Best Friends (20 page)

I swallowed hard and nodded.

“Hell of a way for it to die.” But no, he didn't really say that. I imagined he said it. You know: I said it to myself.

 

 

 

THE MAN WHO MADE me sick was a musician on tour with a female folk singer I'd never heard of but whose concert I was dragged to by a fan of hers, a female resident like myself. The singer had long blond hair she swooshed around, and behind her hair I caught glimpses of the drummer's chiseled, diffident face. It really was a striking face, a beautiful face, and after the concert, as my friend waited for an autograph, I walked back toward the drum kit and asked the drummer where he'd be playing next. I didn't mean this suggestively, but since he clearly thought I did, I started to believe it too.

My resident friend went home, and the drummer and I went to a bar. The people around us exhibited the same reactions—the despairing glances toward me, the defiantly seductive looks at him—that I had noticed in Venice when I went for my walk with Flavio, which made me realize the drummer was as handsome as I'd thought. As Sally had said, the beautiful do have an effect. Noticing this made sleeping with him inevitable, for how could I turn down the opportunity—which I might never have again—of sleeping with a beautiful man?

I left his hotel room after three A.M., feeling sore between my legs and tainted. He was sound asleep and didn't stir. That he'd never remember my last name was a relief; it was quite another thing when he forgot my first.

 

 

 

ON THE OTHER HAND, no one knew. I got back to my residency rotation a week after I got out of the hospital, telling everyone simply that I'd had an infection. I might have mentioned burning with urination, if anyone pressed me for details. A diabetic woman had just come in with a kidney infection and died, so kidney infections were on everyone's minds. People were actually pretty sympathetic. My senior resident skipped me halfway through the admission rotation, on my first call night, so I admitted two patients while the other two interns each had four. A med student offered to fetch me a Coke from the machine downstairs. My attending had work rounds sitting instead of standing. All these things were big enough deviations from the norm that they truly meant something. I was grateful.

 

 

 

“OH, GOD,” Sally said. “You're in the hospital right now?”

“Right now.”

“You lost the baby,” she repeated. “I'm so sorry.”

Tears came to my eyes. I braced myself for what she'd say next: how it would work out, that a baby wouldn't have been good now, that maybe I secretly hadn't wanted a child, that what happened was for the best.

“I'm just so sorry,” Sally said.

 

 

 

“KAPOSI'S,” Freddie Finkelstein said. “I said, Jeez, that looks like a Kaposi's. You see them sometimes out here, on the legs of some of those old Greeks and Italians.”

“Did you biopsy it?”

“Sure I biopsied it. And the path report came back Kaposi's. You notice how I'm saying it:
KaP
osi's. Those people who say Kap
o
si's, they're all wrong. And then a month later I saw another lesion, just the same, little purple-black raised papule, this time on the back of a male hooker. I knew he was a hooker because he listed escort service as his occupation. I mean, what kind of guy lists escort service as his occupation? And I biopsied this one, and it was Kaposi's too. So I'd seen two in two months, and this is one rare cancer, even in your old Mediterraneans, and these patients were two young homosexual men. So I wrote a letter.
California State Medical Journal,
July 1982. Want to see it?”

AIDS was first identified because doctors like Freddie noticed strange things and reported them—Kaposi's sarcomas in the young; pneumocystis pneumonia in the apparently healthy. A pattern emerged. “So you were a hero,” I said. It was 1984. I was still an internal medicine resident in Ohio then, seeing my first cases of AIDS, usually male homosexuals who'd been diagnosed on one of the coasts and had come home to the Midwest to die.

Freddie smiled slightly, trying, not totally successfully, to look modest. “I try to notice the unusual. My father had a saying: You don't look for things, you don't see them.”

“Was your father a doctor?”

“Tailor.”

I told Freddie about the cases of Kaposi's I'd seen, about the hairdresser whose bed I'd sat on as I gave him the news. “It looks like you may have AIDS,” I said. The diagnosis was harder in those days: in 1984 the agent causing AIDS hadn't been identified, some people didn't think it was a virus, and there was no single blood test for the disease. “AIDS?” the hairdresser replied, his face blank. “Is that related to psoriasis?”

I left Freddie feeling that glow I feel when someone has pleasantly surprised me. I told Aunt Ruby how I'd enjoyed the visit. “He's a smart man, my Freddie,” she said.

I told Sally about it. “That's interesting,” she said, her voice belying her words. “He's such a nar.”

Such an idiot, she was saying. “Not a total nar,” I said.

Sally shrugged. “He's puerile. Look at Daphne,” she said.

But this was unfair. Parents shouldn't be judged by their offspring. And Daphne wasn't that bad. In high school she'd been Sally's closest friend. “Look at Ben!” I felt like saying. Ben had left his parents' house. He was living somewhere, with somebody, doing one drug or another; his parents saw him only in extremis, when he came home and asked for another try at rehab. But Sally had made up her mind about Freddie, and once Sally had chosen her adjective, there was not much I could do.

A year after the annulment of her marriage to Flavio, Sally moved out of her parents' and opened her own law office, for women. To do this, she borrowed money from her father. Her first client was a woman who had been rear-ended. The second lawsuit went to trial, Sally's first ever, and she won big for her client. Then came malpractice claims, slip-and-falls, someone's Dominican maid burned by an overactive pilot light. Sally expanded her ad in the phone book, inserted a photograph of herself looking friendly. She brought in a female tax lawyer because some women, having won lawsuits or gotten settlements, didn't know what to do with their money. Word of mouth about the practice was phenomenal. Within eighteen months, she'd hired two associates. “I'm the avenging agent for the aggrieved,” Sally told me over the phone.

I misunderstood her. “The avenging angel?” I said.

“Agent,” she corrected me. “Believe me”—her tone was almost maniacal—“I'm no angel.”

 

 

 

DURING MY RESIDENCY, I liked the middle of the night best. Maybe I'd get my last admission at one or two A.M., and after that I'd wander the halls and check on my other patients. It's amazing how many people in a hospital are awake, or half awake, or aroused by the shadow of someone at the door at three A.M. I liked to sit on people's beds and talk. About their test results, about my residency, about grandkids, welfare, shooting up heroin, about how before the valley was flooded to make a lake they'd go out on their front porch and yell sheepy-sheepy-sheepy. I've never been crazy about people, but in the middle of the night, they improve. I used to head to the overnight call room after four, knowing but not really caring that I might get beeped again. I felt a kind of euphoria, thinking here I was in Ohio, in the middle of the country, dealing with rich and essential things, life and death and rue and hope, while Sally was in L.A. making money.

 

 

 

I ADMITTED ROGER at about two in the morning. We'd gone through all his history, his lifestyle and habits and weight loss, the cough (“As if I have TB! Really!”), the shortness of breath, the toll on his decorating business, and then I held up a hospital gown for him to put on.

Roger dropped his wrist. “It's a little chi-chi for me, darling.”

“God,” I laughed, “you are such a type.”

“It makes people comfortable,” Roger confided. “Then they can peg me.”

We looked at each other and smiled. It was, although we didn't know it, the beginning of a friendship. It was also the beginning of my career.

 

 

 

“ANYTHING INTERESTING LATELY?” I asked Sally on the phone.

“Oh, the usual. But this is unique: I met with a woman who wants to sue her plastic surgeon for making her breasts too big. She has a case.”

“How do you stand it?”

“It's fun, Clare. Every day I'm arguing. It's fun! And I've almost paid Daddy back, did I tell you? Then I'll feel as if I'm truly”—she hesitated—“free.”

 

 

 

I WONDERED ABOUT the drummer. I wondered if I could be infected too. I checked my back in the mirror for purple-black spots; I waited for a fever, a cough. But I stayed healthy. I had gotten out unscathed.

 

 

 

THE SECOND YEAR of my residency, six months after my episode of pelvic inflammatory disease and in the midst of my first celibate phase, a tall and amusing intern joined my team. He was a Cleveland Indians fan who had been his high school bowling champ, and I married him. This was nearly two years after my divorce from Mark Petrello. I thought I was doing everything right, because with Mark I'd been driven by lust and desperation, while with Ted I found companionship and fun. With Ted lust was not an issue, although it ended up being an issue for him. Ted was crazy for me. The month I met him, I led my team to two excellent diagnoses: the first a fun one due to some neat-staining cells in the urine, and the second a bigger winner that impressed even my physician superiors and turned a patient everyone thought was an impossible whiner into a vindicated sufferer of a rare metabolic disease. Both of these diagnoses awed Ted Standforth. “You're unbelievable,” Ted used to say. I loved being unbelievable. There's no better aphrodisiac than being desired. Even Baxter liked Ted, inviting us to his cabin; my mom thought he was a prize; Sally—over the phone—approved immensely. We had a wedding at my in-laws'—Lizzie and Phil's—church in July 1984, followed by a reception with delicious church-lady-catered food and a clown to entertain my nieces and nephews. Ted and I paid for the wedding, but my mother-in-law planned it: I was too busy being a resident, and my mother, caught up in her teaching and the Portage County Alliance for Progress, didn't have the inclination. All I did was buy the dress and show. The only question I recall Lizzie Standforth asking was what kind of flowers I'd like in my bouquet.

“But Clare, dear,” she said when I'd responded, “tulips are spring flowers.” This was a revelation to me.

“You know,” I told Ted, “for someone so smart, I sure do miss things.”

“Why should you know about tulips?” he countered. “Wasn't your mother too busy rabble-rousing to garden?” That was Ted, always ready with an excuse for me.

He was an only child—his older brother, an Air Force pilot, had been killed in some training accident—and, as I told Sally, Ted was as close to his mother as Sally was to her father. Ted's father didn't talk much. I could see the hypothetical disadvantages of marrying a guy so attached to his mother, but what man would treat his wife better than a man who loved his mom? (Actually Ted made this argument.) Lizzie's phone calls and fretting over the menu and pulling at Ted's tie all touched me, in that inarticulate, stumbly way I get touched, and the only mar in the wedding was my mother pursuing the minister into the church kitchen to talk about repressed Central Americans and the Refuge Movement, an entity she always discussed in capital letters. Did I say that was a mar? It wasn't. It gave Sally and me a chance to poke each other and giggle, and as we pulled out of the church parking lot with Ted and me in the backseat and Sally driving, I felt overwhelmed with serenity and pride, thinking how even though Sally had her fabulous business, even though she was rich, even though both her parents were living, it was
I,
Clare Mann Standforth (I would use Ted's last name socially, at least), who would have a happy marriage.

 

 

 

BEN CLEANED UP, briefly, in the name of gay pride. He moved out of his druggie friends' house and into his own apartment. He got a job with a producer who had done only PBS specials but was planning to unleash upon the world its first serious gay film. Ben's task was to call potential investors, mostly gay males. Ben had a very sincere prewritten appeal, which I heard and found persuasive. It made you sorry you weren't gay, weren't part of that special, talented, misunderstood world. Michelangelo, Walt Whitman, Socrates: Hadn't all the best artists and thinkers been gay? “At least he's not a Scientologist,” Sally said cheerfully. The Scientology headquarters on Sunset was a place we often passed, giving us both a wicked frisson.

“You got any dirt on stars who are secretly gay?” I asked Sally at my wedding.

Sally gave a tinkling laugh. “I'm sure I will!”

 

 

 

THE WOMAN IN CHARGE of the wedding food called me on our honeymoon to report that Ted's mother was having palpitations. I wasn't supposed to tell Ted, because Lizzie would worry if he worried, but somebody should know. “Doesn't she have a doctor?” I asked. I'm on my honeymoon, I was thinking. With Lizzie's
son.

“She doesn't want to bother her doctor,” the woman said. “Can you talk to her?”

“Well, okay,” I said, glancing toward the bathroom door and hoping Ted didn't emerge. I can see now that in this interchange the seeds to the destruction of my marriage were already being sown.