Toxic Bachelors (23 page)

“That's bullshit,” she said simply, looking him dead in the eye. “Guys who've been single forever always say they haven't met the right woman. You can't tell me that at forty-six, you've never met the right one. There are a lot of them out there, and if you haven't found one, I think you don't want to. Not finding the right woman is really a poor excuse. Find something else,” she said matter-of-factly, and took a sip of her wine as Charlie stared at her. She had cut right to the quick, and worse yet, she was right, and he knew it. So did she. She looked convinced of what she'd said.

“Okay. I concede. A few of them might have been right, if I'd wanted to compromise. I've been looking for perfection.”

“You won't find it. No one's perfect. You know that. So what's the deal?”

“Scared shitless,” he said honestly, for the first time in his life, and nearly fell off his chair when he heard himself say it.

“That's better. Why?” She was good at what she did, although he didn't realize it till later. Getting into peo-ple's hearts and heads was her business, and what she loved doing. But he sensed instinctively that she wasn't going to hurt him. He felt safe with her.

“My parents died when I was sixteen, my sister took care of me, and then she died of a brain tumor when I was twenty-one. That was it. End of family. I guess I've figured all my life that if you love someone they either die, or leave, or disappear, or abandon you. I'd rather be the first one out the door.”

“That makes sense,” she said quietly, listening to him, and watching him closely. She knew he had told her the truth. “And people do die and leave and disappear. It happens that way sometimes. But if you're the first one out the door, you wind up alone for sure. You don't mind that?”

“I didn't.” Past tense. Lately he was minding it a lot, but he didn't want to say that to her. Yet.

“You pay a big price in life for being scared,” she said quietly, and then added, “scared to love. I'm not so good at that myself.” She decided to tell him then. Just as he did with her, she felt safe with him. She hadn't told the story in a long time, and kept it short. “I got married at twenty-four. He was a friend of my father's, the head of a major company, a brilliant man. He had been a research scientist, and started a drug company we all know. And he was totally nuts. He was twenty years older than I was, and an extraordinary man. He still is. But narcissistic, crazy, brilliant, successful, charming, and alcoholic, dangerous, sadistic, abusive. They were the worst six years of my life. He was a total sociopath, and everyone kept telling me how lucky I was to be married to him. Because none of them knew what went on behind closed doors. I had a car accident, because I wanted to, I think. All I wanted to do was die. He kept torturing me, and I'd leave him for a day or two, and then he'd bring me back, or charm me back. Abusers never lose sight of their prey. When I was in the hospital after the car accident, I got sane. I never went back again. I hid out in California for a year, met a lot of good people, and figured out what I wanted to do. I opened the center when I got home, and never looked back.”

“What happened to him? Where is he now?”

“Still here. Torturing someone else. He's in his fifties now. He married some pathetic debutante last year, poor kid. He's about as charming as it gets, and as sick. He still calls me sometimes, and wrote me a letter telling me she meant nothing to him, and he still loves me. I never answered him, and I won't. I screen my calls, and I never return his. It's over for me. But I haven't had any inclination to try again. I guess you could reasonably say that I'm commitment phobic,” she said, smiling at Charlie, “or relationship phobic, and I intend to stay that way. I have no desire whatsoever to have the shit kicked out of me again. I never saw it coming. No one did. They just thought he was handsome and charming and rich. He comes from a so-called 'good family,' and my own family thought I was nuts for a long time. They probably still do, but they're too polite to say it. They just think I'm weird. But I'm alive, and sane, which looked questionable for a while until I ran my car into the back of a truck on the Long Island Expressway, and scared the hell out of myself. Believe me, running into a truck was a lot less painful and dangerous than my life with him. He was a total sociopath, and still is. So, I threw my biological clock out the window, and my high heels and makeup with it, all my little black cocktail dresses, my engagement and wedding rings. The good news is that I never had kids with him. I probably would have stayed with him if I did. And now instead of one kid or two, I have forty of them, a whole neighborhood, and Gabby and Zorro. And I'm a whole lot happier than I was.” She sat and looked at him and the sorrow and pain in her eyes was unveiled. He could see that she had been to hell and back, which was why she cared so much about the children she worked with. She had been there herself, although in a different way. He had felt cold chills run up his spine at the story she told him. She had made it sound simple and quick, but he could see that it wasn't. She had lived a nightmare, and finally woken up. But it had taken her six years to do so, and she must have suffered incredibly during those six years. He was sorry that it had happened to her. Sorrier than she knew. But she was still alive to tell the tale, and doing wonderful work. She could have been sitting in a chair somewhere, drooling, or on drugs or drunk out of her mind, or dead. Instead, she had made a good life for herself. But she had given up so much.

“I'm sorry, Carole. Some awful stuff happens to all of us at some point, I guess. Life is about what you do afterward, how many pieces you can fish out of the garbage and glue back together.” He knew there were still some big pieces missing in himself. “You have a lot of guts.”

“So do you. For a kid to lose his whole family at the age you were is a crippling blow. You never totally get over it, but you may get brave enough not to hit the door one day. I hope you do,” she said gently.

“I hope you do too,” he said softly as he looked at her, grateful for the honesty they had shared.

“I'd rather put my money on you.” She smiled at him. “I like the way my life is now. It's simple and easy and uncomplicated.”

“And lonely,” he supplied bluntly as she stopped talking. “Don't tell me it's not. You'd be lying and you know it. I'm lonely too. We all are. If you choose to be alone, you may not get hurt by anyone, but you pay a big price for it. It's a big-ticket item, and you know that. So you may not have any obvious bumps and bruises this way, no fresh scars. But when you go home at night, you hear the same thing I do, silence, and the house is dark. No one asks you how you are, and no one gives a damn. Maybe your friends do, but we both know that's not the same thing.”

“No, it's not,” she said honestly. “But the alternative is scarier than shit.”

“Maybe one day the silence will be scarier yet. It gets to me at times.” Particularly lately. And time wasn't on his side. Or even hers for much longer.

“And then what do you do?” She was curious about that.

“I run away. I go out. I travel. See friends. Go to parties. Take women out. There are lots of ways to fill that void, most of them artificial, and wherever you go in the world, you take yourself, and all your ghosts. I've been there too.” He had never been as honest with anyone in his life, other than his therapist, but he was tired of artifice, and pretending that everything was all right. Sometimes it just wasn't.

“Yeah, I know,” she said softly. “I just work till I drop, and tell myself I owe it to my clients. But it's not always about them. Sometimes it is, but sometimes it's about me. And if there's anything left when I go home, I swim or play squash or go to the gym.”

“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

T
WO DAYS AFTER
C
HARLIE'S DINNER WITH
C
AROLE
, 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.