It was no hallucination. That night at dinner I found that if I looked away from Sandra even for a moment, her face would resume its scowl, a spectral presence in my peripheral vision. As for Kelli and Aaron, I couldn’t bear to look at them at all. For a while I spoke to my father as though he were the only one at the table, until his face hardened in such a way as to suggest I include the others. I managed a smile and turned to Kelli.
“So Kelli. What’re you up to these days?”
“What’re you up to these days?”
That was worse than I’d expected, and whatever I managed to stammer about my teaching certificate, etc., came out as disingenuous, affected, self-congratulatory—whatever bad thing they wanted it to be. When I was done Kelli went on talking to her brother as though she’d been pointlessly interrupted.
Scott arrived the next day, and we all went skiing. My father and I were decent intermediates, Kelli and Sandra could wend their way down the green slopes in a wary snowplow, Aaron was a hotdog, and Scott had never skied in his life. Still he insisted on taking the main lift to the top of the mountain without so much as a single lesson. Our father patiently explained to him about bending his knees and traversing to break his speed, whereupon Scott wobbled a few yards and fell down. Thus he descended in bruising increments. For my part I was glad to find I’d lost none of my old skill: I’d ski within inches of where Scott lay sprawled after his latest wipeout and swish a bit of powder onto his prone form; once, while he was struggling to get up, I jumped over him as if I couldn’t wait for him to get out of the way. Scott seemed to take it all in stride.
Finally, after we’d left him on the bunny slope with a beginners’ class, my father turned to me on the lift. His face was flushed with more than the cold.
“Stop making fun of him!”
I was startled by his vehemence, and muttered something about how Scott of all people could take a joke.
My father shook his head. “It’s not good for him. He doesn’t need that right now. Don’t you think his self-esteem is banged up enough as it is?”
I could scarcely doubt my father’s sincerity, but I still thought he was overreacting. I said it wasn’t a question of “self-esteem”: Scott had never gone skiing, for heaven’s sake; there was no reason he should expect to be any good. My father just shook his head and lapsed into a glowering silence. Years would pass before I finally got it: Scott’s incompetence as a skier, to which I had the bad taste to advert, was due to the fact that he’d never been welcome in the old days, when my father and I had taken a number of ski trips while Scott was banished, down and out. Our relative skill was a reminder that for long periods of time we’d conducted our lives entirely separate from his, as if he didn’t exist.
THAT NIGHT, AFTER our parents went to bed, Scott and I abolished whatever benefit of the doubt our stepsiblings were willing to grant us. In the hotel bar for a nightcap, we made it clear to Kelli and Aaron that we meant to drink until we got drunk, and moreover to charge these drinks to our rooms (and hence our father). Room, rather: whereas Kelli and Aaron had separate rooms, Scott and I had to share a single. For this reason and certain ineffable others, we felt entitled, and anyway we were too broke to pay the tab ourselves.
But then, our father’s largesse was well-known to us all, the fact that he himself would hardly have minded: it was a vacation; it was Christmas; it was his treat. What Kelli and Aaron really wanted was a definite moral advantage, some rational vindication of a largely instinctive loathing.
“You’re ordering another?” said Kelli.
Scott and I tapped glasses and nodded. The fullness of her reproach was suggested by her refusal to look at us, a lofty sidelong sigh. Aaron sipped his one stale beer. And still they remained to keep us company, perhaps to keep an eye on us, to commit our enormities to memory.
THE NEXT MORNING it was obvious they’d lost no time tattling on us. The three of them, Sandra and her children, dourly kept their distance; Kelli and Aaron seemed to be nursing their mother through a wasting illness. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that they despised me in good times and bad, drunk or sober, whether I was inclined to ingratiate myself or not. Hating me was dogma. As for Scott, he was simply weird and not much of a threat, though his weirdness had long ago lost its charm.
I wasn’t sure how much my father knew about the night before. It was possible Sandra had spared him the whole painful tale of our lavish drinking, or perhaps he was simply making the best of what was proving a pretty grim business. In any case he seemed cheerful enough, if a bit worried by his wife’s worsening mood.
Sandra and her kids stayed in town that day to shop and commiserate; my father drove Scott and me to the ski basin without them. I sat in the back of the car and brooded over the awfulness of it all while we listened to a mix tape of country-western tunes that Scott had made for our father. Scott was especially proud of the segues between songs—part of his deejay training—the way each song blended seamlessly into the next, how the whole tape seemed a kind of continuous country-western symphony. “Listen to that!” he’d say, one trembling finger aloft. “Shit. Wasn’t that perfect?” I thought of my brother, unemployed these many months, spending untold hours perfecting his segues; if Kelli and Aaron were with us, no doubt they’d have rolled their eyes or, worse, praised Scott exuberantly for his prowess. This increased my sense of grievance, though of course I too found Scott’s segue talk ridiculous.
I wasn’t much of a conversationalist as Burck and I rode the lift. In better days our incidental banter had been as easy as breathing, but now I felt sure my stepfamily was bent on dismantling our rapport piece by piece, until they could cart my father away, sift what they needed, and remake him in their own image. I was damned if I’d take it lying down.
“Look,” I said, after we’d dismounted at the top of the mountain. “I’m tired of being the bad guy in this outfit. Those stepchildren of yours slander me every chance they get, and I’ve never said a word against them . . .”
This was partly true: while I sometimes tried to entice my father into admitting their less endearing qualities—he’d oblige me only in the vaguest way (“Kelli can be pretty strong mustard”; “school isn’t Aaron’s strong suit”)—I was careful not to disparage them outright. But there on the slopes I opened the floodgates at last.
“I take a drink and the first thing they do is run to Mommy and tell her what a lush I am. I make a joke that Sandra doesn’t like and the first thing she does is complain to her kids. And they talk about what a drunk I am, what a shit I am, what a shame it is that such a good man should have fathered two rotten sons. I’m sick of it! What’d I ever do to them?”
My father listened with weary patience, but what could he do that he hadn’t done before? What could he say? Now and then he fogged the air with his unhappy sighs.
THAT NIGHT WAS Christmas Eve, and Sandra had wanted us to walk along the “Christmas Trail” that went past shops and quaint adobe cottages on Canyon Road, lined on either side with the little paper lanterns called farolitos. It was what one did on Christmas Eve in Santa Fe; she’d been looking forward to it. By the time we set out, though, she was markedly subdued, and I knew my father had tried talking to her about my various complaints. No doubt she’d rebutted him with a bitter account of my drinking the night before, which had led to God knows what. I was glad I hadn’t been a fly on that wall.
The Christmas Trail was a sort of darkling carnival midway, with lots of Indians pretending to be picturesque local artisans, hawking their mass-produced wares. From either side of the flickering trail they leered and beckoned; jaded carolers were stationed at intervals along the path. Sandra’s shoulders sagged beneath the serape she’d bought that afternoon for the occasion. I was careful not to say a word, though my brother felt no such compunction.
“I think I’ll treasure this memory until the day I die, Zwieb . . . You carve that yourself?”—this to a cross-legged Indian who nodded guardedly, as though his English
were none too good. “That guy back there carved one exactly like it! Is he your cousin or something? . . . Wow, this trail just goes on and on. Hell no, I don’t want to turn around; I hope it goes on forever! Don’t you, Zwieb?”
And he wasn’t even drunk. The worst part was the way he included me in his mockery, as though we were in cahoots about finding this Christmas Trail (and by implication Sandra herself) the epitome of kitsch. Sandra walked along like Christ en route to Golgotha, supported on either side by her Samaritan children. For the moment she didn’t want my father’s comfort; he was to blame for bringing me into the world, after all.
“Well, it seemed like a nice idea,” she’d sigh from time to time. “I just wanted everyone to have fun . . .”
All this was directed at me. As far as Sandra was concerned, my brother was little more than a hooting Id, a malicious puppet I used to torment her. And she may have had a point there, since his mockery was entirely for my benefit, and indeed the reason—or one reason—he hated her was because she hated me. Scott was nothing if not loyal.
And still there were four days left to our family vacation. We hastily opened presents after the Christmas Trail debacle, then went our separate ways. That meant I was stuck with Scott’s company for the rest of the trip. My father had wisely decided to devote himself to mollifying his wife.
If you were with the adult Scott for only an hour or so, it’s possible you’d leave the meeting with an impression of—well, not normalcy exactly, but a kind of refreshing eccentricity. Our first lunch alone together, the day after Christmas, was like that. We ate in the hotel restaurant (so we could charge the meal to our father) and drank nothing stronger than wine, which was enough to push me beyond our usual banter. I baited him about his ongoing joblessness, his refusal to get on with life at age thirty-two. Whether I was witty or cruel or both, he responded with the same good humor, as though he were simply glad to be spending time with me after the long separations of the past decade.
“I don’t know, Zwieb. For almost five years I worked hard in the service of my country. I figure I deserve some time off.”
“It’s been almost a year.”
“What about my job at Channel Four?”
“That lasted—what? Three months?”
“Three and a half. Also I worked at a few restaurants.”
“Just can’t find the right venue?”
He laughed. “I don’t know, Zwieb. When you’ve worked in the business as long as I have”—he said this as though he’d managed a string of renowned bistros in Provence— “you get picky. I just can’t stand being around fuckups.”
“And yet it may shock you to learn that there are those who consider you a fuckup.”
Still he laughed, which emboldened me to widen my field of attack. I began to recount every lurid highlight from his long career: the arrests, the car wrecks, the lost jobs, the drugs, on and on. “That was a long time ago,” he’d say, or “That car was a piece of shit anyway,” or “What? You’ve never been fired before?” or “What? You’ve never smoked a little pot?”
“Scott!” I said finally, throwing my hands up with a wondering laugh. “Face it! You’re a disgrace!”
His face mottled a little, but he looked thoughtful. “I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “I think I’m a very nice person. I’m just not—” He paused, searching the rafters for the right phrase; then he smiled. “I’m just not conventionally ambitious.”
Later we went back to our room, where we could indulge in more serious drinking out of the public eye. While I lay on the bed and soaked, skimming a book or magazine, Scott sat on the floor and railed at the TV.
“Knocker down and piss on her! . . . You know what you look like? You have any idea? . . . Fuck . . . Piece a shit. What a mind-blowing piece a shit . . . Admit it! You’re a fucking lesbian! And you! Faggot . . . Right, like I’m gonna buy your fucking beer cause your tits are so big . . .”
Some of this was meant to amuse me, I guess, but most of it was so much oblivious ranting. It occurred to me that this was how Scott spent his days: getting sloshed and talking to himself, or rather the TV, which I suppose served as a surrogate for the world he’d rejected and vice versa. It was a very depressing spectacle. I tried not to look or listen, but this was impossible of course, and I found myself becoming angry—angry at my father for conceiving this little get-together in the first place, for putting me in a single room with my crazy brother; angry at my brother for being so noisily, depressingly crazy; angry at my stepfamily for everything. I wanted to dash my brains out against the wall.
Finally I had to get out, but there was no shaking Scott. He thought I was enjoying the whole binge as much as he, and it might have been risky to disabuse him: much of his weird anger at the TV, I realized, was by way of blowing off steam after the beating he’d taken at lunch. So we went bar-hopping. And since I couldn’t bear to hear him talk, I talked about myself. Scott was a good listener: he nodded a lot, his eyes welling up when I began sobbing about my ex-girlfriend Kate who never wrote me anymore, and we seemed to agree that the world was a pretty fucked-up place. My last memory of that night was Scott holding me upright while I puked in the snow.
The next morning our father let himself into our room—we’d failed to appear at breakfast—and found us passed out amid a reek of liquor and vomit. Wearily he told us to get packed and ready to go within an hour, and hardly spoke during the long drive back to Oklahoma. (Sandra and her children stayed in Santa Fe to enjoy the rest of the vacation.) In the car I read aloud from Joseph Mitchell’s Up in the Old Hotel, my Christmas gift to our father. Scott especially enjoyed “Professor Seagull,” Mitchell’s profile of the Greenwich Village bohemian Joe Gould, a Harvard graduate who’d led a skid-row life as a matter of choice. Scott let go with a lot of wild, wheezy laughter and I joined him, what the hell, as if Gould reminded us, amusingly, of our mutual disgrace.
THERE WAS NO question of my seeing Sandra and her kids after that, and eventually Burck dropped me too—worn down by the daily grind of Sandra’s subtle and not-so-subtle persuasion to the effect that I was a worthless character. That I was sane and sober enough to hold a responsible job—I’d been hired as a teacher of gifted students at a good magnet school—didn’t cut much ice. Actually there had been one more Christmas, a year later, when I’d spent a single evening in my father’s company; Sandra and her children had already departed for Santa Fe, minus the Bailey men, leaving me a chirpy card lest I take their absence amiss. My father, in a grim mood, informed me of their misgivings in a way that let me know he emphatically shared them, and afterward sent me the following note: “You are a very serious alcoholic. You will disagree. I am right; you are wrong.” I replied in a spirit of jaunty demurral, and that tore it. We hardly spoke for the next five years.
Sandra wanted me out of the picture, and now she had her wish. As a matter of recompense, perhaps, she renewed her efforts to be a bountiful stepmother to Scott. It came as no surprise that he was invited, and I was not, to our father’s lavish sixtieth birthday party, held at the ranch in Chandler, Oklahoma—Breeze Hill—that he’d bought a few months before. Scott’s date was Maryam, the crazy girlfriend who’d phoned me in New Orleans and threatened suicide. She made a lasting impression by never once letting go of Scott’s arm.
Scott needed all the support he could get. More than a year had passed since he’d lost his job at the TV station, and he seemed less and less apt to do anything about it. “I live the life I love, and I love the life I live,” he liked to say, sighing into a comfy old recliner in front of his TV. He was living off a VA disability pension of roughly five hundred dollars a month (for an injured neck and related back problems) as well as handouts from our parents; he was also amassing a lot of credit-card debt, which explained the elaborate stereo system and brand-new desk in his study, where he claimed to make extra cash as a freelance copy-editor. Up to a point, his serene acceptance of his own inertia was convincing: he liked the little house
that he “rented” from our father, and the fact that he wasn’t “conventionally ambitious” became a point of oft-repeated pride. He also found comfort in Maryam, to say nothing of their churchgoing (they both attended Crossroads). More than ever he affected a kind of smug disapproval over the fact that I wasn’t “saved,” particularly when I tried to needle him about his lazy, aimless life.
I doubted he had the inner resources to keep it up. He was an intelligent person who’d never bothered to cultivate intelligent tastes. His life had shrunk around three basic interests: pop music, peckerwood religion, and the Dallas Cowboys. (The last was a great passion of his childhood, and now, in his mid-thirties, Exley-like, he again spent autumn weekdays pining for the excitement of Sunday afternoon.) Naturally it took more and more stimulants to persuade Scott that life held something good in store. When drunk or high, he doubtless took refuge in the same old fantasies: I picture him prancing around his house naked, the stereo booming, his bottle a makeshift microphone as he imagines a sea of pubescent fans. Meanwhile his old friends had moved on with their lives—even Todd the Tortoise had started a family and gotten a steady job. Chance meetings with such people were an awful ordeal: “Freelance stuff,” Scott would mumble when asked what he was “doing” these days, and his oily face would burn with humiliation.
His only true remaining friend (that I knew of) was a skinny guy with a goatee named Thomas, who played in a western swing band and spoke French. By the time I met Thomas, I’d heard all about him: my mother dropped his name as a good angel in Scott’s life, as proof that Scott was still worthy of “interesting” friends, and even my father deemed Thomas “a nice enough guy” (the latter’s band played at his sixtieth birthday party). I liked Thomas all right. He was a little too carefully articulate—out of proportion, I thought, to his actual intellect—and had a tendency to romanticize my brother as a brilliant quirky fellow who couldn’t be satisfied by ordinary occupations. Thomas supported himself by waiting tables at an upscale restaurant; he was the one who’d gotten Scott those short-lived waiting jobs that he’d mentioned during our lunch in Santa Fe. Thomas seemed to admire my brother’s integrity for refusing to work with people he didn’t respect.
The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait Page 15
