A Friend of the Family (2 page)

“Pete usually knows which way the wind blows,” my wife said, and I loved her for it.

“Remember our sophomore year?” Iris asked. “He didn’t want to go down to DC to protest because he was afraid it would reflect badly on his medical school apps?”

“What does that have to do with anything?” I said. “Anyway, I had to study.”

“I know you did, sweetheart,” Iris said. She tousled my hair — unlike her husband, I still had a thick head of it — then plopped herself at the picnic table next to me. “I’m just teasing.”

“Well, stop.”

She laughed again. I wondered if Iris teased me because she knew I’d never really hold it against her. She folded a paper hat out of newspaper for Neal. Elaine gave me a smile over her paper, and Adam stole Neal’s hat, and the seagulls, which had subsided, began to caw again. I knew my face was red—I was never very good at being teased—so I dug up the sports page, checked on the Yankees, since my Nets had yet to start their season. Eventually, Elaine got up to pour more coffee, and Joe brought out a fresh plate of cinnamon rolls, and Alec
woke up and shuffled onto the porch to see if I wanted to go to the driving range, which I did. The rest of that day’s schedule is lost to me. I’m certain that by dinner we were talking about other things besides the Soviet Union.

And that was 1991. A long time ago.

But I ask you today, have events not borne me out? Rogue nuclear weapons, a breakdown in command of the Russian army, a frightening centralization in the world oil market? An autocratic KGB man at the country’s head? Rising AIDS rates, a widening wealth gap, the largest land mass on the planet — I ask you, Iris, have events not borne me out? Is it so hard to imagine that I might have been right?

At night, in that beach house, Iris and Joe slept in the bedroom on the second floor, and Elaine and I slept one floor down from them, and we could hear them together, always past midnight, although we tried not to. We heard them almost every night, and rolled our eyes at each other, and usually woke up in unrumpled sheets ourselves.

I have not seen the Sterns in almost a year now; I no longer sleep next to my wife. The four of us stayed together for all those years, from the University of Pittsburgh to beyond, moved to the same New Jersey town, rented shore houses, ate countless dinners, signed on to care for one another’s children should the unimaginable happen to us. I happen to have a brother, a biological brother, whom I don’t like very much. I have a best friend whom I miss like a brother, but whom I may never speak to again.

The Soviet Union collapsed and misery ensued, but that was not the worst thing that could have happened.

N
ow, at my
little paved park by the Hudson, the last old fisherman starts packing up his gear slowly, arthritically. As he turns to bring his cooler from the car, I notice the tiniest shuffle in his gait,
probably something not even his wife has yet paid much attention to. Parkinson’s, in all likelihood, although a neurologist would be better equipped to make that evaluation. Still, I’ve sent a handful of suspected Parkinson’s cases to specialists in the past several months, including a heartbreaker, a thirty-seven-year-old single dad; I’ve started seeing the disease everywhere.

“Hey, asshole!”

The fisherman and I both turn. The red and white cigarette boat is stalling in the water about fifteen feet from where I sit, and its young captain has perched himself up on the deck, a pair of binoculars around his neck.

“You know who I am?” the kid shouts.

I stand to get a better look. It takes me a minute, but I do in fact know who he is: Roseanne Craig’s brother. A nasty piece of work; he used to torture his sister, my patient, Roseanne. They worked together on the floor of Craig Motors. He’s been bumping into me every so often these past few months, on line at the Grand Union, buying beer at Hopwood Liquors. He even slashed two of my Audi’s tires last September, before I traded in the Audi for the Escort, which I don’t think he recognizes as mine. An elderly patient saw him do it and called the cops, but I didn’t press charges.

“We’re gonna fucking have your ass, Dizinoff!”

Slowly I put my hands on my knees; slowly I stand up. “Are you stalking me, Craig?”

“We’re gonna fucking have your ass! I’m just telling you now! Get ready!” His voice is strained across the water.

“Have you really been stalking me?”

“I’m not stalking you, Dizinoff. I’m warning you.”

“Very kind of you,” I say. How did he know I would be at this park? Why does he have a cigarette boat? I look up and down the
river, not sure who or what I expect to find, but I expect to find something: a camera crew, the long arm of the law.

“I’ll get you!” the kid on the boat screams.

“You should get out of here,” the fisherman mumbles in my direction. He’s slitting open the side of a bluefish, the blade of his knife sliding neatly through the pearl gray skin. With a bare hand he slides out the fish’s entrails and throws them back into the river, where they roil for a moment before disappearing. I don’t want to get out of here. This is my park. This is a place that’s still mine.

“Kids like that …,” the fisherman warns.

“He doesn’t know me,” I say, absurdly.

“You never know what they’re gonna do.” He puts the bluefish fillets in his cooler, picks up the next wriggling fish, knocks its brain loose against the piling, and lets it rest on the bench to be gutted.

“Dizinoff, you listening to me? We’re going to have your ass! Decision comes fucking Monday. You listening, motherfucker?” The kid bends down into the cockpit of his boat, and despite myself, I shiver. From the interior, the kid removes something small, silver, shiny. Aims it at me. I take a deep breath. Squint, try to figure out what he’s holding.

A can of beer. For Christ’s sake.

Today is Saturday. On Monday, the judge will let us know whether she’ll take the Craig family’s case. On Tuesday, my wife will finally go see the lawyer about the divorce. And then I will know what’s what, and I can plan for the rest of my life.

“We’re gonna destroy you,” the kid says. Then he pitches the can of beer at me, unopened, surprisingly hard and fast. It hits my shin before I can move, stings like a bitch, falls to the pavement, and explodes, sending up a geyser of beer against my legs.

“You should get out of here, man,” the fisherman mutters, almost as if he’s talking to his fish.

A few feet away, the beer-can bomb rolls to a stop, foams, and hisses. I cross my arms against my chest. My pants are drenched, my heart is thrumming, the kid in the boat sneers but does not laugh.

“Are you crazy?” I shout.

The Soviet Union. Good and evil. Once upon a time I knew what was right and what was wrong.

“Fuck you, Dizinoff,” the kid calls, pulling out another can of beer, aiming it at me.

And I buck like the coward I am. Heart racing, I turn, run, trip, fall, rip my pants, stand up again. I make it to the car, reach into my pocket for my keys, try to ignore the blood matting the hair on my shins and my heart pulsing in my ears. I hear the cigarette boat turn and start slapping away along the river. He’s done with me, but my heart won’t quit—I am shaking when I sit down behind the wheel of the Escort. I lock every door. I feel parking-lot gravel buried in the cut in my leg.

By the water, the fisherman is still cutting up his catch. Waves from the wake of the cigarette boat splash up against the piling, but the fisherman doesn’t seem to notice them, or else he doesn’t mind. I see the boat slip down the Hudson like a pleasure cruiser, and I feel the blood trickle toward my shoe.

W
HEN
I first met Roseanne Craig, the girl was twenty-two, a Cal graduate, the daughter of an acquaintance from the JCC whose hypertension I had diagnosed maybe three years before. I didn’t know her dad particularly well, only enough to nod at him in the locker room, but he had a network of auto dealerships in Teaneck
and Paramus where Joe, among others, bought and serviced his Lincolns, Jeeps, and Cadillacs. Roseanne, just back from Berkeley, had been suffering from weight loss and mild depression, and her father, not knowing where else to go, had sent her to my office in Round Hill. I had a reputation, after all, for figuring things out.

Eyes clear, chest good, heart thwop-thwop-thwopping. No fluid in the lungs, no swelling in the hands or feet, no distended veins in the neck, no nodules on the thyroid or masses in the abdomen. No patient complaints besides the aforementioned weight loss — although she still cleared a solid 150 — and perhaps a generalized malaise.

“You’re sure you don’t want to see a psychiatrist?”

“Oh, I have a therapist,” she said. “She does reflexology, too.” Months later, when I told that to my lawyer, he snickered and made frantic notes.

Roseanne Craig was a pretty girl, tough-looking, with dark brown eyes and black hair. She had skeleton tattoos on her upper arms and another large one, I noticed, on her left breast. A frog. “It’s this whole story,” she told me, though I didn’t ask. The frog was surprisingly well done, one of those black-spotted jungle frogs, and it kept its lifelike eyes on me as I palpated.

“We used to call my ex-boyfriend Frogger.” She closed her eyes as I pressed my fingers on her breast, standard procedure in my office for several years now.

“Frogger, huh?”

“Hence the tattoo.” She didn’t seem the least bit depressed to me, but her skin was maybe a little yellow, and with the tattoos — I decided to order a hep test and kept her talking. “He dumped me three months ago” — aha! the malaise — “for a dude. He said it was accidental, like he hadn’t planned it or anything, but …” She sighed heavily as she buttoned up her shirt. “It was some grad student from
Stanford. He told me like a month after I got this fucking tattoo. We were going to move to SF together. Open up a Marxist bookstore. And I was going to bake brownies—like a Marxist bookstore-café. And now I’m living with my fucking parents. Sorry,” she said, wagging an eyebrow at me like a dare. “I shouldn’t curse around doctors.”

“Curse away.” We returned to my office, her combat boots clomping on the floor; Mina, my rather conservative Lithuanian office manager, took note of the boots and rolled her eyes.

“And so,” I asked, once we were back in my office, “with all this stress in your life, you haven’t been able to eat?”

“I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess. I’ve definitely lost weight. My clothes are loose.”

“How much weight, would you estimate?”

“Maybe eight, ten pounds? I don’t know,” she said. “This is all really my dad’s idea. Seeing you, I mean.”

“Okay,” I said. “Well, I think you’re probably fine, but I’m going to order some blood work just to make sure, and if you’re feeling depressed and you don’t like your therapist, come back to me and I can refer you to a” — I couldn’t help myself—“a real doctor.”

“Oh.” She sighed dramatically. “You’re part of
that
medical establishment, then.”

“I’m not sure which particular medical establishment you mean.”

“The one that disrespects alternative therapies. The one that would rather feed me antibiotics than send me to acupuncture.”

“Actually,” I said, leaning back in my chair, “I think antibiotics are overprescribed. I have no problem with acupuncture. And if your reflexologist is doing the job for you, that’s terrific. But I’d still like you to see a shrink.”

“I just never really liked shrinks much.”

“Some of them are nice.”

“Some of them are full of crap.”

“I’m recommending one to you who isn’t.”

“Promise?” she asked, smiling. She really wasn’t as tough as she first made out.

“Promise,” I said.

She tucked a piece of black hair behind her ear, smiled demurely, took the sheet I’d ripped from the prescription pad with the name and number of Round Hill Psychiatric.

When Roseanne Craig left my office, I never thought I’d see her again.

T
HE DRIVE FROM
the park back to Round Hill takes about fifteen minutes, although today I take the long way up to Route 9W, through the back roads of Rockleigh and Alpine. Up here, in winter, the trees are bare and you can see straight across the Hudson; in spring and fall, wild turkeys and deer congregate on the shoulder. Today somehow I miss my exit and have to double back to May-crest Avenue, Round Hill’s main drag. Down a long, steep hill to the heart of town, punctuated with speed traps, stoplights, and
DRUG FREE SCHOOL ZONE
signs. This is a town that likes to play it safe. My fingers are tight on the steering wheel.

Our prosperous little hill is divided into three parts, east to west: the School District, the Manor, and Downtown. The School District is geographic, not administrative, and named for the three square miles surrounding Round Hill Country Day—lush two-acre plots bearing Tudor palaces, Spanish-style haciendas, Georgian piles with helicopter pads and infinity pools. We’ve got celebrities up there, two or three well-known rap stars, the CEO of the hospital, and a handful of dermatologists, plastic surgeons, and orthopedists.

In the Manor, where Elaine and I live, the plots are more manage
able, three-quarters of an acre at most. The houses are mostly Victorians and colonials, sometimes a shingle-sided renovation, and a few 1980 “contemporaries” with birch siding set on a slant and trapezoidal windows. Downtown is literal, at the base of Maycrest Avenue; it’s where we keep our hospital, our businesses, our blacks, and the public school where nobody we know sends their children.

Still stinking of beer, with blood crusted on my jeans, I pull into the driveway of the pale green Victorian house on Pearl Street where Elaine and I have lived since 1982. We bought it for $125,000, fingers crossed and breaths held; Bert Birch had offered me a partnership with privileges at Round Hill Medical Center, and even though Elaine and I both thought, privately, No, not here, we don’t know anyone, how will we afford this? we kept our doubts entirely to ourselves and moved in. As soon as Joe was finished with his ob-gyn fellowship in Baltimore, we persuaded him and Iris to move to town, and they did, and we let out our breaths a little. But we’d been isolated and nervous that whole first year, and for some reason trying to get pregnant, too.