The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  DURING SCOTT’S ESTRANGEMENTS from the family, we used to speak of him with the kind of candor one reserves for the dead, when we spoke of him at all. My father and I would ritualistically mention him toward the latter stages of a given conversation, and one night our Scott-talk took a curious turn. This was in New York, where Burck had come on business and taken me out for a rare fancy meal at the Quilted Giraffe. As ever he asked if I’d heard anything lately, and I told him what little I knew. Then, with a kind of pensive amusement, my father asked if I thought Scott was gay.

  I was taken aback; I smiled. “Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I hear things,” he said.

  “Like what?”

  “Well, for one thing, did you know he was here in New York recently?”

  I did not.

  “Well, he was. With—do you remember Kenny Harlan?”

  I did: he’d been the youngest of my mother’s gay crowd, the wispy scion of a wealthy vulgarian family (oil) who paid a remittance to keep him away. Kenny never worked or read a book or bothered much; as far as I could tell, his main occupation was getting drunk and poor-mouthing people until they beat the shit out of him. I suppose he was suicidal but lazy about getting on with it. Nonetheless I was startled to learn he was still alive, ten years later, and taking vacations with my brother.

  “Old Kenny,” I said. “How is he?”

  “The same. Drunk off his ass. They stayed at the Chelsea.”

  We were both striving to keep up the casual tone. I didn’t bother to ask how my father knew all this. He heard things.

  “So what d’you think Krafft-Ebing would make of it?” he said.

  “Well—” I paused. “I hardly think it matters . . .”

  “I’m not saying it does.”

  This was misleading. Burck, to be sure, was nothing if not liberal-minded, but at bottom he was still born and raised in Vinita, Oklahoma. Just because he was tolerant of homosexuality in the abstract didn’t mean he wanted a gay son, even an estranged gay son. Though he was always kind to my mother’s friends, and amused by them, he worried about the whole scene. “God”—he remarked to me once with a sigh—“I hope you don’t turn into a cocksucker.”

  I tried to put him at ease. “Scott’s always talked about how much he’s bothered by gay men—‘fucking faggots,’ that sort of thing. You remember what he said about Oscar.”

  “Who?”

  “His roommate at NYU.”

  Any mention of NYU, in the context of Scott, made my father wince. “Not sure I do.”

  “You know, he said Oscar wanted to fuck him. He said everybody wanted to fuck him, male or female. He said it bothered him.”

  “Ah yes.”

  “On the other hand, Scott’s pretty lonely these days, so who knows. He and Uncle Ronny go to church together.” I shrugged. “But do I think he’s gay? Nah. He likes girls, the younger the better.”

  Then I mentioned Scott’s obsession with various pubescent starlets, his avid reading of Tiger Beat and the like. This for starters. Finally, once I’d finished, my father changed the subject.

  MY FIRST APARTMENT in New York was an eight-by-twelve studio on the seventeenth floor of the George Washington Hotel at Twenty-third and Lex. As I recall, it cost me $535 a month in 1986, or roughly half my take-home pay as an editorial assistant at Cambridge University Press, where I’d begun working in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences division shortly after being fired from the Morgan Bar for absenteeism and general ineptitude. I didn’t mind my tiny apartment—at least not at first. Sandra and I were in the midst of one of our brief détentes, and during a visit she’d urged Burck to buy me some streamlined Scandinavian furniture that made the most of my scant living space. The better part of my leisure, then, was spent reading on a thirty-inch-wide unvarnished wooden bed (with storage drawers); at my feet was a bookcase with a small TV in the middle compartment that I could watch when I got tired of reading. I rarely turned it on. I figured I’d better keep reading. Because of my promising honors thesis I’d decided to be a writer, though at the time I was mostly writing letters. Meanwhile I was often interrupted by an old lady next door, who on certain nights blasted Petula Clark’s “Downtown” over and over again via the blown, raspy speakers of an ancient hi-fi. When I knocked on her door (diffidently) to protest, she appeared in a soiled housecoat and stocking cap; her face looked like the chalky bottom of a desiccated lake. Her eyes glittered. She gave me a garbled spiel about a noisy man in her ceiling who was trying to kill her by somehow smiting her on the forehead from above (she pantomimed this: smiting her forehead with the heel of her hand, rolling her eyes up into her head, and stumbling backward); Petula Clark helped drown the man’s malicious racket, and since I wanted her to turn down the volume, I was pegged as another of her tormenters. “Killer!” she’d hiss, sitting on the steps leading from the lobby to the mailroom, where (she knew) I had to pass each day after work. I complained to the building manager, who said that they’d already been in touch with the woman’s son in Baltimore. He wasn’t eager to resume custody.

  My boss at work was a gentle scholar named Susan, who appreciated my better qualities (such as they were) and quietly ignored my cadaverous hangovers. I’d never been to New York prior to my arrival that autumn, and mostly I was enchanted. Every block, even the squalid ones, struck me as a fresh romance. I remember discovering Gramercy Park and simply marveling: two blocks away I lived in a grungy residential hotel next door to a lunatic, and here was this fanciful square of grass and trees and quaint wrought-iron benches and somberly prosperous brownstones. I tried the gate: locked! Mais bien sûr, it was right to be locked; it was something to aspire to. I was still young! That seated madonna there on a bench, with her pram, she’d earned a key and I hadn’t. I wished her well.

  But a key would be long in coming, and soon I grew bitter. In college I’d been promising: I belonged to a good fraternity; I had a fetching, whimsical girlfriend; and finally I’d transcended my lifelong inertia and written an honors thesis that was deemed “a model of the form.” And now? I was a bookish sluggard working for peanuts and learning the hard way that a decent undergraduate thesis was hardly a sound predictor of literary success. All the while I sensed that some terrible fall was imminent, and what sanctuary would I seek when it came? I was welcome at home (that is, barely tolerated) only for brief visits during the winter holidays; summer visits were arranged, tensely, on an ad-hoc basis. All this was tacitly understood.

  I decided to spend the summer of 1987 with friends in Hermosa Beach, California. I’d just been accepted into the NYU graduate film school for the fall and was giddy with relief that my life was about to have some forward motion again; also I wouldn’t have to write any more apprentice fiction, thank God. In the meantime I’d moved from the George Washington Hotel to a nice apartment near the UN with my best friend, Mike (my best friend to this day, I hasten to add, with pride and amazement). Mike was dating a dancer/actress who’d done rather well on Broadway and knew a lot of other show-business people. It was a Saturday in late May, and I was in my cubicle at Cambridge University Press for the last time, tying up loose ends for Susan, my boss, who’d been so kind to me. Mike phoned me at work: his dancer girlfriend was having a big party at her raffish penthouse in Spanish Harlem, and so-and-so (a famous actor who went on to become more famous still) was expected to put in an appearance; what say I tip the remaining contents of my in-box into the trash and join them? This I did, more or less, and proceeded to get massively hammered. There was a lot to celebrate, after all, not least my relief at being able to say—to actors, no less—“I’m going to NYU Film School” instead of “I’m in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences division at Cambridge University Press.” The famous guy never showed up, but I did get into a lively chat with an older soap-opera actor (bald, handlebar mustache) who claimed to be a mentor to this celebrity, who was an ingrate, he said, and a bitch.

  Next thing I knew I was sharing a cab with this fellow, since we w
ere both heading downtown, and he asked whether I wanted to grab a quick drink in the Village. It was maybe six in the evening; I said sure. Then I was in a leather bar on Christopher Street near the Hudson River, chatting with an enormous fellow in a motorcycle cap who stared impassively at the back of the bar while I wondered aloud whether it was wise for him and gay men generally to cultivate such a lifestyle in this day and age. I might even have mentioned my mother’s old friends—my darling uncles, so many departed, etc. Probably I wept a little. The sun was a faint disappearing orange over the river.

  Then it was dark and eight hours later, and I was riding in a cab with a pregnant prostitute. I have never recovered those eight hours in any form; the soap-opera actor, later canvassed by Mike, said he’d left after a single drink, while I’d insisted on staying and maybe talking sense into that guy with the motorcycle cap. If the latter got revenge for my egregious little homily by fixing me up with a pregnant, malodorous (some kind of hair stuff and a hard night’s sweat), and quite pimply prostitute, well then I gratefully salute him across the years: it might have been so much worse, and God knows some kind of reprisal was in order. Or maybe I slept at the leather bar for six or seven hours and then endeavored to pick up this person under my own steam; friends tell me I can be eerily articulate in the midst of my blackouts. But I’ll never know. Simply I came to in a cab and there she was. Then we were back at my apartment and she was naked, and very pregnant, and I gave her some money and begged off, whereupon she slept in my bed. I slept in the other room. Mike, thank God, had spent the night at his dancer’s apartment.

  Picture our little tableau in the morning. The prostitute made herself at home, taking a long shower and teasing her ’fro as best she could with Mike’s brush. I sat reading the Times at a little table next to the partial wall between kitchen and living room, while she came and went—naked, flat-footed, dripping—helping herself to the contents of our fridge. I was loath to get on her bad side. She knew where I lived; doubtless she had a pimp. I read and wished her gone. Then I heard a key in the lock. “Get back to the room!” I hissed. “Go! Now!” My urgency must have alarmed her—maybe she thought a wife or a cop was at the door—and she trotted flap flap flap back to my bedroom, her jouncing naked body observed en passant by Mike from our partly opened, chain-locked door. I let him in. I whispered “Sorry about this,” while he stood there with his mouth open, hands on either side of his head à la Edvard Munch’s The Scream. Presently the young woman emerged in her finery and quietly departed, belly first. The next day I left New York for the summer.

  I SAW MY brother again a year later—when all was changed, changed utterly. In the preceding months Marlies had mentioned that Scott was now in California—Mississippi—Hawaii (!)—because he’d joined the Marine Corps and seemed to be doing fine; this, I figured, was some bullshit story he’d fed the poor, gullible woman while leading a hobo life. Even if he’d managed to enlist, I gave him a couple of weeks, tops, before he was returned to the civilian world in a sprawling heap. Meanwhile I’d finished my one and only year at the NYU graduate film school; it cost me roughly $30,000 (I paid off the last of my loans in 2001) to learn I had little talent or interest in that direction and was, let’s face it, lost. So that was that. For the time being, then, I was an incompetent, soon-to-be-fired bartender at an Italian restaurant in Norman, Oklahoma, seeing a lot more of my mother than either of us would have liked. As for Scott, well, picture my pop-eyed astonishment: for he was now, indeed, an ultracompetent aviation supply clerk on leave from his Marine Corps base in Kaneohe, Hawaii. He looked good, too: his face had a glow, and most of his pimples were gone, with little apparent scarring unless you saw him under a certain light. Looking good, in fact, was the one thing we had in common—I was getting a lot of sun—and my favorite photo of us, sitting side by side on my mother’s couch, was taken around that time: Scott seems tickled but magnanimous too, clasping my knee in a consoling sort of way; I don’t seem particularly depressed, perhaps because of my tan.

  Ten or so months before, Scott’s pariahdom was complete: all but my mother had disowned him, he couldn’t find a job, and even his more sordid friends kept away. When the last decent bar in town had eighty-sixed him for good, it was time to make a drastic change or give up entirely: the marines. Such was Scott’s notoriety, though, that he thought better of attempting to enlist anywhere in his home state. Rather he drove (in what I have no idea) all the way to San Diego, drinking Jim Beam the while, or so he later told it.

  I can only imagine what basic training must have entailed; I suppose he persevered out of sheer desperation, a total lack of options, to say nothing of the antic delight he must have afforded some drill sergeant. Anyway, he persevered. My mother went alone to his graduation, and such was my brother’s lockstep conformity on the parade ground, his look of absolute belonging from behatted head to shining foot, that my mother spent the entire ceremony taking zoom photos of someone other than Scott, who finally tapped her on the shoulder as she made to embrace his doppelgänger. Afterward they took a trip to a friend’s place near Joshua Tree in the desert, where my brother reverted to his old ways somewhat: for a solid week he did nothing but lie by the pool and drink, morosely, his Walkman buzzing loud enough to scare birds away—or so my mother said at the time.

  After that, he went from strength to strength. In Meridian, Mississippi, he took a course in aviation supply and finished first in his class. He also proved a superior marksman: for months he competed all over the country with the marine pistol team, racking up medals, and soon became an instructor. Finally he got a plum assignment in Kaneohe, where he was dubbed the Sultan of Supply. It was simply miraculous—though like most miracles one could divine certain scientific explanations amid the mystery. Scott, after all, was hardly the first misfit who’d found a degree of success in the military: as a supply clerk he was expected to sit in his cage and push paper, though he also seemed to possess a talent for doing efficient little favors at the right time, for the right person, regardless of protocol. In short he was popular and rather powerful after a fashion, and with his ego burnished for the first time in years, he didn’t need to drink and drug so much. Nor did he have the time or energy. I imagine he spent the odd spot of leisure in his old manner, as in Joshua Tree with my mother—listening to music, skimming magazines or the Bible, tippling the while—but when he got back to work he behaved himself more or less. He had no choice.

  YET AGAIN SCOTT was welcomed back into the bosom of the family. My father told me about their first meeting in over a year. Scott was so rattled he could scarcely finish a sentence; he coughed and made cryptic jokes, compulsively gulping his beer. Finally my father put a hand on his shoulder.

  “What’s wrong, son?”

  “I guess I’m kinda nervous, Papa. I don’t . . .”

  Burck waited for him to finish, but Scott just shook his head and stared at his glass.

  “You don’t have to be nervous,” my father said. “There’s nothing to be nervous about. Everybody’s happy to see you. We’re proud of you.”

  My brother’s eyes began to leak a little, but he was a marine now and kept his composure.

  Another emotional moment was when I told him about enlarging that favorite photo of us (sitting, tanned, on Mom’s couch) and pinning it over my bed. I’d mentioned it only in passing, in the course of a rare long-distance chat, after he’d asked me to describe my new digs in West Palm Beach—where I’d moved in the hope of starting over, or at least failing in relative obscurity (I was trying, again, to write). My apartment, the bottom floor of a carriage house, was furnished in a quirkily hideous way, and after I’d mentioned the lampstand shaped like a pile of limes, the cubist painting that my landlord had confessed to be his own work, the yellow sofa with its solemn brown stain, I added, “Oh! And there’s a photo of us over the bed.”

  Pause. “What photo?”

  “You know, the one Mom took last summer. The one of us on the couch. I made it into a p
oster and tacked it up. You’re the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning, for better or worse.”

  Naturally I wanted my brother to be pleased that I’d put a photo of us (poster-sized, no less) over my bed, but also I expected him to see the humor of that feature in the midst of such a piquant, overall tackiness. And really the dismal fact of the matter was simply this: I’d hung that photo because I thought it flattered me, because I was badly in need of flattery at the time.

  After a silence, my brother said “Wow” and let his breath out in a long hiss. “I really don’t know what to say, Zwieb.”

  He was on the verge of tears over something that meant almost nothing to me. I did my best to change the subject.

  I BEGAN TO fancy myself a kind of knockabout intellectual à la Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, and thus I contrived to feel superior to certain old friends who’d surrendered themselves to the rat race. At bottom I was a failure and knew it better than anybody. When my worried father would call and ask how I was doing, I’d tell funny stories at my own expense to show him that my sense of humor, at least, was intact. Meanwhile he helped in whatever way he could—there was usually a check or a fifty-dollar bill enclosed with his letters—though it hurt and probably embarrassed him that his second-born son, something of a white hope up to then, was also having a bad time adjusting to the real world.