Toxic Bachelors by Danielle Steel Page A

apartment, but it still smelled musty and looked sad. There were no flowers, no sign of life anywhere. Three months was a long time. All his mail was waiting for him at the office, whatever hadn't been sent to him in France. There was food in the refrigerator, but no one to prepare it, and he wasn't hungry. There were no messages on the machine. No one knew he was coming back, and worse yet, no one cared. For the first time, it made Charlie stand there in his empty apartment and wonder what was wrong with him and his friends. Was this what they wanted? Was this what Adam aspired to, with his constant efforts to stay unattached and go out with coeds and bimbos? What the hell were they thinking? The question was hard to answer. He had never felt as lonely in his life as he did that night.
    For the last twenty-five years, he had been sifting through women like so much flour, looking for some microscopic point of imperfection, like a mother monkey searching her baby for fleas. And inevitably, he found them, and had an excuse to discard them. Which left him here, on a Monday night, in an empty apartment, looking out at Central Park, and couples wandering there, holding hands or lying on the grass, looking up at the trees together. Surely, none of them were perfect. Why was that good enough for them, and not for him? Why did everything have to be so perfect in his life, and why was no woman good enough for him? It had been twenty-five years since his sister died. Thirty since his parents' death in Italy. And all these years later, he was still standing guard over his empty life, watching with ever greater vigilance for barbarians at the gate. He was beginning to wonder, in spite of himself, if it was time to let one of the barbarians in. However frightening that had seemed till now, it might finally be a relief.

5
    I N SPITE OF A DESIRE TO SEEM “COOLER” THAN THAT , Gray had called Sylvia the night he got back to New York on the first of September. It was the Labor Day weekend, and he wondered if she'd be away. It turned out she wasn't, much to his relief. She had sounded surprised to hear from him, and for a moment, he wondered if he had heard her wrong, or misread her, and was doing the wrong thing.
    “Are you busy?” he asked nervously. She sounded distracted, and not entirely pleased.
    “No, I'm sorry. I have a leak in my kitchen, and I have no idea what to do with this goddamn thing.” Everyone in her building was off over the long weekend.
    “Did you call your super?”
    “Yes, his wife is having a baby tonight. And the plumber I called said he can't get here till tomorrow afternoon, for twice the rate since it's a holiday. My neighbor called that it's dripping through his ceiling.” She sounded exasperated, which was at least familiar to him. Damsels in distress were his specialty.
    “What happened? Did it just start out of nowhere, or did you do something?” Plumbing was not his area of expertise either, but he had a sense of how things worked mechanically, which she didn't. Plumbing was one of the few things she couldn't do.
    “Actually”—she started to laugh sheepishly—“I dropped a ring down the sink, so I tried to take the damn thing apart, before it wound up in the Manhattan sewer system. I got the ring, but something went wrong, and I couldn't get it back together fast enough. I seem to have sprung a major leak. Now I have no idea what to do.”
    “Give up the apartment. Find a new one immediately,” Gray suggested, and Sylvia laughed at him.
    “You're a big help. I thought you were an expert at rescue work. Some help you are.”
    “I specialize in neurotic women, not plumbing issues. You're too healthy. Call another plumber.” And then he had a better idea. “Do you want me to come over?” He had just arrived from the airport ten minutes before. He hadn't even bothered to glance at his mail. He had gone straight to the phone and called her.
    “Something tells me you don't know what to do