With Friends Like These: A Novel (14 page)

I was finishing my manicure. The polish was new, the screaming coral of a lobster—ideal for Maine.
He loves me
, I thought as I layered on a final stroke.
He loves me not. And does it matter when we’re having sex?
It has become a feminine truth, all but universally acknowledged, that it does, but a long time ago I decided it didn’t. My ma lusted after the scumbag who was my pop, and where had it gotten her? Broke, mean, bitter,

Arthur strutted out of my bedroom on his sturdy, slightly bowed legs. Was he good in bed? Good enough. I’ve discovered that when I’m with a man, I have to be the belle of my own ball, which is one of Jules’ Rules every woman should follow way before she’s my age: pushing forty. Well, forty-two. Okay, closer to forty-three, which no one knows and no one will. It’s not as if I have to worry about ma revealing my true date of birth, which I suspect she’s forgotten, and since I didn’t graduate from college, I’m at no risk of being outed by some casting director’s dogged cyber-search.

“Doll,” Arthur said, “what do you say to another bouncy-bouncy?”

Arthur, who should know better than to keep his driver’s license in plain view—in his wallet, if we’re getting technical—is also older than he claims, which is perhaps why he takes such pride in being endowed with an extraordinary supply of self-generated Cialis. Generally, I applaud a partner who can give it three times in a go. Just not today.

“No can do,” I informed Arthur. “I have an audition.”
At four-thirty, hours from now
.

A friend who teaches early childhood development once informed me that a human being’s core personality changes only slightly past the age of four. I see the same thing in relationships, counted by weeks. By the end of one month as a couple, patterns become etched as deeply as, in my case, the crevices bracketing my mouth. Arthur and I were three months past that crucial marker. I knew that another naked happy hour would lead to me making a large, late lunch. On this particular Saturday, if I succumbed, it would be hard to pry myself away before the president of the co-op board stopped by for Bloody Marys. Arthur had invited him for two o’clock.

I was already more immersed than I cared to be in the cloak-and-dagger tactics of Arthur’s real estate caper, though here, too, I admired the man’s tenacity. It was clear that fanged Fran despised Arthur, yet he refused to let it deter him. Where the vaunted apartment was concerned, Arthur kept burrowing in deeper, displaying either—my jury was out on this point—his fatal flaw or his fatal charm. I fully recognize that to some Arthur comes across as insufferable. On the other hand, he has stubborn determination—a cousin to loyalty, which in my experience is a virtue in short supply and of crucial importance. Anyone who’s met my family need not be Freud to question why.

I suspect that if I truly gave myself to Arthur, he’d be mine forever, someone I could count on years from now when the two of us had migrated to a gated community midway between Boca and Fort Lauderdale. I could see us gazing at the ocean through misty bifocals, he complimenting me on the nice piece of veal I’d roasted for dinner. Still, hanging
out with the co-op board president today would be too much. When Arthur mentioned it I said no.

“Jules,” he pleaded, “he’s bringing the missus. You can’t let me down now.”

Watch me
, I thought. “An audition is work.” I’d walked into the bathroom, my silky red robe tied loosely, exposing enviable cleavage. My body mass index might fly above average, but the girls are so high and round that in a ladies’ locker room I’ve caught women gawking, and more than once I’ve been accosted by an underendowed female wanting the name of my surgeon. “Dr. DNA,” I like to boast. My tits are the only good thing my family ever gave me, and I frequently deploy these airbags to prevent accidents from happening.

“Can’t you blow it off?” he asked. “Besides, I’ve never heard of an audition on a Saturday afternoon.”

“It’s off-Broadway.” New Jersey, to be exact. “It could be a good part.”
The Taming of the Shrew
. I was shooting for you-know-who.

Arthur rested his hands on my hips and looked at me intensely. Barefoot, I was only inches shorter than he. His eyes, one of his better features, are the color of whiskey, and as I looked into them, I saw need. I like to be needed. But even more, I like to be begged. “Yes?” I said, pitching my voice slightly beyond purr.

“Please,” he answered, as he fingered the top of the red rose tattoo two inches above my left nipple. “I’m counting on you. Don’t you want me to get this apartment?”

The answer to that question was blocked by a brain blizzard. In an ideal world, my friend Quincy wouldn’t have been dumb enough to sing like a canary about this fucktabulous apartment, thus putting me in the position of having to decide whether or not to tell Arthur about it. But with the wheels in motion, careening toward a crash, my heart—beating under the tattoo—told me I needed to support Arthur. He was, at least for the moment, my man, a commodity far scarcer than an apartment.

“If you insist,” I said, and leaned forward to kiss my frog, my Ratty, my
Art the Fart, who played a mean game of online Scrabble and loathed punk rock as much as I did. In some ways, we were a team. Besides, I might be able to make the audition if I beat the hell out of his place by three. “But you’ll owe me.”

“Consider it marked in my ledger,” he answered after an exceedingly long, wet smooch.

“Have you shopped for this party you’re throwing?”

“I stopped by a deli yesterday.”

“Show me.” I prayed that he’d sprung for some rich, bloomy cheese—I was salivating for a triple-crème cow’s milk Savarin—along with pâté and cornichons. He pointed to a small plastic tub of hummus, some poly-bagged pita, and a half-eaten Gruyère, dry and small as a child’s block, along with a few stalks of flaccid celery. This was how he intended to knock the socks off El Presidente. “You’re kidding, right?”

“What, not enough?”

I considered this a teachable moment and scribbled a list—milk, butter, flour, eggs, and fully erect celery. “Go immediately to the Koreans on Columbus and get everything here along with three bouquets of roses, whatever color looks freshest.”

“Three?”

“For Christ’s sake, they cost eight dollars a dozen. Can you say ‘investment’?”

An hour later, a circle of pastry was puffing to perfection, and Arthur had returned from the next-door neighbor, who had lent him four Baccarat bar glasses. Lacking an alternative, I let him keep his napkins, which featured a tomato wearing a sombrero. The doorbell buzzed.

“Welcome,” Arthur said, ushering in a tall, stooped gent and his gnocchi-shaped wife. I stepped forward and extended a freshly manicured hand. Yes, Clambake was a fine shade. I caught the guy staring down at my boobs and praised the Lord for inventing clingy V-necks. “Julia,” I said. “Arthur’s friend.” God only knows how Arthur might introduce me.

“Basil Worthington, and may I present my wife, Maude.” He looked
around Arthur’s living room. “You know, I’ve never been in this line. We’re in the front.”

We knew.

“It’s not as dark as I thought,” he added, noticing a square foot of light filtering in from windows that faced the side street. The glass, I noted, could use a good Windexing.

“But not as sunny as the apartment where I’d love to live,” Arthur said, and, for no explicable reason, laughed.

“Ah, a man who gets to the point,” Basil Worthington replied. “Let’s talk about that.”

And so we did.

  
Talia

Tom’s parents’ place looked both better and worse than I expected. From a distance, the gabled cottage appeared to be ripped from the cover of a weeper novel. Only when you crossed the home’s threshold did the dreamy mood collapse like rotted wood. First there was the color scheme, burnt-toast brown and, for a splash of color, rust. Picture a lawn mower left out all summer in the rain.

Mildew filled my lungs. I was glad that at least, unlike my apartment, none of the windows was sealed shut, perhaps because no one had liberated a paintbrush here for years. I raised each sash and let the evening breeze blow through the rooms, ruffling decades of Wells ephemera. Ancient birthday cards, dog-eared Sears catalogues, and flyers for long-past regattas sat cheek by jowl with
Reader’s Digest
condensed books. A cracked leather-bound copy of the
Iliad
peeked out of the cubbyhole of a rolltop desk. If I’d had the time to thoroughly snoop, I’d surely have uncovered a stock certificate or two, perhaps from 1929.

But I didn’t have time. The next day’s docket was dusting and bed making interrupted by scrubbing, shopping, and pest eradication. These
are tasks at which I proudly excel. By late afternoon the house looked at least
haimish
, with the season’s last roses cut and opening in jelly jars. To reward myself, I took a swim, and recovered a ten-dollar bill visible on the lake’s sandy bottom. Afterward I sat on the dock and popped open a frosty bottle of beer from the premier microbrewery of Portland.

As the sun set, I dried off and walked back to the house. Fortified by a mild buzz, I dialed home. After Tom reminded me, again, why no one fond of hot water should risk taking a shower in his parents’ place that lasted longer than three minutes, he read me the first draft of the Jackson Collegiate application essay he was composing about Henry.

“You don’t think you should take it down a notch?” Within the allotted 250 words, he’d managed to tout Henry as deft, discerning, and keen. “Because a kid knows how to push a DVD into a slot doesn’t mean he’s going to invent the next Microsoft.”

“I want to do him justice.”

Every set of parents would be turning in a required written snapshot of their child. “I know this is war, but Henry isn’t a video game for intellectuals,” I said. “You’re presenting him like a superior brand of toilet paper.”

“That’s something I thought you’d understand.” I replayed Tom’s tone to test for sarcasm. I’d heard what I’d heard.

“Could you add some humor, maybe? We aren’t gunning for MIT.”

“Would you rather write it?”

I would, even with the deadline for June Rittenhouse’s project already hitting me between the eyes like a badminton birdie. “How about if you fax it tomorrow and I’ll give it a try?” In this house I was lucky I’d found a can opener, but there must be a fax machine somewhere in town. “I’ll call you back with a number.”

•   •   •

Quincy arrived a day before the others. She’d driven up from Boston, where crazy Maizie, rehab grad, was performing. As she walked toward
the house, balancing several grocery bags, two skinny baguettes obscured her face. Silhouetted against the sun, they appeared to stick out of her head like antennae—Quincy Blue, extraterrestrial, impossibly beautiful, and I’m not sure she even knows it. Her tanned legs stretched long in cutoffs. This I especially envied, since my skin stays as permanently milky as chowder, another reason I had needed to abandon southern California.

I let myself out through the back porch and practically skipped down the stone path. Now that she’d arrived, the R&R could commence.