Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “I’m sure you’re worn out after your trip,” I said hastily, “but you may not be—comfortable in these chairs.” I did a rapid inventory: the living room was furnished with Fletcher’s rigid normal-size-person creations. But one broken-down recliner in the master bedroom was leftover from the days I lived alone; I’d refused to part with an ugly chair so sumptuous for curling up to read. My husband’s confabulations of oak, cedar, and ash were more sensuous for the eye than the ass.

  I tried to be offhand about it. Turning off the ratatouille, Fletcher was stoic, Cody eager to help. Once upstairs, my husband and I finally met each other’s eyes. Desperate to talk to him for hours, I could only shake my head in dismay.

  “Mom,” Cody whispered as we knelt on one side of the recliner and Fletcher took the other. “What happened to Uncle Edison?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie.”

  “Is he sick?”

  “According to the latest thinking on the subject”—we heaved to a stand—“yes.” Though I was personally unsure how labeling obesity an “illness” got anyone anywhere.

  “Does he eat too much?”

  “I think so.”

  “Why doesn’t he stop?”

  “That’s a good question.” We paused at the top of the stairs.

  “He makes me sad,” said my stepdaughter.

  “Me, too.” I kept my voice steady for her sake. “Very, very sad.”

  I was determined not to make a big deal out of this project, but the recliner was heavy, and in order to get it around the turn at the landing we had to tilt the chair on its side. A certain amount of huffing and Fletcher’s barked directions must have leaked to the kitchen. When we lugged in the recliner, Edison was holding forth to Tanner while leaning on the prep island. I felt bad about making him stand so long, which he must have found tiring. The peanuts were finished.

  “I’m not dissing Wynton Marsalis,” Edison was opining. “He’s brought in some bread, if nothing else. But the trouble with Wynton is he feeds this whole nostalgia thing, like jazz is over, you hear what I’m sayin’? Like it’s in a museum, under glass. Nothing wrong with keeping the standards alive, so long as you don’t turn the whole field into one big snoring PBS doc. ’Cause it’s still evolving, dig? I mean, you got a certain amount of lost free crap, which the public hates, and drives what few folks do listen to jazz even further into the ass of the past. Cats who blow all freaky don’t appreciate that even Ornette riffed on an underlying structure. But other Post-Bop cats out there are killing. Even some of Miles’s contemporaries are still playing, still innovating: Sonny, Wayne . . .”

  “Talk about ‘ass of the past,’ ” said Tanner, focused on his keyboard. “What’s with all the ‘cat’ and ‘man’ and ‘dig’? That shit must have been pretty moldy by the time you were a kid.”

  “Yo, every profession got its patois,” said Edison.

  “It’s true, they really do talk like that,” I said, after we’d set the recliner down in the kitchen to rest. “I’ve visited your uncle several times in New York, and all the other jazz musicians talk the same way. Time warp. It’s hilarious.”

  When Edison withdrew his cigarettes, I urged him to the patio. We didn’t allow smoking in the house.

  “Jesus, it’s like he’s trying to sound like a jazz musician,” Tanner grumbled once Edison had shambled outside. “Like some stereotype of a jazz musician that wouldn’t wash in a biopic because it’s trite. You’re not going to tell me, Pando, that he grew up speaking jive.”

  “Just because you learn something in adulthood doesn’t mean it’s fake,” I snapped. “You could be a little more gracious. Like, give us a hand, because I think we’re going to have to move the table.”

  Lodging the chair at the head of the table was an operation, since the recliner wouldn’t fit in front of the step up to the living room without our moving the table a foot toward the patio door—which meant Tanner had to push his own chair right up against the glass. Reseated but cramped, he looked put out, doubly so when he had to get up again to let Edison inside. As my brother sank with obvious relief into the crazed leather cushion, I caught Fletcher appraising the room critically. He was house-proud. Now the room was off-center, and the dirty maroon eyesore hardly set off his dining table.

  “Hey, Pando, I almost forgot,” said Tanner, typing with the very urgency I had dreaded. “Some photographer called while you were gone, about a re-sked of the Bloomberg Businessweek shoot. Wish you’d pick up your damn iPhone. Taking a handwritten message on a pad is like carving on the wall of a cave.”

  “Oh, God, not another photo shoot,” I said before I realized how that sounded. “I hate them,” I continued, them making it worse, since the very plurality was the problem. “I can’t stand having to decide what to wear, and it doesn’t even matter since I always look hideous,” always continuing to dig my grave. Since it was true enough, in my haste to say something more self-deprecating still to cover for the embarrassing fact of the shoot itself, I almost added, but pulled up short just in time, that lately all I could think when I saw pictures of myself in the media was that I looked fat.

  “They don’t always come out so bad,” said Tanner. “The New York magazine cover, where they added a pull-string on your back? That one was a kick.”

  “Little cheesy, though,” Edison proclaimed from his new throne, and drained the last of his beer. “That rag’s gone to shit. One step from Entertainment Weekly.” It shouldn’t have taken me so long to realize that Edison might have regarded that cover as an invasion of sorts. New York was his patch.

  “You ever been in New York magazine?” Tanner charged my brother.

  “Nah. I’m more the Downbeat type.”

  As I retrieved napkins at his side, Tanner muttered, “Look more like the beat down type to me.” I hoped Edison hadn’t heard him.

  I should have been glad that Tanner stuck up for me, but I didn’t want the responsibility of being the one he looked up to. Baby Monotonous had come to me flukishly. I hadn’t planned the venture or even wanted it, much less worked hard for it until it landed in my lap. I believed I set a bad example.

  “Well, we should all enjoy this making of hay while the sun shines,” I said, laying plates. “Baby Monotonous dolls are a fad. Fads don’t last. Like pet rocks—a perfectly ridiculous gift item that you kids are too young to remember. They lasted about five minutes. In that five minutes, someone made a bundle. But if he wasn’t smart, he’d have been left with whole warehouses full of stones in stupid little boxes. I’ve been very lucky, and you should all be prepared for that luck to run out. Orders are already starting to level off, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see those dolls start cropping up on eBay by the hundred.” Orders hadn’t leveled off.

  “We’re never putting Dad’s doll on eBay!” said Cody.

  “Pando, what’s with trashing your own company all the time?” said Tanner. “Someone finally gets a business off the ground in this family, and all you can do is apologize.”

  “Thanks a lot, Tanner,” said Fletcher at the stove.

  “Basement full of furniture says this house got only one going concern,” said Tanner.

  “Nobody buys quality anymore.”

  “Thanks a lot, Fletcher,” I said.

  It was a pale facsimile of family banter—the fast-paced, rollicking back-and-forth to which our foursome had indeed risen on occasion, but which I generally located only on television. I’d grown up in such proximity to scripted family follies that you’d think I could have done a better job of faking it. But ever since I’d walked in with Edison in tow our interchanges had been forced.

  For once when I told the kids to wash their hands before dinner, there were no groans; with a thick glance between them that I recognized from my own childhood, they scooted off, both spurning the nearest bathroom for the one upstairs. After a lag, I followed. I wasn’t sure how I
wanted to admonish them—probably with something bland and pointless about trying to be nice. When I arrived outside the door, they weren’t even bothering with the pretense of running water.

  “Then, like, he drops some peanuts,” Tanner was saying in a harsh whisper, “and stoops to pick them up, right? Except he loses his balance, ’cause that whale gut throws him forward, and he ends up on his hands and knees! I’m not kiddin’, Code, the son of a bitch couldn’t get off the floor! So I had to help drag his ass upright, and I thought we was both goin’ down! Even his hand is huge. And sweaty.”

  “He is kinda gross,” said Cody. “Like when he bends down, and his shirt’s too small so it hikes up and you can see his crack with little black hairs in it, and these huge butt-blobs bulge over his belt.”

  “Guy could do his own retro TV show, just like Grampa’s: My Three Chins,” said Tanner. “And he’s got a bigger rack than Pando.”

  “If I looked like that, I’d just wanna die. His ankles are bigger around than your thighs. Hey, you think Mom knew he’d turned into such a load?”

  “I kinda doubt it. But notice how she keeps pretending how everything’s all normal? Like, nobody’s supposed to mention that ‘Uncle Edison’ barely fits through the fucking door.”

  I’d heard enough. Clearing my throat, I walked in. “Get it out of your system now. Just because someone’s overweight doesn’t mean he has no feelings.” Yet when I closed the door behind us, the atmosphere remained conspiratorial.

  “But how long’s this guy gonna hang around?” said Tanner. “In twenty-four hours he could bust the whole place up. What if he sits on the john and it cracks to pieces?”

  “I don’t know how long he’ll stay,” I said quietly. “But while he’s here, I want you to imagine what it might be like if you two grow up, and then you, Tanner, visit your sister and her family, and maybe you’ve had a hard time, and maybe you’ve been hitting the Häagen-Dazs. Wouldn’t you want your sister to still treat you like the same person? Wouldn’t you feel hurt if her family made fun of you?”

  “Tanner will never get fat!” said Cody. “He’s got to watch his figure so he can keep pawing all over his girlfriends.”

  I shot back, “That’s what I thought about my brother.”

  That sobered them up. As we walked back downstairs, Cody dragged on my hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “What I said, I didn’t mean it.” She was close to tears. I assured her with a squeeze that I knew she hadn’t. Prone to self-recrimination, Cody was all too capable of tossing sleeplessly that night, berating herself for having been mean about her uncle even out of his earshot. I’d only ever seen her try to be nasty to impress Tanner, and she was lousy at it. At school, she perennially befriended the social dregs out of compassion, pulling her own mid-level status down several notches in the process.

  We sat down to dinner. Fletcher passed his shrimp dish, in a tangy tomato, zucchini, and eggplant sauce over bars of baked polenta. As a special concession, he allowed the rest of us to spike it with Parmesan. The guest, Edison helped himself first, after which our largest rectangular baking pan was half empty. I took a tiny serving to ensure enough remained for everyone else, and Cody did likewise—unless the totem of excess at the end of the table was putting her off her feed. Me, I still had an appetite, but couldn’t meet my brother’s eyes; simply looking at him felt unkind. So I stole glances when he was occupied with his food, terrified he’d catch me staring—at the rolls of his neck, the gapes between straining buttons on his shirt, the tight, bulging fingers that recalled bratwurst in the skillet just before the skin splits.

  I announced that Cody was studying the piano, and she said she “sucked,” but that she’d be grateful if Edison would give her a few lessons. He acted game—“Sure, kid, no problemo”—but his tone was surprisingly cool, considering that he’d usually jump at the chance to show off. I encouraged Fletcher to show my brother what he was working on in the basement later, though Edison couldn’t come up with anything to ask about cabinetry besides, “What’s the latest project?” (another coffee table) and “What materials?” (though Fletcher was doing some striking work with bleached cow bones, his terse reply was “walnut”). There’s nothing more leaden than this sort of exchange, and awareness that Edison didn’t care about the answers to his lame questions made Fletcher protective and closed.

  Yet Edison grew more animated when I pressed Tanner to tell his step-uncle about his interest in becoming a screenwriter.

  “The feature film industry is a total crapshoot,” Edison advised, rearing back in the recliner. “Half the time when after years of frustration the project’s finally lined up with casting, crew, everything, some douche pulls the money. Most Hollywood screenwriters just do rewrites of other people’s rewrites, and never see a script shot. You should think about TV, man. They get shit out the door. Travis, our dad—I guess you’re sort of related, right? Wouldn’t count on a guy who sells Pocket Fisherman on Nick at Nite to provide you a lot of contacts. But he may still know people who know people, and that’s the way it’s done. Me, I got friends out there who went into the industry, including one guy at HBO. Be glad to put you in touch.”

  If I could have gotten away with it, I’d have been pulling the ridge of a flattened hand across my throat. Tanner’s expectations were already unrealistic. I didn’t want him encouraged.

  “Thanks,” Tanner grunted skeptically.

  “Tanner’s met his step-grampa,” I said. “A cautionary tale.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “An unpleasant story that should keep you from making the same mistake.”

  “What’s so cautionary about my grampa being a TV star?” I noted that in this instance Tanner had dropped the “step.”

  “Was a TV star,” I said. “He spends most of his time opening used-car lots and doing Rotary Club lunches—”

  “Lecturing on environmentalism, believe it or not,” said Edison with a laugh. “Chump never recycled a Coke can in his life.”

  “—or,” I went on, “printing truckloads of anniversary T-shirts, when Travis Appaloosa is the only man on God’s earth who knows or cares when the first episode of Joint Custody aired on NBC. TV Land used to occasionally have him on in the graveyard slot, but he burned that bridge by badgering the channel to run Joint Custody marathons the way they do with Twilight Zone and Andy Griffith. Last time I talked to him he’d gotten a fire under him about putting together a reunion show like The Brady Bunch did—only the child actors Travis worked with grew up to be wasters, bar one, and the mayor of San Diego has better things to do. Cautionary. I’ll say.”

  I knew I’d been going on, but someone had to counter the deadly proffering of Edison’s helping hand. I was loath for our kids to feel exceptional for the wrong reasons, and so to fall prey to the same unjustified sense of importance from which I’d suffered as a kid. While superficially self-effacing, my keeping my parentage under wraps at school may have been even more corrupting than Edison’s bannering of his father’s identity at every opportunity. I’d still smugly carried around the fact that my father was Travis Appaloosa like a secret charm, an amulet to ward off evil, when really it was no better than a pet rock.

  Even more averse than I to playing up my Burbank connection, Fletcher changed the subject—turning to the one topic sure to fill out the rest of the meal: all that jazz.

  “Hey, I’ve played with some heavy cats, dig?” Having scraped out the remains of the polenta, Edison upended the bowl of Parmesan on top. Tanner and Cody locked eyes, which bulged in unison. “Stan Getz hired me for three years—paid better than Miles, believe it or not. But just my luck the really iconic recordings haven’t been the gigs I’ve been on. So nobody remembers that, yeah, Edison Appaloosa played with Joe Henderson—because I wasn’t on Lush Life. Paul Motian, too—and it’s hardly my fault the guy has pretty much stopped playing with pianists. And, man, I could shoot myself
over the fact that nobody, nobody thought to record that jam session with Harry Connick, Jr., at the Village Gate in 1991. Harry Connick! Rare for him to sing in those days. Crack pianist himself, and said I had ‘the touch.’ Okay, he wasn’t big yet. But Jesus fucking Christ, I could have been everywhere.”

  I didn’t enjoy the thought: He sounds like Travis. It bothered me that my brother was still trotting out the same list of musicians that I’d learned years before to impress aficionados. It was a list, apparently, that Edison recited to himself.

  “Thing that really gets me in New York these days,” he went on, Parmesan pasted in the corners of his mouth, “is this obsession with ‘tradition.’ Some of the younger cats, they sound like fuddy-duddies. Studying all these chords and intervals like those mindless fucks in madrassas memorizing the Koran. Ornette, Trane, Bird—they were iconoclasts! They weren’t about following the rules, but tearing them up! Personally I blame jazz education. Sonny, Dizzy, Elvin—they didn’t get any degrees. But these good doobies coming out of Berklee and the New School—they’re so fucking respectful. And serious. It’s perverse, man. Like getting a Ph.D. in how to be a dropout.”

  We didn’t usually have wine with dinner, but tonight was an occasion. Edison had opened the second bottle—which made Fletcher’s jaw clench—helping to explain why my brother was dropping consonants, slurring vowels, and adopting a drawling cadence like the honorary African-American he considered himself to be. Most of the founding fathers of jazz were black, and Edison claimed being a white guy was a disadvantage in the field, especially in Europe, where “real” jazz musicians had to look the part.

  “ . . . See, what Wynton’s done by bringing in Jazz at Lincoln Center is cast the genre as elitist. As high culture, high art. Elitist, can you believe it? A form that came straight outta whites-only water fountains? But that’s the drill now, man. Middle-aged boomers hit the Blue Note when they’re too out of it to keep up with hip-hop and figure they need to ditch pop for something more sophisticated. It’s a pose, man . . .”