The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  They behaved as though they’d never met me, and there was another round of shakes, which, I supposed, was just as well. I’d only ever met the band once before.

  “Hello there,” I said, feeling a bit strange about it. “Nice to meet you.”

  I was saved from any further awkwardness by the hurricane that was Marsha bearing down on us.

  “What an honor!” Her hand was to her ample chest. “I’m so glad you could come to our little party! I wish Mona had said…Are you hungry? You must be hungry. Thirsty, maybe?”

  It turned out that Denny and Trey and 8 were all hungry, which was fine since there was a ton of food left. As for Lex, he found his dinner in an unopened bottle of Jack Daniels from the drinks table.

  When Marsha offered to get him a glass, he practically giggled.

  “You’re a funny girl, aren’t you?” he said.

  From then on, mostly I just watched.

  It was like being at a wedding, where etiquette dictates no one should leave before the bride and groom. Of course, the reason here had nothing to do with etiquette, but there was no way any of the other guests were going to leave before Denny and the band.

  After about an hour, Denny approached Jack, who was standing beside me.

  “Any chance we can use your basement?” Denny asked. “Lex’s itching to play some more, but he gave away his guitar, and none of the rest of us are in the right mood for getting arrested, so…”

  “Yeah.” Now Jack looked flustered. “I mean, sure.”

  We said our goodbyes, William’s to Roberta taking the longest, and then the band, my husband, my kids, and I made our way back to the house.

  • • •

  “So, here’s everything,” Jack said, still nervous, showing the band the setup in the basement.

  “Oh, and Lex can use this.” Jack chose the best from among his guitars, handing it to Lex.

  Lex, cigarette in mouth, nodded down at the guitar appreciatively.

  “So, right.” Jack clapped his hands together. “Let me know if you need anything else.”

  He turned to go and I turned to follow.

  “Aren’t you going to stay?” Denny’s voice called him back.

  “I don’t know.” Jack looked down at me, a question in his eyes as he shrugged. “What do you think, Mona? Do you want to listen for a bit?”

  “Listen?” Denny laughed. “I thought maybe you could sit in with us.”

  Jack looked at Denny sharply, as though to see if Denny were joking. But despite Denny’s laughter, it was clear he wasn’t.

  “You’re serious?” Jack still couldn’t believe it.

  “You play, don’t you?” Denny said.

  “Well, yeah…”

  “You want this back then?” Lex offered Jack back his best guitar.

  “No, thanks.” Jack picked up his spare guitar. “You know,” Jack told Denny, “what I do tends to be a bit more mellow than what you all do.”

  “So?” Denny said. “We’ll do a little of both then.”

  And that’s what they did.

  They did some of the band’s standards first, and Jack looked incredibly uncomfortable in the beginning, only occasionally jumping in with a lick.

  “Why don’t we try one of your new songs you showed me?” Denny suggested to Jack.

  “Are you sure? I mean…”

  When it became clear Denny was going to wait until Jack actually played something, Jack went ahead, bowing his head to his guitar. He played the first few notes of the song he and Denny had tweaked a few weeks back, singing the first line or two.

  “So.” He coughed. “It’s kind of like that.”

  “Like this?” Lex played back the line and Jack nodded. “OK,” Lex said, “let’s go.”

  Jack began again and played the song through, only this time Lex shadowed his playing, shadowing so closely you could barely discern the fact that he was playing everything a half note behind Jack.

  “S’not bad,” Lex said. “Go again.”

  This time, the whole band came in on it, with Denny providing some backup hums. The resulting song was different than Jack’s stripped-down version, not necessarily better but definitely more complete.

  By the time they were finished, Jack looked both elated and stunned. In all his years working alone, I don’t think it had occurred to him what it might be like to have a band backing him. He’d been so determined that his career, such as it was, be the anti-Denny experience.

  “You got something there with that one,” Lex said. “You should record that.”

  Jack beamed so widely. I don’t think it even occurred to him to point out that that was what he’d planned on doing all along, that he didn’t need Denny or the band’s validation to do so. And yet it was clear that that’s what Jack felt: validated.

  “Why don’t we do ‘She’s There’?” Denny suggested.

  “What?” Jack said, clearly perplexed.

  “It is your song, isn’t it?” Denny said. “Second album, side B, next to last? I do think it’s a bit buried there…” He shrugged.

  It was my turn to be perplexed. As far as I knew, up until recently Denny hadn’t even known Jack had recorded any albums. Now he was an expert? Then I figured maybe it was like the wine he’d ordered for me. While no one was looking, Denny’d gotten up to speed on Jack’s music. It would appear Denny did a lot of things while no one was looking.

  “Sure.” Jack shrugged, clearly going for nonchalant. “We could do that.”

  They played Jack’s song “She’s There,” then they did a few more standards, and finally just jammed for a bit, playing any old thing.

  At some point, Jack and Denny had stopped playing and started talking instead, and Trey and 8 had drifted off to sleep in the corners, so that only Lex remained seated in a chair, guitar on his knee, playing, a cigarette dangling from his lips. That perpetual curtain of smoke so close to my eyes would have driven me mad, but Lex just stared through it, hardly even squinting. He was just strumming softly, so soft it took me a time to notice that suddenly all I was hearing was the low murmur of Jack and Denny’s voices and that the guitar had stopped.

  Denny got up from the floor and went over to Lex, who was in the same position but now fast asleep, the lit cigarette still burning down to ash.

  “He does this all the time,” Denny said, gently removing the cigarette from Lex’s mouth and finding somewhere to put it out. “He’ll be up again in fifteen minutes or an hour or ten, and he’ll just start in playing, usually right where he left off. If he’s in the middle of writing a song, it’ll be even better when he wakes.”

  “I don’t know how he does it,” Jack said.

  “Frankly, neither do I. But there.” Denny pointed at Lex. “There’s your rock star. 8 and Trey, even you and me—we’re all just pikers by comparison.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “Look, I’m not saying I don’t love making the music—of course I do—and I’m not saying he doesn’t love the life. No one loves it better. But if everything that goes along with it were stripped away tomorrow, Lex’d still be doing this. He wouldn’t be doing it on the side. He wouldn’t be doing it by any half measure or even sixteenth measure. He’d be doing it as hard as he is now, living in the gutter if no one would pay him to play. It’s not just what he does. It’s who he is. It’s everything he is. For me it’s part of a whole. But for him it is the whole.”

  “Well, what about you then? If all the rest of it were stripped away, what would you be doing?”

  Denny looked surprised at the question. “I’d be in business, of course. After all, I’m good with people, aren’t I?”

  Jack stared at Denny and then they both burst out laughing.

  There had been times, so many times that summer, when I’d wondered: really, why had Denny come? It couldn’t possibly be for the reason he said, so that he could bond with Jack, a notion that would never have even occurred to him
if I hadn’t put it in his head. But now, after this entire amazing evening—amazing for William and for me, but more so for Jack than anyone else—I finally saw the truth in it.

  Denny had come for Jack.

  “Hey,” Denny said, “here’s something I’ve been working on. Let me know what you think.”

  He picked up an acoustic guitar and played a song I hadn’t heard him play before, singing along with it.

  “That’s different from anything else I’ve heard you do,” Jack said.

  “And?”

  “And I like it. But everything else you do is British or American, while that’s…”

  “That’s what?”

  “More Mediterranean somehow, like, I don’t know. Morocco or something.”

  “Good ear. That’s exactly right. I was there a few years back, always wanted to do something with the sounds I heard there. You ever been?”

  “To Morocco?”

  Denny nodded.

  “No. We did a lot of traveling before the boys were born, but nothing really since, and for some reason, that’s one place I’ve never been to.”

  Jack reddened. It must have occurred to him how foolish it sounded, telling Denny we’d done a lot of traveling when Denny had seen the entire world.

  “Any interest in going?” Denny asked.

  “Well, yeah. I mean, Morocco.”

  “What about you, Mona?”

  It’d been so many hours since I’d been a part of the conversation, it took me a while to register that Denny had addressed that question to me.

  “Well, yeah,” I finally said, echoing Jack. “Who isn’t interested?”

  “That’s what I figured.” Denny strummed a few chords. “Everyone wants to see Morocco.”

  I woke to a pounding on the bedroom door that I’m not entirely certain was louder than the pounding in my head.

  “You’d better get up unless you want to miss your plane!” a voice called, followed by footsteps rapidly padding back down the stairs.

  I rolled over, groaning, and collapsed into the crook of Jack’s arm. “Who was that?”

  “It was Denny,” Jack groaned back. Then, more alertly: “Did he say something about a plane?”

  • • •

  We were foggy-headed enough that even after we located Denny in the dining area, it took a while to make sense of what he was saying. Really, the only thing that finally did it was when he waved two plane tickets in the air.

  To Morocco.

  “When did you get these?” I demanded while Jack, bleary eyed, made coffee.

  “Yesterday,” Denny said, “when I was at the airport to pick up Lex and the others. Why? Is there something wrong? Because if you’d prefer, you can take the private plane. It’s only ever used by me or by all of us when we’re using it together, so most of the time it just sits on the tarmac somewhere. Of course, I’d planned on it taking the others home today. But as I say, if you’d prefer—”

  “I don’t understand! What’s this all for?”

  Denny looked stunned at the question. “Why, it’s an anniversary present.”

  “Our anniversary was in the spring!”

  “Well, if it doesn’t make any difference to you, it certainly doesn’t matter to me.”

  I have to admit, the whole thing was confusing. He was confusing.

  “You did say,” he said, “that I never gave you and Jack a proper wedding present.”

  He hadn’t even remembered about not coming through with a wedding present until I’d reminded him—he probably barely remembered missing the wedding itself—and now he wanted to make it up to me, twelve years later, with airplane tickets to a place I hadn’t even known I wanted to see before he brought it up the night before?

  “I wasn’t hinting for you to do something like this!”

  “I never said you were. I wanted to do it. So I did. I went ahead and booked the two of you for two weeks—”

  “Just the two of us? For two weeks? We can’t do that! Who would take care of the boys?” I was about to say, “you?” in my most scathing tone of voice, but something pulled me back from the implied insult, and instead I settled for a weak, “Lex?”

  Denny snorted. “Not that he’s not necessarily capable. You’d be surprised how good he can be with children—they tend to like him and he tends to like them—but even he’d be the first to admit that he’s not exactly any parent’s babysitting dream.”

  “Who then?” I asked, again avoiding the possibility of Denny doing it. Yes, he’d come through for William last night, eventually, but what if he got called away to do something—would he take the boys with him—or what if he just had the whim to do something on his own? Would he remember his temporary responsibilities, make other arrangements for them, or would he simply just go?

  A part of me couldn’t believe I was even bothering to engage in this debate, either externally or internally, since there was no way on earth I was going.

  Denny shrugged. “What about Matt and Walter? Of course, I wouldn’t take off for anywhere until after you safely returned, but would it make you feel any better about the whole thing if Matt and Walter stayed here too?”

  Jack spoke up for the first time. “The boys do like Matt and Walter.”

  “Yes, I know but—”

  Seeing a hopeful look on Jack’s face, I stopped talking.

  “When’s the last time the two of you went anywhere on your own?” Denny asked.

  I opened my mouth to answer, but Jack got there first.

  “Before the boys were born.”

  “Then don’t you think you owe it to yourselves?”

  Jack grabbed onto my hand, swung it a bit.

  “So,” he said, “what do you think?”

  “I don’t know. What do you think?”

  “I’d like to, but only if you want to.”

  “OK, then.”

  “OK.”

  “Right!” Denny clapped his hands together. “Now, get dressed and get going! Jeeves is waiting. I mean, I can get away with traveling in my pajamas, but I don’t think you two can.”

  “But we need to pack!” I could be wrong, but I think I was starting to panic.

  “Didn’t you once say,” Denny said, “that you and Jack used to get up and go with just your passports and one good credit card?”

  • • •

  In the end, the packing wasn’t quite that bare bones, but close enough. We threw whatever we thought we might need into two suitcases—what was the weather going to be like in Morocco in mid-July? I had no idea!

  “Mona?” Jack called upstairs. “Almost ready? The boys are awake.”

  “Almost!” I yelled back down.

  I still needed reading material—things to read on the plane trips, things to read once we were there. I could never stand being anywhere without the next few good books to read in view. And what if there were no English-language bookstores convenient to where we’d be staying?

  I grabbed the carryall bag I’d last used when we’d first flown to America back in June—the only things still in it were a half-eaten roll of spearmints I’d told the boys would make sparks in our mouths if we ate them in the dark, but never got around to demonstrating, and a magazine I’d bought at the airport back in England but never got the chance to read. So I left the magazine and the spearmints where they were, piling on top of them several books I hadn’t read yet and a couple of really good ones that I had, just in case.

  “Mon—”

  “Coming!”

  • • •

  And the rest, as they say, was whirlwind.

  Jeeves taking the bags from us. The boys hugging and kissing us. Well, I had to pause the whirlwind for that.

  “I know this is a bit of a surprise,” I told Harry.

  “If you’d rather we stay…” I told William.

  I even meant that last. William was my sensitive boy. If he’d asked us to stay right then and th
ere, I’d have said yes. I mean, this was all starting to sound like a dream trip, but I didn’t want to traumatize my son. There’d be time for more trips when the boys were grown.

  “Are you kidding?” William said.

  “We’ll have a great time with Matt and Walter,” Harry said, adding, with a glance at Denny, “and him.”

  “Exactly!” William said. “So go! Have fun!”

  “When did you get to be so mature?” I said, ruffling his hair. I was pleased he let me do it. I had the feeling a time would come, soon, when I wouldn’t get away with that anymore.

  “Well,” he laughed, “I am double digits now you know.”

  And then the whirlwind was back on again, Denny hustling us out the door into the car, Jeeves starting the engine, the boys jumping up and down as they waved.

  We’d actually started to pull away, and Jeeves was raising the windows, when I heard Denny’s voice yelling, “Wait!”

  He ran back into the house, returning a few minutes later with a carrying case, which he handed through the window to me.

  “Here,” he said, “take my phone. It’ll make it easier for you to call and check in at the house, as you’ll no doubt want to do on a regular basis—you know, to make sure the boys are OK.”

  “But don’t you need it yourself?” I tried to hand it back but he waved me away.

  “No, thanks. Just, you know, if anyone calls looking for me, maybe don’t say where I am?”

  PART III

  Morocco

  Morocco!

  Morocco.

  When I thought to write down my story, just for myself and to be burned immediately upon completion, I figured I’d want to write about the two weeks spent in Morocco in detail. But, as fabulous as the trip was in so many ways—the five-star hotel Denny put us up at, the amazing architecture, the exquisite food, the sheer adventure of it all—as it turns out, there are really just three things worth noting: one involved my husband, one involved my oldest son, and one involved Denny.

  Jack

  Although we’d never been anywhere in Africa before, being travel agents and having sent many clients to Morocco, we knew all about the do’s and don’ts. We knew how to bargain, how one should never accept the first price on anything, and that we should never tell a vendor where we were staying or what we paid for other items. We knew not to offer a price unless we were prepared to pay it, and we knew to show appreciation for the craftsmanship behind what was on display. We knew not to go off with anyone who offered to show us around, however kind the person might seem. We knew not to buy geodes (probably fake) or trilobite fossils (also probably fake).