Best Friends (14 page)

“The nerve.”

“I said no, I'm his girlfriend. That shut her up. Then I gave her my card. And I'm his lawyer too, I said.”

Sally had never been beautiful, but now she was close. Her hair in its customary wedge had a new sheen, her eyes danced, even her teeth seemed radiant. She looked like one of those girls on the cover of a fitness magazine trotting along with a bicycle, brimming with youth and health. Next to her I looked tired and hard. Like a waitress, maybe, or a night clerk at a twenty-four-hour gas station.

Good breeding stock, I thought. They could have gorgeous children.

But Flavio made me nervous. Talking to him, I was always conscious of his looks, of my looks, of trying not to stare at him, not to flirt with him, to act natural. So of course I was never natural. I remember one afternoon especially, walking along the sidewalk in Venice. Sally stopped to look in a T-shirt shop, and Flavio and I moved on. He was talking about something harmless, his sister who lived in London and dreamed of meeting Lady Diana Spencer, whom she was sure the Prince would marry, because Lady Diana had the only good hair in London. Ah, I teased Flavio, how did those Londoners cope? I looked behind for Sally; we'd gotten too far away from her. Did I perm my hair? Flavio asked, or were my waves . . . natural? He might have gestured to my head, he might have actually reached for my hair and touched it. Still, the closeness of his hand made me breathless.

There was a crowd around a street comedian, and I moved into it. Flavio followed. More people came, pushing Flavio and me closer together. I saw people—both men and women—glance at Flavio. The ordinary-looking ones eyed me with curiosity, even despair. The more attractive ones looked right past me, daring Flavio to look back. The comedian was raunchy. I wasn't sure how much Flavio, with his charmingly limited English, understood. It was warm. I felt like I could faint.

“What is ‘come'?” Flavio asked.

It was too much. He was playing with me. He was playing with everyone: Sally, me, Sally's parents, Aunt Ruby, Uncle Freddie. Suddenly I hated him, his looks, his confidence, the cockiness that made him dare to ask such a question in “innocence.” “We've got to find Sally,” I said, pushing back out through the crowd, willing Sally into my line of vision.

“Flavio!” Sally was waving. “Clare! Look at this cute T-shirt I found for Daddy!”

The T-shirt was gray, with a pseudo-academic seal: PSYCHOTIC STATE.

Flavio smiled warily. “Oh, this is a joke,” he said.

 

 

 

“WHAT DO YOU THINK of him?” I asked Aunt Ruby.

“Ooh, isn't he adorable? I could just eat him up. But I have to say, he isn't the young man I would have picked for Sally. I thought she'd find a
nice
Jewish boy. Maybe a dentist. Or one of those little urologists, they always dress nice and neat. But this one . . .” Aunt Ruby waggled her eyebrows suggestively.

“Sally wants something better,” Sid cut in. “She's not like you, Ruby. She'd never settle.”

“Freddie's a fine husband,” Aunt Ruby retorted. “You can just stop about Freddie.”

Ben, passing through the room, grabbed a handful of pistachios from a bowl. “You talking about Flavio again? All I can say is, guy looks like a fruit to me.”

It was impossible to look at him—the perfectly tousled hair, the cheekbones, the very white whites of his eyes—without getting a clear sense of his sexual worth, a disquietingly transactional vision of his relationships with other people. So just what did Sally have? Was she that charming, that smart, that rich? She was my best friend, but I'd never thought she was that . . . what? That valuable?

Could I ever capture a man like Flavio? Would he ever glance from Sally to me and think: “But wait, I am with the wrong woman”? I had fantasies about him. He knocked on the door of the guest room late at night, he pulled me off the sidewalk into an alley behind a Dumpster and pressed me up against a brick wall.

“Are you sleeping with him, at least?”

“I made a mistake with Timbo,” Sally answered with charming obliquity, both she and I remembering that not sleeping with Timbo had once been her mistake. She gave me a coy smile. “I'm a quick learner.”

 

 

 

“MAY BE SHE'LL MARRY HIM.” Sid and I sat in his family room drinking brandy. I enjoyed drinking brandy with Sid. It made me feel fully adult.

“Maybe,” I agreed. “You think he's quality?”

“He looks good, he's Jewish. He's got money.” Sid shrugged. “Hard to say. What's quality? But then again, what's not to like?”

I laughed.

“What about this guy you're seeing, this former anatomy partner of yours. You going to marry him?”

“Nope,” I answered quickly, thrilled as ever by Sid's blunt questions. “We're splitting up.”

“Why?”

“I'm not in love with him.”

“What do you need love for? You tell me this kid's from a nice family, he's going to med school, he's ambitious. What's not to like? He good in bed?”

I shrugged. “Creditable.”

“What the hell, Clare, why not marry him? You're old enough.” Sid waved his snifter. “Listen, marriage is an arrangement. This love stuff is way overrated. I'm not kidding. I'll tell you something, I've never loved Esther.”

I gulped a sip of brandy.

“It's true!” Sid threw his hands out, the bowl of the snifter balanced on his fingertips. “You ask her. It's no secret. Of course, we don't talk about it, it's not something a woman wants to hear, but I certainly don't love her. It's funny, you know, I could say she's a good wife and mother, but”—he gave a short laugh—“you know her. She's a nice woman, but she's vague. I met her at a dance party at the Brooklyn JCC, has Sally told you that? She was beautiful. Beautiful. And high-class, sure; her father sold paintings to the Carnegies. You know what we talked about that first night? Nuns. They fascinated her.”

I nodded. The cruelty of what he was saying started to creep in on me, like dampness seeping through a coat. I wondered if Esther, in the kitchen, could hear him. I pictured her opening the freezer door, hiding behind the noise of the compressor.

“Because, you know, her father used to sell Catholic art. Those Mother-of-God paintings, you've seen those. Esther had been all over Europe with her daddy. Any of those broomstick-up-the-ass intellectuals could have gotten her, but I got her instead.” Sid glittered with self-satisfaction. “And you know why?” He leaned over the arm of his big chair confidentially, looked up at me with a crooked smile. I braced myself, fearful that he was about to confide some sexual secret. “She thought I was a genius.”

“A genius!” I made the mistake of laughing.

“You don't think I'm a genius? Well, maybe not a genius, but you have to admit I'm pretty smart. I've gotten places. Look at this house. This is a big house, right? And we're not in Idaho, where an acre of land is two cents and a piss in the wind. We're talking real estate here. How'd I do it? You ever think of that? I told you where I came from. I grew up in a tenement, I got five cents for shining the neighbor's shoes, I dropped out of high school and worked for the kosher butcher.” Sid set his snifter on the table, undid the top button of his shirt, reached in to scratch his neck. “Listen, you heard of niche marketing? You know what that is? Targeting a product to a certain group. Finding out just what people want and giving it to them. Lots of little groups, lots of products. Strawberry chewing gum for the strawberry lovers, licorice chewing gum, spearmint . . . you get the idea. Listen, I invented niche marketing. Or maybe I didn't invent it, but I was the first one to apply it to my field.”

I wasn't sure I completely followed him. “You mean to distributing magazines?”

“Distributing, publishing. You talked about it yourself, all those magazines you saw for fishermen. See, I go for the small groups, the special interests.” I pictured again all the magazines I'd seen at newsstands:
Bodybuilding Today
or
Youngstown After Dark,
topics that apparently appealed to someone. “I'm proud of my little business.” Sid smiled at me, his teeth gleaming. For the first time I wondered if the teeth were fake. “Of course, it's not so little.”

 

 

 

“WE'RE COMPATIBLE,”Flavio said, pouring me more wine from a carafe. The lukewarmness of this declaration startled me: he wasn't saying “We're in love” or “We're soul mates,” things I'd heard Sally say about him. Sally was in the restroom. The restaurants he and Sally frequented were different from the ones she and I went to: these places were young, funky. The waiters and waitresses sneered and had aggressively stylish haircuts. They made all Sally's and my restaurants seem out of date, faded, Sid-ish. But Flavio seemed right at home in these places.

There was a fussiness to Flavio, I noticed, which relieved me because I'd always found fussiness unattractive. He poured wine in an overcontrolled way. Some—not all—of his shirts had darts. He wore belts tipped with metal ornaments and large watches with all sorts of dials.

“I have no home, you see? And Sally”—Flavio lisped slightly on her name, it came out “Sa-wee”—“has too much home.” The remark startled me, not that I agreed with it, but it did suggest resources of introspection and judgment I wouldn't have guessed Flavio had. What do you know, I remember noting, surprised, the guy thinks. When to look at him, you'd believe he never thought at all.

 

 

 

“IT'S SIMPLE,” Sally said. “I want him.”

“You mean sexually? Like lust?”

“Of course, but not just that, I want
him.
All of him, all the time. I want the two of us to be a unit. I want to marry him.”

Wasn't this the same thing she'd said about Timbo? She wanted to be part of a unit.

There was something in Sally's face that I was to recognize later in the faces of athletes before a competition, a ferocious resolution, an intense concentration that said
I will not be denied.
It was a frightening look, an intensely private look, as if I and any other outsider were mere impediments.

“Sally, you just met him,” I objected weakly.

“When you know, you know.”

“Is he quality?” I asked, half joking, and Sally cast me a look of such disappointment that I vowed never to criticize Flavio again.

“SALLY'S LIKE THE MOST spiritual person I know,” Sally's cousin Daphne confided.

“Spiritual?” I asked. This adjective had never come to me in thinking about Sally.

Daphne was working part-time in housewares at a department store. She wore earrings dangling with tiny pots and pans. “She's a very old soul, don't you think? Someone like her's not going to get waylaid by lust. I think Flavio's a pretty old soul too, but with men it's harder to tell. I can't look at them with a pure spirit eye. That sex stuff”—Daphne wrinkled her nose—“it gets in the way.” She held out a skillet for me to inspect. “See those concentric circles? They distribute the heat. You won't get any scorching, guaranteed.”

“Maybe I should buy one,” Sally said over my shoulder, returning from a foray into linens.

“Don't you dare!” Daphne scolded. She swung around and thwacked the skillet down. “I'm getting you a whole set for your wedding.” And she did.

 

 

 

IN THE PHOTOS from Sally's wedding, I hate to say it, I look smarmy. I'm grinning too much, my arm over the back of a chair is calculated, overrelaxed. I'm standing too close to Sid, to Aunt Ruby, my head is cocked in a sickeningly perky way. I was Sally's maid of honor in a hotel wedding with over four hundred guests. The wedding was actually scheduled to coincide with my spring break. I went to all the parties. I stayed with Sally at her parents' house. I drove the dresses to the hotel with Aunt Ruby, tossing the keys to Sid's navy Jaguar to a valet, asking the doorman to reach into the backseat for Sally's gown. While Sally and Flavio and Sid and Esther had discussions with the photographer the day before the wedding, I sat beside the pool with the out-of-town guests. “Patricia,” I'd say, gesturing toward one of Sally's young cousins,
“por favor, un helado por la chica.”

“Now what's over that direction?” someone would ask. “Is that the San Joaquin Valley?”

“San Fernando,” I'd correct. Every insult I'd felt in being left out of Sally's graduation was canceled ten times over. I was the fifth Rose.

“Twenty thousand dollars if you two just go out on a boat and elope,” Sid had said. “Fifty thousand if you don't invite me.”