A Friend of the Family (21 page)

I
F YOU WERE CURIOUS,
by the way, about the end of my marital renaissance, it happened four years before we bought the Jeep — that would be five years from where I sit tonight — on a cool October evening in 2002, the night Elaine got into a fender bender on the turnpike with her five-speed Saab and I came home late from the hospital to find Iris commiserating with her at our kitchen table.

“What happened?”

“Oh, some kid slammed into me,” Elaine said. “Some asshole.”

“What do you mean?”

“A nineteen-year-old. And it took forever for the cops to come, and he didn’t want to give his insurance information and kept trying to write me a check to cover the damage so he could get the hell out of there.”

“You didn’t accept his check, did you?”

“Of course not, Pete!”

I went to the wine rack for some screw-top red we kept for occasions such as this.

“The kid was such a shmuck, really. One of those spoiled kids in a Beemer, but you could tell he was freaking out that his parents would find out he’d damaged the car. Chain-smoking. I wanted to tell him, Look, shithead, I’ve been cancer-free for eighteen months, I don’t need your nasty little carcinogens blowing my way on top of whatever’s rising off the turnpike.”

“Nobody’s hurt, right?”

She looked at me wryly. “Nobody’s hurt.”

“Where’s Alec?” It was nine o’clock, and he was grounded. He’d been busted for hanging out near the elementary school with Shmuley
and Dan only the week before. I had asked him repeatedly what he wanted with the elementary schoolers (the whole thing seemed much creepier to me than the bust with the ecstasy tablets; what teenager on earth wants to hang out near a K—8 unless he’s a pervert?), and he kept saying he was just “chilling,” they didn’t even realize they were
near
the elementary school, he swore to God, until finally he told me to fuck off and slammed the door.

“Where’s Alec?” I asked again.

“I don’t know,” Elaine said.

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“Jesus, Pete, I’ve had a hell of a day, all right?”

I sighed heavily and opened the refrigerator. There was nothing to eat, a half-opened can of tuna, some take-out Chinese that had been congealing for weeks. I slammed the refrigerator door and opened the pantry. Maybe we had a can of soup.

“Pete, would you calm down?”

“The kid is
grounded,
Elaine, or have you forgotten?” I didn’t want to raise my voice in front of company, but it was difficult to stop. “Elaine, the kid is
grounded.
He needs to start respecting some authority around here, okay? So that he doesn’t get in trouble with the cops again, okay?”

“Why are you yelling at me?”

“Why don’t you know where Alec is?”

She stood, and with a look on her face that reminded me of no one more than our son, she stomped out of the kitchen and up the stairs. I looked over at Iris.

“Where do you think he is?”

“Probably with his friends.” She poured herself some of our screw-top red and sat down with me at the kitchen table. Iris had been part of our lives for so long that she didn’t feel the need to leave when
things got ugly between us; in fact, that’s when she felt obliged to stay. “I’m sure he’s okay, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“It’s not really what I’m worried about,” I said. “I’m sure he’s fine.”

“So then?”

“I want him to start taking us seriously. If we say he’s grounded, he’s grounded. But he’s not going to take us seriously if Elaine keeps undermining us.”

“She had a bad day, Pete.”

“She had a fender bender.”

“A fender bender can make for a bad day. Especially on the turnpike.”

“Alec doesn’t respect us,” I said. “That’s the thing, he really doesn’t respect us at all. And we’re his parents. He should respect us.”

“And he will, when he’s older.”

“We love that little shit more than anyone else ever will.”

“He loves you, too, Pete. Come on,” she said. She sipped her red; it left a pale bluish stain on her teeth. “He’s just seventeen. It’s a horrible, horrible age.”

I stood, found some crackers in the pantry, a corner of cheddar in the fridge. I made myself a sandwich. It tasted good with the red. “He wasn’t like this two years ago.”

“And he won’t be like this two years from now either. But right now it’s hormones and senior year of high school and everything else. He’s a bastard right now, but it won’t last forever.”

“I wish he weren’t a bastard.” I sighed and refilled my glass. “Sometimes I actually hate him. You know what that feels like? To hate your own kid? But he talks to me with that mouth and I just …”

“I know,” she said.

“I want to kill him.”

“I know.”

It was perversely easy to talk to Iris about problems with my kid; I suppose knowing she’d had it worse than we did made me less ashamed of talking about how bad we had it.

“It will go away eventually,” Iris said.

“It will?”

“Or at least it will grow more dull, and there will be other feelings to mitigate it.” Her graying red hair was pulled back in a ponytail, and she was wearing a blouse with the top few buttons sloppily undone. A pair of thin chains around her neck. The skin on her neck dusted with freckles. I poured some more wine in her glass.

“I don’t hate Laura so much anymore. But I did for a long time.”

“How’d you stop?”

“I just did,” she said. “I’m not sure there’s a terrific process I can recommend for learning to forgive your children. Time makes us forget, that’s part of it. Time and age. And I didn’t want to spend my whole life hating my oldest child, so another part of it was a choice. I just chose to forget what she’d done, or chose to work at forgetting, and time did the rest.”

We were quiet for a while. I could hear the upstairs pipes start to gurgle; Elaine was running a resentful bath.

“The hardest thing for me was that I hated her even while I was helping her. I threw everything I had into protecting her, yet part of the time some secret part of me really just wanted to throw her to the wolves. To say, New Jersey, this is what she’s done, she’s ruined our lives, take her and do what you will.”

“But of course you couldn’t.”

She laughed a short, barking laugh. “I tried to explain my feelings to Joe once and he slapped me.”

“Joe?”

“The only time he’s slapped me in our entire marriage. Twenty-seven years. I decided I deserved it. But it was pretty hard. I had a bruise on my cheekbone. And afterward there was none of that ‘Oh baby, I’m so sorry,’ buying me jewelry and shit. I could tell if I brought it up again, throwing Laura to the mercy of the courts, he would have slapped me again just as hard.”

“Jesus.”

“I know,” she said, and I thought of Pauline at her kitchen table:
None of us can ever live up to Laura, his precious.
Not even Iris. What a fool.

We both polished off our glasses and refilled them, while upstairs the bath kept gurgling and I could hear the faint pulse of some kind of music Elaine liked, the Indigo Girls or Joni Mitchell.

“We’ll look back at this and laugh,” Iris said, the stain on her teeth growing darker. I imagined I had a matching one.

“He really hit you?”

She brushed her hand lightly across my cheek, high, where the cheekbone rises to meet the ocular depression. “Right there,” she said. “I told everyone I fell, just like in the movies.”

“It’s almost impossible to bruise that part of your face.” I reciprocated, reached out and touched her fragile cheekbone. “When you fall, instinctively you lean forward with your hands to catch yourself, even if you’re pushed against a wall or something. That’s why people break their wrists all the time; that’s the usual injury from a fall.”

“So then maybe my hands just weren’t working right that day.”

“Then you would have taken it on the chin,” I said. “The other instinct we have is to turn our heads to protect the tops of our heads, our eyes, our braincases.”

“So you’re saying the only way for a person to bruise her cheekbone is to get slapped.”

“Well, something could have fallen on you,” I said. “Maybe a car accident.”

“If Joe ever hits me again, I’ll know what to say.”

“I can’t believe he hit you.”

“I can’t believe I told you.” She shook her head, swirled her wine around in her glass. “That was one of those things I’d planned on taking to the grave.”

Without thinking about it, planning on it, I put my hand on her back and rubbed it gently, the way I would if a woman I was friendly with was telling me her troubles; right now a woman I was friendly with was telling me her troubles. But still I ran my hand along the back of her bra strap for just a second, and it was deliberate. I know, I know, all this good, neighborly life we’d built up over the years — forget it. I didn’t care. Iris kept her forehead in both her hands, looking down at our kitchen table. Or maybe her eyes were closed.

I ran my hand up and down her back, and who knows how much time passed. I only stopped when I heard the jostling at the door. Alec.

“I couldn’t get a ride,” he said, blind with his own self-regard, so that everything about the scene he confronted seemed normal, or invisible. “Before you fucking freak out.”

“Get upstairs,” I said. He marched past both of us. My hand had been back in my lap for whole seconds. I heard him stomp up the stairs two at a time.

Iris straightened up, then stood. “You should go have a talk with him.” My hand still prickled from where it had been touching her. I wondered if her back was prickling, too.

“Thanks for coming over,” I said.

“I came for Elaine.”

“Well, still.”

“Of course.”

I leaned down and moved slowly to her mouth (screw Joe, he’d slapped her; screw Elaine, she didn’t care about our kid), but at that millimoment where everything is decided, she turned her head. I like to think I did, too. I ended up brushing my lips just below the memory of her bruise.

“Good night, Pete.”

“Good night,” I said.

I stood by the doorway and watched her lights turn on, listened to her car start up, felt the pressure of her soft freckled skin against my lips. And that was the end of the renaissance. Everyone who’s ever had intentions knows they mean much more than actions do.

I
SLEPT WELL
last night, a surprise considering everything I’m expecting in the next forty-eight hours, and the fact that I didn’t get to bed until after one. Now it’s seven on the dot and my blankets are twisted around me and the pillow is on the floor.

Next door the Kriegers are warming up, something about cereal and who’s driving which kid to school. I look out from the west window; my house is still there and Alec’s Civic is in the drive. Today is Monday, and I should be in my office by nine, a healthy day of work ahead of me. Sometime this afternoon my lawyers will hear from the judge about the Craigs’ case. I wish I knew how to feel about this.

Just as I’m about to step in the shower, the Vivaldi pipes up again. Joe. Maybe I should pick it up. But I cannot think of what to say to him, and I still don’t want to know what he has to say to me. It’s cowardly, I know, and I’ve always hated cowards, but I just watch the phone until finally, after six rings, it switches over to voice mail. He’s leaving me a voice mail as I watch. A voice mail, brightly blinking, which I delete without stopping to check.

T
HROUGHOUT HIS ADOLESCENCE,
a time when hormones rage like the Mississippi after a storm, Alec seemed, as far as we could tell, as virginal as a churchly novice. Neither Elaine nor I had gotten enormous amounts of high school nooky, but still, there’d
been enough to assure our parents and peers we were normal. For me it was Karen Brauner, who later became a New York State senator; for Elaine, it was a future rabbi named Israel, who tried to get lucky after the movies every Saturday night and only succeeded once, just before Elaine left for Pitt.

But as for Alec, throughout his senior year at Round Hill Country Day he belonged to an exclusive and entirely male set: Dan, Shmuley, and whatever ingrates they’d picked up from the public school gymnasium. Which was strange, since he was a good-looking kid, give or take a piercing, and because he’d always had female friends growing up. I could clearly remember him running around with Stacy and Liza Beckerman, who used to live across the street, and hanging out at the mall with a mixed-gender group of kids in the sixth and seventh grades. But by his senior year he’d started leading a monkish existence, and he announced six months in advance that he had no intention of attending the prom.

“But why?” Elaine asked. Round Hill outdid itself every year come prom time, renting out a Manhattan nightclub and chartering stretch Hummers to drive the kids in, twenty at a pop.

“You wouldn’t understand.” The three of us were hanging out on a Sunday evening completely incidentally; Elaine was fine-tuning a lecture, I was watching a Nets game, and Alec was grounded.

“Try me.”

“Well, first of all I’m in prison, and who knows if my parole officers would let me go to a dance.”

“Very funny.”

“Second of all, I have no patience for that bourgeois bullshit. I need to ride a Hummer to the fucking Limelight to get wasted with a bunch of privileged assholes from Round Hill? I don’t think so.”

“Oh, come on,” Elaine said. “Isn’t that a little much?”

“Is it?” He had his long legs stretched out in front of the television,
was doodling something on a sketch pad. We’d have him home for eight more months, and despite ourselves and how happy we told each other we’d be to get rid of him, secretly I missed him just a little already. Which was preposterous. The kid was a nightmare.

“But isn’t there a nice girl you might like to ask?” Elaine said.

“Mom.”

“It’s your
prom,
Alec. I want to take pictures of you all dressed up in a tuxedo. It’s my right as a mother.”

“Elaine, I don’t think that’s his thing.”

“It’s not my thing, Mom.”

“I think that’s really too bad,” she said. “You guys can make fun all you want, but I think that’s just too bad. You only get one high school prom, you know.”

“One is more than enough.”

“I went to my prom,” she said, as if it mattered. “Your father went to his.”

“I wore a pink ruffled shirt,” I offered.

Alec gave me one of his rare smiles. “Pink ruffles?”

“I looked damn good.”

“I wore a blue taffeta dress,” Elaine reminisced. “Which I made myself on my mother’s sewing machine. We went to a fabric store downtown, which was a very big deal. And my date picked me up in his father’s Buick and I felt like Cinderella, I really did.”

“Well, look, if it makes you feel better, Mom, I promise to go to every dance they have at Hampshire.”

“There probably aren’t any dances at Hampshire,” she said. “That’s why you like that school. It’s a no-school-dances kind of school.”

“But if there are, I’ll go. And bring a nice young lady and send you lots of pictures.”

She tossed a cushion at him. “Stop teasing me.”

He laughed. So did I.

“So what is it, Al?” I was pushing my luck, but I wanted to know. “What do you have against the girls at Round Hill? You used to like them, didn’t you?”

“Ah,” he sighed. “It’s just hard for me to relate to them, I guess. Their priorities are so fucked up. Clothes and parties and image. It’s such adolescent bullshit.”

Elaine and I both quashed our smiles.

“Maybe it’ll be better in college,” she said mildly.

“It has to be.”

“Fingers crossed,” I said.

“Don’t be a dick,” Alec said.

But despite our son’s predictions, Hampshire, as far as we could tell, harbored few women of acceptable gravity. Most of the coeds we met when we visited seemed deliberately flaky, and their unwashed hair and unshaven legs didn’t suggest substance as much as a snotty lack of hygiene. During one particular drive back, Elaine mused, with a certain amount of bravado, that Alec might be gay, but I told her that it was unlikely, that in his early teens he’d carved so many huge palm-wood breasts.

“Would it bother you?” she’d asked.

“Bother me?”

“If he were, you know.” I gave her a long look. She was behind the wheel, and I was picking out a book on CD — either a biography of Napoleon or one of Robert Moses. She finished her thought loudly. “If Alec were gay.”

“Of course not.” But I was lying, and she could tell, and she rolled her eyes at me. I stuck the Napoleon in the stereo and listened to the opening credits. If Alec were gay, if my son were gay—I shuddered and then stopped myself from shuddering, started over. If Alec were
gay—well, sure, so what? The life I wanted for him was a career that gave him pleasure, a family, some material comfort — despite the lump in my throat, I knew that being gay wouldn’t necessarily prohibit any of that, although it would make it indisputably harder. And he’d be an outcast in so many communities. Professionally, socially, religiously. What did Jews think of homosexuality? Was there a specific doctrine? Were we as ugly about it as the Catholics?

“It wouldn’t bother me either,” Elaine said, and I couldn’t tell if she was serious. “It might take some adjusting to, but it would be okay.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“Sure I do,” she said, unwrapping a Power Bar with one hand. “If he’s happy, I’m happy.”

“You’re being a little glib, aren’t you?” “Glib?”

“Don’t you want grandchildren?”

“We could still have grandchildren,” she said. “They let gays adopt.”

“But your own grandchildren—”

“What, you mean biologically?”

“Yes,” I said. “Biologically.” Throughout all our conception troubles, we’d never spoken about adoption; it was a given that we wanted to raise our own child, our own genetic expression. No way were our ancestral evolutions going to end with us when we had so much to give.

Elaine seemed to give it some thought. “It doesn’t matter to me, really,” she finally said. “There are lots of babies in the world who need good homes. If Alec decides to adopt one day, or not have kids at all, well, it’s his life, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t believe that Elaine didn’t want to have grandchildren
with me. How could she not want our grandchildren? She was lying. She was being contrary.

“All I’m saying is I want Alec to be happy. If he were gay, it would be—well, it would be an interesting thing to adjust to. And of course if it were up to me, I’d like to see him happily married with a family of his own. That’s my idea of happiness. But it might not be
his
idea of happiness. So what do you want me to say?”

“I want you to say you want grandchildren.”

“Of course I want grandchildren,” she said. “Didn’t I say that?”

“No.”

“Okay, fine. I want grandchildren. But I can’t control whether I have any, so I’m not going to worry about it.”

I turned the Napoleon back up. A mother in Corsica went into labor on a sweltering August day in 1769 as orchestral music swelled around us.

“What’s that look?”

“I think you’re full of crap, Elaine. I think if twenty years from now we don’t have any grandchildren, it’s going to break your as-long-as-he’s-happy heart.”

She shrugged, signaled a lane change—she always signaled a good minute before she actually shifted—then checked her rearview and blind spot.

“Pete, would you want Alec married and miserable for your sake or happy and alone for his?”

“Married and miserable,” I said, “as long as there were grandchildren.”

“You’re turning into a crazy old man before my eyes.”

“I want grandchildren. I don’t think there’s anything crazy about that. Every parent wants grandchildren. You can laugh all you want, but I refuse to bend my position even two inches.”

“Oh, Pete,” she said. We drove into Hartford, that miserable city with all those half-empty skyscrapers and nowhere to stop for a decent bite. She chewed on her PowerBar. “I guess you win.”

“Good.” This was, of course, my favorite way for our arguments to end.

“But you’ve got to tell me something,” she said. “Promise me that even if Alec
is
gay, or if he decides he doesn’t want to get married, or if he doesn’t want children, you’ll still accept him because he’s your son. And love him just the same.”

“Accept him or be happy about it?”

“I know you won’t be happy,” Elaine said. “But just tell me you won’t be ridiculous, won’t sever all ties or something nutty like that.”

“He’s my only child,” I said. “I would never sever all ties.”

“Good,” she said, and we kept driving. In Corsica, the land was rugged, damp, and thorny. The young Napoleon grew up surrounded by rocky cliffs and turbulent seas. Even as a small child, he was rambunctious, tenacious, a conqueror. It wasn’t until we passed the last exit for Hartford that it occurred to me that Elaine had actually won the argument.

So
WITH ALL
this anxiety about Alec’s sexuality and his dating life and my perhaps premature fixation about whether he would gift us with any grandchildren, you’d think that on a particular Sunday morning ten months ago today I would have been happy to hear some odd bumping, murmuring sounds coming from his room when I got up very early to head to the courts. An odd sort of bumping, a fumbling, muttering sound, and for a second before it hit me, I thought there was a raccoon trapped in the walls.

Thump. Thump. Laughter.

And then I got it, and I stood in the hallway listening to my son make love as quietly as he could and felt a hideous, terrifying chill all over my body.

There was more laughter. More thumping.

In our house? He had to do this in our house? I stood frozen, listening. I was in my gym shoes, my shorts. I felt like a fool, that’s what it was — as if he was making a fool of me right there in my own house, making love to Laura Stern, our best friends’ oldest daughter, a murderer, making love to her in the bed we’d bought him under the roof we’d bought for him in the home we’d made for him, which he’d lived in all his life. How little respect he had for us—how little respect any of them had for us! We were foolish, idiotic, the relics of another age. Obsolete. He was the future. And this was what he was doing with himself.

I stood there until the noises stopped. Then I bolted down the stairs and out of the house, slammed the car shut, and got to the JCC courts early enough to have them to myself. I lost myself in the pulsing sound of it, ball against hardwood, ball against backboard, ball swishing through net and bouncing down again. I dribbled furiously, laying up shot after shot. I was sweating through my T-shirt, so I took it off and threw it to the bleachers on the side of the room. I made eight, nine, ten layups in a row. I jumped up and dunked the ball into the basket. It felt great, so I did it again.

But sometimes it happens when a person loses himself in physical exercise—he doesn’t want it to happen, but it does — that images or feelings he’s tried to suppress for hours or even days come rushing into his head amid all that sweat and adrenaline. My guard was down. I couldn’t help it. As I dribbled the ball up and down the empty court, the Round Hill Municipal Library bathroom swam in front of my eyes, and it was my own granddaughter in the sink, three
months premature, eyes still blind, desperately waving her arms, waiting for someone to save her. But nobody knew she was there. And in the corner of my vision, a flash of Laura Stern’s red hair gleamed as she approached with a hammer, to smash in my desperate, wailing granddaughter’s skull. I tried to put myself in the picture. I tried to take the baby out of the sink. I cradled the basketball in my arms, but I couldn’t change the way I saw what happened in my mind. In the Round Hill Municipal Library bathroom, I was nowhere to be found.

S
TILL, HE’D GOTTEN
into the New School. I kept reminding myself of that as I showered, dressed, drove across the bridge for no particular reason, found myself at the Fairway grocery store, throwing strange items into my shopping cart to keep myself distracted. Miniature blinis. French beets. He’d gotten into the New School. And not once did I make any jokes about the tuition prices, not once did I say anything about how he’d better not mess up this time. He’d gotten into the New School, I’d sent my patient on the board a bottle of very good cabernet, and I kept my fingers crossed and my mouth shut and knew that in just one month he’d be back in classes, and in a mere two years (we should live to see the day) his mother and I would stand up at graduation and cheer as he threw his mortarboard in the air.