A Playdate With Death

by Ayelet Waldman

  My grandmother, who’d lived long enough to see us married, had wept at our wedding. I’d assumed it was because Peter wasn’t Jewish, and I’d gone up to her after the ceremony at my mother’s urging, prepared to promise to raise our children Jewish.

  “What a waste!” she’d cried, hugging me to her breast. “Your tiny piskela of a shiksa nose, all for nothing.”

  ISAAC and I left the Palisades and drove crosstown to Ruby’s Jewish preschool. It was something of a relief to be back in the world I understood, where even the goyim knew when to call someone a schmuck and how to eat a pastrami sandwich.

  On the way home, my cell phone rang. I fumbled for it, coming dangerously close to swerving into the next lane.

  “Hello?” I shouted, over the freeway noise and the crackle of static.

  “Hey! Mama! It’s dangerous to talk on the phone and drive. Daddy says so,” Ruby bellowed from the backseat.

  I ignored both her voice and that of my conscience and continued my conversation.

  “Hello?” I said again.

  “Hi. This is Candace. You know, Bobby’s friend.”

  That was something of a surprise. I hadn’t expected to hear from her again.

  “How did you get this number?” I asked, sounding ruder than I’d intended.

  “Your husband gave it to me. I called the number on your business card, and he told me you’d have your cell phone. I hope it’s all right. I can call back if it’s not a good time.”

  “No. No. Now’s fine,” I said, quickly.

  “I was just calling to see how you’re doing. I mean, with Bobby’s case and all.”

  I flinched. I didn’t have a “case” or a client. All I had was a rather unhealthy curiosity.

  “Okay. Fine. Is there anything you can tell me, Candace?”

  “Me? No. I mean, I don’t really know anything. I was just wondering if you’d found out more about Bobby’s family. His mother. That kind of thing.”

  I paused for a moment, trying to figure out exactly what the woman was getting at. The last time we’d spoken, she’d been unwilling to tell me anything other than the name of the hospital where Bobby was born, and that was only to keep me from mentioning her involvement to the police. What was she after now?

  “I spoke to Bobby’s birth mother,” I said.

  “Really? What’s she like? Did he talk to her before he died? Did she know anything about his death?” The questions poured out of her mouth in a frantic tumble.

  I didn’t answer any of them.

  “Candace, did Bobby mention anything to you about his birth father?” I asked.

  “His father? No. Why? Did he find him, too? What is his name? Did Bobby contact him?”

  I decided not to be forthcoming with her. “I’m not sure. Was there any other reason you called?”

  “Actually, there was,” she said. The tone of her voice changed—it became conspiratorial. “I’ve been thinking a lot about Bobby and his suicide. At first I didn’t think it was possible that he’d killed himself, but the more I think about it, the more sense it makes to me.”

  This caught my attention. This was the first time anyone who knew Bobby had said that it was possible that he’d want to kill himself.

  “Really?” I asked. “What makes you say that?”

  “Well, you know, Bobby and I were very close. Intimate really.” She giggled. It was an unpleasant sound. “He confided in me things that he’d never tell to anyone else.”

  “Like what?” I asked.

  “Like how unhappy he was in his relationship. Like how he wanted to leave Betsy but felt like he couldn’t.”

  I slowed down, not wanting my piqued interest to cause me to get into an accident.

  “Why couldn’t he leave her?”

  “Because she was a junky. He felt like if he left her, she might start using again, or worse.”

  “Worse?”

  “You know, like kill herself or something.”

  “But why would that make Bobby kill himself?”

  “I don’t think you really knew Bobby. Not like I did,” she said, her voice oily.

  “That’s probably true. So maybe you can explain to me why Bobby and Besty’s problems, if they were having any, would cause him to kill himself.”

  “Bobby was a special soul. A sensitive soul. We were very alike in that way. That kind of emotional blackmail makes someone like us feel very . . . very trapped. And anxious. I’m sure that is what Bobby was seeing. He lost sight of himself. He lost sight of the others in his life who could give him peace and joy. So he killed himself.”

  Everything about what Candace was saying rubbed me the wrong way. She and Bobby didn’t seem at all alike, and I doubted that their “special souls” had much in common. Furthermore, the woman was clearly in love with Bobby. Of course she would blame Bobby’s lover and fiancée for what had happened to him. But did she have a more nefarious motive for her phone call? Was she trying to steer me in the wrong direction? The E-mails she had sent to Bobby after his body was discovered seemed to absolve her from any knowledge of, or involvement in, his death. On the other hand, even though they’d had the ring of honesty to them, it wasn’t impossible that they were part of a ruse to establish her ignorance and innocence.

  “So you think Bobby killed himself,” I said.

  “I think it’s possible. Although, of course, there’s another possibility, too.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That Bobby finally decided to leave Betsy once and for all. And that she killed him rather than let him have his freedom.”

  Twelve

  “DO you think cannibals would ever eat their own young, and if so, how would they reproduce?”

  It’s a mark of the state of both my marriage and my husband’s career that Peter’s question didn’t faze me in the slightest. “I suppose the mama cannibal would only nosh on her own offspring if no other food sources were available,” I said after some thought.

  “Hmm. Interesting idea. The possibility of a famine-inspired infanticide could lend the second act just that added level of tension that I’ve been looking for.”

  We were lying with our legs tangled together on the couch, recuperating from the effort of putting our children to bed. I’d come close to strapping Ruby in with her jump rope or the utility belt from Isaac’s Batman costume, but she’d finally consented to lie still and listen to a tape. The strains of “There’s No Business Like Show Business” from Annie Get Your Gun were just barely audible. She had a big thing for show tunes; her Ethel Merman imitation was almost as good as her dad’s.

  “I could spend my entire career writing nothing but cannibal movies.” Peter sounded absolutely thrilled at the idea.

  “Career. What’s that?” I said. He poked me in the side with his toe. I noticed that it was sticking out of his sock. “You need new socks.”

  “I always need new socks. Are we going to have one of our biweekly, ‘I need to figure out what I’m doing with my life’ discussions? Because if we are, I’m going to need another cup of coffee.”

  I kicked him back, making sure to dig a little into his side where I knew he was ticklish.

  “No. We’re not going to have any kind of discussion at all. No talking allowed,” I said.

  We amused ourselves for twenty minutes with an activity that had gotten entirely too rare once we’d had kids, then clicked on the television. We spent a vacant hour watching the end of a spy thriller we could just vaguely remember having seen not long before. One of the benefits of the exhaustion that accompanies parenting is the ability to watch a movie or read a book again and again without remembering a single important feature of the plot.

  The next morning was Saturday, the one day of the week when Peter wakes up with the kids and I get the morning off. I briefly considered heading back to the gym—I hadn’t been there since the morning Bobby’s body had been discovered—but I couldn’t bring myself to go. It was just too strange and sad to imagine working out the
re without Bobby. And I was too lazy to work out anywhere else.

  I left my family involved in an elaborate game of hide and go seek, which consisted of the kids hiding and then shrieking out their locations while Peter looked for them. “We’re in the closet, Daddy! No, the hall closet!”

  I’d found Dr. Reuben Nadelman in about four minutes on the web. He was an attending physician at Cedars Sinai Medical Center’s pediatric oncology unit, and he was in their staff directory. I also found a number of references to him in the L.A. Times, including an announcement of his marriage to a Dr. Larissa Greenbaum, a dermatologist. I couldn’t find a residential listing for the Nadelmans or for the Greenbaum-Nadelmans (and people wonder why I don’t bother to hyphenate) in the phone book. I launched Lexis, a legal search engine, and input the doctors’ names in the real estate database. They had purchased a home on Hollyhock Way in Brentwood four years before, the assessed value of which was $1.2 million dollars. I might not have had his phone number, but I’d easily found his address. The World Wide Web—a nosey Parker’s best friend.

  As I drove through the stone gateway that marked the beginning of the tony Los Angeles neighborhood made infamous by O. J. Simpson’s murderous and ultimately unpunished rage, I mused on the coincidence of Bobby being born to one doctor and then adopted by another. Sometimes it seemed like every Jewish mother but my own had gotten her wish.

  I wound my way through tree-lined streets past faux French, faux Spanish, and faux English Tudor palaces. Dr. Nadelman lived in a Cape Cod that looked like it had been swallowing the steroid prescription of an East German swimmer. Bobby had been blessed with a seemingly endless supply of wealthy parents.

  I was hoping that on a Saturday morning, at 10:30, the doctors would still be home. They didn’t disappoint me.

  Bobby’s birth stepmother (is there such a term?) led me through the house to a large kitchen papered in yellow roses. Bobby’s father was seated at one end of a long Country-French table reading the paper.

  “Reuben, this is a friend of Bobby Katz’s,” Larissa Greenbaum-Nadelman said, steering me toward a chair and putting a cup of unasked-for coffee in front of me. She pushed a sugar bowl and a coffee creamer in the shape of a cow with an open mouth across the table to me and sat down next to her husband.

  Dr. Nadelman nodded his head, folded up his newspaper, and extended his hand. “I wondered if someone would come by. I read about Bobby’s death in the Times. I was so very sorry to hear about it. He seemed like a nice man.”

  “He was,” I said. “I take it that Bobby came to see you.”

  “No, but he wrote to me, and we spoke on the telephone.” Dr. Nadelman took a sip of his coffee. He was a small man with nothing of Bobby’s carefully tended musculature. His dark hair was salted white above the ears. It crossed my mind that he looked Jewish, with his dark eyes and heavy eyebrows, but he could as easily have been Italian or Greek. Then I realized that that kind of thinking was just what I’d found so repellent in Bobby’s birth mother.

  “Bobby contacted me not long ago. He’d received my name from his birth mother, a woman I knew for a short while many years ago. Both Bobby and his mother were under the impression that I was his genetic father.”

  “Aren’t you?” I asked.

  “No, I’m not. When Bobby first wrote to me, I thought that it was possible that I was. After all, I had had a sexual relationship with his birth mother, and we had experienced a failure of birth control. Even then, though, it seemed very unlikely that he was my son.”

  “Why?” I asked. I was absolutely flummoxed by this turn of events. I had been certain, as Bobby most likely had been, that Reuben Nadelman was his biological father.

  His wife interrupted. “You see, Ms. Applebaum, Reuben and I tried for many years to have children. While I had a child from a previous marriage, we never conceived one of our own. Reuben’s sperm count was just too low.”

  Dr. Nadelman nodded. “We finally had our son Nate through artificial insemination of donor sperm,” he said. “Now, while it’s certainly possible for me to have impregnated Susan—after all, all it takes is one sperm—as I said, it’s not particularly likely. I told this to Bobby when he called me. I told him about my infertility, and that it was unlikely, though not impossible, that I was his father.”

  “Do you mind telling me how he reacted?”

  Dr. Nadelman shrugged his shoulders. “He was disappointed, I think. Not because he so desperately wanted to be my son, in particular, but because I think he had been so sure he’d found his father.”

  “Disappointed enough to kill himself?” I asked.

  Again the doctor shrugged. “I’m sorry, I really don’t know the answer to that. I didn’t know him. Certainly not well enough to make a judgment. But he wasn’t distraught when we spoke. In fact, he still seemed to hold out a hope that he was my son, despite what I told him about my fertility issues.”

  “And you don’t know for certain that he wasn’t your son. As you said, all it takes is one sperm.”

  “I didn’t know for certain, then. I do know now.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Bobby told me the story of how he came to find out he was adopted in the first place. His diagnosis as a Tay-Sachs carrier led to his determination that he was the biological son of neither of the people whom he had always known to be his parents.”

  I nodded. I knew that much.

  “For that same reason, I could not possibly be his father.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Tay-Sachs is an inherited condition. It’s autosomal recessive. That means that only if both of a child’s parents pass on the affected gene will that child have the fatal disease.”

  I nodded. I knew all this.

  “Tay-Sachs carriers, on the other hand, receive an affected gene from only one of their parents. That means that either Bobby’s birth mother or father was a carrier and passed that gene on to him. Now, as I’m sure you know, Tay-Sachs is a disease found almost exclusively in Jews of Ashkenazic descent. Thus, the gene must have come from his father, because Bobby’s birth mother is about as Jewish as the Pope.”

  I smiled. The doctor had a sense of humor. Not necessarily a good one, but a sense of humor nonetheless.

  “Despite the fact that I am Jewish, I am not a carrier of the Tay-Sachs gene,” he said. “As you may or may not be aware, Tay-Sachs testing is not a chromosome analysis like, for example, the kind of testing done for Down’s syndrome. The Tay-Sachs test involves the detection of an enzyme. Carriers have about half as much of this enzyme called Hex A in their blood as noncarriers. When Bobby told me about his Tay-Sachs, I went and had a blood test to determine my status. It was negative. I’m not a Tay-Sachs carrier and, thus, cannot be Bobby’s father.”

  I felt completely deflated—just as Bobby would have felt.

  “Did you tell Bobby that you weren’t his father?”

  The doctor shook his head. “I would have called him right away, but I didn’t have the opportunity. I read about Bobby’s death in the papers the same day I received my test results.”

  I heaved a sigh. “I guess I’m back to the drawing board. I need to find another Jewish man with whom Susan Sullivan had sex at the same time as she had her affair with you.”

  “Not necessarily,” Larissa said.

  “What?” the doctor and I spoke in unison.

  “French Canadians and certain Louisiana Cajuns also carry the Tay-Sachs gene.”

  “Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.”

  “Neither did I,” said her husband. “How did you find this out?”

  She patted his hand. “After the boy called, I did a little research. I looked at one or two articles on Tay-Sachs.”

  “Why?” he asked, his brow wrinkled with concern.

  She reached up a hand and touched his cheek. “This was before you got the test results back—before we knew you weren’t a carrier. I wondered if the Tay-Sachs might have been the cause of your infertility.”r />
  “Why didn’t you tell me what you’d discovered?”

  She smiled gently. “I was afraid it would hurt you. I didn’t want you to think that I was still searching for answers. I didn’t want you to think I was still tied up in all those horrible knots, that I was still consumed with our fertility issues the way we both were back then, back before Nate was born.”

  Reuben hugged his wife to him for a moment. In that flash of intimacy, I felt like I could see the relationship these two people shared: the warmth, the love, the respect and caring. I wished so much that Bobby had found out that he was this gentle man’s son. The home made by this father would have been the haven the Katzes could never have provided and that Susan Sullivan would not.

  “Bobby’s father could be either an Ashkenazic Jew or of French-Canadian or Cajun descent,” I said, almost to myself.

  I sat for a moment, thinking of Susan and her vehemence. And her anti-Semitism. Suddenly, another thought occurred to me. Perhaps Susan Sullivan had protested too much. She had admitted to me that she’d lied to her husband about her education. Maybe she’d lied about much more. Perhaps she’d lied about the results of her genetic testing.

  “Is it possible that you are Bobby’s father, but that his mother passed on the Tay-Sachs gene to him? Maybe she has Jewish or French-Canadian ancestry.”

  He looked at me for a moment, surprise in his eyes. “I suppose it’s possible,” he said softly.

  Thirteen

  “WAIT, you’re asking me for help?” I was astonished. I’d spent so much time, over the past couple of years, begging Al for information and assistance. He’d never once asked me for anything in return, other than to lend a sympathetic ear to his Baroque conspiracy theories.