“At least it looks good on you.” He smiled at her. “We're a mess, aren't we? Two commitment phobics having dinner and sharing trade secrets.”

“There are worse things.” She looked at him cautiously then, wondering why he had asked her out. She was no longer sure it was entirely about her plans for the center, and she was right about that. “Let's be friends,” she said gently, wanting to make a deal with him, to set the ground rules early on, and the boundaries that she was so good at. He looked at her for a long, hard time before he answered. This time, he wanted to be honest with her. Last time, when he had invited her to dinner, he hadn't been. But he wanted to be before too late.

“I won't make you that promise,” he said as their equally blue eyes met and held. “I don't break promises, and I'm not sure I can keep that one.”

“I won't go out to dinner with you unless I know we're just friends.”

“Then I guess you'll have to start having lunch with me. I'll bring you a banana or we can meet at Sally's and get spareribs all over our faces. I'm not telling you we can't be friends, or that we won't be. But I like you better than that. Even commitment phobics have romances occasionally, or go out on dates.”

“Is that what this was?” She looked at him, startled. It had never occurred to her when he invited her to dinner. She genuinely thought it was foundation business, but she liked him better than that now, enough to want to be friends.

“I don't know,” he said vaguely, not ready to admit that he had lied to her, or used a ruse to get her to have dinner with him. All was fair in sex and fun, as Adam said. Or something along those lines. This had been fun, and interesting even more than fun, but there was no sex yet, and Charlie guessed there wouldn't be for a long time, if ever. “I'm not sure what it was, other than two intelligent people with similar interests getting to know each other. But next time I'd like it to be a date.”

She sat there miserably for a minute, without answering him, wanting to run away, and then she looked at him with anguish on her face. “I don't date.”

“That was yesterday. This is today. You can figure out tomorrow when it happens, and see what you feel like doing then. You don't have to make any big decisions yet. I'm just talking about dinner, not open-heart surgery,” he said simply. He made sense, even to her.

“And which one of us do you think would be out the door first?”

“I'll toss you for it, but I warn you, I'm not in as good shape as I used to be. I don't sprint quite as fast as I once did. You might get there first.”

“Are you using me to prove your abandonment theory, Charlie? That all women leave you sooner or later? I don't want to be used to confirm your neurotic script,” she said, and he smiled as he listened.

“I'll try not to do that, but I can't promise that either. Remember, just dinner. Not a lifetime commitment.” Not yet at least. He warned himself silently to beware of what he wished for. Stranger things had happened. Although he couldn't imagine anything better than spending time with her, for however long it lasted, and whoever hit the door first.

“If you're looking for the 'right woman,' having dinner with a confirmed commitment phobic should not be high on that list.”

“I'll try to keep that in mind. You don't have to be my therapist, Carole. I have one. Just be my friend.”

“I think I am.” They didn't know about the rest yet, but they didn't need to. The future was up for grabs, if she was willing.

He paid the check then, and walked her back to her house. She lived in a small elegant brownstone, which surprised him, and she didn't invite him in. He didn't expect her to. He thought things had gone better than well for a first date.

She told him that she lived in a small studio apartment, at the back of the building, that she rented from the owners. She also mentioned that it was incredibly cheap, and she'd been lucky to find it. He wondered if she had gotten any kind of settlement out of her marriage, since she had mentioned that her husband was rich. He hoped so, for her sake, she should have gotten something out of it instead of only grief.

“Thank you for dinner,” she said politely, and then more firmly, “It wasn't a date.”

“I know that. Thank you for the reminder,” he said with a twinkle in his eye as he looked at her. He was wearing a blue shirt, with no tie, jeans, and a sweater the same color as hers, with brown alligator loafers and no socks. He looked very handsome, and she looked beautiful as she said goodnight to him. “How about dinner next week?”

“I'll think about it,” she said, as she fitted her key into the front door, waved, and disappeared.

“Goodnight,” he whispered to himself with a small smile, as he walked up the block with his head down, thinking of her, and all the information they'd shared. He didn't look back, and never saw her watching him from an upstairs window. She wondered what he was thinking, just as he did about her. Charlie was pleased. Carole was scared.





12


TWO DAYS AFTER CHARLIE'S DINNER WITH CAROLE, Adam pulled up in front of his parents' house on Long Island in his new Ferrari. He already knew he was in for trouble. They expected him to go to services with them, and he had been planning to, as he did every year. But one of his star athletes had just called him in a panic. His wife had been arrested for shoplifting, and he admitted that his sixteen-year-old son was dealing cocaine. It may have been Yom Kippur for him and his parents, but a football player from Minnesota didn't know shit about Yom Kippur and needed Adam's help. He was always there for them, and this time was no different.

They were sending the kid to Hazelden in the morning, and luckily Adam knew the assistant DA on the wife's shoplifting case. They had made a deal for a hundred hours of community service, and the DA had agreed to keep it out of the papers. The quarterback he represented said he owed him his life forever. And at six-thirty Adam was on his way. It took him an hour to get to his parents' house on Long Island. He had missed the services at the synagogue entirely, but at least he had made it in time for dinner. He knew his mother would be furious, and he was disappointed himself. It was the one day of the year he actually liked to go to synagogue to atone for his sins of the past year and remember the dead. The rest of the time, his religion meant little to him. But he loved the tradition of high holidays, and was grateful that Rachel observed all the traditions with his kids. Jacob had been bar mitzvahed the previous summer, and the service where his son had read from the Torah in Hebrew had reduced him to tears. He had never been so proud in his life. He could remember his own father crying at his.

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.