The False Friend

by Myla Goldberg

  That night over the phone, Celia described all this in a degree of detail that would have bored anyone other than a lover, and which left Huck avid for more.

  “What was I supposed to say?” She sighed. “So I sat with her through the end of a cable movie until Daddy woke up, and then we went to Maxi’s to eat.”

  “You got the eggplant parm,” he said. “And you all split the—”

  “—the fruit de mer. And, of course, the ricotta cheesecake for dessert. With me barely able to eat because of everything Mommy had asked me not to say. We drove back with practically my whole dinner in a doggie bag, Daddy going on again about how wonderful it is that I’m home. And as soon as we were inside, the two of them went to bed even though it was only nine o’clock, leaving me downstairs, remembering.”

  “Tell me,” Huck said.

  She pictured him in their living room, worry sharpening the planes of his face. In their earliest days Celia had expected the novelty of Huck’s company to be tempered by tedium, but Huck had not come into his good looks until his twenties. He had spent his acne-tormented teens becoming a good listener, sparing him the interpersonal laziness of the congenitally attractive. Celia couldn’t decide if lately Huck had grown more handsome, or if she’d simply been provided more opportunities to view him at a distance.

  “It’s so weird,” she said. “I don’t understand how I’ve been coming back all these years without the memories jumping out at me. Djuna and I used to play Monopoly, right here in the middle of this carpet. One time—this is embarrassing, okay?—we got in a terrible fight over ‘title deed.’ ”

  “Monopoly was practically a blood sport when I was a kid,” Huck said. “Those hotels were red for a reason.”

  Celia closed her eyes and pictured the slightly asymmetrical nose, the cowlick over the left temple, the eyes that shifted from brown to green depending on their mood—though, these days, Huck’s face came to Celia most often in profile, bathed in the blue glow of the television, or sunk into a recalcitrant sleep beyond reach of the morning sun.

  “Sure,” she continued, “but this fight wasn’t even about paying rent. Djuna was convinced it was pronounced tittle deed, and I knew it wasn’t. We screamed about it until she finally went home. I remember I blocked the front door because I didn’t want her to leave. I wanted to keep playing—I must have been winning—and finally Mommy came to the door and actually moved me aside so that Djuna could go. Later, after dinner, Djuna called to tell me that her mom said I was right. That it was title deed after all. I got the feeling Mrs. Pearson was on the phone along with her, making sure Djuna said it.”

  For a moment, they listened to each other breathe. Were she at home, they’d already be past the opening credits of a movie, Huck beside her on the couch but long gone.

  “Now it’s your turn to talk,” she said.

  “Everybody misses you,” Huck replied. “At dinner, Sylvie kept sniffing at your empty chair.”

  “What did you eat?”

  “Chili,” Huck said. “Not the crappy take-out kind from Ortega’s. I actually cooked.”

  She pictured him at the stove wielding the ancient wooden cooking spoon he wouldn’t let her throw away, the dogs waiting patiently behind him.

  “You’re not going to let them into bed with you, are you?” she asked.

  “Why, you jealous?”

  She laughed. “Just guarding your welfare. They’re going to be farting like crazy after all the cheese and beans I bet you fed them.”

  “Shit, I didn’t think of that.”

  “You might want to keep them away during your nightly ritual. The flame might set off an explosion.”

  “They must still be digesting,” Huck said, “because we all survived intact.”

  She heard it now, the slightly muted tone to his voice, like there was a bubble caught in his throat. She’d tried getting stoned with Huck, but even his connoisseurship hadn’t saved her from feeling stupid and slightly paranoid. Sativa or indica, white widow or skunk, it all required her to loosen her grip on something she preferred to hold tight. Her acceptance of Huck’s habit had belonged to the earliest phases of her falling in love. It felt nonnegotiable, part of the unwritten contract of their coupling, but it was impossible not to notice that what she used to liken to her mother’s nightly glass of wine had lately become more like a cocktail before and after dinner.

  “Did you set your alarm?” Celia asked. The first morning Huck overslept, he’d been late to school. She’d found him still buried beneath the covers, slack-mouthed and softly snoring over the clock radio when he should have been dressed, half-breakfasted, and heading out the door. The next morning, she’d intervened early enough that by eating in the car he had made it to school before the first bell. After the third day, she replaced her wake-up kiss with his name pronounced as if it were part of a larger language lesson: bed, pillow, blanket, Huck. Neither sympathetic nor accusatory, it seemed to pierce the veil of his sleep more effectively than an alarm ever could. On the fourteenth day Huck overslept, Celia decided to stop counting.

  “I did,” he said. “I set it to Alarm instead of Radio, and I’ve got the volume turned up all the way. Not that I’ll need it. As long as you’re gone, I’ll be the girls’ only option for their morning walk.”

  For years Celia had figured she would live alone: a small apartment in Ukrainian Village or Wicker Park shared on alternating weekends with a boyfriend who would have his shelf of the medicine cabinet, his bureau drawer. Their lives would sporadically intersect from Friday to Sunday, phone calls leavening the time in between. She had been perplexed by people who did it differently, had theorized that they were somehow less busy. In high school and college she simply had not had time to meet people. There were marches to organize and fund-raisers to plan, poems to read and meetings to attend. Her chronic overcommitment and loneliness had felt inherent, conditions like diabetes or color blindness that demanded their own concessions. Then she had met Huck.

  “So you’re going to visit your mom tomorrow at school?” he asked.

  “She said I could come anytime after eleven.”

  “And before that?”

  “I don’t know,” Celia said. “I’m going crazy thinking about it.”

  “I think you should take a Xanax and sleep in.”

  “I don’t need it,” she said. “I’m totally worn out. I feel like I’ve been awake for years.”

  In the silence that followed, Celia heard the sound of rhythmic breathing through the receiver. Then it faded and Celia knew that Huck had returned the phone to his ear.

  “Was that Bella?” she asked. “Tell her that I miss her too.”

  “I love you, Ceel.”

  “You’re my very only,” she whispered. Once she had hung up, she stared at the silent phone in her hand.

  She recognized what was happening to them now because it had happened once before. Six years ago, Celia’s roommate had suddenly moved to Austin and none of Celia’s other friends had needed a place to live. She wouldn’t have been able to ask him any other way. Huck had left the apartment he’d been sharing with two other early-career teachers, and had moved into the roommate’s vacated bedroom. Huck’s desk was the only employed furnishing in that otherwise idle room, but Celia wouldn’t let him call it his office. She maintained separate voice-mail boxes and itemized the long-distance bill, all to avoid straining the inner mechanism that had thus far permitted this deviation from her life’s previously planned course. She’d assured Huck that these measures were not meant to keep him at a distance but to preserve the closeness they had, an explanation that satisfied him for a few months before he began to drift away. Then as now, it had happened slowly, as if he were gradually winding down. He gave up conversation in favor of watching movies and playing guitar. He dressed for work in stained shirts, put dishes in the drying rack that were still encrusted with food, and tripped over Bella or Sylvie lying in their usual places. When he had suggested that they buy their own
place, pool their savings for a down payment and apply their signatures to adjacent dotted lines, he hadn’t phrased it as an ultimatum, but the fatigue in his voice had scared Celia more than the prospect of saying yes. The change in him was so gratifyingly immediate, her own relief so intoxicating, it had been easy to convince herself that purchasing an apartment was a solution rather than a stopgap measure. In retrospect, she saw that the apartment had only bought them four more good years, a grace period that had expired with the birth of Celia’s nephew. She’d thought she and Huck had become inured to births, but then Daniel’s baby pictures had arrived, showing him with his aunt’s eyes. One night, Huck asked Celia if she wanted to go off the Pill, and she said no. He had not asked again.

  Celia realized only after she had left the couch that she should have stayed downstairs. The guest bed stretched empty on either side of her. The heating vent had not been opened, and without Huck to press against, she was cold. Through the closed windows she heard the slam of a car door from across the street, then male voices punctuated by female laughter, footfalls on the street, and finally silence.

  She shifted to the edge of the mattress and, in an attempt to feel less marooned, tucked the bedding around her into a makeshift sleeping bag that recalled her first sleepovers. Mrs. Pearson had called them their bachelorette nights, Djuna’s father either cloistered inside his study or overseas at one of his mathematics conferences. During his absences, Celia and Djuna were each allowed to wear one of Mrs. Pearson’s negligees over their pajamas. They sipped milk from wineglasses while Mrs. Pearson drank Scotch, and stayed up watching rented videos. Mrs. Pearson’s only rule was that their picks not “abound with gratuitous sex or violence.” Like much of what Djuna’s mother said, it was a phrase Celia had intuited more than understood. “Acclimatization,” Mrs. Pearson decreed whenever she had decided that a selection rated R or PG-13 conformed to her amorphous standard. “This is the culture you live in, so you might as well get used to it. Paternalism at any age is condescending.”

  Most of their choices—Freaky Friday or Gremlins, E.T. or The Karate Kid—would have been perfectly acceptable to Warren and Noreen. And because Mrs. Pearson never asked Celia if she was allowed to watch movies like Flashdance at home, Celia was never placed in the awkward position of having to lie. She and Djuna would bookend Mrs. Pearson on the pomegranate-colored couch, an antique prettier and more comfortable than anything Celia’s parents owned. Celia favored Mrs. Pearson’s cocktail arm, to savor the clink of the ice. After screening something like Blue Lagoon, Djuna’s mother would ask if Celia had any questions in the same voice that proclaimed the superiority of silk over cotton, Glenlivet over Glenfiddich. That voice took Celia for a far more cosmopolitan creature than she was, an impression Celia was loath to compromise. Her mind awash in visions of Christopher Atkins mounting Brooke Shields, she had waited until cocooned within Djuna’s sleeping bag to learn how little she actually knew. Even in the darkness of Djuna’s bedroom, Celia had been able make out the dolls that Mr. Pearson brought back from his frequent trips. To Celia, the international collection proved her friend’s worldliness, a quality perfected by Mrs. Pearson’s fingers curved around a whiskey glass. Under the dolls’ collective gaze, Celia was presented with a litany of organs, orifices, and gender combinations in the blasé monotone Djuna reserved for knowledge of the highest order. Accompanying this lesson was the intimate, sweet-tinged musk of Djuna’s unwashed sleeping bag, which wafted out the opening in warm puffs whenever Celia moved. This scent was as individual as a fingerprint, complex and private—the smell of a young body when it is still all smooth clefts and hollows, containing the promise of changes to come. Such cognizance was beyond Celia at the time. She had known then only that being privy to such redolence was simultaneously distasteful and thrilling, and she had attended her friend’s lecture in a state of self-conscious motionlessness periodically interrupted by small, calculated gestures to assure and chastise herself with the scent’s continued presence. By the following morning her nose had acclimated, the smell forgotten until next time. As Celia lay in her parents’ guest bed, its fresh sheets fragrant of nothing, she elegized a green nylon sleeping bag lined with red flannel. Sometimes as she climbed inside, she had told herself that she was entering a crocodile’s mouth. This was Celia’s last waking memory before her mind became briefly, blessedly blank.

  CHAPTER 4

  Since they’d moved in together, Celia had only ever left Huck behind in order to attend an annual Midwestern audit forum, providing Huck a weekend for prog rock, late-night poker, and back-to-back Jim Jarmusch screenings during which it was understood he would smoke in the living room, subsist on pizza and Hostess snack cakes, and be unreachable by phone before noon. The number of his co-conspirators for this yearly ritual had dwindled as friends who once crashed on the couch became fathers who partook for part of one evening, then retreated along the city’s commuter line to the suburbs where people like them could afford houses. Huck had always assumed that one day he and Celia would join them. When they had bought their apartment, he had imagined Celia pregnant inside it, had privately staked out the best corner for a crib. He figured they would get by until a baby turned two, at which point they’d start scouting FOR SALE signs in their married friends’ neighborhoods. Given the Chicago market, a one-bedroom had seemed like a good short-term proposition. That had been four years ago.

  Huck was clutching the phone as though it held some trace of Celia’s voice in reserve. Bella had fallen asleep on the couch and was snoring softly, her flank warm against Huck’s thigh. Were Celia here, they would be watching something noir and French on DVD and ogling Simone Signoret. Huck glanced at his guitar, but his solitude and slight stonedness—the usual preconditions for playing—were tonight undercut by a restlessness that even hydroponically grown Kush could not fix. Huck eased himself away from Bella to avoid waking her. When he stood, the couch gave a halfhearted creak, as if feigning distress at his departure. The couch was the first thing he and Celia had bought for the apartment. It was a flea-market find they’d shamelessly purchased despite a price tag well beyond their agreed-upon couch budget, and Huck wasn’t sure when the creak had started, but it made him hate the couch a little each time. Some WD-40 to the springs would do the trick. This thought had been traveling with the sound, along with the word Later, for a long while.

  They had met their senior year. Huck had been at a group reading to hear a friend, had been among maybe twenty people undergoing an evening of student poetry. One reader had blended with the next until Celia appeared at the podium. Listening to her had been like spying on someone who thinks she is alone. Huck didn’t remember much about the poem itself, which had something to do with a covered bridge, but the stark sincerity with which Celia read it had caused him to turn away as if he’d been staring at too bright a light. Afterward, when he asked her out, she had smiled like she’d been offered elk or ostrich, something she’d never eaten because she’d never before thought of it as food. According to her calendar, his earliest, best chance was to meet her at Pierce Dining Hall during the forty-five minutes she allotted for dinner between classes and committee meetings. Pursuing someone with so little time turned each yes into a prize. Their first date occurred on the heels of a petition drive. Celia agreed to either food or film, but not both because she’d needed to get up early the next morning for tai chi class. During Huck’s first month of courtship, each of his timely appearances at the dining hall met with the same bemused smile; each request for Celia’s company was answered by the same crowded appointment book, until one institutional meal, about five weeks in, she pointed to a blocked-out portion of her Saturday afternoon and said, “How about then?” That was when Huck became regular company on Celia’s weekend drives and happily abandoned the notion that he was the pursuer and she the pursued.

  He loved the way his name sounded in her mouth, its sonic semblance to that other word sometimes enough to give him an erection. A chunk of his life
had been spent explaining that his parents had never actually read Mark Twain. His mother was a fan of Audrey Hepburn, especially Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Huck’s name was borrowed from “Moon River” as crooned by Holly Golightly from her fire escape. He and Celia had watched the film early on, a sign—he told her later—of just how crushed-out he had been. The annual obligation of watching with his mother had turned Huck against Hepburn’s Golightly, her spindly arms and feline smile too calculated for his tastes, a perfectly capable woman trying to pass for helpless girl. Celia’s quiet fluency in the language of car—she was not only the best driver Huck knew, but could change her own oil, tires, fuses, and spark plugs—had been a welcome rebuttal to the Holly Golightly syndrome. Celia felt no need to brandish her skills the way some women made a production out of shooting pool or throwing a football. From the day they met, Celia had been content to be who she was. That there might be a downside to this had taken Huck years to fully comprehend.

  He realized that his desire to call Celia back had less to do with anything he needed to say than with something he wanted to hear. What he had sensed that first day at the poetry reading, woven into Celia’s breath, was the resolve that powered her like an inner engine. Huck discerned its undercurrents in the way she walked into a room, the way she reached for a glass, the way she leaned forward to hear what someone was saying. To Celia, the world was a place that could be fixed. She considered Huck to be a kindred spirit by default. To her, a classroom was a crucible for global betterment, every teacher a born idealist—but Huck approached his profession as a bid to slow the rate of the world’s inexorable decline. While Celia insisted the difference was semantic, Huck knew that nothing short of epiphany would elevate him to Celia’s rosier plane. Theirs was a religious difference without religion, a mixed marriage without marriage. It was a disparity Huck wasn’t sure he had heard in her voice just now, and its absence had unsettled him almost as much as when he’d come home the previous afternoon to find her lying across their bed in the dark.