Toxic Bachelors (25 page)

“If you didn't drink so much and go out with such loose women,” his mother pronounced, “you wouldn't get migraines.” He wasn't sure what the loose women had to do with it, but he didn't ask her. He took her word for it, it was simpler.

“Thanks for a great dinner.” He had no idea what he'd eaten. Probably roast beef. He never looked at what he was eating in their house. He just got through it.

“Call me sometime,” she said sternly. He nodded and resisted the urge to ask her why. It was another question no one could have answered. Why would he want to call her? He didn't, but called anyway, out of respect and habit, every week or so, and prayed that she'd be out so he could leave a message, preferably with his father, who barely managed to squeeze three words in between hello and good-bye, which were almost always “I'll tell her.”

Adam said good-bye to each of them, then said good-bye to Mae in the kitchen, let himself out the front door, and slipped into the Ferrari with an enormous sigh.

“Holy fucking shit!” he said out loud. “I hate those people.” After he said it out loud he felt better, and gunned the car. He was on the Long Island Expressway ten minutes later going well over the speed limit, but his stomach already felt better. He tried to call Charlie, just so he could hear the voice of a normal human being, but he was out, and he left an inane message on the machine. And as he drove home, he found himself thinking of Maggie. The picture of her in the
Enquirer
was awful. He remembered her looking better than that. In her own way, she was a cute girl. He thought about her for a few minutes and wondered if he should call her. Probably not, but he knew he needed to do something that night to restore his battered guts and ego. There were plenty of others he could call, and when he got home, he called them. Everyone was out. It was a Friday night, and all the women he knew would be out on dates with someone. All he needed was a little human touch, someone to smile at, talk to him, and hold him. He didn't even need to have sex with them, he just wanted someone to recognize the fact that he was a human being. Seeing his family took all the air out of him, it was like having his blood sucked out of him by vampires. Now he needed a transfusion.

Sitting in his apartment, Adam ran through his address book. He called seven women. All he got were their answering machines, and then he thought of Maggie. He figured she was probably working, but just for the hell of it, he decided to call her. It was after midnight by then, and maybe she was home. He fished into the leather jacket he'd worn that night, at Vana's concert, looking for the little scrap of paper where he'd written her number. He went through all the pockets, and then he found it. Maggie O'Malley. He dialed the number. He knew it was ridiculous to reach out to her, but he had to talk to someone. His mother drove him crazy. He hated his sister. He didn't even hate her. He disliked her, nearly as much as she disliked him. She had never done anything with her life except get married and have two children. He would have been happy talking to Gray or Charlie. But he knew Gray was with Sylvia, and it was too late to call. And he remembered that Charlie was gone for the weekend. So he called Maggie. He felt a rising wave of panic, as he always did when he went home, and now he really was getting a migraine. Somehow, just being with them, brought back the worst memories of his childhood. He let the phone ring a dozen times, and no one answered. A message machine finally came on with several girls' names on it, and he left his name and number for Maggie, wondering why he'd bothered. Like everyone else he knew, Maggie was out that night, and as soon as he set the receiver down, he knew it was stupid to have called her. She was a total stranger. He couldn't explain to her what seeing his family did to him, or how much pain his mother always caused him. Maggie was some silly girl he had dragged around with him that night, for lack of someone better. She was just a waitress. Seeing her in the clipping his mother had used to torture him had reminded him of her, and he was relieved now that she hadn't answered. He hadn't even slept with her, and the only reason he had kept her number was because he had forgotten to take it out of his jacket and toss it.

In spite of his mother's dire warnings about potential alcoholism, and telling him that even migraine headaches could result, he poured himself a drink before he went to bed, and lay there after he did, trying to recover from the strain of the evening on Long Island. He hated going home and seeing them. It was an exquisite form of torture. It always took him days to recover from it. What was the point of having him, if they were going to treat him like an outcast all his life? He lay in bed, thinking of them, as the headache his mother had warned him about began to pound. It took him nearly an hour after that to fall asleep.

An hour later, he was in a deep sleep when the telephone rang. He dreamed that it was monsters from outer space, trying to eat him alive, and making strange buzzing sounds while they did. And all the while, his mother stood laughing at him, waving newspapers in his face. He put the covers over his head, and dreamed that he was running screaming from them, until he realized it was the phone. He put the receiver to his ear, and was still more than half asleep when he answered.

“…llo…”

“Adam?” He didn't recognize the voice, and realized as he woke up that the headache was even worse than it had been when he went to bed.

“Who is this?” He didn't know, and no longer cared, as he rolled over in bed and started to go back to sleep.

“It's Maggie. You left a message on my machine.”

“Maggie who?” He was still too out of it to understand.

“Maggie O'Malley. You called me. Did I wake you up?”

“Yeah. You did.” His mind was a little clearer then, as he glanced at the alarm clock next to his bed. It was just after two. “Why are you calling me at this hour?” As his head cleared, the headache did too. But he knew that if he talked to her, he would have trouble going back to sleep.

“I thought it was important. You called me at midnight. I just got home from work. I thought you'd still be up.”

“I'm not,” he said, lying in bed and thinking about her. His call to her must have sounded like a booty call to her at that hour. But calling him back at two
A.M.
was hardly any better. In fact, slightly worse. And now it was too late to see her anyway. He was half asleep.

“What were you calling me about?” She sounded curious, and somewhat ill at ease. She had liked meeting him, and was grateful for the seat he'd gotten her. But she was disappointed he hadn't called her afterward. When she mentioned it to them, her friends at the restaurant where she worked didn't think he would. They thought the fact that she hadn't slept with him might make him less interested. Maybe if she had, he might have felt some bond to her. Although the maître d' insisted it was just the reverse.

“I was just wondering if you were busy,” Adam said sleepily.

“At midnight?” She sounded shocked, and as he woke up and turned on the light, he was faintly embarrassed. Most of the women he knew would have hung up on him at that point, except those who were truly desperate. Maggie wasn't, and sounded insulted by his explanation. “What was that, a booty call?” She had called it. Except in his case, it had been an antidote to the venom of his mother. Her particular brand was singularly potent, and he'd been hoping some sympathetic soul would provide the antivenom he needed. And if sexual favors were involved, that wouldn't hurt either. It was just slightly more awkward in Maggie's case, because he really didn't know her.

“No, it wasn't a booty call, I was just lonely. And I had a headache.” Even to his own ears, he sounded pathetic.

“You called me because you had a headache?”

“Yeah, sort of,” he said, sounding embarrassed. “I had a shit evening with my parents on Long Island. It's Yom Kippur.” He guessed correctly that with a name like O'Malley, she wouldn't know beans about Yom Kippur. Most of his dates didn't.

“Well, Happy Yom Kippur,” she said a little tartly.

“Not exactly. It's the Day of Atonement,” he informed her.

“How come you didn't call me before this?” She was justifiably suspicious.

“I've been busy.” He was growing sorrier by the minute. The last thing he needed was to deal with this girl he had planned never to call, at two o'clock in the morning. It served him right, he realized, for calling her in the first place. So much for booty calls to strangers at midnight.

“Yeah, I've been busy too,” she said in her distinctly New York accent. “Thanks for the seat anyway, and a nice evening. You weren't going to call me again, were you?” She sounded sad when she said it.

“Apparently I was, since I did call you. Two hours ago in fact,” he said, sounding irritated. He didn't owe her any explanations, and now his headache was coming back with a vengeance. Evenings on Long Island always did that. And Maggie wasn't helping, contrary to what he'd intended.

“No, you weren't going to call me. My girlfriends said you wouldn't.”

“You discussed this with them?” It was embarrassing to think about. Maybe the entire neighborhood had been polled about whether or not he'd call her.

“I just asked what they thought. Would you have called me if I slept with you?” she asked, curious, as Adam groaned, closed his eyes again, and rolled over.

“For God's sake, what do I know? Maybe. Maybe not. Who knows? Depends if we liked each other.”

“To be honest, I'm not sure I like you. I thought I did the night I met you. Now I think you were just playing with me. Maybe you and Charlie thought I was funny.” She sounded insulted. With his limousine and the places he'd taken her to, it was obvious that he had money. Guys like him took advantage of girls like her all the time, and afterward they never called them. That's what her friends had said, and when he didn't call, she decided they were right. She was even happier now that she hadn't slept with him, although she'd thought about it and decided against it. She didn't know him. And she wasn't willing to trade a seat on the stage for her body.

“Charlie thought you were very nice,” Adam lied to her. He had no idea what Charlie had thought. He couldn't remember. Neither of them had ever mentioned her again. She was just someone who had quickly crossed their radar screen one night, and vanished, never to be seen again. She was right. He wasn't going to call her. Until the nightmare on Long Island, and no one else answered. He'd been desperate for human contact. And now he was getting more than he wanted.

“And what about you, Adam? Did you think I was nice too?” She was pushing. He opened his eyes again, and stared at the ceiling, wondering why he was talking to her. It was all his mother's fault. He had had just enough to drink to believe that most things in his life were his mother's fault. The rest were Rachel's.

“Look, why are we doing this? I don't know you. You don't know me. We're strangers. I have a headache, a big one, my stomach hurts. My mother thinks I'm an alcoholic. Maybe I am. I don't think so. But whatever I am, I feel like shit. I was born into the family from hell, and I just spent an evening with them. That's nothing to mess around with. I'm pissed off. I hate my parents, and they don't like me either. I don't know why I called you, but I did. You weren't home. Why don't we just let it go at that? Just pretend you never got the message. Maybe it was a booty call. I don't know why the hell I called you, except that I feel like shit. And I always feel like shit after I see my mother.” He was getting seriously worked up over it, as Maggie listened quietly at her end.

“I'm sorry, Adam. I didn't have such great parents either. My father died when I was three. And my mother was an alcoholic. I haven't seen her since I was seven.”

“So who did you grow up with?” He had no idea why he was pursuing the conversation, but he was curious about her.

“I grew up with an aunt until I was fourteen. Then she died, and I was in foster care till I graduated from high school. Actually, I didn't really graduate. I got my GED at sixteen. I've been on my own ever since.” She said it matter-of-factly, and seemed to have no need for pity.

“Jesus. That sounds like a bunch of bad breaks.” But a lot of the women he knew had histories like that. The kind of women he went out with had rarely had easy lives, most of them had been molested by male relatives, left home at sixteen, and had gone to work as actresses and models. There were few women he knew who had had normal lives, or were debutantes like the ones who went out with Charlie. Maggie was no different. She just sounded more philosophical about it, and she didn't sound as though she expected him to do anything about it. She didn't expect him to pay for implants for her, in order to make up for the fact that her mother had been a hooker, or she'd been molested by her father. Whatever had happened to her, she sounded as though she'd made her peace with it. If anything, she sounded sympathetic to Adam.

“Do you have any family at all?” He was intrigued.

“Nope. It kind of sucks on holidays, but I see my foster parents once in a while.”

“Believe me,” Adam said cynically, “not having a family is a blessing. You wouldn't have wanted to have one like mine.” Maggie wasn't sure she agreed with him, but she wasn't about to debate it with him at two-thirty in the morning. They had been chatting aimlessly for half an hour. And she still believed his call to her had been a booty call, which she thought was just plain rude and downright insulting. She wondered how many other women he had called, and if he would have bothered to call her at all, if one of the others had come to his aid. Apparently, they hadn't, since he was obviously alone, and had been sleeping soundly when she called him.

“Most of the time, I think I'd like to have a family, even a bad one.” And then she thought of something. She was wide awake, despite the hour, and by now so was he. “Do you have brothers and sisters?”

“Maggie, could we talk about this some other time? I'll call you tomorrow. I'll give you my entire family history. I promise.” And with that, she heard a crashing sound, he groaned, and shouted a single word: “Shit!” He sounded like he'd gotten hurt.