A Friend of the Family

by Lauren Grodstein

  “So you liked that ride, huh, Dr. Pete?” said Laura, who caught me idling in front of a pod-shaped silver coffee table.

  “Oh,” I said. “Well, it was pretty, but cars, you know. They aren’t really my thing. Just need ’em to get you from one place to another.”

  “I thought all men liked cars,” she said.

  “Not all men.”

  “Well.” She took off her glasses and wiped them, casually, on the side of her T-shirt, lifting it just enough so that I could catch a glimpse of the white, white skin of her belly. Which could not have been her intention, and I shouldn’t have been looking, but still I found myself all too quickly staring down at her shoes and then at my own.

  “I grew up in a city, remember,” I said. “So cars weren’t a big deal for us. My dad didn’t even buy one until I was seven or eight. We took public transportation. My mom never learned to drive. Not like you kids, cars for your seventeenth birthdays.”

  “I didn’t get a car for my seventeenth birthday,” she said. “And not for my eighteenth either. But that was okay. I wasn’t really allowed to drive.”

  Were we really going to take the conversation in this particular direction? “Well, I guess you weren’t—”

  “I was too scared to get my license,” she said. “I only got it when I started working at the goat farm, I guess five years ago now. I had to be able to drive a truck. But I remember starting at Country Day, watching all the seniors in their fancy cars, driving to school a whole five or six blocks from their houses. I remember thinking that it seemed so ridiculous. But of course, I was the only one still taking the bus.”

  “Well, neither did Alec,” I said. “Get a car for his birthday.”

  “No?”

  “He wanted one.” And would have gotten one, too, had it not been for the Dan and Shmuley incident, and had he not been behaving like such a shit for most of his sixteenth year.

  “That’s funny,” Laura said. “He seems like the kind of kid who’s always had everything he ever wanted.”

  Now what did that mean? “He’s been rewarded appropriately when he does well,” I said, “and encouraged to behave differently when he doesn’t.”

  “I remember him as such a sweet boy, you know?”

  “He’s still a sweet boy.”

  “He’s changed, though.”

  “Of course he’s changed.” What was she getting at? “But he’s still a wonderful kid. We’ve been very lucky.”

  “Yes?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Very.”

  “High school can be so hard,” she said. “It kills me how little adults remember it, or how they try to glorify it. But everything that’s happened to me in my life started from that place.” She stuck her hands deep in her pockets and looked up at me with a bleak smile, and I surprised myself by smiling back. And by letting something loosen, quickly and surprisingly, like a can falling off a shelf.

  “You’ve come so far since then,” I said.

  “I have and I haven’t. I’ve certainly traveled a lot, learned how to do things. I have actual manual skills, which I’m proud of, certainly. I can reattach a muffler. I can pour rounds of goat cheese. But you know”—she kept looking straight at me—“no matter how far I go, no matter how much I do—”

  “Well” — I cut her off—“that was a long time ago.”

  “It was,” she said. “But I’m starting to be able to talk about it, which feels good. The weird thing is there’s nobody who wants to talk about it with me. My parents certainly don’t—why would they? And my siblings find the whole thing mortifying. They don’t remember it, and they don’t want to hear about it now. All this time later, I can at least—well, I don’t have to pretend it never happened, but I guess everyone else still does.”

  She tilted her head, and in that moment I saw in her not the baby killer, not the older woman out to unravel my son’s fragile grasp on maturity, but a girl who’d been through a nightmare and had come back to rejoin her society. I saw the girl I’d pretended to see all the time.

  “How are you doing these days?” I asked her, letting my voice go a little softer. “Is everything all right?”

  “It is,” she said. “Most of the time.”

  “It’s good to see you again,” I said.

  “Thanks.” She smiled at me, slid her eyeglasses back on her face, and hung her head as though she were a little bit embarrassed, and I felt a little embarrassed, too. “It’s really nice to see you, too, Dr. Pete.” And then we smiled at each other once more, and she turned away, heading over to a big poster of a leopard standing in front of a panther, growling, and I myself turned to a strange sort of black wooden structure — maybe another representation of colonialism? I couldn’t tell. A black sort of basin shape, protected by sinuous, infolded wings, and a tall post sprouting from the head of the basin, curving over as if to peer inside, and the whole thing rocked back and forth. I looked over at the sign to see what the hell it was. Oh, of course, I thought, taking an appreciative step back. I touched it, guards be damned, and admired its gentle back-and-forth. The protective, curvy wings. The post for a mobile to hang from. The irony wasn’t lost on me: a cradle.

  UPSTAIRS WERE ROOMFULS of Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and I exhaled with the dim-bulb relief of liking what I was supposed to like. Iris found me in front of one, a Rousseau, a Gypsy asleep in a desert night, a lion examining her, a lute and a jug of water in front of her, a dreamy smile on her face. None too realistic, but comforting in its way, like a nursery rhyme. The moon seemed to have a happy face painted on it. The lion seemed extraordinarily gentle.

  “What do you think of it?”

  “What do I think?”

  “I mean, do you like it or what?”

  Thirty-four years after I first saw Iris, long red hair swinging loose as she sat in front of me in calculus class, I still wanted to say something that would impress her.

  “Sure, I like it,” I said. “Even though it’s not particularly realistic. I mean, they probably don’t have lions in the Kalahari.” Which was the best I could come up with on such short notice.

  “Who says that’s the Kalahari?” She took a closer look at the painting, stepping a few feet in front of me. “Rousseau was never in a real desert, so there was no reason for him to base this painting on any particular place. I think he just had an idea of a desert. And an idea of a lion, and a Gypsy, too. He only saw taxidermied wild animals during his lifetime. Went to the botanical gardens to study the plants.”

  “Huh.”

  “The critics thought he was a joke. They thought he was as primitive as his paintings. He didn’t get any recognition until after he died, when there was a real rewriting of his artistic legacy.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “PBS special,” Iris said.

  She took a step back, stood next to me. Despite four pregnancies, Iris was still built almost like a teenager, slim and small-breasted. She wore dark jeans, a loose black blouse with the sleeves rolled up. Short heels. The two of us standing side by side like that, looking at a painting, someone might think she was my wife. Someone might imagine the nice life we’d built together, the happy, successful children we were raising, the romantic vacations we took together, leaving all those children with one set of parents or the other. The museums we frequented every Saturday.

  Years ago, I’d watched her in freshman calculus, everyone else scribbling notes furiously except me and her—her because scribbling wasn’t her style, me because I was too infatuated with Iris to hear a word the professor was saying, much less write it down.

  “Too bad Elaine isn’t here,” she said.

  “I know,” I said.

  “She would have loved this. Whose baby shower is it again?”

  “Someone from the English department.”

  “But isn’t she just an adjunct? She really has to go to these things?”

  “Well, you know,” I said. “She wants to be a good soldier.”

&n
bsp; “Elaine is so responsible,” Iris said. “Especially as far as obligations are concerned. It’s one of the things I admire about her.”

  “She’s very admirable,” I said.

  “She is.”

  I never got up the nerve to approach Iris. We were assigned the same study section and she talked to me first. She wanted my notes. How to explain that I didn’t have any?

  Too smart for notes, you some kind of smart-ass? she demanded in her deep, grumbly voice. I’d never heard anything like it. She was from Allentown, the daughter of the city’s last kosher butcher. She smoked marijuana. She went braless. She blew my virgin mind. There were other girls at Pitt, I knew that, but especially that first year I never even thought to look at any of them. What was there to look at? Blond girls with ponytails and convertibles, free-love guitar players, Afropower black chicks with muscle-bound boyfriends in dashikis. I wanted a science major. This science major. A redhead.

  Well, why don’t you have notes? I sputtered.

  I was hoping you’d take them for me, she’d whispered.

  But we’ve never talked before. How was I supposed to know you wanted me to take notes for you?

  You can have my notes, said the scrawny crew cut who was listening in. I knew that crew cut—he always sat exactly three seats to my left and watched Iris with almost the same yearning I did. He had twitchy little shoulders and moles on the side of his neck, which I hoped were cancer. And how’s this for hideous: Iris ended up dating crew cut for almost a year before I introduced her to her future husband. I couldn’t believe it when she dumped him for Joe—I mean, Joe was nice and all, but at least the crew cut had hair. (Why not me, Iris? Why not me?) And I also couldn’t believe it when she told me that crew cut — they’d kept in touch for a long time after college, his real name was Ralph—died of aggressive melanoma right before we all turned forty.

  Iris introduced me to her sorority sister Elaine Meers at a mixer during October of our sophomore year. She had yet to trade in Ralph, but still it seemed more and more clear to me that my chance with her was never. So then, Elaine: short and fair, a soft, girlish voice (especially compared to Iris’s bottomed-out grumble), soft, skinny legs, and a heavy bosom, which I liked. And she liked me. She took me so seriously, listened to what I had to say about school, Nixon, Vietnam, all my half-informed or half-assed opinions. I decided to become more educated for her—smarter for her. And Elaine made me feel not only smart but necessary, gave me the courage to pursue being a grown-up. Her belief in me always outweighed my own.

  I proposed to her exactly one month after we graduated. She was going to study English at City University, I was off to Mount Sinai, we were twenty-two, I loved her. But still, not until Iris was pregnant with Laura—and I mean visibly pregnant, I mean waddling pregnant — did it really sink into my thick dinosaur skull that Iris Berg would never, ever be mine.

  (Why not me, Iris?)

  But still. Somewhere underneath, deep, deep down in her cool, thin interior, I think Iris remembers kissing me at a just-before-spring-break party, 1973. Elaine wasn’t feeling so well and Joe was already back in Philly helping his dad dry-clean. There was Curtis Mayfield on the stereo and thumb-sized joints passed around by other people and she tucked herself into my arms. And I didn’t even have to prepare for it, steel myself. She tucked into me, and I just leaned down and kissed her. And didn’t stop for hours. Every molecule of me more alive than it had ever been. I didn’t think of Joe. I didn’t think of Elaine. I didn’t think at all.

  We never mentioned it to each other again, to the point where, if I didn’t have it written down—I used to keep a Pepysianly obsessive diary—I might not believe it had ever happened. But it happened. And when I’m feeling maudlin, or curious about what another life might have been like, I remind myself that Iris would never have loved me, trusted me, believed in me the way Elaine did. I remind myself that things turned out the only way they could have. Iris has teased me since the day we met, but Elaine has kept me upright.

  And so now I can stand next to Iris with almost no residue of longing whatsoever, knowing that we’ve built such good, friendly, neighborly lives that to long for her even a little would ruin all this good life I’ve built. Iris Berg is not worth that. So I stand next to her at museums, sit next to her at dinner parties, and faithfully attend her New Year’s brunch, and if I can remember what it felt like to let my fingers linger between the spaces of each pebble of her vertebrae, I have forced that memory as far away from me as it will agree to go.

  “What else do you know about Rousseau?” I asked her, the Saturday crowd around us beginning to swell.

  “He was a customs inspector,” she said. “Apollinaire wrote his epitaph. We will bring you brushes paints and canvas / That you may spend your sacred leisure in the light of truth. I always liked that. The light of truth.”

  I pretended to have heard of Apollinaire, nodded appreciatively. We were still gazing at this painting, although I’d run out of things to see in it.

  Iris wiped her hand along her cheek. It was getting warm in here, and she was starting to flush; her eyes were sparkling. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joe approach to put a protective arm around her hip. Self-consciously, I took a step backward.

  “Whadyou two say, fifteen minutes we head down for lunch? I think the crowd’s getting hungry.”

  “Our reservation isn’t until one thirty,” Iris murmured.

  “So we’ll sit at the bar,” Joe said. “This joint’s got to have a bar, right?” His shlemiel act. He rubbed Iris’s hip.

  “I’m sure it does,” I said.

  “Good. We’ll round up the troops in fifteen minutes.”

  “Sounds great.”

  “You enjoying all this fancy-shmancy art?” he asked. “Your kid could be up here one day, maybe. You might be the father of a future famous artist.”

  “We should live to see the day,” I said, which is something my mother liked to say.

  “We certainly should,” Iris murmured, and Joe gave her hip a quick slap.

  “We certainly should.”

  And then Iris and Joe meandered Cézanneward, and I remained grounded in front of the Gypsy and the lion, thinking a little bit about Laura, but mostly about her mother.

  LUNCH WAS EXPENSIVE and silly, all tiny portions and bizarre combinations, raspberry-flavored pork belly, but my son and I were the only two to notice. Laura rhapsodized about the combinations of key flavors and oozed over the wine list, and Joe and Iris, who have always been nuttily catholic about what they put in their mouths, seemed to enjoy trying everything. Even the Red Menace put away her concerns about twenty-dollar-a-month tourists to indulge in a thirty-five-dollar lamb shank, and Neal mentioned twice that he’d dined here several times before.

  The waitress had seated us while Laura was in the bathroom, which meant that by no design of my own, Alec ended up sitting to my left and Laura to Joe’s right, so Alec and I ended up in a private and funny discourse about whether to order eighteen-dollar veal kidneys (not when there was twelve-dollar liverwurst on offer!) while Laura and her father kidded each other privately, too. Everyone ordered meringues for dessert except the two of them, who went in for the double butterscotch sundae. I could tell from Joe’s face he was delighted.

  And then lunch was over. I handed over my AmEx without even looking at the bill, but Joe handed it back to me with a patrician shake of his head, and as we walked back to Iris’s garage on Fifty-fifth Street, I felt both exhausted and thrilled with the way the day had gone. I’d seen some art. I’d learned a thing or two about Rousseau (and would Google Apollinaire as soon as I got home). I’d watched my twenty-year-old son and his thirty-year-old dream date get on like old neighbors (which of course they were) but nothing more than that, nothing to be suspicious of or concerned about.

  “Thanks for lunch, Joe. I’ll get you next time.”

  “Ah,” he said, waving me away.

  Elaine would be home by the time we got back
and we could cook dinner together; I think I had some linguini in the freezer from the Italian store in Hopwood. The Nets were playing the Cavs tonight; maybe we could watch en famille. Alec and I could talk about art during the commercial breaks and he could explain that bullet painting to me. Or maybe—and here I was going a little overboard, I knew — but maybe, even though the Cavs were a big draw, I could get some still-decent seats to the game if we showed up at the Meadowlands early. Maybe—how pie-in-the-sky—but maybe Alec would agree to a game with his old man.

  “So I’ll see you tonight then, huh?” Alec said to me as a pregnant attendant swooped around with Iris’s car. I tore my eyes away from her plumlike figure—she was almost as round as she was high, sweaty, her skin oddly pale, making me wonder if she’d ever heard of gestational diabetes — and turned to my son, who was wearing a shit-eating grin as if he’d just won a call-in contest on the radio. Laura, who reeked of Marlboros, was standing next to him with both her hands in her back pockets.

  “What are you talking about?” I asked as Iris took her car keys and Joe handed the attendant a fiver.

  “We’re going out,” Laura said. “Just for a couple hours.” She smiled and arched her back the tiniest bit, and her shirt rose up on her stomach, and I thought, You are a tricky, horrible woman, you really are, and I was immensely sorry that for a few minutes in a room full of art deco furniture I had given her any benefit of the doubt.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Out, I don’t know. We’re gonna see some more art, right, Alec?” And she ran a carcinogenic hand up and down my son’s bare wrist.

  “Haven’t you guys seen enough art for one day?”

  “C’mon, Pete.” Iris grabbed my arm. “Let’s leave these kids alone.”

  Oh, Iris, please: keep your basket case away from my son. He’s only twenty; he still has time.

  “Don’t worry,” Laura said, and she was laughing — I could see her smother a laugh. “I’ll have him home by curfew.” And Alec, who ordinarily would have grimaced over even a tiny reference to the C-word, just smiled.