by Adam Haslett
Upstairs, I listened for a moment before knocking on the door.
“Yeah?” Michael called out in a tremulous voice, as if he’d been locked in there for months, and I were the jailer come to free him.
He was sitting upright on the bed, in the dim lamplight. Crates of records that he didn’t have space for in his room at Ben’s sat in the shadowed corners. The harder up he got for money, the more Alec pressed him to sell some of his vinyl. But no matter what bills he had to pay, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The records meant too much to him. The most valuable were the white labels and test presses of the artists who’d gone on to fame, a few with the help of Michael’s early reviews. But these in particular he held on to, especially if he thought the artists had sold out down the line. He refused to profit from what he judged to be corporate hype, as if by retaining the better work he could preserve its integrity. I didn’t blame him for this the way Alec did. I sympathized with the urge to dissent, in whatever small way, from monetizing everything. As Michael saw it, capitalism had been cruel to our father, giving him no quarter when he was down, the weight of no money and too much responsibility dragging him under. Which didn’t mean he hadn’t been sick, but that there had been no margin for being sick. I didn’t disagree. But I wished Michael could fathom how furious it made him. He seemed blind to his own anger, willfully so. On the few occasions I’d suggested as much, he’d tilted his head to one side and looked at me quizzically, as if I were describing something wholly alien.
“I have to go out there,” he said. “I have to see her. I could fly to Cleveland tomorrow. She’s just saying we can’t talk because her parents are telling her to. If I see her, it’ll be okay.”
On his lap he held open a half sheet of wrinkled notepaper.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“It’s her last voice mail to me before she left. I transcribed it. Do you want to hear it?”
“No, I don’t.”
“Why not?”
Beneath his guilelessness, knowingly or not, lay the accusation that if I didn’t listen I too would be abandoning him. This was the disavowal: he could remain innocent of his rage as long as he found a way, however indirect, to channel it through us. “Because you’re fixated,” I said. “You don’t talk about anything else. She’s immature. She manipulates you. I get that you’re upset. But you can’t give your whole life over to her.”
“I can’t help it, I have no choice.”
I could have argued the impossibility of the fantasy, but then out would come the Proust quotes and the diatribes against passionless domesticity. Love was an affliction or nothing at all. In which case, Paul and I were nothing. I had given up years ago on being able to share with Michael what I myself went through day to day trying to be with another person, to ease my flinching against Paul’s expressions of love, convinced that what they promised would never last, would vanish without warning and cut me back down to the truth of loneliness. Telling Michael I was pregnant and uncertain what to do? Forget it. His fumbling, anxious response would be worse than his continued ignorance, and would only require me to assure him that I was okay.
He went on about Cleveland, not quite as if I hadn’t spoken, but as if it made no difference, talking as much to himself as to me about how he could get a cab at the airport that would take him to a motel, and how from there he could take a bus to wherever Bethany eventually agreed to meet him, spooling out the line of reasoning he would use to persuade her that they had to be together, that nothing else mattered. He sounded like a child insisting on the existence of an imaginary world.
This time, when he finished, or at least paused, I had nothing left in me to add.
“Everyone’s in the living room,” I said. “You should come down. We could watch a movie.”
“What if I’m alone for the rest of my life?” he asked.
I looked away, down at his feet, at his blue Converse sneakers on the old pine-green carpet. I used to come to this room sometimes, after Michael had returned to England and I was alone in the house trying to take care of Alec and my mother. It was the farthest away I could get and still be home. Michael didn’t tell me until years later about his premonition in the woods, the one that had driven him to leave. Back then it just seemed he had picked the perfect time to be gone.
I knew by training that my own estimation of how a person would end up in life wasn’t the germane thing. Besides, I didn’t know how things were going to turn out for Michael. I couldn’t predict the future. As a counselor, my job was to make room for fears to be aired, so they could dissolve. That was the professional thing to do. And the kind thing. I was closer now than ever to treating Michael that way, as a case, cutting off what remained of brother-and-sister. But I couldn’t. I couldn’t kill him like that. For his sake, and for mine.
“You’re not going to be alone,” I said. “There are lots of women who’ve been attracted to you. You’ll find someone.”
He scanned the note in his hand once more, then folded it up and slipped it into his pocket.
“We could talk about it—at our appointment,” I said. “It might be good for all of us.”
He seemed to brighten slightly at the idea. “That would be okay?” he asked.
“It’s whatever we want it to be. Each of us.”
“Oh,” he said, “okay.” He reached for his beer on the bedside table. “Thanks for coming up,” he said.
In the living room, Alec was watching a rerun of Brideshead Revisited. A young Jeremy Irons ate strawberries under a tree with a blond aristocrat. Mom looked up now and then from her crossword to see how far along the story had progressed. Her gift to her sister this year had been a volume of the Mitford sisters’ correspondence, which Aunt Penny perused now by the fire, her legs covered by a blanket. Paul, slouching on the sofa, was still trekking through his Dostoyevsky, the book in one hand, a glass of Scotch in the other.
The family at its leisure.
“Is he all right?” Mom asked, adding without waiting for an answer, “I’m so glad you talked with him. It’s all so unpleasant.”
“He’s not great,” I said.
“Is this the Indian girl?” Aunt Penny asked.
“No,” Alec said, louder than necessary, and without turning from the screen. “She’s African-American and has borderline personality disorder.”
“Oh, come on now, who said that?” Mom asked.
“I think she did,” Alec said.
“Aren’t there any women his own age?” Aunt Penny asked. “Women he went to college with?”
“The mixer stage is over,” Alec said.
“There’s no need to be snide,” my mother said.
“I’m not. It’s over for all of us. Believe me.”
Paul laughed, but stopped short when he realized no one had joined him.
“Well,” my mother said, standing up to gather her things before going upstairs for her bath, “hopefully he’ll sleep well tonight, and be better in the morning.”
On her way out of the room, she stole a glance at her sister, and, confident she wasn’t watching, turned the thermostat ever so slightly down. I lowered myself into the armchair she’d vacated and my body collapsed into the springs.
After a few blank minutes, Aunt Penny rose as well, saying she needed to begin preparing herself for “the conditions upstairs.” She too stopped at the thermostat on the way out, turning it slightly up.
“You people are crazy,” Paul said.
“Thanks,” I replied, glad for the assist. Having made his promise earlier, he’d happily resumed his role as passive observer. Sensing my displeasure, he decided to bow out, saying he was going to read in bed and would see me shortly.
That left Alec and me sitting by the dwindling fire. He’d switched off the television and turned the wingback in toward the room again.
“How are you holding up?” he asked.
“I can’t talk to you with that mask on. It’s ridiculous.”
�
�You’re not allergic to the house.”
“Neither are you. Just take it off, would you?”
He lifted it onto his forehead, sniffing at the air like a badger. At least he didn’t wear Dad’s cravats anymore, like he had in high school, with the woolen pants and the cardigans, that fustian look he’d cultivated to appear more mature than he was. I could never bring myself to tell him that it just made him look gay. It would have been cruel at the time, when the clothes gave him a means to feel superior. Now he wore formfitting pullovers and aged denim, which also made him look gay, though in a more competitive vein.
“Mom’s retirement isn’t secure,” he said.
“What the fuck are you talking about? She hasn’t retired.”
“That’s not what retirement security means. What I’m saying is, she is going to retire in the next five years, and when she does, her income stream will be just enough to pay her bills, but without a cushion. And she’ll still be paying a mortgage. That is an insecure retirement.”
“I can’t talk about this. I just can’t.”
“Which allies you with her, because that’s exactly what she says when I bring it up. It’s like no one wants to even acknowledge the future. Which leaves me to worry about it.”
“We should have gone to the movies,” I said. “Why didn’t we go to the movies?”
Alec picked at his nose, the tag of his new sweater dangling from his wrist like a cheap ornament. I had trained him from late adolescence in basic psychological literacy and so was able to talk with him about more or less anything, including, over the years, the ups and downs of my relationships. All in all, we were about as close as siblings could be. Which meant we monitored each other’s responsibility for the family, watchful for any sign of defection, as though we were on a desert island together, each surreptitiously building an escape raft that the other occasionally burned. My cardinal sin was having boyfriends to begin with, because God forbid another family unit arose to threaten the hegemony of the dying colony. His was being younger, and so having required my taking care of him when there was no one else to do it, putting him in the hole, in terms of time served. Now, belatedly, he’d set himself up as the family actuary. It was his attempt to engage at the lowest emotional cost.
Realizing he would get no traction from me on Mom’s retirement, he tacked back to Michael, letting me know that Ben had informed him that our brother hadn’t paid his rent this month. Michael had been living with Ben, and then Ben and Christine together, for years by now, in an arrangement that had morphed from a stopgap measure in the wake of his breakup with Caleigh into the most constant aspect of his adult life, all, needless to say, without any planning or discussion. Jobs, doctors, romantic crises had come and gone, but throughout he’d remained in that little front bedroom facing Shawmut Avenue on the edge of the South End. I’d long been glad for it because, while it might have overstated the case to call Michael their ward, Ben and Christine had kept him on as a member of their domestic establishment, giving him the daily contact and occasional home-cooked meal he’d otherwise be without. That Alec remained close to them both provided a kind of collective, monitoring intelligence, for better or worse.
“But surprise, surprise,” Alec said, “Ben gets a check in the mail from…Mom. So it’s not just his student loans now, it’s his rent. And there’s no way she can afford to keep doing that. But whatever! I guess everyone’s happy just drifting along.”
I zoned out for a bit to the embers of the logs, and he quit his yapping. But only for so long.
“Did I tell you about my trip up here, about the guy who cruised me?”
I shook my head.
“This guy next to me totally cruised me. Seriously. He gave me a blow job in the parking lot at 128. We exchanged, like, three words.”
“That’s gross.”
“Oh my God,” he said. “You are so homophobic.”
“Oh, please. He could have murdered you.”
“And that makes it gross?”
“It’s just a little extreme,” I said. “Like maybe you’re acting out.”
“I thought you worked with Bay Area homeless kids. How is this extreme?”
“You don’t prostitute yourself to pay your rent.”
“That may change,” he said.
“Whatever. My point is, is this really what you want to be engaging in? Wouldn’t you rather have a boyfriend?”
He gaped at me, incredulous. In my exhaustion I had walked right into it—the blithe demonstration of my heterosexual privilege in suggesting such a thing was so readily had, when I knew well enough that it wasn’t. But here he was, attractive and articulate and employed, and I didn’t get why he couldn’t find someone else like that in all of New York City. It was half the reason he’d moved there. So why was he exposing himself to these random encounters?
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I take it, then, you’re not seeing anyone at the moment?”
“No,” he said, fiddling with his cuticles.
“Could you stop that picking?” I said.
“Okay—something is clearly up with you. What is it? Paul?”
“No. I’m pregnant.”
He glanced from his hands straight into my eyes, testing my sincerity. When he realized it was true, his mouth fell open. “You’re shitting me,” he said. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know? Are you saying you might have a child?”
“Well, I’m not going to have a deer. You say child like it’s a disease. You sound like Michael.”
“Okay, let’s just say, that would be a game changer. Procreation?”
Seeing his reaction, I felt almost giddy, as if all of a sudden my escape vessel was complete, and I’d made it out onto the open water, free at last. What better veto of filial duty than an infant?
Officially, Alec and I were no longer competitive. To be explicit about it would seem petty. But it still squirreled its way into moments like this, when the battle became primal again, and we struggled, pulling each other together because that’s what we’d always done to get through, and pushing each other away to convince ourselves over and over that we were more than just functions of a loss.
“I haven’t decided,” I said, generously, not wanting to scare him any further. “But who knows? Maybe it would be good for all of us. You’re the one saying we don’t think enough about the future.”
This took him a moment to digest.
On the table beside him, next to the fluted lamp with the hexagonal shade of waterfowl, the picture of a younger Dad stared from behind the glass of a studio portrait. He must have had it done for some business venture. Mom had found it in his papers and had it framed. We didn’t do family photographs on the mantelpiece or the walls. This was the only one. It occurred to me in a way it hadn’t before that my father would have liked Paul. They would have gotten along. Paul would have been able to reassure him that he was a reliable person, trustworthy, an observer of the social contract. Nothing awkward would have arisen. If Dad had been well enough to focus on the fact long enough, he would have been politely happy at news of a grandchild.
“Well, that is a stunner,” Alec said.
He had ceased his fidgeting, oblivious to the dull horn of his mask that still poked from his forehead. The house had gone quiet around us.
“I love you,” he said. “For whatever it’s worth.”
Michael
AFTER-ACTION REPORT
Operation Family Therapy
Mission: Enhanced communication / familial well-being
Outcome: Pending
1. After taking cannon fire from a beached dreadnought on Mass. Ave. two klicks east of Central Square (allegiance and origin unknown), Mom continued to operate our down-armored Honda at below regulation speed and ordered the commencement of a routine park-and-destroy mission. The entire unit was placed on alert. Multiple initial space sightings proved false. We tacked south into Cambridgeport, keeping
to side streets. Weather was hibernal. Birds were occasional. Eighteen minutes out from rendezvous a viable space was ID’d in front of a deli. Mom was skeptical but maneuvered the vehicle into position. As she shifted into reverse, a VW sedan driven by an irregular nosed into the designated space behind us. Mom immediately launched a DEFCON 1 verbal barrage, which backfired against the closed windows, causing multiple casualties. Celia was swiftly medevaced to Ramstein Air Base for a laparoscopic frontal-lobe transplant and returned to active duty four minutes later. Others ran for psychic cover only to find the terrain on fire. Fog of war. Following the skirmish, tensions in the little platoon rose. Trying to regroup, Alec commenced a psyop designed to convince Mom that an open stretch of curb downwind of a laundromat ended more than twelve feet from the adjacent hydrant. The operation failed. Mom ordered a higher alert. Celia observed that we had been on one for a decade. Eleven minutes out, Alec suggested we consider PAYING for a garage space. At this point, command and control began to break down. Mom hissed aloud, Who are all these people? I suggested they might be people who lived in the neighborhood. Seven minutes to rendezvous, after Mom had threatened to drop us off and go on alone, an enemy sport-utility vehicle bearing a Dole/Kemp sticker vacated a meter in front of Crate and Barrel. Alec leapt from the vehicle to secure the perimeter and Mom backed our transport into the slot.
2. Unit reached the training facility on time. Decor was South by Southwest (Naugahyde couch, Sierra throw). Vaginal imagery detected in wall hangings. Waiting room ransacked for war loot; none found. I suggested that Mom read Field and Stream to kill the additional minute and thirty seconds. Mom nonresponsive. Mortar fire heard from the direction of the Charles River; presumed friendly. Five minutes after scheduled rendezvous, a woman uniformed in Geiger jacket and pearls, presumed hostile, exited the training office with no visible wounds. Engaging unilaterally, Alec kneecapped her with a bronze Navajo sculpture. Body stored in closet. Mustachioed training officer, balding, presumed neutral, then escorted the unit into a semicircle of modernist sitting furniture. Coffee table, presumed original, bore a leather, presumed Naugahyde, box of Kleenex. Unit ID’d itself by rank and serial number. Training officer’s diplomas were too far away to make out; presumed valid. Training officer, smiling, introduced himself and asked us to call him Gus. Silence. Gus requested a report from each member of the unit regarding what we considered our mission to be. Rear Admiral Celia appeared depressed and drained in these opening minutes of the engagement. PTSD from park-and-destroy mission not to be ruled out.
