The False Friend (6 page)

S
ince 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.

When he’d walked through the apartment door, there’d been no reason to think that she had beaten him home, nothing to indicate a difference between that Monday and any other. Huck had taken the girls for their afternoon walk, and was coming into the bedroom to fetch a magazine. He reached his side of the bed before noticing her, the surprise of it causing him to jump as if she’d crept up from behind. “Ceel?” he’d said, as if he wasn’t sure. She’d woken him that morning with the usual hand on his shoulder, his name pronounced in that way that recalled the creak of their aging couch, the sound of something that needed to be fixed. As Huck had stood over Celia in the half-light cast by the approaching dusk, he had struggled to imagine a malady dire enough to send her home from work. She’d been known to barricade herself inside her private office with herbal tea, ibuprofen, and zinc lozenges to avoid taking a sick day. Huck had considered the possibility that nursing her through some awful affliction would force an end to his late mornings, and perhaps return him to the sort of person who ministered to the slow-draining sink in the bathroom, the loose bedroom-door handle, or their beloved creaking couch. He would restore Celia to wellness, and himself to a person who did all the stuff he was supposed to do, and by the following week they’d both be their normal selves again.

But Celia hadn’t been sick. They’d sat on the couch, her
body huddled against his like someone desperate for warmth. Huck hadn’t been able to see Celia’s face, and this had conspired with the utter incongruity of what she was saying to turn her unfamiliar. For not more than two heartbeats, Huck had found himself inhabiting a stranger’s life. It was one of the most frightening things that had ever happened to him. The furniture, the dogs, the woman beside him—Huck had wanted none of it, recognized nothing. “Oh dear,” he’d said, the sound of his voice bringing him back. When he had grasped Celia’s chin and turned her toward him, her features were vulnerable in a way he’d never witnessed, a sight as surprising as raindrops falling up, or the ocean going still. Gone was the woman of recipes and how-to manuals, schedules and flow charts, each task reduced to its composite steps. Huck telephoned the airline himself to book their respective flights, then held Celia’s hand as she’d called home. The dogs rose to their feet when Celia spoke Djuna’s name, the fragility of her voice awakening a protective instinct that manifested in Huck as a faster pulse and the need to hold her close. Celia’s self-reliance was such a constant that its disintegration was no less revealing than Huck’s first sight of her naked, sleeping body. As they’d discussed how she should approach the coming week, Huck’s solicitude had paired with Celia’s uncertainty to provide a new kind of union.

Neither of them had slept that night. Smoking usually helped Huck, but Celia had lately become bothered again by his habit, so instead he had spent long swaths of time taking deep, even breaths and trying not to move. This had bestowed the single advantage of allowing him to follow her out of bed so that she hadn’t needed to wake him the morning of her
flight. He’d been kissing her good-bye when he realized that it had been weeks since they’d last had sex, and it struck him that something was happening to them, had been happening for a while now—a sound beneath the threshold of their hearing, a vibration so slow and steady that it had been mistaken for stillness.

“Wait,” he’d said, and watched as Celia’s shoulders tensed. The dogs had pricked their ears.

Sharing his discovery would have meant forcing her to carry it with her onto the plane. For the next four days, it would have occupied the empty place beside her on the mattress, casting its own imprint on the second pillow.

“I’ll miss you,” he had said instead, and kissed her again. She’d smiled, and then was gone.

A
t night, the tartan walls of the Scottish Suite could be mistaken for tasteful in the ambient light, which was just bright enough to allow Celia to read the titles lining the bookshelf along the far wall. This informal history of family pursuits abandoned or outgrown was arranged by topic, with sections devoted to genealogy, home maintenance, career self-diagnostics, school counseling, gardening, and fantasy baseball. A selection of guidebooks—some well-worn, others pristine, all domestic—attested to Warren’s ambition to drive to all the major national parks, an aspiration he’d shelved when gas had topped two dollars a gallon. Without an actual guest beside her,
Celia felt uncomfortably aligned with the guest bedroom’s castoffs, an exile with nowhere else to go.

Her loneliness that first night magnified the foldout bed’s usual discomforts, shuttling her from oblivion into hyperalertness, her brain humming with imaginary versions of all the conversations she needed to have. After a failed attempt at slow, deep breathing, Celia tried to drown her thoughts in a torrent of trivia from her most recent audits. She counted sheep by summoning scores from PepsiCo’s successful vending bid over Coca-Cola. She recited the various percentages by which requests for psych-hospital beds had surpassed capacity. At some point a threshold of exhaustion was reached. Statistics beat down her mental rehearsals for the coming day until none of it sounded like language, her words denatured, her head filled with bleats and yowls.

When mid-morning angled its way through a gap in the window shade, she jolted upright, panicked that she hadn’t walked the dogs. One foot was on the floor before she remembered where she was. According to her watch it was eight
A.M
. Her father would have left early in order to swim, but her mother’s school day didn’t start until nine. “Mommy?” she called, even though the stillness of the house told her she was alone. Her watch was still running on Central time.

Celia braved the hallway in her nightshirt. As children, she and Jeremy had been permitted downstairs in pajamas, but their parents only ever left the bedroom fully clothed. At some point Celia had adopted this habit, until Huck—early on in their courtship, the first demand of her he ever made—refused
to serve post-coital pancakes to a woman wearing anything more than a bathrobe. The stairway carpet on the soles of Celia’s feet felt like Christmas morning, circa 1981. In the kitchen, she found a note beside a fresh half pot of coffee—
Good Morning! Call me when you wake up. Love, Mom
, the office number penned beneath, as if Celia could have forgotten. Through the kitchen window, the day proceeded without her. Celia was briefly a child kept out of school. Sunlight through the hummingbird feeder stretched an illumined band of red across the table’s surface. Birds were new. When Celia was growing up, her father had taken in a stray kitten, an avid hunter who—by the time Celia left for college—still had not gotten over a formative, stray-life trauma that compelled it to mewl between mouthfuls of food. A month after Howler’s death, Noreen had bought the hummingbird feeder in wordless protest against the idea of adopting another.

When Celia began to dial, she realized that her mother’s number did not exist in her mind as serial digits, but as a pattern her fingers tap-danced across the phone’s numeric grid. Her mother picked up on the first ring.

“Good morning, this is Noreen Durst.”

“Hi, Mom.”

Celia had forgotten this brisker version of her mother, whose voice had overseen her daily return from middle school, marshaling the hours that separated her children’s homecoming from her own. Later, that voice became the arbiter of adolescent sick days, fake and genuine, Celia’s fate decided by a judge far less suggestible over the phone.

“Celie! I’m so glad you called. Did you just wake up?”

“Yeah.” A smiley face beamed from the note’s bottom edge. “Thanks for the coffee.”

“Did you eat yet?” Noreen asked. “Everything’s where we always keep it, except the cereal, which isn’t in the pantry anymore. Your father moved it to the cabinet—”

“—above the coffeemaker, I know. It’s been that way for years.”

“Has it? Well, in the grand scheme of things it hasn’t been there long. My goodness, Celie, when was the last time you called me at school?”

Through the receiver Celia heard a bell, the sound upping her pulse as if no time had passed. She checked the wall clock: second period had just begun. “That’s funny,” she said once the bell had stopped. “I was just wondering the same thing.”