Toxic Bachelors

by Danielle Steel

  The food was as delicious as he had promised, and they talked about her ideas for the center until dessert. She had some big dreams and hard work ahead of her, but after what she'd accomplished so far, he knew she was capable of achieving all she set out to do. Especially with help from foundations like his. He assured her that others would be equally impressed, and she'd have no trouble getting money from him or anyone else the following year. He was vastly impressed by all she did, and how carefully she was already planning for the future.

  “That's quite a dream you have, Ms. Parker. You really are going to change the world one day.” He believed in her 1,000 percent. She was a remarkable young woman. At thirty-four, she had accomplished more than some people in a lifetime, and most of it by herself, with no one's help. It was clear that the center was her baby, which once again made him curious about her.

  “What about you? What else do you do with your spare time? I say that jokingly, believe me. It's no wonder you have no time to eat. You mustn't sleep much either.”

  “I don't,” she reassured him. “It seems like such a waste of time to me.” She laughed as she said it. “That's all I do. Work and kids. Groups. Most of the time I hang out at the center on the weekends, although officially I'm not working. But being there and keeping an eye on things makes a difference.”

  “I feel that way about the foundation,” he admitted, “but you still have to make time for other things, and have some fun sometimes. What does fun mean for you?”

  “Work is fun for me. I've never been happier than since we opened the center. I don't need other things in my life.” She said it honestly, and he could see she meant it, which worried him a little. Something was wrong with this picture, or at least the one she presented. Other than work, much was missing.

  “No men, no babies, no ticking clock telling you to get married? That's unusual at your age.” He knew she was thirty-four, and had gone to Princeton and Columbia, but he knew nothing else about her, even after dinner. All they had talked about was the center and the foundation. His work and hers. Their respective missions.

  “Nope. No men. No babies. No biological clock. I threw mine away several years ago. I've been happy ever since.”

  “What does that mean?” he pressed her a little, but she didn't seem to mind it. He sensed that whatever she didn't want to answer, she wouldn't.

  “The kids at the center are my children.” She seemed comfortable as she said it.

  “You say that now, but maybe one day you'll regret it. Women aren't lucky that way. They have decisions to make at a certain age. A man can always make a fool of himself and have a family when he's sixty or seventy or eighty.”

  “Maybe I'll adopt when I'm eighty.” She smiled at him, and for the first time he smelled tragedy in there somewhere. He knew women well, and something bad had happened to this one. He didn't know why or how he knew it, but he suddenly sensed it. She was too pat in her answers, too firm in her decisions. No one was that sure of anything in life, unless heartbreak got them there. He had been there himself.

  “I don't buy it, Carole,” he said cautiously. He didn't want to scare her, or make her back off completely. “You're a woman who loves children. And there has to be a man in your life somewhere.” After listening to her all evening, she didn't seem gay to him. Nothing she had said to him suggested it, although he could be wrong, he knew, and had been once or twice. But she didn't seem gay to him. Just hidden.

  “Nope. No man,” she said simply. “No time. No interest. Been there, done that. There hasn't been anyone in my life in four years.” A year before she'd opened the center, as he figured it. He wondered if some heartbreak in her life had turned her in another direction, to heal her own wounds as well as others'.

  “That's a long time at your age,” he said gently, and she smiled at him.

  “You keep talking about my age as though I'm twenty. I'm not that young. I'm thirty-four. That seems pretty old to me.”

  He laughed at her. “Well, not to me. I'm forty-six.”

  “Right.” She turned the tables on him quickly, to get the focus off herself. “And you're not married and have no kids either. So what's the big deal? What about you? Why isn't your clock ticking if you're twelve years older than I am?” Although he didn't look it. Charlie didn't look a day over thirty-six, although he felt it. Lately, he felt every moment of his forty-six years, and then some. But at least he didn't look it. Nor did she. She looked somewhere in her mid-twenties. And they looked handsome together, and were very similar in type, almost like brother and sister, as he himself had noticed when he had first observed that she looked a lot like his sister, Ellen, and his mother.

  “My clock is ticking,” he confessed to her. “I just haven't found the right woman yet, but I hope I will one day.”

  “That's bullshit,” she said simply, looking him dead in the eye. “Guys who've been single forever always say they haven't met the right woman. You can't tell me that at forty-six, you've never met the right one. There are a lot of them out there, and if you haven't found one, I think you don't want to. Not finding the right woman is really a poor excuse. Find something else,” she said matter-of-factly, and took a sip of her wine as Charlie stared at her. She had cut right to the quick, and worse yet, she was right, and he knew it. So did she. She looked convinced of what she'd said.

  “Okay. I concede. A few of them might have been right, if I'd wanted to compromise. I've been looking for perfection.”

  “You won't find it. No one's perfect. You know that. So what's the deal?”

  “Scared shitless,” he said honestly, for the first time in his life, and nearly fell off his chair when he heard himself say it.

  “That's better. Why?” She was good at what she did, although he didn't realize it till later. Getting into peo-ple's hearts and heads was her business, and what she loved doing. But he sensed instinctively that she wasn't going to hurt him. He felt safe with her.

  “My parents died when I was sixteen, my sister took care of me, and then she died of a brain tumor when I was twenty-one. That was it. End of family. I guess I've figured all my life that if you love someone they either die, or leave, or disappear, or abandon you. I'd rather be the first one out the door.”

  “That makes sense,” she said quietly, listening to him, and watching him closely. She knew he had told her the truth. “And people do die and leave and disappear. It happens that way sometimes. But if you're the first one out the door, you wind up alone for sure. You don't mind that?”

  “I didn't.” Past tense. Lately he was minding it a lot, but he didn't want to say that to her. Yet.

  “You pay a big price in life for being scared,” she said quietly, and then added, “scared to love. I'm not so good at that myself.” She decided to tell him then. Just as he did with her, she felt safe with him. She hadn't told the story in a long time, and kept it short. “I got married at twenty-four. He was a friend of my father's, the head of a major company, a brilliant man. He had been a research scientist, and started a drug company we all know. And he was totally nuts. He was twenty years older than I was, and an extraordinary man. He still is. But narcissistic, crazy, brilliant, successful, charming, and alcoholic, dangerous, sadistic, abusive. They were the worst six years of my life. He was a total sociopath, and everyone kept telling me how lucky I was to be married to him. Because none of them knew what went on behind closed doors. I had a car accident, because I wanted to, I think. All I wanted to do was die. He kept torturing me, and I'd leave him for a day or two, and then he'd bring me back, or charm me back. Abusers never lose sight of their prey. When I was in the hospital after the car accident, I got sane. I never went back again. I hid out in California for a year, met a lot of good people, and figured out what I wanted to do. I opened the center when I got home, and never looked back.”

  “What happened to him? Where is he now?”

  “Still here. Torturing someone else. He's in his fifties now. He married some pathetic debutante
last year, poor kid. He's about as charming as it gets, and as sick. He still calls me sometimes, and wrote me a letter telling me she meant nothing to him, and he still loves me. I never answered him, and I won't. I screen my calls, and I never return his. It's over for me. But I haven't had any inclination to try again. I guess you could reasonably say that I'm commitment phobic,” she said, smiling at Charlie, “or relationship phobic, and I intend to stay that way. I have no desire whatsoever to have the shit kicked out of me again. I never saw it coming. No one did. They just thought he was handsome and charming and rich. He comes from a so-called 'good family,' and my own family thought I was nuts for a long time. They probably still do, but they're too polite to say it. They just think I'm weird. But I'm alive, and sane, which looked questionable for a while until I ran my car into the back of a truck on the Long Island Expressway, and scared the hell out of myself. Believe me, running into a truck was a lot less painful and dangerous than my life with him. He was a total sociopath, and still is. So, I threw my biological clock out the window, and my high heels and makeup with it, all my little black cocktail dresses, my engagement and wedding rings. The good news is that I never had kids with him. I probably would have stayed with him if I did. And now instead of one kid or two, I have forty of them, a whole neighborhood, and Gabby and Zorro. And I'm a whole lot happier than I was.” She sat and looked at him and the sorrow and pain in her eyes was unveiled. He could see that she had been to hell and back, which was why she cared so much about the children she worked with. She had been there herself, although in a different way. He had felt cold chills run up his spine at the story she told him. She had made it sound simple and quick, but he could see that it wasn't. She had lived a nightmare, and finally woken up. But it had taken her six years to do so, and she must have suffered incredibly during those six years. He was sorry that it had happened to her. Sorrier than she knew. But she was still alive to tell the tale, and doing wonderful work. She could have been sitting in a chair somewhere, drooling, or on drugs or drunk out of her mind, or dead. Instead, she had made a good life for herself. But she had given up so much.

  “I'm sorry, Carole. Some awful stuff happens to all of us at some point, I guess. Life is about what you do afterward, how many pieces you can fish out of the garbage and glue back together.” He knew there were still some big pieces missing in himself. “You have a lot of guts.”

  “So do you. For a kid to lose his whole family at the age you were is a crippling blow. You never totally get over it, but you may get brave enough not to hit the door one day. I hope you do,” she said gently.

  “I hope you do too,” he said softly as he looked at her, grateful for the honesty they had shared.

  “I'd rather put my money on you.” She smiled at him. “I like the way my life is now. It's simple and easy and uncomplicated.”

  “And lonely,” he supplied bluntly as she stopped talking. “Don't tell me it's not. You'd be lying and you know it. I'm lonely too. We all are. If you choose to be alone, you may not get hurt by anyone, but you pay a big price for it. It's a big-ticket item, and you know that. So you may not have any obvious bumps and bruises this way, no fresh scars. But when you go home at night, you hear the same thing I do, silence, and the house is dark. No one asks you how you are, and no one gives a damn. Maybe your friends do, but we both know that's not the same thing.”

  “No, it's not,” she said honestly. “But the alternative is scarier than shit.”

  “Maybe one day the silence will be scarier yet. It gets to me at times.” Particularly lately. And time wasn't on his side. Or even hers for much longer.

  “And then what do you do?” She was curious about that.

  “I run away. I go out. I travel. See friends. Go to parties. Take women out. There are lots of ways to fill that void, most of them artificial, and wherever you go in the world, you take yourself, and all your ghosts. I've been there too.” He had never been as honest with anyone in his life, other than his therapist, but he was tired of artifice, and pretending that everything was all right. Sometimes it just wasn't.

  “Yeah, I know,” she said softly. “I just work till I drop, and tell myself I owe it to my clients. But it's not always about them. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's about me. And if there's anything left when I go home, I swim or play squash or go to the gym.”

  “At least it looks good on you.” He smiled at her. “We're a mess, aren't we? Two commitment phobics having dinner and sharing trade secrets.”

  “There are worse things.” She looked at him cautiously then, wondering why he had asked her out. She was no longer sure it was entirely about her plans for the center, and she was right about that. “Let's be friends,” she said gently, wanting to make a deal with him, to set the ground rules early on, and the boundaries that she was so good at. He looked at her for a long, hard time before he answered. This time, he wanted to be honest with her. Last time, when he had invited her to dinner, he hadn't been. But he wanted to be before too late.

  “I won't make you that promise,” he said as their equally blue eyes met and held. “I don't break promises, and I'm not sure I can keep that one.”

  “I won't go out to dinner with you unless I know we're just friends.”

  “Then I guess you'll have to start having lunch with me. I'll bring you a banana or we can meet at Sally's and get spareribs all over our faces. I'm not telling you we can't be friends, or that we won't be. But I like you better than that. Even commitment phobics have romances occasionally, or go out on dates.”

  “Is that what this was?” She looked at him, startled. It had never occurred to her when he invited her to dinner. She genuinely thought it was foundation business, but she liked him better than that now, enough to want to be friends.

  “I don't know,” he said vaguely, not ready to admit that he had lied to her, or used a ruse to get her to have dinner with him. All was fair in sex and fun, as Adam said. Or something along those lines. This had been fun, and interesting even more than fun, but there was no sex yet, and Charlie guessed there wouldn't be for a long time, if ever. “I'm not sure what it was, other than two intelligent people with similar interests getting to know each other. But next time I'd like it to be a date.”

  She sat there miserably for a minute, without answering him, wanting to run away, and then she looked at him with anguish on her face. “I don't date.”

  “That was yesterday. This is today. You can figure out tomorrow when it happens, and see what you feel like doing then. You don't have to make any big decisions yet. I'm just talking about dinner, not open-heart surgery,” he said simply. He made sense, even to her.

  “And which one of us do you think would be out the door first?”

  “I'll toss you for it, but I warn you, I'm not in as good shape as I used to be. I don't sprint quite as fast as I once did. You might get there first.”

  “Are you using me to prove your abandonment theory, Charlie? That all women leave you sooner or later? I don't want to be used to confirm your neurotic script,” she said, and he smiled as he listened.

  “I'll try not to do that, but I can't promise that either. Remember, just dinner. Not a lifetime commitment.” Not yet at least. He warned himself silently to beware of what he wished for. Stranger things had happened. Although he couldn't imagine anything better than spending time with her, for however long it lasted, and whoever hit the door first.

  “If you're looking for the 'right woman,' having dinner with a confirmed commitment phobic should not be high on that list.”

  “I'll try to keep that in mind. You don't have to be my therapist, Carole. I have one. Just be my friend.”

  “I think I am.” They didn't know about the rest yet, but they didn't need to. The future was up for grabs, if she was willing.

  He paid the check then, and walked her back to her house. She lived in a small elegant brownstone, which surprised him, and she didn't invite him in. He didn't expect her to. He thought things had gone better than
well for a first date.

  She told him that she lived in a small studio apartment, at the back of the building, that she rented from the owners. She also mentioned that it was incredibly cheap, and she'd been lucky to find it. He wondered if she had gotten any kind of settlement out of her marriage, since she had mentioned that her husband was rich. He hoped so, for her sake, she should have gotten something out of it instead of only grief.

  “Thank you for dinner,” she said politely, and then more firmly, “It wasn't a date.”

  “I know that. Thank you for the reminder,” he said with a twinkle in his eye as he looked at her. He was wearing a blue shirt, with no tie, jeans, and a sweater the same color as hers, with brown alligator loafers and no socks. He looked very handsome, and she looked beautiful as she said goodnight to him. “How about dinner next week?”

  “I'll think about it,” she said, as she fitted her key into the front door, waved, and disappeared.

  “Goodnight,” he whispered to himself with a small smile, as he walked up the block with his head down, thinking of her, and all the information they'd shared. He didn't look back, and never saw her watching him from an upstairs window. She wondered what he was thinking, just as he did about her. Charlie was pleased. Carole was scared.

  12

  TWO DAYS AFTER CHARLIE'S DINNER WITH CAROLE, Adam pulled up in front of his parents' house on Long Island in his new Ferrari. He already knew he was in for trouble. They expected him to go to services with them, and he had been planning to, as he did every year. But one of his star athletes had just called him in a panic. His wife had been arrested for shoplifting, and he admitted that his sixteen-year-old son was dealing cocaine. It may have been Yom Kippur for him and his parents, but a football player from Minnesota didn't know shit about Yom Kippur and needed Adam's help. He was always there for them, and this time was no different.