A Friend of the Family (26 page)

No passport, and the packed luggage: he’d never meant to talk to us again about school. He’d never meant to talk to us about anything. I picked up the phone next to his bed and started calling airlines — Air France, American, Continental—but none of them would release passenger information to me, much less tell me if they had an Alec Dizinoff and a Laura Stern booked on some future flight, exact date and time unknown. On his desk sat the shiny New School catalog. Had he
ever
intended to go? Was the whole thing a gigantic setup? When I came home four months ago and found those
brochures — did he intend to go
then?
Or was he just looking to make a fool of me? Did he have some sort of perverse agenda against me even then?

I looked at his suitcase, his gorgeous, beautiful Samsonite suitcase, which he was supposed to take to college and keep there for four whole years. I opened up the window—it was stiff, it stuck, but I did it — and then I picked the thing up in both my hands. I threw it as hard as I could into the New Jersey night, into the yard and the property we’d bought and paid for all those years ago, we’d bought and paid for all for him, we’d picked this life out all for him.

And then I went to bed.

I heard Alec creep up the stairs at two in the morning. If he noticed his suitcase was gone or his window was open or his garbage was newly scattered all about his room, I suppose this is just one more thing I will never know.

I
T WAS STILL
dark out when I woke up, but there was no falling back asleep, and I didn’t want to. I threw on my clothes, kissed Elaine on the forehead, and crept out of the house. No pager, no cell phone — I wasn’t sure where the day would take me, but I knew I didn’t want to be tracked. I was surprised at how many Round Hill lights were on this early on a Saturday, and people on the streets — dog walkers, a pair of intrepid joggers, a mother pushing a stroller around the block, still in her robe.

It was six thirty. I took myself to the Old Lantern to suck down coffee and a western omelet. I felt a heightened sense of myself, my pulse in my wrists and my temples; if I were another sort of man, I might have been on the fringe of an anxiety attack. But I took deep breaths and forced my breath to steady, and it did. Despite my best efforts, my mind pushed back fifteen years ago to that morning Joe Stern asked me for help spiriting his daughter away to Mexico. Her trial was still six months in the future and nobody knew what that future would bring. If only we had managed to get that girl to Mexico, everything would be different now, my whole story would be different, but it’s hard to know fifteen years in advance what you’ll hope for so long down the line.

Through the plate glass window, scratched with late-night teenage
graffiti, the sun came up. The bleary-eyed waitress refilled my coffee mug and the diner scene sprang alive: seniors, postal clerks, public-course golfers, a few cops sleepy from a night patrolling downtown Round Hill. Crime figures were up this quarter, and I knew more than a few Manor and School District ladies who now bought their groceries exclusively in Hopwood rather than risk a parking lot mugging in our own downtown Grand Union. There’d been a reported rape near the John F. Kennedy Gardens two months earlier. Two of our Round Hill public school kids, eighteen-year-olds, acquaintances — the details were blurry, but still, a rape. For people who noticed or cared about these things, Round Hill property values had suddenly ticked downward.

I poured ketchup on my hash browns. I watched the television play silently above the counter. ESPN. A few feet in front of me, sitting right up at the counter, but I hadn’t even noticed until now, was Officer Barnes, the nice old cop who’d done us a favor and kept Alec in the clink that night five years ago, after the elementary school bust. He’d done as decent a scared-straight job as a twinkly-eyed old geezer could do, spent the whole night reminding Alec about every subcode in the New Jersey drug enforcement act. It did the trick back then, and Alec seemed relatively reformed when we picked him up at six in the morning. Never again, guys, he swore. I mean it. I’m so sorry. Never again.

From the counter up front, Officer Barnes waved at me and smiled. He was tucking into an enormous plate of the Saturday special, steak and eggs. Did he remember me or did he think I was someone else? And how were we supposed to fight serious Round Hill crime with the jolliest police force this side of the Mississippi? I took a sip of my coffee and waved back. My heart, which I’d propped up with grease and caffeine, was sinking fast. I left a twenty on the counter and
disappeared out to the parking lot, where morning’s first dewy light was still shining on the cracked concrete.

I put on my sunglasses and headed up toward the Palisades. I can’t honestly say that a plan was forming in my mind, that I had any particular course of action. If I knew anything, it was that Laura Stern was my last hope, and only by talking to her might I possibly get some understanding of what she and Alec were up to. If nothing else, their plan sounded so ridiculously vague—I knew that Alec would do nothing to clear those plans up for me. At the very least I had to know what they were thinking they were going to do. Didn’t I deserve at least that? Maybe Laura would be able to inform me of pertinent information like
where
in Paris (even foreign cities have neighborhoods) and
how
they were going to get housing and
when
they planned on returning and of course, most important,
why, why, why, why, why.

Why, Laura?

This should have been his senior year. If he wanted to go to Paris that badly, I would have taken him.

The Palisades to the George Washington Bridge. Six-dollar toll. Traffic on the FDR. Construction at seven thirty on a Saturday morning, and I was stuck at a full stop in that hideous, half-crumbling underpass. I watched the sunlight shine down on Queens, a tugboat slog its way up the East River. Above me the lovelies of Sutton Place were just rising from their featherbeds. I tapped my fingers on the steering wheel. I turned the radio on, listened to sports radio for the asinine repetitiveness of it. This is Mike from Massapequa Steve from Seaford Bernie from Bay Ridge Richie from Rockland I want to talk about Jeter Randolph Matsui Rodriguez Reyes the Giants the Knicks the Rangers but nobody had a word to say about my poor Nets, who’d made it to the playoffs once again this year and collapsed, once again,
in the second round. The traffic started to move. I turned off the radio.

It didn’t take much cruising off the Houston exit to find Avenue A Yoga, nor did it take much detective work to find the button marked
CHANG/STERN
in the retrofitted brownstone right above it. I had been fortunate enough to find a parking spot right across the street and watched my car as I buzzed up.

And buzzed up.

And buzzed up.

If she thought she was getting away from me this easily, she was a fool; I would sit on the stoop and wait all day. What did I care? I had nothing else to do.

I buzzed up.

“What is it?
” Through the exhausted fury of the voice, it was hard to tell if this was Stern or this was Chang.

“Laura?”

“Yes? Who is this?”

“It’s Pete Dizinoff. Dr. Pete. I want to talk to you.”

She was quiet on the other end for many seconds. This was rude; simple manners said that she should greet me and inquire about how I was doing or, more courteously, let me in. I was an old family friend.

“What do you want?”

“I need to talk to you.”

“About?”

“Laura, can you please just let me in?” I made no promises, like I won’t take up too much of your time, or I just need to ask you about a few things. I had no idea how much time I would take and I had no sense of what we would, in the end, really get down to talking about. I still had a baby picture of Alec in my wallet. If I had to, I would force her to stare at it to get her to understand.

She buzzed me up, and I took the stairs up two floors in a clean, renovated, wallpapered hallway. There was only one apartment per floor, which meant the apartments were nice-sized, which meant that Joe and Iris had set Laura up well, since how on earth would that girl be able to afford Manhattan rent on her own?

“Dr. Pete?” She was still in her nightclothes. Short silk shorts, a lacy blue top, a fluttery little blue robe. As if she’d posed for a Victoria’s Secret campaign before getting out of bed. I thought of her sitting in my kitchen a few weeks ago, her finger on my forearm. I thought of Iris in her white bikini all those previous summers, idly eating breakfast in a kitchen in Rehoboth.

“Dr. Pete?” Laura said again.

“I’m sorry to barge in this early,” I said, embarrassed, suddenly, for both of us.

“That’s okay,” she said. “I understand.” She did? “Want some coffee?”

“Sure.” So we were going to be cordial about this. Good. She led me into the kitchen and sat me down at a little wooden table that got perfect eastern light.

“My roommate’s not in. Otherwise she would have freaked out when you buzzed. Wendy really needs her beauty sleep. A person is not allowed to make any noise before eight a.m. weekdays, ten a.m. on the weekends, and if you do, you have to bear terrible consequences.”

“That sounds burdensome,” I said. I watched her slim back as she took coffee out of the freezer, measured it into the filter. Her red hair was piled on top of her head. In another life, another kitchen, this was Iris.

She said, “I’m pretty good at keeping quiet.”

So we were quiet while she made the coffee, and listened together to the pot burble and steam. I understood then at least part of what
was so seductive about Laura—any woman who can make strong coffee in lingerie in a Manhattan apartment can look like a miracle to a middle-aged suburban guy—but I still didn’t understand what a woman like this could possibly want with my poor, addled son.

“So you want to talk about Paris, right?” she said when the mugs were in front of us, sugared and creamed.

“I just need you to help me understand what this is about.”

“There’s not much to it, Dr. Pete,” she said. “I have some friends in Paris that I met during the
vendange
last fall. Some really nice guys with connections in the fashion business. They’re opening up a clothing store near Les Halles—it used to be the main food market for Paris, but then it got demolished and they built this mall and these parks instead. It’s a touristy part of the city,” she said, “and they need someone to help them with the English-speaking customers. Hence,
moi.”

“Fine,” I said. “But what about Alec?”

“He wants to come.”

“And what will he do when he gets there?”

She tipped a little more sugar into her coffee. “I really have no idea,” she said. “Help out around the store, I guess, although I told him I couldn’t be sure there’d be enough work. Maybe he could sell his paintings on the street. People do that, you know, in that neighborhood.”

“You want him to sell his paintings on the street.”

“Why not?” She sipped her coffee, and it suddenly occurred to me that it was quite possible she didn’t care about my son at all.

“Laura, if I ask you something, will you answer honestly?”

“I’ll do my best.” She scratched at a pale reddish eyebrow.

“Why do you want my son with you in the first place?”

She laughed. “Why wouldn’t I?”

“Do you know what it will mean to have a twenty-one-year-old tagging along with you in Paris? A kid who’s never been there before? Who doesn’t have a job? Who doesn’t speak French?”

“You make him sound so
helpless
,” she said. “He’ll be selling his paintings. And he wants to go to all the big museums, see the major art.”

“And then what?”

“Then what?”

“Where do you plan on living?”

“My friends have an extra room to start,” she said. “And then I’m sure we’ll find a place of our own.”

“Ah.” We said nothing else for a minute. I watched a pigeon perch on the fire escape outside her window, cooing nervously. I tried to see Laura as a little girl again, the daughter of my oldest, dearest friends. I looked at her, looked through her, saw her in her baby carriage, Elaine and me walking her through Fairmount Park, along the Schuylkill River, Boathouse Row. I remembered her toddling around, jelly on her T-shirt, a cup of apple juice in her hand. I remembered her carrying books under her arms, oversleeping all those mornings in Rehoboth. I refused to think about the handicapped bathroom in the Round Hill Municipal Library and all that had transpired after.

“What about visa issues?” I finally asked.

She laughed again. “We’ll be paid off the books, Dr. Pete.”

“I see.”

“It’s no big deal.”

“Of course not.” Somehow, oddly, I was heartened at how half-assed this all sounded. If they’d had a plan, an excellent plan, I would have been more alarmed. “Laura, you can understand why I’m not thrilled at the idea of Alec going off to Paris with you.”

“I know,” she said. “Of course I know.” And she actually reached out and patted my arm as if I were the child here and she were the one
explaining certain hard truths. “But the thing is, Alec really wants this. He really wants to go. So who am I to tell him he shouldn’t?”

“Laura, you care about Alec, don’t you?”

She laughed again, a condescending, infuriating laugh. “Alec is one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met, Dr. Pete. He’s smart and dedicated to his art and to what he believes in—”

“He’s a kid.”

She waved her hand across her face. “Listen, I’ve explained it to him that Paris will be hard, that we won’t have a lot of money, that we won’t know a lot of people. And for a guy like him, who’s grown up with every comfort, it could be tough. But he doesn’t mind. He says he doesn’t need a lot of money, a lot of community.”

“Laura, he’s saying that because he’s an infatuated kid. A kid! As long as he’s with you, he doesn’t care about anything else.”

She stood to refill our coffee mugs. “It’s sweet, isn’t it?”

“Sweet? Are you joking?”

Something occurred to me: her roommate was gone, she was wearing this sexy lingerie, but still Alec had come home in the middle of the night. “Why isn’t he here?”

“Oh, he wanted to stay,” she said. “But sometimes I have to send him home, you know? I think it’s better for us if we don’t spend every single second together.”

“What do you think it will be like in Paris?”

“Alec understands me, Dr. Pete. He knows I can’t be around other people all the time. Sometimes I just need my space. Alec gets it. He understands.”

“Laura, if you told Alec to dress up in a clown costume and climb the Empire State Building, he’d pretend to understand. That’s how infatuated twenty-one-year-olds behave.”

“I think he deserves more credit than that,” she said.

“You do, huh?”

She sat back down again with our mugs, then reached to a drawer behind her for her cigarettes, her lighter, and her ashtray. “Sure,” she said. “My question is, why don’t you?”

It was galling to be told how little credit I was giving my son, but still I was impressed with my own fortitude, my ability to sit in that lovely, sun-filled kitchen with Laura Stern in her underwear and not get loopy with rage. Her voice was grumbly in the morning, even before her first cigarette of the day, but as she lit up and blew smoke in my eyes, I was still thinking as clearly as I ever had.

“Look,” I said. “I have enormous respect for my son. I think he’s a terrific person, a talented person, a kind and generous person. If I thought less of him, I wouldn’t be quite so bothered by his desire to run off to Paris with you. Perhaps you can understand that.”