Valley Fever (11 page)

“I don't think that's the best idea I've ever heard,” Anne said.

“Did so much go on between us?” I said. “What went on was between you and Hasso.”

“Hasso!” Bootsie said. “That was his name.”

Just after moving in with Bootsie, I'd started seeing an old friend of mine from Berlin, a cotton broker's dilettante son who'd pursued me relentlessly, over two continents, but for whom I had no real feelings. Bootsie disapproved of my ambivalence. Hasso was kind to me and handsome in that brooding German wire-rimmed-glasses sort of way, and he passed the time and made me feel pretty, but he was lazy and dull and I saw no future with him. Still, he and I dated for several months while I recovered from the disaster with Newton.

When I did finally get up the nerve to break things off with Hasso, he said, “Are you upset about what went on with me and Bootsie?”

“You and Bootsie where?” I asked, stupidly.

When I confronted Bootsie, quite gently, maybe not believing what I'd been told, she blamed me for my cruelty to Hasso and leading him on and insisted she'd done it just to keep his spirits up. “You know how much sex means to me,” she'd said at the time. This was true, I knew, but still I couldn't bear to look at her.

“Hasso says it was that week I had the flu,” I had said.

“Yes,” she'd said. Seeing I had been stunned quiet, she added, “What, do you think now I'm going to lie about it?”

I packed my little suitcase and spent an expensive week in a cheap hotel before finding an illegal sublet on the Upper East Side, someplace I was certain to never, ever run into Bootsie, who didn't travel north of Bergdorf's.

Immediately I'd begun to miss her. It was no fun to eat french fries alone at the McDonald's on Union Square, or go looking by myself for a cart or market that served its coffee in those old blue paper cups with the Acropolis drawings on the side, or do any of the other things no one but Bootsie appreciated as much as I did.

Now Bootsie said, “I was depressed, on the verge of a breakdown, and what I didn't tell you was that I'd been pregnant when you came back from London. I was a mess. But you were a mess, too.”

“You were pregnant,” I said.

“And I apologize for that. Not for getting pregnant. For not telling you.”

“We're done apologizing,” Anne said.

“Is this too much?” Bootsie said to Anne.

“I missed you,” I said.

“But, Ingrid, you were so caught up in yourself,” Bootsie said. “You didn't even notice the day I went to the doctor. You didn't even notice I was in bed for two days.”

“I don't remember,” I said. “I remember so little about that whole period.”

Anne nodded at me. “You know how you can get, Ingrid.”

“How can I get?”

“Selfish.”

I said, “I thought we weren't going to talk about this.”

Bootsie went on, “I got angry that I couldn't tell you everything, but I felt bad for you, too, because Newton had really wrecked you.” She looked around the room, as if to make sure everything was in order. “It's really hard to train good servers,” she said. Bootsie could be forgiven anything, eventually, because of her cheekbones and her posture and her crazy hair and frankness. “Do you remember Linus? He was so sweet, Linus, and so handsome. The baby would have been beautiful.” She paused a half second. “I should have married Linus, don't you think, Inky? I could have had a baby and sent her to Brearley and had one of those nice, safe New York lives.”

I said, “I think that would have been worse than coming back here.” I had adored Linus. He was very well and happily employed as an editor at
The New York Times
, and he was content. Bootsie feared a life with such a person might lack adventure. She had said at the time, “If I wanted a lack of adventure, I'd move back to Fresno.” Now Linus was a stranger and her dad was dead and she was right there back in Fresno after all. “But I always thought you should have married Linus,” I said.

“Well, I didn't,” Bootsie said, then, “I just went to the doctor and had it taken care of.”

I said, “Oh, Boots.”

She said, “I don't see myself being in love for the rest of my life. I'll get married and all of that, but I can't see any relationship lasting for more than ten years.”

I said, “Our relationship has lasted more than ten years.”

She said, “Yes, but I'm not fucking you.”

In New York, when she was in art school, Bootsie had had a yearlong affair with a girl in her class. Bootsie did these sorts of things just so she could say that she'd done them: affairs with women, affairs with married men, threesomes and foursomes and sex in the tiny, filthy bathroom of the Heathrow Express, fifteen minutes to Central London. She kept looking just in case she was missing something. “Nothing really turns me on,” she told me once. “Except being choked. I like to be choked.”

There was a pause during which Anne checked twice that her tennis bracelet was still there. Anne doesn't like scenes of rapprochement, she doesn't like nostalgia, she doesn't like displays of soft feeling. She's very un-actressy in that way. But Bootsie had her boxed into the booth and she couldn't escape.

“It's funny,” Bootsie said, “for a long time I thought you were the bad friend.” Our drinks came, and one for Bootsie. “Then my dad died. Cheers,” she said, and we all clinked glasses.

“We don't really have to talk about this,” I said.

“I like it,” Bootsie said. “Don't you like it? Don't you think it's a relief?”

“Maybe we should have some food,” Anne said.

“We keep trying to order food,” I said. “And then it comes and it's not what we thought we wanted.”

“A lot of things are like that.” Bootsie hailed one of the waitresses. “Fritters,” she said. “I like to talk about the past. It's as if you can fix it.”

“That sounds nice,” I said.

“It's true. Here's what I should have done: not quit the
Times
. Apologized to my father before he was dead. Taken a semester abroad. Actually learned calculus instead of stealing the exams.” When she talked, her curls bobbed all around. “Not sold my place on Laight. What should you have done, Annie?”

Anne looked up toward the busy restaurant, as if for an idea or quick getaway. “I don't know,” she said. “I'm very happy.”

I said, “Come on, Anne.”

“You lie,” said Bootsie. “What do you wish you had done, Inks?”

“Not got fired so much,” I said. “Stayed in one place. Berlin, maybe.” Berlin was the one place I had moved for myself instead of a boyfriend. I'd moved there to practice my high school German and to manage an American café that served crabs and chowder. I missed Berlin all the time. “Bought an apartment in New York while I was employed and while my parents had money.” I couldn't think of anything else.

“Berlin,” Anne said. “You were miserable in Berlin. It was so cold there, you barely went outdoors in the winter. Berlin,” she said, shaking her head.

I said, “The point is to change the past. It's a game, Anne.”

“You were so lonely in Berlin,” she said.

“I'm lonely now,” I told her.

There was the uncomfortable silence of truth at the table.

Bootsie said, “I always thought it was crazy you didn't stay with George Sweet. He was good for you. You'd probably still be in New York, running some international media company, living in a town house on West Sixty-ninth.”

“I'd live on East Sixty-ninth,” I said.

“Of course you would,” said Bootsie. “But that's your mother talking.”

You see what she could do: she could turn things around in twenty seconds so that once again you were in the position of weakness.

“People take marriage too seriously,” Bootsie said. “If it doesn't work out, you just get a divorce.”

“Then what's the point of getting married?” Anne said.

“Just to see what it feels like.”

“It doesn't really feel like anything,” Anne said.

The fritters came and I recognized them as my own, the fritters I make for myself and for everyone else for brunch or when there's no other food or when we're all too drunk to even get ourselves to a drive-through. My grandmother taught me how to make them when I was tiny. These things sometimes skip a generation. I had three deep scars on my left hand from cubing zucchini after drinking. “My fritters,” I said.

“Surprised but not happy,” Bootsie said. “Right? I grow the squash myself. You can't open a restaurant and not have Ingrid's fritters on the secret menu.”

I was quite drunk, and only being quite drunk can make such a reconciliation possible. Of course, this must have been Anne's plan all along. To our table they brought three more sorbet dishes, filled with mojitos frozen with liquid nitrogen. It was a very dangerous way to drink a mojito.

“You think I brought up George Sweet because I'm an asshole,” Bootsie said.

“No,” I lied.

“But that's not why,” she said. “I brought him up because he's sitting at the bar.”

We all looked. My throat seized up a bit. There was his straight broad back with the sharp wing bones. His blond curls had gone dark; he'd cut them short. He was heftier, like his father. In high school and in his twenties, George was a skinny string, long and muscular and light. Now he'd gotten darker and heavier, like all of us.

“He's still so lovely,” said Bootsie.

“I like George,” Anne said. “I always liked George.”

“Everyone loves George,” said Bootsie. “He's like the town mascot. He's darling. And he comes in here all the time.”

“I sort of wish he hadn't come in tonight,” I said. I wanted to be more like Anne, more like Bootsie, more like the sort of person who doesn't feel anything, who doesn't sting and sear when seeing again someone she'd loved a long, long time ago. I really had loved him.

“He plays rugby, too. In some league. He's always all scratched up. It's very sexy.”

Anne said, “Ingrid just got demolished two weeks ago.”

“I'm just talking,” Bootsie said.

“Tell me some gossip about someone else,” I said. “Let's talk about someone else, can we?”

“Who?”

“Hilda Sorensen,” I said.

“She's seeing Greg Kappas and she wants him to divorce Arlene and marry her, but Greg and Arlene can't get divorced.”

“The land with the riparian rights belongs to Arlene's family.”

“You already know all my gossip. How long have you been here?” I didn't tell her what I knew about her and her bartender. It was important to keep any small advantage with Bootsie.

Since that night at the club, and maybe because I'd been reading
Middlemarch
, I'd been thinking of the tragic and mercenary ways people are bound. Greg and Arlene had become this enormous mythical representation of everything I could have been, had I made even more bad decisions. I'd been thinking of the narrowness of small towns, Fresno in particular, and how it could be possible to have some significant life here, or even a happy one. Of course, completely happy people are tedious and stupid, but here was Bootsie: happy and bright and brilliant, as she had always seemed destined to be. I felt I must keep my distance from her, as if her comfort in our provincial hometown could somehow be catching.

The music had gone up and the place was loud now, so even though we were no more than fifteen feet from him, George was all the way across a crowded, noisy room.

Bootsie said, “You could have married George just to see what it was like.”

“That's something else I should have done.”

“There are reasons you and George broke up,” Anne said.

“Yes,” I said. “Remember that song ‘Detachable Penis'?”

Anne said, “Ingrid, come on.”

I continued, “I loved that song. Once we were driving and I said to George, ‘If you had a detachable penis and you were going away for a week, would you leave me your penis so I could use it?' He said no. I said, ‘Do you mean you don't trust me with your penis?' It turned into a real fight. I said, ‘If you don't trust me enough to leave your penis with me, do you even love me?' That was where the end started, and that was right at the beginning.”

“You're drunk,” Anne said.

“At least he was honest,” said Bootsie.

Really the end had started after George and I had moved to New York, to the bright studio on West Eighty-fourth Street, and I told him we ought to think about living in separate apartments. It was my mother's idea; she had coached me through the conversation, providing a script that started with “Artists should know what it's like to live alone.” George sat in the crook of our tiny sectional sofa and sobbed. “It's fine,” he had said the next day. “Everything is fine. Give me a couple months.”

Soon afterward, George fell for one of the tall, smart, silky-haired girls who worked with him at Marvel Comics. I knew but pretended not to know. Both he and this silky-haired cartoonist got jobs in DC, and he moved out of the apartment on Eighty-fourth Street with the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and the built-in desk he had designed himself. We visited each other for a while, acting as if nothing was wrong, but eventually he told me he'd given up. I guess I'd given up, too. It didn't last long between George and the silky-haired cartoonist. A few years on, he wrote a thriller and came back to Fresno. The thriller made some money. He wrote another one, which made even more.

“Mom says he got married,” I said.

“He's not married,” said Bootsie. “I don't think it ended well.” Bootsie started waving her long, wiry arm.

“Don't,” I said.

“Don't,” Anne said.

“He's coming over here,” Bootsie said.