, pouring out her sticky grief. A wave of fury hit me. Why did Timbo's mother feel compelled to tell Sally—or anyone—exactly how Timbo died? Why should anyone have to hear about the ring? “Who else did she tell?” I demanded. “Did she stand up and give a speech about it at the funeral? ‘He was a nice boy, my son, but he got what he deserved.' Any loving mother would have kept quiet. Hasn't she heard of death with dignity?”

For an instant Sally looked stunned. The thought that someone could willfully, and with good intentions, withhold something hit Sally the way it had hit me—as a kind of revelation. The Oberlin culture praised honesty, openness, letting it all it hang out. “She didn't have to tell me,” Sally repeated wonderingly. “She didn't.”

I was furious. “Of course not. But everybody's so open these days,” I said angrily. “Everybody's so up front.”

“You're right.” Sally leaned forward with a sudden urgency. “Why
did
she tell me? I wouldn't tell something like that if it were my son.”

“Of course you wouldn't,” I scoffed. “What's the point? She told you because she couldn't stand knowing it herself. She had to dilute the nastiness.”

Sally blinked. “If she had any inner strength, she wouldn't have told me.”

“Of course. She has no inner strength.” I paused, then spat it out. “She's not
quality.
”

 

 

 

A COUPLE OF GUYS from Timbo's old dorm had been at the funeral, so I assumed they knew. The word must have spread through the dorm, then leaked onto campus through girlfriends, classmates, friends of friends, acquaintances, professors. I heard about it in psychology class, only the ring had metamorphosed into a whole contraption, a blowup thing like a blood-pressure cuff, and the accident had been solely Timbo's fault.

“Guess the moral is, don't diddle and drive,” someone said.

“Shows what a frustrated id will do.”

“Sad. Did he have a girlfriend?”

“Yeah, but . . .” Laughter and shaking of heads. My face blazed, I bit the inside of my cheek. These were my classmates? These were people I was supposed to feel close to? I'd thought this college was supposed to be liberal.

In our dorm there were debates in the halls. Both males and females participated. What, really, was wrong with a penis ring? What was wrong with masturbation? Didn't everybody masturbate? Should the fact that Timbo was wearing a masturbatory aide diminish his death in any way? The debates often deteriorated, going from principles of freedom into talk of things the ancient Greeks did, or the Chinese metal masturbation balls mentioned in
Our Bodies, Ourselves,
or the true meaning of the lyrics to “Layla,” which ostensibly no woman understood. Eventually, people dissolved into their rooms, less edified than stirred up.

“I hate that,” Sally said. “I don't want to hear about masturbation every moment of my life.” For a while, to escape the talk, she took a circuitous path—through a fire escape door and stairwell—to and from our room. Then one day she got angry. She held her head up and walked right past them.

“Nobody ever says anything to you, do they?” I asked.

“Are you kidding?” Sally answered, her tone scathing. “They wouldn't have the balls.”

Balls? I thought, smiling to myself. Did Sally really say “balls”?

 

 

 

MARGARET—MY FRIEND with no cultural references—accompanied Sally and me to the Campus Restaurant for breakfast. “Do you like bacon?” Margaret asked Sally, then quickly put her hand over her mouth. “Oh. I'm sorry.”

“What are you talking about?” Sally said, although I'm sure she knew.

“Clare told me you're Jewish,” Margaret said in a confiding tone.

“And?”

Margaret seemed to realize at this point that she'd said something wrong, and her voice took on a mild whininess I'd heard before. “Well, pork, pork,” she said, and went on about the Bible and its dietary laws, which was something she knew about from Sholom Aleichem and
Fiddler on the Roof.
I felt sorry for her. It had been hard to be raised in Guatemala with nobody around but missionary Baptists and native Catholics, no TV, no movies, no cosmetic ads. She'd never heard of Max Factor!

“Half the students at this college are Jewish,” Sally said. “Do you see people eating bacon in the cafeterias? Do you see many men wearing yarmulkes?”

Margaret believed more in the images she got from movies and TV and reading than in what she could look around and see. This was her sublime goofiness, one of the things that made her, for me, such fun to be with. But I could see it drove Sally crazy.

“People away at college are known to deny their backgrounds,” Margaret said. “I'm sure the Jewish students don't eat bacon when they're home.” Her voice became almost belligerent. “And I bet a lot of them wear skullcaps, too!”

Sally shot me an incredulous look and asked Margaret, “Do you have any idea what my father's like? I'll help you. He's fifty years old and he grew up in a kosher home in Brooklyn. When he was a boy, he never thought of eating a cheeseburger, because that's meat and dairy combined. And now he lives in Los Angeles and he's a businessman. Do you have a mental picture of him?” She was reaching into her handbag. “Does he have a long beard? Does he wear a ‘skullcap'?”

Margaret, stunningly, continued to miss the point. “Is he in the diamond business?” she asked eagerly.