Best Friends (15 page)

“Daddy!”

“A hundred thousand if you don't tell me until it's over.”

“Daddy! That's si-ick!”

“Thank God I only have one daughter. At Ben's wedding I can sit there and drink.”

 

 

 

“TO MY BEAUTIFUL, wonderful bride,” Flavio said, lifting his glass. It was the dinner for out-of-town guests the evening before the wedding. A modest supper, only seventy or so attendees, held in the private dining room at a dark Italian restaurant. I smiled at Sally. She reached across the table and touched my hand. Sid was smiling, Esther was smiling. And Flavio, standing over Sally: I had to admit he looked sincere.

“God,” Daphne said loopily, her long hair even bigger than usual, curling over the tops of her arms, “doesn't it make you want to get married?” I didn't even answer. Daphne didn't bother me on this trip. She was a bridesmaid, true, but I was maid of honor.

 

 

 

FLAVIO'S FATHER AND SID both approved of nuns. Sid pointed out with pride that two nuns, former teachers of Sally's, would attend the wedding. “You must introduce me,” Flavio's father said. He was short and lined, like a thin Aristotle Onassis, with long tobacco-stained fingers. He'd been hidden in an Italian convent during World War Il, and his lifelong business was imports-exports; after dessert one evening, he swept from his pocket a wooden box containing cigars that were really, truly Cuban. “You're kidding,” Sid said, examining the little gold band. “You smuggle these from El Salvador or something?” Flavio's father only smiled.

The mother was blond and glamorous, with a peculiar lisp that was either an accent or a speech impediment. She was Shpanish, she said, and when I looked blank, she spoke louder: from Shpain. I volunteered to speak Spanish with her. “I like English,” she said. “Ish more practical.” She nodded at Flavio and Sally, who were cooing at each other down the table. “Shpanish ish the language of looove.”

I got such a kick out of that. Unlike other lines, this one for me maintains its innocence. About Flavio's mother I remember little else.

“We're delighted with her,” Flavio's father said at one point. “We were not sure Flavio would marry.”

“That's impossible!” Daphne cried. “He's so handsome.”

“We are delighted with her,” Flavio's father repeated.

At some point I started wondering exactly what the export-import dealings were—if Flavio's father was an arms dealer, for example, or a shipper of plutonium or chemicals, or a smuggler of drugs. “What exactly do you import?” I asked him flat out at the wedding reception, where he and I, at the head table, were separated only by his wife. The wife raised her eyebrows and leaned back, clearing the space between us for his answer.

“Have you heard of tchotchkes?” Flavio's father said.

I had. It was one of those colorful and useful Yiddish words I'd learned from Sid. “You mean knickknacks?” I asked. “Little souvenir-y things?” To impress him with my knowledge, I gave examples: ashtrays stamped with pictures of Niagara Falls; dome paperweights you turned over to sprinkle snow.

“Exactly,” Flavio's father said. “That is my business. My business is tchotchkes. I have factories in Taiwan and Hong Kong.”

“Oh my,” I said, chuckling. I chuckled so much I could tell I was exasperating him, but because I was drunk, I didn't care.

A bathtub-size vat of shrimp. Mountains of flowers. Four hundred and fifteen rented chairs slipcovered in black or white with contrasting bows, and three open bars. Two ice sculptures, the larger a ship with sails on a wave-tossed sea.

“What's the ship stand for?” a short man with a cigarette holder asked Sid. “That the boat your grandparents came over on?”

His wife elbowed him. “I like it,” she assured Sid. “Something different from the usual swan.”

There was an orchestra in the main dining room and a string quartet in the foyer, not to mention the roving mariachi band from East L.A. whose members seemed to be mysteriously changing, a band that Ben, in charge of the music, had insisted upon as
auténtico.
And in the center of this was Sally—no, she wasn't in the center, she was whispering to Flavio behind the potted bougainvillea, she was nodding as Esther gesticulated at some guest, she was standing very close to me watching the guests pile up hors d'oeuvres. “This is a big wedding,” she said in a wondering tone.

“You should have gone for the boat.”

Sally laughed and shook her head. “You know Daddy!”

And the thing was, I thought I did.

Ben had a friend at the wedding, a young man named Ray, who wore a poorly fitting suit and lank bangs that half covered his eyes. As Daphne and I stood waiting for Sally and Flavio to cut the wedding cake, Ben and Ray were nudging each other and laughing. “We can tell about Daphne,” Ray said, “but what are you, Clare?”

“I'm the maid of honor,” I said.

Ben and Ray broke into a fresh round of guffaws. “No, not your role in the wedding, essential as it undoubtedly is,” Ray said. “We mean, what are you? Homo? Hetero? Bi?”

“Hetero,” I said quickly. I stood on my tiptoes to get a glimpse of Sally, hoping Flavio didn't shove cake in her face. “How old are you, anyway?”

“God,” Daphne said, sighing, “you can just see it. Soul mates.”

Ray jutted out his chin and shook the bangs from his face. “I'm sixteen. I've, like, got my license and everything.”

Sixteen. The same age as Ben. People definitely grew up faster in California. “What about you?” I asked.

“Oh, Ray's definitely gay,” Ben said. “Gay Ray.” He turned to Ray for confirmation. “Right?”

Some older people around us were wrinkling their foreheads and inching away. Daphne frowned at Ray and shushed him. At Oberlin my junior year, I had participated in a “happening” that was actually an art class project. My classmates and I stood in a soccer field and knotted ourselves into various positions, and people who walked by us looked both curious and uncomfortable, although I felt cool and unthreatened. Ray and Ben reminded me of myself doing that project, and I thought of the giddy superiority they must feel.

“I don't know what I am,” Ben said.

“You like guys, face it, you're a guy guy,” Ray said. Sally and Flavio were motionless, like ornaments, facing the cake, Flavio behind Sally with his left arm around her shoulder, his right hand clutching her wrist. Sally held the knife. I realized they were posing.

“But I like girls too,” Ben said.

Ray giggled. “Maybe you're a lesbian.”

“I hope he shoves it in her face,” Daphne said. “That's so cute when they do that.”

Flashbulbs clicked. Sally turned her face to Flavio and smiled. “Excuse me, guys,” I said, moving away.

Later, Sally and Flavio were dancing, the other occupants of the head table had drifted off to mingle, and I was the only person sitting when suddenly a woman was standing beside me, juggling her plate and a drink and chatting away. She was wearing a straw hat with feathers sticking over its brim. I missed the beginning of what she said. “They're not all blue, but most of them are,” she continued.

The wedding, like the slipcovered chairs, was black and white with rose accents, and it wasn't until years later that I had any idea what this woman was talking about. At the time I thought she was an ingrate, making to me, a member of the wedding, snide remarks about the reception and its cost.

“I guess that's where the money is!” she said cheerfully, her immense head bobbing. Her nose resembled a beak. I was tempted to reach up and dislodge a feather.

“And if you think about it,” she went on, “what is it but entertainment, and what's wrong with that? This whole town's built on entertainment.”

“Excuse me,” I said. “Little girls' room!”—wondering if she'd recognize this as an insult.

There must be lots of money in tchotchkes, I thought in the bathroom. Two rich kids: a marriage of tchotchkes and magazines. My wedding would be nothing like this. Maybe I'd elope to Las Vegas, save myself the ignominy of a church chapel and a tacky reception hall. Magazines and tchotchkes. It made you shake your head. And yet how better to make money than on things people used every day? I looked around for ideas. Toilet paper! Lipstick! Hairpins! There was a purity to it. It wasn't like money made on cattle futures or loan-sharking. It was respectable money. My hair, which I'd had tied up, had half fallen around my shoulders. I hoped I'd look presentable in the wedding pictures. Now I looked looped. “You little alky, you,” I said to myself in the mirror, wagging a finger. As I walked back out the bathroom door, I fell off my shoes.

THE NIGHT BEFORE the wedding, Sally and I lay in the dark in her bedroom and talked. She'd thought she'd never get over Timbo, that she would be a kind of premature widow, an excellent lawyer consumed only by her cases. She'd written off her whole sexual being. And then, out of the blue. . . .

“He's so good,” she said, propping herself up on her elbow. “Can't you see how good he is? I told him about Timbo, and he cried. He didn't laugh, he cried!” She sighed. “Am I lucky. I'm blessed! There's no other word for it. I'm blessed.” She reached out and touched my arm. “You'll be blessed someday too.”

I thought about my former anatomy partner, who'd told me as we stood in line for a movie that he might someday love me more than his own mother. “Your mother?” I'd answered, astonished. “I'm competing with your mother?” I'd had to let him down, and fast.

I thought about Dan, my chem-professor lover, who, according to a former French major Sally had run into, was still married, still teaching in Cleveland, and now had two children.

Sally fell asleep, her breath coming calm and easy. It impressed me that, on the eve of her wedding, she fell asleep before I did. She seemed to be suffering nothing; no anxiety or regrets or self-censure, when here I was seething with all of them. It struck me once again how different Sally and I were. At Sally's inner core there was a kernel of faith, while at mine there was a kernel of anger. In a funny way we complemented each other. “I love you,” she always said over the phone. And she did. I loved her too. I was not an endless drag on her, I was a help. I kept her from too much faith. Thinking this, I finally fell asleep.

 

 

 

SALLY AND FLAVIO were still dancing. Arthur Murray had given them their money's worth. At one point I collapsed on a chair beside the dance floor, and there they were six feet from me, entwined, barely moving. They didn't see me. Sally reached her right hand up and cupped the side of Flavio's face, murmuring something. Flavio dipped his face into her hand and nuzzled her, his hand moving over her breast. She moved closer and he kissed her hair, and then she pulled back a bit and looked up at him, her face so open and radiant that tears came to my eyes. What a creep I was to doubt them. They rotated, and Flavio's face came into view, his head cocked and wistful, his eyes gazing at some inward picture. I thought at that moment I could read his mind, that he was thinking of their future together. I stood and slipped quickly away before they turned again and Sally could see me.

I stayed for three days after the wedding, helping the guests gather up their belongings, driving people to the airport, sitting around in the evening watching videos with Sid and Esther. I hoped I hadn't made a fool of myself at the end of the reception, doing some sort of jitterbug with Flavio's cousin, but no one mentioned it. I didn't even remember Flavio and Sally's leaving the reception for their honeymoon.

Who would I visit now in Los Angeles? Where would I stay? When Sid drove me to the airport, he hugged me—something he'd never done before—and as my plane moved off from the gate, I was startled to see him waving from the waiting-room window.

 

 

 

IN THE MONTHS AFTER the wedding, I got postcards, an occasional airmail letter, a call when Sally and Flavio got back to Los Angeles, which she at least considered their home. She quit her new job, which to me was astonishing, since I knew how focused Sally was. I wanted to ask her if she'd lost her ambition, but I didn't dare. “I'm a wife,” I imagined her saying, chastising me in a surprised tone. I gathered that she considered the energy she threw into wifedom equivalent to the energy she'd thrown into law school, although I never asked her this directly. I couldn't; I never saw her. Her wifedom was certainly not conventional, no dinners at home or redecorating, no children or carpools. The places they went were amazing, and for what seemed to me extravagantly extended periods—six weeks, two months—or decadently short ones. They once flew to London for a wedding and were back in three days. I got missives, words from the front: Hong Kong was very very busy. In Paraguay, bugs the size of matchbox cars skittered across the sidewalks, smuggling was the major industry, and everything was named for the dictator. Morocco was bustling and calm, relaxing and sinister, and the people they stayed with were Americans who dressed in Arab clothes. The Nepalese were cheerful and welcoming, although the altitude gave Sally headaches. Everywhere there was some business, everywhere Flavio or his father or his cousin had contacts, and they stayed at people's houses or at the company apartments and visited English-speaking clubs and attended far-flung bar mitzvahs. Somewhere in this time I heard the word “Eurotrash,” and I wondered if Flavio was that. No, I thought, he seemed to work hard, whatever he did. Sally said he'd often have meetings all day, and she was stuck with the wives and daughters or, better, by herself at a hotel, which she could use either as a base to go out and explore a city or as a retreat. Their life was unimaginable, beyond glamour. I bought a world atlas. I imagined going on a trip with them to see what it was like. I told Sally once—when she called me from Rio on my birthday, the connection eerily clear—I'd love to simply
be
her for three weeks. “It's busy,” she said—not the adjective I'd expected, and the precision of Sally's adjectives was something I admired.