With Friends Like These

by Sally Koslow

  “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.

  CHAPTER 13

  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 t
out 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.

  “I’d have been here twenty minutes ago, but I had to wait for a turtle to cross the road,” she shouted.

  “Then you met our closest neighbor,” I answered as we hugged and I took the bags. They were promisingly heavy. “You made good time.”

  “Particularly considering I brake for antiques stores. Remind me to show you my clam basket and the Bakelite I got for nine bucks.” She was speaking at full gallop, which Quincy does only when excited. “And my taxidermy. What’s a home without its own raccoon?”

  “Is this all for your new apartment?” I asked.

  The grin on Quincy’s face switched off. She put down the bag in her arms and pulled out her cell phone. “That reminds me, I need to make a call.”

  “Good luck with reception,” I said as I left her outside. “It comes and goes here, not unlike the sun.”

  I carried the bags to the kitchen and began unpacking. Miniature croissants, seven-grain bread, a five-dollar jar of mustard, that expensive sweet cream butter, plums, nectarines, olives, almonds, bottles of pinot grigio, and—appropriately enough—quince jam. I was putting the wine in the refrigerator when Quincy walked into the kitchen and sat at the Formica table, an upgrade from when Abigail and Big Tom pledged their troth to Walmart. I’d put out sugar cookies from the best and only bakery in town and tall glasses of cold lemonade, made the way Abigail had taught me, with plenty of sugar syrup and juice from real lemons. Quincy pressed her glass to her forehead before she dug two pills out of her bag and gulped them. She finished her drink in nonstop swallows and looked around.

  “Can I steal that cuckoo clock?” She’d recovered her smile.

  “I’d like to smack it. It’s come here to die.” I loved that Quincy was the first to arrive. I didn’t see enough of her alone, and she’s a woman who listens and weighs what you say. “After you’re settled in, I thought we’d drive to town, pick up donuts for breakfast, then go for lobster.” I grabbed her duffel. “Come.”

  At the top of the landing, Quincy stopped to study a densely hung collection of family pictures: Tom and his sisters and brothers celebrating summer by sailing, canoeing, napping in hammocks, climbing trees, roasting hot dogs on sticks, and holding up fish longer than their arms. In the corner I spotted a new addition, Henry waddling on the beach, his face obscured by a large straw hat, a shovel in one chubby paw and the other grasping Tom’s hand. I saw Quincy look at the picture, poised to say aw.

  “Theoretically, you have your choice of bedrooms,” I said, not wanting to linger at this shrine to family fecundity, “but don’t get too excited.” I led her to the front room on the second floor. “This is where I’d thought you’d stay—it’s got a view of what we call a beach.” I pointed to a moonscape of black rocks. “I figured, given Chloe’s habits, you’d be happiest here.” Chloe requires postapocalyptic darkness and a white-noise machine, and even then she often spends hours each night reading. She’s no one’s idea of a roommate. “You could share with Jules.” The room had two frilly canopied double beds, yet Quincy didn’t even walk to the window to look at the sea before she said, “Let’s see the other bedroom.”

  It was half the size, with a single bed. She stretched out and slowly sank. “I don’t think so,” she said.

  “There’s one more bed, out on the sleeping porch. If it turns cold you’ll freeze your tush off, but one thing we’re not short of here is blankets.”

  “Show me.” We walked across the landing and I pushed open the screen door.

  “I love it,” she said, though I wasn’t sure what there was to love: the bed and view were far better in the big room. Yet she staked her claim by dumping her duffel on the floor.

  Quincy’s decision puzzled me for the rest of the afternoon, while we took a swim and planned menus for the next few days. I waited for her to explain. She didn’t. I decided to take it to the next level, trying first my version of subtlety. “Hey, maybe I was imagining it, but when we were together a few weeks ago there seemed to be some friction between you and Jules.” She ducked it. Later, at the lobster pound, I, Talia the assault weapon, fired point-blank. “What the fuck is going on with you and Jules?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  I jabbered about Henry, which carried us through dessert. We drove home and changed into our pajamas, but I wasn’t tired. The air was too sticky, the crickets too vociferous, and my psyche too worried about when I’d get around to rewriting the essay about Henry along with June Rittenhouse’s project. I’d started the pitch five times, but each attempt sounded like dreck. I was getting more agitated at the house, which made me even less capable of finding an edgy tone.

  “What do you say I open some wine?” I asked.

  “I’d say pour,” Quincy answered.

  I pulled out a sauvignon blanc. I wouldn’t know if it was flinty or fleshy, only that it was ice cold and cost less than ten dollars at Trader Joe’s. We sat side by side in the screened porch off the front of the house, the bottle between us on a rickety wicker table next to a flickering citronella candle. I’d poured us each a second glass before I worked up my nerve. “I have to talk to you,” I said.

  “I thought that’s what we were doing.”

  “I’m feeling guilty about something.”

  “It’d better be good.” Her tone was lilting and mischievous, as if she was expecting to hear that I was running off to London with Eliot, my married boss. I turned to her. Her symmetrical face, with its elegant, narrow nose, was framed by shaggy hair she cuts herself. I’ve always liked that Quincy doesn’t take herself too seriously, nor is she quick to judge. I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with Jules, who would give me advice before I’d even uttered a clause.

  The words stuck, suddenly, in my throat. Friends don’t steal friends’ jobs, especially when the friends are going to start a four-day love fest. I wanted to talk about how I was sandbagging Chloe, but I didn’t know this Talia, and couldn’t explain her, with or without Mean Maxine translating. Quincy was pinning me down with her cat eyes. I defaulted to the misdemeanor. “Tom wants to pull all sorts of strings to get Henry into private school.”

  “That’s what you’re feeling guilty about?” She scrunched up her face. “Yay, Tom. If I had a child …” Here she took a long, audible breath. “I’d wa
nt him to go every summer to these obscenely expensive camps they have up here and, of course, the best possible school.”

  “It’s not only that I feel like a phony trying to get my kid into a private school, a school that, by the way, we can’t afford.” I squirmed. Even this was harder than I thought. “Chloe and Xander want the same school for Dash, and … there aren’t many spots. We’re competing against them.”

  She refilled our glasses. “Who says you’re competing? Maybe both boys will get in.”

  Quincy had no reason to be familiar with the evil politics of private schools. “Or not. Let’s say Dash gets in and Henry doesn’t. I think I’d despise Chloe, or at least Tom might.”

  Quincy took some time before she spoke. “You think it’s Henry who will get in, not Dash, and Chloe will be crushed.”

  I would never second that out loud, but Henry is older than Dash and Tom and I are fairly certain he might be the world’s most brilliant child, even if I’m too superstitious to admit this. I shrugged.

  “These things happen all the time, friends going against friends.” Quincy smirked—yes, that’s what it was—then broke into an unreadable chortle.

  “I don’t want to go against Chloe,” I, the towering hypocrite, proclaimed.

  “You two should be able to discuss this.”

  My chutzpah kicked in. “Like you could chat girl to girl with Jules about whatever it was that made you all twitchy when we had dinner in Westport?”

  For the next twenty minutes Quincy spilled out an annotated play-by-play. If I was following her, she’d found an apartment so perfect it sounded airbrushed. “After seeing almost fifty apartments, when I walked into this place it felt absolutely like home.” Idiotically, she’d blathered to Jules about it, and Jules blabbed to her boyfriend. “She’s betrayed me. No ethics.” Now Arthur, whom I’d yet to meet but already despised, was, with Jules’ help, scheming to grab the place away from the Blues, though Quincy and Jake had put down a deposit on it. “He’s trying to break our contract.”