Pretend I'm Your Friend Read online

Dr. Green, a man probably in his late thirties and therefore suitable for one of her daughters, was holding her hand. No wedding ring. He continued with the explanation of her diagnosis. Once it had been an ugly old man who’d discussed her fibroids, harmless and dull, nestled like grapefruit in the tree of her womb. Now it was young Dr. Green, with his winsome smile and fancy talk about tumors that metastasize to the liver.

  Mary-Kay’s mouth was dry. Outside it was still early May.

  “There are things you can expect,” he said. “Surgery, chemotherapy, radiation.”

  She studied the peculiar way his hand was lying on top of hers, suggestively covering her bare knuckles, as if he were picking her up in a bar.

  Do you do this sort of thing often? she thought, but she was dressed in a paper wrapper. It was not possible to land that kind of joke.

  “I need you to be strong, Mrs. Robinson.” His formality startled her. Weren’t they intimate now? “There’s more.”

  He started speaking about other body parts. Her sphincter had caused some sort of problem, though it didn’t seem possible the two were linked—her eroding female organs and that particular portal of elastic tissue. The problem had spread to her skin, Dr. Green explained, or perhaps had started there, or maybe even—there were data to suggest—the two cancers were completely unrelated. A strange coincidence.

  “Loosening,” he said, “…some grafts to be sure…”

  Outside the window, a tree had begun to sprout buds; and beyond that was the parking lot, shiny with windshields. She had the perfect excuse to pick up the phone and dial Gerald Howe now: Hello, my darling. Good thing you didn’t leave your wife after all. Turns out I won’t be staying.

  Dr. Green said, “A hysterectomy will be necessary, debulking, a careful protocol of estrogen and progesterone—sometimes itself a risk for cancer.”

  Mary-Kay’s laugh sounded tinny in the little room. “Hysterectomy?”

  She’d contracted a disease fitting for someone young with a need for those organs. She’d done her job, used them wisely, birthed and raised her children. She’d found ways to keep busy, managed to forget about passion, to do the honorable thing and leave love alone. She’d even learned to settle into the rest of her life with Richard. Richard! This was out of the question.

  “We may be able to save your colon,” Dr. Green was saying, “depending on the damage.”

  She pointed across the room: “Are you sure that’s my file?”

  He wrote something on the chart.

  “My daughters come to this office,” she continued, wondering if it sounded suspicious. Involuntarily, she lifted a hand to her bangs. She’d need more highlights now, perhaps a different cut.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Robinson,” Dr. Green said.

  Mary-Kay tried one more time: “You don’t seem to understand. They’re of child-bearing age; they still use these parts.” When Richard felt the mass in her abdomen, he’d suggested they call an ambulance. She wanted to tell the doctor: Couldn’t he just imagine ever-practical Richard picking up the phone for 911?

  Dr. Green looked at her expectantly. He held his pen, poised, over a future sentence. What could he be writing? A report on her behavior? Mary-Kay Robinson tried to bargain for her life. She implicated the innocent.

  Maybe he just wanted to let go of her hand.

  More than anything Mary-Kay wished she could be somewhere else, or not anywhere. The waiting room: limbo, a no man’s land where she could still pretend to know herself, be free from thinking the very next thought. She wanted to be patiently or nervously pacing, while someone else, anyone else—one of her daughters—sat in a white paper dress with the young doctor and took it like a man.

  She was an awful person. And that was why.

  “It takes time to sink in,” Dr. Green said, kindly. “I’m very sorry.”

  “Not you! You shouldn’t be sorry. It’s me.” She was certain he could see right through her. “I’m the one.”

  Not them, not my daughters.

  She saw herself clearly: all the pain and sorrow and stolen hearts, all the diaper pins and menstrual pads and parent-teacher conferences. Had they all been for nothing?

  The point was the nonsense and minutiae, Gerald might say. All of it just insane enough to make each kiss indelible. She began to cry at the thought of his voice.

  The very possibility, an oasis.

  Pretend

  I’m Your

  Friend

  Sitting in her apartment with two police officers, Marie is stunned, not because her boyfriend, David, killed himself in the bathroom, but because it is April and 1999, a year to party, if you believe the song by Prince.

  “Open and shut,” the taller cop says.

  Marie never realized before that people could die in warm weather.

  “Nothing suspicious here,” says the second cop.

  “My baby brother fell through a frozen pond once and drowned,” she tells the police, who peel tape off the doorjamb and gather up their note pads. “My uncle died in a blizzard. Of course, that was in the seventies. Weather has changed.”

  Outside on the front stoop, where the air is gentle, the policemen squint sadly and shake Marie’s hand. Over their shoulders, Marie spots Susan coming up the block, carrying a pot of her famous yogurt-spinach soup. As the squad car pulls out into the street, Marie realizes that she could just shut her door and lock it. This is your best friend, she reminds herself. Susan turns up the path, face blotchy with grief.

  “I would have been nicer to David,” Susan says, “but he was such a drug addict.”

  They stand on the front stoop, looking at one another, as if someone else might open the door and let them in. My apartment, Marie reminds herself, motioning Susan into the foyer.

  It’s almost lunchtime. They decide to eat the soup, though there is cleaning to do. Four friends from high school are due to arrive this evening to cheer and comfort Marie during her crisis. Susan has made arrangements.

  At the table, Marie watches her line up the salt and pepper shakers, the napkins, and the water glasses, all in an even row. “Are you sure he didn’t leave a note, Marie? Did you check his pockets?”

  Chopped eggs float in the soup like pulverized rubber balls: yellow and green. “No note.”

  “I suppose you’ll wait to date,” Susan says. “I mean, I suppose you’ll stay with men and all, right? It’s got to be easier with men.”

  Marie looks hard at Susan’s round face. Now that David is gone, all her friends will start to worry about alternative attractions. “A little early to tell.”

  Susan looks down at her soup. “Sorry.”

  In the mirror, Marie practices telling her friends, who are due to arrive this afternoon. “Actually, I’m already seeing someone.”

  The words seem unconvincing.

  “Olive,” Marie says, trying to believe it herself.

  As if her expressions were governed by the tight barrette holding back her hair, Olive barely moved her face when she first smiled at Marie. She showed up with the crisp fall air, a new junior lawyer on the floor, ambitious and chatty, which Marie could see the senior lawyers considered a liability. Silently they suffered her cheerful greetings: “Hello! Hi there! Look at you! What a day!” Passing by each plush office, she stuck her pointy face into the doorway and spoke loudly.

  “She just wants attention,” said one of the other data processors.

  Marie could hear the partners scratching their pens onto legal pads. She’d been temping the night shift since November: a hundred pre-formatted files, printed and stapled to a hundred long sheets of blue construction paper. Blue backs the secretaries called them.

  Olive always found her way to the data station where Marie and the others were assembled for nightshift in a temporary horseshoe of computers. She immediately started talking to Marie, the only woman, the only non-actor, non-artist, non-poet in the crew. The only one without a true purpose. Marie was lost, a state she could never seem to hide or shake.
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  “Attorney is my day job,” Olive said confidentially. “But I’m a writer, too.”

  Marie stared at Olive’s Armani blazer.

  “I mean, I have to write,” Olive continued. She took a seat on the edge of Marie’s desk, which everyone in the office referred to as data-entry station #1. “It’s like a religion with me.”

  “What do you write?” Marie said.

  “Oh, everything. Plays, novels. Whatever.”

  Mostly, Marie knew, Olive wrote steamy little lists she sent out electronically:

  PRETEND I MET YOU IN AN ELEVATOR.

  PRETEND YOU ARE A BAD GIRL.

  PRETEND YOU KNOW ALL MY SECRETS.

  PRETEND I DON’T WORK DOWN THE HALL.

  “What about you?” Olive asked.

  “Oh I don’t write anything.” Marie said, hoping this explained the fact that she never returned Olive’s e-mailed love notes, or her cyber advances. “Bad checks, sometimes.”

  “No, I mean generally.” Olive laughed. “Where are you from?”

  “Cleveland, I guess,” Marie said. “We moved around a lot. I was born in Rome.”

  “Sounds exotic!”

  “Rome, New York,” Marie said. “It’s Upstate.”

  Olive scratched her head with the eraser end of a pencil. “You look Jewish.”

  “Italian.” Marie’s hands were still poised above the keyboard, ready to finish typing her assignment. It was getting late.

  Olive pressed her nose to the side, mugging a scowl: “Mafia?”

  “Insulting,” Marie said, but smiled. Olive was technically her boss.

  “Just kidding,” Olive said.

  In Cleveland, in the early 80s, Marie’s father had worked overtime to provide for his family. A carpet contractor, he had aimed for a low profile, while impeccably furnishing certain important offices downtown for certain important people. For most of her adolescence, Marie had had no idea that her best friend Gina was the great grandniece of one of the most important mobsters alive, Reni Piscaretti. Once, she’d overheard her parents fighting the morning after a dinner party with the Piscarettis, at the Blue Rose Restaurant, later site of the famous slayings.

  He asked me, Carlo. Marie’s mother’s voice trembled. He pointed it in my face and said, Come on, taste! What was I supposed to say?

  Her father was furious: Guys lined up for miles to poison that S.O.B., and you eat off his fork? Smart, Celine, real smart.

  That afternoon, her mother took a cab to the hospital to have her collarbone set, as her father tended to overemphasize his point with a punch or slap. He was a violent man, but only after drinking too much.

  At the periphery of Marie’s desk, Olive’s foot wiggled in an expensive pump. “You married?”

  “Married?” Marie repeated.

  “Yeah, you know, with somebody?”

  “David,” Marie said. “We live together.”

  “David?” Olive paused. “I was expecting something more feminine. Dana, maybe. Daveen.”

  Marie let her fingers fall in their proper position over the keys: “Not this time.”

  Olive didn’t answer.

  Marie hated silence and added a few words to lighten things up. “But thanks for asking.”

  The cat jumps up on the kitchen table, startling Susan, who spills her soup.

  Marie’s been thinking of changing the cat’s name. “What about Heathcliff?”

  “I don’t like it.” Susan wipes the table with her napkin. “How about Honey?”

  With David, Marie got to make most of the decisions. He didn’t care about things, as long as she was happy. She’ll miss that. She is sad to be thrust back into a world of negotiating with other people.

  “Anyway, I think she’s in heat,” Susan says, watching the cat howl and hunch.

  After they took David’s body away, Marie cleaned for hours, using paper towels and garbage bags. There was even blood matted into the cat’s fur.

  After the initial shock, she tried calling Olive at home, but Jewel, Olive’s girlfriend, answered the phone. She explained her situation into Olive’s voicemail at work, asking for a temporary leave of absence. Human Resources called back, and later in the week, the legal secretaries sent flowers with a note card offering condolences from Dean, Dean, & Dean. For a few days Marie waited for Olive to call her, but the week since David’s suicide passed in silence. For some reason, she imagined the message Olive might have sent out electronically at work:

  BLEW HIS BRAINS out IN BATHROOM!

  HIGH AS KITE.

  CAT WAS ONLY WITNESS.

  “Maybe in college you had sex with women as a reaction to your childhood,” Susan says, starting to clear the soup bowls. “Violence will do that to a person.”

  Marie doesn’t know how to tell Susan that her childhood is why she has sex with men; she’s striving for mastery. Sex with women is what feels good.

  She can’t seem to bring up Olive.

  “It’s hard to explain,” Marie says.

  After the first time Marie and Olive made love on top of a desk in a dark law office—quite by accident and never again, Marie vowed almost immediately—Marie worried that David would figure it out. She started arriving home from work even later than usual, collapsing in bed unwashed. David nudged his head under her arm, pressing against her. His body, thin and ropy with muscle, made her feel even more pudgy than usual.

  He leaned on his elbows, trying to kiss her.

  “It’s late,” Marie said.

  David spoke in a low voice into the pillow: “The late great David Schenkel.”

  “Are you high again?”

  He rolled onto his back. “No.”

  “Did you go to class tonight?”

  With his head pulled back on the pillow, it would have been easy to crush his windpipe.

  “Yes, I went,” he mumbled, pulling her close. “You smell good.”

  “Aren’t you sleepy?” Marie whispered, smoothing his hair.

  He pressed her hands against his nostrils, inhaling a trace of Olive’s scent. “Seriously, Babe, what’s that smell?”

  “It’s nothing. Go back to sleep.”

  Night after night in a dark office, it was the same. The entire sexual act taking less than twenty minutes: a sentence without adjectives, a verb, followed by another verb, two nouns in a tangle. They never bothered to undress completely, taking turns going down on each other; first Marie, then Olive.

  “Be yourself,” Olive whispered.

  Marie could always see a trace of light down the hall, partners working late. The directive was confusing. Myself? Marie considered it.

  In bed at home, she closed her eyes and leaned close to David, her stomach fluttering with secrets.

  With Olive, at least, despair was a sentence she could imagine:

  I’M TIRED OF PRETENDING.

  *

  After four months on the nightshift data-entry legal team, sleeping till noon, heading into Manhattan when everyone was leaving, Marie thought about doing something important with her life: the LSATs, the Peace Corps, working in AIDS. She missed camaraderie; she missed sunshine.

  One day, on her way to work at the beginning of the shift, rising to the 40th floor, Marie shared an elevator with Olive, who was holding a deli sandwich. “Can you believe this is lunch?”

  “Busy day,” Marie said, as if they were strangers. It had to be at least six p.m.

  Olive lit a cigarette under a no smoking sign, exhaling dramatically. “Don’t believe everything you read, Miss Thing.”

  The other data entry workers were generally cold to Marie, East-Village types in the arts. They arrived in chatty clusters with bags of junk food. They recounted episodes of television shows Marie had never seen. They discussed city politics. Behind her back, they referred to her as Data Bitch.

  “You guys couldn’t make it in this office in broad daylight,” she told one of them once after they’d made fun of her perfect stack of finalized blue backs.

  The stupid
one laughed, and the other guy gave Marie the finger and threw a crumpled bag of Doritos at her computer screen.

  At nine p.m., alone in the tiny kitchen, during her dinner break, Marie watched darkness descend. Pinpricks of light came up over Manhattan one by one. Despite a warning posted next to the refrigerator—It is not safe to unseal these panes—she opened the window. Later, Olive sent an e-mail:

  YOU BETTER BE CAREFUL TO HEED ALL SIGNS.

  ON THE 40TH FLOOR, YOU CAN GET SUCKED OUT.

  When Marie refused to respond, Olive sent a status report.

  ROGERS v. ROGERS DUE MONDAY A.M.

  CLIENT MEETING. LET ME KNOW YOUR E.T.A—A.S.A.P.

  GIRLFRIEND OUT OF TOWN TILL TUES.

  SHE (JEWEL) AND I HAVE BEEN TOGETHER TWO YEARS

  (LESBIAN FOREVER). THIS ENTITLES ME TO DO

  WHAT I WANT.

  LET ME KNOW YOUR SCHED.

  Marie dragged the icon of the message to the trash at the bottom of her screen, knowing that when everyone left, she would succumb to Olive in one of the empty offices.

  No reply was necessary.

  At midnight sharp, when the data boys disappeared, leaving Marie to clean up the mess—pizza boxes, bags of chips, half-finished legal briefs, cans of soda, stains on the rug—Olive came up behind her.

  “What are you, the cleaning staff?” she asked.

  After lunch, Susan dusts the living room with a washcloth and pops open a beer. The way she flips the top with her thumb and forefinger reminds Marie of the little pistol David carried in his waistband and used variously as a bottle opener, doorstop, and paperweight. He was always pulling it out and banging it around to make himself feel handy. Marie puts down her mop and stretches in the salmon-colored armchair by the table, which David once dragged to the kitchen so he could eat, watch TV, shoot up, and doze in comfort at the same time. She looks through the rear window at the fenced-in concrete square passing as a Brooklyn garden. Last spring, David planted a little row of marijuana along the fence in their garden with some tulips. This spring, they bloomed before he killed himself. There won’t be a funeral service of any type; his mother wants the body sent back home. Lately, Marie notices, the cat no longer seems to feel like chasing birds.