The False Friend (5 page)

Noreen touched the television remote and a moment later a snack food jingle flooded the room. At times like this, Celia’s teenaged self felt like an ugly shirt she had tucked into the back of her drawer but had yet to outgrow. Whenever she came back home, her mind resumed all its worst habits: the hair-trigger sensitivities, the rush to judgment, the combative reflex that dug a dividing line between herself and the rest of the world. She partly blamed the house for her regression. Her entire childhood was contained by these rooms, her adult experience here minuscule by comparison.

   
That night over the phone, Celia described all this in a degree of detail that would have bored anyone other than a lover, and which left Huck avid for more.

“What was I supposed to say?” She sighed. “So I sat with her through the end of a cable movie until Daddy woke up, and then we went to Maxi’s to eat.”

“You got the eggplant parm,” he said. “And you all split the—”

“—the fruit de mer. And, of course, the ricotta cheesecake for dessert. With me barely able to eat because of everything Mommy had asked me not to say. We drove back with practically my whole dinner in a doggie bag, Daddy going on again about how wonderful it is that I’m home. And as soon as we were inside, the two of them went to bed even though it was only nine o’clock, leaving me downstairs, remembering.”

“Tell me,” Huck said.

She pictured him in their living room, worry sharpening the planes of his face. In their earliest days Celia had expected the novelty of Huck’s company to be tempered by tedium, but Huck had not come into his good looks until his twenties. He had spent his acne-tormented teens becoming a good listener, sparing him the interpersonal laziness of the congenitally attractive. Celia couldn’t decide if lately Huck had grown more handsome, or if she’d simply been provided more opportunities to view him at a distance.

“It’s so weird,” she said. “I don’t understand how I’ve been coming back all these years without the memories jumping out at me. Djuna and I used to play Monopoly, right here in the middle of this carpet. One time—this is embarrassing, okay?—we got in a terrible fight over ‘title deed.’ ”

“Monopoly was practically a blood sport when I was a kid,” Huck said. “Those hotels were red for a reason.”

Celia closed her eyes and pictured the slightly asymmetrical nose, the cowlick over the left temple, the eyes that shifted from brown to green depending on their mood—though, these days, Huck’s face came to Celia most often in profile, bathed in the blue glow of the television, or sunk into a recalcitrant sleep beyond reach of the morning sun.

“Sure,” she continued, “but this fight wasn’t even about paying rent. Djuna was convinced it was pronounced
tittle
deed, and I knew it wasn’t. We screamed about it until she finally went home. I remember I blocked the front door because I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to keep playing—I must have been winning—and finally Mommy came to the door and actually moved me aside so that Djuna could go. Later, after dinner, Djuna called to tell me that her mom said I was right. That it was
title
deed after all. I got the feeling Mrs. Pearson was on the phone along with her, making sure Djuna said it.”

For a moment, they listened to each other breathe. Were she at home, they’d already be past the opening credits of a movie, Huck beside her on the couch but long gone.

“Now it’s your turn to talk,” she said.

“Everybody misses you,” Huck replied. “At dinner, Sylvie kept sniffing at your empty chair.”

“What did you eat?”

“Chili,” Huck said. “Not the crappy take-out kind from Ortega’s. I actually cooked.”

She pictured him at the stove wielding the ancient wooden cooking spoon he wouldn’t let her throw away, the dogs waiting patiently behind him.

“You’re not going to let them into bed with you, are you?” she asked.

“Why, you jealous?”

She laughed. “Just guarding your welfare. They’re going to be farting like crazy after all the cheese and beans I bet you fed them.”

“Shit, I didn’t think of that.”

“You might want to keep them away during your nightly ritual. The flame might set off an explosion.”

“They must still be digesting,” Huck said, “because we all survived intact.”

She heard it now, the slightly muted tone to his voice, like there was a bubble caught in his throat. She’d tried getting stoned with Huck, but even his connoisseurship hadn’t saved her from feeling stupid and slightly paranoid. Sativa or indica, white widow or skunk, it all required her to loosen her grip on something she preferred to hold tight. Her acceptance of Huck’s habit had belonged to the earliest phases of her falling in love. It felt nonnegotiable, part of the unwritten contract of their coupling, but it was impossible not to notice that what
she used to liken to her mother’s nightly glass of wine had lately become more like a cocktail before and after dinner.

“Did you set your alarm?” Celia asked. The first morning Huck overslept, he’d been late to school. She’d found him still buried beneath the covers, slack-mouthed and softly snoring over the clock radio when he should have been dressed, half-breakfasted, and heading out the door. The next morning, she’d intervened early enough that by eating in the car he had made it to school before the first bell. After the third day, she replaced her wake-up kiss with his name pronounced as if it were part of a larger language lesson: bed, pillow, blanket, Huck. Neither sympathetic nor accusatory, it seemed to pierce the veil of his sleep more effectively than an alarm ever could. On the fourteenth day Huck overslept, Celia decided to stop counting.

“I did,” he said. “I set it to Alarm instead of Radio, and I’ve got the volume turned up all the way. Not that I’ll need it. As long as you’re gone, I’ll be the girls’ only option for their morning walk.”

For years Celia had figured she would live alone: a small apartment in Ukrainian Village or Wicker Park shared on alternating weekends with a boyfriend who would have his shelf of the medicine cabinet, his bureau drawer. Their lives would sporadically intersect from Friday to Sunday, phone calls leavening the time in between. She had been perplexed by people who did it differently, had theorized that they were somehow less busy. In high school and college she simply had not had time to meet people. There were marches to organize and fund-raisers to plan, poems to read and meetings to attend. Her
chronic overcommitment and loneliness had felt inherent, conditions like diabetes or color blindness that demanded their own concessions. Then she had met Huck.

“So you’re going to visit your mom tomorrow at school?” he asked.

“She said I could come anytime after eleven.”

“And before that?”

“I don’t know,” Celia said. “I’m going crazy thinking about it.”

“I think you should take a Xanax and sleep in.”

“I don’t need it,” she said. “I’m totally worn out. I feel like I’ve been awake for years.”

In the silence that followed, Celia heard the sound of rhythmic breathing through the receiver. Then it faded and Celia knew that Huck had returned the phone to his ear.

“Was that Bella?” she asked. “Tell her that I miss her too.”

“I love you, Ceel.”

“You’re my very only,” she whispered. Once she had hung up, she stared at the silent phone in her hand.

She recognized what was happening to them now because it had happened once before. Six years ago, Celia’s roommate had suddenly moved to Austin and none of Celia’s other friends had needed a place to live. She wouldn’t have been able to ask him any other way. Huck had left the apartment he’d been sharing with two other early-career teachers, and had moved into the roommate’s vacated bedroom. Huck’s desk was the only employed furnishing in that otherwise idle room, but Celia wouldn’t let him call it his office. She maintained separate voice-mail boxes and itemized the long-distance bill, all to
avoid straining the inner mechanism that had thus far permitted this deviation from her life’s previously planned course. She’d assured Huck that these measures were not meant to keep him at a distance but to preserve the closeness they had, an explanation that satisfied him for a few months before he began to drift away. Then as now, it had happened slowly, as if he were gradually winding down. He gave up conversation in favor of watching movies and playing guitar. He dressed for work in stained shirts, put dishes in the drying rack that were still encrusted with food, and tripped over Bella or Sylvie lying in their usual places. When he had suggested that they buy their own place, pool their savings for a down payment and apply their signatures to adjacent dotted lines, he hadn’t phrased it as an ultimatum, but the fatigue in his voice had scared Celia more than the prospect of saying yes. The change in him was so gratifyingly immediate, her own relief so intoxicating, it had been easy to convince herself that purchasing an apartment was a solution rather than a stopgap measure. In retrospect, she saw that the apartment had only bought them four more good years, a grace period that had expired with the birth of Celia’s nephew. She’d thought she and Huck had become inured to births, but then Daniel’s baby pictures had arrived, showing him with his aunt’s eyes. One night, Huck asked Celia if she wanted to go off the Pill, and she said no. He had not asked again.

Celia realized only after she had left the couch that she should have stayed downstairs. The guest bed stretched empty on either side of her. The heating vent had not been opened, and without Huck to press against, she was cold. Through the
closed windows she heard the slam of a car door from across the street, then male voices punctuated by female laughter, footfalls on the street, and finally silence.

She shifted to the edge of the mattress and, in an attempt to feel less marooned, tucked the bedding around her into a makeshift sleeping bag that recalled her first sleepovers. Mrs. Pearson had called them their bachelorette nights, Djuna’s father either cloistered inside his study or overseas at one of his mathematics conferences. During his absences, Celia and Djuna were each allowed to wear one of Mrs. Pearson’s negligees over their pajamas. They sipped milk from wineglasses while Mrs. Pearson drank Scotch, and stayed up watching rented videos. Mrs. Pearson’s only rule was that their picks not “abound with gratuitous sex or violence.” Like much of what Djuna’s mother said, it was a phrase Celia had intuited more than understood. “Acclimatization,” Mrs. Pearson decreed whenever she had decided that a selection rated R or PG-13 conformed to her amorphous standard. “This is the culture you live in, so you might as well get used to it. Paternalism at any age is condescending.”

Most of their choices—
Freaky Friday
or
Gremlins, E.T
. or
The Karate Kid
—would have been perfectly acceptable to Warren and Noreen. And because Mrs. Pearson never asked Celia if she was allowed to watch movies like
Flashdance
at home, Celia was never placed in the awkward position of having to lie. She and Djuna would bookend Mrs. Pearson on the pomegranate-colored couch, an antique prettier and more comfortable than anything Celia’s parents owned. Celia favored Mrs. Pearson’s cocktail arm, to savor the clink of the ice. After
screening something like
Blue Lagoon
, Djuna’s mother would ask if Celia had any questions in the same voice that proclaimed the superiority of silk over cotton, Glenlivet over Glenfiddich. That voice took Celia for a far more cosmopolitan creature than she was, an impression Celia was loath to compromise. Her mind awash in visions of Christopher Atkins mounting Brooke Shields, she had waited until cocooned within Djuna’s sleeping bag to learn how little she actually knew. Even in the darkness of Djuna’s bedroom, Celia had been able make out the dolls that Mr. Pearson brought back from his frequent trips. To Celia, the international collection proved her friend’s worldliness, a quality perfected by Mrs. Pearson’s fingers curved around a whiskey glass. Under the dolls’ collective gaze, Celia was presented with a litany of organs, orifices, and gender combinations in the blasé monotone Djuna reserved for knowledge of the highest order. Accompanying this lesson was the intimate, sweet-tinged musk of Djuna’s unwashed sleeping bag, which wafted out the opening in warm puffs whenever Celia moved. This scent was as individual as a fingerprint, complex and private—the smell of a young body when it is still all smooth clefts and hollows, containing the promise of changes to come. Such cognizance was beyond Celia at the time. She had known then only that being privy to such redolence was simultaneously distasteful and thrilling, and she had attended her friend’s lecture in a state of self-conscious motionlessness periodically interrupted by small, calculated gestures to assure and chastise herself with the scent’s continued presence. By the following morning her nose had acclimated, the smell forgotten until next time. As Celia lay in her parents’ guest bed,
its fresh sheets fragrant of nothing, she elegized a green nylon sleeping bag lined with red flannel. Sometimes as she climbed inside, she had told herself that she was entering a crocodile’s mouth. This was Celia’s last waking memory before her mind became briefly, blessedly blank.