9

THE PHONE RANG AGAIN. Jeez, I was turning into one of those jerks who walk around talking on their cell phones all the time. I have a love-hate relationship with the telephone and have mixed feelings about people being able to reach me any time of the day or night no matter where I am.

“What now?” I said.

“Robin?”

“Claire! I’m so happy it’s you!”

“I’m through. Where are you?”

“On Canal, heading towards the Bowery.”

“Where can I meet you guys?”

“Singular. Tamayo got swept away by the Halloween Parade. Hmmm. You know the No-Name Diner on the Bowery, around Great Jones Street?”

“You know I hate burger joints.”

“I’m tired and hungry and I have to have some red meat. I haven’t eaten in a couple of hours.… So much stuff has happened.…”

After I gave her the headlines, she said, “Some friend, fucking up your night like this. Are you sure there’s a reconciliation waiting for you at the end of this and not a confrontation?”

“You have to know Julie,” I said. “And her sense of humor. I’ll fill you in later.”

“Okay. I’ll meet you at the No-Name and bring the stuff I pulled for you. I just have to pick it up from the library.”

“Do you have a costume? Because I’m in costume and if I look like a dork you have to look like a dork too.”

“I checked out something from JBS props and costumes. I’ll change into it.…”

“Please. And do me another favor.…”

“Okay.”

“Do you still have the spare key to my place?”

“Yes.”

“Can you stop at my place and bring me something?”

“Yeah, sure,” she said. “What do you want?”

“It’s a gold Godiva chocolate box in the bottom of my trunk at the end of my bed.”

“Okay,” she said.

“You’re a pal. You sound blue. Are you okay?”

“Madri Michaels has read Solange’s manuscript and she told me that I’m chapter fifteen.”

“I heard.”

“It’s the second time in as many days Solange has directly or indirectly … Why do I care what she thinks? It’s just, I have a few doubts myself still.…”

“I know you do.”

“But I just couldn’t see myself being a Washington political wife, you know? Dealing with all the reporters and the backstabbing, not to mention the asskissing.”

“I know.”

“Everything you do or say is completely picked apart and/or twisted.”

“I know.”

“Oh God. Did I do the right thing? Jess wasn’t always so intransigent, you know. I was in love with him. He’s going to be a great, great man and …”

In five minutes, if Claire continued this line of thought, I knew she would completely reverse herself, and be cursing her job and her own selfish dreams for taking her away from Jess, a good guy whom she had loved once, until you were convinced she wanted to go back to him. But if you suggested this, she’d reverse herself again, and end up crying. It was tiring, having to be so supportive on both sides of an argument.

“My career is important. I couldn’t be a reporter and a political wife. At first it was okay, it was a new world, Jess was great.…”

“It’s okay, Claire. There, there …”

“Robin, don’t do that,” Claire said.

“Do what?”

“Be so … sympathetic, so.…”

“Nurturing.”

“Yeah. If I want sympathy I’ll call my grandma or my sister.”

“Well, what do you want from me, then?”

“I don’t know. The usual. It’s like the … Okay, you know that diplomatic dinner I went to? The disaster? After I pound my fist to make a point, sending my salad fork somersaulting through the air towards an unsuspecting waiter, I’d much rather have you or Tamayo say, ‘You nailed him! Good shot!’ than have an oh-so-diplomatic wife pat my shoulder and whisper—discreetly, for heaven’s sake—‘That’s okay. We’ll get you another fork.’ Then resume discussing the business at hand.”

“I think I know what …”

“She was trying to be kind, but I felt more embarrassed, more awful. Do you understand?”

“Yeah.”

I’d rather be loudly embarrassed and get a laugh out of it, than quietly embarrassed by someone who is too well meaning, though I’d rather not be embarrassed at all, and I am much more of an expert on this subject than Claire, for whom a flying fork is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. Claire, for example, has never risen to accept an award, tripped over the hem of her dress, and accidentally pushed the mayor’s face into his soup.

“When people feel sorry for me …”

“I dig, Claire.”

“I’ll see you in, say, a half-hour,” she said, sounding irritated.

Boy, was she touchy these days. But she was going through a hard time, so I had to cut her some slack.

I wasn’t always so extra-sensitive. You know, when I first heard about Claire’s troubles that summer, the first thing I felt was a little schadenfreude rush. I hate to admit it, but I felt a bit relieved. I didn’t want to feel that way, because she’s a terrific person who got where she is by sheer force of will and talent and I love her blah blah blah, but there you go, that’s the first thing I felt. I couldn’t help it. Her life looked so perfect, and knowing it wasn’t and she wasn’t made me feel just a tad less inadequate next to her. One of the reasons I felt so inadequate next to her was racial. She had to overcome sexism and racism, whereas I only had to overcome one big external obstacle, and yet I hadn’t done nearly as well as she had. That meant … omigod … some of my career problems had to come from … me, perhaps a few more than I had originally estimated. Not only that, but she had been doing very well in areas of failure for me. She’s been a star Washington correspondent, a job I had tried and blown. Until it went kerblooey, she had been in a seemingly perfect love affair with one of the most eligible men in America.

After I got over that first thrill of shameful joy, my empathy kicked in, so much so that hearing her miserable made me miserable too. It also shook my confidence, because, if someone as supremely confident as Claire could get shaken like this, what hope did a neurotic like me have? Even though she was younger than me, Claire, I realized, had become one of my role models—in some ways, not all. I’d learned a lot about confidence from her.

(I also learned a lot about national politics, synthetic languages, exotic diseases, and rural Southern folk magic. Her mother wrote quasi-anthropological books about folk magic, some of which was pretty wild. For instance, if you want to keep a man faithful, cook a little of your menstrual blood into his food. Eeuw. As Tamayo said, it may not keep a guy faithful, but just mention it and he’ll think twice before he asks you to fetch his dinner.)

Long story short, what I learned was, schadenfreude aside, it’s better to have happy, successful friends, because unhappy friends are a lot more grief. Plus, it’s easier to borrow money from happy, successful friends, should the need arise.

How much the whole Jess thing tore Claire up became clear to me when I went to visit her in Washington, just after it all happened, and we rented Casablanca. Claire took Casablanca very personally. Did she defy her own nature and stay with Jess for the good of the nation, like Ingrid Bergman? Or did she choose television news, which would be the Humphrey Bogart character in this scenario? Or was it the other way around, was it better for the nation if she was a reporter and Jess was Humphrey Bogart? What about her needs? But it wasn’t just Casablanca, it was shots of happy couples on television, even TV commercials in which supportive wives did laundry, cooked, or otherwise fussed over husbands and kids. Everything she watched, heard, saw seemed fraught with meaning for her, pricking a different question in her head.

In this state, she was especially vulnerable to Solange, who knew it and exploited it. What Solange had to gain from it, I’m not sure. There was no professional advantage—Solange had her own huge show and Claire was in General News. Maybe Solange was still trying to attract attention away from her own near-scandal the previous year, when it was discovered that her best-selling self-help affirmation tapes were being manufactured by slave laborers in drafty Chinese prisons. (Operations were quickly switched to a factory in Malaysia where they only exploited law-abiding grownups.)

The No-Name burger joint is a brightly lit and clean yet somehow dingy lunch counter where the customers look like the cast of Barfly and the staff all look like Lon Chaney. And they’re not in costume. But the burgers are great and it’s open twenty-four hours. I ordered one, along with a Coke, from the limping one-eyed waiter. He brought me a Diet Coke. Yuck. But rather than make him limp back to the end of the counter to replace it, I just poured a teaspoon of real sugar into it. Not being on the air anymore meant I could eat as much as I wanted and not worry about my weight. (The weird thing is, when I was on the air and worried about my weight, I was actually a little heavier.)

While I waited for my delicious, greasy, undercooked burger, I called home to see if any more occasional boyfriends were planning to drop in on me this weekend and join the orgy. There was a message from my mother: “I had another lovely talk with your friend Sally this week while you were away. What a highly intelligent young woman.”

Though I didn’t approve of my friends’ consulting Sally, I thought it was kind of sweet, my mom and Sally becoming friends. Sally’s mom was dead, and it seemed like, well, good karma that she could enjoy my mom. It wasn’t like Sally could make my mom any nuttier than she already was, or vice versa.

My mom is nutty like a genius, and in a benevolent way. Sally has this theory about my mother, who believes she is a member of the British royal family. Sally believes my mother was a member of the British royal family—in a past life—and her past life and this life are just more mixed up together than is normal.

“I’m a bit worried about Sally, though. Did you know that experimental medication she is taking has caused a numbness in her left arm?” my mother said, and urged me to check up on Sally.

Now I had to worry about Sally’s left arm too, on top of everything else. I was rapidly approaching Worry Overload. Sally had been working as a human guinea pig since she found herself having a crisis of faith and on the verge of bankruptcy. “Cosmically,” one day she was scanning the back-page classifieds of The Village Voice “looking for a sign” when she saw that a local medical center was offering to pay people to participate in an eczema study. Having eczema was a prerequisite, and Sally didn’t have eczema or know how to acquire it, but the ad started her thinking. Turns out you can make decent money being a human guinea pig if you’re willing to take pills and sign a legal waiver. She was able to make $400 a week in a three-month study of headache medication, and was now getting $1,000 a week in a PMS-pill study. She said she figured it was her moral duty, and a good karma-clearer, to offer herself up and spare some poor lab rat the possible side effects: mood swings and weight gain. Lord knows, New York doesn’t need any more overweight, manic-depressive rodents.

“Don’t forget Sally’s birthday is coming up,” my mother concluded. “And don’t forget to call home on Sunday.”

I hadn’t forgotten Sally’s birthday, although finding a present was tricky. While in L.A., I’d gone looking for a present for her on Melrose.

“May I help you?” a young woman asked me, flashing a banal smile. I told her I needed a present for a girlfriend.

“What kind of woman is she?” asked the clerk. The question struck me as so bizarre. Did she really want to know? I knew what the clerk expected me to say, that Sally’s tall, about thirty years old, an Ivy Leaguer, favorite color is blue, that kind of thing. But I decided to tell her exactly what Sally was like. “Well,” I said, “she’s a bald witch with a degree in comparative religion from Princeton who can’t keep a boyfriend, and in a previous life she was a murderous Sumerian harlot.”

“Oh,” the clerk said, not missing a beat. “Perhaps a scarf?”

The limping one-eyed waiter brought my burger, and as I raised it to my mouth I caught my reflection in the window. My hair was even worse now. Now I looked like a redheaded albino Buckwheat. I had a lot of nerve criticizing Sally’s looks.

Then my reflection dissolved, and I saw past it to a disheveled guy outside, who was riding a bike in a semi-circle on the sidewalk. It was almost eleven, according to the Marlboro Lights clock on the wall of the diner, and he was riding a bike on the Bowery. What a nut. He looked like he was wearing yellow crime-scene tape as a bandanna, but when he got closer I saw that the yellow plastic tape, unevenly torn and unevenly tied around his stringy-haired head, said “Caution—Radioactive.” He was singing, loudly, over and over, “Country roads, take me home, to the place I belong,” while people dodged his shaky bicycle.

The microchip in my buttocks was beeping like crazy, and I fugued.