One morning he came into the bathroom while I was washing my face—still pretty clear at the time—and said he wanted to watch, that perhaps he was doing something wrong to have so many pimples. It occurs to me now that he was just trying to find something for us to talk about.
“Well, there’s nothing much to it,” I said with faint exasperation, with the kind of stoical condescension one shows a pestering six-year-old. If my brother caught on to this, he gave no sign; the year before he would have clouted me upside the head. Now he just stood there, lips parted, while I covered my face with Noxzema and washed it off with a hand towel and hot water.
That was the last I saw of Scott for a long time. For a week or so I contrived to stay away at friends’ houses, and one day when I came home to change clothes, Scott was gone. He’d decided to go back to New York for no particular reason.
THAT WAS THE year my parents’ marriage, long moribund, came to an end. They still had moments of companionship, but mostly they led separate lives. Even when my mother was home she slept alone in my old bedroom, which she’d converted into a kind of Arabic caravansary—a low brass table with elaborate pewter pitchers, tapestries of desert scenes, and the like. But the whole Arabic thing had palled, and I imagine such decor served only as a bleak reminder of certain failed experiments. Little wonder she preferred life in Norman: most of her stuff was there, and she’d taken up with a tall, baby-faced grad student, Dave, who helped her care for some famous chimps who knew sign language.
On the surface, at least, my father grudged her nothing: for a long time she’d been unhappy—despite the seeming festivity of her life—and now she was somewhat better. Besides, Burck was doing his own thing as well. That summer he went to Colorado for an Outward Bound program. Slender enough to begin with, he returned several pounds lighter and glowed with idealistic notions of a better life: more simplicity, more reflection, fewer “poisons” such as coffee and alcohol (which he’d never consumed to excess anyway). He showed me a photo of his Outward Bound group, all of them happily bedraggled after their long ordeal in the mountains; Burck was the oldest by far (forty-five), but his smudged and grinning face was boyish. That summer, too, he spent a month or so with a family in Sweden. The mother was a big woman in her late thirties named Elsie, who’d met my father while touring the States with an avant-garde acting troupe. She was the type who sensed “connections” with certain people—correctly so in my father’s case. A couple of years later, I too visited Elsie’s family in Sweden, and they spoke of Burck as an almost holy figure—so kind and curious and fun. They showed me a drawing that the little girl had made of my father in a diving pose at the village lake. By comparison I was a big disappointment: a glum, self-conscious adolescent, I was taken aback by Elsie’s persistent wish to discuss things like masturbation; also (to my later shame) I showed little interest in getting to know her daughter, then a shy thirteen-year-old who didn’t speak much English and was rather plain. For my father, though, it was a liberation of sorts. Not long ago I found some letters he’d written my mother from Sweden, all about how hopeful he was for a renascent marriage on his return.
AMONG MY FATHER’S resolves that fall was to rescue Scott from New York. My brother’s letters and occasional phone calls had become increasingly bizarre, all the more for being fairly articulate. With a lot of elaborate wordplay he described all the “crazy moothray fookrays” that one encounters in the course of a long, idle day in the city. A bum in Tompkins Square had put a knife to Scott’s throat and demanded a blow job; certain people, normal-seeming to begin with, had beaten the shit out of him “for no reason.” He was persecuted on all sides but, with a kind of wan bravado, insisted he was happy. New York was the only town for him.
Burck went to an address in Hell’s Kitchen indicated by Scott’s letters. I picture him standing on the sidewalk in his suede blazer and loafers, the rabble reeling around him as he glances from an envelope to a squalid tenement and back to the envelope again. Scott’s apartment was several flights up; perhaps there were a few sunburned, shirtless junkies asleep on the stairs. Though my father had alerted Scott to his visit—writing well in advance and specifying date and time—Scott wasn’t expecting him. He received my father warmly but had a hard time staying awake. A pair of checked, institutional-looking trousers hung loose and filthy around Scott’s bony pelvis; a patchy beard sprouted amid the pimples. At some point he began talking about a Utopian society he wanted to found on the bottom of the sea. My father offered to pay his way home on the condition that he see a psychiatrist, kick the drugs, and go back to school (or get a job), in that order, but Scott wasn’t ready yet. He thanked him all the same.
My father told me about this visit only once, some twenty years later, and I may be misremembering certain details. By then we only spoke of Scott once or twice a year, while a kind of gas filled the room until we could barely breathe unless we changed the subject. Before that happened, usually, either he or I would have found some fresh detail or story, a bit of colored glass to add to the mosaic of my brother’s life. It was a work in progress on our part.
MY MOTHER’S LIFE in Norman was purposeful and pleasant, a relief from “the fugitive distress of hedonism,” as Cyril Connolly would have it. Her visits home, with us, became more and more a matter of duty. For a long time she’d craved escape from the chaos of Scott’s presence, but now the house seemed, if anything, rather forlorn and pointless. I myself was rarely around; I resented her desertion and almost made a point of keeping away during her rare visits. Our dogs were dead. As for my parents’ marriage: since Sweden they’d adopted a greater openness, a kind of enforced candor that entailed discussing their love lives in elaborately casual detail.
For Marlies, then, coming home meant getting drunk with old friends who’d long ago begun to bore her. One day she and Phyllis (“Chlo-eeee!”) and Marilyn (an alcoholic doctor) and Marilyn’s brother (the proprietor of a scuba shop) were having a long boozy lunch in the basement of the Tiffany House apartments near the intersection of May Avenue and Northwest Expressway. I’m unsure what the Tiffany House looked like in 1979; nowadays it’s pretty grim, part of the nondescript suburban badlands—a painting by the misanthropic love-child of Norman Rockwell and de Chirico. After three or four hours in the Tiffany House, the scuba guy said he needed to get back to his shop, and Marlies offered him a lift. It was only a mile or so. They were sailing along in her massive Caddy when the guy said his shop was coming up on the right, so Marlies abruptly turned right and sideswiped a woman trying to pass. My mother drifted back into the left lane, waited for what she would always insist was a seemly interval, then swerved right again—“and lo and behold,” she remembers (indignant unto the present day), “that damn broad was there again!” They all pulled into a parking lot, and the scuba guy went into his shop and called the police, whom Marlies berated, gaily, from the backseat of their squad car (“for catching me instead of the stupid broad that insisted on passing me even though she could clearly see that I was trying to make a turn into the right lane . . .”). She also begged for cigarettes, but the stolid cops wouldn’t budge, explaining that it would affect her Breathalyzer test. “All the more reason!” she cackled. Later, in jail, she managed to bum a smoke from her cellmate—a weeping woman who’d been caught stealing from the Dollar General—and used the smoldering match to write “Marlies slept here” on the underside of her cellmate’s cot.
Four hours later my father arrived. “What kept you so long?” my mother snapped at him, and Burck calmly replied that he’d considered leaving her there overnight in hopes of teaching her a lesson. Otherwise he didn’t reproach her. Indeed, he was glad to be of use. He hired an old friend to handle her case, a man whose alcoholism (then in abeyance) had left him somewhat washed up as a lawyer. He was glad for the work but didn’t do a very good job, according to Marlies, whose license was revoked for a year; she was also ordered to attend six months of AA meetings and take a course about drinking and driving.
The first part of her punishment made her furious.
“Now you do something!” she scolded my father. “You get the nastiest crooks off, so you just see to it I don’t lose my license!”
And Burck handled that too—gladly, again, but I think in a quiet way he’d decided that enough was enough. He wanted a different kind of life, and so in spades did Marlies, who cheerfully attended her AA meetings (a hilarious chapter of mostly gay men) and found the drinking-and-driving course “very informative.” But none of it, really, was necessary by then. Marlies was through with all that, or anyway the worst of it—the daily tippling and dreary repetitive jokes, the Arabic youths, the Free Spirit, the whole scene. She devoted herself all the more to her studies.
One day I came home and found my parents sitting together on the living room couch. Burck was caressing Marlies’s hands in his lap, and they looked at each other with an earnestness that somehow excluded me.
“It’s good we can talk this way,” said my father, letting her hand go with a quick pat (wrapping it up) and greeting me with a smile. It was over.
part II
weeds don’t die
I got my driver’s license around the time of my parents’ divorce, and promptly began to follow in Scott and Marlies’ wavering tire tracks. It didn’t help that I too liked to get drunk, or that my father traveled a fair amount and trusted me too much. Once I took his silver Sedan de Ville for a joyride and dented the rim of the right front wheel by swerving over a curb. I managed to replace it from a salvage yard, rather cheaply and in the nick of time, quite pleased by how I’d handled the matter. The morning after my father’s return, however, he called me outside in an ominously even voice. He stood peering into the open trunk. “Has someone been in this trunk?” he asked. “No,” I lied; “why?” He invited me to have a look inside, where he’d stowed a number of museum prints prior to framing; the cut-rate grease monkey I’d hired had crumpled these up and thrust them into the tire well. “Has someone been in this trunk?” he repeated. “I guess so,” I said, affecting amazement.
Around that time, too, I smashed up my own first car, a 1975 Vega hatchback that I’d had for all of two months (“the snatch hatch” I roguishly named it, with scant reason). Late for school one morning, I’d briskly scraped some ice off the windshield, which refroze within a block of our house; rather than pull over and do a better scraping job, I blindly plowed into a neighbor’s parked car. I returned to our house on foot and summoned my father. He stood there in the street, dressed for work in an elegant navy suit and camel’s-hair topcoat, surveying the two demolished vehicles with practiced detachment. “The joys of fatherhood,” he remarked.
Burck tried to be stoical toward my more serious lapses, but otherwise seemed in a state of constant, seething irritation where I was concerned. Not without cause. My everyday attitude was a bit on the blasé side. Toward money, for instance. In the middle drawer of his desk he kept a checkbook, of which I availed myself when I needed small amounts of cash. I kept forgetting (often on purpose) to record my withdrawals and was called on the carpet once a month to explain the discrepant balance. Also, we bought our groceries from an upscale neighborhood market where my father had a charge account; I ignored the fruits and vegetables, deli meats, and good bread he bought, in favor of gourmet frozen meals that I charged by the cartful and ate for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. “Why don’t you eat this stuff?” Burck demanded, standing beside the fridge and waving a baguette in my face while I somberly ate a fat lasagna for my afternoon snack. “Is it because you’re too goddamn lazy to fix a sandwich? Because the best you can do is press a button on the microwave?” That was it in a nutshell, though I sat there in wounded silence, heartily sick of being persecuted over trifles.
At the time I felt more sinned against than sinning. I didn’t have a single close friend whose parents were divorced, and to some extent I blamed my father for our sad, anomalous bachelor arrangement: he shouldn’t have let his wife run wild like that, and God knows what-all he should have done about Scott. Since it was out of the question to say so (and since on some level I knew better), I avoided my father as much as possible. If he joined me in front of the TV of an evening, I’d let a decorous five minutes pass before mutely leaving the room. If he nagged me about my dirty dishes in the sink—or any number of cumulative misdemeanors—I’d slowly get up and take care of it with a look of haggard martyrdom. At least once I gave vent to my bitterness.
“I can’t do anything right! It’s gotten to where I hate being here!”
I meant this to sting. I wanted my father to feel contrite.
“Then leave,” he said. “Pack your shit and get out. Go find an apartment and live there. I’ll be happy to pay your rent.” And he went on to enumerate the many ways I’d made him feel unloved and alone these past few months, though of course he didn’t put it in those words. And while it hurts me to remember this, I was relatively unmoved at the time. Perhaps in the abstract it struck me as a shame that we, who’d been so close, didn’t get along anymore, but I thought he’d made a botch of our lives and deserved to suffer for it.
Still, I had to go on living there—taking my own apartment would have been even more stigmatizing than the present arrangement —so later that evening I conceded I’d been less than an ideal housemate. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I love and respect you more than any person on earth.”
Burck accepted this lame, mawkish apology with a nod and went back to his reading.
ONE EVENING HE told me, rather irritably in passing, that my brother’s bus would arrive that night from New York; he wanted me to give Scott a ride to a friend’s apartment (Todd the Tortoise’s apartment, it turned out). I hadn’t seen Scott in sixteen months and felt no eagerness to see him now. I don’t think I registered any emotion one way or the other on learning that he was, for whatever reason, returning from New York; it’s possible I was a little annoyed at having it sprung on me like that. Anyway, I told my father I was meeting a friend that night.
My father lowered his newspaper and looked at me bleakly. “Then you and your friend drive to the bus station at ten thirty-five and pick up your brother.” He gave the newspaper a sharp flick and resumed reading.
Though my brother looked different, I was able to spot him from a fair distance among the shabby stragglers standing outside the station. He’d cropped his hair short for his homecoming, and his face looked older, peevish—I was fifteen minutes late—but his manner of bouncing on his toes and staring around with an arrogant upturned chin was unmistakable. He was wearing his checked trousers and a yellowing white T-shirt. I didn’t get out of the car, so there was no question of our hugging each other. The disinclination was mutual, I think, as I hadn’t answered more than two or three of his letters, long ago, and then in a perfunctory, pompous way. I was never home when he called.
He nodded at my friend—they knew each other slightly—and tossed his duffel bag in the backseat. No more steamer trunk. He glared out the window while I tried catching his eye in the rearview mirror. I asked for an address.
He ignored this. He wanted to know what I thought of our parents. He meant the divorce.
“What do you mean?” I said, with pointed annoyance. I didn’t want to discuss the divorce around my friend. I hadn’t told him or anybody else about it.
My brother, just as pointedly, spelled it out—that is, he picked up on the fact that I didn’t want to discuss it, and why, and was therefore all the more determined to do so. “The divorce,” he said.
“What about it?”
He shook his head. I asked him again for some kind of address; I was driving aimlessly around the block in one of the worst parts of the city. My friend—a tense young man who ironed his own shirts—kept his eyes averted and pursed his lips.
“You don’t care at all, do you?” said Scott.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t. As a matter of fact, Scott, I thought the marriage was a joke and I’m glad it’s over.”
&n
bsp; This wasn’t true, though at the time I thought it should have been. In fact, when my father finally got around to telling me about it, I professed in somewhat milder terms to think it best for all concerned. If I showed any bitterness at all, it was against my absentee mother: “I assume there won’t be any turbulent custody battle,” I said. My father relayed this remark to her on the phone and they both laughed, relieved I was taking it so well. I’d wanted them to be hurt by my seeming indifference.
“Okay?” I said to Scott in the rearview mirror.
He wouldn’t look at me. He was staring out the window.
“Address?”
He let a few beats pass, then gave me his destination with a sort of desolate petulance. It wasn’t far.
“Thanks for the ride,” he said, getting out.
I watched him go. Beyond my friend’s blurred profile—staring straight ahead—I saw Scott mount the stairs of a mud-colored stucco building that looked vacant, condemned, except for a weak yellow lightbulb over the front door. My brother stood waiting in that light, hugging his duffel bag, until finally his friend stuck a wary, disheveled head out. The head withdrew, the door stayed open, and my brother held up one stiff hand and waved it, for me, before walking inside.
My friend and I went our way without a word on the subject of Scott or my parents’ divorce, as if the whole ten-minute episode had been a dream.
I WAS ALMOST expelled from school that year. I didn’t even know I was in trouble. Though I’d always been a bit of a behavior problem—the benign kind, I liked to think: a loudmouth, a clown, a showoff, but sort of endearing too—I was honestly at a loss when my father called me that afternoon from his office. He sounded very angry. He kept his voice down almost to a whisper, which was all the more menacing in its modulated intensity.
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Page 6
