The Best Friend Read online

  Despite the understated surroundings, I suspected that every patron had a six-figure income. The dress code for men seemed to require bold-colored braces and power ties, and a sizable percentage wore blue shirts with contrasting white collars.

  We were all coming from work, but our uniforms were as varied as our professions. I was wearing a suit and tie, all of it purchased from a discount men’s store. Carolyn also wore a lawyer costume, but hers was more expensive than mine: padded shoulders and pinstripes, befitting an era when Dynasty set the tone for woman’s fashion. Nicky was in his standard starving-artist getup—faded blue jeans and a black turtleneck sweater.

  When Nicky set up the meeting, I assumed Carolyn was just another one of his sexual conquests. Someone who would burn bright for a few weeks and then go the way of the dodo bird. Many who came before her had followed exactly that trajectory, and I assumed there were many more to come.

  “You’ll like her. She’s a lawyer like you,” Nicky had told me.

  In point of fact, Carolyn McDermott was a lawyer nothing like me.

  She was a third-year associate at Martin Quinn, one of the biggest law firms in the country. An associateship there was the brass ring of the legal profession—at least until you came up for partner in the next decade. Even in the mid-1980s, they paid law school graduates $65,000, which was more than twice what I earned, and I’d already been practicing for four years. You didn’t get hired there without a perfect résumé. Nicky’d boasted that Carolyn had an Ivy League education and a clerkship with a well-respected federal judge before joining Martin Quinn.

  My own pedigree had afforded me a path through the relative underbelly of the legal profession. Undergraduate and law school at St. John’s, which was second-rate in every way but its basketball team. Despite the fact that I’d gotten pretty good grades, no law firm would have me upon graduation, so I’d joined the Office of the Federal Defenders of New York—the FD, for short. For the next four years, I represented the vilest form of scum imaginable—drug dealers, wife beaters, rapists. When I left the office, my win-loss record at trial was 7–28. Although those were hardly Hall of Fame stats, nobody else among the office’s sixty-seven lawyers had even won twice.

  I might have spent my career as a public defender had it not been for the fact that in some years my wife took home more than I did in her hodgepodge of jobs—waitress, babysitter, vocal tutor, actress. When I first mentioned that I was thinking of leaving the FD to go out on my own, she asked, “Can we afford it?” My answer—“Can we afford it if I stay?”—was only partly meant to be clever.

  Unspoken between us was that when Anne turned thirty, I started becoming aware of her biological clock, even if she preferred to ignore it. Part of me thought that if I led by example, taking a job I didn’t necessarily love because that’s what grown-ups thinking about the future did, Anne would follow suit.

  It had not worked out that way, at least not so far. To the contrary, whenever I mentioned that she might want to transition into a more stable lifestyle, she always used Nicky as a shield. “Are you also telling your best friend that he should have a regular job and give up his dream of becoming a novelist?”

  The opening of my eponymous law firm taught me that being your own boss means you can actually lose money working. If it were not for court-appointed work, I would have gone under, but the thirty-five dollars an hour I was paid for those cases was scarcely enough for me to be able to pay my office rent.

  My hours at the FD had been long, but at least when I left for the day, I was on my own time. Private practice worked the opposite way. If I had no billable work from nine to five—which was often the case—I had to work twice as hard after hours to drum up business. That meant attending bar association meetings that began at eight o’clock or taking out prospective clients or those I hoped would someday be business-referrers for drinks or dinner. Whatever the cause, I rarely arrived home before ten. By that time, Anne was usually out, participating in various open mic sessions. Our schedules made it akin to a harmonic convergence when we were together and awake at the same time.

  Which was why I had hoped that Anne would join me to meet Carolyn. At the last minute, though, she had canceled. One of the Upper East Side families that paid her roughly my hourly rate to tutor their off-key daughter on vocal techniques had asked for an “emergency appointment” to prepare for an upcoming middle school audition.

  “I’ll catch Nick’s next conquest,” she told me. “Probably be next week, anyway.”

  I chuckled at the dig. In the movie version of Nicky’s life, his past girlfriends would appear as a montage of beautiful women differentiated by hairstyles and clothing but always well endowed. Here’s the kicker, though—they were always smart. Not a bimbo in the bunch. Not even the rebounds or the one-night stands. Each new girlfriend was, as Nicky put it, a woman of substance.

  From her résumé, I already knew that Carolyn fit that last criterion, but upon catching sight of her, I realized she also would have been heartily welcomed into the club of prior Nicky paramours based on her physical attributes alone. She was six years younger than Nicky, which was about as young as he could have gone at the time and not been a thirtysomething dating a grad student. Her figure strained against the buttons of her blouse, and the McDermott surname fit his penchant for Irish women, although Carolyn was black Irish, with dark, almost black hair and an alabaster complexion. Combined with sapphire-blue eyes, she had a certain Snow White vibe.

  “Carolyn, this is Clinton,” Nicky said.

  “Clint,” I corrected. “Unless you call him Nicky, in which case you can also call me what Nicky calls me.”

  She laughed. “Nicky?” Apparently, she had not been briefed on that point.

  “Call him Clint,” Nicky said with an eye-roll for my benefit. “It’s the third iteration of his name since we’ve met. His given name is Francis. Then he was Clinton through high school, and somewhere along the line he became Clint. I think it makes him feel like Dirty Harry.”

  “To be fair, no one ever called me Francis. Not even my mother.”

  “Clint it is,” Carolyn said with a smile. “Now, Nicky, can you get me a beer?”

  Nicky laughed. To me he said, “I told you, right?”

  Nicky got up and made his way to the bar. As soon as he left, Carolyn slid down the bench until she was against the wall, sitting directly opposite of me. The bartender was busy, which meant that I’d be alone with her for the next few minutes.

  “So you’re the one and only Clinton—I mean Clint—Broden?”

  “Guilty as charged.”

  “I’ve been excited to meet you because . . . well, the way Nick talks about you, I didn’t think you could actually exist. He seemed to be describing . . . I don’t know, a superhero, maybe.”

  “You sure he was talking about me?”

  She made a face like she might have been mistaken, but I knew it was a put-on. Living with Anne had alerted me to the difference between good and bad acting.

  “Let me see,” she said, in mock thought. “Are you the smartest guy he’s ever met? And have the most beautiful wife?”

  It’s hard not to like someone after an introduction like that. But even if she had been less kind, I couldn’t have helped but like Carolyn. She was exactly as Nicky had described, and I thought that, despite my best friend’s seemingly impossibly high standards for women, he might have finally found the woman of his dreams.

  The next day, Nicky wanted to see me again at the same bar. I assumed that he wanted to get my views about Carolyn, or to brag about how his evening had ended with her. But when we sat, he handed me a shopping bag that contained his completed manuscript.

  “Hot off the presses,” he said. “I want you to be the first to read it.”

  This was only the second time I’d been given the honor of reading his work, and to my knowledge, it was only the second time he’d completed a manuscript. His first effort had been an outgrowth of his senior-year college
project. That book was about two childhood friends from a middle-class, outer-borough neighborhood. Although he took pains at the time to emphasize that it was a work of fiction, it wasn’t too difficult to decipher that I was Clay, best friend to the story’s protagonist, Nate. The plot revolved around a can’t-miss business deal. At first, Nate tried to entice Clay into joining the venture, but Clay saw the danger and cautioned Nate to back out. Four hundred pages later, all Clay’s concerns were proven true, but Nate prevailed on the last page, outwitting his business partners and escaping to a Caribbean island with a suitcase full of cash.

  The book was good enough to capture the attention of a well-respected New York City literary agent, but they couldn’t sell it to one of the big publishing houses, although at least two publishers said that they wanted to read Nicky’s next novel. The agent told Nicky not to lower his standards and accept a deal with a smaller press; instead, he should write something new.

  I thought it a tremendous success that Nicky’s first effort had piqued an agent’s interest and resulted in favorable reactions from the major publishers, but Nicky was devastated. The rejection might have been the first he’d ever suffered, at least of any consequence.

  I’m not sure he wrote another word for the rest of our twenties. At least he didn’t mention anything that got further than the “idea stage,” and he never asked me to read anything. Then, around the time that Anne and I got engaged, he mentioned that he was back at it, working on something he was very excited about.

  Apparently, it had taken him three years to finish, but there it was, what looked to be at least a ream of paper in a shopping bag. I glanced at the title: Precipice.

  “Is it about two best friends from Astoria?”

  He laughed. “I’m tempted to tell you that you’ll find out when you read it, but no. It’s a love story, actually.”

  That surprised me a bit. I hadn’t thought Nicky knew enough about love to write a love story. A young buck who has sex with hundreds of women? That he could write. But love? It seemed outside his scope of experience.

  “I can’t wait to read it,” I said. “Fair warning, though, it may take me a while. I have this appellate brief due in two weeks. Unfortunately, all my reading’s going to have to be case law until that’s submitted.”

  He seemed disappointed that he’d have to wait before getting feedback.

  “Why don’t you ask Carolyn to be your first read?” I suggested.

  “I don’t think so. To be honest, I don’t think there’s a real future there.”

  “Why? She seemed great.”

  “I know. I was just thinking . . . I don’t know, just . . .”

  “No, you’re right, Nicky. That sounds like a perfectly good reason to break up with a beautiful, intelligent woman.”

  “You got lucky. Anne was practically the first woman you were serious about. That’s why you can’t understand what it’s like to be with someone who you think is great, smart, beautiful, and you have amazing sex, but you still have that nagging feeling like they’re not the one for you.”

  “That’s the most pathetic thing I’ve ever heard,” I said with a laugh. “You almost make me glad that beautiful women aren’t constantly throwing themselves at my feet. If you want my advice, and I know you don’t, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t take it, give Carolyn some more time. I think there’s something real there.”

  “I’ll take it under advisement,” he said.

  It turned out that he did more than that. Not two months later, they were engaged, and their marriage came a month after that. Then, as soon as they returned from their honeymoon, they moved to the suburbs.

  And now, a month after that, Carolyn was dead.

  3.

  Nicky said he was fine to stay in his house, but I suspected he had no idea how he’d feel once he was alone, so I told him that he didn’t have a choice in the matter, at least not tonight. After a brief back-and-forth, he agreed to take the train back to the city and stay with Anne and me for the night.

  On the ride back into the city, Nicky told me that he had taken “something” to calm himself, so if he got a little loopy, I shouldn’t be concerned. He didn’t get loopy so much as sleepy. When we got back to my apartment, I delivered him into the bedroom and told him to rest.

  Nicky was still asleep when Anne came home. It was about three in the afternoon. Anne was wearing her gym clothing and still sweating. When she saw me in the living room, she looked like she’d seen a ghost. By the fear in her eyes I first thought she had already heard the news about Carolyn, but then I realized that her concern stemmed from my being home in the middle of the workday. As if only some type of tragedy could explain it.

  “I have some very bad news,” I said. “Carolyn died this morning. An accident. She drowned in the bathtub.”

  Anne reacted with silence. It reminded me of what I’d gone through earlier that morning when Nicky called to impart the same news: a delayed response because the statement made zero sense.

  Twenty-seven-year-old women are not supposed to drown in the bathtub.

  “Nicky’s here,” I said. “He’s resting in our bed. He called me right after he discovered her body, and I went straight to their house. The police were already there. I stayed with him until they left. He’s . . . well, you can imagine. Devastated. He took something to calm himself, and then he felt tired. I didn’t want him to be alone.”

  Anne took in the information, nodding as I spoke. Then she said something I would hear many times over the next six months: “How can you even drown in your own bathtub?”

  “She must have hit her head or something. Maybe getting out and she slid back in.”

  Anne brought her hands to her mouth, clearly shaken as she absorbed our new reality.

  Nicky and I met shortly after my family moved to Queens, when I was eight. My mother had excitedly told me that our new neighborhood was named after John Jacob Astor, who was the richest man in the country at the beginning of the twentieth century. I later learned that the town elders had hoped that by calling their village Astoria, the town’s namesake would invest in the neighborhood, but Astor gifted the village only $500, and he actually never set foot in the place that bears his name.

  Even without his largesse, however, Astoria flourished. The 1960s brought an influx of Greeks into the neighborhood, as was evident by the Greek restaurants, Greek bakeries, and Greek Orthodox churches. One such place was the Apollo Market, owned by Nicky’s family.

  I met my future best friend on a muggy August day, about a week before we began fourth grade. Our apartment was stifling hot, and I had no friends to play with outside. In what was a first, my mother gave me a nickel to buy a pack of baseball cards, simply so I’d leave the apartment and stop sulking.

  Even though Nicky was only eight, he was working the market’s cash register. He urged me to open my pack in front of him. I cracked the gum in two, giving him the bigger piece, and he looked over my shoulder as I shuffled through the cards.

  “Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford in the same pack!” he exclaimed. “I’ve never seen that before. You must be the luckiest kid in the world.”

  I’ve often wondered if Nicky and I would have been friends had our bond not formed so early. Not because I wouldn’t have wanted to be his friend—everyone wanted to be around Nicky. He had that sense of ease that you hoped would rub off on you; simply being close to him bathed you in the warmth of the sun that seemed to perpetually shine on Nicholas Zamora. I brought little of that to the table. Although I was a decent athlete, puberty was not kind to me. I topped out at five foot six on my toes and could no longer compete athletically with boys like Nicky, who were half a foot taller. But through our school years, he kept me close, never dropping me for his jock buddies or the girls who flocked around him.

  After my parents died, I lived with Nicky’s family during college vacations until graduation, which his parents attended in my parents’ stead. Then Nicky and I shared a walk-up apartm
ent in Hell’s Kitchen. I worked as a paralegal for a big law firm while going to St. John’s Law at night. Nicky tended bar at night while he claimed to be writing the great American novel during the day, but to me it seemed as if he spent most of his free time drinking and bedding beautiful women.

  We were still sharing that same place when I met Anne. Back then she joked that she wanted to get married just so she’d have only one husband, not the two she currently felt wedded to because Nicky and I sometimes seemed joined at the hip. The joke was on her, of course. Even after Anne and I were married, the three of us remained inseparable.

  Losing my parents had already conditioned me to accept that the unthinkable sometimes happens, and always without warning. Yet Carolyn’s death still shocked me. I couldn’t believe she was actually dead.

  Anne, on the other hand, had never suffered a loss of this magnitude, and therefore had the belief that the world made sense and was safe. For her, Carolyn’s death was unfathomable, a breach of the world order upon which she relied. Whereas I imagined myself in Nicky’s place, wondering how I would go on if Anne had died in such a freak accident, my wife undoubtedly saw her own mortality in the randomness of Carolyn’s death.

  Whatever Nicky took to calm himself, it knocked him out good. He was still fast asleep at ten, when Anne would have otherwise headed out to do her open mic set. Tonight, however, she stayed in, and we spent the evening—our first weeknight together in weeks—watching television.

  “How is Nick going to go on after this?” she asked.

  “What choice will he have?”

  “I don’t think I could . . . if something happened to you, I mean.”

  I smiled at her. “Nothing is going to happen to me. But I know what you mean. I can’t imagine my life without you either. I know it’s not the most romantic notion, but something I learned when my parents died is that you don’t decide to go on after a tragedy, you just do because . . . well, it’s the only path available. You’re never the same after, and I’m certain that will be true of Nicky too.”