Best Friends (16 page)

 

 

 

WE AGREED LATER that it had been lost time for us, those years she was with Flavio.

“Years?” Sally said. “I wasn't with Flavio for years. We were married twenty months.”

I swore it had to be longer.

“Wouldn't I know?” Sally said. “It was twenty months. Twenty months and two hundred thousand miles. Don't you remember, I got married in March 1981, less than a year after I got out of law school, which was right before you started your last year in med school and met Mark Petrello? And you were only married a few months. You were through with him before Flavio's and my first anniversary.”

“Can that be true?

“Sure it's true. On our only anniversary, Flavio and I were in Los Angeles for once, and we ate out at Trumps, and I remember telling Flavio your getting married and divorced seemed like a dream to me, because I hadn't even met your husband.”

“Well, your life seemed like a dream to me. Every time I opened my mailbox, you were somewhere different.”

“One hundred and eight planes in a year. I kept track. I wrote you to keep myself sane. It seems like a dream to me now, especially with, well, especially now that Ben—”

I hurried to interrupt her. “I wonder what happened to Flavio's sister. You think she's met Princess Di yet, now that Di's come down in the world?”

 

 

 

THE ONLY OTHER PERSON from college with whom I kept in contact was Margaret. She'd gone to chef school after graduation but found that the “important” restaurants didn't want to hire women, so she'd gone to work at a head shop in Cambridge and pursued a degree in library science. She stopped to see me as she drove from Massachusetts westward to a new home and job. She stayed with me three nights, bringing with her in her maroon Gremlin two cats, innumerable plants, a futon, and a boyfriend named Roger. “What's his story?” I whispered as he skulked off.

Margaret shook her head. “I know what you're thinking. I myself thought wow, this fellow looks like Charles Manson! And I was in Guatemala for Charles Manson. But he's really very gentle, Clare. It's just . . .” She pursed her lips and looked around her. “Vietnam, Clare. In a word, Vietnam.”

He hit her, I'm sure; she had a bruise over her right cheekbone which she blamed on an open door. She referred to their twisty rings made of wire coated with colored plastic as “commitment symbols”; they each wore it on their left hand.

They were headed for Salina, Kansas. Windy, Margaret said. Sort of desolate. Did I remember
Bonnie and Clyde
? That kind of landscape. She hoped to find a farmhouse to live in, because having people on top of him drove Roger crazy. She'd be working at a Pioneer Museum, cataloging papers and artifacts. And what would Roger do during the day when she was gone? Margaret frowned. “I think he'll try his hand at making furniture. He'll miss me. It'll be hard.” She looked at me with a modest smile. “He says I keep the wolves from his door.”

 

 

 

SALLY AND FLAVIO BOUGHT a condo in Los Angeles, a place I visited exactly once, shortly after their first and only anniversary and after my divorce. I was already depressed, and their condo depressed me more. It was in Brentwood, allegedly a posh area, but it had stuccoed walls and an outside staircase, and the number 5 in their neighbor's address marker hung upside down. There were a lot of runners in their complex, people passing their windows wearing sleeveless T-shirts and headbands and fancy sneakers. A neighbor's car had a bumper sticker that mystified me: MY OTHER CAR IS UP MY NOSE. I asked Sally about it. “Cocaine,” she said. I laughed and shook my head. It seemed like the only appropriate response.

One night we ate dinner at Sid and Esther's. The food was excellent, better than anyone's mood. “Tell me about Nepal!” Esther said. Sally talked at length, but Flavio sat silent and hunched over, peering down the table.

We had the double-layer pecan pie for dessert. “Tell me about Hong Kong!” Esther said. “I've always wanted to visit Hong Kong.” I got up to use the bathroom. Ben hadn't eaten with us; he and a gang of his friends were in the kitchen. Esther, Sally had told me, let them smoke pot in the garage, so she would know what Ben was doing. “Let's get high and go to Chuck E. Cheese,” I heard someone in the kitchen say, and then there was a general movement toward the door.

 

 

 

NOW, ABOUT MY HUSBAND. His name was Mark Petrello, and he was an emergency room attending doctor, a hotshot who had finished the residency program and been hired on to teach. He was thin, about two inches shorter than me, and he strutted around like a bantam rooster. He reminded me of Prince, the singer, who was popular at the time; in fact, before I fell in love with Mark, I referred to him in the ER as “the Princeling,” a remark everyone who worked there found wildly amusing.

We fell for each other in July, the first month of my final year in med school. I was doing a month in the ER, and a major head trauma came in. The patient had fallen off a platform and landed in some kind of industrial shredder; basically, he had no face. I had no desire to see this and was scurrying out of the trauma room when Mark Petrello, who was in charge of the case, commanded, “I need you.” I thought he meant me and turned around, realizing too late that he was talking to a paramedic, and then I was simply mesmerized, standing there, looking at Mark Petrello at the head of the bed, the bloody not-a-face in front of him, realizing that he was going to try to save this guy, wondering how in the world he'd do it. The first thing you do in resuscitating someone is to establish an airway, either through the mouth (this patient's mouth was unrecognizable) or through the nose (the nose was gone). What would Mark Petrello do? Desperation welled up inside me: even the Princeling could fail. But he extended his arm in front of him and pointed, and then he really did look like Prince striking a pose. Only Mark Petrello said, “Trach kit.”

Twenty seconds later, the guy was breathing through a hole sliced in his neck. Mark Petrello had saved a life. I melted. I knew this was the sort of moment ER docs like him lived for, that he'd just done what any quick-thinking doc would do—he'd been prepared for it, even; the radioed message from the ambulance had told him it would need to be done. Still, it moved me. Sexually, I mean. From that moment, Mark Petrello was my man. And, boy, did we know it.

We were married in less than eight weeks. I think we got married so fast because we were both afraid the other would get away, or our feelings would go away, and Mark's very job, day after day with the almost dead and dying, gave him a sense of perpetual urgency. We got married at City Hall in September 1981. Mark and I were holding hands. We'd brought no witnesses, no family. All that mattered was each other. On the stairs up to the judge's chamber, Mark pushed me against the banister and kissed me. My hands were all over him. The judge had the decency to look amused. His secretary was our witness. “Good luck to you both,” the judge said, shaking our hands. He told me I was a radiant bride, probably a generous comment. I was a hot bride.

We checked into a downtown hotel and didn't emerge for thirty-six hours. I missed a rheumatology clinic, an allergy clinic, and a tutorial on lupus; I also missed (as I pointed out to Mark, indignantly) several meals. Since I'd met him, all my appetites had returned. “So eat me, baby,” he kept saying, stroking my hair. “Eat me.”

His idea of fun could be strange. He and his ER buddies rented gory movies to laugh at their special effects. “God,” they'd say, “another rare levoliver”—meaning a liver on the left side of the body, instead of on the right. “Oh no!” they'd shout. “Another Beefheart Syndrome!”

“Don't you see enough of that blood-and-guts stuff at work?” I asked, incredulous. Sally, who still read the “Movie Guide for Puzzled Parents” in
McCall's,
would die if she were forced to watch these movies.

Mark slumped on the couch, the remote control slipped between his legs. “Sick, isn't it? You like being married to a sicko, sweetheart?”

We consolidated our things into his apartment. I dropped all my inquiries to residency programs in California, because I intended to stay right where I was. And there was no question that, as Mark Petrello's wife, I would be admitted by the internal medicine residency at the university.

Maybe in the future, Mark and I both thought, maybe after my residency, we'd move to California. Mark would be a published hotshot then, a valuable commodity for any trauma center, and I could work some reasonable hours at Kaiser, leaving me time to raise kids. Mark had a friend in California who was an hour from the mountains, an hour from the desert, and right beside the sea. That sounded idyllic. Certainly not a landscape we'd find in Ohio.

 

 

 

I CALLED MY MOTHER after we'd been married three days. Satisfyingly, she wept. “But you're my only daughter!” she said. “Couldn't you have let me be there?”

I called Sally a week later, when I knew she'd be back in Los Angeles from another trip to Hong Kong. “How was Hong Kong?” I said.

“Okay,” she said. “Hectic. How are you?”

“I'm married!” I said. “Just like you!”

It was only after I got off the phone that I wondered at myself.
I'm married, just like you!
What a goofy thing to say. Was that really why I'd gotten married, to be just like Sally? And if not, why had I gotten married, exactly, and in such a dramatic, precipitous way? Why wasn't I changing my name?

 

 

 

THE FIRST HUMILIATION with Mark was when I started rethinking trimethoprim sulfa. Trimethoprim sulfa (trade names Bactrim or Septra) was and is the antibiotic you use almost instinctively to treat a urinary tract infection. It works, but it's not always a harmless medicine. “I saw someone else with a Bactrim rash this week,” I told Mark. “And Pete Hemphill had a patient whose white count dropped to eight hundred. Did you know Bactrim elevates serum creatinine? It decreases the tubular secretion of creatinine, so in a way it's artifactual, but—”

“God,” Mark exploded, “you really are a baby flea, aren't you?” Internists have the reputation for being obsessed with minutiae. Other docs sometimes call them “fleas”—the last ones off a dying dog.

I was furious. “You knew that,” I said. I walked around our apartment, attacking the blinds with a dust cloth. “You knew that.” I wanted to stir up dust. I sneezed and my eyes watered. “So what do you want me to be? A stupid ER cowboy like you?”

The next humiliation: I was looking at our water bill, which for some reason came addressed to Dr. and Mrs. Mark Petrello, not to Dr. Mark Petrello like our usual bills, and it struck me that we should have a joint checking account.

“Why?” Mark said. “I can pay the bills. You don't have any money.”

That was true. I was still in med school; I wouldn't have any money until I started my residency next July. “But we're married,” I said. “Married people have joint accounts. It's a married thing to do.”

Mark gave me a cold look. “Are you going to want alimony too?”

 

 

 

HE WAS A GOOD ER doc, he told me once, because he was always thinking about what he should do next. Let's say he had a woman in ventricular fibrillation, the heart wiggling like a bag of worms. First, of course, Mark would shock her, then shock her again, and in the meantime he'd be running in bretylium, and he'd be thinking in the back of his mind that the woman could go flatline, in which case Mark would give her atropine, then epi, then maybe an external pacer, and there was always the possibility after a pulse was restored that the woman would be hypotensive, in which case Mark would run in fluid, then dopamine, then levophed, then if that didn't work, Mark could even stick a needle in the heart, drain off any fluid that might be compressing it. A whole tree of possibilities grew in Mark's brain in seconds, and one of the branches, surely, was the branch he would need to climb. He could make decisions quickly. He didn't have doubts and regrets. If A didn't work, he'd try B. If B didn't work, he'd try C. Et cetera. “What if you get to X-Y-Z?” I asked. “What if you can't think of anything else?”

He laughed. “Sweetheart, haven't you heard of death?”

 

 

 

THE FINAL HUMILIATION was an ER nurse, Leslie, who lifted weights and ran and liked to talk about high-protein drinks and the gun she kept in her car. Mark slept with her probably twice a week. I knew it was twice a week because about that often Mark came home smelling like lavender. Why such a hip chick wore lavender, I'll never know.

We were all together at the ER staff Christmas party. There was a loud band, but I wasn't dancing. I was drinking. The Princeling was dancing all over the place. He danced with most of the ER nurses, then with a homely girl from transcription. Leslie the Lavender Lady was standing near my table.

“Are you going to dance with the Prince?” I asked. I was drunk.

“Maybe I should,” Leslie said, “maybe he needs a faster woman.”

My hips and thighs—always my problem areas—seemed to get bigger and heavier until I was simply a lump sitting in the chair, and it didn't surprise me at all when skinny little Mark, my sprite, after dancing with Leslie, came over and looked down at me with what could only be contempt. “Clare,” he said, “look at you. Have you moved one centimeter since we got here?”

Our marriage lasted six months and sixteen days. I was lucky to get out that fast. I wouldn't have gotten out that fast on Sally's power, because all she did during our phone conversations was listen and sigh, and occasionally throw in a word or two about where she and Flavio had come from or where they were off to.