Best Friends

by Thomas Berger

  “Both little old ladies,” Sam said. “Drove it only to church teas, hot scones in baskets on the back seat, clotted double-Devonshire cream, gooseberry jam.” He kissed the air.

  “I’m going to the kitchen,” said Kristin.

  It was after she left the room that Roy decided her clothes were the product of more than good taste. She wore them well, in bearing and stride. Today the colors were a perfectly coordinated lime green and olive. But he could not believe her apparently better opinion of him was permanent. It was probably not natural for a wife really to like a husband’s best friend, or vice versa. There was a normal rivalry that had no homosexual reference. However, speaking for the man, or at least himself, the reverse resentment, if it existed at all, was much weaker. He had no problem with Kristin.

  The meal she made, in little more than an hour, was superb as usual: salmon fillets on a bed of potatoes sliced paper-thin, under julienned fennel, carrots, and kalamata olives, inside little hobo bags of parchment paper, tied with scallion strands. Of the selections of wines Roy had brought, the Sonoma-Cutrer Russian River Ranches Chardonnay was righteous, though Sam stubbornly, maybe even perversely, stuck to the same boutique ale despite its treacly-sweetness, not at all suited to the fish at hand. Today he seemed to be the one defiant of Roy.

  The cognac he produced later on, however, had been an earlier gift of his best friend, and it was Kristin who declined that, as well as any help with the cleanup. She became even somewhat irritated when Roy’s offer seemed too insistent, so he lost the advantage gained by the Alvis, the subject of which had occupied some of the dinner conversation, along with other of his exotic wares such as the Aston Martin DB-1 that won at Le Mans in 1959 and a customized 1940 Packard that had supposedly been owned by the bygone movie star Errol Flynn, a claim made by the previous owner, which Roy frankly doubted because it could not be confirmed by any paper trail.

  “We certainly wouldn’t pay what he was asking.”

  Kristin sympathetically nodded her sleek blonde head, money being her profession.

  But Sam, no doubt grateful for a possible diversion from motor vehicles, asked, “Wasn’t Flynn supposed to be quite the lech? Raping young girls, and so on? Still, Casablanca is a great picture.”

  “Errol Flynn wasn’t in it,” said Kristin.

  Sam groaned. “Now, why did I say that? I know he wasn’t. I owned the cassette for years, and it was one of the first films I got on DVD.”

  Roy came to his friend’s aid, if lamely. Maybe that was what annoyed Kristin. “Flynn was a lecher, though, I believe, and involved in a lot of scandals in his time. My father mentioned him.”

  “That’s right,” Sam chimed in. “That’s where I first heard his name.” Sam spent a lot of time at Roy’s house when they were teenagers, and Roy’s father was always partial to him. “Hey, you want to look at They Died With Their Boots On later? I’ve always had a crush on Olivia de Havilland.”

  “I know,” said Roy, and as to the movie, “Sure.”

  “Not me,” said Kristin. “I’m sleepy.” Though you could not have told it from her alert eyes.

  Dessert had been sliced peaches in a stemmed glass filled with sparkling Vouvray, accompanied by langues-de-chat that she had baked over the weekend, but when thawed were as if new from the oven. It was after this course was finished that the brief argument about the washing-up ensued. Of course, not much was needed for the job but the dishwasher, a lately updated model no doubt selected by Sam, given its multitudinous touchpad offerings, more elaborate than the dashboard on any of Roy’s vintage cars.

  When he discerned that Kristin would be genuinely offended if he insisted further, Roy smiled to bring her back and said, “I just wanted to run that fantastic dishwasher.”

  Sam asked loudly, “Hey, remember that old joke about a guy who got his dick caught in the dishwasher? How’d that go, exactly?”

  Roy was embarrassed in front of Kristin. He answered truthfully, “I don’t remember it.”

  Sam stood ponderously against the counter, a hand on it for security, though he could hardly be drunk on a few beers. “It hinged on the sex of the dishwasher, I think. The dishwasher was human, you see, in a rest-au-rant.”

  The hesitation between syllables caused Roy to look more carefully at the man he had known for so long. Sam was drunk, probably had poured down a bit before Roy arrived, or more than that. It took quite a lot of extra alcohol with a body of his size.

  Roy was least fond of any situation in which he himself was sober and his companion was inebriated to any degree. This was worst when the latter was a woman, for it meant she was preoccupied by some personal problem that had no reference to oneself, but for which one would be blamed if present when the emotion reached critical mass. Any kind of sexual relations in this context would be disastrous, but neither was it a simple matter to escape with grace.

  No such special problem came into play with Sam, but Roy was reluctant to leave his friend alone to drink through the old movie. He wondered whether Kristin was really sleepy or just politely determined to avoid a film in which she had no interest. In the almost three years of their marriage, Roy had never seen them quarrel. Sam was too good-natured for that, and Kristin seemed too smart. Or such was Roy’s interpretation. He had never thus far come close to marriage, not having yet found that woman for whom he could forsake all others. He suspected that for a man of his temperament, being formally attached to one woman was to lose the possibility of being a friend to any, and in most cases he began and ended a romantic connection on an amicable basis and remained on good terms with former intimates for years.

  The exceptions, and of course there had been some, were unrepresentative: Usually these were errant wives, risking more than those who did not have to deal with injured or possibly vengeful husbands. It was true that Jane Waggoner threw a glass of Gewürztraminer in his face when he wondered whether they should begin to ease off, and this was in public, though fortunately in an inn fifty miles away in an untrendy corner of the county, ignored by the kind of people who would recognize them. As ill luck would have it, Jane had just that morning asked her spouse for a divorce, else she might not have been so bitter, and Roy’s gently but justly disclaiming personal responsibility had not helped.

  Showing how drunk he all at once was, Sam suddenly relieved Roy of the current dilemma, asking, “Gimme a rain check on the movie, willya? Don’t feel up to it, if you don’t mind.”

  As if it had been Roy’s idea! He nevertheless went along with the game, as he usually did. “We’ll do it another night.” He was eager to get away. He praised Kristin’s meal again and said that week after next it was his turn, the Auberge if that would be okay, Gérard promised a saddle of venison, and she responded graciously. He never called her “Kris,” as did Sam and, apparently, her other friends, nor had he ever exchanged even air-kisses with his best friend’s wife. For her part, she had never offered him a handshake.

  “Talk to you, kid,” he said to Sam.

  “Hey,” said Sam, winking blearily. “There you go.”

  There was a touch of coolness in the evening breeze and the sports jacket Roy wore would be a bit light in the open car, but raising the Alvis’s canvas top was too much work, especially in the darkened driveway. Sam if sober would have switched on the outside lights and even might have come along to help with the top.

  Roy worried that the Alvis would not start immediately, as he had not driven it much, but the engine came throatily to life with one touch of what one who sold vintage British cars should be careful to call the self-starter (as in fact the canvas top was the “hood,” and the hood, the “bonnet”) and echoed loudly throughout the neighborhood of broad lawns and designer landscaping.

  At home there were five calls on his answering machine, one from a usually overwrought woman named Francine Holbrook, the other four, one per hour, were from his sister. He elected to call his twin first, who was always exasperated with him—but he had known her since birt
h.

  “Goddammit!” she cried. “Why can’t I get you when I need you? The IRS is after Ross. He might go to jail.”

  Robin’s husband was almost twenty years her senior and, perhaps for that reason, in a hurry to sire another string of kids to replace the three from his first marriage who had been commandeered by his ex-wife. Therefore Robin was usually pregnant and more self-concerned than ever.

  “Come on,” said Roy. “You’re overreacting.” Overacting was more like it. Born second, Robin got all the emotion left over after Roy had been furnished with the reasonable amount, or so he saw it. She spent much of her childhood in a tantrum. When their mother decamped, Robin made the most of being the only female under the family roof. “This is America. You can’t be sent to jail without a trial. He’s probably just being audited at this point.”

  “Easy for you to say. You don’t have two children with another on the way, and I’m alone tonight. Ross is being bicoastal.” Alone to Robin meant with at least one au pair, if not a team.

  “I’ve been working my head off,” Roy said, answering the, to him, deafening though silent accusation. “I’ll drop in tomorrow evening.”

  “Late enough to miss the kids.”

  “I was trying not to stick you with dinner. How about I come earlier and bring Chinese?”

  “You do what you want, Roy. You always do.”

  This of course was a blatant misrepresentation, and she knew it. He had never done what he wanted, but rather what he had to do according to standards that few others noticed, let alone respected. For example, he was careful never to mention Sam’s name to Robin, who had had an affair with his best friend years earlier, before either was married. It had ended so unpleasantly, at least for Robin, that she could never bring herself to disclose what went wrong. Sam himself had not brought up the matter, no doubt finding it too delicate by reason of the complex loyalties involved.

  Roy’s final duty on this Sunday evening was to return the call from Francine Holbrook. Because Robin was only his sister, at her most waspish she was easier to deal with than Francine, a divorcée with whom he had been having an attachment that for several weeks had been either phasing out or being reawakened. Francine could not make up her mind on this matter and Roy was shrewd enough not to fix a position of his own, having learned by painful experience that in such a situation he could not but lose unless he remained undefinable.

  It was also true that Francine was extremely ardent in bed, or in any other venue in which they found themselves momentarily alone.

  “Francine.”

  “I don’t care where you’ve been or who you’ve been doing,” said she in a voice made throatier by the phone than it was face to face. “I want you to come over.”

  “Now?”

  “Roy, if you had anything better to do right now, you would not be returning my call.” Having said which, she began to talk dirty. As usual, he was both appalled and aroused.

  He began to rebutton his shirt.

  2

  Sam suffered sharp chest pains the next morning, not long after Kristin had left for the bank. Luckily it was one of the cleaning woman’s days, for he was inept when a situation demanded a prompt response.

  By the time Roy was notified, late in the afternoon, his friend was resting comfortably in a hospital room, having undergone an angioplasty and the insertion of a stent to keep the artery open. He should be out in two days.

  Roy interpreted Kristin’s staccato report as evidence of an intensity of emotion not apparent in her tone, which was mint-cool as always; much the same, he could assume, as that in which she conducted business.

  “I’m relieved to get the good news as soon as I got the bad.” Though in reality he was somewhat hurt that he had been informed only now.

  “You could see it as a warning,” said she. “He’s a good fifty pounds overweight.”

  What a time to criticize the man. Nevertheless, Roy found himself vocally agreeing. “I’ve been after him on that matter for years. Maybe he will have learned his lesson now.” He was appalled at how vapid that sounded in his internal echo. “When can I visit him?”

  She gave him the hospital’s schedule, then asked, “Know the first thing he said when he saw me? He wanted to know about the Stecchino.”

  “Is that a medical term?”

  “It’s a fancy espresso machine from Italy. It came yesterday afternoon, too late for him to fire it up and give it a maiden run before you were due.”

  “That’s what he was doing this morning when he felt the chest pains?” Typical of Sam, who was competitive in such matters; he had to establish mastery over a new gadget before displaying it to his friend. Machinery, however powered, being as temperamental as it was, his insistence on putting his pride on the line this way was silly. It happened all too frequently that some new device he believed he dominated would wait until there was a witness on hand to see its sudden failure. At such times Sam might become violent toward the offending object. Roy once saw him fling a twenty-eight-hundred-dollar laptop into a blazing fireplace. At Roy’s bon mot, “Now, there’s a Grandyose gesture,” Sam had exploded in laughter. There was some reason to believe that he had been in an up mood throughout the incident. It was ominous news that an inanimate adversary could now seriously threaten his health.

  “It’s polished brass,” Kristin said. “All dials and little spigots and stands almost three feet high. Seven hundred something. For three cups a day.”

  “You don’t drink coffee, do you?” This was hardly news, and sounding the emphasis might be offensive—he was always worried about that possibility—but in fact it was apparently not so here, for she laughed almost carelessly. “I’m usually the joy-killer.”

  Maybe it was his imagination, but he heard some poignancy in this statement, the first he had ever identified in her. But also, on general principles, his heart went out to self-critics. “Don’t say that! It’s not true. You’ve brightened that guy’s life in every way. Take it from me.”

  “But you’re his friend.”

  Roy found this seemingly straightforward assertion to be cryptic. It could mean anything from he was flattering her because her husband was ill to he was Sam’s lifelong comrade whereas she was only the wife of a few years. “I sure am,” he said. “That’s how I know.”

  He was reassured to hear her say, simply, “Thank you.”

  Sam was probably a little paler than usual and, if assessed by the eyes alone, older than when last seen, but there had certainly not been time as yet for him to diminish in bulk by reason of the starvation diet of which he had complained instead of saying hi.

  He made the hospital bed, for all its attendant white and stainless-steel accessories, look smaller than it was. There was an incongruous white identification band on his thick hairy wrist.

  “Next time smuggle me some rations. I’ll really have a heart attack if I have to live long on the cat piss and bird poop they call food.”

  “Yeah, a cheeseburger and a hot-fudge sundae,” said Roy, standing at the foot of the bed.

  “Also a bottle of any decent double-malt Scotch.”

  “If I know you, you mean it.” Roy shook his head. “Pathetic.” He located an enameled steel chair, drew it closer to the bed, and sat down. Sam was now considerably higher than he, a big dark head on the glaringly white pillow. “You’re worried about your coffee machine?”

  “I wondered if it got turned off before it exploded. I guess it did…. Maybe that thing’s bad luck. Kris really hates it. Want to take it off my hands?”

  “The Stickerino?”

  Sam humorlessly corrected him. “The Stecchino. You won’t find a superior—”

  “Sure,” Roy told him quickly, finding a lecture on specialty-coffee-making at odds in this setting, that peculiar hospital-stench in his nostrils. “I’ll get it tonight. I’ll leave a check with Kristin.”

  “No! I don’t want her attention called to it. Just get it out of there before she comes home…. I’
ll give you the code. You won’t have to write it down. It’s—”

  “What code?”

  “The front door. Didn’t you ever notice? Well, I guess you aren’t supposed to. The keyhole’s for show, but it’s dead. The lock is controlled by the touchpad under the house-number plate, to the left of the door.”

  “I’ll be damned.”

  “You won’t even have to write it down,” Sam repeated. “It’s my birth date, backward. Get it? Okay, you begin with five sixteen sixty-seven. You don’t just switch it to sixty-seven sixteen five. That’d be too easy for somebody to figure out. What you do is reverse the entire thing to seventy-six sixty-one five.” He narrowed his eyes. “Got it?”

  Roy sighed. “I guess so.” Their birthdays were only ten days apart. For most of their lives they had celebrated in common, on a chosen day between May 5th and 15th. “But I hope you’re not telling me to go to your house and swipe the espresso machine while Kristin is at work.”

  “That’s exactly what I’m asking you to do. She’ll get the idea immediately, and neither of us will ever mention it again.”

  Was this an example of the kind of delicacy that characterized their marriage and was perhaps essential to its success? Roy was impressed. “All right.”

  “Bring a blanket to wrap it in,” said Sam. “So the brass won’t get scratched. Kris will already have tossed the bubblewrap.”

  “Good idea.” Roy intended to take the machine straight from the Grandy house to Robin’s. Not only did he not drink enough coffee to give the Stecchino the work it deserved, but his brother-in-law swallowed gallons of the Starbucks product daily and would surely be comforted by the limitless availability of latte at home, especially with the audit threat looming. Ross also remained a prodigious smoker of cigarettes. How he had lived to the age of fifty-one was a miracle. Roy sometimes reflected that he himself was the only man he knew whose habits were healthy, and yet he was one of the few without familial responsibilities.