The False Friend by Myla Goldberg Read Free Book Online Page B

Hepburn, especially
Breakfast at Tiffany’s
. Huck’s name was borrowed from “Moon River” as croonedby 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, herbody 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