Funny Once (14 page)

The cost of that first love, that first real love, was the friendship with Rochelle, who did not like to lose, yet whose tragedy that continued to be. No matter Cara’s pleading, no matter the evidence that Rochelle could
always
find men, and Cara could
never
, or hardly ever, or with such monumental difficulty, no argument would budge her. Rochelle seemed bent on an ultimatum: either him or me. For the remainder of that year they lived as enemies, occupying their tenancy as if on shifts at a plant, guards of the same inmate, Rochelle camping out at the econ prof’s office, Cara across the street at Louis’s, occasionally glimpsing from his apartment window the shadow of lean and miserable Rochelle in theirs.

Cara pretended to have given him up when in fact it was he who left Cara, he who began sleeping with the ballerina in her thirties, the sophisticated beauty who’d also grown up in the city, who had a life history he more readily recognized and esteemed. He would have continued to sleep with Cara, but it wouldn’t have been the same. She was somebody, she learned, who had to be the only one.

To explain her heartache she ran back to Rochelle, spinning the tale of having chosen their friendship over Louis White. Her sobbing grief was real, a useful side effect, a purported sacrifice, tribute to their friendship. She was practical, that way; hadn’t farm life taught her to improvise, to make the most out of what otherwise could not be controlled, weather and animal plague and government fickleness?

They swore then that they would never say goodbye to each other. Never.

“April doesn’t
look
so terribly cruel, does it?” Rochelle said of the sunny day outside the cab.

“There’s studies that say April is when last summer’s vitamin D runs out. That’s why people get saddest then.”

“Let’s blame April.”

“Yes. The month of April: Discuss.”

Their trouble was joined together now instead of being borne separately, en route to sturdy, busy Manhattan. Suddenly Cara’s issues felt more thrilling than frightening. It was the possibility of impending freedom, a promising new love. She had already been chatting online with potential future mates. The world was opening again, as if once more in bloom, she could embrace it, April was also spring! Yet a small part of her trouble panicked her, the damage she would cause her boy. The hurt she would be responsible for in her boy’s father, whose feelings mattered to gentle Emmett. She’d kept this husband longer than the others, and had brought something substantial into the world with him.

A bad dream had provoked her reaching out to Rochelle. A dream in which her punishment had been Emmett’s death. In the dream, she had already made a choice, a dooming one, and she had woken profoundly shaken, Emmett dead and buried. She had reached out because it had seemed a portent.

And there was Rochelle, reaching back. Now here they were in this too-warm cab, the city skyline from the bridge a nostalgic sight, the stiff creak of the seat and the exhausted suspension of an overdriven vehicle familiar and real, hair oil smudging the windows. Cara was feeling immeasurably reassured already. Divorcing her husband did not mean killing her child. That was nonsense. She had Rochelle as well, this steady witness and friend, this presence beyond all others. Rochelle reminded her that she, Cara, did not discard all intimacies, was capable of loyalty and love.

“You’re from Russia,” Rochelle now said to the driver, gargling something along the lines of “I visited recently” in his native tongue. The man flicked his gaze to the rearview, then shrugged.
So what?

“Yalta wasn’t at all what I thought it would be,” she said to Cara. “I mean, true, it was winter instead of summer. I went right to the cliffs and looked down at the waves. Big deal.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cara answered, “but keep going.”

“On the other hand, I guess I was actually warned of the same . . .” She stroked her dog, in her bag, mindlessly. “If I willed you Sylvia Plath, would you not be mean to her?”

“I would. Would not,” Cara corrected. “I mean, I’ll do what you want.”

Rochelle reached across to lay her other plump freckled hand on Cara’s knee, which gave Cara a place to look, to realize that she would recognize that hand anywhere, that she’d been familiar with it for longer than any other hand in her life besides her own.

“Is it back?” she asked the hand.

“No, no, that’s not it,” Rochelle said, checking around for something wooden to knock, settling on the scarred plastic divider between them and the Russian. “I’m clear, there.”

“Then what?”

“No, you first. I want to hear about you first, and only after we’ve had a few.” Cara began putting together the story she’d not been able to frame aloud for anyone else. The story of the perhaps end of her current marriage, the conceivable explosion of her life. Emmett was what gave it extra gravitas, that dear twelve-year-old boy, he who’d only in the last year quit requiring Cara to tuck him in at night. In one way, it was easier to think of leaving, since she would still have Emmett. And in another way, it was considerably harder.

“Why did I bring so many books?” Rochelle said of her heavy suitcase at the hotel curbside.

“Mine’s full of shoes.”

“There’s us in a nutshell, all right.” Rochelle had retired from the law nearly a decade earlier, choosing to travel and read books. Combining the two, in fact, taking literary tours of England, Mexico, Ireland, France. “All I want to do is read,” she’d confessed in her thirties. “I’d rather read than anything else, even sex. Even eating. Is that terrible?” This was rhetorical; Rochelle had already made peace with loving literature. It was her religious practice. She’d pilgrimaged on its behalf, this past year to Russia; Cara had the postcards to prove it, her son the pretty stamps.

Her son, whose godmother was Rochelle; Cara had had to argue with her husband about it. He’d wanted his brother and his brother’s loathsome wife to be assigned. Cara, however, had prevailed. The fact that Rochelle had started Emmett’s college fund had been helpful.

“It’s not terrible,” Cara had said, of Rochelle’s passion for reading. “I wish I could be that satisfied with a book.” She would read what Rochelle recommended, always with the dim suspicion that she was being scolded or diagnosed, certainly cared for in a unique way, and shy about being grateful for the lesson, even if it stung. Some of the books in that suitcase were surely destined for her.

But Cara admired Rochelle’s love of literature the way she did Rochelle’s approach to men, envious of what she could not truly understand. This was, in fact, only half a lie. Over time, many things about Rochelle had become curious to Cara. Why didn’t she want the trophy, the husband, for instance? The proof that she was uniquely desirable? In the beginning, Rochelle had been a kind of sick collector of men, torturing herself with one obsessive inappropriate object of affection after another—those men who were either married or in some lethal position of power in the same law office, or were vastly younger, or, once, horrifyingly older, not to mention married, another time ludicrously famous, a sickening, hopeless pursuit, but what they shared, time and again, was unavailability. They would not choose her, when the time came to choose.

“Why don’t you want to be chosen?” Cara had pleaded. It was only Louis White who’d turned her away, long ago, only Louis who had been the one to break her heart, instead of the reverse. Had he taught her how not to thoroughly risk her heart? Perhaps. Rochelle’s aching romances gone wrong had led, in the old days, to skeletal thinness and tragic dark circles and cigarettes being lit off the burning embers of other cigarettes. Cara had been jealous. No healthy habit or athletic regimen had ever driven her to such desperately tawdry loveliness. “Why do you keep opening the same wound?”

“I don’t
know
,” Rochelle had wailed, miserable, the beautiful blue veins in her temple pulsing. “I don’t think it’s on purpose?”

Hardly anything on purpose was interesting, Cara had told her, not knowing if that was true or not, but feeling it was right to say. Now it was difficult to recall that version of Rochelle, that fragile unconfident woman with the straggly black-dyed hair, that open book of need splayed on the barroom table or hotel bed. This new version, which had grown—literally!—over time, did not recall or suggest that girl; this woman seemed the mother of her,
grand
mother, even, patiently knowing, padded, calm, gently dismissive. Her hair white, her clothing like the sheets or tarps thrown over furniture or cars, coverage against the elements, nothing more, her shoes those of the service industry, nurse or chef or custodian, she was at least double the weight she’d once been, twice the size. “I am vast,” she would say. “I contain multitudes.”

Before she quit dyeing her hair, people sometimes asked when was her due date.

“You haven’t changed a bit,” Rochelle always said, and Cara never once thought it could be anything but a compliment. Unlike Rochelle, Cara was terrified of letting herself go, and so remained ever alert and loyal to the self-conscious fear she’d found at age fifteen, under the gaze of boys and men, what they reflected back to her paramount. Without a mirror, she panicked. In the photographs from thirty years ago she and Rochelle looked so alike as to be mistaken for sisters, not quite twins, but nearly so. They had tended, each of them, to adopt the accents and attitudes of those they were near, the Midwest being a state of mind eagerly abandoned. Ohio, Indiana: Ohoosia, they named their commingled states of origin. And soon they squawked like New Yorkers, their parents horrified that first Thanksgiving, the two of them on the telephone disparaging the fat content of the meal, the dull dullness of dullsville. Cara’s grandmother hadn’t recognized her when she came through the mudroom.

“Oh my lord,” she said, clutching her bodice.

“Your hair,” lamented her father.

“Don’t lose any more weight,” warned her mother.

Cara could still summon up the picture she’d made of Rochelle’s home in her mind, replaced eventually by the reality, an enormous tall-windowed house in the college town where her parents were professors, and where Rochelle had, in high school, had all manner of promiscuous misadventures with both the town
and
gown elements. Cara had gone to that home to help Rochelle remove her mother from it. Professor Emeritus Carmichael had opened the doors to the animals and weather; she appeared to be subsisting on kibble herself.

“I think it was the coyote that was the last straw,” Rochelle had said. She had taken Cara on a tour of the bars that had hosted her misspent youth. “I mean, you would not really guess this, to see her now, but my mom really had a stick up her ass about housekeeping, once upon a time. I mean, she used to make us leave our shoes on the porch.” The neighbors had complained to the city. Cats were one thing, and owls another, and raccoons and opossums and squirrels and the occasional wild dog, and deer, well, deer, but coyotes? Somehow the upper echelon of the food chain . . .

“I look like my mother, don’t I?” Rochelle said now at reception, her mind having gone, as it often did, to the same place Cara’s had, perhaps not by the same route, but arriving there regardless. Maybe the man checking them in had mentioned AARP? “Don’t worry, I could not care less. I am ridiculously smitten with my own mind, so who gives a flying fuck what I look like?”

“That’s so enlightened,” Cara said carefully.

But Rochelle just laughed. “You are so full of shit. Gimme my wallet, will you?”

Rochelle rode the elevator up; Cara took the stairs, working her biceps with her suitcase. The hotel was extravagant, dark, filled with the possibility of rock stars and famous athletes, because that was a luxury Rochelle still indulged in, most others necessarily abandoned. Her father’s death had led to her early retirement, the large inheritance having bankrolled her jobless life for a while. Later, she’d sold the art and antiques that he’d left, an Indiana house’s worth of items in her family for generations, and she indifferent toward them. Only more recently had she had more difficulty affording her languor, yet never agreeing to Cara’s offer of a loan. A gift, it would have been. Cara would, could afford to, give it, but Rochelle was fierce in declining. It was part of who she was.

They settled at the seventh-floor bar before taking their luggage to their room, eager to begin their Lost Weekend, aided by the pulsing drumbeat and no-clocks-or-judgment atmosphere. Rochelle ordered wine and shrimp cocktail and crab cakes, Cara vodka neat. The dog was brought a saucer of water, which it turned its nose up at.

“How often have you been in love?” Cara had asked Rochelle once. “Truly in love?”

“Dozens of times!” Rochelle had said. “Or maybe never? Once? And I already know how many times you think you’ve ‘been in love, truly in love.’ Three.”

“Wrong,” Cara lied. “It’s four. And don’t think I didn’t notice that totally unnecessary ‘you think,’ because I did.” That she’d not been in love with two of her three husbands was understood; the ring on her finger reminded her, mostly, that she could always get divorced and take it off.

Upon hearing Cara’s dilemma, a not unfamiliar one, Rochelle nodded atop her loose and fleshy neck, offering the opinion that unhappy married parents were worse than divorced happy ones. Further, Rochelle believed that Cara’s husband was entitled to know the truth, however painful. Would Cara, Rochelle inquired, want
him
to keep such news from
her
? Adults, to Rochelle’s way of thinking, ought to be accorded respect from one another. Rochelle, Cara was kind of puzzled and hurt to behold, was not very interested in this problem of Cara’s, sort of phoning in the advice, her estimable mind quite clearly elsewhere. Here at the bar with the ubiquitous television playing behind them, it seemed not very exciting or worth discussing, unsexy even, vaguely maybe juvenile? Perhaps they hadn’t had enough to drink yet?