Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  “So now what?” Edison scowled at the proffered mug. “It’s only eight o’clock, man!” The television hadn’t arrived yet, either.

  “Well . . .” I settled back beside him, cradling the tea as Edison had cupped his cognac the night before—which already seemed weeks ago. “We’ve been around each other for over two months, and you still haven’t talked to me.”

  “Balls. I’m a fucking motormouth and you know it.”

  “You haven’t explained what happened. For you to end up like this. There’s more to it than corned beef on rye.”

  “What, you expect some bare-all confession?”

  “Out of sheer desperation to fill time? Yes. I want to know what’s made you so depressed.”

  “Let’s see. I had a shit-hot wife who walked out. I got a son I ain’t seen since he was four. I ain’t got laid in years. I got no money and no work, and at the age of forty-four I’m dependent on my nationally famous sister for my allowance. Sounds pretty depressing to me.”

  “That Reader’s Digest version only got us to eight-thirteen. I don’t get it. I got the impression that pretty soon after you left Tujunga Hills you took Manhattan by storm.”

  “That may be putting it kinda strong. But I played three years with Stan Getz! I did some serious venues, man. The Vanguard, the Blue Note. I played—”

  “With some heavy cats,” I deadpanned. “So why aren’t you still playing with heavy cats?”

  “Look, it’s not like I sucked. Cats change their sound. And, around when I started having trouble with Sigrid, I may have got . . . a little difficult. You know, I was a fucking star, man—”

  “Like Travis,” I said heavily. “That’s a pretty dangerous role model you’ve got for yourself. Travis Professional Asshole.”

  “Maybe I got it from Travis at that. It didn’t go down too good. I, like, walked out a few times. In the middle of gigs. When the audience wouldn’t shut up, or the bass was amped too loud.”

  “That’s what you ragged on Keith Jarrett for doing.”

  “Takes one to know one. But Jarrett can get away with it—”

  “Which is why he makes you mad.”

  “I got with the program in due course, dig? Came round to the view that pulling that everything-just-so-or-I-refuse-to-play shit was unprofessional. But I’d already got a reputation. Cats got leery of playing with me, so the primo gigs stopped coming my way. And I never played with Miles! Every dude even carried the guy’s horn been sitting pretty ever since. Those cats can act up much as they like, insist on silk dressing gowns and berate the audience about their cell phones—”

  “But you’ve recorded all those CDs.” I’d heard the if I’d only played with Miles riff before. “I know you haven’t made them up, because you’ve sent me copies.”

  “Anybody can make CDs, man. Snagging a distributor, getting reviewed by Ben Ratliff—that’s another bag altogether.”

  “Still, you kept playing.”

  “Yeah, but lower down the pecking order. Cornelia Street. Small’s. Fat Cat. People noticed. I was going in the wrong direction. In fact, I never told you this, but . . .”

  “What?” I sensed there was so much he’d never told me that, rather than killing an hour or two, we could be up all night.

  Edison took a hard slug on his tepid tea in the spirit of downing a double whiskey, and I wondered if the primary point of boozing was that prop—not what was in it, but the glass. “There was this period, in the mid-nineties. Joint Custody had only been off the air, what, twelve, thirteen years? Plenty club hoppers grew up watching it. So for a while I tried marketing myself as ‘the Real Caleb Fields.’ I was actually listed in the Voice as Caleb Fields.”

  At least he sounded sheepish. “Did it work?”

  He shrugged. “Brought in a few curiosity seekers. Hey, you use what you got, right? And we’re, you know . . . not chopped liver. He may drive us nuts, but Travis was a network TV star. We’re special, kid.”

  I almost didn’t say it, but keeping just this sort of remark to myself was why after all these years, and two months in the same house, my brother and I still didn’t know each other well. “You mean you’re special.”

  When Edison looked over, the fire in his eyes wasn’t from crying. “Look. I’ve worked motherfucking hard. Maybe I’m rusty right now, but you’ve seen it—most of my life I’ve practiced six or seven hours a day. I’ve hustled—since nobody out there walks up to you on the street and just offers you a gig because you look like a nice guy. I’ve listened and studied the gamut, from Jelly Roll Morton, to Monk, to Chick, to Bley. In the days before you could get every obscure recording under the sun on iTunes, I tracked down all their music, everything those cats recorded—”

  “Ever catered a dinner party for seventy-five?” I deliberately refrained from playing the Baby Monotonous card. “Missing three nights of sleep in a row chopping onions and rolling out tart crusts—?”

  “Don’t talk about food, man. Please.”

  “I’ve worked hard, too. If that’s the standard, lots of people are ‘special.’ And there’s a big difference between feeling special and feeling privileged. Entitled.”

  “Maybe I am entitled. I got something, I’m—”

  “You have talent, and I don’t.”

  “Hey, kid. This isn’t going anywhere.”

  “It’s going somewhere all right, just not where you want to go.”

  We sat for a minute in silence.

  “My life is shit. You’re flying high, and I’m in three hundred eighty-six pounds of shit. Beats me why you want to make me feel even worse.”

  “I’m not.” I softened. “We grew up thinking wrong, Edison. I’ve tried to get it through to Tanner and Cody, without much success, either. This whole obsession with . . . It’s just, you care too much what other people think of you!”

  I didn’t imagine it possible for Edison to slump any lower against that baseboard, but he did. “Other people don’t think about me at all, babe, not these days. You know, when I tried going by ‘Caleb Fields’? Some of the audience always walked out in a huff. They thought they were coming to see Sinclair Vanpelt. Can you believe it? The little fuck who thought an arpeggio was an Italian pastry.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, that’s pretty rich.” I patted Edison’s knee and got up. We’d kept “dinner” in reserve; though that morning I’d had no idea how one might look forward to protein powder, I advanced on the kitchen with gusto. “How are you feeling?” I called as I stirred.

  “Light-headed. Pissy. Fat.”

  “At your size, by tomorrow morning you’ll have already lost a pound and a half.”

  “And you’ll be able to tell the difference?”

  “A journey of a thousand miles . . .”

  “Eat your homilies, sister.”

  “Homilies, then”—a word that sounded like something made out of cornmeal—“for dessert.”

  The next morning Edison was astonished to have lasted twenty-four hours on a quartet of envelopes dissolved in water, and an entrenched petulance was contaminated with self-congratulation. Overcome with relief that we were no longer on the very first day, I had lined up tasks for our second. Yet running errands was constantly impeded by one of us having to pee. We were supposed to be drinking a minimum of four pints of liquid per day in addition to the shakes, and without food water goes right through you. Twice we had to U-turn back to our Prague Porches bathroom before we finally made it to Walmart—by which time Edison refused to budge, and stayed behind in the car.

  “You never heard the expression ‘Ignorance is bliss’?” joked the hefty guy behind me at checkout, nodding at my boxed, heavy-duty scale, big enough to require a platform caddy.

  “Yeah, honey,” the woman ahead chimed in amiably. “I’d rather not know.”

  “Well, there’s ignorance,” I allowed, “and there’s sel
f-deceit.”

  “Self-deceit makes life bearable,” said the philosopher behind me, loading his case of Bud onto the belt. “Make ’em see too clear in the mirror, whole human race’d jump off a bridge.”

  I laughed. “My brother and I just started this horrific all-liquid diet. And if we don’t start charting a little progress”—I patted the box—“we’re definitely jumping off that bridge.”

  Shouldering his beer, the guy followed me outside and offered to help load the scale in the car. A farmer, I guessed, brawny enough that, if agriculture hadn’t grown so mechanized, he’d have been quite a hunk. “Keep the faith, ma’am,” he said, closing the trunk; he must have glimpsed Edison’s mounded outline in the passenger seat. “But don’t you forget—the right to lie to yourself is what makes this a free country!”

  “Doesn’t anyone in this place ever shut up?” Edison groused when he was gone. “Everywhere we go, in five seconds a new yokel is your best friend. Jesus, at least in New York total strangers don’t yak your head off.”

  At some point I might defend Iowans’ conviviality as making the most mundane transactions rich, personal, and satisfying, but now was not the time.

  I called home later that afternoon and got Cody. “I don’t care what Dad and Tanner say,” she said quietly. “I think what you’re doing is wonderful.”

  I put Edison on, and for once Cody did most of the talking. When he got off, he was abashed and at a loss for words. I asked what she’d said. “Teenage girls should never be given access to the fucking Internet,” he grumbled. “She’s been doing searches. On obesity. So it was all this ‘I love you, Uncle Edison’ stuff and ‘Mom is giving you this big chance and if you don’t take it you’re gonna die.’ I’d heard about all the badgering kids do when their parents smoke. Same thing. It’s unbearable. It’s fucking blackmail.”

  At six p.m. we went to see a film, and I don’t remember what we saw. All I can remember is the thick fug of artificially buttered popcorn. When following the BPSP program (which we had started calling “Blip-Sup”), smell is so intense that I worried whether we could ingest some fraction of the 1,500 calories in a large bucket through our noses. Torn on whether inhaling the theater’s salty infusion was a joy or a torture, I would soon conclude that, if you ever had a choice between the two, you picked joy.

  That night the TV—a little 24-inch LED, though Edison had rooted for a monster 65-inch plasma—still hadn’t been delivered. At least the twin recliners had arrived, so we didn’t have to pick up my brother’s story where we’d left off while sprawled on the floor.

  During that second day, when I wasn’t concocting recipes in my head—adding cranberries to cornbread, or doctoring ground lamb patties with fennel and paprika—I’d been reflecting on what little Edison had told me so far. Professionally, he’d struggled more than he’d ever let on. I’d been self-indulgent. I wanted to revere my brother, and in the service of that reverence had for years taken his braggadocio at face value.

  It had seemed lucky at the time, but his getting the big breaks when he was only twenty or so wasn’t lucky at all. When things go swimmingly at that age you think it’s just the beginning, because you’ve been instantly recognized as one of the Chosen People. I was increasingly antagonistic to this designation, not only for Edison, but for myself and my kids. No, nothing was wrong with feeling valuable in some way, if deservedly so. But Edison had always regarded himself as exceptional in a manner that was indolent and presumptuous. His character would have profited in his twenties from, say, working on the assembly line of an air-conditioner plant. I had never worked harder than when running Breadbasket, and in sweating over four gallons of tomato sauce I came to appreciate the hard work of others around me—the deliverymen, the bakers, the postal workers, most of their toil unsung. No one ever told them that they were special.

  Tanner expected the same instant recognition the moment he bestowed his literary largesse on Steven Spielberg. The only cure for this ignorant arrogance is fetching lattes for a decade and staying up nights slaving over scripts you now realize no one wants to read. Only gradually do you come to appreciate that the occupation you aspire to is harder than you thought, that the supply of other young, self-anointed apples of their own eyes is inexhaustible, and that you’re not as uniquely gifted as you’d thought. It’s surely a fine emotional art—dousing your hollow hauteur without quenching the fire in your belly altogether—but the kids who master it come out the other side both shit-hot at their professions and bearable as human beings.

  There must have been a jazz equivalent of paying the dues that my brother was now forking over in middle age, and he’d have fared better to have had the callowness beaten out of him when he was young enough to bounce back. A surprisingly large number of up-and-comers in every generation fancy themselves geniuses waiting to be discovered, and having that baseless self-regard ratified while on the penumbra of adulthood can be ruinous. I hate to say it, since I remember my school days as forlorn, and then in our teens we lost our mother, but the truth is that Edison and I grew up spoiled, basking in the glow cast by a father whom all of our classmates recognized off the set. What my brother had needed when he ventured out on his own at seventeen was a good kick in the pants, and I could connect our spoiled upbringing, and the seamless continuation of this pampering when he obtained high-profile come-hithers as a fledgling performer, to his current size.

  I remembered Edison from that era, when at eighteen I visited him for the first time in New York. He had energy, and older musicians fed off his sense of discovery at the keyboard. That freshness was electric, and contagious; I could see why they all wanted to play with him. Only later would I pose the perfidious question: Had his surname opened doors? The series then airing its last few seasons, he must have raised bemused eyebrows with “Appaloosa.” I wouldn’t dismiss my brother’s talent, but one revelation you’re denied when the waters part too readily in your youth is that lots of people are talented. Even an irrelevant novelty can single out one from the pack.

  In any case, it must have come as a shock when, rather than rocket further into the jazz stratosphere, by thirty he’d started to founder. (I was staggered he’d resorted to calling himself Caleb Fields, even briefly.) I’d never envied people who peak early, condemned forever more to reminisce about a stellar past they’d not been savvy enough to appreciate as parvenus. Arguably, by mid-career Edison would have been better off falling flat on his face, obliging him to make a go of something else. By his mid-forties, he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything but play jazz piano, and he’d found just enough work all these years to keep him in the game. It was a trap. I’d seen the type in the entertainment world of L.A., people who get so far and no farther, seething resentfully on the margins at people who direct real Hollywood movies or act in real Broadway plays. These near misses often get just enough reward here and there that they won’t give up, but their occasional small successes are in some ways worse than nothing. Failure affords release.

  “So,” I introduced over the day’s final packet of Blip-Sup, which we had learned to sip at a contemplative pace. “When we left off, you’d become a conceited prima donna and suffered the consequences. What happened next?”

  “Well, this is out of order . . . Just promise you won’t freak out.”

  “On five hundred and eighty calories a day, I don’t have the energy to freak out.”

  “Sigrid. When she was pregnant. Like, eight months. Anyway, she walked into one of my rehearsals, and I was high.”

  “On what?”

  “I don’t mean pot, which would make for a piss-poor story. The real thing.”

  “You took heroin?”

  “You promised you wouldn’t freak out! And I don’t mean I was a junkie. Takes an average of ten years to get physically addicted to that shit, which out here in Iowa nobody would realize.”

  “We have one of the worst meth problems in the
country, so don’t pull rank.”

  “Anyway, big deal, I tried it. You know why Bird was so great, don’t you? He was high. So you have to try getting high to understand the music. He could play that out because he didn’t give a shit. You want me to ‘not care so much what other people think of me’? Score me some smack.”

  “You can’t imagine I’m going to buy the idea that taking heroin is an obligation of your profession, like practicing scales.”

  “Yeah, well, Sigrid didn’t buy that, either. I’d already pushed it being . . . you know, not always what you’d call considerate. With the kid on the way, the smack was the last straw. She turned heel that afternoon and packed her bags.”

  “Did you keep taking it?”

  “Nah. It was a little too good, if you know what I’m sayin’. Made me nervous. You think I got no discipline—”

  “I never said that, Fletcher did. And look at you: two days on eight envelopes of guck.”

  “It was a short flirtation, few months max. Never touched it again. For Sigrid, it was too late. I made one big appeal after Carson was born, but I made the mistake of getting wasted on JD first. ’Cause I was nervous. Not the best way to present my case. She wasn’t impressed.”

  “Did you . . . did you drink a lot?”

  “For a while. But I pulled up short from that, too. Can’t play too good plastered. Got sloppy.”

  “I’m just getting the impression that it’s always been something.”

  “Please don’t say I got an ‘addictive personality.’ ”

  “I didn’t. You did.”

  “A large pepperoni pizza, in the scale of things, seemed the least bad option. I could still play the fucking piano.”

  “But when did you stop buying slices and order the whole pie? More to the point, why? When you visited us four years ago, you were trim as ever.”