Best Friends (47 page)

“So you're Clare.” She shook my hand heartily. “Call me Virginia. I've heard about you for years. How are you, Sally? How's your dad?”

“It's a better room,” Sally said. He'd been moved; the neighbor next door to his old room was a screamer. “He looks out on the butterfly garden.”

“That's good.” Virginia made a little pout. “Nice scenery never hurt anyone.” She waved at the computer screen. “I'm just going through Sean's latest.”

“Anything good?”

“Oh, the usual.” Virginia looked at me and smiled. “Sean's a specialist in males.”

“How in the world did you get into this line of work?” I blurted. I'd been inspecting her hair: I would place a bet that she used rollers.

“Same reason Sally's father did.” Virginia indicated Sally with her thumb. “Take care of the kids. It's a good business. Lends itself to organization. Sid was quite a guy that way.”

“Virginia, don't say was,” Sally objected. “Daddy's not dead. He still
is.
”

“I keep forgetting, honey,” Virginia said. “But you're right, he still is.”

We were quiet for a while, Sally studying circulation figures on another computer, me picking up and reading a
Newsweek,
Virginia scrolling through photos.

“Wow,” Virginia said, “look at the dingdong on this one.” She turned the computer screen toward us; Sally and I glanced at each other and smiled. “Not that I'd want a thing like that poking around in me,” Virginia added.

She turned to the computer screen again. “Amazing,” she said. “How the heck does he find these people?” She held out her hand quickly, palm to us. “Don't tell me.”

 

 

 

THERE WERE A THOUSAND things Sally had to do, business meetings, lawyers' meetings, accountants' and tax people's meetings, but the thing she dreaded, the one thing, was simply going to his Malibu house and sorting through his things.

“I'll do it,” I said.

If I could just throw away the clear dross, the toiletries and the junk in drawers and the magazines, pack up any cans for the food bank, go through his clothes and separate out what could be turned into rags and what could be donated to Goodwill. “He has some outfits from the seventies.” Sally rolled her eyes. “Those shirts with wide collars and belts with big buckles—they can go in the trash. But don't touch the furniture, and leave anything personal for me to go through when I can stand it.”

I was surprised and touched me that she trusted me after the bad things I'd said about Sid in the past, the way I'd helped estrange her from him years before.

God knows what I'll find here, I thought as I drove up the hill. A muggy summer day. I remembered Sid's garage in the house off Mulholland, the kids' toys piled up, the parking spaces empty of cars, the pool net hanging on the wall.

The rosemary bushes were overgrown, and a rolled-up newspaper had petrified beside the door. I let myself in and turned off the alarm. As soon as the beeping stopped, the silence was sepulchral. No clock, no refrigerator running, no air conditioner. Peter had unplugged almost everything when Sid moved to their house in Pacific Palisades. Every week or so, a neighbor nosed around the outside. No one had been inside for months.

The first thing I did was open some windows. I glanced around the living room, the long sofa and the heavy chest fronting the curved picture window. Next to the chest sat the floor-to-ceiling folding screen covered with framed photographs. The only pictures of Ben were a portrait when he was perhaps three and Sally ten—young Ben sitting on Sally's lap—and a snapshot of him grinning beside their old Mulholland pool. That second picture was probably twenty years old. Atop the big chest lay some shells and a wooden box, ornately carved with a screen in the top, about the size of a deck of playing cards. Beyond the bric-a-brac, down the hill, I saw a jumble of obscenely expensive houses and the implacable sea. I turned away.

I did his bedroom closet first, then the kitchen. There was surprisingly little stuff. The outfits from the seventies weren't there. I realized Sid must have pared down his possessions in the move from the house off Mulholland, and the overcrowded feeling here was simply because it was small. I was piling Sid's few pots and pans and wooden spoons into a packing crate to take to the disaster response shelter, wondering if I'd find anything disgusting in his bedroom chest of drawers, when Aunt Ruby walked in.

I hadn't seen her for years, since Esther's funeral. It wasn't clear which one of us was more astonished. She remembered me right away, which touched me, and in a glance, she took in what I was doing.

“You're alone,” she said.

“Sally couldn't handle it yet.”

“I was driving past—I drive past all the time, checking on things—and I saw the kitchen window open. You hear about these squatters.” Aunt Ruby lifted her right hand from behind her skirt—she was wearing a very large dress, not quite a muumuu—and held up an enormous knife.

“I'm glad you recognized me!” I said, and Aunt Ruby laughed. She waddled over to one of the kitchen chairs, laid her knife on the kitchen table, and sat down, peering around her at the crates and boxes I'd filled. “Anything interesting?”

“He didn't have much stuff here, really,” I said. “He'd stripped down.”

“Well,” Aunt Ruby said, lifting her sleeve to rub her eye, “he wasn't himself after Ben died.” I remembered Sally telling me about Uncle Freddie's disease, how anxiety had made Aunt Ruby an eating woman. She'd might have gained another fifty pounds since she'd hustled Ben through the side gate to the gardeners' bathroom. She'd been big before, but now she was enormous. She looked like you could stick her with a pin and deflate her.

“Is Sally managing everything?” Aunt Ruby had left the door ajar, and the scent of rosemary wafted through the room.

“You mean Crown?”

Aunt Ruby nodded. “I figured no one needed me. I've been by to see him; it's a clean enough facility. I was surprised Sally didn't take him back to her house.”

“He's too total-care. She couldn't find the help.”

“So how is she handling being a pornography queen?”

I shrugged. “She views it as temporary. She's hoping to sell stuff off.”

“Oh, I'm sure. It's much too tawdry a business for young Sally.” Aunt Ruby emphasized the word “tawdry” in a mocking way.

“You think it isn't tawdry?”

“Of course it's tawdry, but Sally grew up on it.
Tit World
put the meat on Sally's table.”

“So to speak,” I muttered, but Aunt Ruby didn't hear me. She put her chin on her hand and gazed at me.

“I'm not speaking against Sally, I love Sally,” Aunt Ruby said, “but I hate it that she's running away.”

I started back on my packing. “She's not running away. She's planning to sell a business she doesn't want a part of.”

“Did Sid tell you about his scholarship program? He had a scholarship program for his employees. What's going to happen to that?”

I glanced incredulously at Aunt Ruby. “And he loved AIDS education,” Aunt Ruby said. “Every movie since 1985, the men are wearing condoms. I know that's important to you.”

I taped shut a box of canned goods, not sure what to say.

“If she didn't want his business, she should have told him. He knew he was losing his memory, he knew he was as good as dying. He would have sold it off if she'd asked him. But no, she let him keep things going, thinking his daughter would take over. Like Christie Hefner, sort of. He dreamed about that.”

“Maybe she just didn't want to make him unhappy. She did everything she could for him, always, especially after he got sick and she moved him in with her. You should see the things she did for him.” I shivered, thinking of the disimpaction.

“I called there all the time to come over and see him. Did she tell you? She always put me off.”

“I thought you'd visited him a couple of times.”

“Oh, a couple. I would have visited much more if I'd felt welcome.”

I wandered from the kitchen into the living room and cast my eyes out over the ocean. “How's your husband?” I said.

Aunt Ruby's disembodied voice wafted from the kitchen. “He's holding his own. He gets a shot now, interferon, have you heard of it? Boosts his immune system to fight off the hepatitis virus. Horrible side effects. He hardly eats.”

“He got hepatitis from a virus? I thought—”

“What? Didn't Sally tell you? Sure, we thought it was alcohol, but there's this new virus they've found, hepatitis C, and it turns out Freddie . . .”

She went on. My eyes swept through the knickknacks on top of the chest and lighted on the carved wooden box. It had a hinge, I noticed. For no good reason, I picked up the box and opened it.

“And it's a terrible disease, hepatitis. I had no idea. I thought it was something only degenerates got.”

A tiny plastic bag inside the box. I slipped my nail under to dislodge it, and the bag fluttered to the floor.

“He thinks he must have picked it up from a patient. That's how doctors get it, you know. It's a needle-stick disease. Or with all the skin biopsies he did, and they used to do them very casually, not always wearing gloves. And he did deal with alternative-lifestyle patients.”

I bent over to pick up the bag. A tiny plastic bag, the kind you slip earrings into.

“It's a good thing we have a great sex life, or I'd be worried. About where he got it, I mean. But his hepatologist says in almost half the cases the source isn't . . .”

Ben's tooth.

I froze, leaning over the floor, my hand out to pick up that tiny bag. The same bag Sid had slipped out of his pocket to illustrate the truth about Ben's death.

“That's true,” I said to Aunt Ruby, my voice sounding wavery and odd.

I could hear her rising in the kitchen, her heavy standing and plodding to the kitchen door.

I slipped the bag into the pocket of my jeans.

“It's kind of you to come help Sally,” Aunt Ruby said, looking at me.

“She's my best friend.”

Aunt Ruby sighed. “I worry about her, I really do. How old is she? Thirty-eight?”

“Almost.”

Aunt Ruby gave an irritated wave of her hand. “My brother spoiled her, that's the problem. He made everything so easy for her that she never had to think about life. It's like they say, he fed her steak every day but never showed her how he killed the cow. He didn't do her any favors. Pitiful girl—finds out when she's well into her twenties that her father puts out dirty magazines. You know how she found out, don't you? I let it slip when we were having a conversation. Of course, I never in the world dreamed she didn't—I mean, the girl was a lawyer! He was a fool like that, my brother. I loved him, but he was a fool for his children.”

I shrugged. “Worse things to be a fool for.”

Aunt Ruby gave a short laugh. “Yeah, sure. But your children you have the rest of your life.” She stopped, apparently remembering Ben. “At least you hope so.” Her tone changed, and she narrowed her eyes and peered at me. “Did he have AIDS?”

I wasn't sure who she was talking about.

“You're an AIDS doctor, right?” Aunt Ruby asked. I nodded. “You can tell me, I'm up on the ways of the world, didn't Ben have AIDS?”

I thought of the blood tests for HIV that Sally had gotten on Ben every few months, the clean-needle stash she'd accumulated, the heroin she procured for him, all the effort that had gone into keeping Ben AIDS-free. “No, he didn't.”

She didn't believe me. “You can tell me, I won't tell anyone, I won't go crazy like Sally would. It's for my own peace of mind. I figure Ben found out he had AIDS, and Sid took him to Mexico for some of those crazy treatments, and then he kept getting worse and killed himself. That's how I figure it.”

“It didn't happen like that.” The words popped out of me. I slipped my hand in my pocket and felt for the plastic bag.

Aunt Ruby eyed me with fresh suspicion. “Then what did happen?”

I started to stammer.

“I figure Sid called you up when he found out about Ben's AIDS. How could he not call you up? You're an expert! A family friend!” Aunt Ruby moved closer to me, her voice growling now, insistent. “I know Sid wouldn't tell Sally that Ben had AIDS. Sid told me after he got back from Mexico that he'd done everything to protect her.”

“He did. Everything.”

“So what happened? Ben just die one of those sad AIDS-y deaths down there? Or did he kill himself? That's what I think.”

Maybe only I could remember him properly, because only I knew how he'd died.

“I can't see him using a gun.” Aunt Ruby stepped back and gazed, frowning, into the air, as if worrying an old question. “There was something feminine about Ben, and I can't see him shooting himself at all. Pills, maybe. Slit wrist, maybe. I know Sid said he threw himself off a cliff, but I'm not sure about that, either. I asked Sid point-blank about it, and he didn't answer. I think Sid didn't want to bring the body home. He got Ben buried down there so there wouldn't be any questions at the border.”

I couldn't stand it. This hopeless guessing, this misinformation. Before I even realized, I was blurting it. “I'll tell you what happened. Ben didn't have AIDS. He never got AIDS, because Sally used to get him his heroin and clean needles so he wouldn't have to share. Sid took Ben to Mexico to clean him out, but Ben couldn't stand it and called Sally, and Sally was going to drive to Mexico with heroin for Ben, but Sid found out—tapped the phones, you know, he always bugged Ben's room—and then to make sure Sally didn't leave L.A., Sid took Ben outside of that little town in Mexico and shot him dead.”