My oma told me that the best friendships often start with a quarrel. She said there’s a closeness that comes from a good, healthy fight that you can’t get any other way, and I think it must be true. Look at CM and me. Our friendship started with a fistfight, and twenty-two years later it’s still going strong. The friendship, I mean.
The fight was about a boy. It seems ridiculous now, but at the time we were the two tallest girls in the third grade, and Michael Garrity—while neither attractive nor pleasant—was the only boy taller than we were.
After the playground monitor had escorted us to the office, with CM holding wet paper towels on her bloody nose, and our mothers were sequestered with the principal, we were left by ourselves in the hall to await sentencing. We turned to each other as if on cue, and the instant our eyes met, we started to laugh. We got a two-day suspension from school. Our parents grounded us for a month. On our first day of freedom, we went behind her garage and gouged ourselves with her dad’s rusty Boy Scout knife to become blood sisters.
She accepted a choreographer’s fellowship position with a dance company in Seattle over a year ago, and we haven’t seen each other since. But whenever we talk on the phone, it feels as if we’re picking up right where we left off only a day or two ago. She’s the one person I want to talk to now, but before I can call her, she calls me on Monday night. At the sound of her voice, my seething emotions attain critical mass and I start to bawl.
“Wyn?”
I blow my nose and keep blotting the tears that refuse to abate.
“What’s going on down there?”
“I don’t know. David is … We’re—I think we’re splitting up.”
As I’m pouring my heart out, I suddenly realize she’s laughing. Surprise stops my tears in their tracks.
“I’m sorry, Baby. I’m not laughing at you. It’s just that I was calling to tell you Neal moved out.” Now I’m laughing, too, albeit a bit hysterically. “I think we should fall back and regroup,” she says. “Why don’t you get your ass on a plane and come up here for a nice, long visit?”
The following Saturday, one of those blue-and-gold September afternoons, finds me on an Alaska Airlines flight heading for Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. My mother’s reaction to my departure was predictable.
“Have you taken leave of your senses? This is exactly the wrong time for you to go away. You need to be there. Show him you love him. Cook dinner for him. Make your presence felt.”
The fact that he’s never home for dinner, doesn’t want to feel my presence—in fact, acts slightly surprised and annoyed when we pass each other in the hall, as if I’m a long-term houseguest who’s overstayed her welcome—none of this registers with my mother.
David’s unabashed enthusiasm was depressing. “I think it’s a really good idea, Wyn. I need to do some thinking. It’ll be good for me to be alone.”
The plane’s docking ritual seems lifted from a religious service, as in “Thank God we made it.” There’s a final lurch, lights blink, chimes sound. The pilgrims rise en masse, pressing forward through the jet way, straining toward that first breath of fresh air. I scan the crowded terminal for CM. She’s easy to spot, with her mass of auburn hair a good four inches above most other heads, but she’s already seen me.
“Wyn!” She runs up and gives me a big hug. “You look way too good for someone who’s just been dumped.”
Actually, she’s the one who looks great. But then she always does. CM—or Christine Mayle to the rest of the world—is the only woman I’ve ever known who even looks good the week before her period.
Analyze her features and she’s not classically beautiful. But at just under six feet tall, with creamy skin, green eyes, and long auburn hair, she doesn’t look like very many other women. Her taste in clothing is, frankly, weird—handmade this, ethnic that, strange color combinations. But somehow it all looks good when she puts it on, and she carries herself like the dancer that she is, striding rather than walking. I always expect her to break into a tour jêté.
Her apartment is on the fifth floor of an old brick building at the top of Queen Anne Hill, and it’s very CM. Two bay windows frame sweeping views of the city and Mount Rainier and the ocean—”Elliott Bay,” she corrects me. It has built-in cabinets and a fireplace, crown molding, green-and-black tile in the kitchen. No water pressure, but tons of ambience.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a guest room.” We settle ourselves on her couch. “This thing is a Hide-A-Bed. I think it’s pretty comfortable.”
I cringe, thinking of my back.
“We’ve had worse,” I say, smiling. “Remember that place we rented in Laguna that summer?”
She laughs. “The closet with the adjoining sponge?”
I kick off my shoes and pull up my knees, resting my chin on them. “Tell me about Neal. I’m so embarrassed I just dumped all my toxic waste on you when you called. I didn’t even ask about him.”
“We made it to eighteen months, three weeks, three days. That’s our new personal best.” She shrugs philosophically. “But it was going downhill for a while before he left. I think it started when he lost out on a teaching job he was sure he had. He got in this downward spiral where he couldn’t work. He got very clingy and insecure. Then he started dropping hints about how it was my fault—”
“Your fault?”
“Yeah, you know. Like I pressured him to move up here when he really should have stayed in L.A. and worked.”
“You know he’ll come back. He always does.” It’s about the best I can do in terms of comforting.
“I don’t think so.” She lets out a weary sigh. “We’ve never lived together before. It was …”
Instead of finishing the sentence, she goes to the kitchen, comes back with a bottle of champagne and two juice glasses. After a solemn toast to the Amazons—our high school nickname—she says, “What do you think’s going on with David?”
I set down my glass and press my fingers into the ridge of bone above my eyes, where headaches are born. “I honestly don’t know.” The lump in my throat makes conversation difficult. “It hasn’t been good for a long time. I guess I was trying to avoid it, just hold it together till things magically got better.”
“Did he say why he’s so unhappy?”
“He said he felt trapped—not by me, of course. It’s marriage in general. Too confining. And he might want to change jobs. He doesn’t want his options limited. I think for the first time in his life, he’s looking for self-realization.”
She looks at me. “Sounds more like he’s looking to screw around.”
“Thanks, Mayle.”
“Sorry. That was a dumb thing to say. It’s just that I never knew David to have a philosophical thought in his pretty head.”
“He isn’t stupid.” My voice sounds stiff and hollow inside my head, the way it does when you have a bad cold.
“If he’d dump you, how bright can he be?” she says, indignant on my behalf.
I don’t say anything.
“Come on, hate his guts. You’ll feel better.”
I take another sip of champagne and study her bare feet, curled over the edge of the couch. God. Even her feet are beautiful. Strong, slender. Maroon-painted toenails.
“You know any lawyers?”
My stomach turns over. “We’re not talking about the big D. Yet. Maybe it won’t come to that. Maybe if I just give him some space …”
She lets it hang there for a minute, and then says, “Well, if it does come to that, be sure you check around. Ask some of your rich-bitch friends. Preferably a female lawyer. I think the men all subconsciously identify with the husband. If you can’t find one you like, you should call my friend Jill Trimble. In Silver Lake. She divorced Roy a couple of years ago. Took his ass to the cleaners.”
“Could we talk about something else?”
She leans over to hug me. “I’m sorry, Baby. It just makes me furious that he’d do this to you.”
The sofa bed is like every other sofa bed in the world—lumpy and saggy. I dream strange, exhausting dreams about swimming or drowning, wake up, roll around, drift back to sleep, into another dream. Finally, at eight I get up, pull on my sweats, and sit in one of the bay windows, stare at the fog hovering over the water.
I left CM’s phone number on three message pads—in the kitchen, in David’s office, and in the bedroom. Just in case he gets an uncontrollable urge to hear my voice. I could call him right now. To let him know I got here okay. But Sunday’s his one morning to sleep late. He’d probably be pissed off if I woke him up.
I picture him sitting on the flagstone patio with the New York Times and his coffee. That’s what we do on Sundays when the weather’s good. In the spring, there’s the perfume of creamy white gardenias, wet from the sprinklers. On dry fall days, the pepper berries crunch underfoot, spike the air with their sharpness. He’d be all dressed, of course, but I’d be wearing his high school soccer jersey that I cut the sleeves out of, and my flip-flops. He used to tease me about sleeping in the jersey, said he felt like he was sleeping with some jock. I thought it looked kind of sexy. Maybe not.
CM wanders out, yawning. She looks at the rumpled bed. “You didn’t sleep, did you?”
“I heard you thrashing around once or twice. Is the couch awful?”
“It’s not that bad. I’m just having weird dreams.”
“Liar. You can sleep with me.” She dismisses my protest. “I’ve got a queen-size bed. It’ll be fine. Hey, in Laguna we did it in a double. Besides, since we’re having such a bad time with men, maybe we should become born-again lesbians.”
She insists on going out for breakfast. “There’s a great little bakery just down the hill. We can have a brisk walk, get coffee and scones, and read the paper. I have to go to a meeting this afternoon at the studio, so you’re on your own till dinner.”
“You have meetings on Sunday?”
“Not usually. Right now we’re working out an itinerary for a series of master classes at schools back east, so things are a little crazed.”
It’s nine by the time we leave the building, me bundled up in sweats, a windbreaker, Dodgers baseball cap, long scarf wrapped around my neck, velour gloves. CM, oblivious to the cold wind off the water, wears tights and a Seattle Mariners jersey.
I should have realized that her idea of a brisk walk just down the hill is my idea of a forced march, particularly when I haven’t had my coffee. We weave through a maze of streets, commercial and residential. Small shops, cafés, a few bars. Victorian houses, craftsman bungalows, Spanish/Moroccan stucco, New England saltbox. Some old, some new, in varying states of renovation and decay. Sprawling magnolia trees, velvet-green pines, a few magnificent old hardwoods. Gardens spilling over with flowers, neatly manicured lawns. One shabby cottage has a wooden sign stuck in the weed-infested ground. It says “We like the natural look.”
Half an hour later, we arrive at the block of squatty brick buildings that includes the Queen Street Bakery. By now, the sun has burned through the fog. I’ve removed the scarf and gloves, tied the windbreaker around my waist, and I’m still sweating like a prizefighter. The crowd of couples and families and kids and dogs spills out onto the sidewalk. One guy has a red-coated cat on a leash. I hear him tell someone it’s an Abyssinian.
CM points at a vacant table near the open French doors. “Better grab that. I’ll, get the food.”
I drop gratefully into a chair, disentangling my layers of clothing and looking around me. The place is laid out shotgun style; from the front you can see behind the counter to the serving station, past the backs of the big black ovens, straight through to the back door. The café part is full of mismatched tables and chairs, with bright cushions, artworks of wildly divergent styles and levels of expertise. There are plants everywhere—spider plant, wandering Jew, devil’s ivy—obviously chosen by some unrepentant flower child. But it’s the smell of the place that grabs me—not just the food, but the space itself—old brick and sun on freshly mowed grass.
When I was growing up, my family always vacationed at Lake Tahoe, in the High Sierra, right where Nevada’s elbow pokes California in the ribs. We rented the same cabin every year, two weeks in the summer, a week at Christmas.
On Saturday mornings, my father and I would drive over to Truckee, a little town with a high concentration of Basque sheepherding families. There was a bakery there called Javier’s, and we always tried to get there just as the huge round loaves of sheepherder’s bread were coming out of the oven.
The owner of the place was named Jorge, and he and my father had a running joke about the nonexistent Javier and where he might be that morning. They would talk about the weather and the sheep and the fishing while I wandered around, eating cookies and watching the bakers in back. I could never get enough of the smell of that place—the bread, the strong coffee, the creaking, splintered wood floors—or the feel of the loaf, warm in my lap on the drive home.
The Queen Street Bakery has some of that same flavor about it.
CM sets down two mochas and an earthenware plate with two scones. “Don’t thank me, just leave a big tip.”
One bite of the scone makes me smile—golden brown and crisp on the outside, meltingly tender inside and not overly sweet, with just enough chewy nuggets of currant to provide counterpoint. Funny how the tiniest perfection can make you believe everything’s going to be all right.
When CM parks herself in a chair and crosses one long leg over the other, every male in the place between thirteen and eighty is checking her out, some surreptitiously, some not so. It’s always like that, no matter where we go. One look and their eyes keep drifting back to her like compass needles to magnetic north.
It’s funny. Most women would kill to look like CM. They think if they were only beautiful, all their relationship woes would be over. They’d probably be surprised to find out that CM has just as much trouble with men as they do—sometimes I think she has more. Sure they stare at her, but a lot of them are too intimidated to do anything beyond that. Her looks scare off a lot of perfectly nice guys, and her in-your-face independence takes care of the others.
And then there’s Neal. He keeps breaking up with her—or acting like an asshole till she breaks up with him—and coming back. Does that mean he really loves her? Or that he enjoys emotional upheaval? Or is he into the power trip of making a beautiful woman cry over him?
Oblivious to the testosterone wafting our way, she takes a long sip of her mocha and her eyes close in contentment. She sets down the cup and folds her arms.
“You know you’d be better off without him.”
My head falls back. “Don’t. I came up here to decompress.”
“You came up here because you wanted me to talk some sense into you.”
“No, I didn’t. Between my mother pestering me to hang on for dear life and you nagging me to cut loose, I don’t know what I’m doing. I just want to float for a while.”
“If you ask me, that’s what you’ve been doing for the last seven years.”
“I didn’t ask you.”
“Wyn, can you honestly say you’ve been happy? I mean, there you are tooling around L.A. in your sports car and sitting through boring committee meetings and eating little artistic arrangements of sushi for lunch and giving dinners for people you loathe and spending shitloads of money on clothes that don’t even look like you. Is this really what you want to do with your life?”
“What do you want me to do?” I say crossly. “Become a medical missionary in Zimbabwe?”
“I want you to do whatever makes you happy. Are you happy?”
“I love David and—”
“Why?”
I stare at her. “Why do I love him?”
“Yes. What is it about him that you love?”
“For Chrissake, Mayle. I love him because I love him. It’s a feeling. You can’t break it down into components. I know you can’t stand him, but—”
“Never mind how I feel about him. In fact, forget him for the moment. Is your life making you happy?”
“I knew when I married him how our life was going to be, and I accepted that.”
“Answer the question.”
“How many people are really happy?” I’m shredding my napkin.
She leans forward, grips the edge of the table. “Answer the fucking question. Are you happy?”
“How should I know? Stop badgering me.”
She leans back in her chair. “I rest my case.”
“Are you happy?”
“Yes.”
“Even though Neal’s gone.”
“That makes me sad. I miss him. I like getting laid regularly. But for the vast majority of the time, I’m happy with my life.”
Every morning on her way to the studio, CM drops me off at the bakery. I have coffee, read the paper, have more coffee, eavesdrop on the conversations floating around me, watch the women who work there. Most of them seem to be roughly my age, and it interests me how different their lives are and how hard they all work. Pretty soon, they know who I am, that I’m visiting CM, and I know most of their names and what they do.
There’s Ellen, one of the owners, with eyes the color of espresso and short, dark hair. She wears long dresses with black Doc Martens and wire-rimmed glasses that keep sliding down her nose while she’s waiting on people, and she must know every single person within a ten-block radius. She asks about their husbands, wives, kids, pets, always by name. She’ll talk local politics with anybody who shows the slightest inclination, and she’s a fount of neighborhood gossip—what shops are closing and why, who’s moving in or out, who’s pregnant or getting a divorce, whose cat or dog is lost or found.
A punked-out kid named Tyler is the espresso barista, the youngest of the lot. She’s got blue hair and a nose ring, a tattoo of some Celtic knot design encircling her wrist. Lots of eye makeup and she dresses all in black. From her conversation with the other women, I gather that she just graduated from high school and is in career limbo. She works at the bakery in the mornings, dabbles in a few art classes late in the day, does the club scene at night. I wonder when she sleeps.
Diane is the resident cake baker and Ellen’s partner. She’s a Meg Ryan blonde, tall and skinny, with that coltish grace that’s all elbows and collarbone. Ellen needles her about her tendency to oversleep; she usually rolls in around nine o’clock to start baking the cakes for tomorrow and decorating the ones for today. I love to watch her designs take shape. She does wedding cakes with real flowers. She does birthday cakes with buttercream roses and daisies and ivy, fruits, animals, or toys, and the dedication in nimble, flowing script. She probably could have been a sculptor, but when I tell her that, she just laughs and says she likes being a baker because she can eat her mistakes.
On Wednesday, after I have coffee, I catch a bus down to the bottom of Queen Anne Hill and stroll south along the waterfront. The breeze off the Sound blows fresh in my face, snaps the colored pennants on the light poles. I picture CM at the studio, giving class, writing grants, doing her own workout. Here we sit, both of us with a lapful of relationship disaster, and yet her life seems to have changed very little—at least superficially.
I wander out onto one of the wooden piers. Scents of creosote and diesel fuel merge in my nostrils with the iodine smell of seawater. Across the bay, the cranes and container ships of the working port look like an animated cartoon. I find a wooden bench that’s relatively free of seagull shit and turn my face up to the sun.
Okay, she’s not married, I am. She and Neal lived together less than two years; David and I for seven years. But that doesn’t explain it away entirely. As long as I’ve known CM, she’s seemed to have an inner compass that I lack. Even in grammar school, she knew she was a dancer.
While I was changing my major every year, she sailed through the UCLA dance curriculum and began getting work almost immediately, although not for much money. Sometimes I felt bad for her having to work two jobs, but she never seemed to find it any more than a minor inconvenience, a brief detour on the road to a destination that was never in doubt.
If I hadn’t married David, I’d probably still be teaching bonehead English to a bunch of teenage delinquents and wondering if I should go to grad school and taking aptitude-assessment tests. I guess the truth is that she’s driven and I’m drifting. But it’s never made the slightest difference in our friendship.
The closest we ever came to having a second fight was when I got engaged to David. His charm never worked on her the way it did on the rest of the female population. She found him insipid, almost beneath contempt, and never minded telling me so. She called him Pretty Boy. He called her an intellectual snob and said she was jealous of me. He never understood why I found that hilarious, and he never understood our friendship. For years I nurtured the hope that they’d learn to like each other, but mutual tolerance was about as good as it got.
Of course, if the truth be told, I was never overly fond of Neal, either. He was our graduate instructor in psych 101 and CM was instantly smitten. He’s attractive enough in that brainy/sexy way. Tall and lean, dark and brooding. He even wears a Van Dyck. He’s been a Ph.D. candidate in clinical psychology for as long as I’ve known him. CM thinks he’s brilliant. She says the reason he has so much trouble finishing his degree is that he keeps butting heads with the academic establishment. To me, he seems like the consummate bullshit artist.
Another reason I find him so irritating—aside from the fact that he’s continually making CM unhappy—is that he always wants to talk about my relationship with my father. Like he’s titillated by the possibility that there might have been something unnatural going on.
“Spare some change, lady?” A cigarette-raspy voice. A woman hovers at the end of the bench, shifting her weight from one foot to the other. She looks too young to be one of the hard-core homeless, but her skin has the leathery tan that comes from exposure and her eyes have that vacant hardness that eventually replaces hope. Spikes of dirty brown hair poke through holes in her red knit cap.
I hate looking at her filthy, ripped jeans and grimy parka, but I’ve never been able to just look away. David disapproves of giving money to panhandlers. “There are plenty of jobs around” is his standard line. He says I’m only encouraging them to remain dependent on handouts. I know there’s a certain amount of truth to that, but I always have a hard time saying no when I’m standing there in my hundred-and-fifty-dollar Donna Karan T-shirt and my Calvin Klein jeans and my Bruno Magli sandals.
I dig in my pocket for a crumpled dollar bill, press it into her hand.
“God bless,” she says.
It reminds me of running to put pennies in the Salvation Army Christmas kettles when I was little because I liked to hear the bell ringer bless me. Right now I suppose I need all the blessings I can get.