A Friend of the Family Read online

  “Hey, asshole!”

  The fisherman and I both turn. The red and white cigarette boat is stalling in the water about fifteen feet from where I sit, and its young captain has perched himself up on the deck, a pair of binoculars around his neck.

  “You know who I am?” the kid shouts.

  I stand to get a better look. It takes me a minute, but I do in fact know who he is: Roseanne Craig’s brother. A nasty piece of work; he used to torture his sister, my patient, Roseanne. They worked together on the floor of Craig Motors. He’s been bumping into me every so often these past few months, on line at the Grand Union, buying beer at Hopwood Liquors. He even slashed two of my Audi’s tires last September, before I traded in the Audi for the Escort, which I don’t think he recognizes as mine. An elderly patient saw him do it and called the cops, but I didn’t press charges.

  “We’re gonna fucking have your ass, Dizinoff!”

  Slowly I put my hands on my knees; slowly I stand up. “Are you stalking me, Craig?”

  “We’re gonna fucking have your ass! I’m just telling you now! Get ready!” His voice is strained across the water.

  “Have you really been stalking me?”

  “I’m not stalking you, Dizinoff. I’m warning you.”

  “Very kind of you,” I say. How did he know I would be at this park? Why does he have a cigarette boat? I look up and down the river, not sure who or what I expect to find, but I expect to find something: a camera crew, the long arm of the law.

  “I’ll get you!” the kid on the boat screams.

  “You should get out of here,” the fisherman mumbles in my direction. He’s slitting open the side of a bluefish, the blade of his knife sliding neatly through the pearl gray skin. With a bare hand he slides out the fish’s entrails and throws them back into the river, where they roil for a moment before disappearing. I don’t want to get out of here. This is my park. This is a place that’s still mine.

  “Kids like that …,” the fisherman warns.

  “He doesn’t know me,” I say, absurdly.

  “You never know what they’re gonna do.” He puts the bluefish fillets in his cooler, picks up the next wriggling fish, knocks its brain loose against the piling, and lets it rest on the bench to be gutted.

  “Dizinoff, you listening to me? We’re going to have your ass! Decision comes fucking Monday. You listening, motherfucker?” The kid bends down into the cockpit of his boat, and despite myself, I shiver. From the interior, the kid removes something small, silver, shiny. Aims it at me. I take a deep breath. Squint, try to figure out what he’s holding.

  A can of beer. For Christ’s sake.

  Today is Saturday. On Monday, the judge will let us know whether she’ll take the Craig family’s case. On Tuesday, my wife will finally go see the lawyer about the divorce. And then I will know what’s what, and I can plan for the rest of my life.

  “We’re gonna destroy you,” the kid says. Then he pitches the can of beer at me, unopened, surprisingly hard and fast. It hits my shin before I can move, stings like a bitch, falls to the pavement, and explodes, sending up a geyser of beer against my legs.

  “You should get out of here, man,” the fisherman mutters, almost as if he’s talking to his fish.

  A few feet away, the beer-can bomb rolls to a stop, foams, and hisses. I cross my arms against my chest. My pants are drenched, my heart is thrumming, the kid in the boat sneers but does not laugh.

  “Are you crazy?” I shout.

  The Soviet Union. Good and evil. Once upon a time I knew what was right and what was wrong.

  “Fuck you, Dizinoff,” the kid calls, pulling out another can of beer, aiming it at me.

  And I buck like the coward I am. Heart racing, I turn, run, trip, fall, rip my pants, stand up again. I make it to the car, reach into my pocket for my keys, try to ignore the blood matting the hair on my shins and my heart pulsing in my ears. I hear the cigarette boat turn and start slapping away along the river. He’s done with me, but my heart won’t quit—I am shaking when I sit down behind the wheel of the Escort. I lock every door. I feel parking-lot gravel buried in the cut in my leg.

  By the water, the fisherman is still cutting up his catch. Waves from the wake of the cigarette boat splash up against the piling, but the fisherman doesn’t seem to notice them, or else he doesn’t mind. I see the boat slip down the Hudson like a pleasure cruiser, and I feel the blood trickle toward my shoe.

  WHEN I first met Roseanne Craig, the girl was twenty-two, a Cal graduate, the daughter of an acquaintance from the JCC whose hypertension I had diagnosed maybe three years before. I didn’t know her dad particularly well, only enough to nod at him in the locker room, but he had a network of auto dealerships in Teaneck and Paramus where Joe, among others, bought and serviced his Lincolns, Jeeps, and Cadillacs. Roseanne, just back from Berkeley, had been suffering from weight loss and mild depression, and her father, not knowing where else to go, had sent her to my office in Round Hill. I had a reputation, after all, for figuring things out.

  Eyes clear, chest good, heart thwop-thwop-thwopping. No fluid in the lungs, no swelling in the hands or feet, no distended veins in the neck, no nodules on the thyroid or masses in the abdomen. No patient complaints besides the aforementioned weight loss — although she still cleared a solid 150 — and perhaps a generalized malaise.

  “You’re sure you don’t want to see a psychiatrist?”

  “Oh, I have a therapist,” she said. “She does reflexology, too.” Months later, when I told that to my lawyer, he snickered and made frantic notes.

  Roseanne Craig was a pretty girl, tough-looking, with dark brown eyes and black hair. She had skeleton tattoos on her upper arms and another large one, I noticed, on her left breast. A frog. “It’s this whole story,” she told me, though I didn’t ask. The frog was surprisingly well done, one of those black-spotted jungle frogs, and it kept its lifelike eyes on me as I palpated.

  “We used to call my ex-boyfriend Frogger.” She closed her eyes as I pressed my fingers on her breast, standard procedure in my office for several years now.

  “Frogger, huh?”

  “Hence the tattoo.” She didn’t seem the least bit depressed to me, but her skin was maybe a little yellow, and with the tattoos — I decided to order a hep test and kept her talking. “He dumped me three months ago” — aha! the malaise — “for a dude. He said it was accidental, like he hadn’t planned it or anything, but …” She sighed heavily as she buttoned up her shirt. “It was some grad student from Stanford. He told me like a month after I got this fucking tattoo. We were going to move to SF together. Open up a Marxist bookstore. And I was going to bake brownies—like a Marxist bookstore-café. And now I’m living with my fucking parents. Sorry,” she said, wagging an eyebrow at me like a dare. “I shouldn’t curse around doctors.”

  “Curse away.” We returned to my office, her combat boots clomping on the floor; Mina, my rather conservative Lithuanian office manager, took note of the boots and rolled her eyes.

  “And so,” I asked, once we were back in my office, “with all this stress in your life, you haven’t been able to eat?”

  “I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I guess. I’ve definitely lost weight. My clothes are loose.”

  “How much weight, would you estimate?”

  “Maybe eight, ten pounds? I don’t know,” she said. “This is all really my dad’s idea. Seeing you, I mean.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Well, I think you’re probably fine, but I’m going to order some blood work just to make sure, and if you’re feeling depressed and you don’t like your therapist, come back to me and I can refer you to a” — I couldn’t help myself—“a real doctor.”

  “Oh.” She sighed dramatically. “You’re part of that medical establishment, then.”

  “I’m not sure which particular medical establishment you mean.”

  “The one that disrespects alternative therapies. The one that would rather feed me antibiotics than send me to acupu
ncture.”

  “Actually,” I said, leaning back in my chair, “I think antibiotics are overprescribed. I have no problem with acupuncture. And if your reflexologist is doing the job for you, that’s terrific. But I’d still like you to see a shrink.”

  “I just never really liked shrinks much.”

  “Some of them are nice.”

  “Some of them are full of crap.”

  “I’m recommending one to you who isn’t.”

  “Promise?” she asked, smiling. She really wasn’t as tough as she first made out.

  “Promise,” I said.

  She tucked a piece of black hair behind her ear, smiled demurely, took the sheet I’d ripped from the prescription pad with the name and number of Round Hill Psychiatric.

  When Roseanne Craig left my office, I never thought I’d see her again.

  THE DRIVE FROM the park back to Round Hill takes about fifteen minutes, although today I take the long way up to Route 9W, through the back roads of Rockleigh and Alpine. Up here, in winter, the trees are bare and you can see straight across the Hudson; in spring and fall, wild turkeys and deer congregate on the shoulder. Today somehow I miss my exit and have to double back to May-crest Avenue, Round Hill’s main drag. Down a long, steep hill to the heart of town, punctuated with speed traps, stoplights, and DRUG FREE SCHOOL ZONE signs. This is a town that likes to play it safe. My fingers are tight on the steering wheel.

  Our prosperous little hill is divided into three parts, east to west: the School District, the Manor, and Downtown. The School District is geographic, not administrative, and named for the three square miles surrounding Round Hill Country Day—lush two-acre plots bearing Tudor palaces, Spanish-style haciendas, Georgian piles with helicopter pads and infinity pools. We’ve got celebrities up there, two or three well-known rap stars, the CEO of the hospital, and a handful of dermatologists, plastic surgeons, and orthopedists.

  In the Manor, where Elaine and I live, the plots are more manage able, three-quarters of an acre at most. The houses are mostly Victorians and colonials, sometimes a shingle-sided renovation, and a few 1980 “contemporaries” with birch siding set on a slant and trapezoidal windows. Downtown is literal, at the base of Maycrest Avenue; it’s where we keep our hospital, our businesses, our blacks, and the public school where nobody we know sends their children.

  Still stinking of beer, with blood crusted on my jeans, I pull into the driveway of the pale green Victorian house on Pearl Street where Elaine and I have lived since 1982. We bought it for $125,000, fingers crossed and breaths held; Bert Birch had offered me a partnership with privileges at Round Hill Medical Center, and even though Elaine and I both thought, privately, No, not here, we don’t know anyone, how will we afford this? we kept our doubts entirely to ourselves and moved in. As soon as Joe was finished with his ob-gyn fellowship in Baltimore, we persuaded him and Iris to move to town, and they did, and we let out our breaths a little. But we’d been isolated and nervous that whole first year, and for some reason trying to get pregnant, too.

  I put the Escort in park and look up at our house. Elaine’s Jeep is in the driveway, and so is Alec’s Civic. I wonder if they’re spending the afternoon together, maybe sharing last weekend’s crossword, a simple pleasure for them both. I know how happy Elaine is to have our son back. To be honest, he’s a better housemate than I’ve ever been, neater, more considerate, and, unlike me, he enjoys most of the things his mother does. At night, from the studio, I can hear them play their favorite music: that Cuban band from the movie, some African chanting Alec picked up from a friend who went in for the Peace Corps. It all sounds like high-end restaurant music to me, but who cares what I think? Not these two. No reason to.

  Does Roseanne’s brother come here? I wonder. Does he know where my wife and child sleep? Does he care about them, or is his rage only directed toward me? I reach down and wipe my bloody leg, pull out a tiny piece of gravel. I was a coward, but so was the kid. Throwing beer cans. Screaming obscenities.

  I roll down the window but the house is quiet, although I see lamplight burning from behind the living room shades. Reproduction Tiffany lamps that we bought in Bedford during our marital renaissance, six years ago now. She’s done the crossword by them ever since. If Craig has come to the house, if he’s stood outside, maybe he’s watched her complete the Sunday. If he touches her, even thinks of touching her, I swear to God I’ll kill him without a blink.

  Elaine and I have known each other for more than half our lives. She’s watched over me. She still watches over me, despite the doubts about me that she regrettably holds. As I watch, the Tiffany lamps go dark, and a minute later, after she’s fetched her jacket, her purse, and her keys, my wife stands at our front door, looking out at me in my little white Escort. I wave at her. She blinks, smiles sadly, and waves back. She’s kept her hair short in recent years, and she’s put on forty pounds, but I can remember her clinging to my side back in college, eating cinnamon rolls in Rehoboth, and if I could only scroll back time and do it again, every day would be a renaissance.

  “You coming in?” she calls from the top step of our porch.

  “You going out?” I ask.

  She pulls her jacket around her shoulders and nods.

  “I think I’ll sit here for a while,” I say.

  Elaine has grown used to what could kindly be called my eccentricities. She shrugs, descends from the porch, and steps lightly to her car. She swings her purse at her side. It breaks my heart to see her go.

  CHAPTER TWO

  LOOKING BACK, AS my circumstances often suggest that I do, I see my thirties and forties as a vast steppe; only occasionally did the landscape bulge or dip. Bert Birch had brought me in because he was heading into his midfifties and his wife had been warning him for twenty years that she’d leave him if he didn’t find a partner and take a vacation with her once a year. In 1982, Bert was fifty-five, an old-fashioned kind of doctor in an old-fashioned kind of office with one nurse, one secretary, and half a day off on Wednesdays. He kept Popular Mechanics in the waiting room; occasionally, quietly, he made house calls. He ran a comfortable, neighborly practice, and although he was based at Round Hill Medical Center, most of his patients came from the less swanky communities down the valley: Bergen-town, Hopwood, Maycrest Village. They were teachers, postal clerks, cops, hairdressers. Bert took care of generations of the same family, celebrating their births, mourning their deaths, bringing home, at Christmastime, fruit baskets or homemade sheet cakes or bottles of lambrusco. He’d been at it for twenty-seven years, had taken over the practice from his own father, who remembered when cows used to graze where the Sunoco now stood.

  During the decade we worked together, we got along very nicely; I know for sure Bert felt fatherly toward me despite his sometimes gruff demeanor. He made bad jokes. He threatened to take me golfing. His wife, MaryJo, often invited Elaine and me over for operatic Italian dinners; she was from four generations of North Jersey Sicilians and referred to her impeccable tomato sauce as “gravy.” In the warm light of the Birches’ rambling center-hall colonial, Elaine and I would scarf down platters of scungilli marinara, trippa fra diavolo, rigatoni, meatballs in gravy. There were five Birch children and six Birch grandchildren and often they’d cram in at the table right next to us. Elaine and I never wanted children quite as badly as we did during our drives down Maycrest Avenue, full of MaryJo’s decadent cooking, arms still aching from the warmth of one Birch grandbaby or another.

  As I grew more comfortable in Round Hill, I began branching out, joined the JCC, started making connections with the other local docs. I was interested in developing a good reputation, and although I had no problem with your everyday checkup, your diabetic accountant or petit mal secretary, what I longed for were the specialty cases, the sleuthy diagnoses nobody else had been able to figure. I’d caught the Sherlock Holmes bug during a medical school rotation, when I intuited a case of Goodpasture syndrome in a twenty-four-year-old graduate student who thought he was having
a mind-blowing asthma attack and a hangover. I had just finished a unit on nephrology, so my mind was in the right place, but still, because I was paying excellent attention, I probably spared the kid a lifetime of dialysis. I’ll never forget him—his name was Paul Chung, he was studying to be an architect, and we shared the same exact birthday. For maybe four years after, he sent me Christmas cards.

  Anyway, during those first few seasons, I’d stay late at the office, taking patients long after Bert had packed it in, then go home to curl up in the downstairs study and pore over JAMA, the New England Journal, journals for specialties I hadn’t pursued. I’d become an internist because I liked the diversity of cases, because I liked primary care, and because I didn’t feel like spending any more time in training. My brother, Phil, was already making fifty thousand dollars right out of NYU Law; I wanted to start earning, too. As an internist—a sort of jack-of-all-trades — I could peruse articles on subjects from gastritis to hemodialysis, learn how to tell Crohn’s colitis from ulcerative. I would refer the exotic patients to the specialists, but the specialists would make their diagnoses with my hunches in hand.

  Still, it wasn’t just ambition keeping me in the study; I guess it rarely is. Elaine and I had been trying to have a baby for four years, and her inability to hold the embryo — or our inability to discuss the matter with anything like honesty — made me feel increasingly lost and insecure in our bedroom. We’d been to the fertility doctors, who told us that there was nothing physiologically wrong with her and advised us to just, you know, relax. Just relax? I can hardly imagine a doctor with the cojones to make that suggestion today — but back then, in 1983, it seemed like fair enough advice. Relax, do what nature tells you, and Elaine, take it easy those first three months, not so much running around, okay? And oh, how she took those doctors seriously, as though they were headmasters, prison wardens. Lying on her back eighteen hours a day, rising only to eat, take a shower. But it didn’t matter—by eight weeks in, the bleeding would start, and it wouldn’t end until we were in the emergency room, waiting for an ultrasound to confirm what we already knew. Those years were the first period of several during our marriage when I took to sleeping on the couch. Sex in the evening, just to get it over with, and then me in the study with my quilt and my JAMA. If it bothered her—and it must have bothered her—she never said a word.