Best Friends

by Thomas Berger

  “With men.”

  “With anybody. I don’t mean just sexually.”

  “You can say that about everyone.”

  Impulsively Roy asked, “But does what men do really matter that much?”

  “Now you are talking about sex, I hope. Otherwise it doesn’t make any sense.”

  “You’re right,” Roy had said. “I guess I wasn’t thinking.” With your best friend you could say stuff that with anyone else, especially girls, would only earn you scorn. Old Sam had been listening good-humoredly to a lot of crap from him in twenty years. He had to love the guy.

  7

  Roy returned the Grand Cherokee to the lot behind the garage and went inside to reclaim the E-Type from the guys, but they had already elevated it on the lift and taken away the entire exhaust system: mufflers, tailpipe, and chrome-plated resonators. The late model Bentley that had previously occupied the lift had been lowered and temporarily abandoned, demonstrating the impracticality of the guys, for this car belonged to an independent client of theirs who paid them a king’s ransom for routine servicing, whereas they would get no fee from Roy for labor. He might, however, be saddled with the cost of parts, which for marques long out of production could be hefty. This was annoying, for, as he had assured them, the car’s performance on his run from Officer Howie had been faultless.

  But he knew better than to protest while a project was underway, for Diego could turn sullen and Paul waspish, and how often in contemporary life did one get the opportunity to complain about anyone’s taking too many pains with anything?

  He went up via the interior stairway to the showroom, which was level with the sidewalk and street beyond the big front windows—a pair of which were hinged and could be swung open for the passage of classic automobiles to and from the floor. The office occupied a shallow space at the rear, separated from the glistening wares by a thin partition that offered little privacy of conversation, but then Roy’s was not a used-auto business in which salesmen connived with a manager to fleece the customers. Roy had nobody at the office with whom to conspire against a client—after working for him for several years, Mrs. Forsythe was still unable to distinguish one car from another.

  It was his idea to address her as Mrs. Forsythe and hers to call him Roy, and in both cases the reason was, presumably, the difference in their ages, which took precedence over the orthodox employer—employee protocol. On the other hand, she herself preferred the old-fashioned, perhaps patronizing “secretary” to the “assistant” standard in contemporary use.

  A plump-cheeked, purse-lipped woman in her early fifties, Mrs. F. was either a widow or a divorcée. She had never specified which, and Roy did not ask. She had herself filled out all the forms required by the various governmental agencies that oppressed the small-businessman, to do which was why Roy had hired her. He signed everything without carefully reading the details; he swore by Mrs. Forsythe. Of her personal life he knew only her home phone number and that she had a teenaged daughter who looked reasonably pretty in the desktop photograph. The girl had never appeared at the office during the years her mother worked for Roy, no doubt because of his reputation for lechery, of which Mrs. F. would have been aware, (owing to the phone calls from women who obviously had no interest in classic cars), but to which she never alluded, denying him an opportunity to aver that he offered no threat to Juliette for a good five years, by which time he hoped to have settled down at last.

  As he reminded himself occasionally, Roy really did want to find a good woman with whom he would fall in love, get married, and even have children. That these impeccable intentions had remained thus far in the abstract, as opposed to a promiscuity all too concrete, was an obsession of his sister’s, to which Roy’s answer was to ask whether Robin would prefer him not even to dream of an alternative to his stupid, irresponsible dead-end existence? That would stop her for a while. It was thoroughly hypocritical. Roy enjoyed his life. He loved the company of women even when they were being unpleasant to him. He had never had a close male friend other than Sam.

  Before going to his desk, where he anyhow rarely stayed long, he tarried among the array of cars now on the floor. They were his babies, though of course he would not have used the term even with collectors, for whom it was not passionate enough for such works of art, such expressions of virtue in the original sense of strength, courage, virility; such spiritualizing of the material, poetry in metal, or, in the case of the canary-yellow Lotus Elite, fiberglass.

  There was the handsome Alvis, admired by Kristin, and the oyster-white MGA fixed-head coupé that he had driven to the fateful episode at The Hedges, which already seemed remote though, if anything, more terrible. Nearer the show windows was a red Porsche Speedster; a ‘52 Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith; a green Mercedes roadster, in mint condition but with an automatic transmission, power brakes, and removable hardtop, vulgarities to the cognoscenti of high-performance cars; and the current leader of his inventory, a silver Lamborghini Espada, twelve cylinders, six Weber carburetors, a 200-mph performer, with blue leather interior and fewer than 40,0008 miles on its odometer, for which he was asking about a dollar per mile. The others were priced at even less. Selling vintage cars, at least in his fashion, was not a route to riches. Manufacturing shipping containers, in his father’s way, had produced extraordinary profits without which Roy would not have been able to indulge himself in a business his father had considered a joke.

  For the first few weeks he had been open on Peregrine Street, a block off Main, the showroom was as accessible to the public as a Chevy dealership; and especially on weekends, when the village was thronged with antiquers, the collection had attracted many visitors. Roy had no objection to being included in the list of suggested Things to Do that accompanied the map for tourists distributed by the local chamber of commerce, offering, as in effect he did, a little free museum. But the policy proved unfortunate. Children pawed the coachwork, and adults climbed into the leather interiors and tried the horns and headlamps. After Roy posted please do not touch signs, not only at the entrance but also on a standard beside each automobile, a mother bitched at him for shooing away an offspring of hers who dripped corrosive cola on the finish of a recently detailed Maserati 3500GT, and an elephantine man lowered his enormous lardass onto the wing, i.e., fender, of a perfectly restored little MG-TC, imperiling its suspension. Politely asking him to rise provoked the threat of a lawsuit.

  Subsequently he locked the door against the general public, but could do nothing to expunge his listing from the tourist brochure unless he wanted to pay for a new edition thereof, and visibly irritated persons occasionally slapped the glass of the show windows in indignant response to the posted notice, by appointment only.

  Roy gathered the mail that had been pushed through the front-door slot to scatter and slide across a floor as highly polished as the cars. Not many potential buyers nowadays submitted bids by this means, so the postman usually delivered only bills. Those today included a statement from a company that insured vintage cars; the rates having gone up again, it was a whopper.

  He deposited all the envelopes on Mrs. Forsythe’s desktop, which was clean except for the computer and telephone, and took the periodicals to his own, which was littered, though with nothing current. In the big newspaper, he turned first to the classified advertisements for imported and sports cars, where now and again you might find something of interest, though not today. Then he took up the local paper. The report of Francine’s murder and her ex-husband’s suicide was featured prominently. Sy Alt, though seemingly distracted by more demanding cases, had done a good job in keeping Roy’s name out of the story.

  When he was finished with the papers and magazines, Roy took them to the corner table, where Mrs. Forsythe still managed to keep the periodicals on hand neatly shingled, despite the now-limited room because of the espresso machine. The moss-green blanket in which he had wrapped the Stecchino for transport was in a neat fold atop a filing cabinet. He had better return it before
Mrs. F. complained.

  He returned to his desk and, biting his lip, dialed Sam Grandy’s cell phone number.

  “It’s not too early?”

  “I wake up at dawn in this place.”

  “Sorry the way I left there yesterday.”

  “I’m the one who should apologize. It hit me only after you left that something was really wrong, but I didn’t actually get it till Kris kicked my ass. I thought you knew I was kidding, I swear.”

  There was still something wrong here, but Roy had no stomach for pursuing the matter. “How in hell are you today?”

  “I guess this is hard to believe, but I feel fine. I still think these greedy doctor bastards exaggerate the hell out of the slightest gas pains—how else would they stay rich?…So where’d you go last night with Suzie Akins?”

  Roy had not asked her to keep it from Sam; she had volunteered to do so. Why do women lie about their intentions? “You know about that?”

  “I can see the parking lot from my window if I get up to use the toilet. I wouldn’t piss in a bedpan if I was dying. It was still light enough to see you two talking down there. The rest is just an informed guess.”

  “We had a drink,” Roy told him, relieved to find that Suzanne had kept her word. “That was all.” But now he worried that Sam might, in some japery with her, suggest that Roy had gone into detail about their “date.”

  Sam proceeded to justify the fear. “I’ll wait till I hear her version.”

  “I’ll be over later.” Roy hung up and immediately called the hospital number.

  It was not easy to reach Nurse Akins when she was on duty. He had to do some lying.

  “Who’s this?” she asked when found. “I don’t have a brother, so he can’t have gotten hurt.” She was scarcely mollified when she heard Roy’s explanation. “You bothered me for that?”

  “I just didn’t want you to be embarrassed.”

  “You mean you, Roy. I think you always mean yourself.”

  Francine said something of the sort the last time he ever heard her speak, but she had been going to bed with him for months.

  In the big bottom drawer of Mrs. Forsythe’s desk he found a copy of the telephone directory and turned to the yellow-page list of florists. He dialed the number of a shop two villages away and asked the woman who answered to send flowers in memory of Francine Holbrook to the appropriate funeral home—and quickly, for according to the newspaper, the services were to be held before noon this very morning.

  “Signed—?” asked the woman on the phone.

  “Oh…I guess, ‘A Friend.’” He gave her his real name, phone, and credit-card number.

  Mrs. Forsythe appeared on the stroke of noon, as always. She carried a black purse large enough to hold the made-at-home sandwich she would eat at her desk and the plastic mug in which a teabag would be steeped.

  “How do you feel today, Roy?” Below her curly brown-rinsed hair was the kind of sensible face that he had implicitly trusted on first seeing it. He had never since had reason to believe otherwise. Therefore he tended to humor her.

  “I’m feeling better, Mrs. F., thank you. Touch of food poisoning, probably.”

  She unloaded her bag and took the mug into the little lavatory at the far end of the office, where she kept an electric hotpot in which to heat water for her tea.

  When she emerged Roy said, “When I remember to bring coffee for it, I’ll make you some espresso.” He pointed toward the Stecchino.

  Mrs. Forsythe’s smile sometimes seemed tinged with mockery, though that could have been his imagination. “Thank you,” said she, “but plain old Lipton’s good enough for me.” After quickly opening and scanning the bills that had come by envelope and assembling the faxes that had arrived overnight, she returned to the washroom and brought back the steaming mug with its little hanging tag. She sat down before the monitor, her now unwrapped sandwich to the left of the keyboard and the steeping tea to the right.

  She looked over at Roy, who had retained and was now studying the latest issue of Thoroughbred and Classic Cars, a glossy British monthly that provided a wealth of useful information in his area of professional interest, including prices being asked in the U.K. for the marques in which he traded. Such research was part of his job, but he suspected Mrs. F. believed he did no work at all.

  “Did you want to ask me something?”

  “I went to see poor Mrs. Holbrook last night. She looked beautiful.”

  He was not prepared for this. “Did you know her?”

  “Unfortunately, I never saw her when she was alive.” Mrs. Forsythe moued as if holding back tears. “I heard her on the phone a lot.” She squinted and said, with the hint of a sob, “She had such a sweet voice.”

  Roy produced the kind of lie that is informed by sincerity of intention. “She was a sweet person.”

  “What time is the funeral?”

  This was pushing it. “I’m not going,” he said, with a putting-the-foot-down edge of voice. “I’ve sent flowers.” He nodded, signifying the messages that had accumulated. “See if a decent offer has come in for the E-Type Jaguar. Remember, that’s also called XKE.”

  “You’ve told me that many times,” Mrs. F. said reprovingly and turned back to her sandwich, mug, and keyboard.

  But she could forget it as often. Ignorance, and perhaps even dislike, of cars was the source of the only weakness in her work. Mrs. Forsythe could have strolled past a 300SL without noticing that its gullwing doors were raised.

  Roy found the special hand mop for the purpose, took it into the showroom, and whisked the dust off the cars, the high-sheen finishes of which were magnets for it, even on such a lightly traveled side street as this. He would do the same several times before the day was over.

  When he returned to the office, Mrs. F. smiled at him. “You keep those things cleaner than I do my house.”

  “That’s because I’m trying to sell them.” He should not have had to point that out.

  Beaming, she waggled a stubby forefinger. “Bet you’d do it anyhow.”

  Which no doubt was true, but her manifest satisfaction was due to something else. “You’ve got something?”

  “Fort Lauderdale.” She peered at the monitor. “He’ll meet your price, but what about delivery? He doesn’t want anybody driving it that far.”

  “Tell him about Exotic Car Transport,” said Roy. “You know the drill.” In fact, better than he.

  Though without bearing on matters of life and death, this was the rare positive occurrence of the past several days, and a quarter hour later Mrs. Forsythe introduced another.

  “Here’s a person in Vermont looking for an old Ford,” said she. She had finished her sandwich but still sipped at the tea as if it were not stone cold by now. “Thirty-seven. I think my grandpa had one of those when he was young. Didn’t they call them Model Tees?”

  “I believe the Model T was even further back,” said Roy. “Any other details?”

  She snickered, “Well, he has mistyped ‘Cord’ for ‘Ford.’”

  “I think he means Cord, Mrs. F.! Tell him I can put my hands on an Eight-Ten, but it’s rough. Make us an offer as-is, and/or if we handle the restoration.”

  “You’ve got my head spinning,” said Mrs. Forsythe. “If I didn’t know you, I would think you were joking about Cord versus Ford.” She first patted her hair just above her nape and then made her fingers dance over the keyboard.

  Roy’s afternoon went by in such a fashion. He had made no appointments for today. He passed up lunch, being still devoid of an appetite. At four o’clock Mrs. Forsythe went around the corner to a deli and brought herself back a piece of yellow layer cake and a plastic cup of heavily milked coffee.

  As it happened they never heard back from the guy in Vermont, who perhaps after all had meant a 1937 Ford. But the deal for the Jag XKE seemed to be holding. There were more e-mails and messages by fax, as well as a number of telephone calls on business matters.

  And then, while Mrs. F. w
as en route to the delicatessen, having switched on the machine—Roy’s practice at the office was never to answer the phone directly—he heard a juicy young female voice ask, “Then there really is an Incomparable Cars?”

  He lifted his extension. “Who is this?”

  “Michelle.”

  “Oh.”

  “You don’t have any idea who I am, do you?”

  “I’m waiting for you to incriminate yourself.”

  “You always seem to have a ready answer,” she said with a lilt that elevated the final words as if they posed a question.

  “That’s supposed to create the illusion that I’m clever,” said Roy. “But I doubt you are fooled.” Without making a conscious effort to identify her, he suddenly, for no good reason, could do so. “You collect money for animals.”

  “Now you really have impressed me.” Michelle chortled in a deeper tone than that of her speech. “I thought your business card was fake! Gee. Were you serious about letting me test-drive a Rolls?”

  “No, I just said it to make fun of you.” She produced more contralto laughter. “Of course I meant it. When can you come over?”

  “God, any time you say.”

  “How about,” asked Roy, “I pick you up in the Rolls-Royce at seven. You can drive it to the restaurant where we’ll have dinner.”

  “You’re not kidding, are you?”

  “Where do you live? I’ll come in so your parents or roommate can check me out.”

  “I’m twenty-one,” said she. “I don’t need anybody’s okay.”

  “You need mine,” said Roy. “Before you go out with somebody you don’t know, you should at least identify him for someone else close to you.”

  “Now you sound like my father, not a guy with a Rolls. Are we going someplace fancy? I’m asking because I want to know how to dress.”