The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “What can I do to help?” I offered Jack.

  “I don’t know. There’s not much that really needs doing. Perhaps grab some drinks for everybody from the fridge?”

  I was about to go do that, but Biff was already on his feet. “Let me get something from my place. I’ve got the perfect thing to drink with that.”

  Marsha rolled her eyes at this. And when he returned with a sterling champagne bucket filled with bottles of Budweiser, she rolled her eyes again.

  “What?” he said. “No, you don’t get it. It’s so what it is, it allows the flavor of the meat to really shine.”

  It made no sense to me when he said it, but as I ate my burger, alternating with sips from my bottle of Budweiser, I kind of saw what he meant. The Budweiser didn’t add anything, but it certainly didn’t take anything away. Plus, the buzz I was catching from it was somehow wiping away the cobwebs of having essentially just woken up and the disorientation of immediately being thrust into a social situation.

  The boys—our two and Biff and Marsha’s, Billy and Tommy—dispensed with their food as quickly as was humanly possible—and headed back to whatever game they were playing in the sand.

  “You know,” Jack said, leaning close to me and lowering his voice a bit but not enough for the other couple not to overhear him, “Biff recognized me right away.” From the bright light in Jack’s eyes, I got the impression there’d been some pre-dinner drinking while I slept and that he had his own buzz going on.

  “What do you mean he recognized you?”

  “It’s true,” Biff supplied before Jack could answer. “I mean, he’s Jack Springer, right? I have all of his albums.”

  “Even Stirred Not Shaken,” Jack added, raising his eyebrows at the impressiveness of it all. “And you know almost no one has that.”

  This was true. Stirred Not Shaken had been released before Jack met me, and there were two albums since. Of course, almost no one had those either.

  It struck me as odd. After all, Jack wasn’t famous. But a total stranger met randomly on the beach in America was a fan? How bizarre. And yet Jack looked so thrilled—it was the kind of thing that almost never happened to him, being recognized for his music—I couldn’t say anything to take away from that.

  The men talked about Jack’s music for a time while I listened to Marsha talk at me about the impossibility of finding an au pair who didn’t ever want any time off, but then I heard Biff say something that caused me to turn from Marsha to see my husband’s reaction.

  “What’s it like,” Biff had just asked, “having Denny Springer for a brother?”

  Oh, no, I thought. Here it comes. Jack almost never talked about his brother, and he never had any patience for people he deemed as using him to gain access to or information about Denny. Now, I thought, Jack will see Biff as the user he probably is, and the bonhomie they’ve just shared will pass into distant memory.

  “About what you’d expect,” Jack said tersely, which is what I’d about expected him to say, closing the case. But then, to my surprise, he laughed. And, having laughed, he expanded. “Think about other really famous people—presidents, actors, the Queen of England. Now think of those people’s siblings. It’s that. It’s living your life in the biggest shadow you can possibly imagine. And that shadow is so all-encompassing. In the beginning, you think, ‘This is kind of great.’ And then after a while you think, ‘I hate this.’ And then, after another while you realize that the only way to stay sane is to simply ignore it. But what’s it really like? I don’t know. When I figure it out, I’ll let you know. And anyway, it does come with its perks.”

  “Which are?” Biff asked.

  “I don’t know.” Jack laughed again. “But it must, right? So I’ll let you know when I figure that one out too.”

  I think it was the most I’d ever heard Jack say in one sitting about his brother, about what it was like being Denny’s brother. And, like the Budweiser with the burger, his vagueness made no sense except that it did.

  • • •

  Guests gone, the boys asleep in their new rooms, I joined my husband in bed. I expected to find him asleep, but he was sitting up against the headboard, his chest naked, and the once-over he gave me as I climbed in next to him could only be described as salacious.

  “You’re kidding me, right?” I said.

  He lifted the blanket, revealing that, no, he wasn’t kidding in the slightest.

  “But aren’t you exhausted?”

  “Ask me again afterward,” he said, lowering his lips to my neck.

  It’s a funny thing about married sex. In the beginning, it’s all every-chance-we-can-get sex, rip-each-other’s-clothes-off-do-it-in-the-supply-room-at-work sex. But that’s not sustainable. Particularly after you have kids, it’s more like if-we-can-find-the-time-and-we’re-both-not-completely-knackered sex. But that hadn’t bothered me, even if it had bothered my friends when similar attrition had happened in their own marriages.

  A few years after Jack and I were married, Stel and Bri both had weddings and, as soon as the glow had worn off, began fretting about it. They’d bring women’s mags to our hen nights and take the ridiculous quizzes in them: “Are You Getting It As Often As You Should?” and “Is The Reason You’re Not Getting Enough Bangs Because You Haven’t Been Spending Enough Bucks?” They’d compare themselves to the national averages, feeling smug elation when they beat the averages or at least met them, worrying they were headed for divorce court when they did not. Me, I didn’t bother with the quizzes. I knew that what Jack and I had was good. Sure, we’d go through dry spells. There’d be times we were too busy with the agency, too busy being parents. Sometimes those dry spells would go on for weeks, like it just had; we’d both been so wrapped up planning the trip. But then we’d come together again and it would be some version of spectacular: spectacularly funny or spectacularly energetic or even spectacularly sad, as it had been after Jack’s favorite aunt died too young.

  The sex we had that night was spectacularly nice in its laziness.

  Afterward, I snuggled into Jack’s arms, but before I could drift off to sleep, I felt him disengage himself from me and rise from the bed.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  “To work,” he said. “I thought of a new idea for a song.”

  “At this hour?” I said, at that point not even knowing anymore which hour this hour was. “Can’t it wait until morning?”

  “Well, I did come here to make a new album…”

  Which was true. Jack normally put out an album at the rate of one every five years or so. His goal for the summer was to complete in three months what normally took him a half-decade. It was the real reason we were here.

  I felt him kiss me on the forehead as I closed my eyes on a day that had seemingly gone on forever.

  • • •

  Talk about beginning as you mean to go on.

  That first day set the template for the summer.

  The boys would get up shockingly early, fly through breakfast, and then they were off, the beachside door slamming behind them as they raced to find the friends they would run with all day long until after dark, only returning at midday when hunger drove them to seek sustenance.

  At first, I was a little concerned about this arrangement, being accustomed at home to knowing where they were every second. But Jack allayed those concerns. “It’s not like that here, is it?” he said. “There’s just the beach people, the boys know what the rules are—like no swimming alone—and there’s so many of them in their pack now, I can’t help but think there is safety in those numbers.”

  It was true. The boys had increased their circle of beach friends, and now they ran with girls as well as boys, including one older girl, Roberta, whom I suspected William had a crush on.

  Jack referred to Roberta as “The Terminator,” out of the boys’ hearing of course.

  “Look at the arms on her!” he told me. “I don’t think you ne
ed worry about the boys’ safety, not so long as Roberta’s around.”

  Jack and I had increased our circle of beach friends as well. Most nights we were invited to barbecues at other people’s houses or we had people to ours. We took a few trips into town to look at the shops or have a rare meal in a restaurant or even see a play, but mostly we stayed where we were.

  So the boys ran all day and Jack worked on his music every night. Before long, he had two songs he was happy with.

  If Jack had increased his production, the pace of our sex life had increased as well. Without discussing it, we’d somehow found ourselves back to that early-marriage pace of things, finding somewhere new in the house to do it almost every day. Sometimes, it’d be right after the boys thundered out for the morning. Sometimes, it’d be right before Jack went for his nightly sessions in the basement, or after he returned, triumphant. It was always good.

  And what else did I do? The boys didn’t really need much from me, other than food. So I was left to read on the beach or on the daybed in my favorite room of the house, listening to the beach sounds outside. Sometimes, I would tell myself I should want more from my days, that I should have a bigger purpose. But I didn’t, not really.

  We lived in that cocoon of peace for two weeks.

  And then, one night, late, there came a knock at the door.

  • • •

  At first, I thought the pounding was a part of my dream. But as it went on, without ceasing, I swam up to consciousness. I waited for Jack to do something about it, but opening my eyes, I saw the vacant space beside me in bed. The clock on the night table said it was after three a.m., and still the knocking persisted. Realizing that Jack must still be working in the basement and would be unable to hear anything due to the soundproofing, I hauled myself out of bed and across the floor.

  I couldn’t imagine who it might be. Perhaps Marsha was having trouble again with her latest au pair? But surely even she wouldn’t be inconsiderate enough to wake me up for that. Perhaps one of the other wives had had a fight with one of the other husbands then, a fight that had seemed more monumental and world ending due to a night of too much drinking? Surely it was something benign like that.

  But as I arrived at the bottom of the staircase and turned into the kitchen, I thought: What if it wasn’t something benign? What if it was some sort of dangerous intruder? Albeit, an incredibly well-mannered dangerous intruder if he was knocking to be let in, but still…

  I cast about the kitchen, looking for something that might threaten the intruder away. It seemed all that Biff and the other men in this country ever talked about was baseball, and yet, where was a baseball bat when you needed one? Oh, and golf. They talked about that a lot too. A club would come in handy right now, but no such luck. And that broom, missing half its straw, would hardly do the job. At last, I settled on a cast-iron skillet, thinking it would have to do.

  I flung open the door, skillet at the ready, unsure if I would be facing friend or foe.

  And there he was, leaning against my doorjamb, fist still raised as though he’d been caught mid-pound.

  “Oh, hello!” my brother-in-law said. “You know I had the damnedest time finding this place?”

  Denny sashayed past me, followed by two tall men, burly in their black suits and white shirts. All three of them toted similar mini suitcases, which I recognized as being the kind of case that had contained Denny’s mobile phone when I’d last seen him back at Easter. Denny also wore a suit, only in his case it was cutting edge: gray silk with an eggplant-colored shirt and black skinny tie, wingtips on his feet, no socks. On his head was a Panama hat.

  “Did you bring your whole entourage with you?” I asked peevishly, eyeing the men in black.

  “Are you going to hit me with that if I say yes?”

  It was only then I realized I was still gripping the handle of the frying pan. Naturally, I instantly felt foolish. And naturally, feeling foolish made me feel instantly more peeved.

  “What are you—”

  “Doing here?” my husband said.

  Where had Jack come from?

  Without waiting for an answer, Jack bent down and kissed me on the cheek, whispering in my ear, “It was a really good night. I made an insane amount of progress on that new song.”

  If I hadn’t had my sleep so rudely interrupted, it might have struck me then how strange it was for Jack to be doing and saying such things at that moment, like a cat spraying his spot.

  “Aren’t you happy to see me?” Denny asked.

  “Of course I’m not unhappy about it,” Jack said, sounding as though my peevishness had influenced him. “I’m just perplexed, that’s all. What are you doing here? And how did you know where to find us?”

  “As to the latter,” Denny said—in that precise way he had of speaking sometimes, as if to say, “You know I could have been a teacher, right?”—“I called up our parents and they told me. As to the former, is it so surprising that I’d want to come hang out with my kid brother?”

  Denny glanced at me briefly, as though checking to see if he had my approval. And then: “I thought maybe we could bond.”

  At this last, Denny reached up from his lesser height, encircling Jack in a hug that could only be called awkward.

  If Jack had merely said he was perplexed before, he fully looked the picture now.

  • • •

  “Where are we going to put them all?” I practically hissed at Jack.

  I’m never at my best when I first wake up. Add to that having been woken in the middle of the night from a sound sleep by the arrival of my brother-in-law, plus his two bodyguards, and I was on the verge of being an outright bitch.

  While Denny and the bodyguards made themselves comfortable at the front of the house, Jack and I busied ourselves making coffee in the kitchen. Well, I busied myself. Jack just kept me company.

  “Look at that!” I heard Denny’s pleased voice. “It’s a little Renoir!”

  “I don’t think so,” Jack snorted. “Can you imagine stuffing a Renoir in the dark hallway of a tip like this?”

  ‘A tip like this’? I loved that house. I thought Jack did too. Was he trying to impress his brother?

  “Perhaps you can’t,” Denny said, “but I can and it is. All you have to do is look at the brushstrokes. It’s from his Ingres period.”

  His ‘Ingres’ period? Christ, it was about four in the morning. If I’d wanted an art lesson…But that was the point: I didn’t want one. Without Denny having done much, already I felt as though I’d been invaded.

  “So it’s real?” Jack said, having joined Denny in the hallway.

  “I’d say so. Yes.”

  “So it’s worth…”

  “This house.” Denny paused as though considering. “Plus the big house next door and the one next to that—somewhere in that range.”

  Jack whistled. “Why would someone put something so valuable on the wall of a rental?”

  “If you could afford something like that,” Denny said with a shrug, “why would you ever want to hide it away?” Pause. “So, is there a problem?”

  “Problem?” Jack sounded so vague. I could only assume he was still musing over the little painting.

  “Yes,” Denny said. “I thought I heard Mona say something along the lines of, ‘Where are we going to put them all?’”

  Damn.

  “I kind of got the impression,” Denny went on, “that she was referring to us. Unless of course she meant you’ve got whole closets full of these little Renoirs you’re trying to find places to hang.”

  “Ah, no.” Now Jack sounded sheepish. “You had it right the first time. It’s just that, well, there are only three bedrooms here, the master and two smaller…”

  “Perfect!”

  “Perfect?”

  “Of course! One for you and Mona—the master, I would think—and one for me, and one for Matt and Walter to share.”

  “Matt and Wal
ter?”

  “My bodyguards.”

  “Right. But the thing is, we’ve got the boys too…”

  “The boys? You mean, you’ve got bodyguards too?”

  “No! William and Harry.”

  “William and Harry?”

  “Our sons!” I practically shouted from the kitchen. I kept it to practically only because I didn’t want to wake those two boys, still sleeping upstairs.

  “Oh, right!” Denny laughed. “The princes!”

  Prat.

  His laugh had that reassuring quality, you know, the one that says, ‘Of course I know who your sons are! I never forgot about them for a second!’ When, really, I was quite sure, he’d forgotten about them entirely.

  “Oh, never mind all that now,” Denny said in a slightly distorted voice, as though stifling a yawn. “Why don’t you and Mona go on to bed? We can get sleeping arrangements sorted in the morning. I mean, I suppose I could just go on to a hotel now, but that would kind of defeat the purpose of bonding with you, wouldn’t it?”

  Jack was silent for so long, I sensed that he was dumbfounded by this turn of events. After all these years, here was Denny, coming to Jack, wanting to spend time with him.

  “But where will you and the boys sleep?” I called from the kitchen.

  “We can flop in the living room. I’ll be fine like that for one night. Me, Lex, 8, and Trey—we all lived together in a one-room apartment back when we first started, back in our ‘salad days,’ as it were.”

  It was almost as though I could picture the look on Jack’s face as Denny spoke these words: eager, as though finally hearing a firsthand report about life on Mars. In the years I’d known Jack, the few times we’d been around Denny, all Denny could talk about was whatever great thing he was doing right now, in the moment. But he never spoke about the past, all the years and things Jack might have naturally heard about if they’d had a more normal relationship.

  Or maybe I was completely wrong about things? Maybe I was just projecting what I was feeling, projecting my own eagerness for details onto Jack. Maybe, if I could see Jack’s face, what I’d see there would be doubt: doubt that this was really happening; doubt about his brother’s motives at all.