Best Friends (55 page)

“Have you seen the house off Mulholland lately?”

“Oh, it's the same. The neighbors hate it.” The house had been bought from Sid by a French actress, who sold it to a fertility specialist when she gave up on American film. The doctor had replaced the driveway's vegetation with rows of topiaries and decorated the balconies with minarets painted gold and aqua. “Like little colorful penises,” Sally said. The espalier, she'd heard, was dying or dead; Carlos had retired.

The espalier dying? Carlos retired? I felt a pang as if I'd heard of a betrayal. But that was silly. The espalier had lived longer than Ben.

“But I hear the doctor may be moving,” Sally went on. “Nothing stays static here, that's for sure.”

Nor here either, I thought, rolling over in bed. I was naked in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in a Holiday Inn, waiting for Ted to return from his brunch with the drug rep who'd arranged his trip. “How's the weather?”

“Fine. Sixties. Pretty clear.”

In Wilkes-Barre, the snow was deep enough that not a blade of grass showed through. Behind the curtain, a small drift had accumulated on the inside windowsill. It was cloudy and the wind was moaning. More snow, lots of snow, was predicted. I'd driven here yesterday, thinking I was crazy to be traveling. It surprised me that any local doctors had shown up the night before for Ted's post-dinner speech, but doctors will do anything for free food. Now it looked as if Ted and I would have a bonus night together, snowed in.

“How's it there?”

“Winter storm warning.”

Sally was enough of a southern Californian to believe in the romance of snow. “Oh, Aury must be excited! Have you been sledding yet?”

“No. Maybe this weekend. She's still asleep.”

“Is your mom okay?”

“Fine.” Another of your assignations? my mother had asked. I should charge you double. Believe me, you do, I'd answered.

It was cowardly of me not to tell Sally, but I couldn't. There was no one on Ted's side who knew, either. In a way, we were the perfect people to conduct an affair. Not everyone can keep a secret.

 

 

 

I WOKE UP at about two in the morning. Ted was awake too. “That light out the window reminds me of those flashing license plate frames. Remember how you used to want one ?”

“Boy, I forgot about those.”

“You should get one, now that your mother's in Texas and won't go crazy over it. You should buy one. Maybe I'll get you one for your birthday. What do you think, should I get you one for your birthday?”

“It would certainly be a novelty in the doctors' parking lot.”

“It would be great. Rakish. Rakish: Do you like that adjective? I think I'm improving with adjectives. Want me to get it?”

“Are you kidding? Mary would divorce me in two seconds if I put one of those on our van. Two seconds.”

“Oh dear,” I said, rolling away from him in the dark.

We were snowed in for two bonus nights, until Monday morning, and when we turned on the TV for the weather, what we got instead was news of the Northridge quake.

Earthquake. An earthquake in Los Angeles. I watched the film of the broken highway and the cracked buildings and the map with the little diagrammed epicenter, and my hand was on the phone before Ted even fully grasped what we were seeing.

An automated voice came on the line and said all circuits were busy.

“Look at it,” I said. “It's not near her. I know where that highway is. I think we're okay. That's the thing about Los Angeles, it's sprawling. You might as well say an earthquake hit Ohio as to say it hit Los Angeles.”

Ted called his wife, then went to the hotel restaurant and brought us back some breakfast, which he seemed determined I should eat. He sat beside me on the bed, hunched in front of the TV, stroking my back. “Clare, Clare. I'm sure she's all right.”

There was footage of some of the biggest houses on Mulholland: they looked okay, and I wished Sally had never left her parents'.

In the middle of the morning, the phone rang. Ted and I glanced at each other, not sure who should answer. I had left the hotel number with my mother; Ted had left it with his wife.

Ted picked up the phone. “Sally?” he said. “You're okay?” I scrambled over the bed to get closer. “I was sure you were dead!” To my astonishment, Ted started sobbing.

“Give it to me,” I said. “Don't scare her.” And then, into the receiver: “Sally?”

“I'm on our cell phone,” she said. “I've spent the last few hours finding out about Daddy. He's fine. We're fine. Everyone's fine.” She sounded perfectly calm. “You live here, you have to expect this. And it wasn't that bad. Linnea and the twins didn't wake up. Ezra was hysterical, but Barbara loved it.”

“Good,” I said. “Good.”

“Barbara wants another earthquake.” I listened for sounds of the children, but the background was deathly quiet.

“Where are you?” I said.

“Outside.” And then Sally fell apart. “Clare, what are you doing? I tried to call you at home, and your mother told me you weren't there. I don't even know where you are anymore. Where are you? And what are you doing with Ted?”

 

 

 

I FLEW OUT THREE weekends later. Sally seemed reflective: their house was sound, and nothing but knickknacks had been damaged, including a framed photograph of Sally and her family taken before she went off to college, which had slid off a table and disappeared, hidden for minutes as Sally pillaged the room for it in the predawn light, believing somehow the earth had cracked open and swallowed it. “You know,” she said, “like something biblical.”

“Jeez, it sounds terrible.”

“It was better than I thought, really. The picture was only under a chair.”

Houses around them had cracks, but theirs had no cracks at all.

 

 

 

—“I WALKED THOUGH the kitchen door and I saw you and I thought: Do you live here? Aren't you supposed to be living in Ohio? I think Ohio's a figment of your imagination. I think you're always here.”

—“What do your patients do when you're gone? Do they manage to survive without you?”

—“What about Aury? You ship her off again with her new dad?”

Peter was amazingly hostile. I couldn't understand it. Here I was in post-earthquake L.A., being brave, showing up. And all Peter's little-boy enthusiasm was gone. He had no snakes or interesting rocks to show me this time.

—“Why didn't you just get a sperm donor, if you didn't want your daughter to have a father? What made you decide to drag a real man into it?”

—“You could have even had an egg donor. You're a doctor. Why be personal? Why stick your own genes in a child?”

I defended myself to Peter: “I come out here frequently but only for short times. Like Friday through Monday on a holiday weekend. I hardly ever miss more than a day of work. And the infectious disease docs cover me when I'm away because they covet my business. And, yes, lately Aury has spent some weekends with her father and half sisters. Don't you think that's good? Aren't you in favor of children interacting with their fathers?”

“I hear you're interacting with the father too,” Peter said.

 

 

 

“ PETER THINKS I ' M A horrible mother,” I said. Sally was in the rocker in Linnea's room, rocking her sobbing baby back and forth, back and forth. Sally had thought that by the fifth child, a new baby would be a piece of cake, but Linnea proved differently.

“He believes people should be honest. And look at you, Clare! First you didn't tell Ted you and he had a daughter, then when he finds out by accident, you start an affair with him and don't even tell me.”

I was trying to figure out where in that welter of accusation was the crime that most disturbed Sally: it was not telling her, I was sure. But I answered another part. “I didn't know Ted was definitely Aury's father. And we were divorced when I got pregnant.”

“I understand that.” Sally stroked Linnea's hair, and the baby's cries slowed to gulps. “But you should explain it to Peter.” Linnea's eyelids fluttered.

I made a skeptical noise. What did I care about Peter? I hated weird old Peter, shut up with his computer for hours, more intimate with people in Greenland and Vietnam than he would ever be with me. Did he even have clients these days? I doubted it. “It's not worth it,” I said impatiently.

“I never dreamed you were sleeping with Ted.”

I sighed.

“I can't get over that last time I talked to you before the quake.” Sally held Linnea's head against her chest, tracing the baby's ear with her finger. “I mean you were there, you were in some ratty hotel room with Ted, and all along I'm imagining you sitting in your kitchen.”

I felt accused, naked, a hundred times more naked than I had felt in that Pennsylvania motel room. “It was a Holiday Inn,” I defended myself. “Ted's never ratty.”

“And Ted, Ted!” Sally shook her head. “Why in the world are you seeing Ted?”

“I love him.”

“Why didn't you stay married to him, then?”

“Sally . . .”

Linnea let out a quick yelp. “Linnea, Linnea,” Sally murmured, pressing her fingers gently against Linnea's lips.

“He thinks the best of me. He makes me feel like I'm worth something.” I hesitated, thinking how to explain the sex of it. “He makes me feel alive.”

Lots of other ways to feel alive! I imagined her saying. Or: You need a
man
to prove you're worth something? Or: And you thought my business was immoral!

“It just surprises me. You were so done with him.”

“You can never tell what'll ring your bell,” I said. An old quote from Sid. I knew it would make Sally smile, and it did. He was a bugger, but he had a way.

“But what are your expectations?” Sally went on. “He has three daughters by his wife. I worry about you. No quality man is going to leave three children.”

“I don't need him to,” I said. “I'm happy having him for my few hours. I'm happy being able to think of him and know he cares. That time we were stuck in Wilkes-Barre? Three nights was almost too much.”

“Marriage is a lifetime. Day after day after day.”

“I don't need a marriage, I need friendship,” I said. “Look at us.” By this I meant: look how close we are and yet we only see each other a few days every few months.

But she thought I meant something different. “I don't mean to let you down, Clare. Give me some time to adjust.”

Linnea gave a final sob and collapsed, suddenly asleep, her head lolling back on Sally's arm. Sally could have been holding a rag doll. She gazed down at her littlest child. “If a chest of drawers fell over, it would kill her.”

 

 

 

“ IT CAN ' T LAST, you know,” Sally said to me at the airport. She carried, as usual, a baby in a backpack.

“What do you mean it can't last?” I objected. “It has to last. He's Aury's father. It's, it's”—I struggled for a word—“ongoing.”

Sally raised her eyebrows and gave me a look. She'd always been much more of a realist than I was.

I thought of Ben's tooth in its tiny plastic bag. I thought of what Sid told me, of Aunt Ruby's doubts, of Virginia's confimation. Something had happened. Sally had a right to know the possibilities, a right to be fully adult. Absurd to try to protect her.

But two months later, over the phone, Sally dropped her own bombshell: “We're moving to Idaho.”

I thought I'd misheard. “The state of Idaho? As in potatoes?” I scanned my brain. I'd never known anyone from Idaho, or even anyone who'd visited the state. “Isn't that where the white supremacists live?”

“I know it sounds precipitous, but it's not. We've been talking about leaving Los Angeles for ages. And now Daddy's business is sold, and we found an excellent nursing home up there, and Peter can work out of anywhere with his computer, and then the earthquake: I don't think I can stand living here after the earthquake. If a cabinet fell over, it could—”

“I know, I know,” I interrupted. “Kill one of the children.”

“It's true, Clare. Don't make me sound melodramatic. We bought land in Idaho. With a very primitive house, but one we can stay in until we build.”

“Have you ever even been to Idaho?”

“Last weekend. Peter's been e-mailing people up there, we already had leads on the property.”

“And you're moving your father up there?”

“It's a very nice nursing home. Private, in a little wooded glen; the staff is wonderful.”

“How soon are you moving?”

“Anytime, really. Ezra starts kindergarten in the fall, and I'd like to get him established. As soon as we get packed up. We'll get an ambulance to take Daddy.”

An ambulance! The cost must be staggering. I wondered if his electric bed was going. “Can you sell your house?”

“Oh, sure. No cracks.”

“Incredible,” I said. It was just hitting me that I would not be visiting California, that the cheap flights from Cleveland to Los Angeles would mean nothing to me, that the landscape in which I'd always envisioned Sally and her past and future would be hers no longer. “I can't believe it.”

“Idaho's beautiful,” Sally said. “You'll love it. We're in the southeast corner.”

“Won't you miss the ocean?” I would.