A Little Change of Face (26 page)

“Which made you have to tell me this now. Because even though it would be wrong for you to advance-warn me that
someone might hurt me, now Pam is a definite bad commodity. He, on the other hand, you wouldn't have told me about if you didn't have to.”

“Bingo.”

“And you were able to see all this in—what—about the space of a minute?”

“Pretty much.”

“And then you came back here.”

“Well, no, not right away.”

“Oh? What'd you do first?”

“Well, first I had to hit Pam, didn't I?”

“You
hit
her?”

“Yeah.”

“But you've never hit another human being in your life. You're the fucking biggest humanitarian I've ever met in my life, for chrissakes. You stop your car for hurt animals.”

“Doesn't matter, does it? I still had to hit her.”

“Why?”

“'Cause she dishonored you. 'Cause she dishonored the friendship you'd shown her. 'Cause someone had to hit her for you, and he's too nice to do it.”

How had I ever thought that Pam could be a stand-in for Best Girlfriend? How had I ever imagined that Kelly, nice and screwy as she'd turned out to be, would be better at giving me insight than this woman whom I'd known, who'd known me, nearly my whole life?

That was when I finally drooped. That was when I finally just put my arms around her and held on tight to Best Girlfriend, speaking the words aloud that one of us had said off and on at times over the years. “It sure does suck, our not being gay. Damn, but I'd marry you.”

“P
am, you bitch!”

“Wha—?”

“How dare you pretend to be my friend all this time!”

“I—”

“Friends want what's best for the other person. Friends want what's best for the other person in spite of what's best for themselves. But that was never you.”

“I—”

“All you ever wanted was to see me fall.” I reflected on how I'd once asked her if she was
trying
to instill free-floating feelings of worthlessness in me and how true that had turned out to be. “You're just a small-minded person with petty wants. You figured that if you could somehow make me less, you'd be more.”

“That wasn't—”

“We're through, Pam. You're not my friend anymore. You never were. You don't even know the meaning of the word.”

Of course, that conversation never took place, except in my head. Even though Pam deserved to be yelled at, and I wasn't sorry in the slightest that Best Girlfriend had hit her, it would have made me feel too small to do the yelling she deserved. She knew what she had done. She knew what it had cost her. It was enough to play the scene through in my mind.

I
called my mother.

“Hello?” I heard her voice, the dawning of alarm preparing to do battle with sleepiness.

“Hey, Mom.”

“Scarlett?” Now she was wide-awake, really scared. “What's wrong? Has something happened?”

“Nothing bad,” I said, sort of lying, “I just wanted to talk.”

“Oh. Talk.” I could almost see her settle back on to the pillows. “It's kind of late.” I would have bet anything she looked at the clock. “Couldn't it wait until morning?”

I took a deep breath.

“Those men—” I finally was saying something I'd never said before “—when Dad was alive… What was that all about?”

Her answer was a long time in coming. Perhaps she was wondering how I knew and if she should ask me about that. Perhaps she was debating if complete denial might not be the safest route.

“Your father loved me very much,” she said softly. “He loved me for myself. I knew that. But I just wanted… I also wanted…”

“What, Mom?”

Big breath on the other end of the line. “I also wanted to be still found beautiful.”

Were those two things contradictory? I wondered, the desire to be loved for who you are and the desire to be found physically beautiful in a purely objective sense? Could I get both things from one person?

“It's okay, Mom,” I said. “Go back to sleep. I'm sure Dad knew how much you loved him.”

T
here was one thing, as a lifelong reader, that I knew about writers, and it came to me now.

As a writer, you're always confronted with a choice: tell the people what they want to hear, or tell them the truth? Choose the first, and you might still get your happy ending; choose the other, and, well, you'd get the truth. One ending, hopeful; the other, in my case, cynical. But, if you looked at the better writers—and I don't necessarily mean the more successful ones, just the better ones—it wasn't even so much about making a clear-cut choice, one path over the other, so much as it was about striking a balance, something neither wholly comic or wholly tragic, the kind of balance seen in the best of nature, the kind of natural balance that slams you in the face every time you remember that children's poetry and art still managed to grow at Auschwitz, every time you remember that every comedian who has ever lived to make you laugh must one day die.

The sun rises, the sun sets, sometimes the fiddler manages to stay off the roof, sometimes he just fucking falls off. And right there, right fucking there, was my entire story in a nutshell; for, if the choice of the writer was to be a crowd-pleaser or a truth-teller, then my own personal choice came down to this:

Did I really want to be a tragic heroine, or did I want to have a happy life?

Hmm,
rubbing my chin here,
be a tragic heroine, or live a happy life? A tragic heroine, or…? A tra…?

Nah.

Why?

Because it's not in me, not in me to choose expedience over truth, not when I already know the truth that lies in the tale. And I was still hoping I could be cynical
and
hopeful; that maybe truth could still be truth and contain a part of happy.

“B
ut how can you say that?” I asked.

“Which part?” Steve asked.

We were in the Sandwich Submarine, having decided to talk about us on neutral ground, the talking-about-us part turning out to be talking about us by way of talking about me. We were studiously
not
discussing what I had done with Saul or what he had done with Pam, if he had done anything with Pam at all after Best Girlfriend hit her and left. If he had done something with Pam, I didn't want to know it, not because I would blame him but because I would never be able to get the images out of my mind. I was guessing he felt the same way about Saul.

“All of it,” I said. “But, really, how can you say that you know you'll love me all the time? Never mind the whole frump/not-really-a-frump issue, etc., etc. Do we really need to get into that again? Sometimes I'm difficult. Sometimes I'm a complete bitch. I'm
changeable.
Sometimes, the me you
get in the morning isn't even the same as the me you get in the afternoon.”

He shrugged. “But you're still you.”

“And that's enough?”

“No, it's not enough.”

Aha,
I thought. I finally had him.

But that masochistic victory didn't hang on the board very long, because that was when he chose to floor me for all time with:

“No, it's not
enough,
Scarlett. It's everything.”

I
n spite of his words, his wonderful words, I still do not know how our story will end.

Will I forgive him his betrayal of me?

I don't know.

During our little talk at Sandwich Submarine, it came out that Steve had his own confession to make, which finally explained the unaccountable expression of guilt I'd seen on his face when I first told him of my deception.

“I need to tell you something,” he'd umm-ed at me.

“Hmm…?” I'd still been looking at him dreamy-eyed, lost in his unconditional acceptance of the person I was.

“I'm rich,” he'd said with a guilty grin.

“What?” That snapped me out of it.

“My brother and I made a small fortune building property developments. Remember how surprised you were to hear he lived on Deer Hill Avenue?” He blushed. “Well, I'd decided to live incognito for a while since I was tired of
feeling like the only reason women liked me was for my money.”

“But,” I butted, “what about all of your ‘be yourself' stuff?”

“Look,” he'd sighed, “we all hide parts of ourselves, wanting to be liked for ourselves but fearing we won't be liked for ourselves, fearing that who we are is ultimately unlikable.”

“So, what, you were
masquerading
as a relatively poor person?”

It turned out that while I was busy being not quite who I was, he was busy being not quite who he was as well.

And, somehow, we were getting past that, too.

Will he forgive me my betrayal of him?

I don't know.

Whether we ever finally decide to discuss it or not, I just don't know if either of us will ever forget.

I do know that I will never forgive Pam.

Is it because I believe it to be Pam's fault, everything bad that happened to me?
Was
it really Pam's fault?

No, I know whose fault it was. It was mine. I choose, we choose, we all choose, we make the rules, we choose the game, even if we think that the only reason we're choosing a path is because it's been so well-trodden before us that it appears irresistible, we still choose; even if we think we're choosing something just to be different, to set us apart. That said, I'm still not going to ever forgive Pam, simply because I
choose
not to.

There are a few other things I know now as well.

Remember my list of things that were important to me? Books, friendship and that one true love?

Books, sad to say, can sometimes let you down. Not only
that, but a day may come, hopefully not for a long time, but it still may come, when I am no longer able to read in the way that I am used to; age will get me, either in the form of decreasing eyesight, or decreasing mental capacity, or simply in decreasing patience.

Is Steve that one true love for me?

Oh, I think he is. I truly believe that. If not him, I cannot imagine another man ever even coming close.

But, even if our mutual betrayals can be overcome, lust has a tendency to fade over time; that in-love feeling mutating into something else.

So I am left with knowing two things.

For as long as I live, I will have Best Girlfriend. Friendship, real friendship: it is the one relationship that endures. It is the one thing that should never depend upon appearances, but rather upon what lies at the core.

And now, for the final thing I know:

No matter what happens, you should never lose your sense of humor.