A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  The service was quick; the rabbi spoke briefly about lives cut short before their time. A man who identified himself as Bobby’s brother described their bucolic life as children. He told us about Bobby’s earlier high school drama successes and his struggles in Hollywood. Bobby’s brother said how proud he and the rest of the family had been when his younger sibling had ultimately found professional satisfaction. Except that he described Bobby as a physical therapist, not a trainer. I suppose Bobby might have gone to school and been certified as a physical therapist, but somehow I didn’t think that was something he’d keep a secret from his clientele. He’d certainly never mentioned that to me.

  After Bobby’s brother sat down, a beefy man in an illfitting blue blazer rose to his feet and looked as though he might begin to speak. He was sitting with the AA crowd, and they all raised their faces to him expectantly. He opened his mouth but then caught sight of the rabbi. The rabbi shook his head vigorously and frowned. The man blushed and, appropriately chastened, sat back down. The rabbi launched into a final prayer, and then it was all over. The usher rolled back the screen, and Bobby’s family walked back out of the room. I caught a glimpse of his dark-haired mother, her face drawn and gaunt. Her narrow, colorless lips were pinched in a thin line, and she leaned heavily on the arm of a younger woman with similar coloring, whom I imagined must have been Bobby’s sister. As soon as they’d gone, I squeezed past the exiting guests in the direction of Betsy and her friends.

  “Hi, Betsy,” I said.

  “Oh, Juliet,” she wailed and fell out of her friend’s arms and into mine. “Did you see that? They wouldn’t even let me sit with them. The funeral director wouldn’t let me into the room with them. He said, ‘Family only,’ and threw me out.”

  I patted her back and murmured a few comforting words.

  “It’s disgraceful, is what it is,” said the gray-haired woman. “Betsy’s the widow for crying out loud.” The other friends and supporters who’d gathered around us murmured in agreement.

  “Did you talk to Bobby’s parents, Betsy?” I asked.

  She nodded, her face pressed against my shoulder. Then she sniffed and picked up her head. “Oh, sorry,” she mumbled. “I got your jacket all wet.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I have two kids, remember? I’m used to having snot on my clothes.”

  She smiled wanly.

  “Have you spoken to his family?” I asked again.

  “Yeah,” she said. “His brother came by a couple of days ago to tell me that they were going to let me stay in the apartment until the end of the month. Like they have a right. It’s my home. They can’t throw me out.”

  This was worse than I thought. “And his parents?”

  “They won’t even talk to me. I finally got through to them, and his dad said that their lawyer told them not to talk to me. Can you believe that? I mean, Bobby and I were engaged. We had a date and everything. The rabbi is talking to me. Why can’t they?”

  “What did the rabbi say?”

  “He came by the same day as Bobby’s brother. He said he wanted to see how I was doing, but who knows why he was really there. She probably sent him to make sure I hadn’t stolen the TV set or something.”

  “She?”

  “Bobby’s mother. God, I hate her.”

  The gray-haired woman put her hand on my arm. “We’re having a potluck after the burial. Since none of Bobby’s AA family is welcome at his parents’ home, we’re hosting our own reception at Betsy’s house. You’re welcome to join us.”

  “Thanks,” I said. I followed the group out of the hall and down a long, winding path of crushed white rock to the burial site. I stood with the AA contingent on the outskirts of the crowd and watched as the members of Bobby’s family gathered around the grave. The coffin was perched on a hydraulic lift over the gaping hole. There was a pile of earth covered in a large piece of what looked like AstroTurf to one side of the open grave, and the air was redolent with the meaty smell of soil and grass. The rabbi began to sing the prayers in his deep, atonal voice, and a few of the onlookers joined him. Dredging up the Hebrew words from somewhere deep in my memory, I murmured along with them. The deeply familiar prayers brought tears to my eyes, yet I found them soothing and peaceful. So slowly that it seemed almost imperceptible, the coffin began to sink into the grave. It landed with a faint and final thump, and, one by one, each member of Bobby’s family took a small trowel full of dirt and spilled it onto the coffin. After the last of them had gone, Betsy pushed forward and took the trowel out of the pile of earth. She dumped the dirt into the grave and cried, “I love you, Bobby. We’ll be together someday. I promise you.”

  I glanced over at Bobby’s parents in time to catch his mother’s face pinch into an angry scowl. Bobby’s father reached an arm around his wife and drew her away from the scene. The two of them, flanked by their children, walked back to the waiting limousines.

  SINCE the ban on the presence of recovering addicts at Bobby’s parents’ home after the service obviously did not include me, I decided to head over there with the rest of the guests. I got the address from Laurence, Bobby’s boss, and found my way to a large Mediterranean-style home set far back from the road on a block of almost identical houses. Bobby’s parents had put out quite a spread, and it was a little while before I could pry myself away from the buffet table. Finally, having gorged myself to a rather embarrassing degree on blintzes, whitefish salad, and those fruit minitarts that are ubiquitous at every L.A. event, be it a funeral or a movie opening, I made my way through the crowd in the direction of Bobby’s family.

  They were making a fairly symbolic effort at sitting shivah, the traditional Jewish mourning ritual. They sat on low chairs, but they all wore their shoes and had on little black polyester scarves that they’d torn at the corner, instead of rending their own garments. I know that’s not unusual, that only the ultra-Orthodox still tear their clothing, but still, it seemed somehow to belie the sincerity of their mourning, like they were sad, but not sad enough to ruin a good shirt. I stood in a line of people and finally reached Bobby’s mother.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I said, echoing everyone else. What else is there to say?

  “Thank you,” she murmured and looked beyond me at the next person.

  “Um, I was a client of Bobby’s,” I said, trying to keep her attention.

  “Oh?”

  “He was a wonderful trainer. So knowledgable.”

  She didn’t answer, just nodded politely and reached out her hand to the woman standing behind me.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” the other woman said.

  I wandered through the line, expressing my condolences to the rest of the family. His two sisters and brother all looked quite a bit older than he’d been, the oldest sister by as much as a dozen years. But then, Bobby might have been older than I thought. His business did require a certain youthful appearance.

  I stood for a while in a corner of the room and then caught the eye of a short man with a hairline that had receded to the purely hypothetical. He sidled over to me.

  “Were you a friend of Bobby’s?” he asked.

  “A client. And a friend. I’m Juliet Applebaum,” I replied.

  “I’m Larry. He was my brother-in-law. I’m married to Michelle.”

  “Bobby’s sister?”

  “The younger one. Over there, that’s Lisa, she’s the oldest. And that’s her husband Mitch.” He pointed to the dark-haired woman seated next to Bobby’s mother and to a tall, stooped man with an oversized nose sitting on the couch and leafing through a magazine.

  “Did he just have the one brother?”

  “Yeah, David. Dot com David.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Didn’t you know? David is Cyberjet. The Internet portal? He’s worth like a hundred million dollars, even after the crash.”

  “Wow,” I said, delighted to have found someone at once close to the family and indiscreet.

  “Wasn’t Bobby
getting married?” I said. “Where’s his fiancée?”

  Larry snorted. “Betsy? No way Arthur and Leslie would ever let her into the house. She’s a drug fiend. And, anyway, I’m betting she had something to do with Bobby’s death.”

  “Really?” I asked. “I thought it was suicide.”

  “Who’s to say she didn’t drive him to it? Anyway, the cops haven’t ruled out murder.”

  That explained their insistence on getting a statement from Betsy. “Do the police consider the fiancée a suspect?”

  “Probably. At the very least, she drove him to it. That’s what Arthur and Leslie think, anyway. Like I said, she’s a drug fiend.”

  “Didn’t Bobby and Betsy meet in recovery?”

  He snorted. “I wouldn’t mention that around here if I were you. We’re not allowed to talk about Bobby’s little problem. The most Arthur and Leslie will admit is that he had a period of ‘youthful indiscretion.’”

  At that moment, Larry’s wife joined us. She, like her mother, was slim and dark-haired. Her mascara was smudged and her nose tinged with red. She looped her arm through her husband’s and smiled at me wanly.

  “I’m Juliet. I was a client of Bobby’s,” I said.

  “Thanks so much for coming. It really means a lot to my parents, to all of us, that so many of Bobby’s colleagues and clients came today,” she said.

  “He was a lovely guy,” I told her, feeling my eyes fill.

  “He was. He really was.” The tears flowed freely down her cheeks. “He’s always had just the biggest heart. He was the kind of kid who brought home stray cats and lost dogs.”

  Larry shook his head. “Gee, your mom must have just loved that.”

  Michelle smiled through her tears. “Oh, she went ballistic. He’d hide them in his room until one of the cleaning ladies would find them and tell my mother. Once he hid a rat in his closet for like a month. And not a white rat, either. A big gray street rat. Then, one day while he was at school and Lisa was home from college, she was digging around his room for something or other, and she opened up this plastic shoe box with holes punched in the top. She started screaming and ended up kicking the box over and the thing got loose. My mother had the exterminators in within an hour, and there was rat poison all over our house for days. They never caught the rat, though. He’s probably still living in the basement.”

  We made small talk for a while longer, during the course of which Michelle told me what Bobby had already told me months before: Their parents were both doctors. Their father was a surgeon and their mother a pathologist on the faculty at UCLA. The girls had followed in their footsteps. Lisa, the older sister, and her husband Mitch had an obstetrical practice in the Valley. Michelle, a research scientist with both an M.D. and a Ph.D., was a statistical geneticist with Biogenet, a biotech company that specialized in creating disease-resistant seed.

  “Wow,” I said. “A doctor, a scientist, and an Internet entrepreneur. It can’t have been easy competing with you guys.”

  “No,” she admitted, “but then Bobby didn’t really try to compete. He wasn’t academically inclined. From the time he was a little kid, he said he was going to be an actor. That’s all he really wanted. He didn’t even go to college.”

  “That must have been something of a disappointment for your parents.”

  “I guess so, but then they never really expected that much from him. I mean, not academically. He wasn’t like the rest of us. He just didn’t have that kind of brain.”

  She sighed and leaned against her husband. “I should go sit next to Mom. Are you okay on your own, Larry?”

  “I’m fine. Juliet’s keeping me company. Aren’t you?” he said with a leer.

  Michelle didn’t seem to notice her husband’s wolfish expression. She nodded distractedly and left us.

  “Intense family dynamic,” I said to Larry.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” he whispered.

  “Really?” I leaned closer to him and raised my eyebrows.

  He was obviously flattered at the attention and altogether too happy to be dishing his in-laws to an encouraging ear.

  “It can’t hurt to talk about this now. I mean, the poor guy’s dead. Arthur and Leslie never expected much from Bobby because they’re big believers in the heritability of intelligence.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “They expected their kids to be brilliant because they think they are such perfect genetic specimens. But not Bobby.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Bobby wasn’t theirs. He was adopted.”

  “Really?” This shocked me. Bobby and I had had long talks about our families. He’d never mentioned this.

  “You want to know the really messed up thing?”

  I nodded.

  He glanced over his shoulder and motioned me closer. I leaned in, and he said in a low voice, “They never told him.”

  “Really?” I matched his whisper. “That’s so strange. Why not?”

  “They said it was because they didn’t want him to feel inferior. But David, Lisa, and Michelle all knew. Michelle’s the baby, and she was eight when they brought him home, so of course they knew. The whole family kept it a secret from Bobby.”

  “He never knew?”

  “No. I mean, he didn’t know until recently.”

  “And how did this suddenly come out?”

  “Totally by accident. It had something to do with his being a Tay-Sachs carrier. David knows. He’s the one who told him.”

  BECAUSE it was some time before I could corner Bobby’s brother David, I had to satisfy myself instead with reinvestigating the buffet table. I was strategically placed to take advantage of the tray of tiny pecan tarts that made their late appearance on the arm of a white-jacketed server. I was wolfing down my third when I saw David start to walk out of the living room. I wiped my mouth and slipped out after him. I found him slumped in a cracked leather armchair in a library, away from the noise of the crowd. I smiled at him as I entered the room, then gazed admiringly at the walls of books.

  “What a beautiful room,” I said.

  “Yeah. My parents keep all their medical texts in here. When Bobby was little, I used to get the dermatology ones down and scare him with pictures of pustules and varicella and the like.”

  “Gross.”

  “He loved it. He’d squeal and shriek and then say, ‘Show me another one.’ We really liked the V.D. pictures.”

  I lowered myself into the matching armchair opposite Bobby’s brother. “You gave a lovely eulogy.”

  “I guess. I didn’t really know what to say. I mean, what do you say when your kid brother dies?”

  The question was rhetorical.

  “Were you two very close?”

  “No. I mean, we got along, but, you know, I was twelve when Bobby was born. I left for college when he was six. I didn’t come home much after that.”

  “Still, it sounds like you loved him very much.”

  David shrugged and wiped tears from his eyes with an angry fist. “Yeah,” he croaked.

  “I’m Juliet, I was a friend of Bobby’s. And a client.”

  He shook my hand perfunctorily.

  I didn’t really know how to ask David what it was that I wanted to know, but it’s always served me well just to open my big mouth, so that’s what I did. “I hope you don’t think I’m prying, but I was wondering, well, what you make of Bobby’s death. I know it’s not really any of my business, but Bobby didn’t seem at all depressed to me, and I saw him pretty regularly. Do you have any idea why he would have killed himself?”

  David looked at me for a moment, as if surprised at my audacity. Then he said, “No. Honestly, I don’t. I mean, I thought for a while it might have been because . . . well, because of something that happened, but then he didn’t seem depressed at all to me, either, even after everything, and I just didn’t think it could be . . . that.”

  “You mean Bobby finding out that he was adopted?”

  “Y
ou know about that? He told you about that?” David sounded surprised.

  I nodded, figuring I was answering the first question, not the second.

  “I thought it might be that at first,” David said. “But you know, I don’t really think it could be. I mean, he freaked out when I told him, but he was mostly pissed off at Mom and Dad for keeping it a secret. He didn’t seem depressed about it. On the contrary.”

  “On the contrary?” I asked.

  “Well, you know Bobby. He never really felt like he fit in this family. He always felt like an intellectual failure around here. He seemed almost relieved to find out that he wasn’t biologically related to the rest of us. He even said to me something like, ‘So I’m not a freak of nature; I’m just a regular person.’” David sounded as if he were trying to convince himself rather than me.

  “He found out because of the Tay-Sachs diagnosis?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I guess you know that I told him.”

  I nodded.

  “The rabbi made him do genetic testing before the wedding. Bobby called me after he got the results of his Tay-Sachs screen. He came to me because he knew that Lisa and Michelle would have had to be tested when they got married. But I’m not married. He wanted to tell me that he was a carrier and that I might be, too. I told him I wasn’t worried about it, but he, you know, pressed me. So then I finally told him. I mean, why not? I never thought it should be a secret. I never agreed with Mom and Dad that we should pretend he was just like the rest of us. I mean, he had a right to know. Didn’t he?” He held his hands out beseechingly. I wanted to make him feel better, to reassure him that he’d done the right thing. I had a feeling that, his protestations notwithstanding, David was terrified that he’d done something awful by telling his brother about the adoption. Deep inside, he was probably desperately afraid that what he’d said had driven Bobby to suicide.

  “I certainly think he had a right to know,” I said. “How did your parents react to his finding out?”

  David grunted in disgust. “They were furious with me. My dad still isn’t speaking to me. My mother just gave me one of her trademark ‘I’m so disappointed in you’ speeches. Neither of them was really willing to talk about it with Bobby. They confirmed it, and that was that. We weren’t supposed to speak about it ever again.”