They had met five decades earlier, at an all-girls’ summer camp in Connecticut. Joan was new money and everyone was aghast at her lack of refinement, her apparent disinterest in self-improvement. Frances was the most popular girl there, handily; vast energies were expended daily that her friendship might be won. She was bored by this, and became fixated on Joan, admiring her gracelessness, her scuffed kneecaps, her scowl. In the cafeteria one afternoon all looked on as Frances moved to sit with Joan, a piece of chocolate cake in each hand. Joan eyed the dessert with suspicion.
“What’s this?” she said.
“One for you, one for me.”
“Why?”
“Just being decent, I guess. Why don’t you unscrew your face and have a bite?” Frances took a bite herself; Joan followed after. Over the course of the consumption of the cake, Joan became emotional, and the moment she finished she hurried from the cafeteria, fearful she might cry from the fact of Frances’s kindness, and she did cry, in the forest by the lake where a loon came in for a wake-making landing on the polished silver water. That night, at the campfire sing-a-song, Joan sat next to Frances, and Frances smiled at her and touched her knee to welcome her into her life.
Their friendship began with a pistol shot, it seemed; they loved each other from the start and it had been this way all the time since. Now, so many years later, Joan was the only one Frances could be herself with, though this isn’t accurately stated since it wasn’t as if Frances suddenly unleashed her hidden being once Joan arrived. Let it be said instead that she did, in Joan’s company, become a person she was only with Joan—a person she liked becoming. Joan had many friends, but beyond Malcolm, Frances had only Joan.
She, Frances, was looking out the high window above her vanity and into the black cube of sky. A leaf wandered drunkenly past. “It used to be that seasons filled me with expectation,” she said. “Now they seem more a hostile encroachment.”
Joan was perusing a catalog in bed. “I thought we’d agreed not to talk about death at night.” She flipped a page. “Christmas is coming. I say it each year, but you’re hell to shop for.”
“I’m simple: I want nothing.” Frances had come to think of gift-giving as a polite form of witchcraft. Another leaf bobbed past her window and a chill took her. She was wrestling with the thought of whether or not to discuss her problem with Joan. She had decided she would when there occurred an unexplainable event, which was that a sleek black lizard, ten inches from nose to tail, shot from behind the toilet and breezed over the tops of her bare feet before continuing on into the bedroom. Frances hung up the phone, crossed the room, and closed the door to shut herself in. She returned to the phone, picked it up, and called Malcolm, who was in bed down the hall, staring at the telephone and wondering why Susan wasn’t calling him, but also why he wasn’t calling Susan. He jumped when it rang.
“Malcolm,” Frances whispered.
“Oh, hello, there. Did you miss me, or what?”
“Listen to me. There’s a lizard dashing around my bedroom and I need you to come down here and do something about it.”
“A lizard? How’d that happen?”
“I don’t understand the question. It walked in of its own accord. Will you come, yes or no?”
“You want me to?”
“I want you to. Also I want you to want to.”
“Well, I guess I’d better come, then,” said Malcolm.
Soon he entered Frances’s bedroom. She spoke from behind the bathroom door: “Do you see it?”
“No.”
“Stomp around a bit.”
Malcolm stomped about the room but there was no sign of the lizard. Knowing his mother would accept nothing less than unassailable proof of the reptile’s demise or departure, he constructed a plan to set her mind at ease. He opened a window and waited awhile. “You can come out, now,” he said. “It’s gone.”
Frances’s face appeared in the doorway. “Gone where?”
“Wherever lizards go—it’s not for us to know.”
She crept across the carpet and to his elbow. Malcolm explained about the window and she asked, “You saw him run out?”
“He took it at a sprint.”
“You’re very good,” she told him, squeezing his arm.
“It wasn’t much.”
“You’re very good and clever.”
But now the lizard emerged from beneath Frances’s bed, approaching them in halting zigzags. It stood at their feet performing important push-ups and Frances returned to the bathroom, closing the door behind her. “Please will you pack me a bag,” she said, “and one for yourself, and I’ll meet you downstairs in fifteen minutes.”
He did as he was told and soon found her in the lobby, explaining to the doorman about the lizard. Her hair was up, her cheeks faintly rouged; she wore a long black-and-red-checked wool coat to cover her pajamas, and ballet slippers on her feet. She took up her suitcase and exited the building, Malcolm following behind her. They registered at the Four Seasons and retired to their respective suites.
Frances ordered two martinis from room service. When they arrived she set them on the bedside table, admiring their twin-ness for a time, then she drank them. Failing to take any water before sleep she had parched visions all through the night: a juicy plum eluded her, passed from hand to hand in some person-thick open-air-market dream environment. Upon waking she once again called room service, requesting that which she could not have in slumber. The plum was delivered on a heavy, filigreed tray. She sat in the center of her overlarge, sunlit bed and ate it, hopeful for a valid experience, but it erred on the dry side, possessed no magic, and did nothing to lessen much less solve her deeper difficulties. This was unfortunate but unsurprising and she didn’t let the fruit’s failure influence her mood. Bracing herself, she called Mr. Baker, who wasn’t available to answer, mercifully. She left a false but believable message explaining that she was indisposed and so unable to meet that day. Returning home in the early afternoon, the doorman presented Malcolm and Frances with a couriered letter as well as an outsize floral bouquet. Frances sniffed the flowers and asked, “Who has died, and what was their purpose, and did they fulfill their potential?” The doorman didn’t hazard a response. Frances made him uneasy; he believed there was something quite wrong with her.
“Any lizard news?” she asked.
“Yes, Mrs. Price. That’s the end of that.”
“You killed it?”
“Yeah.”
“You personally?”
“Personally I killed it.”
“What was the killing style?”
“Foot killing. I’ve got it in a box if you want to take a look.”
“I’ll pass, with thanks and sad regrets. Please will you carry the flowers, Malcolm?”
The letter was from Mr. Baker. Frances read it to herself while she and Malcolm waited for the elevator. Frances, enough of this. It’s past time and you know it’s past time. I’ll be at the Grotto at 3 P.M. tomorrow. There’s nothing to be done about the larger problem but we can take measures to simplify the transition. Frances gasped inwardly; the last word was a tactless violence against her.
The bouquet eclipsed Malcolm’s head and shoulders. His voice came from behind the flowers: “What does it say?”
“Nothing,” Frances said.
“Who’s it from?”
“Nobody, nothing.”
The elevator arrived and Frances pressed the penthouse button. Once in motion, she sought out the card in the bouquet. It was from the hostess of last night’s party; Frances read it aloud: “‘How lovely it was to peer across the room and to see you standing there, with your son, and your cigarette. I’m rich in friends but not so that I can’t identify the gem of the bunch. Yours admiringly and ever fondly.’”
Frances had no immediate reaction or comment to these words, but in entering the apartment she relieved Malcolm of the bouquet, carried it to the kitchen, and jammed it into the garbage chute. Between the unkind honesty of the couriered letter and the abject stupidity of the card, she was beyond comfort.
Sometimes the world corrected itself, she knew this, for it had so many times in her past. She understood intuitively that it would not correct itself now, though.