Best Friends (25 page)

“What are you talking about? Aunt Ruby, what—”

 

 

 

SHE'D BEEN LIKE ME at first, shocked and angry, confused, but since then she'd thought about it a lot and talked it over with Sid. Some of the things she'd realized surprised her.

First off, he was good at it. It was a business like anything else, and there were lots of unexpected angles. The politics of cover art. Targeting age-groups. Identifying outlets. “He's good at organization and financing,” Sally said. “And what sets him apart is he gives his artistic people free rein. You wouldn't believe the people he has working for him. Film school graduates, photographers who put on shows at art galleries, prop people who used to work at
Vogue.
And they're all reasonably happy. It's a living, it's a little bit what they hoped for.

“Clare,” she told me, “this stuff is as old as time.”

And he paid everybody. “It's not as if a woman comes in and rolls around naked and leaves without a penny to her name. And the performers are not necessarily educated. How else are they going to survive?”

And then there was the whole matter of the First Amendment.

“See, the other thing he's good at is niche marketing. He has a magazine for shoe fetishists, he has a magazine for people who like to see women smeared with food. You could almost say it's therapy. Can you imagine thinking you were the only person in the world who dreamed about a naked woman covered with blueberries? Think how isolated you'd feel. The magazine lets you realize you're not alone.”

She brought up Timbo. “Isn't it odd our culture can't talk about sex directly, despite all the breasts and legs used to sell cars and beer? Think about Timbo, crashing a car when he was masturbating! He was a victim of sex. And maybe adult magazines, by bringing things out in the open, make people less likely to be victims.”

And the scholarship fund! “How many publishers of adult magazines fund scholarships? I met one of the recipients a month ago, a black guy who studies physical therapy. He was very pleasant. He wore a bow tie.”

 

 

 

“DO YOU TRUST your doctor?”

“Do I trust him? Oh sure, I've seen him for years. My parents saw him, my sister sees him.”

“And you would say he was truthful, he told the truth?”

“Dr. Olsen? Oh yeah, he's always been truthful, he's always told me the truth. Found my mother's cancer. Told me to quit smoking!”

“Were you wearing your seat belt?”

“Yes.”

“Are you sure? You couldn't have forgotten in the excitement of the accident, that you weren't wearing it?”

“I was wearing my seat belt.”

“That's definite in your mind?”

“Yes.”

“That's always been definite in your mind?”

“Look. I was wearing my seat belt.”

Sally sighed and took a sheaf of papers out of her briefcase. “Are you aware that Dr. Olsen, in his deposition, referring to his office records of your visit to him after the accident, stated that you told him you were not wearing your seat belt?”

 

 

 

“IT'S DRECK, BASICALLY, ” Sid said. “You know that word? It means trash. Worse than trash.” He brought up the topic, not me; Sally must have told him, in a whispered conference in the foyer, that I knew. I'd sat silently through the whole meal, thinking of the scathing remarks I'd planned but unable, somehow, to say them. We were back in the dining room with the peach enameled table, where the Pollock had once hung on the wall (replaced by a super-realistic painting of a girl and a dog), where I had, years ago, first tasted bouillabaisse and chardonnay. The conversation was overpolite, off, and the first hint of passion were in these words of Sid's.

“I admit it, it's dreck! That's why I hit it off with Flavio's father: he made tchotchkes, I made dreck. I got into it through the back door. I distributed magazines, I really did, I had those trucks piled up with the latest issues. We'd go back and reclaim the stuff that wasn't sold, and here's what I noticed: the blue stuff didn't come back.
Look, Life,
you name it,
Ladies' Home Journal
, there were always leftover issues. But not the blue stuff. The lightbulb went on, okay? I started with a mimeographed newsletter, believe it or not. Some of my outlets sold it from behind the counter.
Girls Galore
, sketches and stories. I had a buddy who could draw, and I thought up the stories myself. The first advertiser I had was a tobacco shop. This was fifty-seven. Things were pretty innocent back then.

“But hey, basically, it's a stupid business. You're not catering to people's higher interests. Even the stories you tell—if you happen to tell a story, and a lot of times you don't—are stupid stories. Here comes the delivery man delivering flowers, oh look, the girl at home likes him, oh look, he likes her too, she's sticking this out, he's sticking that out, the flowers are everywhere, et cetera. So maybe the delivery guy's a black guy, or maybe he's a girl, or maybe the girl's a guy and he's delivering groceries, cucumbers maybe, or there's two delivery guys and one girl, I don't know. Eh. You can think it's disgusting, or you can just say, well, that's what people like to think about. Why not? Better than imagining your house burning down, or losing your money, or the next Vietnam War. I don't think what people read is what they do, by the way, not really. You ever read those letters in
Penthouse
? Sure you do, everybody's read those. You don't think those are true, do you?”

I could see what he was trying to do, readjust my moral landscape, change my thinking. He was disappointed in me, I supposed, finding me Midwestern and puritanical despite my irony and sharp tongue.

Sally was leaning slightly forward, watching us, catching first my eye, then his. Esther was poking the tines of her fork through a tiny hole in a cloth napkin.

What do they do? I wondered suddenly of Sid and Esther. In the privacy of their bedroom, or on the stairwell, in the laundry room now that Sally and Ben were gone—what do they do? Surely Sid wasn't content with the usual. I thought of passive, listless Esther and voluble Sid. I imagined performances involving servants, the curtains, candlesticks.

“Clare?” Esther repeated. “You'll take some pie, won't you?”

Her best pie, my favorite, the pecan with a double nut layer. “Too rich for me,” Sid was saying, waving it away.

“A tiny piece for me, Mom,” Sally said.

I looked at Esther's hands across the table, cutting the pie. The slight tremor, her head dipping as if accepting a blow.

He hurts her, I thought, and felt sick. He's a sadist. “I'll have a nice big piece,” I said for Esther's sake.

Sid leaned back expansively, clasped his hands behind his head, and stuck his elbows in the air. “Hey, let me ask you this: Is it worse than owning a company that makes the bigger, better bomb?”

 

 

 

SALLY FIXED ME DINNER the next night, an elaborate meal—chicken and mashed potatoes, baby carrots with dill, muffins studded with bits of red and green peppers—and I took this as an act of contrition. We sat at a table in her condo near the sliding glass windows, using cloth napkins and placemats. A bud vase with a single rose stood in the center of the table.

She didn't seem to know about the violence. “Blue magazines,” she'd said, and once, with a smile, “girlie magazines.” We talked again about my father, the extra money he gave me for clothes, the big shrimp at Thanksgiving.

“If he did it, he did it for you,” Sally said, holding out the basket of muffins.

It wasn't quite right. It didn't square with my knowledge of Sally that she should be so accepting. But, as she said, Sid was her father. Honor thy father and thy mother—Bible stuff again. Although I couldn't really say that Sally honored her mother. Mostly, she ignored her.

Sally told me about Ben's new apartment, which he shared with three male friends in a complex in Manhattan Beach. “It's very spartan,” she said. “Two chairs and a table in the living room.”

“I love your adjectives,” I burst out, surprising myself. I'd left the magazine in the bottom of the suitcase, under a camisole and a denim skirt. What adjective would Sally use for it? Disgusting. Vile. Unbelievable. Evil.

“It
is
spartan,” Sally went on. “It surprised me that with four gay guys, well, after Flavio, it surprised me that the apartment was so, that it wasn't more ....”

I could have helped her.

“That it wasn't more decorated,” she finished finally.

“Oh,” I said, letting her feel foolish. It seemed unlikely that every gay male had an aesthetic sense, although that was my stereotype too. I thought of my patient, Decorator Roger. I adore pornography, he'd said.

“They seem like decent guys,” she said, anxiety in her tone. “Not substance abusers.”

“That's promising.”

“Not that I can tell for sure.” With her fork poised, she looked at me across the table. Then her gaze dropped to her lap, and she smoothed her napkin again. “What does bother me about Daddy, what I found out later, is that he does a lot of magazines for gays.”

“What?” This startled me. For no good reason, Sid's producing porn for gays had never occurred to me. I thought of Flavio's magazine behind the toilet.

“It's about a third of his business. I asked him. It's not that I'm anti-gay, you know that; what bothers me is that Daddy's anti-gay. You know how he talks. Yin-yang, the Israelites sending out the virgin. But he makes a lot of money off gay sex. And he expects to make more and more, what with AIDS. He says people buy smut if there's repression or danger, and AIDS is danger.”

Sid's cynical expectations surprised me, but of course made perfect sense. And why not market to gays, a bigger group—I hoped—than heterosexual sadists. Smut, Sally had said. Maybe that was what people in the trade called it.

“It doesn't seem right that he should make money off of people who repel him,” Sally said firmly, but her voice quivered a bit at the end.

Who better to make money off of? I thought, but didn't say it.

“Before, I could tolerate things, I didn't like them, but they were tolerable. But after I found out about the men's stuff . . .” Sally hesitated. “After Flavio moved out, after I'd found out all about him and his—” She winced, unable to say it. “I found some magazines Flavio had tucked under our mattress. You know. And I looked through them, and two of them, two of them—”

“Crown Communications,” I said.

Sally nodded. “Crown Publications, back then. Daddy, I said, how can you publish this stuff? And he said I publish it, I don't enjoy it. But that's not the point, I said, don't you see how hypocritical it is? And he said honey, it's a market. And I said is everything a market? And he said look, a few years ago the heterosexual market was drying up, and getting into homos—that's exactly how he put it—getting into homos was a strategic move. He had to support his family. He had to pay for my college, he said.”

The difference between paying for Sally's college and the money Sid made was so extreme as to make his comment insulting. Sally knew this, of course: despair had crept into her voice. “Oh, Sally,” I said.

She shrugged her shoulders helplessly. “It's what he does. It's how he thinks. I have to accept that there's a moral vacuum in him. I found those magazines on a Sunday afternoon, and I remember sitting on my bed, thinking my God, what can I do? You remember that bed Flavio and I had, with the wrought-iron headboard? I thought I should impale myself on that, let Daddy and Ben keep phoning and phoning and then come over and find me. I thought that would be a fitting solution. Impaled on my marital bed.”

We sat in silence for a few moments, our food untouched. “I wish you'd told me,” I said.

“I couldn't. I was mortified. The root of that being ‘mort,' meaning death, like rigor mortis.”

I smiled in spite of myself. “You're
proud
of your adjectives!”

“Maybe.” We smiled at each other, and for a moment we were our old selves, the best of friends.

 

 

 

“WECOULD SEE A MOVIE,” Sally suggested later.

I went through the paper, looking for a movie we'd agree on. I didn't want some stupid comedy, and Sally would agree to nothing with a hint of violence.

“How about
Tess
?” I asked.

A shadow crossed Sally's face. “Does anybody die in that?”

I thought of the magazine in my suitcase. Sally knew about the girlie magazines, she knew about the guy magazines, but she clearly didn't know about the magazines like the one I had.

 

 

 

“IT'S A VARIED GROUP,” Sid said. “There's a Hasid works out of Brooklyn, and a bunch of Chinese, and Italians and Greeks and hillbillies and a couple Scandinavians. You know, they're people. They have families and mortgages and hemorrhoids and all that stuff. They're not monsters.” He reached for his snifter, looked across at me as he sipped. “It's not so bad, Clare. You'll get used to it.”

Sally was up in her former bedroom sorting through old books; Esther was in the kitchen. Their absence was calculated, I suspected, so that Sid and I could be alone.

We were in the family room, the wood-paneled room reminiscent of the dimly lit restaurants Sid favored, this room where we'd sat together so many times before. I knew he expected me to smile, to concede, to say “Oh, don't worry.” And I almost wanted to, the spell of this room and my memories was so strong.