Best Friends (29 page)

“Daddy?” Sally said softly, touching his sleeve.

Sally's cousin Daphne, just in from South America, dabbed her nose with an embroidered handkerchief. “There're sure a lot of people. You think all these people knew Aunt Esther? I didn't think hardly anybody knew Aunt Esther.” She was wearing a garish engagement and wedding ring set and a short black dress knotted across her breasts, a triangle of flesh exposed beneath it.

Uncle Freddy was too sick to come.

I explained who Sally thought the guests were. “Sally was surprised too, she didn't realize Sid was so”—Sally had hesitated, searching for the phrase—“big in his field.”

“Look at that,” Daphne said in wonderment. “The Countess of Come. I almost didn't recognize her with her clothes on.”

We both laughed.

“You haven't seen the Black Stallion here, have you?” Daphne craned her head.

“I wouldn't know him.”

“Bow tie. He'd be wearing a bow tie.”

I shook my head no.

“Aunt Esther sure was a good cook. Best cook in the family. You don't think she was drinking, was she?”

I said no. I'd asked the same thing of Sally, and Sally had said her mother never drank before she drove. Sally had her own ideas about the accident, but I didn't tell Daphne this.

“I feel terrible for Uncle Sid,” Daphne said. “Mommy and I were at his house last night, and he's a mess. You know that Irish woman Aunt Esther used to write to? He called her over there. It was like three A.M. in Ireland. I guess she started crying. Told him she'd come to the funeral if there was any way she could. She told Uncle Sid it was like losing a sister.”

So there were people who loved her. I felt relieved.

“At least Uncle Sid thinks that's what she said, some of those accents you can hardly understand.” Daphne sighed. “I wish I could stick around here longer and help everybody, but I've got to get back home. Eduardo can't run a house. He's terrible with the help, no sensitivity at all.” Daphne lifted her right leg to scratch at her left ankle with her high heel.

“I rented a big car,” I said. “I thought Sally would come with me, but she's going with her dad. Do you want a ride to the cemetery?”

Daphne glanced up to the casket, where Sid, Aunt Ruby, and Sally were now huddled together. “Oh sure.” Daphne rummaged in her tiny black bag. “Happy to.” She grabbed a small plastic box out of her purse and waved it triumphantly. “Breath mints! I knew I brought them. Doesn't it make you feel there's something right in the world when you know there are breath mints?” For the first time in my life, I understood why Sally liked Daphne.

 

 

 

I DIDN'T KNOW ABOUT the Jewish custom of the family shoveling clumps of dirt into the grave. Sid shoveled first.

Oh, the sound of the dirt hitting wood. I can still hear it years later. I think it's the saddest sound I've ever heard.

WHEN IT WAS GETTING dark and almost everyone was gone, Sally found me sitting out on the patio near the espaliered tree. It was a chilly night. I was thinking—seeing the lights of Los Angeles twinkling below me, listening to the chirps of birds settling in for the evening—how it was true what people said, life went on. Even now I was plotting a new life for myself, without this place, without Sally.

Sally looked beat, her eyes blank and hollow, wayward curls sticking up from her crown. “It's strange to be here,” she said. “I haven't been in this house for months.”

“Did you and your father talk much?”

“We talked. He's demolished. How could he not be? He agrees with me, he thinks it was suicide too. Apparently she'd just made up a will, left everything to Ben.”

“Ben!”

“Daddy says she wanted to look after him. He says last week she said to him, out of the blue, that she didn't think Ben would ever be capable of supporting himself. ‘So we'll have to look after him,' she said. Daddy didn't think much of it at the time, but when the police came by, it hit him. She had a lot of her own money. Family stock.”

“Did she leave you . . . ?”

“Some jewelry.” Sally, never one to wear jewelry, smiled ruefully. “And Ben doesn't get any money directly until he's thirty-five, so in the meantime I'm the trust officer.”

“You mean you'll control—”

“Right. His funds.”

“What does Ben say?”

“Honestly? He doesn't seem to care.”

From the house there was still conversation and the occasional clink of a fork or glass.

“How impossible,” I said.

“She thought I could handle it,” Sally said. “It's a logical position for a lawyer.”

“Oh, I'm sure it is, but . . .” I wavered. Sally would be looking after Ben's affairs? Controlling Ben's money? Esther hadn't done her daughter any favors. The trees stirred in a breeze, a dog barked, and from below us came a thin wail barely recognizable as a siren.

“Clare, I've got to tell you, I'm making up with Daddy. Life's too short to fight. And it's a commandment: Honor your father and mother. And who else do I have?”

I didn't say anything. A tense-looking woman clutching the hands of two sullen young girls swept past us toward the driveway. Sally and I exchanged glances. “Face-lift,” we both said at once.

 

 

 

“IT'S GOOD TO SEE YOU,” Sid told me. “Thank you for coming out for Sally.”

I answered, not totally lying, that it was good to see him too: he's just a person, I thought, a person who makes mistakes like anyone else. When everyone was gone and Sid had gone to bed, while Sally and I were sitting in the living room reviewing the day, Ben walked in. He complained in a slurred way about a musician friend who had cornered him at the reception to ask if Sid ever needed music for his movies.

“Movie music?” Sally said sharply. “Why in the world was he asking about that now?”

“Fucking opportunist,” Ben said. He pushed past both of us and out the glass door.

He was standing on the patio where I'd stood, euphoric, years before; where Sally and I had sat just hours ago.

Ben shut the glass door behind him and leaned against it. “Fucking opportunist!” he screamed into the air. His hair was tangled and matted, the back right pocket of his shorts almost torn off. Hairy legs and then black high-top Keds.

“No loathing like self-loathing,” Sally muttered. For an instant I wasn't sure I'd heard her right. Then it hit me that she knew as well as I did how hard her life with Ben would be.

 

 

 

ROGER WHIS BY'S FAMILY didn't give him a funeral. They had him buried in a plot far from the family's, under a flat marker listing only his name. The obituary stated that memorial contributions could be sent to his parents. I wish any of this surprised me. He died on September 30, 1986, at thirty-eight. I gave birth to my daughter less than three months later.

Roger drove himself, early that autumn, to a hospital thirty miles from his home so he could die under my care. His legs were seeping and his belly bloated from his failing kidneys. “I'm a sight,” he said. “Sorry.”

“You name the baby for me,” he said later, patting my belly on one of his last coherent days. He'd awakened at five that morning and had the night nurses wash his hair, thinking today might be the day his mother would visit. His father was a total loss, Roger said, but he had some faith, now that he'd written her, in his mother.

“Don't get your hopes up,” I said. In retrospect I'm almost, but not quite, sorry I said that: if I hadn't, he might have distrusted me.

“You'll remember me,” Roger announced implacably. “I'm counting on it.”

I called Roger's parents' house that day, their name and number listed on his hospital admitting sheet as next of kin. A woman with a meek voice answered. “Hello,” I said. “You don't know me, but my name is Clare Mann, and I'm Roger Whisby's physician. I'm calling to give you some information about him. Are you his mother?”

There was a second's hesitation. “Yes,” the woman answered. I noticed a sudden whine in her voice, as if she suspected I was about to ask for a contribution to some unassailable cause she had no intention of supporting.

“Your son's very ill,” I said. “He has kidney failure and incipient liver failure and he can't breathe and I don't think he'll make it out of the hospital. Normally I don't call family members if the patient doesn't request it, but he would really love to see you and . . .”

I finished my spiel breathlessly and listened. The baby inside me gave a ruthless kick.

Silence.

“Mrs. Whisby?” I said. “Mrs. Whisby?” I rattled the disconnect button of the phone, checked the phone cord, picked up the phone and looked under it before it dawned on me that Roger's mother had hung up.

I slammed the receiver into the phone, making enough noise that the charge nurse, thinking there'd been an accident, came running down the hall. “Are you okay?” she asked. “Are you going into labor?”

What kind of monster was Mrs. Whisby? What kind of mother could throw away her own child?

 

 

 

“LISTEN TO THIS,” Sally said. “He says he's not gay anymore.”

“Not gay anymore! What are you talking about?”

“He's got a girlfriend, a manicurist. She's the backup manicurist for Madonna's publicist, and her dream is that someday Madonna will notice her publicist's nails. Her name's Candy. Ben's moved back in with Daddy, and Candy stays with him most nights.”

“You're kidding,” I said dully.

“I know, I can't believe it either. She paints Ben's nails. And his toenails.”

“What does your dad say?”

“He says whatever Ben's doing is okay, so long as it keeps him off men.”

WAS MY PREGNANCY an accident?

Are there ever accidents? That's a better question. As far as my conscious mind went, yes, my pregnancy was an accident. I doubted I could get pregnant, after all my unsuccessful attempts with Ted, assuming that my pelvic infection and miscarriage had scarred me for life. After our divorce, I was always busy and tired, and no, it didn't cross my mind I could be pregnant. (It was actually a ward clerk who told me I was, and I didn't believe her until I sat down and realized I'd missed three periods.) But in terms of what my body wanted—here's where it gets interesting—I think it wanted me to be pregnant. I needed a fresh start.

The father was a one-night stand. Actually, the father was one of three one-night stands: an ER nurse I'd known at University; an old friend of Baxter's who looked me up in Akron; and Ted, who had left his fellowship position after our split and was finishing his training in Baltimore. I should have been on the pill, certainly, but I got pregnant after AIDS appeared, when there was a lot of stress on barriers, and I kept thinking I should get fitted for a diaphragm, but then I'd get busy and put it off. And no, I didn't make my partners wear condoms. I'm aware this is crazy. I have a sort of masochism where sex is involved. Not Sid's magazines' kind of masochism; mine is straightforward human masochism. Deep down, I like the possibility that sex will make me suffer. It was a huge surprise, when my daughter was born, to realize that sex could bring me such joy.

 

 

 

“HE'S FUCKED UP,” I told my mother.

She was shocked by my language, but by then I was eight and a half months pregnant and wore my bulk like a shield. I could say anything to her then.

I waddled to the sink and got a glass of water. “There's no other way to put it. He's beyond confused. He's beyond neurotic. He uses drugs, he doesn't have a job, he barely finished high school, he's living back at his father's house with a girlfriend, and now, to top it off, he doesn't know if he's gay or straight.”