Funny Once

by Antonya Nelson

  “OK, Florence Nightingale, have fun.” As a physician, as a card-carrying member of Doctors Without Borders, he could not argue with Cara’s purported agenda. She had Hippocrates on her side.

  Their destinations—high and low, be they Met or Barney’s, be they bookstore or thrift store, Shakespeare or stand-up—were all merely incidental, stage sets utterly secondary to the talking, and in order to truly talk, they would have to drink, so that while their meals would be inarguably sumptuous, they, too, would be simple props, obvious excuses to order liquor, and lots of it. Also: a few helpful pills, cigarettes. The women would share their stashes, as they had always shared, since first meeting in college. Under the influence of a few drinks, it was those young women they beheld: two doughy midwesterners woefully misplaced in New York City, frightened silent, pretending and defended by reflex, throwing their hands into the air on busy corners as if snatching at flying objects, frantically adapting, scrambling to shroud themselves in black, instantly setting about to starve and smolder, walking awed endless blocks with their heads tilted back like baby birds, helpless and hungry.

  So hungry.

  At LaGuardia, Cara didn’t recognize Rochelle. On first sight, there was nothing special about either of them, Cara thought, two women who blended, camouflaged, dull as everybody else, each in an outfit best described as modified sleepwear: Cara an obvious runner in a velour sweat suit, Rochelle a middle-aged matron wearing blowsy linen, ingeniously disguised as a harmless grandmother. This miracle—hiding in plain sight, sizzling sensibility bedecked in two different yet ubiquitous uniforms—thrilled Cara. No one (no one!) knew what she was thinking. Neither would anybody believe what her friend Rochelle was conceiving, right before their eyes! The scathing commentary that went on without relent, you had only to hit a particular button, she would open her mouth and scandalize you, it was incredible. Everyone was not like this, adamantly not, and how had Cara, anyway, ever located this rare gift? How, in all the world of billions who did not, did not, get her, had she found this essential inimitable friend?

  By being assigned the bed across from Rochelle, a million hours in the past, that little dorm cubicle that some random Powers That Be At Barnard had furnished with two girls whose hastily tossed-off written inventories in the application packet had somehow led to their being deemed roommate material.

  It was harder to find a true friend than it was to find a spouse, Cara had discovered. For she’d found three of those, and only one of these. And always she had run to Rochelle when it was time to abandon that marriage, and maybe? Maybe it was coming again, although this time would be different, what with the child. What with the fifty years she suddenly had to admit was her age, although people always guessed she was younger. Always.

  As usual, they were shy at first, each with a tucked smile, a slightly averted gaze.

  “Why Funkytown?” Cara finally asked in the cab. “I mean, I’m there too, it’s that time again.” She was falling out of love, had already fallen. It had taken longer, and it would be harder to extricate herself, but there was no denying the signs. Yet mightn’t she, because of twelve-year-old Emmett, have to stay? Her online dating profile made no mention of a husband, yet confirmed the boy. And an age of forty-two. Divorcée. Maybe she should claim widowhood? Nobody could blame a widow.

  “Oh, you know,” Rochelle said vaguely of her own blue season, a fleeting sad flinch crossing her forehead. “The vapors.” With her she had a new dog, this one wearing a service animal badge. “Why not?” she’d said at baggage. “As soon as they see the word Psychiatric I am in like Flynn.” Until she’d become a world traveler, Rochelle’s love life had indeed been what brought her down, sent her to Funkytown. But vacationing abroad had taught her about all the fish in the sea, and the seeming infinite variety, the nature of love having released her from its former fixated grip. “European men,” she would sigh in wonder. “They have no interest in the twenty-two-year-old. And why should they? Those vapid brats. And Mediterranean men, oh my god? Please.” She was forever urging Cara to follow her lead, to forget the dooming relentless striving to be ever-young, to instead resign, recline, indulge, let loose of vanity’s tedious toil.

  “Hold this?” she said now, handing over her wallet to Cara. “Sylvia Plath eats money, don’t you, you little shit?” The dog blinked blankly away from the open zippered compartment. “No comment, bien sur.”

  “Where?” demanded their driver, who was from where? Rochelle would know.

  “Times Square,” Rochelle answered. “Times Square,” she murmured to Cara, as it was she who’d made the reservation. “I dunno, I felt like being in the thick of things, like any other little old lady from Florida. Do you mind?”

  “I would go anywhere.” Which was true. Where Rochelle said to go, she would go.

  “Read this label,” Rochelle said, twisting her blouse collar tag toward Cara. “This line is all about fortunes. Execrable dreck. I edit them.”

  To Inner beauty had been appended Outer yech. She rose on her massive hip to give Cara access to her waistband, her pale dimpled skin crazy with tiny red spots and wormy purple veins, a shimmering river of stretch marks, this brief reveal suggesting that beneath the garments it could only be so much more of the same or worse. Cara could not imagine allowing such ruin to fall upon her own flesh. Their twenty-year-old selves would have been appalled at the sight. Rochelle had so grandly done that thing they’d promised themselves they’d never do: let themselves go. And how far Rochelle had gone! How extravagantly! The cabbie did a double take in the rearview. I am great, people are terrific, life is wonderfull had become I am greasy, people are terrible, life is mispelled.

  “Remember that taxi last year with the urine?” said Cara. “Oh my god were we hungover.”

  “I’m just glad I got in first. I pride myself on never landing in the wet spot.”

  “So. Gross!” Cara had returned home last year ill and listless, blaming it on Rochelle’s exhausting saga, never confessing to how fully fun it had been, how the sadness was in being back, home to Ordinary Life.

  It wasn’t always mostly fun. It wasn’t always New York, either. There’d been Greencastle, Indiana, when Rochelle’s mother had had to be moved. There’d been drunk camp in the Utah canyonlands, which Rochelle had required and which Cara had attended in sober solidarity. Miami, when Rochelle had undergone uncertain surgery and subsequent chemo. There’d been the deaths of parents, all four of them, each of a radically different tenor, these only-children left finally orphaned, and there’d been Cara’s deep postpartum depression, Rochelle swaying sleepily on her feet with tiny Emmett in her arms, Cara a fetal ball in the rocking chair. There’d also been her decisions to leave her husbands, Rochelle knowing before those innocent men, helping plot the exit strategy, script the kindest, gentlest scenario. Between the women there’d been so much. They’d become adults, helped raise each other, moved away, yet never lost touch.

  Last year it had been the death of Bad Samson, Rochelle’s beloved wretched dog—which, maybe because Cara had grown up on a farm, a place overfilled with animals and death, they died and became dinner, even if they had names and personalities in advance, she’d learned to behead chickens, somebody had to—and still, even if Cara couldn’t quite muster true grief, it was a point of pride to pretend such compassion and concern for Rochelle’s rescued Pomeranian.

  And now a new one, Sylvia Plath in her purse. Cara could certainly understand how Sylvia Plath, like Bad Samson, had come to be discarded the first time around, and thereby in need of rescue. Without children, without spouse, here was where Rochelle’s love was poured—because love had volume, and needed a container, a way not to be wasted.

  Early on, there’d been a low moment between them. For one long hard school year they had loved the same man, and they might have parted ways forever as a result. But after? They’d shared the deepening kinship of caring beyond that same man, and where was he now, anyway? He’d been everything, once upon a time, L
ouis White from across the way, and now was nothing.

  They’d met him their third year of college, he and his roommate in the building across the street from Cara and Rochelle’s apartment, acquaintance made on an angry sweating summer night while audience to an altercation from balconies above it. A highly amusing distracting drunk fight between four fat marrieds, shoving and punching and stumbling and shouting. Louis and his roommate were commentating.

  “As a betting man, I’d put money on the ladies,” the roommate said into his fist, leaning over the iron railing.

  “We’re gonna have to agree to disagree on that one,” Louis said into his. “I’m going with the guys here, not to be sexist, but let’s not forget our friend testosterone.”

  “Lou, that’s just where they’ll fool you, wait and see.” Sure enough, it was the pudgy husbands who eventually sat defeated in the street, one with his head in his hands, the other searching for his shoe, wives stalking away huffily pulling garments back into order, all angry elbows and head-butting, victors, Louis calling lazily across the way, “You guys got anything to drink? That whole debate brought up a powerful thirst.” From the first it was clear that Louis was the one to desire. His roommate, James Huckabee, Chuckles, laughed too eagerly, had settled already into his role as wholesome bewildered sidekick, not intense enough, his glance clear, his motives pure, he played the banjo and wore wire-rim glasses and would marry young, have more than the national average number of children, love the same woman in the way of the parishioner for decades and decades. Louis, however, was a Bad Boy, and would never wed. No girl could resist trying to win and rescue him. And better if there were two of them, to compete for the position. Slippery, elusive, sultry-eyed Louis.

  Cara lost her virginity to him. Rochelle had already had a half dozen lovers, her current one her econ professor, several of them one-night stands taking place mere feet from Cara’s bed back in that little dorm room. Poor Chuckles, who spent that first evening gamely trying, falling flat, and Rochelle and Cara nearly at each other’s throats by its end, trading the snidely betraying information they possessed of one another, exposing weakness after weakness, Louis the listener, Louis the judge, Louis the point on which they’d risk their friendship. She could still see him, leaning back on their futon couch that night, chin tilted toward the ceiling as his beautiful throat swallowed their liquor, his rangy easy-limbed self soaking up also the palpable pleasure of being desired, a boy filled with heady intoxicants.

  He’d graduated from Columbia. He worked as a bike messenger, he wrote songs for a band, he dealt weed. He’d grown up in the city. His pet name became, for Cara, Manhattan, since his, for her, was Buckeye.

  But first he chose Rochelle, and broke Cara’s heart. Then next he chose Cara, for longer, for better, she the ultimate winner. He wouldn’t have sex with her for nearly a month, despite having fucked Rochelle the first night out. This respect, this care, this difference between the girls that he recognized and honored became part of his complicated appeal to Cara. Never again in her life did she ever have a lover half as well tuned to her. She’d never have known it was possible if not for Louis. Three husbands later, she could say so with confidence. It was rare to be so thoroughly, bodily, suited.

  The cost of that first love, that first real love, was the friendship with Rochelle, who did not like to lose, yet whose tragedy that continued to be. No matter Cara’s pleading, no matter the evidence that Rochelle could always find men, and Cara could never, or hardly ever, or with such monumental difficulty, no argument would budge her. Rochelle seemed bent on an ultimatum: either him or me. For the remainder of that year they lived as enemies, occupying their tenancy as if on shifts at a plant, guards of the same inmate, Rochelle camping out at the econ prof’s office, Cara across the street at Louis’s, occasionally glimpsing from his apartment window the shadow of lean and miserable Rochelle in theirs.

  Cara pretended to have given him up when in fact it was he who left Cara, he who began sleeping with the ballerina in her thirties, the sophisticated beauty who’d also grown up in the city, who had a life history he more readily recognized and esteemed. He would have continued to sleep with Cara, but it wouldn’t have been the same. She was somebody, she learned, who had to be the only one.

  To explain her heartache she ran back to Rochelle, spinning the tale of having chosen their friendship over Louis White. Her sobbing grief was real, a useful side effect, a purported sacrifice, tribute to their friendship. She was practical, that way; hadn’t farm life taught her to improvise, to make the most out of what otherwise could not be controlled, weather and animal plague and government fickleness?

  They swore then that they would never say goodbye to each other. Never.

  “April doesn’t look so terribly cruel, does it?” Rochelle said of the sunny day outside the cab.

  “There’s studies that say April is when last summer’s vitamin D runs out. That’s why people get saddest then.”

  “Let’s blame April.”

  “Yes. The month of April: Discuss.”

  Their trouble was joined together now instead of being borne separately, en route to sturdy, busy Manhattan. Suddenly Cara’s issues felt more thrilling than frightening. It was the possibility of impending freedom, a promising new love. She had already been chatting online with potential future mates. The world was opening again, as if once more in bloom, she could embrace it, April was also spring! Yet a small part of her trouble panicked her, the damage she would cause her boy. The hurt she would be responsible for in her boy’s father, whose feelings mattered to gentle Emmett. She’d kept this husband longer than the others, and had brought something substantial into the world with him.

  A bad dream had provoked her reaching out to Rochelle. A dream in which her punishment had been Emmett’s death. In the dream, she had already made a choice, a dooming one, and she had woken profoundly shaken, Emmett dead and buried. She had reached out because it had seemed a portent.

  And there was Rochelle, reaching back. Now here they were in this too-warm cab, the city skyline from the bridge a nostalgic sight, the stiff creak of the seat and the exhausted suspension of an overdriven vehicle familiar and real, hair oil smudging the windows. Cara was feeling immeasurably reassured already. Divorcing her husband did not mean killing her child. That was nonsense. She had Rochelle as well, this steady witness and friend, this presence beyond all others. Rochelle reminded her that she, Cara, did not discard all intimacies, was capable of loyalty and love.

  “You’re from Russia,” Rochelle now said to the driver, gargling something along the lines of “I visited recently” in his native tongue. The man flicked his gaze to the rearview, then shrugged. So what?

  “Yalta wasn’t at all what I thought it would be,” she said to Cara. “I mean, true, it was winter instead of summer. I went right to the cliffs and looked down at the waves. Big deal.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Cara answered, “but keep going.”

  “On the other hand, I guess I was actually warned of the same . . .” She stroked her dog, in her bag, mindlessly. “If I willed you Sylvia Plath, would you not be mean to her?”

  “I would. Would not,” Cara corrected. “I mean, I’ll do what you want.”

  Rochelle reached across to lay her other plump freckled hand on Cara’s knee, which gave Cara a place to look, to realize that she would recognize that hand anywhere, that she’d been familiar with it for longer than any other hand in her life besides her own.

  “Is it back?” she asked the hand.

  “No, no, that’s not it,” Rochelle said, checking around for something wooden to knock, settling on the scarred plastic divider between them and the Russian. “I’m clear, there.”

  “Then what?”

  “No, you first. I want to hear about you first, and only after we’ve had a few.” Cara began putting together the story she’d not been able to frame aloud for anyone else. The story of the perhaps end of her current marri
age, the conceivable explosion of her life. Emmett was what gave it extra gravitas, that dear twelve-year-old boy, he who’d only in the last year quit requiring Cara to tuck him in at night. In one way, it was easier to think of leaving, since she would still have Emmett. And in another way, it was considerably harder.

  “Why did I bring so many books?” Rochelle said of her heavy suitcase at the hotel curbside.

  “Mine’s full of shoes.”

  “There’s us in a nutshell, all right.” Rochelle had retired from the law nearly a decade earlier, choosing to travel and read books. Combining the two, in fact, taking literary tours of England, Mexico, Ireland, France. “All I want to do is read,” she’d confessed in her thirties. “I’d rather read than anything else, even sex. Even eating. Is that terrible?” This was rhetorical; Rochelle had already made peace with loving literature. It was her religious practice. She’d pilgrimaged on its behalf, this past year to Russia; Cara had the postcards to prove it, her son the pretty stamps.

  Her son, whose godmother was Rochelle; Cara had had to argue with her husband about it. He’d wanted his brother and his brother’s loathsome wife to be assigned. Cara, however, had prevailed. The fact that Rochelle had started Emmett’s college fund had been helpful.

  “It’s not terrible,” Cara had said, of Rochelle’s passion for reading. “I wish I could be that satisfied with a book.” She would read what Rochelle recommended, always with the dim suspicion that she was being scolded or diagnosed, certainly cared for in a unique way, and shy about being grateful for the lesson, even if it stung. Some of the books in that suitcase were surely destined for her.

  But Cara admired Rochelle’s love of literature the way she did Rochelle’s approach to men, envious of what she could not truly understand. This was, in fact, only half a lie. Over time, many things about Rochelle had become curious to Cara. Why didn’t she want the trophy, the husband, for instance? The proof that she was uniquely desirable? In the beginning, Rochelle had been a kind of sick collector of men, torturing herself with one obsessive inappropriate object of affection after another—those men who were either married or in some lethal position of power in the same law office, or were vastly younger, or, once, horrifyingly older, not to mention married, another time ludicrously famous, a sickening, hopeless pursuit, but what they shared, time and again, was unavailability. They would not choose her, when the time came to choose.