Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “Why don’t you want to be chosen?” Cara had pleaded. It was only Louis White who’d turned her away, long ago, only Louis who had been the one to break her heart, instead of the reverse. Had he taught her how not to thoroughly risk her heart? Perhaps. Rochelle’s aching romances gone wrong had led, in the old days, to skeletal thinness and tragic dark circles and cigarettes being lit off the burning embers of other cigarettes. Cara had been jealous. No healthy habit or athletic regimen had ever driven her to such desperately tawdry loveliness. “Why do you keep opening the same wound?”

  “I don’t know,” Rochelle had wailed, miserable, the beautiful blue veins in her temple pulsing. “I don’t think it’s on purpose?”

  Hardly anything on purpose was interesting, Cara had told her, not knowing if that was true or not, but feeling it was right to say. Now it was difficult to recall that version of Rochelle, that fragile unconfident woman with the straggly black-dyed hair, that open book of need splayed on the barroom table or hotel bed. This new version, which had grown—literally!—over time, did not recall or suggest that girl; this woman seemed the mother of her, grandmother, even, patiently knowing, padded, calm, gently dismissive. Her hair white, her clothing like the sheets or tarps thrown over furniture or cars, coverage against the elements, nothing more, her shoes those of the service industry, nurse or chef or custodian, she was at least double the weight she’d once been, twice the size. “I am vast,” she would say. “I contain multitudes.”

  Before she quit dyeing her hair, people sometimes asked when was her due date.

  “You haven’t changed a bit,” Rochelle always said, and Cara never once thought it could be anything but a compliment. Unlike Rochelle, Cara was terrified of letting herself go, and so remained ever alert and loyal to the self-conscious fear she’d found at age fifteen, under the gaze of boys and men, what they reflected back to her paramount. Without a mirror, she panicked. In the photographs from thirty years ago she and Rochelle looked so alike as to be mistaken for sisters, not quite twins, but nearly so. They had tended, each of them, to adopt the accents and attitudes of those they were near, the Midwest being a state of mind eagerly abandoned. Ohio, Indiana: Ohoosia, they named their commingled states of origin. And soon they squawked like New Yorkers, their parents horrified that first Thanksgiving, the two of them on the telephone disparaging the fat content of the meal, the dull dullness of dullsville. Cara’s grandmother hadn’t recognized her when she came through the mudroom.

  “Oh my lord,” she said, clutching her bodice.

  “Your hair,” lamented her father.

  “Don’t lose any more weight,” warned her mother.

  Cara could still summon up the picture she’d made of Rochelle’s home in her mind, replaced eventually by the reality, an enormous tall-windowed house in the college town where her parents were professors, and where Rochelle had, in high school, had all manner of promiscuous misadventures with both the town and gown elements. Cara had gone to that home to help Rochelle remove her mother from it. Professor Emeritus Carmichael had opened the doors to the animals and weather; she appeared to be subsisting on kibble herself.

  “I think it was the coyote that was the last straw,” Rochelle had said. She had taken Cara on a tour of the bars that had hosted her misspent youth. “I mean, you would not really guess this, to see her now, but my mom really had a stick up her ass about housekeeping, once upon a time. I mean, she used to make us leave our shoes on the porch.” The neighbors had complained to the city. Cats were one thing, and owls another, and raccoons and opossums and squirrels and the occasional wild dog, and deer, well, deer, but coyotes? Somehow the upper echelon of the food chain . . .

  “I look like my mother, don’t I?” Rochelle said now at reception, her mind having gone, as it often did, to the same place Cara’s had, perhaps not by the same route, but arriving there regardless. Maybe the man checking them in had mentioned AARP? “Don’t worry, I could not care less. I am ridiculously smitten with my own mind, so who gives a flying fuck what I look like?”

  “That’s so enlightened,” Cara said carefully.

  But Rochelle just laughed. “You are so full of shit. Gimme my wallet, will you?”

  Rochelle rode the elevator up; Cara took the stairs, working her biceps with her suitcase. The hotel was extravagant, dark, filled with the possibility of rock stars and famous athletes, because that was a luxury Rochelle still indulged in, most others necessarily abandoned. Her father’s death had led to her early retirement, the large inheritance having bankrolled her jobless life for a while. Later, she’d sold the art and antiques that he’d left, an Indiana house’s worth of items in her family for generations, and she indifferent toward them. Only more recently had she had more difficulty affording her languor, yet never agreeing to Cara’s offer of a loan. A gift, it would have been. Cara would, could afford to, give it, but Rochelle was fierce in declining. It was part of who she was.

  They settled at the seventh-floor bar before taking their luggage to their room, eager to begin their Lost Weekend, aided by the pulsing drumbeat and no-clocks-or-judgment atmosphere. Rochelle ordered wine and shrimp cocktail and crab cakes, Cara vodka neat. The dog was brought a saucer of water, which it turned its nose up at.

  “How often have you been in love?” Cara had asked Rochelle once. “Truly in love?”

  “Dozens of times!” Rochelle had said. “Or maybe never? Once? And I already know how many times you think you’ve ‘been in love, truly in love.’ Three.”

  “Wrong,” Cara lied. “It’s four. And don’t think I didn’t notice that totally unnecessary ‘you think,’ because I did.” That she’d not been in love with two of her three husbands was understood; the ring on her finger reminded her, mostly, that she could always get divorced and take it off.

  Upon hearing Cara’s dilemma, a not unfamiliar one, Rochelle nodded atop her loose and fleshy neck, offering the opinion that unhappy married parents were worse than divorced happy ones. Further, Rochelle believed that Cara’s husband was entitled to know the truth, however painful. Would Cara, Rochelle inquired, want him to keep such news from her? Adults, to Rochelle’s way of thinking, ought to be accorded respect from one another. Rochelle, Cara was kind of puzzled and hurt to behold, was not very interested in this problem of Cara’s, sort of phoning in the advice, her estimable mind quite clearly elsewhere. Here at the bar with the ubiquitous television playing behind them, it seemed not very exciting or worth discussing, unsexy even, vaguely maybe juvenile? Perhaps they hadn’t had enough to drink yet?

  “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 enco
unter 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.