“Can you believe it? Like I can
therapize
him out of being gay? But I do, I take him to student services, they have every kind of therapy, and for an entire year we try to work out whether or not Frogger is gay. And he’s supposed to be honestly thinking about it. Keeps telling the therapist he loves me, wants to be with me, it was just that one month when it happened, it won’t happen again. I believe him! The therapist believes him! And the entire time he’s sleeping with that guy from Stanford.”
Oh, dear. “Roseanne, did you ever take a—”
“I took an HIV test right away and then another one at a clinic six months ago. I’m negative.”
How could I not have thought of that sooner? I hung my head. It was always a surprise when I let my assumptions get in the way of good medicine.
“I’m sorry all this happened to you, Roseanne. I really am.”
“Yeah, well—” She looked down at her hands for a moment, picked at a cuticle. “It feels good to talk about it with someone who’s not one of my friends. I can’t tell my parents the whole truth. And my brother would probably go find Frogger and kill him. Literally.”
“Well, listen, anytime you want to talk and you don’t feel like going to your psychiatrist, you can always stop by and talk to me,” I said. And I meant it.
She stopped picking her cuticle. She had a small, lovely smile.
“Do you have any plans the rest of the summer?” I asked. “Any vacations to look forward to?”
“Actually, some friends from high school have a place on a lake in the Adirondacks. Saranac Lake. We’re going canoeing next weekend.”
“Well, that sounds like fun. Something to take your mind off things.”
“Oh, please.” She laughed. “I’ve never canoed in my life. They told me we were going to have to catch our own dinner, and that’s where I drew the line. No way am I gutting a fish. It’s not like we’re on
Survivor
or something.”
“Research before you go,” I said. “Tell them there’s a good steak house somewhere in the area and gutting fish might lose its appeal.”
“Good idea.”
“Or just order in pizza.”
“I don’t think you can order in pizza in the woods.”
“You’d be surprised,” I said. “I once had pizza delivered to a campsite in Yosemite.”
“You like to rough it, too, huh, Dr. Dizinoff?”
I grinned at her. In my heart, I knew she’d be fine. “I’ll check in with you on Monday, okay? Let you know how soon I can get you in to see April.”
“Thanks,” she said, and we stood and shook hands. If I’d had no sense at all of professional protocol, I might have drawn her in for a hug. I liked her for a million reasons. She was smart, pretty, tough, showed initiative in her work and her love life and her health. If Alec would only date a girl like her—maybe there was some way to introduce them? It was a shame we weren’t in the market for another car.
“Doc?” Mina stuck her head into my office as soon as Roseanne disappeared. “Let’s get out of here before anyone else shows up.”
“Good idea,” I said. “Have yourself a great weekend, Mina. I’ll lock up.”
“I’ll
lock up,” she said. “You still haven’t bought Elaine a birthday present.”
“Aah!”
She laughed her snaggletoothed Lithuanian laugh. “There’s a sale on at the Gilded Lily downtown,” she said. “They close at seven. Hurry up.” Mina. My shining light.
I found a parking spot right in front of the store and left fifteen minutes later with a healthy-sized hole in my wallet and a nice, sparkling evening bag, a silk scarf, and a pair of earrings made from Venetian glass, which looked like psychedelic bottle caps but which the saleslady promised me my wife would love. She could tell I was running late and was just going to take her word for it. I handed over my AmEx without even checking the price tag. When I signed the receipt, I gasped.
But my generosity was rewarded by some joint miracle of stoplights and traffic, and I beat Elaine home with time to spare. I rolled up my sleeves, arranged the presents on the kitchen table, got to work mixing a marinade for the tuna steaks in the fridge. We’d have tuna, grilled vegetables, and mashed potatoes swirled with the wasabi I’d found at Fairway (a neat little trick I picked up from the Food Channel), and Alec was supposed to pick up a cake for dessert. I called his cell.
“You’re checking to see if I forgot the cake.”
“Did you forget the cake?”
“I’m at the bakery right now.”
“Good,” I said. It was good to hear him. “Use my charge card.”
“I wouldn’t do it any other way.”
So that by the time Elaine was home, the tuna was resting in the marinade, the potatoes were bubbling, the vegetables had been sliced and washed, I’d set out a little tray of olives and cheese, pulled two brunellos from the basement and a nice pink champagne, and even managed to change out of my shirt and jacket into a clean white T-shirt with
LIPITOR
scrawled across the back.
“Happy birthday, Lainie,” I said when she came in, hauling an
overstuffed briefcase and a fifty-four-year-old smile. Elaine was seven months older than I was. Back when that was more of a laughing matter, I used to tease her.
“What are these? Presents!” My wife loved presents; she dropped her briefcase and grabbed the first little package, the one with the earrings.
“Did you go to the Gilded Lily? Oh, you shouldn’t have!” And she tore into her packages and gushed over each of them and treated me to a long, grateful smooch right there in the kitchen. Then she stuck the earrings in her ears — they still looked like bottle caps to me—and tossed her hair this way and that. “What do you think?”
“You look beautiful.”
“But do I look old?”
“Not a day over thirty.”
“You lie, you lie, you lie,” she said, and she wrapped me up in another big smooch. It was amazing what earrings and a handbag and a scarf could do. “I’m just going to run these upstairs. Pour me something to drink, will you?”
I turned on the stereo, opened the doors to the patio, dragged out a bucket of ice, and wiped the dust and cicada shells off the outdoor furniture. Just as I was about to pop the pink champagne, Iris and Joe appeared in the backyard, carrying a much better bottle, some frosty Krug.
“Where’s the birthday girl?”
“Krug?” I asked as Joe handed me the bottle. “Why are you two such show-offs?”
Joe shrugged and Iris pecked me on the cheek and then we went inside to pour five glasses and wait for the rest of my family to join us.
“What’d you get her, Pete?”
“A handbag, a scarf. Some earrings. I don’t know. I’m so bad at that stuff.”
“Iris? Is that you?” Elaine called from upstairs. “Come up and see my presents! Bring me some champagne!” It was her birthday and she was treating herself to a little girls-only.
“Sounds like you made her happy,” Joe said.
“Ladies love me,” I acknowledged. I took the plate of sliced vegetables outdoors to the grill and got started.
It was a nice August evening; the whole summer, in fact, had been reassuringly temperate after a few short-lived June heat waves. The hundred-year-old maples that shaded our backyard shook with squirrels climbing up, up, up and chipmunks scattering along their trunks. We used to keep a bird feeder out here for the robins and jays, the occasional oriole, but the raccoons kept figuring out how to swipe the feed and we didn’t like having them so close to the house. We still got raccoons back here sometimes, though. Raccoons, rabbits, skunks, all those deer.
Joe sipped his Krug appreciatively. “Say what you will about the suburbs,” he said, as the grill flamed beneath us.
“I was thinking the same exact thing.”
Alec came walking up the path from the driveway, an enormous cake box balanced precariously in his arms.
“There’s some champagne for you in the kitchen.” I wanted all of us to be festive.
“Great,” he said as he backed his way into the house. “The cake cost seventy dollars.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Doesn’t it feel like money actually doesn’t mean a thing anymore?” Joe asked. “Like money has been separated from all sense of value?”
I looked at my old friend, whose wife cleared a million dollars a year. “Sometimes.”
“It does to me all the time,” he said, and Alec came back out with his glass of champagne.
“So how’s it going, kid?” Joe asked. “Getting ready to start school?”
Alec shrugged, glugged his Krug like it was soda pop.
“Slow down,” I said. “That’s no way to enjoy a good champagne.”
He rolled his eyes and took a prissy, delicate sip. “I’ve been trying to finish up these small oils before I go,” he said. “But I’ve been working overtime at the store.”
“Well, you’ll be able to keep working on them at school, won’t you? Taking some studio classes?”
Alec shrugged, then glugged the rest of his champagne. “I guess.”
“What will you be taking?”
“Just, I don’t know, some painting, an English class.”
“Anthropology,” I said. “Studio pottery.”
“The potatoes are boiling over, Dad.”
“Shit,” I said. “Here, you watch the vegetables. I’ll go—”
“No, it’s okay, you guys hang out,” he said. “I’ll make the potatoes.”
“No, but there’s a secret—”
“You want me to do that wasabi thing, right?” he said. “I’m on it.”
“You know how to do the wasabi thing?”
“You stir wasabi into mashed potatoes,” he said. “It’s no big deal.” Why did he have to deflate my wasabi thing? It
was
a big deal, completely wonderful, an unexpected, hard-to-place spicy kick in a bowl of fatty off-white potatoes. Jerk.
“He looks good, Alec,” Joe said, a bit generously, after Alec disappeared.
“Yeah, well.” I spiked some zucchini on my fork to flip them over.
“No, really,” Joe said. “He looks happy. He’s gonna have a great time at school.”
“To be honest, I think he looks so damn happy because he’s spending too much time with your daughter.”
The thing with Laura and Alec had been going on for months now, but Joe and I almost never talked about it. We were each embarrassed, I guess, of our own disapproval. I didn’t want Joe to think I didn’t
like
Laura (although I probably didn’t), only that I didn’t like her for my son, but this was a finer point than I felt comfortable making. I expected Joe felt similarly about Alec.
“So what do you think of that?”
“The truth?” I said, poking the eggplant. We were two middle-aged men standing over a grill; we could have been talking about anything, sports, the weather, our wives.
“Of course.”
“I don’t like it,” I said. “The age difference, everything. And Alec’s at such a vulnerable point right now. I wish he’d just concentrate on his schoolwork and not be involved romantically. Especially with a much older person.”
“I don’t like it either,” Joe said. “I’m not sure it’s the best thing for her to be dating a kid.”
“When she moved to the East Village, I thought—”
“So did I,” Joe said. “In fact, that’s part of the reason I thought she was going so abruptly. So she could sort of cool it with Alec without having to have a difficult conversation. But evidently he spends a couple nights a week there—”
“He does,” I said.
“It’s funny, if he’d wanted to date Pauline, I would have been thrilled. I used to think about that, actually, how nice it would be if those two somehow—”
“But it’s Laura.”
“I know.”
“Do you think it’s like—” and I wanted to be delicate, but at the same time I really wanted to know what Joe thought. “Is it like arrested development on her part? Or something? I mean, Alec, God bless him, is not necessarily the most mature kid, and you’d think Laura would get a little bored.”
“Could be,” he said. “I’m not sure how much she’s really dated in her life. She might feel comfortable with a younger person. It could be a power thing.”
“Does it … does it bother you to think about—”
“I don’t,” Joe said.
“Me neither,” I said. Which was a lie. Sometimes, just as I was falling asleep, I heard those bumping, murmuring sounds in my head and wanted to die.
“Ah.” Joe shuddered (he thought of it, too) and changed the subject. “Anything interesting in the office lately?”
“Let’s talk about anything else, huh?”
“Don’t you think?” He looked down into his flute.
“Let’s see … the office. The office. A girl I like came in today, Roseanne Craig—you know her? Arnie Craig’s kid? I’ve been seeing her periodically, complaining of malaise, some weight fluctuation, amenorrhea, food cravings—”
“She pregnant?”
“Swears to God she isn’t, although I probably should have made her take a test.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“She said it would have to be a virgin birth, and I imagine she knows the last time she had sex.”
“She’s pregnant.”
“Okay, well, let’s just say for a second she isn’t, for the purposes of this conversation. We bought a car from her six weeks ago, Elaine’s Jeep. She didn’t seem pregnant then, at least.”
“She’s a car dealer?”
“Works for her father,” I said. “Comes in about a year ago, complaining of depression, some weight loss — clearly she doesn’t really know why she’s there except her dad wanted her to come.”
“Okay.”
“Then she tells me this story. Seems her boyfriend left her and she’s stuck back in New Jersey when she thought she’d spend her life in California running a bookstore.”
“Tough break.”
“I tell her she needs a shrink, she says she’s seeing a reflexologist.” We shook our heads at each other. “Then we buy the Jeep from her and she looks great. But then she comes in today again and is absolutely depressed. I like this kid, too. There’s something winning about her.”
“Will she see someone?”
“I told her to go to April Frank at Round Hill.”
“Could it be something else?” he asked. “Not depression? Maybe autoimmune? Endocrinologic?”
“What, like a thyroid thing?”
“I don’t know,” he mused. “You see Hashimoto’s every so often, it can present like that. And I had a woman with Addison’s a few years ago. Mood swings, weird food cravings, nausea.”
“Joe, I’ve seen maybe two cases of Addison’s since I started practicing. Nobody has Addison’s. And she hasn’t mentioned any dizziness, no joint swelling.”