A Friend of the Family (3 page)

I put the Escort in park and look up at our house. Elaine’s Jeep is in the driveway, and so is Alec’s Civic. I wonder if they’re spending the afternoon together, maybe sharing last weekend’s crossword, a simple pleasure for them both. I know how happy Elaine is to have our son back. To be honest, he’s a better housemate than I’ve ever been, neater, more considerate, and, unlike me, he enjoys most of the things his mother does. At night, from the studio, I can hear them play their favorite music: that Cuban band from the movie, some African chanting Alec picked up from a friend who went in for the Peace Corps. It all sounds like high-end restaurant music to me, but who cares what I think? Not these two. No reason to.

Does Roseanne’s brother come here? I wonder. Does he know
where my wife and child sleep? Does he care about them, or is his rage only directed toward me? I reach down and wipe my bloody leg, pull out a tiny piece of gravel. I was a coward, but so was the kid. Throwing beer cans. Screaming obscenities.

I roll down the window but the house is quiet, although I see lamplight burning from behind the living room shades. Reproduction Tiffany lamps that we bought in Bedford during our marital renaissance, six years ago now. She’s done the crossword by them ever since. If Craig has come to the house, if he’s stood outside, maybe he’s watched her complete the Sunday. If he touches her, even thinks of touching her, I swear to God I’ll kill him without a blink.

Elaine and I have known each other for more than half our lives. She’s watched over me. She still watches over me, despite the doubts about me that she regrettably holds. As I watch, the Tiffany lamps go dark, and a minute later, after she’s fetched her jacket, her purse, and her keys, my wife stands at our front door, looking out at me in my little white Escort. I wave at her. She blinks, smiles sadly, and waves back. She’s kept her hair short in recent years, and she’s put on forty pounds, but I can remember her clinging to my side back in college, eating cinnamon rolls in Rehoboth, and if I could only scroll back time and do it again, every day would be a renaissance.

“You coming in?” she calls from the top step of our porch.

“You going out?” I ask.

She pulls her jacket around her shoulders and nods.

“I think I’ll sit here for a while,” I say.

Elaine has grown used to what could kindly be called my eccentricities. She shrugs, descends from the porch, and steps lightly to her car. She swings her purse at her side. It breaks my heart to see her go.

L
OOKING BACK, AS
my circumstances often suggest that I do, I see my thirties and forties as a vast steppe; only occasionally did the landscape bulge or dip. Bert Birch had brought me in because he was heading into his midfifties and his wife had been warning him for twenty years that she’d leave him if he didn’t find a partner and take a vacation with her once a year. In 1982, Bert was fifty-five, an old-fashioned kind of doctor in an old-fashioned kind of office with one nurse, one secretary, and half a day off on Wednesdays. He kept
Popular Mechanics
in the waiting room; occasionally, quietly, he made house calls. He ran a comfortable, neighborly practice, and although he was based at Round Hill Medical Center, most of his patients came from the less swanky communities down the valley: Bergen-town, Hopwood, Maycrest Village. They were teachers, postal clerks, cops, hairdressers. Bert took care of generations of the same family, celebrating their births, mourning their deaths, bringing home, at Christmastime, fruit baskets or homemade sheet cakes or bottles of lambrusco. He’d been at it for twenty-seven years, had taken over the practice from his own father, who remembered when cows used to graze where the Sunoco now stood.

During the decade we worked together, we got along very nicely; I know for sure Bert felt fatherly toward me despite his sometimes gruff
demeanor. He made bad jokes. He threatened to take me golfing. His wife, MaryJo, often invited Elaine and me over for operatic Italian dinners; she was from four generations of North Jersey Sicilians and referred to her impeccable tomato sauce as “gravy.” In the warm light of the Birches’ rambling center-hall colonial, Elaine and I would scarf down platters of scungilli marinara,
trippa fra diavolo,
rigatoni, meatballs in gravy. There were five Birch children and six Birch grandchildren and often they’d cram in at the table right next to us. Elaine and I never wanted children quite as badly as we did during our drives down Maycrest Avenue, full of MaryJo’s decadent cooking, arms still aching from the warmth of one Birch grandbaby or another.

As I grew more comfortable in Round Hill, I began branching out, joined the JCC, started making connections with the other local docs. I was interested in developing a good reputation, and although I had no problem with your everyday checkup, your diabetic accountant or petit mal secretary, what I longed for were the specialty cases, the sleuthy diagnoses nobody else had been able to figure. I’d caught the Sherlock Holmes bug during a medical school rotation, when I intuited a case of Goodpasture syndrome in a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who thought he was having a mind-blowing asthma attack and a hangover. I had just finished a unit on nephrology, so my mind was in the right place, but still, because I was paying excellent attention, I probably spared the kid a lifetime of dialysis. I’ll never forget him—his name was Paul Chung, he was studying to be an architect, and we shared the same exact birthday. For maybe four years after, he sent me Christmas cards.

Anyway, during those first few seasons, I’d stay late at the office, taking patients long after Bert had packed it in, then go home to curl up in the downstairs study and pore over
JAMA,
the
New England
Journal,
journals for specialties I hadn’t pursued. I’d become an internist because I liked the diversity of cases, because I liked primary care, and because I didn’t feel like spending any more time in training. My brother, Phil, was already making fifty thousand dollars right out of NYU Law; I wanted to start earning, too. As an internist—a sort of jack-of-all-trades — I could peruse articles on subjects from gastritis to hemodialysis, learn how to tell Crohn’s colitis from ulcerative. I would refer the exotic patients to the specialists, but the specialists would make their diagnoses with my hunches in hand.

Still, it wasn’t just ambition keeping me in the study; I guess it rarely is. Elaine and I had been trying to have a baby for four years, and her inability to hold the embryo — or our inability to discuss the matter with anything like honesty — made me feel increasingly lost and insecure in our bedroom. We’d been to the fertility doctors, who told us that there was nothing physiologically wrong with her and advised us to just, you know, relax. Just relax? I can hardly imagine a doctor with the cojones to make that suggestion today — but back then, in 1983, it seemed like fair enough advice. Relax, do what nature tells you, and Elaine, take it easy those first three months, not so much running around, okay? And oh, how she took those doctors seriously, as though they were headmasters, prison wardens. Lying on her back eighteen hours a day, rising only to eat, take a shower. But it didn’t matter—by eight weeks in, the bleeding would start, and it wouldn’t end until we were in the emergency room, waiting for an ultrasound to confirm what we already knew. Those years were the first period of several during our marriage when I took to sleeping on the couch. Sex in the evening, just to get it over with, and then me in the study with my quilt and my
JAMA.
If it bothered her—and it must have bothered her—she never said a word.

This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.

He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and bloom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.

A
ND SO THE
steppe unfolded. Our boy reached a height of six foot four by his fifteenth birthday but, almost certainly to spite his old man, showed little to no interest in basketball. Instead, he began studying art, both at Round Hill Country Day and in private lessons with a local sculptor three evenings a week. Our living room filled with pieces of cherrywood or palm carved into abstracted parts of the female form: almost always gigantic breasts. Alec assured us this was serious Art, so what if our living quarters looked like a Dada bordello? He began painting, too, still lifes of flowers, lemons, and his iPod, or the contents of our bathroom garbage can. Once, he drew a picture of me dozing on the couch, just sketched it while I was sleeping there, completely vulnerable. He showed it to me the second I woke up, and the picture both embarrassed and moved me—how invasive, how impudent, to draw for posterity the way your father drools in his sleep, but then there was something loving, too, about the attention to detail, the way he caught the plaid of my collar, the uneven bump of my chin. I brought the picture to my office to hang up, but then got embarrassed and brought it back home.

Thus Alec prospered in an entirely different direction than the one I would have expected, but prospered nonetheless, and so, happily, did my wife. Elaine had completed her PhD in English literature at the City University Grad Center a year after we moved to New Jersey, but she’d never plunged into the quicksand of the academic job market. She wasn’t much for competition, and also we’d been trying so hard to start a family — so she kept her PhD to herself, and not once did any invitations arrive at our house addressed to Dr. and Dr. Dizinoff.

But when Alec began his sixth-grade year, Elaine suddenly felt the urge to go back to school herself. A few calls to former professors landed her an adjunct spot at Bergen State, where she was assigned the perpetually unpopular
Beowulf-to-Chaucer
survey. It was a position for which she would be criminally underpaid, but she threw herself into the course with gusto, and eventually the chair agreed to give her a per-course raise of five hundred dollars, which fanned her usually unfannable ego. Sometimes, in bed, we’d play variations of games wherein she was the sexy professor and I was the naughty student. I think she liked these assignations more than she would have initially guessed.

And so this was how I galloped across my steppe, healthy and oblivious, even though people dear to me were strapped into their own hellish roller coasters and couldn’t find the escape latch. Or, to be less preposterous about it, almost fifteen years ago, my best friend, Joe Stern, had a problem with his daughter Laura, a terrifying problem — the kind of thing impossible to imagine when parenthood is new, the baby is six months old and drooling into her rice cereal, and your wife looks like the Madonna, long hair and clear skin, spooning Gerbers into the kid’s peachy face.

The year Laura turned seventeen, there was a rash of neonaticides across New Jersey. Cheerleaders delivering at their proms, abandoning
their babies in Dumpsters, that kind of thing. Iris said to Laura one morning, as the girl was heading out for school, Honey, can you even imagine? and Laura shook her head. Later that same afternoon she was admitted to Round Hill with major blood loss, and her baby, at twenty-five weeks’ gestation, was found dead in a trash can not too far from the Round Hill Municipal Library. Laura had delivered in the second-floor bathroom. The baby’s skull was crushed in like an egg.

Was the baby alive when Laura smashed its skull? That was the crux of the legal battle, and also, secondarily, whether or not Laura had been in her right mind. Joe and Iris, who’d been thinking of moving to the School District, immediately took their house off the market, probably with some relief. Iris was friendly with a wonderful big-firm litigator, and together they found Laura the very best representation to face off against the State of New Jersey, which was battling in the name of Baby Girl Stern. Joe took care of the psychiatric angle, and forget about Round Hill, they went to Columbia, the chief of adolescent psychiatry. Four days a week. Joe and Iris both began seeing therapists themselves and in their spare time tried to fend off the press.

Where was I during that time? Looking back, all those years ago, it’s hard to remember exactly. Absorbed in my work, I guess, making money, worrying over some stocks and daydreaming about renovating the kitchen. I was captain of the JCC men’s basketball league, thirty-five-and-older division. So maybe that—and then of course there was parenthood, and work, and my own marriage, which was suffering from predictable twelfth-anniversary doldrums (Elaine wanted to try for more children; I refused to even talk about it). But I suppose, in the end, my absence was due to what it was for all of us: discomfort, the general impossibility of knowing what to say, a vague disgust at what Joe’s daughter had done, and the self-satisfaction of not having had it happen to us.

But one morning, just after six, I was at the JCC shooting the ball around; Elaine’s snoring had woken me up. And who should walk in but Joe, whose calls I hadn’t answered in the past week and a half.

“Jesus, Joe,” I said. He was gaunt; he’d lost at least ten pounds while I wasn’t paying attention. His Eagles T-shirt hung loose over his shoulders, and his shorts sagged.

“Pete.” He nodded and threw his ball at me. “Twenty-one?”

“Twenty-one,” I agreed, dropping my own basketball. Six in the morning was still early at the JCC, and we had the court to ourselves. I thought to myself, The nice guy would let him win, poor bastard, and then I thought, Joe would know if I was letting him win. So I brought up my game, played him hard, our sneakers squeaking on the polished wood. In sixteen minutes we were tied at twelve, and although Joe had elbowed me to the floor twice, I’d hung him up twice myself. In another ten minutes I’d won the game.

“What are you doing now?” he asked as we toweled the sweat off our necks.

“What am I doing?” All my days started the same way back then: the JCC, ten minutes in the sauna, then a shower, a stop at the Dunkin’ Donuts for a cinnamon cruller and a large coffee, in the office by 7:45. I’d always toss the doughnut bag in the lobby garbage to hide the evidence from Mina—she disapproved of sugar in the morning, or, frankly, ever.

“You want to get breakfast?”

I’d known him at that point for twenty years — I’d been the best man at his wedding, he was my only child’s godfather, I’d eaten a thousand meals with him. What made me feel so strange about eating one more?

“Or if you’ve got to get going—”

“Breakfast sounds great,” I said. “I was just thinking about eggs.”

He had a nine thirty appointment, he said, on the Upper East Side — a Cornell psychiatrist nobody we knew had any ties to. His partners were taking on more than their share in the office so that he could attend to his family problems, his psychiatric needs and those of his daughter, his legal meetings, his lunch breaks with his wife. Joe was now only seeing his high-risk patients three afternoons a week. But still, he said, he liked to make time for breakfast.

In the car, Imus blared from the radio. I moved to turn it off, but Joe said no, leave it, and we drove to the Old Lantern in silence except for Imus’s yammerings about Janet Reno’s decision to fire ninety-three federal attorneys. In the parking lot, I wedged my Lexus into a corner spot, and Joe and I dashed to the diner with our jackets over our heads. It had just started to rain.

“So how’s Iris holding up?” I asked after we had sat down and chitchatted the waitress into bringing us some coffee.

“Iris?” Joe blinked. “You know,” he said. “She’s got everything all figured out. Spreadsheets.” It was an old joke between us that our wives were the brains of our respective operations, and we were just the appendages.

“I’m not surprised.”

“Budgets, strategy plans, doctors’ appointments, lawyers. The trial’s set for December.” Today was the last day of June. “This lawyer we hired, I called your brother about him. Phil and I talked the other night. He said he’s very good.”

“Well, Phil knows the field,” I said, guilt-stabbed. My brother had managed to return Joe Stern’s calls, and I hadn’t.

“He offered me Knicks tickets.”