Toxic Bachelors (24 page)

But tonight he knew there would be no such tender moments. His mother would be livid that he hadn't made it in time to go to synagogue with them. It was always something with her. His taking care of his clients in a crisis meant nothing to her. She had been furious with her younger son ever since his divorce. She was closer to Rachel, even now, than she had ever been to him, and Adam always felt his mother liked her better than her own son.

They were all sitting in the living room, just back from synagogue, when Adam walked in. He was wearing a tie and a beautifully cut dark blue Brioni suit, a custom-made white shirt, and perfectly polished shoes. Any other mother would have melted when she saw him. He was well built and good looking, in an exotic, ethnic way. On rare good days, when he was younger, she had said he looked like a young Israeli freedom fighter, and had occasionally been willing to let on that she was proud of him. These days all she ever said was that he had sold his soul to live in Sodom and Gomorrah, and his life was a disgrace. She disapproved of everything he did, from the women she knew he went out with, to the clients he represented, the trips he took to Las Vegas on business, either to see title fights for his boxers, or to see his rappers do concert tours. She even disapproved of Charlie and Gray, and said they were a couple of losers who had never been married and never would be, and hung out with a bunch of loose women. And every time she saw pictures of Adam in the tabloids with one of the women he was dating, standing behind Vana or one of his other clients, she called him to tell him that he was a complete disgrace. He was sure tonight wasn't going to be much better.

Missing services on Yom Kippur was about as bad as it got, as far as she was concerned. He hadn't come home for Rosh Hashanah either. He'd been in Atlantic City cleaning up a contract dispute that had erupted when one of his biggest musical artists had shown up drunk, and passed out onstage. High Jewish holidays meant nothing to his clients, but they meant a lot to his mother. Her face looked like granite when he let himself into the house and walked into the living room. He was so stressed and anxious, he was pale. Coming home always made him feel like a kid again, which was not a happy memory for him. He had been made to feel like an intruder and a disappointment to them since birth.

“Hi, Mom, I'm sorry I'm so late,” he said as he walked toward her, bent to kiss her, and she turned her face away. His father was sitting on the couch staring at his feet. Although he had heard Adam come in, he never looked up to see him. He never did. Adam kissed the top of his mother's head, and moved away. “I'm sorry, everybody, I couldn't help it. I had a crisis with a client. His kid's selling drugs, and his wife was about to go to jail.” His excuse meant nothing to her, it was just more cannon fodder for her.

“Lovely people you work for,” she said, with an edge to her voice that could have sliced through a side of beef. “You must be very proud.” Sarcasm dripped from her voice, as Adam saw his sister glance at her husband, and his brother frowned and turned away. He could tell it was going to be one of those great evenings that left his stomach aching for days.

“It feeds my kids,” Adam said, trying to sound lighthearted, as he went to the sideboard and poured himself a drink. A stiff one. Straight vodka over ice.

“You can't even wait to sit down before you have a drink? You can't go to synagogue on Yom Kippur, or say a decent hello to your family, and you're already drinking? One of these days, Adam, you're going to wind up at AA.” There was little he could say. He would have made a joke of it with Charlie and Gray, but nothing that happened in his family was ever a joke. They looked like they were sitting shivah, as they waited for the maid to tell them that dinner was served. She was the same African American woman who had worked for them for thirty years, though Adam could never figure out why she did. His mother still referred to her as “the
schwartze
” in front of her, although she spoke more Yiddish than he did by now. She was the only person Adam enjoyed seeing on his rare visits home. Her name was Mae. His mother always said with a look of disapproval, what kind of name was Mae?

“How was synagogue?” he asked politely, trying to strike up conversation while his sister Sharon spoke in hushed tones to their sister-in-law Barbara, and his brother Ben talked golf to their brother-in-law, whose name was Gideon, but no one liked him, so they pretended he had no name. In his family, if you didn't make the cut, everyone pretended you had no name. Ben was a doctor, and Gideon only sold insurance. The fact that Adam had graduated magna cum laude from Harvard Law School was canceled out by the fact that he was divorced because his wife had left him, a fact for which, in his mother's opinion, he was almost certainly to blame. If he were a decent guy, why would a girl like Rachel leave him? And look what he'd been dating ever since. The mantras were endless, and he knew them all by then. It was a game you could never win. He still tried, but never knew why he did.

Mae finally came to call them in to dinner, and as they sat down at their usual places, Adam saw his mother stare down the length of the table at him. It was a look that would have wilted concrete. His father was at the opposite end, with both couples lined up on either side. Their children were still being fed in the kitchen, and Adam hadn't seen them yet. They'd been shooting basketball hoops and secretly smoking cigarettes outside. His own children never came. His mother saw them alone with Rachel, on her own time. Adam's place was between his father and sister, like someone they had made room for at the last minute. He always got the table leg between his knees. He didn't really mind it, but it always seemed like a sign from God to him that there wasn't room for him in this family, even more so in recent years. Ever since his divorce from Rachel, and his partnership in his law firm shortly before that, he had been treated like a pariah, and a source of grief and shame to his mother in particular. His accomplishments, which were considerable in the real world, meant absolutely nothing here. He was treated like a creature from outer space, and sat there sometimes feeling like ET, growing paler by the minute, and desperate to go home. The worst part of it for him was that this was home, hard as that was for him to believe. They all felt like strangers and enemies to him, and treated him that way.

“So, where have you been lately?” his mother asked in the first silence, so that everyone could hear him list off places like Las Vegas and Atlantic City, where there were gambling and prostitutes and roving bands of loose women, all of whom had been summoned there for Adam's use.

“Oh, here and there,” Adam said vaguely. He knew the drill. It was tough to avoid the potholes and pitfalls, but he usually gave it a good try. “I was in Italy and France in August,” he reminded her, he had spoken to her since.

There was no point telling her he'd been in Atlantic City the week before, dealing with another crisis. Mercifully, she had no idea where he'd been on Rosh Hashanah and didn't expect him to come home. He only made the effort on Yom Kippur. He glanced at his sister then, and she smiled at him. For an instant, in a momentary hallucination, he saw her hair get tall with white streaks in it, and fangs come out. He always thought of her as the Bride of Frankenstein. She had two kids, whom he rarely saw, who were just like Gideon and her. He went to everyone's bar and bat mitzvahs, but other than that, he never saw them. His nephews and nieces were all strangers to him, and he admitted to Charlie and Gray that he preferred it that way. He insisted that everyone in his family were freaks, which was precisely what they thought of him.

“How was Lake Mohonk?” he asked his mother. He had no idea why she still went there. His father had made a fortune in the stock market forty years before, and they could have afforded to go anywhere in the world. His mother liked to pretend they were still poor. And she hated planes, so they never ventured far.

“It was very nice,” she said, foraging for something else to spear him with. She usually used whatever he told her to clobber him. The trick was not to give her any information, other than what she read in the tabloids, which she purchased religiously, or what she saw on TV. Generally, she sent him clippings of the ugliest pictures of him, standing behind one of his clients being handcuffed and taken to jail. She always wrote little notes on what she sent, “In case you missed this …” When they were particularly bad, she sent them in triplicate, mailed separately, with little notes on them that began, “Did I forget to send you …”

“How're you feeling, Dad?” was usually Adam's next attempt at conversation, which always had the same response. He had been convinced as a boy that his father had been replaced by a robot left there by creatures from outer space. The robot they had left had a piece of defective machinery that made it difficult for it to speak. It was capable of it, but you had to kick the robot into action first, and then you realized the battery was dead. His father's standard answer to the question eventually was “pretty good,” as he stared into his plate, never looked at you, and continued to eat. Removing himself mentally entirely, and refusing to enter into the conversation, had been the only way his father had survived fifty-seven years of marriage to his mother. Adam's brother Ben was turning fifty-five that winter, Sharon had just turned fifty, and Adam had been an accident nine years later, apparently one that was neither worth discussing, nor addressing, except when he did something wrong.

He couldn't remember his mother ever telling him she loved him, or wasting a kind word on him since he was born. He was, and had been even as a child, an embarrassment and an annoyance. The kindest thing they had ever done for him was ignore him. The worst was scold him, shun him, berate him, and spank him, all of which had been his mother's job when he was growing up, and she was still doing it now that he was in his forties. All she had eliminated over the years was the spankings.

“So who are you dating now, Adam?” his mother asked as Mae brought in the salad. He assumed that because he hadn't gone to synagogue, and had to be punished for it, she had brought the big guns out early this time. As a rule, she waited to level that one at him till after dessert, with coffee. He had learned long since that there was no correct answer. Telling her the truth, on that or any subject, would have brought the house down.

“No one. I've been busy,” he said vaguely.

“Apparently,” his mother said, as she walked swift and erect to the sideboard. She was slim and spare and in remarkably good shape although she was seventy-nine years old. His father was eighty, but going strong, physically at least.

She took a copy of the
Enquirer
out of the sideboard then, and passed it down the table, so everyone could see it. She hadn't sent him the clippings of that one yet. She'd apparently been saving it for the high holidays, so everyone could enjoy it, not just Adam. He saw that it was a photograph taken of him at Vana's concert. There was a girl standing next to him with her mouth wide open and her eyes closed, in a leather jacket, and her breasts exploding out of a black blouse. Her skirt was so short it looked like she had none on. “Who is
that
?” his mother asked in a tone that suggested he was holding out on them. He stared at it for a minute, and had absolutely no recollection, and then he remembered. Maggie. The girl he'd gotten a seat on the stage for, and whom he had taken home to the tenement she lived in. He was tempted to tell his mother not to worry about it, since he hadn't slept with her, so obviously she didn't count.

“Just a girl I was standing next to at the concert,” he said vaguely.

“She wasn't your date?” She was torn between relief and disappointment. She'd have to choose another weapon.

“No. I went with Charlie.”

“Who?” She always pretended she didn't remember. To Adam, forgetting the names of his friends was just another form of rejection.

“Charles Harrington.” The one you always pretend you don't remember.

“Oh.
That
one. He must be gay. He's never been married.” Her point on that one. She was in control now. If you said he wasn't gay, she'd want to know how you knew, which could be incriminating. And if you threw caution to the winds and agreed with her, just to get the hot potato out of your lap, it would inevitably come back to haunt you later. He had tried it with other topics. It was best to say nothing. He smiled at Mae instead as she passed the rolls again, and she winked at him. She was his only ally, and always had been.

He felt like he'd been in hell for several hours by the time they got up from the table after dinner. The knot in his stomach was the size of his fist by then, as he watched them settle into the same chairs where they always sat, and had been sitting before dinner. He looked around the room then, and he realized he just couldn't do it. He went to stand close to his mother, in case she had an urge to hug him. It didn't happen often.

“I'm sorry, Mom. I have an incredible headache. It feels like a migraine. It's a long drive, I think I'd better go.” All he wanted to do was bolt for the door and run for his life.

She looked at him for a long moment with her lips pursed, and nodded. She had punished him adequately for not going to synagogue with them. He was free to go. He had done his duty, as whipping boy and scapegoat. It was a role she had assigned him for his entire life, since he had had the audacity to arrive in her life at a time when she thought she was finished having children. He had been an unexpected and unwelcome assault on her tea parties and bridge games, and had been soundly punished for it. Always. And still was. He had been a major inconvenience to her, and never a source of joy. The others took their cues from her. At fourteen, Ben had been mortified to have his mother pregnant again. At nine, Sharon had been outraged by the intrusion on her life. His father had been playing golf, and unavailable for comment. And as their final revenge, he had been brought up by a nanny, and never saw them. As it turned out, the punishment that had been meted out to him had been a blessing. The woman who had taken care of him until he was ten had been loving and kind and good and the only decent person in his childhood. Until his tenth birthday, when she was summarily fired and not allowed to say good-bye. He still wondered sometimes what had happened to her, but as she hadn't been young then, he assumed that she was dead by now. For years, he had felt guilty for not trying to find her, or at least write her, to thank her for her kindness.