Big Brother

by Lionel Shriver

  Edison rubbed his face. “It’s hard to get the chronology right. The last time I came to see you, I may not have been playing at the top—like, maybe I hadn’t got into the Vanguard in ten years. But that’s mainly because the owner never forgave me for walking offstage when some bozos by the bar kept blathering through the whole first set. I was totally within my rights, too, and if it had been Jarrett? She’d have backed up the musicians, and tossed those bridge-and-tunnel rubes out on their ear.”

  “Edison. You were going to explain why you started to overeat.”

  “I’m tryin’, man, I’m tryin’! But I gotta set the table, if you know what I’m sayin’. Point is, I still had connections, still had a rep. Lotta cats, even younger cats, were grateful to play with me. But you got any idea what a place like Cornelia pays? Like, on a weekend, maybe a hundred bucks. That’s before dinner and cab fare. The Jazz Gallery pays zilch. Clubs like Barbès in Brooklyn, I’m lucky to walk out with forty. I was playing every sorry gig I could get my hands on, but I was slipping behind, man. Coming up short on the rent. Once I got three months in arrears, if I didn’t do something I was gonna get evicted. So I didn’t see no other way out, man. I just didn’t see no other way out.” Edison was shaking his head with his chin in his hand. I gave him time.

  “So,” he resumed. “I sold the fucking piano.”

  “Oh, no!” Edison’s Schimmel was the first major purchase he’d made with the proceeds of those more lucrative early years, and it was his most prized possession. At under six feet, the piano wasn’t quite a grand, but it had tyrannized his every relocation. “I thought you said it was in storage.”

  “I did store it, didn’t I? In somebody else’s house.”

  “What was it worth?”

  “More than I got for it,” he said bitterly. “I swear the day they hauled that sweet instrument outta my place was worse than the day Sigrid walked. And the timing was sorta dark. See, once the movers left, I shuffled off to get me some ciggies. And what’s on the newsstand, fresh that day? New York magazine. My own sister grinning from the cover. A little more rounded than I remembered, so it took me a second.”

  “You should be glad I could stand to drop a pound or two,” I said coldly, “or you wouldn’t have any company on this diet.”

  “Touchy, touchy! I call myself a fat motherfucker, you can handle rounded.”

  I was touchy—and irritable. I envied Edison his cigarettes, the distraction, the occupation of his hands. Sugarless mints didn’t do the trick. Uncut by passing the macaroni, pure talk was draining. At least the literal draining of herbal tea and diet soda meant I had to keep heading for the bathroom. I now looked forward to peeing: it was something to do.

  “I asked you what set off this food bender,” I said on return, “and you keep talking about something else.”

  “No, I’m not talking about something else. That day—I’m selling my piano to stay alive, which is cannibalism, man—it’s like gnawing your own arm to keep from starving. At the very same time my kid sister’s rolling in it, some kind of industrial—magnate! Talk about rubbing it in! Well, far as I can pinpoint it, that’s where it started. I beelined to a joint on the corner that served a mean rack of ribs. Corn muffins, mashed potatoes. Soon as I polished off that first rack, I ordered another one. Then I had the mud cake. Think I had two of those, too. It just seemed—like I deserved it, like a good feed was the least I could ask. I don’t even remember feeling full.”

  “I don’t get it. What did an article about pull-string dolls have to do with you?”

  “You can’t be that stupid. You obviously find it incredibly satisfying, so go ahead. Enjoy. One of us should get something out of it, and it ain’t gonna be me.”

  I squinted. “You’re not blaming me for your getting fat, are you?”

  Edison rolled his eyes. “It’s not about you, it’s about me in relation to you, dig?”

  Okay, I didn’t want to play innocent to the point of seeming an idiot. Siblings did use each other as yardsticks. Yet I’d never begrudged Edison his accomplishments, which I’d so venerated that for years I’d turned a willful blind eye to the fact that he’d been struggling. If I’d ever preened about running my own catering business, it was only to impress him. I was dumbfounded why having been born three years later would make so much difference. “I wasn’t trying to beat you.”

  “Well, you did. If you beat me without trying, that’s even worse.”

  “What good has it done me? Travis hates me. And keeps pretending I’m nothing but a housewife. You hate me, from the sound of it—”

  “Gimme a break! Maybe I wouldn’t get much of a kick out of making dolls. But to say hitting the big time all over these magazines as a nationally celebrated entrepreneur, and making I don’t know how much bread in the process, to say that hasn’t done you ‘any good’—well, babe, that’s just ridiculous. Travis hating you—in the way that you mean—well, I want Travis to hate me like that. It’s a compliment, that level of resentment. You make him mad. I make him laugh.”

  “If you really want to impress Travis—or make him ‘resent’ you, which I guess is the next best thing—then you lose that weight.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake, anybody can go on a diet.”

  “No, anybody can’t. It’s the one thing most people can’t do. Haven’t the last couple of days been hard? They’ve been hard for me. I can’t stand it. All I can think about is food.”

  “Being slimmer of the year,” he said, “ain’t what I ever wanted to be famous for.”

  “Maybe nobody dreams of growing up to be formerly fat. But they sure don’t dream of growing up to be fat. If only because—when you walk down the street, it’s all people see. You big as a house, but in any meaningful way you’re invisible.”

  “Maybe I like it that way.”

  “That makes a lot of sense. Jazz pianist with ambitions to international renown seeks above all to pass by unnoticed.”

  “It does make sense, if you understand me at all.” Edison lit another cigarette. I was starting to regret letting him smoke in the apartment, which already stank, and his consumption had skyrocketed. But yanking his last crutch would have seemed like abuse of the disabled.

  “ . . . You didn’t buy it, did you.” It wasn’t really a question.

  “Buy what?” He knew perfectly well.

  “New York magazine. Your own sister on the cover, and you grabbed your Camels and walked away.”

  “It was five bucks!”

  “You wouldn’t have bought it if it was ten cents.” The jibe had a dolorous cast. “But back to the piano. I don’t understand why before selling the Schimmel you didn’t come to me.”

  “You have no idea. You’re so used to being the middle kid in our family that you can’t get your head around what it might be like to be me.”

  “If I were in dire straights I wouldn’t hesitate to come to you, if I thought you could spare the money.”

  “Exactly.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “No, you don’t.”

  “This is all some . . . birth-order nonsense?”

  “Call it whatever cliché you want. I’m your big brother. That means you go buy New York magazine with me on it. That you come to me for cash, and you can have it, too. That I don’t end up a charity case living on my kid sister’s dime.”

  Interestingly, whatever reservations Edison once had about tapping my resources had evaporated. That was obvious when he’d lobbied for the 65-inch plasma flat screen the day before. Like those of most people who’d made a go of an enterprise, my profits were finite—money is always finite—and a large proportion of the gravy had been poured back into the business. But something sinister happens whenever people plop you into the category of the wealthy. It’s as if your money, by conceit inexhaustible, isn’t real, so your generosity isn’t real, either.
r />   “Besides,” said Edison. “I only realized you could have helped me out after I’d already sold the Schimmel and then saw that cover story. That catering bag was barely in the black. From what you’d said on the phone about this ‘Baby Moronic’ biz—”

  “Monotonous.”

  “It sounded whack. I thought you were out of your freakin’ tree. So when a tenor player mentioned he’d bought one for his wife’s birthday, I didn’t make the connection.”

  “That’s because whenever I tell you what’s up with me, your mind wanders. I’ve always been able to hear it. Your grunts and uh-huhs are in all the wrong places.”

  “Don’t take this wrong, but that catering trip . . . You moved to Iowa . . . Then you married some closemouthed seed salesman turned carpenter I got nothing in common with . . . The only reason I got to find that riveting is you’re my sister.”

  “That’s not enough?”

  “Sure it is. Sort of. But we live in totally different worlds, man. I’m up jamming till the wee-smalls in Manhattan, and you’re rustling around in all this—corn.”

  If I’d long aspired to be dull, I had apparently achieved my goal. So what was my problem? Well, I had a headache. I felt weak. I couldn’t keep a grip on the reason I was subjecting myself to this deprivation. I missed my husband, and Edison wasn’t the only one who could be bored by a sibling. I couldn’t stay focused on what I was doing in this bland, underfurnished apartment, and I suspected this mutual vagueness of mind was why Edison and I seemed incapable of getting his story to flow in a comprehensible fashion. I bore down.

  “Back to the main agenda,” I said. “The Schimmel must have been worth thousands. That would have bought you some time.”

  “It bought me something,” Edison muttered.

  “Meaning?”

  He covered his face with his hands. “I ate it, man. I ate my piano.”

  “Oh, Edison.” I sounded like our mother.

  “I’m on the town, I’m not warming up a two-sixty-nine can of soup, am I? That’s when things started to get heavy. Or I did. And restaurant food is pricey.”

  “I just . . .” I threw up my hands. “I’m dumbfounded! You were a high school track star!”

  “You could understand if you made an effort. Yeah, I used to look pretty good. Then I didn’t. That’s the point. Once I got sort of fat, one more baby-back didn’t matter. See, when you look sharp, you got something to protect—an investment to preserve, a power to keep. But when you’re already big, there’s nothing to lose from being bigger. Now, going wide didn’t help me professionally, I admit. Especially for the younger cats, this middle-aged fat guy fucked up their image. So suddenly I’d notice in the Voice that bands I been playing with for five years are listing with a different piano player. Which made me eat more. ’Cause it passed the time. ’Cause I was hungry. ’Cause I was pissed off.

  “So I’d do a wedding, and . . . There was one in particular, on Long Island. It turns out the band wasn’t supposed to eat the buffet. We were meant to get a plate, in the kitchen, like, you know, the Negroes. Nobody said so, per se. So I took a chance, and between sets I hit the spread. It was good grub, too, shrimp and lobster and roast beef, so maybe I piled it on kind of high. A little high. Then we all got an earful when we were packing up, and the happy couple took two hundred bucks out of our pay, a shortfall the band passed on to me. Two hundred bucks! And it was a quintet, so five ways that was only three hundred per before my bad-boy deduction, leaving me with a lousy C-note. No way I ate two hundred bucks’ worth of their damned food. But one look at me, and everyone assumed I ate the whole roast pig. Like the head-shaking tut-tuts I get in restaurants—when I’m sitting there eating a regular turkey club like everyone else? I can hear the other guys at the lunch counter thinking: These porkers always complaining about glandular problems, but whenever you see them in public they’re up to their nuts in onion rings . . .

  “Anyway, after that wedding fiasco, my rep took another hit, and cats started warning me before asking me on a gig: ‘Don’t know if you’re interested, ’cause we don’t get dinner on this one,’ or ‘You’re not allowed to touch the food.’ Fucking insulting. Wasn’t like I couldn’t go five minutes without a cheeseburger.

  “You getting the picture, Panda Bear? Money got super tight. Cats who should’ve been thanking their lucky stars to be associated with someone with my résumé are starting to avoid me. I’m getting fat—yeah, of course I noticed—and that was a drag, too. That’s the thing: getting fat makes you fatter. The weight itself is such a bummer that it drives you right into the arms of a lamb shawarma. Too many shawarmas translate into fewer gigs, more chowing down to forget my troubles, even fewer gigs. It’s, whaddya call it, a feedback loop, know what I’m saying? Meanwhile, the Schimmel may have paid off the arrears, but after I ate through the rest of that dough I was back where I started. Couldn’t keep the apartment, even in Williamsburg. Which is getting pretty full of itself, actually, but never mind.

  “So I put everything in storage. Slack helped, rented a van. Thousands of CDs. Cartons of sheet music. Whole library of jazz biographies. Had a box set of twelve Miles LPs, Chronicle—all the recordings he did with Prestige. Limited edition, numbered, only ten thousand pressed. Gorgeous, all brown and soft, with heavy sleeves. Bio, photos, liner notes on each set. Shoulda sold it when I had the chance, but I couldn’t bring myself, man. I just couldn’t part with it.”

  He sounded so morose, I had to ask. “But your stuff is still in storage, right?”

  Edison stared out the window to the lights of the Burger King glimmering through the trees. “Fell behind on those payments, too. Went back to Box My Pad last spring, thought I’d try to strike a deal for back rent. They’d already auctioned my unit. Unless the lucky bidder was a jazz fiend, he’d have hauled most of my shit to the dump. Dozens of framed posters from gigs, some in German, French, Japanese. My sound system. My vinyl—including Mother’s Magnolia Blossoms, I’m afraid. All my photographs, aside from the few I’d uploaded to my website. Clothes, not that I could wear most of them anymore.”

  “So that’s what happened to your leather trench coat,” I said softly.

  “Keep seeing that Miles box set on some mildewed mattress. Rained on. LPs cracked in half. And all those CDs. Mine’s a pretty old laptop, small memory by current standards. I’d only transferred a fraction of that music to the computer.”

  “You lost everything?”

  Edison spread his hands. “What you see is what I got.”

  I don’t think of myself as a hopeless materialist, but this revelation hit me hard. It’s sometimes so difficult to be sure of what and who we are, our sense of ourselves is so precarious, so tentative—and these physical totems are guide wires. Edison’s posters had been emblems he could touch, sure verification that every European tour had not been in his head. Having accompanied him to many a music emporium in New York, I knew how rigorously he’d worked to compile that rarefied CD library now either cluttering some disappointed scavenger’s rank basement or scattered to seagulls. That was our family’s last copy of Magnolia Blossoms. And I mourned that coat.

  “So that’s when you started sleeping on your friends’ couches?”

  “No. Gotta understand, yeah, some of the cats made themselves scarce. But a hard core of my friends would do anything for me, man. Word went out I was having trouble keeping a crib, and they found me a place. That club in Red Hook—”

  “Three Bars in Four-Four.” (At 44 Visitation Place—a haunting address I remembered.) “The one you managed.”

  “Well, not exactly. I never, like, managed it, though I can see how, over the phone, you might have, you know—got that impression.”

  “Yes. I got that impression.”

  “There was a room over the club. See, Three Bars is a real seat-of-the-pants operation, can’t afford a cleaning service, and the whole idea of the hang
was they’d stay open ultra late—by which time the staff was dying to go home. So the deal was, I’d clean the place after closing, and in exchange I could stay in that room on the second floor for free. Of course, it wasn’t up to code, not much better than a closet with an electrical socket. Only one window, covered in spiderwebs. But I didn’t need much, and I could use the club john to wash up. During the day when Three Bars was shut I could practice on the house piano, and being right upstairs meant I also became, like, the house keyboard player. Slack and the other cats would come by after their own gigs, since by then just about everybody’d moved to Brooklyn. It was a cool place, really smoking. Still is, far as I know. Honest, for a while there things weren’t so bad.”

  “So why don’t you still live there? Hardly sounds opulent, but you could play.”

  “Yeah, well. Three Bars sells food, right? Not just burgers, but fish, a chicken salad with mango and cashews and shit. Good home fries . . .”

  I didn’t like where this was headed. Edison wouldn’t look at me.

  “So they noticed stuff disappearing,” he continued reluctantly. “From the kitchen.”

  “Oh, Edison,” I said, again with that maternal color. “It sounds as if your friends really went out on a limb for you. Just a little self-control . . .”

  “Yeah, yeah, I heard that from several parties, thank you. But it’s not easy for me to get around lately, and sweeping wore me out. Bringing in all those glasses to the dishwasher, I was already in the kitchen. No fridge upstairs, and I’d been warned against storing even dry goods, because of rats. So by six in the morning I was famished, and nothing in Red Hook was open yet. I always put everything back, plastic covers sealed up. And that chicken salad was killing.”

  “It sure killed something.”

  “Yeah. My last chance.”

  I clinked my cappuccino shake glass against his. “Your next-to-last chance,” I said, and we downed the dregs.

  chapter four

  Having let it hulk oppressively in its box by the door, we finally unpacked the scale on Day Four. Eschewing the measly drama of a digital readout, I’d chosen the old-fashioned kind with a wide white face and red needle. We dragged our sentinel beside the picture window, where it stood at attention against the wall, its big round head keeping stern watch as I patted out every last grain from the day’s third set of envelopes. We’d already formed fierce opinions about the flavors. Edison liked the butterscotch; I was rounding on the view that only the vanilla could go the distance.