The False Friend (19 page)

They went inside. For Huck, who had grown up in a series of cramped apartments in Cleveland Heights, Celia’s childhood home would never cease to feel palatial. At a party, he’d once overheard Celia joke to a friend that their apartment lacked the space for children. He thought she was hardly qualified to
judge, having grown up where half a room was devoted to an uninhabitable couch. Neither could he understand why a house with space to spare would hang its family photos in the hallway. Why put pictures somewhere narrow and poorly lit, where there’s no place to sit? To really look at them he had to lean against the coat closet, jamming its doorknob into the small of his back.

Stopping there now, Huck had to admit that he liked the hallway’s privacy. It wasn’t a place where people stuck around, which allowed him to ogle Celia’s pictures without feeling self-conscious. In early studio portraits involving hobbyhorses and abstract backgrounds, her face could have foretold any number of future people, but by the time of the waterfall backdrop, the autumn trees, and the country scene, her poses bestowed protean glimpses of the woman she would become. In one, she held her head at an angle that belonged to her adult repertoire of gestures; in another, she had gained the posture that would exalt her once she became tall. Huck had no idea how the photographer had managed it, but in the fifth portrait—Celia could not have been older than ten—she showed her true smile, her frequently-sighted-but-impossible-to-capture smile, the one she could never produce on command. In it she looked so much like herself, only smaller, that Huck was seized by feelings generally considered criminal.

“Don’t you ever get sick of looking at those?” Celia murmured as she passed.

“No,” he replied.

He felt most comfortable in the den, which lay behind the more ceremonial living and dining rooms and off to the left,
like a proper heart. Noreen had already outfitted the coffee table with the bowls of grapes and oranges, the plate of cheese and crackers, the dish of M&M’s, and the half glasses of white wine—which would all conspire to make leftovers of the Japanese food they would order so painstakingly, Noreen and Warren puzzling over the dog-eared take-out menu as if it were high-order math before settling on their same old circled selections.

As he and Celia settled on the couch, Huck knew better than to reach for her hand. Early on, he had made a point of flaunting Celia’s Jensenville prohibitions—stealing a kiss in the kitchen, or asking her parents direct questions about money or their health. Huck’s parents didn’t come with such strictures: around Alyce and Quinn, he’d always been able to do and say what he liked, an oceanic freedom that—Celia reminded him—had nearly drowned him. Her parents were different, she’d said, and if Huck truly desired their acceptance, he would respect their limitations. Rather than try to change them, he should try to understand them, advice Huck had been humbled to realize required much more effort and attention than anything he had previously attempted.

“It’s funny,” Warren began once dinner had been phoned in, “but we’ve all been so busy these past few days that we haven’t really had a chance to enjoy one another.” He swiveled his recliner away from the TV. “Cee Cee, if I promise to stay up until ten tonight, will you forgive your decrepit mother and me the early hours we’ve been keeping?”

“It’s okay, Daddy,” Celia said. “I’m not great company right now anyway.”

He batted her words away with his hand. “You’re never bad company. Is she, Huck?”

Celia flinched at being reduced to third person, which she swore her father never did with Jeremy. Only she was ever made to feel invisible.

“Sure she is, sometimes,” Huck answered, then turned to Celia to break the spell. “But you have great taste in film,” he told her, “and you know the rules to every card game, which in my book more than makes up for it.”

Noreen appeared from the kitchen holding a bowl of cubed cantaloupe. “Melon,” she announced. “You see what visiting in April gets you? I’ve told Celia it’s a crime, depriving a Midwestern boy like yourself the beauty of a New York State spring.”

“Mom.” Celia sighed. “We do have melon in Chicago.”

“Of course you do,” Noreen agreed. She swiveled her recliner to match her husband’s at a parallel angle. “A toast,” she said. “To your visit.”

Huck clinked. Viewed through his glass, the room closed around him in a blurred circle.

“So,” Noreen began, “I suppose Celie told you the good news?”

Celia returned Huck’s blank look.

“About Pam?” Noreen prompted.

“Oh,” Huck said. “Yes, of course. Congratulations!” He tried nodding to lend the words more force.

“Thanks.” Warren grinned. “They don’t know yet if it’s a girl or a boy, but I’m thinking a boy will be easier—they’ve
already got the clothes, plus Pam grew up with brothers so she knows how to handle them.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” Noreen demurred. “I think Pam wouldn’t mind a girl. I know how much I liked having one of each.”

“I’ll tell you one thing.” Celia’s father leaned forward. “Boys and girls are different, no two ways about it. Different interests, different games—”

Noreen nodded. “It was always so easy to figure out who to invite to Jem’s birthday parties, but Celie was a different story. Do you remember your slumber parties, sweetie? You used to torture yourself over who should be on or off the list.”

“I sure wasn’t sad to see that go,” Warren said. “All that shrieking and whispering, and at some point there was always one little girl reduced to tears. Then, by middle school, it was tons of kids for pizza and a movie. They’d be sprawled over every inch of the den, eating cheese slices like they’d never been fed. Who were those kids, Cee Cee?”

Celia was silent, their talk like water around a stone. Huck tried to catch her eye but she was intent on twisting the skeletal remains of a grape cluster in her fingers, its fruit consumed, the divaricated stem in her hand like the remains of a tiny tree.

“Cee Cee?” Warren asked, and Celia looked toward her father as if startled awake. “Who were those kids who came to your pizza parties? Were they from Newspaper Club and Mock Trial, and all those other things?”

Celia shrugged. “I guess so, Daddy. I just invited anyone. Whoever came, came.”

The ticking of the wall clock in the dining room combined with the muted sound of hip-hop from a neighboring yard to amplify the new silence in the den. Noreen examined her glass. Warren tapped at his armrests as if he’d adopted Morse Code.

“Well, I think it’s been twenty minutes,” he said. “I’d better go hunt down our sushi before it gets cold.” He chuckled as he rose from his chair. “Why don’t you come with me, Huck? You can see the new car in action.”

In ten years of fetching their dinners, Warren had never requested Huck’s company. Huck looked to Celia just as her hip pocket began to vibrate. Without a word, she rose from the couch.

Noreen asked, “Who is it?” but Celia was already in the hall.

“Ceel?” Huck called.

“It’s fine, Huck,” she called behind her. “Go with Daddy.” She took the stairs two at a time.

“M
rs. Linke? Thanks so much for getting back to me.”

“Of course, Celia. I’ve got a number for you. Josie’s so looking forward to catching up.”

As Celia scrambled for pen and paper, she caught a glimpse of her father’s departing car through the guest room window. Between thanking Mrs. Linke and hanging up, there was an awkward pause in which she sensed Josie’s mother gauging whether or not to pretend at having anything more to say.

Celia looked at the ten digits she had just scrawled on a gas receipt. Josie had joined their ranks with only slightly more subtlety than Leanne, hers a dogged courtship instead of a direct appeal. Josie began wearing her hair in a ponytail, abandoning
a long-term relationship with the ribbon barrette. One day she appeared in school with a jacket identical to Djuna’s, asserting she’d had it forever. To woo Celia, she claimed to have always loved poetry. A notebook purportedly filled with original verse was brandished but never opened. Josie could be counted on to laugh at any joke, second any plan, or substantiate any claim. Djuna’s private mockery of this made Celia thankful that Josie’s bids for acceptance had upstaged her own.

After Josie’s phone rang six times, Celia stopped counting. She was mentally composing a suitable voice mail when a female voice almost startled her into hanging up.

“Oh!” Celia said, standing in her excitement, a suitor hesitating at the threshold.

“Hello?” the voice repeated.

“Josie?”

Josie exclaimed Celia’s name, the first syllable stretched like a piece of taffy. The sound placed Celia beside Djuna on the morning school bus, the two of them pretending to ignore Josie’s arrival. Celia was struck temporarily mute. She could smell grape bubble gum and the sour reek of midweek lunch boxes.

“Is this an okay time?” she asked when she was released by that ghost of herself in shorts and matching socks, the skin of her thighs fused to a green vinyl bus seat. “Your mother said early evenings were best.”

“Anytime is just fine for you!” said Josie. “Wow, Celie Durst. It’s been, what, twenty years?”

“Something like that.” Celia plumbed her memory for images of Josie in middle or high school but could only summon
Josie’s forsaken ribbon barrettes, hair dangling from each side of her head like the ears of a cocker spaniel.

“Gosh, it doesn’t seem like that long, does it?” Josie said. “Your folks are still in Jensenville, huh?”

Celia glanced at her mother’s sewing table. According to the dusty stack of pattern envelopes, the last real action that corner had seen was the creation of a Han Solo costume. “Yeah. I don’t think they’ll ever move.”

“Oh god, mine neither. We should get our parents together. They would totally hit it off.” Josie sighed. “You know, I always regretted that we fell out of touch. Every few years, I would think to myself, ‘I wonder what happened to Celie Durst?’ but I was too scatterbrained to ever do anything about it. That’s something I always admired about you, how organized you were. I bet you’re a high-powered lawyer now, or some kind of corporate executive.”

Celia suspected that Josie was thinking of Becky. “Nothing that fancy,” she said. “I’m in Chicago. I work for the city.”

“You’re in Chicago?” Josie echoed. “I might be in a group show there! If it works out, I’ll invite you to the opening!”

Celia’s throat tightened. “I saw some of your sculptures online,” she said, and waited for what would come next.

“For what it’s worth,” Josie said, “they always look crappy on the Internet. There’s the whole problem of scale, plus the mixed-media aspects.”

The figures Celia had seen had been stranded in the center of large, empty rooms or shunted into corners. “Is that stuff wax?” she asked, which felt as relevant as asking the color of someone’s shirt once they had leapt off a bridge.

“Actually, it’s a kind of polyester resin. I cribbed the technique from Louise Bourgeois by way of Ron Mueck. Are you familiar with those two?”

“I’m not sure.” Celia visited the Art Institute for the really big shows. She tried to imagine seeing Josie’s work without feeling like she had been publicly turned inside out.

“Well, there’s at least one Bourgeois at the Art Institute, and Mueck was part of a group show at the MCA a few years ago … not that I’m keeping track.” Josie laughed. “As you can see, I’m slightly competitive.”

They sat at their respective ends of the line.

“Is your work always about girls?” Celia finally asked.

“Yeah, I used to feel bad about that,” Josie said, “but then I read a quote by Judy Chicago about how an artist should always trust her voice. Plus, once someone called me a mixed-media, feminist Henry Darger, which totally made my day, so I decided to stop worrying.”

“And is it all taken from memory?” Celia persisted. “Because the three pieces I saw—”

“The Feminettes,” Josie said. “That was the first time I really let my work get personal. It felt weird, because I hate art as memoir, but for a piece to really resonate you’ve got to put part of yourself in there. The trick is striking the right balance. So when I decided to draw upon what happened—”

“It was all there,” Celia said. “The fight Djuna and I had, the five of us on Ripley Road. But the one that really threw me was the one in the woods. I’m not sure how … I mean, I remember you waiting back at the road with Becky and
Leanne. I didn’t see you but if you were there, if you actually
saw
what happened—”

“Uh, Celie?” Josie interrupted, and Celia realized that where her non-phone hand had been gripping the blanket, there were five fingertip-sized gaps in the weave.

“I want to apologize,” Josie said. “I can only imagine what it would be like, finding that stuff out of the blue. Back when I started on those pieces, I wondered about contacting you, to ask if it was okay, but I didn’t because … I mean, what if I asked and you said no? So in the end, I just went ahead and hoped that if you saw them, you’d see the ways in which our experience had inspired the work without telling anyone’s specific story. I guess I hoped that you might feel … well, honored, I suppose, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that regardless of the whole permission thing, which is complicated, I should at least have
told
you. Not to ask your blessing, but because you deserved to know. But after a while, it began to feel too late. And it’s been this sort of lasting regret of mine ever since.”

Celia felt her hands unclench. “Look, can I just ask you?” This was her last best chance. “How have you managed to live with what you saw? Because I’m finding it pretty hard—”

“It
was
hard,” Josie said. “Which is probably why I avoided that material for so long. I wanted to think I’d put it behind me, you know? But something like that, it stays with you, it’s part of the way you see the world, the way you see yourself.”

Celia sprang from the bed, smiling from the relief of finally not having to explain herself. “God, it’s so good to be talking
like this,” she said. “I mean, I thought I was the only one. But if you were there too, it means … well, it means that you made the same choice that I did. And … I can’t believe I’m saying this … I mean, two wrongs don’t make a right, but to know all these years that it hasn’t just been me—”