“How long have you known this?”
“Like, hmm—” and here she consulted the ceiling “—like since you met her? Like since that time you introduced me to her for the first time when I came home to visit right after you originally met her? Like when I could tell right away that she hated who I was in the history of your life and that she would have done anything to erase me?”
Infuriation speaking here: “And why didn’t you tell me?”
Soft whisper: “Oh, no. I could never tell you that.”
“How come?” I was offended. “I thought we tell each other everything. Well, except of course for the fact that the man I’m in love with might have slept with someone else because you think I’d be better off not knowing, but that’s a whole new situation we never encountered before, so I’ll accept the precedent you’ve set for now.”
“Actually, I did tell you. I only said that I wouldn’t have told you if it’d been anyone else but Pam.”
“Right. Pam. The snake in the grass. The snake you always knew was there. I believe you were about to tell me why you couldn’t tell me that, even though you knew it all along?”
“Because I can’t tell you who to be friends with.”
“Not even if you’re fairly certain they’re going to hurt me?”
“Nope. Not even then.”
“Why the hell not?”
“Because it wouldn’t be right.”
“How could protecting your best friend ever not be right?”
“Because what if my radar started going all phlooey on me? What if I started seeing shadows? What if I was wrong about somebody and only saw the bad in them because I was jealous of your other friendships and wanted to keep you for myself? Huh? What kind of friend would I be then?”
“You’d be Pam,” I said.
“Damn straight. And that’s a risk I can’t afford to take. Not for me. Not for you. If I really love you, then I need to trust you to choose your own path with people…well, for the most part.”
“And Pam? What happened at Minnesota’s?”
“You mean Chalk Is Cheap?” she said.
I made an impatient gesture.
“Well, like I started to say, I could see just looking at her doing her spider-on-a-stool act there—”
“Spiders sit on stools?”
“When I’m telling this story, yeah, they do.”
“Go on.”
“And I could see what she was trying to be—you—and I could see how she’d gotten herself to that moment in time, how she’d been the one to first oh-so-innocently spill the beans to him about your oh-so-slight indiscretion—”
“Well, I did leave with the intention of screwing another man’s brains out, an intention I fulfilled, I might add.”
“True. But those are just details compared to Pam.”
“Go on.”
“And I could see how she’d made sure to position herself to be the one to offer him consolation over his hurt. And I could see that even though he wanted to be as far away from her as possible, she’d appealed to the chivalrous part of his nature and had guilted him into buying her a drink preparatory to sex.”
“Guilted doesn’t spell-check, either.”
“Sure it does. Fuck spell-check.”
“Go on.”
“And I could see one thing for damned certain.”
“Which was?”
“That even if it was acceptable for him to sleep with her, and even if it was on some teeny-tiny level acceptable for her to sleep with him under the guise of ‘my life has been one huge long disappointment, I’m bitter, and I just want to have a little closeness and this guy, even if he is my ostensible best friend’s guy, looks like he could use a little human closeness, too,’ even if all that could be made to fly, there was one small thing that just couldn’t.”
“Which was?”
“Her coming on to him right there in Wyoming’s.”
“Minnesota’s.”
“Whatever. The point is that while Danbury might be a relatively small city, it’s got its fair share of places to grab a drink. So why did she insist on having a drink with him, him who was surely not in his right mind, in your favorite place to drink? Because she wanted to hurt you. Because that was the whole point all along.”
“Which made you have to tell me this now. Because even though it would be wrong for you to advance-warn me that someone might hurt me, now Pam is a definite bad commodity. He, on the other hand, you wouldn’t have told me about if you didn’t have to.”
“Bingo.”
“And you were able to see all this in—what—about the space of a minute?”
“Pretty much.”
“And then you came back here.”
“Well, no, not right away.”
“Oh? What’d you do first?”
“Well, first I had to hit Pam, didn’t I?”
“You hit her?”
“Yeah.”
“But you’ve never hit another human being in your life. You’re the fucking biggest humanitarian I’ve ever met in my life, for chrissakes. You stop your car for hurt animals.”
“Doesn’t matter, does it? I still had to hit her.”
“Why?”
“’Cause she dishonored you. ’Cause she dishonored the friendship you’d shown her. ’Cause someone had to hit her for you, and he’s too nice to do it.”
How had I ever thought that Pam could be a stand-in for Best Girlfriend? How had I ever imagined that Kelly, nice and screwy as she’d turned out to be, would be better at giving me insight than this woman whom I’d known, who’d known me, nearly my whole life?
That was when I finally drooped. That was when I finally just put my arms around her and held on tight to Best Girlfriend, speaking the words aloud that one of us had said off and on at times over the years. “It sure does suck, our not being gay. Damn, but I’d marry you.”
43
“Pam, you bitch!”
“Wha—?”
“How dare you pretend to be my friend all this time!”
“I—”
“Friends want what’s best for the other person. Friends want what’s best for the other person in spite of what’s best for themselves. But that was never you.”
“I—”
“All you ever wanted was to see me fall.” I reflected on how I’d once asked her if she was trying to instill free-floating feelings of worthlessness in me and how true that had turned out to be. “You’re just a small-minded person with petty wants. You figured that if you could somehow make me less, you’d be more.”
“That wasn’t—”
“We’re through, Pam. You’re not my friend anymore. You never were. You don’t even know the meaning of the word.”
Of course, that conversation never took place, except in my head. Even though Pam deserved to be yelled at, and I wasn’t sorry in the slightest that Best Girlfriend had hit her, it would have made me feel too small to do the yelling she deserved. She knew what she had done. She knew what it had cost her. It was enough to play the scene through in my mind.
44
I called my mother.
“Hello?” I heard her voice, the dawning of alarm preparing to do battle with sleepiness.
“Hey, Mom.”
“Scarlett?” Now she was wide-awake, really scared. “What’s wrong? Has something happened?”
“Nothing bad,” I said, sort of lying, “I just wanted to talk.”
“Oh. Talk.” I could almost see her settle back on to the pillows. “It’s kind of late.” I would have bet anything she looked at the clock. “Couldn’t it wait until morning?”
I took a deep breath.
“Those men—” I finally was saying something I’d never said before “—when Dad was alive… What was that all about?”
Her answer was a long time in coming. Perhaps she was wondering how I knew and if she should ask me about that. Perhaps she was debating if complete denial might not be the safest route.
“Your father lov
ed me very much,” she said softly. “He loved me for myself. I knew that. But I just wanted… I also wanted…”
“What, Mom?”
Big breath on the other end of the line. “I also wanted to be still found beautiful.”
Were those two things contradictory? I wondered, the desire to be loved for who you are and the desire to be found physically beautiful in a purely objective sense? Could I get both things from one person?
“It’s okay, Mom,” I said. “Go back to sleep. I’m sure Dad knew how much you loved him.”
45
There was one thing, as a lifelong reader, that I knew about writers, and it came to me now.
As a writer, you’re always confronted with a choice: tell the people what they want to hear, or tell them the truth? Choose the first, and you might still get your happy ending; choose the other, and, well, you’d get the truth. One ending, hopeful; the other, in my case, cynical. But, if you looked at the better writers—and I don’t necessarily mean the more successful ones, just the better ones—it wasn’t even so much about making a clear-cut choice, one path over the other, so much as it was about striking a balance, something neither wholly comic or wholly tragic, the kind of balance seen in the best of nature, the kind of natural balance that slams you in the face every time you remember that children’s poetry and art still managed to grow at Auschwitz, every time you remember that every comedian who has ever lived to make you laugh must one day die.
The sun rises, the sun sets, sometimes the fiddler manages to stay off the roof, sometimes he just fucking falls off. And right there, right fucking there, was my entire story in a nutshell; for, if the choice of the writer was to be a crowd-pleaser or a truth-teller, then my own personal choice came down to this:
Did I really want to be a tragic heroine, or did I want to have a happy life?
Hmm, rubbing my chin here, be a tragic heroine, or live a happy life? A tragic heroine, or…? A tra…?
Nah.
Why?
Because it’s not in me, not in me to choose expedience over truth, not when I already know the truth that lies in the tale. And I was still hoping I could be cynical and hopeful; that maybe truth could still be truth and contain a part of happy.
46
“But how can you say that?” I asked.
“Which part?” Steve asked.
We were in the Sandwich Submarine, having decided to talk about us on neutral ground, the talking-about-us part turning out to be talking about us by way of talking about me. We were studiously not discussing what I had done with Saul or what he had done with Pam, if he had done anything with Pam at all after Best Girlfriend hit her and left. If he had done something with Pam, I didn’t want to know it, not because I would blame him but because I would never be able to get the images out of my mind. I was guessing he felt the same way about Saul.
“All of it,” I said. “But, really, how can you say that you know you’ll love me all the time? Never mind the whole frump/not-really-a-frump issue, etc., etc. Do we really need to get into that again? Sometimes I’m difficult. Sometimes I’m a complete bitch. I’m changeable. Sometimes, the me you get in the morning isn’t even the same as the me you get in the afternoon.”
He shrugged. “But you’re still you.”
“And that’s enough?”
“No, it’s not enough.”
Aha, I thought. I finally had him.
But that masochistic victory didn’t hang on the board very long, because that was when he chose to floor me for all time with:
“No, it’s not enough, Scarlett. It’s everything.”
epilogue
In spite of his words, his wonderful words, I still do not know how our story will end.
Will I forgive him his betrayal of me?
I don’t know.
During our little talk at Sandwich Submarine, it came out that Steve had his own confession to make, which finally explained the unaccountable expression of guilt I’d seen on his face when I first told him of my deception.
“I need to tell you something,” he’d umm-ed at me.
“Hmm…?” I’d still been looking at him dreamy-eyed, lost in his unconditional acceptance of the person I was.
“I’m rich,” he’d said with a guilty grin.
“What?” That snapped me out of it.
“My brother and I made a small fortune building property developments. Remember how surprised you were to hear he lived on Deer Hill Avenue?” He blushed. “Well, I’d decided to live incognito for a while since I was tired of feeling like the only reason women liked me was for my money.”
“But,” I butted, “what about all of your ‘be yourself’ stuff?”
“Look,” he’d sighed, “we all hide parts of ourselves, wanting to be liked for ourselves but fearing we won’t be liked for ourselves, fearing that who we are is ultimately unlikable.”
“So, what, you were masquerading as a relatively poor person?”
It turned out that while I was busy being not quite who I was, he was busy being not quite who he was as well.
And, somehow, we were getting past that, too.
Will he forgive me my betrayal of him?
I don’t know.
Whether we ever finally decide to discuss it or not, I just don’t know if either of us will ever forget.
I do know that I will never forgive Pam.
Is it because I believe it to be Pam’s fault, everything bad that happened to me? Was it really Pam’s fault?
No, I know whose fault it was. It was mine. I choose, we choose, we all choose, we make the rules, we choose the game, even if we think that the only reason we’re choosing a path is because it’s been so well-trodden before us that it appears irresistible, we still choose; even if we think we’re choosing something just to be different, to set us apart. That said, I’m still not going to ever forgive Pam, simply because I choose not to.
There are a few other things I know now as well.
Remember my list of things that were important to me? Books, friendship and that one true love?
Books, sad to say, can sometimes let you down. Not only that, but a day may come, hopefully not for a long time, but it still may come, when I am no longer able to read in the way that I am used to; age will get me, either in the form of decreasing eyesight, or decreasing mental capacity, or simply in decreasing patience.
Is Steve that one true love for me?
Oh, I think he is. I truly believe that. If not him, I cannot imagine another man ever even coming close.
But, even if our mutual betrayals can be overcome, lust has a tendency to fade over time; that in-love feeling mutating into something else.
So I am left with knowing two things.
For as long as I live, I will have Best Girlfriend. Friendship, real friendship: it is the one relationship that endures. It is the one thing that should never depend upon appearances, but rather upon what lies at the core.
And now, for the final thing I know:
No matter what happens, you should never lose your sense of humor.
A LITTLE CHANGE OF FACE
A Red Dress Ink novel
ISBN: 978-1-4592-4848-9
© 2005 by Lauren Baratz-Logsted.
All rights reserved. The reproduction, transmission or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without written permission. For permission please contact Red Dress Ink, Editorial Office, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario M3B 3K9, Canada.
This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, incidents and places are the products of the author’s imagination, and are not to be construed as real. While the author was inspired in part by actual events, none of the characters in the book is based on an actual person. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental and unintentional.
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(* The women behind the counter don’t count, since it’s unfair to expect women to compete when they’re wearing that blue uniform.)
A Little Change of Face Page 25
