Funny Once (15 page)

“This show is so boring,” Cara said suddenly, attempting to jolly up and jump-start their conversation. Rochelle joined her in watching the live feed from Times Square. “Elmo is morose, and Hello Kitty just seems tired.”

“Captain Jack Sparrow’s on Adderall,” Rochelle added after a minute.

“You’d have to be. Wait here.” Cara took the stairs to the first floor and hustled up the block. The scene was far less subdued in the light of day, with a lusty soundtrack, ticket sellers hawking shows, car horns, tourists gaping and holding up their cell phones, stunned and amazed, and the shrill alarm of sirens, more than one, coming and going, the relentless signal to somebody else’s disaster. Cara found and faced the camera and began waving, mouthing
Hello, Rochelle! I love you!
and madly blowing kisses.

Back at the bar Rochelle had ordered another round. “That was awfully sweet,” she said, smiling forlornly.

Cara was pleased with herself, breathless from the run up seven flights.

“Listen,” Rochelle said, a catch in her voice, “I have to tell you something.” Were these the worst words in the world? Yes, they were.

“The cancer’s back! I knew it.” No wonder Cara’s story had seemed paltry and selfish. Rochelle was dying!

“No. No, that’s not it. Not cancer, OK? I promise.” The two of them made fists and knocked wood on the tabletop, which made Sylvia Plath suddenly burst out barking. Nobody even looked their way, this hip bar with its unflappable occupants. “But remember Louis White?”

“Louis?”

“We got back in touch a while back. I mean, I found him, I don’t know, a while ago, ages ago, just suddenly I was thinking about him. Maybe I had a dream? Anyway, it took a little work, he’s not exactly on the radar out there. But then I found him. And it was like, I
found
him. Do you know what I mean?”

Her eyes were tearing up, small there in her fleshy florid face. Yes, Cara knew exactly what she meant. She had lost that foundness herself, so long ago now. And yet the feeling for his perfection, or theirs, at least from Cara’s perspective, had never left her. She’d never been as fully in love with another, never been as good in bed, at love, with any body, anybody else. So yes, she knew what Rochelle meant. “He moved to Tucson, to live with his father. He had this arthritic father, and they shared a double-wide. Trailer,” she added. Cara’s breathing was growing heavier, she realized, her heart was pumping as if for a fight, in fear, rage, outrage. In this state she heard the tale of bewildering decades-long correspondence, nearly daily phone calls. “And he came with me, sometimes, abroad.”

“What?” Cara was gathering information the way one might in a car accident or tornado, pieces of import flying randomly around her, what might she need to grab on to?

“Not all the time, just when he could afford it. When he could leave his dad. That’s why he moved to Arizona back when, his family ended up there. It was his idea to go to Ireland, I’ve never thought much of Joyce.”

“Joyce who?”

“Who Joyce, you mean.” Through her tears, Rochelle offered up a small smile. “He’s a very good drinker. You probably remember that.” On the Internet they got drunk together late at night and said or wrote things neither recalled the next day. Or one recalled what the other couldn’t, and there was the record, if they wished to consult it, a long record of their thoughts. Also letters. Books they read and sent to one another, notes in the margins.

“What does he look like now?”

Rochelle considered this, stroking Sylvia Plath in the bag on her lap, sighing. “Like me, I guess,” she finally said. “Out of shape, a little bald, with a few missing teeth. I tried for a while to pay for replacements, but you know Louis.”

“No,” Cara said stiffly, “I don’t know Louis.” That was the whole point: she had. Once upon a time she’d won, and then renounced her prize. Or so Rochelle believed. In the version of the story that Rochelle possessed, Cara had taken a sacred vow. Except maybe Rochelle knew that wasn’t true. Embarrassment swelled in Cara, shame to now join nerves and that initial ongoing outrage.

“We look like every other lazy middle-aged American,” Rochelle went on. “We live in the two places where people go to take it easy, to ease out in easy chairs. We are Winter Visitors. Snowbirds. Who don’t migrate come summer.”

Cara now featured herself and her husband at the gym on a grim sleety morning, feverishly pedaling and lifting, hanging on to—running after—an impressive image that was reflected back to them from a thousand mirrors, the walls being made of those, those and a few windows, through which you could view grey and despicable weather. They were often named a Handsome Couple. Their kid was beautiful as well. All of which seemed, suddenly, very average and dumb, as if she’d invested heavily in faulty stock, been swindled by a cunning con man long ago, yet had only herself to blame.

“Are you OK?” Rochelle asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Mental pause,” she said, sniffing, cocktail napkin to her nose. “I sometimes lose all track of everything, plus sweating. Do you hate it when people tell you it’s better than the alternative? I want to say, just which alternative is it you are referring to, anyway, because obviously you are a person who believes there’s only one alternative when there are
endless
ones, is it better than the alternative of being, say, thirty-
five
again, before there was ever a whiff of the possibility of something like a hot flash or a brain freeze or a whisker of a chance of a chance whisker—”

“I’ll be right back.” Cara’s chair threatened to spill over, she stood so swiftly from it, and around her vision swam tiny flashing stars. In the restroom stall she wondered if she would weep. It appeared she would not, she was still too stunned, her heart banging in her neck. Did Rochelle truly not remember that Cara had loved Louis? That in the official record of their friendship she’d given him up for Rochelle’s sake? That for years and years she had longed for him, that he was hers to long for? Could she be faulted for that, here? The humiliation of what she’d just learned wouldn’t leave her alone, it rushed her like Mother Nature, in the way of illness or weather, relentless, and she powerless under its force, buffeted and dizzy. Cara was going to have a lot of thinking to do, she couldn’t do it all right here and now, semi-crocked in a bathroom stall, in New York.
City
. So she flushed, and when she returned to the table she would blame the shellfish snacks, even after all this time she was, it turned out, still a simple farm girl from a landlocked state, and exotic cuisine turned her stomach. In the meantime, she stopped at the front desk to book another room, a single, terribly expensive, terribly necessary. Maybe she would never see Rochelle Carmichael ever again. Ever.

On the table lay a folded paper. Rochelle nodded at it, so Cara read it.

I love you. Goodbye.
It was the old trouble: she’d been thrown under that train again.

“I get it,” Cara said, “you two were in love, life mates, like penguins or something, and now it’s over. Better than best friends. Better than being mar—”

“He shot himself in the head last weekend.”

When Cara could not fashion anything more than a gulp in response to that information, Rochelle added, “Hello, Funkytown,” and Cara realized at least one thing was certain: she wouldn’t be staying in that expensive single she’d just booked at the front desk after all.

“Typed on a typewriter,” she finally noted, having to note something. Only obvious things occurred to her, as she was having to remind herself to breathe.

“Yeah, just like back in college. He didn’t answer his phone, no email, too many days had gone by, so I called his sister.”

“I didn’t know he had a sister.”

“He has a sister,” Rochelle sobbed. “He actually has
two
sisters.” She had never looked worse, never more like her brain-addled ancient mother. Sylvia Plath was licking her hand as if to stop its frantic clutching. “That’s the thing about a real live letter: it takes a few days for the news to arrive. There’s no possibility of being talked or texted out of it.”

“‘It’? Oh, I see what you mean. That’s true, there isn’t.”

“Apparently he didn’t want to be.”

She was supposed to say she was sorry, but Cara couldn’t do it. Her sorrow was selfish, her own, and too sudden to extend elsewhere. Louis’s father had died, Cara learned, and then Louis had been in a car crash. Despite its not being his fault—he was a very good drunk driver—he nonetheless was cited when revealed to be over the limit. He not only lost his license, but also suffered a serious shoulder injury, which led to a heavy regime of narcotics. And that to a singular kind of moroseness that would not lift. “I wish I’d been paying better attention,” Rochelle said. “I feel like I could have saved him.”

“That’s the kind of guy he was,” Cara said, thrown back abruptly to that intensely passionate past, lying alongside Louis, limbs entwined, she’d never forget because he was her first, her best. Into her ear he had sung a song, some silly thing he’d written, it was hers, from him.

“That’s the kind of girls we were,” Rochelle said. “Are, I guess. Still are.”

They fell asleep in mid–drunk conversation, just the way they had in this city more than thirty years before, in twin beds then instead of queens, in a small room without air-conditioning, under a breeze from an oscillating fan that swiveled and blew, back and forth, all day and night, swinging between them, patient soldiering metronome, Cara could never encounter an oscillating fan, its faithful breathing whir, without thinking of Rochelle and talking in bed with her. Into the dark they had spoken, filling each other in on everything that mattered, and much that didn’t.

Sylvia Plath lay on the pillow beside Rochelle. She’d snarled when Cara had reached for her water glass. “Little shit!” she’d hissed at her, afraid.

A strangely vital thing, love, a very invisible yet essential item, hidden as an illness, mortal that way as well. In her bed, listening finally to Rochelle’s steady sleep nearby, Cara felt sure an answer would come to her regarding their friendship. It was not over. But where would it, where
could
it, go next? And whom could she tell how she now felt? Nobody, no body. Tomorrow she and Rochelle would visit the sites of their peculiar tastes, the Strand, the French dress shop, Little Italy, where they’d eaten so often back in their Barnard days, yet had never been able again to locate the restaurant they’d then adored, where the waiters had known them, brought them free desserts, flirted. Outside, the air was growing brisk, a last blast of winter. On Sunday, after they boarded their flights apart and home, they would each pass through those enduring clouds, that ongoing cold rain.

The There There

Once, when they were still a family, and the boys were mostly grown yet still living at home, they were sitting, the four of them, at their customary seats at the kitchen table discussing the perfect crime. That is, the murder you would get away with. From his quadrant, ­Caroline Wright’s husband radiated disapproval.

“Out on the ocean,” said their eldest, Will. He had just returned from a college recruiting trip to UCSB, so the ocean would naturally come to mind. “You could rent a boat, get them a little tipsy, then dump them overboard. Later you would tell the cops you searched and searched.”

“If it was a girl, she could be on her period,” added his little brother, Drew. “To explain the sharks.” Though he was the younger, he already had more experience with girls and their periods; he’d imagined, maybe, his difficult girlfriend on that boat, Caroline thought. “If she was on her period,” he went on, “you could also go into the forest and wait for a bear . . .”

“You’d have to do some weeping to the authorities,” she added to Will’s nautical fantasy, “but not too much. Shock tends to dry up the tear glands.”

“Or,” said Will, “I also like the idea of putting poison in a pill that’s a prescription, so the victim will take it who-knows-when.”

“You’d have to want to kill a pill taker,” Caroline said. “A capsule-pill taker. And you’d have to find some poison that fit inside it.”

“
My
perfect murder,” said Drew, “would be where there are two people and each of them whacks the other one’s enemy. Some strangers-on-the-plane kind of thing.” He sat back to finish his pancakes, a diffuse expression clouding his eyes, the look he’d had since he was a toddler when overtaken by the land of make-believe.

“Train,” corrected Will. “Not plane. Mom?”

“Up in the mountains,” Caroline said. For many years she’d not really lived anywhere but Telluride; when she took her daily hike, she always half expected to find a body, an aspen-limb-like leg or arm amidst the blowdown. “Up somewhere high and remote, some slippery trail. Maybe after a wine-and-cheese picnic tryst situation, way above timberline, just when the trail starts to have frozen spots. One tiny misstep, and whoops, over they go.”

“Like when people back up to get their picture taken at the Grand Canyon,” Will added.

“It’s weird when the pictures survive and the person doesn’t,” said Drew, apparently dreamily adding that factor into his own scenario with the strangers, the planes and trains, the bears and sharks, the hapless victims.

“If you knew somebody with a bunch of hogs . . .” Will was saying, and Drew was adding, “Yeah, yeah, yeah! I saw that show, too!,” when Caroline’s husband, Gerald, rose from the table and set his breakfast dishes gently in the sink, that condemning clink of porcelain on porcelain. He was saddened by the conversation, disappointed in his family, his closest associates. The weight of it caused him to stoop, and the boys hung their heads, regretful, silenced; they would later make it up to him and he would enjoy forgiving them, but how much more horrified her husband would have been to know that it was him Caroline was imagining, standing too close to the edge at the picnic tryst, next tumbling over a cliff.