Funny Once (13 page)

“Yes,” Cara said. “See, that’s why we are absolutely the safest people in the air today. Because it already happened, what you’re thinking of. It won’t be that again. What you need to worry about is going to Navy Pier. Or a Cubs game.” Back to scribbling went the girl, turning the book so that Cara couldn’t read what she was writing. She now disliked Cara, which was not an uncommon thing to happen after Cara opened her mouth. And that was the exact opposite of why she was today flying from Chicago to New York.
City
.

She had received a miraculous summons from her old best friend Rochelle two days earlier. After months of both making halfhearted gestures—brief emails that promised, always, “more later” and then failed to deliver, or missed calls minus messages, each perhaps having had the most fleeting impulse but insufficient time or energy to follow through—Cara was literally poking at Rochelle’s area code when the text from the same number appeared on her little screen. Synchronicity! Fate!

Funkytown
, it said. And Cara burst into grateful tears. It was time. They were newly fifty years old. Apparently that meant something. They would meet, as usual, in the city, where everything between them had begun more than thirty years earlier.

“Rochelle’s been dumped again,” Cara told her husband. He rolled his eyes. He’d met Rochelle, but only in the second stage of her adult life, the defused one. He understood what led men to unload her, but was baffled as to why they’d take her up to begin with. “You and Emmett will have to batch it for the weekend,” Cara told him. The story at her house in Evanston was that Rochelle was needy, lonely, likely to throw herself under a train if not for Cara’s ministering aid. At Rochelle’s house, which was a romantically run-down apartment in Key West, there would be no story. She lived alone. At most, she would have to hire a dog sitter. To whom no story would be owed. To whom any story would be just fine.

“OK, Florence Nightingale, have fun.” As a physician, as a card-carrying member of Doctors Without Borders, he could not argue with Cara’s purported agenda. She had Hippocrates on her side.

Their destinations—high and low, be they Met or Barney’s, be they bookstore or thrift store, Shakespeare or stand-up—were all merely incidental, stage sets utterly secondary to the
talking
, and in order to truly talk, they would have to drink, so that while their meals would be inarguably sumptuous, they, too, would be simple props, obvious excuses to order liquor, and lots of it. Also: a few helpful pills, cigarettes. The women would share their stashes, as they had always shared, since first meeting in college. Under the influence of a few drinks, it was those young women they beheld: two doughy midwesterners woefully misplaced in New York City, frightened silent, pretending and defended by reflex, throwing their hands into the air on busy corners as if snatching at flying objects, frantically adapting, scrambling to shroud themselves in black, instantly setting about to starve and smolder, walking awed endless blocks with their heads tilted back like baby birds, helpless and hungry.

So hungry.

At LaGuardia, Cara didn’t recognize Rochelle. On first sight, there was nothing special about either of them, Cara thought, two women who blended, camouflaged, dull as everybody else, each in an outfit best described as modified sleepwear: Cara an obvious runner in a velour sweat suit, Rochelle a middle-aged matron wearing blowsy linen, ingeniously disguised as a harmless grandmother. This miracle—hiding in plain sight, sizzling sensibility bedecked in two different yet ubiquitous uniforms—thrilled Cara. No one (no one!) knew what she was thinking. Neither would anybody believe what her friend Rochelle was conceiving, right before their eyes! The scathing commentary that went on without relent, you had only to hit a particular button, she would open her mouth and scandalize you, it was incredible. Everyone was not like this, adamantly not, and how had Cara, anyway, ever located this rare gift? How, in all the world of billions who did not, did not,
get
her, had she found this essential inimitable friend?

By being assigned the bed across from Rochelle, a million hours in the past, that little dorm cubicle that some random Powers That Be At Barnard had furnished with two girls whose hastily tossed-off written inventories in the application packet had somehow led to their being deemed roommate material.

It was harder to find a true friend than it was to find a spouse, Cara had discovered. For she’d found three of those, and only one of these. And always she had run to Rochelle when it was time to abandon that marriage, and maybe? Maybe it was coming again, although this time would be different, what with the child. What with the fifty years she suddenly had to admit was her age, although people always guessed she was younger. Always.

As usual, they were shy at first, each with a tucked smile, a slightly averted gaze.

“Why Funkytown?” Cara finally asked in the cab. “I mean, I’m there too, it’s that time again.” She was falling out of love, had already fallen. It had taken longer, and it would be harder to extricate herself, but there was no denying the signs. Yet mightn’t she, because of twelve-year-old Emmett, have to stay? Her online dating profile made no mention of a husband, yet confirmed the boy. And an age of forty-two. Divorcée. Maybe she should claim widowhood? Nobody could blame a widow.

“Oh, you know,” Rochelle said vaguely of her own blue season, a fleeting sad flinch crossing her forehead. “The vapors.” With her she had a new dog, this one wearing a service animal badge. “Why not?” she’d said at baggage. “As soon as they see the word
Psychiatric
I am in like Flynn.” Until she’d become a world traveler, Rochelle’s love life had indeed been what brought her down, sent her to Funkytown. But vacationing abroad had taught her about all the fish in the sea, and the seeming infinite variety, the nature of love having released her from its former fixated grip. “European men,” she would sigh in wonder. “They have no interest in the twenty-two-year-old. And why should they? Those vapid brats. And Mediterranean men, oh my god? Please.” She was forever urging Cara to follow her lead, to forget the dooming relentless striving to be ever-young, to instead resign,
recline
, in
dulge
, let loose of vanity’s tedious toil.

“Hold this?” she said now, handing over her wallet to Cara. “Sylvia Plath eats money, don’t you, you little shit?” The dog blinked blankly away from the open zippered compartment. “No comment,
bien sur
.”

“Where?” demanded their driver, who was from where? Rochelle would know.

“Times Square,” Rochelle answered. “Times Square,” she murmured to Cara, as it was she who’d made the reservation. “I dunno, I felt like being in the thick of things, like any other little old lady from Florida. Do you mind?”

“I would go anywhere.” Which was true. Where Rochelle said to go, she would go.

“Read this label,” Rochelle said, twisting her blouse collar tag toward Cara. “This line is all about fortunes. Execrable dreck. I edit them.”

To
Inner beauty
had been appended
Outer yech
. She rose on her massive hip to give Cara access to her waistband, her pale dimpled skin crazy with tiny red spots and wormy purple veins, a shimmering river of stretch marks, this brief reveal suggesting that beneath the garments it could only be so much more of the same or worse. Cara could not imagine allowing such ruin to fall upon her own flesh. Their twenty-year-old selves would have been appalled at the sight. Rochelle had so grandly done that thing they’d promised themselves they’d never do: let themselves go. And how far Rochelle had gone! How extravagantly! The cabbie did a double take in the rearview.
I am great, people are terrific, life is wonderfull
had become
I am greasy, people are terrible, life is mispelled
.

“Remember that taxi last year with the urine?” said Cara. “Oh my
god
were we hungover.”

“I’m just glad I got in first. I pride myself on never landing in the wet spot.”

“So. Gross!” Cara had returned home last year ill and listless, blaming it on Rochelle’s exhausting saga, never confessing to how fully fun it had been, how the sadness was in being back, home to Ordinary Life.

It wasn’t always mostly fun. It wasn’t always New York, either. There’d been Greencastle, Indiana, when Rochelle’s mother had had to be moved. There’d been drunk camp in the Utah canyonlands, which Rochelle had required and which Cara had attended in sober solidarity. Miami, when Rochelle had undergone uncertain surgery and subsequent chemo. There’d been the deaths of parents, all four of them, each of a radically different tenor, these only-children left finally orphaned, and there’d been Cara’s deep postpartum depression, Rochelle swaying sleepily on her feet with tiny Emmett in her arms, Cara a fetal ball in the rocking chair. There’d also been her decisions to leave her husbands, Rochelle knowing before those innocent men, helping plot the exit strategy, script the kindest, gentlest scenario. Between the women there’d been so much. They’d become adults, helped raise each other, moved away, yet never lost touch.

Last year it had been the death of Bad Samson, Rochelle’s beloved wretched dog—which, maybe because Cara had grown up on a farm, a place overfilled with animals and death, they died and became dinner, even if they had names and personalities in advance, she’d learned to behead chickens,
somebody
had to—and still, even if Cara couldn’t quite muster true grief, it was a point of pride to pretend such compassion and concern for Rochelle’s rescued Pomeranian.

And now a new one, Sylvia Plath in her purse. Cara could certainly understand how Sylvia Plath, like Bad Samson, had come to be discarded the first time around, and thereby in need of rescue. Without children, without spouse, here was where Rochelle’s love was poured—because love had volume, and needed a container, a way not to be wasted.

Early on, there’d been a low moment between them. For one long hard school year they had loved the same man, and they might have parted ways forever as a result. But after? They’d shared the deepening kinship of caring beyond that same man, and where was he now, anyway? He’d been everything, once upon a time, Louis White from across the way, and now was nothing.

They’d met him their third year of college, he and his roommate in the building across the street from Cara and Rochelle’s apartment, acquaintance made on an angry sweating summer night while audience to an altercation from balconies above it. A highly amusing distracting drunk fight between four fat marrieds, shoving and punching and stumbling and shouting. Louis and his roommate were commentating.

“As a betting man, I’d put money on the ladies,” the roommate said into his fist, leaning over the iron railing.

“We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one,” Louis said into his. “I’m going with the guys here, not to be sexist, but let’s not forget our friend testosterone.”

“Lou, that’s just where they’ll fool you, wait and see.” Sure enough, it was the pudgy husbands who eventually sat defeated in the street, one with his head in his hands, the other searching for his shoe, wives stalking away huffily pulling garments back into order, all angry elbows and head-butting, victors, Louis calling lazily across the way, “You guys got anything to drink? That whole debate brought up a powerful thirst.” From the first it was clear that Louis was the one to desire. His roommate, James Huckabee, Chuckles, laughed too eagerly, had settled already into his role as wholesome bewildered sidekick, not intense enough, his glance clear, his motives pure, he played the banjo and wore wire-rim glasses and would marry young, have more than the national average number of children, love the same woman in the way of the parishioner for decades and decades. Louis, however, was a Bad Boy, and would never wed. No girl could resist trying to win and rescue him. And better if there were two of them, to compete for the position. Slippery, elusive, sultry-eyed Louis.

Cara lost her virginity to him. Rochelle had already had a half dozen lovers, her current one her econ professor, several of them one-night stands taking place mere feet from Cara’s bed back in that little dorm room. Poor Chuckles, who spent that first evening gamely trying, falling flat, and Rochelle and Cara nearly at each other’s throats by its end, trading the snidely betraying information they possessed of one another, exposing weakness after weakness, Louis the listener, Louis the judge, Louis the point on which they’d risk their friendship. She could still see him, leaning back on their futon couch that night, chin tilted toward the ceiling as his beautiful throat swallowed their liquor, his rangy easy-limbed self soaking up also the palpable pleasure of being desired, a boy filled with heady intoxicants.

He’d graduated from Columbia. He worked as a bike messenger, he wrote songs for a band, he dealt weed. He’d grown up in the city. His pet name became, for Cara, Manhattan, since his, for her, was Buckeye.

But first he chose Rochelle, and broke Cara’s heart. Then next he chose Cara, for longer, for better, she the ultimate winner. He wouldn’t have sex with her for nearly a month, despite having fucked Rochelle the first night out. This respect, this care, this difference between the girls that he recognized and honored became part of his complicated appeal to Cara. Never again in her life did she ever have a lover half as well tuned to her. She’d never have known it was possible if not for Louis. Three husbands later, she could say so with confidence. It was rare to be so thoroughly, bodily, suited.