Best Friends (28 page)

“Did he really drop those magazines?” I asked.

“In the last year,” the article said, “persuaded by his daughter, Sidney Rose has dropped two magazines because of their sexually violent content.”

“That's what Mom says. I asked her about it.” A pause. “I think he sold them off, actually. I can't tell you they're out of print.”

“He must have mentioned you to the guy who'd interviewed him.” “Mom” she'd said. Not “my mother.”

“I noticed that too.” Sally bit her lip. “I asked Mom. I guess things really were bad a few years ago, right after I started Oberlin.”

“A near-victim of a seventies über-phenomenon, the sexual revolution,

Sidney Rose credits his company's survival to the targeting of homosexual and bisexual males . . .”

I thought of the Roses' house, Patricia with her color TV, the closets with built-in lights, the constantly tended landscaping. “Things never looked bad. Did you realize?”

“Never. His father made him keep his shoes polished, remember? So he wouldn't look poor. Daddy did sell the Pollock. Not for much, by today's market. And I guess he borrowed. A lot, Mom says. She says she didn't ask him about it. But everything's fine now. They're loaded.” This last sentence was uttered with a sarcasm that, even though I should have expected it, always surprised me in Sally.

“How's Ben?”

“He's working. Daddy got him a job at a video store, of all places. Some friend of a friend.”

“They stock your dad's movies?”

“Clare. What do you think? There's a huge market. People who are ashamed to be seen at a porn flick.”

“It makes sense.”

“Everything he does makes sense. He's interested in politics now, Mom says. Going to fund-raising dinners. Guess which party?”

Reagan was in the White House. “Democrat?”

“Republican. Free-trade, libertarian Republicans, not the religious right. But he contributed to Reagan.”

I shook my head. “Strange bedfellows.”

Sally leaned forward urgently. “His life is strange bedfellows. Think about it.”

There was always this intensity when she talked about her father, as if he were still the dominant force in her life, even though she swore she'd cut him out of it.

Later, we stopped at Ben's video store to drop off groceries. Sally pulled eggs, spaghetti sauce, canned fruit, and soup out of the bag to show him. From the supermarket deli she'd also bought some moo shu pork. Ben's eyes, heavily lidded, barely seemed to register the items. His curls were clumped and matted. When Sally was done, Ben gazed into the empty bag. “You get any beer?”

“Is that food, Ben? I'm feeding you. Tell me, is that food?”

Ben wore a droplet turquoise earring and was dressed completely in black. He pushed a dark curl impatiently behind his ear. “Take it to my place, man, I'm not off here for four hours. I don't want that moo shu getting moldy.”

Sally sighed and lifted the groceries from the counter.

“Knock first,” Ben said. “They'll pull their pants up.” A sly grin. “I don't think anyone's there, anyway.” He seemed to notice me for the first time. “Clare-ster,” he said.

I said hello.

“Hey, Toby,” Ben said across a counter, “come here and get a load of some excellent wrists.”

It took me a moment to realize what he was talking about.

“Here.” Ben waggled a finger at me. “Stick them up on the counter. Oh, come on, show them to Uncle Toby. Tobe's like me, he loves body parts.”

“Really, Ben,” Sally objected.

“Right up on the counter.” Ben turned to Toby, a young guy with a wispy goatee. “She's shy. Aren't they gorgeous? Best wrists I've ever seen.”

“Man, this is a compliment,” Toby raved. “Ben hardly ever asks anyone to show me anything.”

“
Clare's Knee,
” Ben said. “That's a Frenchy film, right? Who is that, Malle? Buñuel? How're your knees, Clare?”

I was glad I was wearing long pants. “Average.”

“And wrists aren't even, like, private,” Toby noted.

Sally grabbed my wrist and pulled me away. “Clare's wrists are private,” she said.

 

 

 

FOR MONTHS AND MONTHS, I didn't see Aunt Ruby. Freddie, her husband, had cirrhosis of the liver and an enormous swollen belly. It turned out Freddie was a secret drinker. He stashed vodka in the bottles of rubbing alcohol he kept at his dermatology office. He was retired now, weak, intermittently confused. He spent most of his time in bed.

“Aunt Ruby says if she were a drinking woman she'd hit the bottle too, but of course she's not a drinking woman.” Sally paused. “She's an eating woman.”

“Has she gained—?”

“Oh, fifty pounds. She can't wear any of her clothes. All she wears is muumuus. It's quite a scene. She fixes him these huge meals she puts on a bamboo bed tray, and then she sits on the edge of his bed and says, ‘Freddie, Freddie baby, you've got to eat.' She'll even try to feed him with her fingers. And he lies there and closes his eyes and squinches up his mouth until she starts crying and the food gets cold and she eats it all herself.”

“How frugal.”

“They kind of hate each other,” Sally confided cozily.

“How about Daphne?”

“Still in Bolivia with her Copper King.” Daphne had married into a Chilean mining family, one in which all the women, Sally said, dressed as flamboyantly as Daphne.

“Should we go visit Aunt Ruby? I haven't seen her for ages.”

“I don't want to see her,” Sally said. “I don't want any more reporting about me to Daddy.”

 

 

 

THERE WAS NOTHING in Ben's fridge except a jar of barbecue sauce, a dried-up chunk of cheese without a wrapper, a container of tofu, and ten or twelve cans of beer. All the blinds were pulled. While Sally unloaded the groceries, I wandered into the bedroom and was repulsed by the smell of semen. There were no covers on the huge bed, and I didn't dare look at the sheets. I went to the window and pulled up the blind, slid open the window. This place needed to air out. An extravagantly flowered branch bumped against the screen.

To live like
this,
I thought, turning back to the kitchen, in the midst of so much beauty.

Sally put the cans of beer from the fridge into her grocery bag and carried them out to the backseat of her car.

We were quiet driving home. “Daddy says they call themselves the Lost Boys,” Sally said at last.

“That's appropriate.” I thought for a moment. “It's such a gorgeous landscape, you know, and he has everything, but still . . .” I hesitated, belatedly struck by what she'd said. “Are you talking to your father now?”

Sally tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “Only about Ben. Only by phone.”

I could see the sadness in it, sure, Sally and her father “estranged” when they'd been so close, but I felt frantic too, thinking I could lose her back to him. “Just so he doesn't seduce you,” I said.

Sally shot me a skeptical look. “Ben?”

“No, no.” I tried not to sound agitated. “Your father.”

“He is my father,” Sally said after a moment, “and whatever else he did, he was always a great father to me.”

“Yes, but, but, here you are doing women's law, women's law of all things, when—”

“Maybe my career's an atonement!” Sally burst out.

I shut up.

 

 

 

THAT CHRISTMAS EVERYONE—my brothers with their wives and children, my mother, me—met at Frank's house. We had a wonderful time: a snowball fight, late nights talking in the kitchen, group breakfasts in our pajamas, Baxter doing his imitations of our aunts and uncles; so much so, I wondered what I'd been doing all these years, why I'd put such anguished effort into a crazy California family when my own family was much more fun. More normal too. What was wrong with normal? You could see why guys like my dad, who fought the War in Europe or the War in the Pacific, came home and married and bought little houses and hoped for children and an unremarkable American life. I found that I hoped for a life like that too.

But how dare I? I was a double divorcée, consumed by work, childless, infertile. My brothers quoted TV characters I'd never heard of, and even my mother laughed when I thought Joe Montana was a professional wrestler. “How'd you get so weird?” Eric asked, his arms stretched out on the back of the sofa, his new wife and their sons—Tahini, Ginkgo, and Eric's son Cody—arrayed around him. “You must have gotten those kooky genes of Mom's.”

I went to bed that night in my apportioned corner, a cot tucked between a closet and a chest of drawers in Frank's oldest daughter's room, beneath a poster of Michael Jackson, the most famous lonely person on the planet.

“YOU'RE PICKING UP PACKAGES for Ben now?” I asked incredulously over the phone. “Taking them from point A to point B? What do you think they are? Jams and jellies?”

“Clare. It's not my business what it is. He asked me to pick it up, I said I'd be happy to, and I don't feel it's my place to ask.” I could imagine her looking back at me, chin tilted up in her defiant way.

You trusted Flavio too, I thought. You trusted your father. Trust can be a big mistake. “Did it cross your mind it could be drugs?”

“Oh, I doubt it. I don't think Ben would put me in that position. My thought was it was a sex toy or something.”

That wasn't totally implausible, but it seemed less likely than contraband. Or someone's severed body part, I thought suddenly: the crowd Ben ran with seemed vague and harmless (“Let's get high and go to Chuck E. Cheese!”), but anyone with money could surely be someone's prey. It crossed my mind that Sally could even be the target. She had money; she had, as a lawyer, a certain exalted position—wasn't that a setup for blackmail? “Oh Sally,” I said, surprising myself with my fervor, “I wish you wouldn't do it. Or wait till I get back out there, let me go and pick it up. Nobody could hurt me.”

“You can't cut me off from my parents and then expect me to lose contact with my brother!” Sally shrieked.

 

 

 

THERE WERE BASKETS with white yarmulkes set out at the funeral home, and the casket—per Jewish custom, Sally said—was closed, which disappointed me so much I couldn't make sense of it until later, when I realized I'd hoped to see her not for “closure” but to see in her dead countenance, the set of her jaw, maybe, or the squaring of her shoulders, some hint of who she really was.

Sally was not undone. Sally was spookily Sally, resolute, brave, a little impatient. I was waiting for guilt, but she surprised me. As I stood beside her, she scanned the room and nodded at a tall blond woman wearing a bun and a sleek fitted suit, who responded with a face practically melting with sympathy. “That's Sara Tweedles,” Sally said. “Have you heard of her?” I shook my head no. “The Countess of Come,” Sally whispered.

There were more congregants than I'd expected, many of them glamorously dressed: one woman who hugged Sally had an asymmetrical haircut and a small hat capped with black feathers; her female companion wore shoes with an undersea design pieced in bits of colored suede. The men were sloppier, friendlier; some of them were gathered in clumps, laughing and talking. “I don't know any of these people,” Sally said. “Industry people. Not friends of my mom's.”

I HAD JUST PURCHASED an answering machine, and I got home after nine from the hospital and flicked it on for my first message. There was a whir and a click, then Sally's voice. “Clare?” she said, and then a peculiar pause. “Clare?” she repeated. “This is me. Call me whenever you get in. Whenever, I don't care. Today, call me today. Right now, as soon as you hear this.” There was more silence, as if she were hoping I'd pick up the phone, then a limp click as she hung up.

I thought Ben had overdosed. I thought Sid had shown up at Sally's house demanding that Sally take him back as a father. I thought Uncle Freddie had died. It never crossed my mind that the trouble was Sally's mother, that she'd been killed late the night before—February 5, 1986—in a one-car accident in Topanga Canyon, bashing her car into the stone gatepost of an empty house that had recently been put up for sale.

 

 

 

BEN WAS SLUMPED in a chair with his legs open, his head a circle of unruly curls. Sid was leaning against the closed casket, his back trembling through a tweedy black and gray jacket. Aunt Ruby stood beside him, stroking his back with the flat of her hand. I angled myself to get a glimpse of Sid's face. He did, indeed, look stricken. What had been between them, Sid and Esther? Had he, despite his protestations, loved her after all?