Best Friends (19 page)

“I'M GETTING INTO FILM,” Sid said. I tried not to be alone with him—afraid of what he'd tell me about Ben, what questions he'd ask about Sally—but he cornered me. Sally wasn't often where he was anymore: she was busy in the kitchen, reading in her room, taking a long shower.

“Movies! How exciting! You mean you're making them?”

“I'm not making them, I'm bankrolling them. Little movies. Videos, even. We're not talking
Raiders of the Lost Ark.
But I got film school graduates working for me. You believe that? Film school graduates!”

“And you're making what, training films? Films for the army or for companies?”

“Yeah.” Sid looked amused yet pleased. I thought my perspicacity had surprised him. “Training films.”

“Maybe you'll graduate to bigger films.” I was eager to impress him. “Maybe you'll do a Bible movie,” I suggested, remembering how he loved those stories.

“Oh yeah, oh yeah,” Sid said. “A Bible movie. Knock people's socks off. Show 'em what the Bible really is.”

There was one conflagration. Ben was seeing a therapist, a motherly looking woman who came to the house and Ben's room—with its Queen posters and drawn blinds and sweaty smell—two times a week.

Ben met his father in the upstairs hall. “You're bugging my room!” Ben shouted. “I want all bugs out, and I want to see Dr. Morrison in her office.”

“You're crazy,” Sid said.

“You think I don't know a bug?” Ben yelled, heading down the stairs. “I want a car. I'm calling her, I'm going to her office!”

“Who's paying her?” Sid bellowed.

Ben's voice was ice. “You made me this.”

He went to Dr. Morrison's office, and Sid spent time with the door closed in Ben's room. I was in Sally's bedroom, petrified, mesmerized, wondering if I should repeat the conversation to her. She was taking one of her endless showers. It was a tribute to the house's size and insulation that she emerged from the bathroom with no idea what had gone on. “Your father and Ben had a fight,” I whispered. I had been looking under the chairs in Sally's room to be sure there were no bugs here, although I wasn't sure exactly what a bug would look like.

“Really?” Sally said out loud, toweling her wet hair. “Was Daddy riding Ben again?”

 

 

 

SID NEEDED A LAWYER to help him change the name of his corporation.

“I'm sure he's got lawyers,” Sally muttered. “You can't have a business like he has and not have lawyers.”

“Sally, why don't you do it?” I objected. “He wants you to do it. He wants to use your expertise. And it can't be hard.” I was frustrated by her sulkiness.

“Of course it's not hard,” Sally snapped. “That's not the point.”

I wasn't sure what the point was, but I didn't press it. Sid had told me the current name of his company, Crown Publications, was too limited. “It'll be Crown Communications. That's better, don't you think? You can't forget about videos these days. We want to leave the door open to everything.”

I thought Sid sounded savvy. A distributor has distribution channels, so why not use them for other items?

I know, in retrospect, that I was an idiot, that my credulity was almost greater than a reasonable person could understand. And I was smart! I was a doctor! But I never put things together. I never asked Sid more about his work, or Sally about her anger.

Part of me didn't dare question. I saw a family so close it drew together even after betrayal. If I wanted to stay an honorary Rose, I had no choice but to keep quiet. Other than my med school graduation, my family, scattered across Ohio, met once a year at Christmas. My mother phoned only to harangue me, Frank and Eric to solicit medical advice or ask how much I'd chip in for this or that present. Even Baxter didn't communicate with me anymore. He lived in his log cabin now, surviving on odd jobs and barter. To reach him, I had to phone a neighbor. “I'm a hermit,” he said. “That's just what I am. Don't tell Mom.”

But in Los Angeles, in that huge house on a spur off Mulholland, I felt part of a big wide world that made me happy. Even on that miserable trip, I could walk out the sliding doors and onto the patio, in front of the espalier, to gaze at the city below. It was only because of Mark Petrello that I'd ended up doing my residency in Ohio. Afterward, I would move out here.

“WE DON'T HOLD MUCH hope for him,” Sally said after lunch. “He's very anti-gay.”

“He's a write-off,” Ben confirmed. “He doesn't want to accept that his only son isn't going to be out there producing baby Roses.”

“He's from a different generation,” I said. “He probably never had any exposure . . .”

Sally and Ben exchanged glances.

“His business,” Ben said, leaning forward to me but looking at Sally, as if asking what he should say, “his business is full of gays.”

I remembered that from before. It still surprised me. “That's what he told me,” I said. “I mean, magazines! It's not a business you associate with gays, not like decorating or fashion design or something.”

Sally and Ben looked at each other again. “Let me tell you,” Ben said, “he makes a lot of money off guys like me.”

“From magazines? Really? Are gays a good target audience? I guess they would be. You think of them as educated, they have money, they like to read—”

“Clare, stop it,” Sally said, and I was so startled I did.

“Oh Sally, did I tell you?” Ben asked. “I found another bug in the curtains yesterday. I didn't make a peep, and I tossed it out the window. We'll see how fast he catches on. See why we hate him, Clare? See?” A waiter walked past. “Oh, look at that tush. Yum yum. Couldn't you just eat it?”

Sally gave an exasperated sigh. “No,” she said. “I could not. And I don't need to hear if you could, either.”

 

 

 

WHEN I GOT BACK to Ohio, I found a letter from my brother Eric. I knew as I slit the envelope that he wanted something. He had fallen for a fellow Glow Music clerk and had gotten her pregnant. He planned to leave his wife and children. Together he and his new woman—an angel, the love of his life—hoped to open a drive-in restaurant, if only they could get the start-up funds. In the course of the letter, Eric mentioned the names of his girlfriend's children.

“Ginkgo is a boy?” Sally said after a pause.

I picked up the letter again, cradling the phone with my shoulder. “Tahini's a boy too. They're both boys. If I remember right from what Eric told me at Christmas, Tahini's dad was a black guy, and Ginkgo's dad was from Korea or somewhere.”

“Tahini is a food. It's Middle Eastern,” Sally said. “It's sesame paste. You use it to make hummus.”

“I don't think either of the fathers were in the picture when the kids were born. The names are totally hers.”

“You can eat ginkgo, too. Ginkgo nuts. They grow on the ginkgo tree. Are you sending money?”

“God, no. Would you? Eric may never speak to me again. Not that that's a loss.”

“Sad,” Sally said. “But it's interesting, isn't it? All of a sudden you're a doctor, so he thinks you're rich and he can ask you for anything. Still, he's your brother.” Before I could answer, she'd moved on, her voice full of sudden mirth: “I wonder what she'll call Eric's baby. Something all-American. Toast? Tahini, Ginkgo, and Toast, there's a threesome.”

I couldn't imagine the Sally I'd known in college possessing the sharpness—the fury, really—to come up with “Toast.” She was more like me now. It was a loss but it was funny.

Tahini, Ginkgo, and Toast, I repeated. Pretty soon we had the giggles.

“Still, he's your brother,” Sally repeated.

 

 

 

THERE WAS NO GOOD reason for me to sleep with my ex-husband. Whim again. It started with a party at an ICU nurse's apartment where everyone drank too much and even doctors who wore antismoking buttons on their white coats cadged cigarettes and shared gruesome and hilarious stories about death. Mark and I started on either end of a sofa, then he laid his head in my lap, then we went back to our old apartment. I had quit the pill after our divorce, a renunciation of the world of men, but birth control didn't cross my mind that evening. The next morning we were both irritable, less with each other than with ourselves. Eight weeks later, I confirmed that I was pregnant.

 

 

 

IN SOME WAYS I loved my residency. I adored the adventure of it, scurrying to the books to read about something I'd barely heard of, the quandaries of care, the peculiar personalities, the physical exams. I liked going to the residents' lab late at night and staining sputum. I loved finding a spleen. I didn't mind examining people with lice, although a lot of the residents would make the ER nurses give the louse-ridden a Kwell bath before they'd even talk to them. I liked being the calm in the center of the storm, being tough, doing what someone else might not do. I'm the baby of four kids, remember, and the only girl: at times I'd felt like the add-on, the accident (which I probably was). But as a resident, I felt essential. One of my attendings referred to me in writing as “particularly useful.” I will carry that compliment to my grave. I would be happy if it were on my tombstone.

Having said I loved my residency, I should explain that not everyone loved me. I was only modestly popular with patients, which surprised me. After my father's experiences, I thought what every patient wanted was honesty and attention, two things I could certainly give. Yet there was something about me—I sensed it—that made people nervous. I often said the wrong things. I told the daughter of a nursing home patient admitted with pneumonia that I didn't order blood or sputum cultures because they were expensive and what they might show didn't matter—true, but I shouldn't have said it. A woman with secondary syphilis asked the attending doctor to take me off her case. All I had done was say to her, in what I thought was a friendly way, that what she had was probably enough to make her swear off sex forever. I knew what I was talking about, because I'd just encountered something similar myself.

 

 

 

“YOU CAN'T KEEP IT,” Sally said instantly.

“What do you mean?” I said, hurt.

Her voice came through the phone like gunfire. “Do you want to marry Mark again? Is that why you did it?”

“It was an accident! I didn't mean to get pregnant! I wasn't scheming. Sally, you're hurting my feelings.”

“You could put it up for adoption. There are lots of deserving parents.”

“I want to keep it! If I decide to have it. If I have it, I'll keep it. I'd be a good parent.” Wouldn't I? I had an image of myself walking through the L.A. airport with my bundle of baby, a huge grin on my face, going to meet Sally. “I won't even tell Mark, he'll never think it's his. I'm a doctor, I can afford it.”

“Clare, every baby deserves a father. I mean that. I feel that strongly. Where would you be without your father?”

 

 

 

I GOT HORRIBLY SICK. I had a fever, bleeding, pain. I crawled to the phone and called the life squad myself after I woke up on my bathroom floor.

The resident in the ER described my vaginal discharge as “repulsive” (“No offense,” he said a heartbeat later, patting my knee), and the ultrasound of my pelvis showed no fetal heartbeat. I underwent an emergency D and C, then stayed in the hospital for intravenous antibiotics.

I wasn't treated for this at University Hospital, where I was a resident. I was treated at the private hospital next door. I begged the life squad to take me there, where no one would know me. When I was getting sick, I was too embarrassed to go to my gynecologist, and I wasn't about to go to the University Hospital ER and sit in one of the pelvic rooms, my roommate potentially one of those notorious women who leaned out the door in a hospital gown, asking each passing doctor to hurry up and do their exam. This may have been a mistake. Everyone at the private hospital seemed disgusted with me. Even the women bringing meals to my room circled lavishly around my bed. I remember being in the ER, already burning with shame, when the attending doctor asked me why I didn't ask my recent partner to use a condom. “I didn't know him very well,” I said, startled into truth, “and I knew I was already pregnant.”

“This something you do often?” the doctor asked.

I bit the inside of my cheek, hoping I didn't cry. “No.”

“Well, the baby's dead. There's no choice.” I winced a little at his wording—“choice”—did he know I'd thought about an abortion?