The False Friend

by Myla Goldberg

  “Make yourself comfortable,” Warren said. “There’s a switch on the right-hand side that you can use to slide everything around. It’s all electric, complete with heated seats. Sometimes, when I open everything up to let the breeze in, I turn mine on. Go ahead and try it. It’s like being in a fancy hotel and wrapping yourself in a prewarmed towel.”

  Huck pressed the switch. In minutes, the seat reached a temperature that reminded him of sitting in his own pee.

  Before doing anything else, Warren reached for his driving gloves, which hung from the rearview mirror when not in use, dangling like a pair of sleeping bats. Donning them, Warren reminded Huck of a surgeon entering the operating theater: a man about to undertake a great responsibility; a man in love with his hands. With professional pride, he slid open the sunshade.

  “I always wanted a convertible,” Warren said. “But I never lived where it would be any kind of practical. When it’s nice out, I’ll slide open the moonroof and roll down all the windows, but only if I’m alone. Nor’s kind of sensitive these days about her hair.” When he pressed a switch, the moonroof raised itself at one end, half a drawbridge rising. Warren turned toward Huck, his eyebrows arched at a comparable angle.

  “Cool,” Huck said and Warren grinned, a boy with a Matchbox car.

  “Now listen to this!” he said. Jazz ripped through the front seat. “Whoops!” he apologized, and readjusted the dial. “That’s my solo driving volume. I’m actually happy when I hit a little traffic on my way to work. There are speakers in six different places!” As he pointed out each speaker’s location, Huck realized they had never been without Celia’s company. Warren released the parking brake, then paused and looked toward the house as if he had left something behind.

  In the day’s fading light, they passed cars in the final throes of the homeward commute. Huck saw pedestrians walking dogs inferior—as all others were—to the two he had left in Chicago. He suddenly longed for Bella spread out beside him on the couch, Sylvie at his feet as if his shoes were in need of protection. He wondered if these passing drivers and dog walkers would mistake him and Warren for father and son. Whenever they went out as a foursome, Huck was taken for Celia’s husband. It was an assumption none of them ever corrected or used to segue into the obvious conversation, the one the four of them had never had.

  Warren braked for a red light. “It’s a quiet car,” he said. “Handles well. Better than the rest of us, to tell the truth.”

  It took Huck a moment to realize what Warren meant.

  “There’s so little we can do for her anymore,” he continued. “It’s a funny complaint, I know. That’s the way it’s supposed to be, if you do your job right. She’s a grown woman, but that doesn’t mean that sometimes …” He shook his head. “Nor and I, we’re both glad that she has you, especially now. Listen to this. Jazz Messengers. Birdland, 1954. Listen to the way Horace Silver keeps the rhythm.”

  When they reached the restaurant, Warren disappeared inside, returning minutes later with a large bag, accompanied by a young Japanese woman who smiled and nodded as he gestured emphatically in Huck’s direction. Huck smiled and nodded in return before realizing that Warren was talking about the car. A moment later, the scent of new upholstery was overpowered by the tang of miso soup.

  Huck was handed a bag the approximate weight of a toy poodle. He considered the possibility that he had only been invited along to prevent spillage.

  “That was one of the owner’s daughters,” Warren explained. “Whenever you eat there, you see all the children and grandchildren around, helping out or playing in a corner. A real family business. Suki said they were looking to buy a new car. You know, sometimes I think I should have been an automobile salesman.”

  Huck held the bag on the floor between his feet. He talked about his classes, then fielded Warren’s historical trivia questions. Eventually, Warren would revert to jazz or cars, but Huck had made his peace with this, had come to realize that as much as Warren liked people, they made him nervous, his congeniality constructed over a deep well of shyness. Huck suspected that Celia’s preference for small-scale socializing was a more conventional strain of her father’s anxiety, that nature rather than nurture was responsible for two people at ease in the company of data. Huck had witnessed Celia with a spreadsheet. There was relaxation in her concentration. She was like a beaver intent on building a dam, all native capacities put to best use. She had looked like that when she wrote poems but Huck had only seen that once, back when they were still in school and he had been falling in love.

  It hadn’t been any one thing. Love can’t be mapped so easily, but Huck would have been dishonest not to count that stolen glimpse as a key moment, Celia sitting at her desk hunched over a sheet of paper, dancing with herself. She had written metered poems, a font of sestinas and villanelles in an age of blank verse. Then she had stopped, abandoning her poetry at graduation the way others renounced green hair or bisexuality. It had taken a while for Huck to decide that she had stopped completely, that she wasn’t simply writing when alone. Even longer in coming had been the admission that there was nothing arty or visibly unusual about Celia, who wore business coordinates to work and flossed every night, even when that meant abandoning the narcotic afterglow of a good fuck. Huck wondered, if they were to meet now—but he wasn’t sure how that would happen. His friends were teachers and musicians, hers were economists, social workers, and lawyers. On a Venn diagram, his circle and hers would not overlap. Were Huck today to come across Celia’s Internet profile (he was infinitely grateful his bachelorhood had predated that quagmire), his eyes might stop only briefly to admire her face before moving on to more obvious quarry.

  They were almost at the house when Warren turned to Huck as if they’d been speaking all along. “Tell me,” he said. “She talks to you. Does she really think she did this thing?”

  Huck pictured Celia in the guest bedroom watching for their return.

  “She does,” he said.

  Warren shook his head. “I just don’t understand it,” he said. “This idea of hers … well, it’s ridiculous. Forgive me, but there’s really no other way to put it.”

  Huck could tell Warren didn’t want to be looked at, but it was hard to keep facing front. Huck wondered if the confessional had bred in Warren a taste for sidelong confidence. When they reencountered a tree they had passed several minutes before, he realized that Warren had been circling the same few blocks, drumming his fingers on the wheel while working up the courage to begin.

  “Cee Cee’s a good person,” Warren said. “She’s sensitive, she’s kind … practically all her life she’s tried to help other people. I mean, sure, she can be stubborn sometimes, especially when she gets a certain idea in her head. But I hope that all this new business hasn’t … that she hasn’t … that you—”

  “Warren, I’m in love with your daughter.”

  Warren let out a slow breath. “I suppose I already knew that. We love her too, of course. Which is why we were hoping you could help us to talk some sense into her. Encourage her to see reason. We can understand she might have a hard time taking it from us, but if it came from you …”

  It was so unlike Warren to ask for anything that Huck didn’t recognize at first that an appeal had been made. It was a quiet car. The rush of air into and over the narrow breach made by the moonroof was louder than the engine. He turned toward Warren, whose eyes darted away from the road just long enough for Huck to see the fear there.

  “I’m not really comfortable with the idea of choosing sides,” Huck said as mildly as he could. “I worry about saying something I’d regret later on.”

  Both Celia and her father draped their hands over the steering wheel at ten and two, as if resting them there rather than preventing a moving vehicle from crashing and bursting into flames.

  “Did Cee Cee tell you that she talked to her mother?”

  Huck nodded. “I remember her telling me that Noreen recalled things differently.”


  “Not differently,” Warren amended. “Accurately. Let’s suppose for the sake of argument that things happened the way Cee Cee says they did. Nor and I weren’t with her at the time. A band of wild hyenas could have carried Djuna off. But Nor and I were around later, and I’m telling you that none of what happened afterward jibes with Cee Cee’s version.”

  They stopped for a red light at an empty intersection.

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” Huck said, no longer certain he wanted Warren to be talking at all.

  “Didn’t she tell you?” Warren asked.

  The light turned green. Warren drove around a squirrel. Huck couldn’t tell if it was terrified or bored.

  “Celia doesn’t remember what happened afterward,” he said. “She’s tried, but she can’t.”

  “Exactly,” Warren confirmed. “If she did, she would have to see the illogic. Let’s look at it from the beginning: Cee Cee says that she and Djuna were in the woods, that Djuna fell … into a hole or something, and that Cee Cee left her there. She was mad at Djuna; she made up the story about the car to get even, and once she realized what she had done, it felt too big to take back. Now, children sometimes do terrible things. I won’t deny that, and I won’t try to say that Cee Cee was an exception. But when children misbehave, especially when they misbehave as badly as Cee Cee is saying, what do they do after? They hide, that’s what. If Cee Cee had done what she says she did, she would have never gone to Djuna’s to tell Grace what had happened. I mean, it’s one child in a million who might have the … I don’t even know what you’d call it … the gumption to pull off a stunt like that. To lie like that, believably … and to Grace Pearson’s face, no less. Not to mention to the police and to Nor and myself. That sort of thing takes practice. And Cee Cee was an honest kid. For crying out loud, look at her now! How much more straight an arrow can you get?”

  Huck had discovered early in life that he was a good liar. True, it had started small, but he hadn’t needed to practice. He had left his new jacket at the playground. When his mother asked where it was, he told her it had been taken from the class coat closet. Maybe he had an honest face, or maybe it was because he didn’t look away, but his lies were never questioned. He had kept at it—his lies growing in scale, ambition, and frequency until he wasn’t always sure what would happen when he opened his mouth—until he got so disgusted with himself that he gave it up cold turkey. It did not seem incredible to Huck that a person could succeed on a spectacularly grand scale her first time out, or that the experience might come to make honesty all the more appealing.

  “This sounds like a conversation you should have with her,” he said.

  Warren nodded while looking ahead, as if agreeing with the angle of the windshield.

  “Of course you’re right,” he said, “but you know how it is. In an ideal world I’m sure that she and I could talk about all of this … but the truth of the matter is that she’s still my little girl. Perhaps it’ll be different for you if you have a daughter, but for me … When it comes to Cee Cee, there are certain things. The search party, for instance. The day after Djuna disappeared, all the neighbors started organizing. My daughter’s own best friend, and I didn’t want to go. I know that sounds awful, but I couldn’t imagine being the one to find something and having to go back home and tell her … having to watch her face—”

  Warren’s face went slack.

  “But the point is,” he continued, “I did search. We all did. We searched all along that road and beyond and we didn’t find a single thing. Not a shoe. Not a hair ribbon. So you can understand that when Cee Cee says she left Djuna back there, I find it just a little hard to believe.”

  At some point Warren must have changed course without Huck realizing it, because they were pulling up to the house. The steep grade of the driveway was custom-made for sleds and tricycles, a slant that signaled a dozing child to either awaken or feign deeper sleep in order to be carried inside.

  “Well, here we are,” Warren said. “Why don’t you grab the takeout. I bet you a nickel Nor put out these square plates she got on sale a couple months ago, supposed to be specially made for eating Asian food.” He chuckled. “As if the shape of the plate would make a difference.”

  Warren climbed out and strode the length of the front walk. As he reached the house, he froze for a moment before removing his driving gloves, then looked back at the car before thrusting them into his pants, his pockets bulging as he went inside.

  CHAPTER 19

  Noreen had put out the square plates, had even brewed green tea for the sake of authenticity, the steaming cups sipped in ceremoniously minute quantities to mitigate the repercussions of dinnertime caffeine. Devoid of appetite, Celia reflexively shuttled a piece of eel and cucumber roll beneath the table. Homesickness was not the proper term for the dog-shaped void that met her outstretched fingers. She did not know what to call it, this desire to return not just to another place but to another time.

  “How did your phone call go, sweetie?” Noreen asked. “Did you … Was it Mrs. Pearson?”

  Celia shook her head. Since her silent arrival to the table, Huck’s stare had slowly escalated to the one he beamed across restaurants to hail preoccupied servers. Were Celia in Chicago, she’d be talking, or at least working up to it, but her parents’ house annulled the habits she and Huck had built over ten years.

  “You look so upset,” Noreen coaxed, “and I’ve been worried all this time that if you did end up talking to Djuna’s mother, she might, well … I don’t know quite how to say this without sounding awful, but … I didn’t like them, Celia. I never did.”

  For the first time since dinner had begun, Huck’s attention shifted. Celia felt her jaw unclench.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Noreen took a breath. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to finally say this. Ask your father. When you were little it took all my self-control to hold myself back. I’m sorry, sweetie, but I never liked Djuna or her mother.”

  Celia looked to Warren, uncertain what she’d heard.

  Her father nodded. “Back then,” he said, “at night, after you’d gone to bed, your mother and I would stay up talking about it.”

  “They weren’t nice people,” Noreen explained. “It wasn’t Djuna’s fault, of course. She was only following the examples she’d been given. I blame Grace—”

  “And the husband,” Warren said.

  “Who knows?” said Noreen. “Dennis was so rarely there. All those academic conferences. I heard that he exhausted the math department’s budget, that he had to pay for trips out of his own pocket. And who could blame him, with someone like Grace waiting for him at home?”

  “How can you say that? Mrs. Pearson was totally great!” Celia said, surprised at the ferocity and paucity of her defense. As far as she could remember, the last totally great thing in her life had been a Genesis album.

  “She adored you,” Noreen agreed. “And I could see how much you adored her right back. It was impossible to compete. Here was a woman who had traveled, who had this beautifully furnished home, who had opinions about art and food—”

  “About everything, really—” Warren interjected.

  “—and if you didn’t agree with her … or worse, didn’t have an opinion of your own … about Victorian architecture, for example, or modernist poetry—”

  “She was a poet?” Huck asked.

  “An English professor,” Celia said. “She loved my poems.”

  “Djuna’s mother loved everything Celie did,” Noreen said. “She took her under her wing. But as for everyone else …”

  Warren shook his head. “Notwithstanding how she treated Cee Cee, she was a snob, plain and simple. Noreen and I are not unintelligent people and she made us feel like rubes. She enjoyed it.”

  Celia appealed to Huck. “She wasn’t like that! I learned so much just by listening to her. She was the first adult not to talk down to me. She never treated me like a child.”

  “But you we
re a child,” Noreen reminded her. “You were eleven years old. We didn’t know what to do. We knew we couldn’t try to keep you from seeing Djuna. So we decided to let things run their course.”

  “Wait it out,” Warren said.

  “Celie and Djuna were so … mercurial,” Noreen explained. “We thought if we were patient, the friendship would burn itself out. Or at least fade into something a little less …”

  “Extreme,” Warren suggested.

  Noreen nodded. “But in the meantime, we saw Celie becoming more like her … less tolerant, less considerate, more willing to make a joke at someone else’s expense.”

  “We didn’t turn a blind eye,” Warren said. “When she was at home, we expected her to behave.”

  “But it was awful, watching her change like that, knowing that we had to let her make her own decisions about who she wanted to spend time with, who she wanted to be.”

  “All we could do,” Warren told Huck, “was hope that we were right about the person we felt she was at heart.”

  Celia tried to content herself with the backs of her parents’ heads. She was certain that without Huck to address, her parents would not have been able to speak at all.

  “And then,” Noreen told Huck, “all our worries were taken away. And as ashamed as I am to say it, I was relieved.”

  When Noreen turned toward Celia, her face reflected a fear that Celia had thought was hers alone.

  “I didn’t think I would ever tell you that,” Noreen said. “I was sure you’d hate me for it. It’s a mother’s job to show her best self to her children. But you’re grown now, and it’s something I still think about.”

  For a moment, they were the only two people in the room.

  “Your mother is being too hard on herself,” Warren said. “She was heartbroken for Djuna, and for Djuna’s mother, for all that poor woman went through.”

  “No parent deserves that,” Noreen confirmed. “It was shameful, really, the way the community turned its back on Grace.” She shook her head. “The way I turned my back.”