A Friend of the Family Read Online Free Page B

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.
    This is something about himself that Alec still doesn’t know: how much he was wanted, how difficult it was to have him. And during some moments of adolescent rebellion, and again during the wars over his dropping out of Hampshire, when he would scream that he wished he’d never been born, Elaine would grab his flailing arms, hold him still, and say, You can never say that. That’s the one thing you are never allowed to say.
    He was born at Round Hill Medical Center on July 4, 1985, nine fifteen at night. As we held Alec for the first time, the town fireworks began to whiz and bloom, celebrating 209 years of democracy in America and also, Elaine and I were certain, our son’s long-awaited arrival.
    A ND SO THE steppe unfolded. Our boy reached a height of six foot four by his fifteenth birthday but, almost certainly to spite his old man, showed little to no interest in basketball. Instead, he began studying art, both at Round Hill Country Day and in private lessons with a local sculptor three evenings a week. Our living room filled with pieces of cherrywood or palm carved into abstracted parts of the female form: almost always gigantic breasts. Alec assured us this was serious Art, so what if our living quarters looked like a Dada bordello? He began painting, too, still lifes of flowers, lemons, and his iPod, or the contents of our bathroom garbage can. Once, he drew a picture of me dozing on the couch, just sketched it while I was sleeping there, completely vulnerable. He showed it to me the second I woke up, and the picture both embarrassed and moved me—how invasive, how impudent, to draw for posterity the way your father drools in his sleep, but then there was something loving, too, about the attention to detail, the way he caught the plaid of my collar, the uneven bump of my chin. I brought the picture to my office to hang up, but then got embarrassed and brought it back home.
    Thus Alec prospered in an entirely different direction than the one I would have expected, but prospered nonetheless, and so, happily, did my wife. Elaine had completed her PhD in English literature at the City University Grad Center a year after we moved to New Jersey, but she’d never plunged into the quicksand of the academic job market. She wasn’t much for competition, and also we’d been trying so hard to start a family — so she kept her PhD to herself, and not once did any invitations arrive at our house addressed to Dr. and Dr. Dizinoff.
    But when Alec began his sixth-grade year, Elaine suddenly