A Friend of the Family (25 page)

“Could we not talk about this right now?” Elaine said. “Please?”

“I’m sorry, Mom.”

I just continued to glare at him.

“Next week,” Elaine said. “For me, okay? Do me a favor, just cool it for one week. You can talk about this again, but in the meantime, don’t withdraw yet, okay, Alec? Okay? And we’ll talk about this more on Friday.”

“But—”

“Please,” Elaine said. She wiped her nose with her wrist. “Friday night, you two can get together and talk about all of this. But not until then. Give it a week. Please.”

“Fine,” Alec said. He was chastened.

I stood, stormed into the kitchen, slammed the door, slammed some dishes in the sink. I wiped the champagne flutes off the counter in one furious gesture and let them smash on the floor.

Elaine had had fifty-three happy birthdays before this one. God knows you can’t win them all.

I
WENT TO
work Monday morning determined not to let Alec’s temporary insanity disrupt my entire week. Between appointments, on the exam room phone, I called the New School registrar to make sure the kid hadn’t withdrawn; he hadn’t. I asked them, if he called, not to let him, but they said that wasn’t really in their power. I begged. They said no. I hung up.

I had a packed day at the office, which was terrific as far as keeping me distracted went; if I was lucky, there’d be some huge crisis right around seven o’clock, which would keep me in the hospital until I was too exhausted to think straight. Elaine and I hadn’t talked about Alec the whole weekend. We went about our separate lives and were cordial with each other even as we chose to dine separately — our heads, such as they were, buried in work. As for Alec, he was doing triple shifts at Utrecht and, of course, crashing in the city. I’d had a passing idea to call Joe and talk to him about this, but as I picked up the phone my hand froze and suddenly I couldn’t talk to him, knowing what I might say. It occurred to me that part of me—most of me—blamed him for this. Which was unreasonable, of course. But if children are the sum of their parents, what the hell did Laura say about him?

So Monday I showed up at the office with no small relief and was soon crushed with patients. An arthritic hairdresser I’d been watching for years, two new diabetics, a few squeezed-in semiemergencies, a hypochondriacal magazine editor with chest pains who thought she was having a heart attack but had actually just strained a muscle in Pilates. A teacher with pretty bad bronchitis. And then a round of college students in for their physicals, armed with somber-looking sheets I had to sign off on.

During lunch, I asked Mina to put in a call to April Frank’s office to see if she could squeeze Roseanne in. That evening, luckily for me,
but of course not for them, two of my patients were admitted to the ER with various middling-to-serious complaints, so I stuck around to hold their hands as specialists came by and did the voodoo that they did so well. I made rounds. I grabbed a dinner at the hospital cafeteria: chicken piccata, raspberry Jell-O. I thought about going to the JCC, but when I looked at my watch I saw it was almost ten. I drove home, making up a long route, onto the Palisades for no particular reason, and by the time I got home, the lights were out as I’d suspected they’d be.

The week progressed in this same busy fashion: Janene came back from Nantucket midweek with a box of homemade caramels for the office—this is what she did when she went on vacation, sat around with her kids and went swimming and made candy. It was a distinctly female thing, I thought, to bring presents for the office; never once when I’d gone away had it occurred to me to bring anything back for anyone other than myself, and when Vince Dirks traveled — usually to some godforsaken place to shoot long-range photographs of squalor—all he brought back was some kind of stomach bug or strange rash or both. Elaine started classes. I got Roseanne an appointment in two weeks’ time to see April, who was apologetic but overwhelmed by the number of patients she had clamoring at her door.

But still, my stomach rumbled with the thought of my oncoming conflagration with Alec on Friday night. Of course there was some kind of chance he would return to reason, decide to go to the New School as we’d agreed, and put thoughts of Paris and Laura out of his head. There was even some small chance that Laura herself had come to her senses and decided that Paris would be a lot more interesting without a twenty-one-year-old who didn’t speak a word of the language tugging at her sleeve the whole time. True, my hopes were dampened a little by a Wednesday afternoon call from my brother,
who told me that Alec had asked his cousin Lindsey for some lastminute French lessons. “What the hell is with that kid this time?”

I could feel the heat start to rise in my chest. “He’s thinking of studying abroad,” I said.

“Don’t you need to actually be studying something to study abroad?” I could imagine Phil leaning forward on his ebony desk in his office on the forty-fifth floor. Calling me in between five-hundred-dollar billable hours just to bust my ass.

“He’s starting the New School in the fall,” I said, heat rising faster now, up my neck, my cheeks. Phil was silent. “Did someone tell you otherwise?”

“French isn’t such a useful language, Pete. Someone should mention to him, if he really wants to find himself a constructive pursuit, many of the gardeners and restaurant workers in the New York area rely on Spanish.”

“Fuck off, Phil.”

“Just trying to be helpful, Pete.”

I don’t know which one of us hung up first.

But it did occur to me that week, when I was at my most exhausted, that maybe the proper tactic to take here would just be to relent. Alec would go to Paris, run out of money or patience, yearn for home. Or he and Laura would start to grow apart, and then, alone and unable to find work in a town notoriously unfriendly to outsiders, he’d bide his time for a while before returning to our doorstep, cap in hand, as they say. Or he’d go, they’d have a big fight, and he’d come right home in time to get to school with only a week’s worth of missed classes and very little schoolwork to make up. No matter what, he’d be back at school eventually, which was the important thing.

But it wasn’t lost on me that this was his senior year, or rather it was supposed to have been his senior year, and that next May there’d
be a round of graduation parties for the likes of Neal Stern among others, and we would have to answer endless questions about what Alec was up to — or worse, our neighbors and associates would know better than to ask. Sure, it might sound grand to say, Oh, he’s living in Paris now. But I would know what was at the rotten heart of that: our son working at some Tunisian-owned clothing store and serving as the plaything of a woman half again his age. And I wouldn’t be able to look any of my neighbors or associates in the eye, because it would be likely I wouldn’t have spoken to my son in months or even a whole year.

And this was what was on my mind when I bumped into Joe in the hospital cafeteria.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked casually. Joe tended not to eat in the hospital cafeteria unless he’d just gotten off a delivery and was starving; otherwise, his practice liked to order in.

I shrugged and loaded up my tray with baked chicken, salad, and a Coke and watched as Joe assessed the steam-table options with a finicky glint in his eye. Oh, for Christ’s sake, take the chicken, it won’t kill you.

“Just trying to figure out how to get my kid not to ruin his life.”

“Sorry?”

“Just trying to get Alec not to—” And then it occurred to me. “Joe, you know, right?”

“Know what?”

“That they’re moving?”

“Who’s moving?” he asked. “Moving where?”

Oh, Joe, my ignorant brother. We paid up and found an empty table in the corner of the room. “Joe, this will probably sound as insane to you as it did to me, but you should know that our children are planning to move to Paris together in a week and a half.”

“Paris? Paris, France?”

“I thought you knew.”

“How would I know?”

At least our own kid had the courtesy to give us some warning. “Evidently Laura knows some Tunisians with a clothing business in Paris,” I said. “Alec thinks he’ll get a better education in the arts if he just, I don’t know, hangs out with her and absorbs the fumes.”

“She’s leaving?” He looked down at his plate, arranged his fork on his melamine tray. “Already?”

“Joe, you didn’t talk to her about this? She hasn’t said anything?”

“I thought she liked it in the East Village,” he said. “I mean, her roommate’s been a little difficult, but she was supposed to get a job, she was looking into it. There’s a yoga studio downstairs from her, Avenue A Yoga. She thought maybe she could get certified to teach.”

“I guess there’s been a change of plans.”

“I guess so.” He sighed. He rubbed his bald spot.

“Any chance you could maybe, I don’t know, say something to her? Tell her this is—”

“You know, I really enjoyed having her around,” Joe said, picking at his chicken. “It’s been so long since we got to spend time with each other, got to know each other a little,” he said. “It’s been so long.”

So this was where we were. My son’s future was in the toilet and Joe was strumming his sad guitar. “Look, I don’t think—”

“Remember that day we all went to the museum? Wasn’t that a great day?” Christ. “I thought to myself, at the end of that day, that this was the sort of thing I’d been missing, the company of my oldest daughter alongside the company of my oldest friend. We were driving home, and I was thinking about how many good times we’d missed over the years because Laura hadn’t been there.”

“That’s what you were thinking about?”

“Yeah,” he said, a little abashed. “I know, I know, but I’ve always had a soft spot for that girl, Pete.”

“I’m not sure you have to write her requiem just yet.”

“It’s just with Pauline leaving for college, I consoled myself that at least Laura was back in town. That even though my youngest was leaving, my oldest was back in my life.”

I let my breath out heavily. “Maybe you can talk to her?”

His head drooped. “There’s never any talking to her. Once she gets it in her head to go somewhere, she goes. She was at her aunt Annie’s house, I remember, until she just decided one day to pack up and leave. Annie was frantic. Turns out she’d left a note. Same, really, with the goat farm. She could have stayed, even though the place got sold, but she decided she wanted to go pick grapes or something. So she left.”

“Well, maybe this time you could ask her to stay.” I didn’t know how to explain my position delicately. “It would be helpful to me, Joe, if you asked her to stay.”

“Why do you think she’d listen to me?”

“Because she’s your daughter?”

“So?” He laughed. “Look, ever since Laura’s trial, her time at Gateway, she’s—well, she hasn’t really been compliant, to say the least. I could get on my knees and beg her to stay, tell her how much it would mean to me, to you, but she’d just give me that sad, condescending look she has and tell me that the spirits are calling her, whatever, she has to go. How could I stop her?”

“You could tell her she’s forbidden.”

He laughed out loud. “Pete, you can’t forbid a thirty-year-old woman to do what she wants to do. No matter how much you’d like to.”

“Alec was supposed to enroll in college,” I said bitterly.

“And Laura was supposed to get a job.” But Laura wasn’t the tragedy here. Laura wasn’t the colossal tragedy. Or maybe she was once, but that was a long time ago.

“Listen, I’ve got to go,” I said. I’d eaten three bites of my chicken. I stood. “So what are you going to say to her?”

“What can I say?” He shrugged. “I’ll tell her I love her. Maybe Iris and I will make plans to visit. You and Elaine could come. We could all go to the Louvre together. Another museum trip.”

“Are you serious?”

“Sure,” he said. Innocent as a lamb. I shook my head at him and stormed out of the cafeteria, into my car, and back to the office, where unfortunately I was too early for my next patient and had to stare out the window for nine infuriating minutes, biting my nails and doing everything in my power not to pick up the phone, call Iris, and tell her to put her fucking foot down right this instant, since her husband was too much of a pussy to get the job done.

F
RIDAY NIGHT ARRIVED
full of dreadful expectation. I had assumed that Alec would meet me at the house by dinnertime for our scheduled parley. Our man-to-man. But when I got home at six, he was nowhere to be found. Nor at seven, nor at eight, nor at nine or nine thirty. “Where is he?”

Elaine shook her head. “Did you try his cell?”

I tried his cell. No answer.

“I thought we had an appointment to talk about Paris tonight,” I said. “To explain to him our point of view.”

“He knows our point of view,” she said.

I didn’t want to lose my temper. “To make him
acknowledge
it. To make him understand.”

“I’m sure he’s coming home,” Elaine said. She’d been on the treadmill
in the living room until my pacing became intolerable. She and I had done a terrific job of not talking about this, and we weren’t going to start now. I tried to watch some of her television program, some kind of cop show, but I couldn’t concentrate on the imbecile plot; I kept listening for Alec on the front steps, trying his cell phone every ten minutes.

“Where is he?”

“I guess at Laura’s? Or at the store?”

I tried the store. He wasn’t there.

“Do you have Laura’s number?”

“You could call Joe.” I couldn’t call Joe. I bit off the last remaining corner of my thumbnail and stormed upstairs.

“Where are you going?” I didn’t answer. Alec’s room was a mess — Coke cans, art supplies, and, God help me, a few torn condom wrappers — but there, on the floor, was his Samsonite, the suitcase we’d bought him to take to college. I opened the thing up. Neatly packed, all ready to go. I thought perhaps if his passport was in there, I could just take it. I could just take his passport and destroy it and then he wouldn’t be able to go anywhere, much less Paris. I went through his clothing, layer by layer, the side pockets, the zipped outside pocket. No passport.