With Friends Like These...

by Gillian Roberts

  I laughed, too. And tried to believe that it was Jack’s high-pitched voice that had made her think I was in danger, and not any special intuition of impending danger on her part—or intimate knowledge of the note I’d received.

  * * *

  Last year the highlight of the Junior Journalism Conference had been a strawberry-blond history teacher with dark eyes. Once he opened his mouth, it was obvious there was precious little behind the splendid facade, but he was so aesthetically pleasing, I’d hoped for a second viewing.

  However, his school was now represented by a tidy woman in a dress-for-success suit. The businesslike power ensemble had a certain ridiculousness, given the realities of teaching, where success is largely intangible, and certainly nothing that good tailoring can assist. I murmured something about the missing strawberry-blond.

  “You talking about Douglas?” She had a brassy voice that clashed with the suit. “He left teaching. Went to L.A. to act, can you believe?” She rolled up her eyes so that I’d get it that there was something fishy about his new profession.

  I waited to find out what was on her agenda.

  “From what I hear,” she continued, as I’d known she would, “he mostly acts sexy. Entertaining dirty old women. One of those male exotic dancers.” She pursed her mouth in distaste and waited for me to concur.

  “Glory be, undressed for success,” I murmured. Before we could debate the hunk’s career path, a student tapped my shoulder and whispered that she couldn’t find the page makeup room, which problem provided me with an acceptable excuse to move on.

  I saw the student safely into a room of earnest seniors arranging and trimming columns, like paper-thin jigsaw puzzles that didn’t interlock, and then I stood by the door, deciding what to do. I scanned the workshop list: editorial writing, news coverage, copy editing, photography, sports writing, features, and columns, and then, finally, the faculty advisors’ workshop, scheduled for a half hour from now. I had time to search for coffee.

  I spotted the machine, and the man currently using it, Terry Wiley. He was bent over, retrieving a cup of what looked to be cream mixed with a little coffee. “Oh!” he gasped upon seeing me. “It’s, ah, Pepper, right? Amanda. I had forgotten that you—but of course, you did say…well, in the confusion, who could remember anything?” He sounded as if the sight of me had literally taken his breath away. He pulled a stirrer out of a container on the counter and worked on the contents of his cup, treating the mixing of coffee, cream, and sugar as a major project. “Let’s see—Philly Prep, I think. What a surprise—a nice surprise to see you again. So soon.”

  The oddest thing about him was not his spluttering but my absolute conviction that his befuddlement was an act, a lie, that he had known full well I’d be here and yet felt it necessary to deny it. I could not for the life of me figure out why.

  “Well,” he said. “Well, well. You, ah, busy right now?”

  I shook my head.

  “Then would you,” he shrugged with one shoulder, “like to sit down or something? I mean after you get your coffee. I mean I’m assuming you want coffee or you wouldn’t be here.” He laughed nervously.

  I couldn’t envision him part of that high school trio Lyle had described, but I knew it was possible. I see unlikely combos like that at school—kids who need sounding boards and audiences so much they confuse them with friendship.

  I put change into the machine and received a cup of bitter black brew, and I sat down at a small cafeteria table across from Terry Wiley.

  He ran his tongue nervously over his lips and looked around the room as if searching for a topic of conversation.

  “It’s unusual for the science teacher to be the newspaper advisor,” I said, trying to fill the conversational abyss before the man had a heart attack. I felt tired already. I seemed to be on a roll—Inarticulate Men R Us. Quinn last night, Terry Wiley today. Mackenzie had his faults, but at least speech wasn’t a controlled substance with him. He talked funny, but he believed in words, thoughts, communication, and I gave him points for that.

  “Unusual? Well…I guess. But, um…”

  I peeked at my watch. Twenty-four more minutes of this torpid tête-à-tête. My heart plummeted.

  “I was a writer once,” he said. “Reporter. Philadelphia Bulletin. Remember that? Afternoon paper. Gone now, of course.”

  I wondered whether his news stories had also emerged in two- and three-word gulps, like stuttered telegrams. Even more than that, I wondered why I made him so nervous.

  “Science stories. Health. Inventions. You know.” He gulped. “Paper folded. Didn’t want to move.” Major swallow of air. “Offered job teaching.” He looked abashed, then focused on his cream with coffee and drank from it.

  “Lucky journalism students you have,” I said when it appeared that Wiley had drained his conversational reservoir. “To have an authentic pro as their advisor. The rest of us spout theory, but you know the real world of journalism.”

  I should have said, “And did you like it, Wiley? Do you miss it? Did you think about your other writing—the one opening on Broadway and making somebody else famous? And did you fester about it after the lawsuit, before the party Sunday night? Would you please confess now and get my mother off the hook?” Instead, I drank more coffee.

  “Journalism’s risky,” Wiley said. “That’s what I know. Bulletin went out of business. Now I’m a teacher. A lot safer.”

  The sum total of his knowledge of two professions. How depressing, and not much to dig in the flat-surfaced landscape of his world.

  How to leap the chasm from that to whatever murderous impulses lurked inside his twitchy exterior? I debated techniques for a moment, then decided to proceed the only way I could—straight on. “There was a teacher of yours at my table the other night,” I said. “Priscilla somebody. She said something about your having been a playwright.” I was proud of getting to the point via an almost truthful route.

  “She said I was a playwright?”

  I nodded. “She said you wrote something back in high school.”

  “Lemoyes changed her mind? Now?”

  I had the horrible realization that Priscilla Lemoyes must have testified on behalf of Lyle. I would have given anything to unsay my words.

  “Wrote the senior show in high school,” Wiley said. His speech had become less nervous, so much so that it was without affect. It sounded as if he were reciting memorized lines. “Tried to, that is. They only used one skit.” He looked bemused. “Can’t believe Lemoyes changed her mind, after all. A little late for me, but all the same…” He didn’t seem angry because of my lie. In fact, he looked relieved. Exonerated, perhaps?

  Now that he was relaxed, what could I do but push at him a little more? “Never tempted to go back and tinker?” I asked. “Write another play or fix that one up?”

  He shook his head.

  I had pushed us back into silence. Terry’s eyes repeatedly darted toward the door, as if awaiting the posse who would rescue us. Since we were both headed to the same advisors’ meeting, and since I obviously had no other commitments, I didn’t know how to gracefully excuse myself. I silently counted off the seconds.

  But then, miracle of miracles, just as I reached fifty-nine-one-thousand, Terry spoke spontaneously. “Well!” He sounded breathless again, but pleased at having discovered a new conversational lode. “Awful, wasn’t it? Lyle, of course.”

  “Awful.” And did you do it? Why couldn’t I think of a single other thing to say about the death of Lyle Zacharias?

  We stared at each other. “Awful,” I said again.

  “Scary,” he added.

  More silence. “Guess we didn’t have to go to the hospitals, after all.” My voice emerged with an unfamiliar, high-pitched perkiness. “The police are pretty sure it wasn’t the food that was poisoned.” And then I clamped shut my mouth—a few sentences too late. I couldn’t believe I’d blurted out privileged information.

  I once dated a headhunter, an executive re
cruiter who, over dinner, explained his method of getting people to divulge things the law didn’t allow him to ask, but that he nonetheless wanted to know. “If you keep quiet,” he told me, “there is an almost irresistible impulse to fill the silence, keep the conversation going. People get uneasy and blurt out incredible things, often not in their own best interests.”

  He then proceeded to use the technique on me, and even forewarned, I became one of his suckers, babbling nonstop while the recruiter grew pensive, or took forever to light and tamp his pipe. By the end of the evening, he knew everything about me and I knew nothing about him, except that I didn’t want to see him again. Another Dater’s Digest’s Condensed Relationship: a first-date/last-date all-in-one sandwich.

  And now I’d done it again, repeating what Mackenzie had told me in confidence, what had definitely not been meant as an all-points bulletin. The only atonement I could think of was to practice the same technique on Terry Wiley and see what I could learn. Unless, of course, his tongue-tied habits were so ingrained that he could sit in silence without any discomfort. I smiled, lifted my eyebrows slightly, and kept my lips sealed.

  “Who on earth could have done it?” Terry finally said, wrinkling his brow in a great show of sorrow and confusion.

  I shook my head. And waited some more.

  “Of course, I don’t know much about Lyle’s…” He left the idea dangling, shook his head, ending the unarticulated idea. I waited some more. “We’ve been out of touch a long time.”

  I nodded and widened my expectant smile.

  “Since,” he added as the silence persisted, “since Lyle’s first wife—Cindy—died. Terrible thing happened to her.”

  The timing of his split with Lyle surprised me, or at least the way he’d marked it historically. If Cindy had been the old high school friend, the emotional link, I could understand it, but that wasn’t the case.

  I’d had it with silent passivity. “You were good friends with Cindy, then?”

  He nodded.

  “What was she like?” It was an honest question. Through some alchemy, this woman whose existence I hadn’t suspected two days earlier now felt like someone I’d lost and needed to reclaim.

  Terry looked thoughtful. “Wonderful,” he finally said. “Kind. Beautiful. Cared about people. About what was right.” It is odd to see a blush on the cheeks of a man with a graying mustache. Particularly if the blush is provoked by mention of someone dead for many years. Someone wonderful.

  He’d been in love with her. With his buddy’s wife.

  He cleared his throat and spoke in a hoarse whisper. “She was a good friend,” he said. “To both of us.” Janine. Of course. He’d been married since high school. “Cute baby, too. Janine pretended…” His glance flicked to the doorway again, then around the room, anywhere but near mine. “We, um…don’t have children. When Janine saw that red-haired baby, she wanted…even looked a little like her.”

  Did that mean that under Janine’s borscht dye job there was authentic, if faded, red hair? Would mysteries and surprises never cease?

  “Wanted to adopt her. She…it wasn’t her fault. Babies don’t know about guns. Couldn’t…” His voice and attention both drifted away.

  Couldn’t know what a gun was or couldn’t adopt? He meant both, most likely. In either case, he didn’t seem likely to elaborate.

  So Cindy died, Wiley and Janine couldn’t adopt Betsy, and the friendship ended. Odd timing. Odder still how, no matter to whom I spoke, everything seemed to have happened at the same time. The career break with Ace of Hearts, the end of the partnership with Richard Quinn, the accidental shooting of Cindy, the split with the Wileys—too much converged at the same historical moment to be simple random coincidence.

  I felt as if the present were the loose ends of a skein that had been knotted together two decades earlier.

  How had things really worked? Had Lyle known that his buddy was in love with his wife? Had, perhaps, their break come before Cindy died? Had she loved Wiley back?

  Obviously, Terry Wiley, still staring into private space, considered the issue closed. After all, he had carried his secrets for two decades, and there was no reason to suddenly spill them in the middle of a journalism conference. Besides, it was time to go to our meeting. We bussed our empty coffee cups to the trash can.

  Terry Wiley looked more like a man carrying a corpse than one holding a used plastic cup. And maybe he was.

  * * *

  I ducked into the ladies’ room before I went into the meeting, and was shocked to see who was washing her hands one sink over.

  “I’m here with my husband.” Janine made her words sound like a dare. “Didn’t he tell you? I know you had coffee with him. My stomach’s a mess. Can’t handle the acid in coffee. You look surprised to see me.”

  “I—Yes. I am. You aren’t a newspaper advisor, are you?”

  Her nasty laugh was more like a bark. “Nope. But I’m not stupid, either.”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t follow.”

  “I’m here to protect my interests. Do you follow now? I told him I wanted to know what he did. He thinks I meant what he does with the paper, but I didn’t. I meant with you. Keep your hands off my husband.”

  “Me? My what? Your what?”

  She carefully dried her own hands. Her nails were an iridescent purple. “I saw the way he looked at you Sunday night. And I heard you coming on to him about when you’d see him again. Don’t think my poor health keeps me from seeing what’s going on in front of me.”

  Now I understood Terry Wiley’s repeated glances at the doorway, his acute nervousness upon seeing me. I was mildly entranced by her honest belief that I coveted her husband. Terry Wiley, of all people. “I can assure you—” I stopped myself. How do you tell a possessive wife that even if you were stupid enough to mess with married men, her husband would be close to the last possibility on the list? I stopped trying to assure her of anything.

  “It’s not my fault that your biological clock is running down!” Veins on the side of her neck looked in danger of rupturing.

  I couldn’t believe I was standing in a bathroom being verbally abused by a woman with beet soup hair and a chartreuse pants suit, and being too polite to tell her that I didn’t, no matter how desperate my biological clock, want her husband to reset it.

  “And it’s not my problem that your chance of getting a man at your age is practically nil! I read that stuff about how you’re more likely to be killed by a terrorist than to get married.”

  “How about if I marry the terrorist?” She was not amused. “Then how about if I tell you that it’s been proven that was an inaccurate statistic?” She really had very little intellectual curiosity. “Then how about if I leave?” But she blocked my exit with one screaming green polyester arm.

  “I don’t care what you do or how desperate you are!” she screeched. “You can’t take advantage of a man’s mid-life—any middle-aged man would be flattered by a young woman’s advances, but that doesn’t make it right!”

  Okay, it was time to be honest, no matter how insulting it might be. “Listen up,” I said, “even if your husband were the last man on earth, I wouldn’t want him.”

  “You chose a career, not marriage—now live with that choice! You women think you can have it all, but that doesn’t include my husband!”

  I stood there, flabbergasted, and she took the opportunity to open the restroom door and hold it for her exit line. She took a deep breath. When she spoke, it was in a deliberate, patronizing voice, as if she had to teach me something I should already know.

  “He has a certain weakness,” she said. “For redheads.” She patted her purple hair. “Redheads. Plural. It wouldn’t be the first time.”

  “I’m not even—it’s chestnut. Brown, actually. With highlights.”

  “Stay away from him!” she snapped, her patience and her little lesson both over. “Stay away—or so help me, I’ll kill you.” I believed her.

  Sixteen

>   We won a prize. Actually, a single twelfth grader won it for headline writing, but we generalized it into a group triumph. Next morning, Maurice Havermeyer, my principal, carried on as if it had been the Pulitzer. The headline-writer was congratulated in assembly and named the Philly Prep Student of the Week, and our staff was repeatedly referred to as award-winning journalists. Nobody, not even the staff, sniggered.

  Dr. Havermeyer, never one to miss a trend, has become high on self-esteem—ours, because his is already up to maximum capacity. It appears that self-esteem, its name notwithstanding, requires enormous outside-of-self esteem. Hence, Philly Prep’s RAA! Team, as Havermeyer has clumsily dubbed it. RAA! as in Respect, Appreciation, Acknowledgment!

  Respect, appreciation, and acknowledgment, hokey or not, felt good, particularly while sitting in assembly, wondering which of the adolescent souls in the room wished me ill. I scanned the auditorium to see if somebody was directing a less than respectful or appreciative eye in my direction. The sort of eye that imagines gravestones with teachers’ names on them.

  Eyes—and a few hands—were directed many ways, but not mine, except for some blank stares and another goofy smile from Raffi Trulock many seats to my left.

  He saw me see him and ducked his head. His buddy punched his shoulder playfully, then leaned forward and looked over at me.

  And I got it. A bit belatedly. Raffi’s slightly dazed grins and overcasual greetings. My cheeks heated up, an annoying trait I can’t seem to outgrow. I had become a love object. An awkward but not unusual adolescent rite of passage, and not dangerous when kept in check, just always surprising—and discreetly flattering.

  How odd, I thought. I am simultaneously adored and loathed by students. Given my druthers, I would have chosen to keep the fond one anonymous and to have known the face of the latter.