A Friend Is a Gift You Give Yourself

by William Boyle

  “Once,” Rena says.

  “Saved my life back in Los Angeles. I saw it three nights in a row when I was in a particularly bad place.”

  “Where are we?” Rena sits up, stretches, looks at her hands. They’re shaking. Her knuckles are red.

  “The beautiful James Motel on the outskirts of Monroe.”

  “How’d we get here?”

  “The priest drove us.”

  “Oh my, I wasn’t very nice to him, was I?”

  “He’s a priest. He can take it.”

  “I really lost it. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s understandable.”

  Rena stands, stretching her arms above her head. “I should go,” she says. “I need to go.”

  “Where?” Wolfstein asks.

  “Adrienne. Lucia. I wish I had that number.” She searches the floor of the bus in her mind, tries to remember the numbers she wrote. She feels around in her pocket for the phone. It hadn’t even occurred to her that Lucia might’ve tried to call. Maybe she got scared right away, regretted taking off. She turns on the phone and there’s nothing, no missed calls, though she’s honestly not a hundred percent sure if the thing’s even set up to work yet. She must’ve left the instructions in the package on the bus, too.

  “One’s gone for good, and the other’s MIA. Rest up, Rena. I bet the cops find Lucia soon; she won’t last out there on her own. As for Adrienne, it’s horrible, but it’ll be nothing but red tape right now. You can deal with it in a day or two.”

  Rena knows in her heart that Wolfstein’s right. There’s nothing to be done about Adrienne with the cops running the show. And what happens with Lucia’s a wild card; chances are good she winds up sitting down on that briefcase on the side of the highway and trying to hitch a ride and getting picked up by a state trooper. Even without Rena’s participation, word must be out on her. Or maybe she’ll call after all.

  “How on earth can I rest?” she asks Wolfstein.

  “Can I tell you a story?” Wolfstein gets up and lowers the TV but leaves the picture on. A close shot of Bette Davis smoking fills the screen.

  Rena stares at those heavy, beautiful eyes. She feels lost in them for a moment, yearns for eyes like that, for a different life where she could’ve been Bette Davis. “I don’t think I have time for stories,” she says to Wolfstein.

  “The first movie I made was in New York. This was in ’73. I was living in the shittiest motel you could imagine, not far from the Port Authority. We called it the Scouring Pad. Place made this joint look like the Waldorf. I was living with this gal from Iowa City. Cully was her name. She was thirty-five at the time, but she looked fifty. She had a pimp. I didn’t want that life. I wanted to call my own shots.”

  Rena walks into the bathroom and turns on the water. She puts both faucets on high blast, collecting some water in her cupped hands, and then splashing it over her face as if to shake herself out of this nightmare. “I can’t believe how I acted with that priest,” she says to herself in the mirror.

  “Anyhow,” Wolfstein continues, coming up behind Rena in the doorway, “I was telling you about me and Cully at the Scouring Pad and my time on Sweet Cupcakes.”

  “Sweet Cupcakes? That was the name of the movie?”

  “Right. It was lighthearted. A simple romp. We were getting our footing. I played a maid. I was serving all these cupcakes to these upper-crust types. Dorothy Cumming was the lady of the house.”

  “Why are you telling me this?” Rena shuts the water and dries her face with a stiff towel. Wolfstein’s hands are on her shoulders now, rubbing, kneading.

  “Stay still,” Wolfstein says. “You’ve gotta get rid of some of this tension.”

  The massage actually feels good, and it doesn’t feel wrong to have Wolfstein’s hands on her. She’d shriveled at Enzio’s touch, but she’d totally forgotten what well-intentioned hands could feel like, how welcome mere contact could be. She closes her eyes and lets Wolfstein work.

  “I was a masseuse for a few months,” Wolfstein says.

  “Of course you were,” Rena says.

  “You can just see me, right? Carrying around that massage table, karate-chopping some fat fuck’s back?” Wolfstein’s hands on her shoulder blades now, pushing hard against a knot. “I’ve never felt someone as tense as you.”

  Rena’s not sure what to say. Under normal circumstances, she’s stressed, tense as hell. Now, with all that’s happened, with what she’s seen, her body has felt like murder. Her muscles raw and burning. Her bones older than ever. Her head buzzing. Her jaw tight. She imagines the pain inside her as cancerous clouds.

  “Let go of some of it,” Wolfstein says, her voice a whisper in Rena’s ear.

  Rena leans her head back slightly and exhales. She feels lighter, looser.

  “Why was I telling you about ’73?” Wolfstein says. “Getting old is the pits. I had a story. It had real significance.”

  “You’ll think of it.”

  The white shirt Rena’s wearing clings to her. She can smell her own sweat. She wishes she had her deodorant. Wolfstein reaches up under the shirt and now she’s working Rena’s lower back, fingers pulsing against bare skin. She knuckles around Rena’s bra strap.

  “That feels good?” Wolfstein asks.

  “Uh-huh,” Rena says, almost cooing.

  “I remember now.”

  “Remember what?”

  “Where I was going with that story. There’s the movie part of the story, and then there’s the Cully part. On Sweet Cupcakes, I had trouble with this piece of shit, Frankie Mangello. He thought who he was. We only had one scene together, but I hated every second of it. Frankie was just a bum, mean as hell, big into drugs. He was from Brooklyn, like you. Bay Ridge. I hated to see him eat a slice of pizza because of his mustache. Mustaches and pizza don’t mix, you ask me.”

  Rena crosses her arms over her chest.

  Wolfstein continues: “Frankie comes to me one day after we’re done and says, ‘Wolfie, I’ve got a proposition for you.’ ‘No,’ I says, without hesitation. I’m not getting into anything with this guy. I’m no dummy. To this day, I don’t know what the proposition was. Well, he held a big grudge against me after that. This other afternoon, maybe a week later, I’m shooting my scene with him. He gets a little rough. The director tells him to cool it. I go nuts. I yell at him. We finish, but he’s giving me this nasty look the whole time, and I’m miserable. A few hours later, no shit, he’s walking on Ninth Avenue and an air conditioner falls out a seventh-floor window in an apartment building and nails him. He wound up in a coma. Died three days later. That’s what you get, I guess.”

  Rena’s trying to make sense of the story. She’s scrunching her eyes together, waiting for Wolfstein to continue, to make sense of it for her. “That’s the story?” Rena asks.

  “Just part one,” Wolfstein says. “I went home, and Cully was there. She wasn’t feeling well. Had cramps. She was a sad case, like I said. But a true sweetheart. I told her I was upset, cried about Frankie. I wasn’t upset that he’d been hit by the air conditioner; I was upset about how he’d treated me. I was upset about my life. I was thinking I’d made all these bad decisions already and that there was no turning back from them. Cully took me out for pancakes. She listened to me. I sat next to her in the booth at the diner and put my head on her shoulder. She told me it was okay to cry. She stroked my hair. She even fed me my pancakes, you believe that? It was really nice.” Wolfstein stops rubbing and steps back over the threshold. “You feel a little better?”

  Rena turns around. She crosses her arms tighter, hugging herself into a shiver. “The air conditioner killed Frankie, and Cully fed you pancakes? What’s it mean?”

  “It means friendship is the greatest romance. And it means men ruin everything, but sometimes air conditioners fall on their fucking heads when they’re out walking.” Wolfstein gives a big smile. “I want to get loaded. Don’t you want to get loaded?”

  “I don’t think so.”

&nb
sp; “There’s a liquor store across the street. I’m going and I’m getting vodka, and then I’m twisting your arm to have a drink with me. Why don’t you take a shower?”

  Rena doesn’t say anything. She watches as Wolfstein goes over to a chair in the corner and leans over her bag and withdraws a hundred.

  “I’ll get a little something to nosh on, too.” Wolfstein zips the bag and heads for the door.

  “You’re just leaving that here?” Rena asks.

  “Keep an eye on it for me, would you?” Wolfstein pauses as she puts her hand up to turn the knob. “And don’t run off on me again. Won’t get us anywhere.”

  Rena nods.

  “I’ve got the key,” Wolfstein says, holding up a flimsy-looking white card before tucking it in her pocket. And then she’s gone out the door, singing under her breath.

  Rena goes to the window and peels back the heavy curtain. She watches Wolfstein trot across the parking lot past a scatter of dented cars. This is a woman life can’t take down. Rena admires that. She closes the curtain and sits on the bed, staring at Wolfstein’s money. Maybe she should just take a shower and cool down.

  She brings the bag into the bathroom with her and sets it on the toilet tank, making sure it’s secure. She turns the shower on hot and waits for the bathroom to get steamy. She locks the door and gets undressed, folding her clothes neatly and putting them on the counter next to the sink. She puts her arms up over her head and stretches. She just stands in the steam, letting it rise up around her.

  This isn’t a very nice motel. She can tell from the threads of mold in the grout, the peeling paper on the walls, the brownish water stains on the ceiling. The mirror over the sink is cracked. The toilet seat is crooked, stray hairs curled in the nook between the seat and the tank. The garbage can on the floor is full. She wonders how long the hot water will last.

  In the shower, she lets the water needle over her. She gets lost in the thrumming sound. Whatever else she can say about this room, about this motel, the water pressure’s pretty good. It takes her out of herself for a minute. Her hair dangles into her mouth, and she sucks water from it. She wonders about Lucia again. She tries to picture her, adrift in the world. She sees what happened to Adrienne on a loop in her mind’s eye. She doesn’t know if she is anymore, if she can ever be again.

  The hot water lasts and lasts. She can’t believe it. She’s thankful.

  When she gets out, her fingers and toes are pruney. She towels off and tries not to see herself in the fogged-over mirror. It’s warm in the bathroom, still full of steam. She can hear Wolfstein out in the room now, bottles clanking, the TV louder than before.

  A knock on the door. “I hope you’ve got my bag in there,” Wolfstein says on the other side.

  “I do,” Rena says, as she gets dressed. “Figured better safe than sorry.”

  “Gave me a little scare.”

  Rena puts her hair up in a towel and opens the door. The steam ghosts out. Wolfstein’s standing by the TV with a bottle of vodka perched next to her on the desk, unwrapping one of those plastic-wrapped motel cups. “I thought maybe you put the shower on as a distraction and took off with my dough,” Wolfstein says. “Just for a sec that thought went through my mind, I’ll admit. I know your brain’s a million places.”

  “I would never do that,” Rena says. While the thought of leaving again did pass through her mind, she never would’ve entertained the idea of taking Wolfstein’s money.

  “How was the shower?”

  “Hot.”

  “Good. I’m pouring you some vodka.” She swipes her free hand away from the vodka and points to the bed, where a big bag of Utz potato chips and a couple of plastic bottles of Seagram’s club soda are propped against the pillows. “I also got other refreshments.”

  “I’ll just have a club soda.”

  “I’m strong-arming you into a little vodka. At least a splash. I don’t want to drink alone.” Wolfstein unwraps another cup and sets both on top of the TV. She half fills them with vodka and then retrieves the club soda and adds it to the mix.

  Rena: “That’s a splash?”

  Wolfstein shrugs. She plucks up both cups with one hand, pinching them together between her thumb and pointer, and delivers one to Rena. She taps hers against Rena’s and says, “Here’s to it.”

  Rena sips a little. It’s strong, burns the back of her throat. She can’t remember if she’s ever had so much as a sip of vodka. A girl she went to high school with, Jane Williams, liked vodka, kept a stash in her purse. She remembers that name, but she can’t remember Jane’s face or what color hair she had. She must not have been Italian. Williams could be anything. She remembers Bobby Murray chugging his vodka and how that led to Adrienne getting shot.

  Wolfstein sits on the bed and slurps down some of her drink. A different movie is on TV. “I don’t know this one,” she says to Rena. “You know this one? That’s Gloria Grahame. I like her so much. But I’ve never seen this one. Don’t you love that? When it’s a movie you’ve never seen with an actress you love?” She searches around for the remote, sloshing vodka on the bedspread, and clicks the info button. The Big Heat is what it says in the blue strip on the top of the screen.

  Rena thinks how she’s never had that feeling Wolfstein mentioned: a movie she’s never seen with an actress or actor she loves lighting her up. She’s never cared that much about movie stars, she guesses.

  “Lee Marvin’s in it, too,” Wolfstein continues, plucking a couple of chips out of the Utz bag and chomping on them. “He’s so young here. I met his first wife once. Betty. She was something else.”

  Rena sips the vodka again and tries to stay focused on the movie. She remembers the phone she bought at the bus station and finds it on the nightstand, hoping for a call from Lucia. It’s on now, that’s clear, but there aren’t any missed calls that she can see. She dials her house number and lets it ring. She doesn’t have an answering machine. She’s not sure why she’s doing it. She imagines the phone just ringing on the hook in the kitchen, that terribly sad sound filling the house. Thinking of her empty house sets something off. She feels tears on her cheeks before she even knows she’s crying.

  Wolfstein lowers the volume on the TV. “You okay?”

  “It hits me in waves,” Rena says, going into the bathroom for a tissue.

  “You ever meditate?”

  “I’m Catholic.”

  “You can be a Catholic and meditate. It’s just about getting things straight. Facing your fear instead of walking away from it.”

  “You meditate?”

  “I used to. A lot. Now, I just try to relax. That’s what I’ve been doing these last couple of years. Relaxing. One thing I read along the way really stuck with me. We all have troubles, we all have heartaches and tragedies and traumas; that’s what defines us. You can be a coward and still be the bravest person in the world because you do things anyhow. It’s okay to be scared. Necessary, even.”

  Rena lets Wolfstein’s words wash over her. What she’s saying is pretty smart.

  “That and ‘drink up’ are good pieces of advice,” Wolfstein says. “Nothing can hurt you too bad if you just drink up.” She tips back her cup and finishes her first drink, shaking it off when the vodka hits. She goes and pours herself another, no splash of soda this time.

  Rena has nothing to lose. She downs her drink, and it seems to explode inside of her, firecracker snaps under her skin, a raw feeling in her throat, something wretched crawling in her stomach. She drops the cup and races to the bathroom, falling to her knees and puking into the toilet. She looks up at Wolfstein’s bag on top of the tank and catches her breath.

  Wolfstein’s up and in the doorway again. “I used to know a guy, he was a writer, he’d say no story should have puking or crying. He wasn’t any good. He wrote about college professors jerking off in their gym socks. Please, give me a little vomit, that’s fine with me. Life is full of puke and tears, right?”

  Rena unspools some toilet paper and dabs
at the corners of her mouth.

  “What’s your fantasy?” Wolfstein asks.

  “My what?”

  “Your fantasy. Like, you and your husband on a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace?”

  “I don’t think like that.” Rena sits up, her back against the bowl. She reaches behind her and hits the handle, flushing away what’s there.

  “I’ll tell you mine. Just to distract you. I’m on an airplane, drinking champagne in first class. Marty Savage is my flight attendant. Paul Newman’s the pilot. He’s got a beard. You ever see that picture of Paul Newman in Venice with a beard? Jesus Christ. That’s enough to make you believe that God’s a sculptor with the softest hands and most everybody’s fuckups, but with Paul Newman he really got it right.”

  “I’ve never seen it.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Close your eyes and imagine. Any version of Paul Newman will do. Cool Hand Luke Paul. Verdict Paul. Nobody’s Fool Paul. It all works.”

  “I’ve never seen any of those.”

  “Jesus Christ, Rena. Just go with me here. Come on, close your eyes.” Wolfstein sits on the floor just outside the doorway, careful with her legs, seeming to wince in pain a little as she settles her back against the doorjamb, even more careful with her vodka.

  Rena closes her eyes. She doesn’t see anything. It doesn’t even seem like darkness there on the backs of her lids.

  Wolfstein lets out a long sigh. “So, Marty Savage, he’s neglecting the other passengers. He’s just standing there, ready to pour me more champagne. He’s got one of those little towels so he can wipe off the neck of the bottle after he pours. So hot. I’m sucking it down. This is the best champagne you ever heard of. It tastes like rainbows. Marty’s sweating a little. He leans down and whispers, ‘Meet you in the bathroom in two minutes?’ And I just nod. When I get there, it’s not just one of those little boxy airplane bathrooms. It’s magnificent. Mirrors on all sides. It’s small, but there’s carpet on the floor and everything is new and clean. Marty comes in. He brings the champagne. I sit up on the sink and tell him to take off his clothes. He does. You know what’s coming next, right? Paul Newman joins us in there. ‘Who’s flying the plane?’ I ask. ‘It’s under control,’ Paul says, and he gives me that smile. He comes over and kisses me on the neck. His beard smells like rosemary. We pass around the champagne.”