Pretend I'm Your Friend Read online

  “Alice-James.”

  “You Americans have weird names.” He sticks out his hand. “Yo soy Pedro de Cuba.”

  A.J. is kissing Pedro from Cuba when an image of her baby brother floats up. She clasps the back of Pedro’s neck for more pressure and tries to settle into the pillow, wanting his mouth to blot hers out. Feel it, she tells herself, somehow reminded of the numbness of growing up in Pennsylvania. Pedro lifts her shirt and kisses her breasts. She works her hand down his naked back and wonders if she should enter him, where he is not quite wet, but moist––sweaty. This is what keeps a man feeling alive, according to Gordy. A mental picture of Helena laughing relieves her, mercifully, but doesn’t stay. Her baby brother leans a head on her shoulder and coos like a little bird. She can recall the squeak of his talcum-y skin, his tiny erections, which sometimes she touched when no one was looking. Then she can hear someone crying; her father, this time with his head on her breast, or maybe the sound comes from her. Pedro sucks her nipples, as if she is a musical instrument on the verge of emitting sweet sounds. She concentrates on maneuvering into an arch to press her finger into his ass.

  “Not so fast,” Pedro whispers. “Take it easy.”

  A.J. reminds herself that she is lying naked on a cot in Pedro’s studio in Florence. She hears the sounds from Via Dante Alighieri below. They are very near the Duomo. On their walk to dinner, Pedro had carefully pointed out the site of the great poet’s restored medieval home. At the restaurant that seemed like someone’s home, he quoted a few lines from the Inferno in Italian in a way that seemed only slightly rehearsed. On the walk back to his studio, they had turned corner after corner into plaza after plaza of tourists scouting out ice cream and sidestepping pigeons. The strange world filled A.J. up like a song. She felt alive to be walking in Florence with a stranger, Pedro, who laughed and pointed out sights and called her niña.

  Now, lying with Pedro, she lights a joint for him and one for herself. This is an offering of love—maybe not love, but something—because he saved her, because he knows her, because this is her very first time. One joint entirely for him.

  “I’ve never been high before,” Pedro says, smiling. “I like it.”

  “I’ve never been fucked before.” A.J. laughs.

  Pedro’s features soften. “This is an honor, then.”

  For a moment, A.J. feels like crying. Pedro puts the marijuana on the windowsill, kissing her gently, placing himself between her legs and entering slowly, touching a chord, something like pain but also like lightness. It is sad suddenly to be so human, A.J. thinks—so merely human. When she opens her eyes, the room swirls. What she recalls is another room from another time. Perhaps this is the essential experience of sex: you remember places from your past, or perhaps they are your future. She doesn’t know if her eyes are open or closed, or suddenly who it is, sweaty and gasping, on top of her. She grips the body and pulls it close, hoping for mercy, an end. Pedro finally stops moving, breathing heavily into her neck, then slides slowly out of her body, and they lie still. They share the joint.

  Pedro says, “You are no virgin, mi amor.”

  A.J. covers her body with the stale blanket; her breasts seem to spill over onto the bed, her stomach looks fat, her feet too big. She is doughy and pale, enormous in the dark room with the dark man, a stranger, who is about to fall asleep, to leave her there alone.

  “That was my first time,” A.J. says insistently.

  Tears make the room a blur, and she sees now that her life depends on certain difficult half truths. Pedro takes her hand, kissing the knuckles. “Don’t listen to me, niña. Really. Pedro is foolish.”

  He squeezes his shoulders into the mattress as he falls asleep, pinning her slightly against the wall.

  In the morning, A.J. rushes to meet Helena at the Piazza Santa Croce as planned. Jet-lagged and late from oversleeping, A.J. is almost glad that this time it will be Helena waiting on her for a change. Helena is too beautiful for her own good; her teeth are too white, and she’s a total liar: You and me and Florence forever. Hurrying along, A.J. breaks into a sweat and has to stop to catch her breath. Too much smoking, she thinks. Near the Bapistry, the strangest feeling overtakes her, a kind of dizzy sensation that someone is standing on top of the Campanile, 276 feet above her head, pointing a rifle at her, slowly pulling her into the cross-hair view and taking aim. She walks more quickly, heads over to the Ponte Vecchio, where the sweet-faced Italians will soon be setting up shop. Love thy brother, she thinks, sick to her stomach. Tucking her shoulders up near her ears, she shoves her hands deep in her pockets and looks for a place to get a cup of coffee.

  The past doesn’t matter, A.J. tells herself. It’s the future that counts.

  Outside the cathedral, Helena grills A.J. about Pedro. “Did it hurt?” she wants to know. “Did you like it? The first time always hurts.”

  It didn’t hurt.

  “That’s weird. It’s supposed to hurt.” Helena lights a regular cigarette and sits on the step, pulling A.J. down beside her. They are both wearing the same clothes as yesterday, the same clothes they had on in Waynesboro, which now seems like a million miles away. In A.J.’s back pocket is the charcoal drawing folded in half, along with the fifty lira she stole from Pedro, who was still asleep when she slipped out of his apartment.

  “What about you?” Maybe in the end, A.J. will escape Waynesboro, too, and travel the world, making everyone she knows part of her past. “How was Roger?”

  Helena pulls at the lit cigarette between her lips. “Okay, I guess. Well, actually, Roger was kind of gay. Nothing happened. I went back to the hostel.”

  If A.J. had spent the night with Helena, she could have avoided the smell of Pedro’s body, his small uncomfortable cot, the question he’d left swirling inside her brain.

  “Gay?” Her head pounds. “Not another one?”

  Helena laughs and sticks out her tongue. “Who asked you?” She jumps up then, and skips up the steps to the cathedral.

  Straining to her feet, A.J.’s limbs feel made of stone. “Wait for me.” Miraculous Helena bouncing back, she thinks, as she trails behind. Not even a hundred brushes with imperfect love can weigh her down.

  *

  Inside, Sante Croce smells of moldy devotion. The great cathedral is dimly lit and packed with old women praying. At the holy water fount, under the enormous vaulted ceiling, Helena stands close behind. A.J. can feel heat radiating off her body and smell the soapy smell of her flesh. Perhaps this is how close Helena stands when she’s seducing two-timing Gordy or poor gay Roger from Cleveland.

  A.J. looks across the row of pews, longer than a football field, down a separate hallway, where there are statues and paintings as far as the eye can see, elaborate ceramics, Stations of the Cross. At one popular corner, you can put a coin in a slot to light up the Lord, a famous twelfth-century carving. A mall for the Savior, A.J. thinks. Through the dark they make their way past the monuments of Michelangelo, Galileo, Machiavelli.

  “I need a joint,” she says.

  “You know what day it is, don’t you?”

  A.J. thinks it over. “The second day of you and me and Florence forever?”

  “Good Friday,” Helena corrects. “The day the Jews killed Jesus. My people, your Lord. I hope you’re not still mad about that.”

  A.J.’s laugh breaks the silence, causing a few kneeling women to look up from their prayers. She covers her mouth. “All the more reason I need to smoke.”

  Helena drags her to the sacristy to light a candle. “Come on,” she whispers, pulling A.J. to her knees. “Save our souls.”

  A.J. rolls her eyes.

  “Say a prayer, A.J. You’re Catholic. You know, Forgive me father and all that jazz.”

  “I don’t know the words.”

  They settle on their knees before Jesus, who is nailed to his cross. His pinched, mournful face makes A.J. think that maybe he did something to deserve his fate, to be so bound; people don’t just go around getting their wounds
doused in vinegar for nothing. Son of God or not, he might have done better to keep his mouth shut. But then someone had to die for someone. For everyone.

  A.J. herself is nearly free—nearly eighteen—nearly gone. Only her brother and sister will be left behind to talk about how she got out.

  Better them in that house than me. Immediately she feels guilty; she never saved anyone, not even herself.

  Helena leans forward to ask A.J. to say a prayer for her, but presses her lips to A.J.’s mouth instead. They are warm and dry, her lips, accommodating. A.J. pulls back, but Helena kisses again, tongue lingering lightly on A.J.’s teeth.

  “I always wondered.” Helena smiles, shrugging. “It’s kind of nice.”

  A.J. blushes and clears her throat, feeling ridiculous.

  Helena jabs her with a good-natured elbow. “Oh, don’t be stupid, will you? It’s no big deal.”

  An organ begins to play, the notes jumbled. “Meet me outside, A.J. Okay? I’m starving.”

  A.J. cannot come up with a single prayer: “Thank you.” When she looks up at Jesus’ sad face, as He stares down at her, offering the hint of a smile.

  The light strikes A.J.’s face like fire as she steps out of San Croce. The yellow gold is so bright that she has to squint, but she’s thankful for the warmth. She’s lucky to be alive, lucky that Helena is waiting for her on the bottom step. Waving and grinning, Helena shouts something she doesn’t catch because a small crowd of street children appears at the same exact moment, running toward A.J. She smiles, happy to see their grubby faces, their tight balled-up fists, which are raised to Heaven, exultant.

  They rush in, their fingers digging into A.J.’s ribs and pockets. This close, she can’t tell suddenly whether they are children or tiny dirty women. They stand as tall as her waist and smell of rotten lettuce, hair matted and tangled, clothes made of rags. They squawk like birds, whistle, and smack the air, drawing A.J.’s eye first to the ground, then the sky; to the right and left, until she is dizzy. One of them squeezes her elbow; another throws herself at A.J.’s feet as if for mercy. The human stench is suffocating, the press of knuckles surprisingly warm and forceful.

  They seek out A.J.’s softest places.

  They touch her everywhere, bruising her skin.

  At last they knock her to the ground, covering her completely. Lying prone on the stone steps under the disheveled creatures, A.J. hears Helena call her name. The hands continue to pinch, as if searching for her wallet or her soul. Not there, she thinks, relieved to know the truth. When it’s over, she will pick herself up and begin again, this time from scratch, with no past at all. Someday, she will not need to wonder if such terrible children mean to love or harm her with their kisses and their small hands of God.

  Sorry

  Mrs.

  Robinson

  Mary-Kay Robinson followed the nurse in the blue cardigan.

  “Take everything off,” the woman said when they arrived at a small room at the end of the hallway. “Underwear too.”

  At 57, Mary-Kay was hardly unfamiliar with pelvic exams, but she’d recently learned to hold her tongue.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  The other day her daughters had asked what was wrong. “The heart is a cow,” she’d said. They just stared at her blankly, though they should have understood: Janet was in the midst of a messy divorce and Lily was dating a construction worker, who was no prize as far as anyone could tell. “Not even the sense to lie down in the pouring rain. Protect the udders.”

  She’d never figured out exactly how to talk to her girls. All grown up, they seemed ill-prepared for love, probably her fault, though there were other factors: history, difficulty breast-feeding, a near-public affair she’d had years ago with Gerald Howe.

  She could still hear her own heart lowing behind the sturdy white fence of her sternum, just above and to the left of a mass she’d found in her abdomen last Wednesday. She’d been lying in bed watching TV with Richard, thumbing through a book. She could have easily rolled over and gone to sleep, but she’d said, “Feel this.”

  “Shit, Mary-Kay.” Richard fingered the lumps. “A pile of rocks.”

  Mary-Kay carefully removed her clothes, put on the hospital gown, and sat up on the table, inspecting her legs, which were still her finest feature. Her own daughters, flesh of her flesh, had missed the entire point of being female, which was to enflame desire, not drown it out. What if they spent the rest of their lives thinking marriage—that warmish puddle of emotion—was enough?

  How could they not?

  She’d discovered true passion only by accident, the day she spotted Gerald Howe in his gabardine suit disciplining teenagers down a glossy buffed hallway. There was something sexy about his determination, the certitude of his reprimand. He’d confiscated their marijuana cigarettes, then turned around and waved, saying, “How’s my favorite PTA treasure?” In a million years, she wouldn’t have figured Gerald Howe, assistant principal at the junior high school, for the man who’d reveal a universe unexplored within her own body.

  They shared certain opinions about child rearing. After they both opposed a referendum to close down one of the high schools, other parents began to look to them for guidance: What do Gerald and Mary-Kay think? Soon, Mary-Kay was putting on silk blouses for board meetings, for which she was district treasurer. Once, she rescheduled a hair appointment so her cut would be fresh but not too new.

  He kissed her on the lips one evening in the administrator’s lounge after a grueling budget negotiation. They were in the middle of putting the coffee urn away. Darling, he said, and slowly peeled away her blouse, pressing her into the gray fabric sofa while the other parents got into their cars and drove away.

  At climax, he grabbed a fistful of hair, gently at first, then roughly, as if he were exposing her neck to an unseen executioner. No one had ever pulled her hair before. When he wept, out of guilt or passion, she’d felt their destiny like an oncoming train: so random, so inevitable.

  That year—1978?—Mary-Kay’s youngest daughter, Lily, had been new to the junior high. After an incident involving ninth graders and a Swiss army knife, Mary-Kay started driving her to and from school, taking her out of class an hour early on Tuesdays and Thursdays to steal more time with Gerald. She waved off Gerald’s concern about Lily. “Gym class and study hall?” she said. “I think she’ll live.”

  Maybe she’d been rash.

  Lily was a serious child, sitting quietly in the back of the family station wagon while Mary-Kay swung around to the side faculty parking lot. “You wait here and do your homework. Okay, honey?” Mary-Kay had headed for the empty bleachers, where Gerald was waiting. “Mommy’ll be right back.”

  Lily never looked up from her books.

  Maybe Mary-Kay shouldn’t have driven Gerald Howe the few blocks home every afternoon, or convinced Lily over pre-dinner ice cream sundaes that their time alone with Principal Howe was a special secret. Lily never asked a single question; wise beyond her thirteen years, she’d coolly licked fudge from her lips, judging Mary-Kay silently.

  After a while, a handsome young man wearing a stethoscope around his neck came sauntering into the examining room where Mary-Kay sat propped on the table.

  It was 1997. How had so much time passed by?

  He smiled winningly. “Have you been waiting long, Mrs. Robinson?”

  “A lifetime,” she said.

  *

  Once, a few years ago, Mary-Kay thought she’d spotted Gerald Howe shelving books at the Barnes & Noble. It was odd she’d never bumped into him before, not once in all the years since he’d politely asked her never to call his house again. He loved his wife; he’d taken a vow.

  It wasn’t as if they could just go on having an affair.

  Mary-Kay hadn’t exactly been surprised when he’d called it off; Gerald had cried whenever they’d made love. She’d been a fool to think they might continue as they were, forever. Still, she was glad to have had a foolish heart thumping fervently i
n her chest.

  By the time Gerald called it quits, Lily had sailed into high school with honors; Mary-Kay had quit the Westchester PTA, and Richard, poor unsuspecting Richard, was none the wiser. No harm done, except Lily’s continued lack of interest in boys and her preoccupation with Mary-Kay, who’d wandered the house at night, stuffing herself with whatever she found in the cabinets, vomiting to get empty. She missed everything there was to miss about Gerald.

  “Mom,” Lily said, appearing after midnight in her nightgown. “When are you going to stop crying?”

  Mary-Kay was hurrying home with Richard’s birthday gift when she’d spotted Gerald Howe in the Galleria. It was a Sunday; the girls were coming for pot roast. Maybe Gerald had taken a job in his retirement.

  Work keeps the fingers nimble, the mind agile, she imagined him saying.

  From across the mall, the sound of his voice came back, the feel of his hands. She sat down on a bench next to a pretzel cart. To think that she might have happened by on any given day of the week and found him there, among the fiction titles! Through the glass, he looked handsome, a little heavier, more gray in his hair. His children had given him grandchildren no doubt; his wife had joined the garden club.

  Imagine being so close all this time.

  She picked up the Ralph Lauren sweater wrapped and bagged for Richard, and the yellow birthday cake with coconut frosting. She’d come back another day and find him; maybe they’d have a cup of coffee at the food court.

  “Hello, Gerald,” she whispered. “I’ve missed your face.”

  “The name’s Douglas, lady,” said the kid behind the pretzel cart, handing her a diet coke and some change.

  Now Mary-Kay was trying to pay attention to the young doctor in the examining room. There’d been a terrible mistake, a mix-up. The sort of thing that happened to someone else.

  The doctor mentioned her ovaries right off the bat.

  “I haven’t used that plumbing in years,” she said.