The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  They almost blew it again with all their giggling when we stepped off the elevator and I knocked on the penthouse door.

  “What if we’ve got the wrong room?” Stella said.

  “What if they’re not even here?” Bria added. “Probably just get some rich nabob trysting with his secretary.”

  I shushed them, knocking more loudly.

  “What do you lot want?” said the burly bouncer who answered, his arm muscles straining impossibly large against the tightness of his T-shirt sleeves as he held the door only partially open.

  “Room service,” I said boldly.

  No sooner were the words out of my mouth than I stole a glimpse at the room beyond him. And there, in a room already crowded with all kinds of people, many of them women, they were: Denny and Lex, leaning into one another and laughing. So close. Even 8 and Trey were there. If I couldn’t yet touch them, I could now see where a person might be able to.

  “Room service.” The bouncer snorted. “Like I haven’t heard that one before. But OK. Here’s the room. What sort of service?”

  As I tried to frame a winning reply, the bouncer snorted again.

  “Ah, never mind that. We’ll take you.” He grabbed onto my arm, pulling me forward. “But not you two.” He chin nodded at Stella and Bria.

  “Wait!” I said. “But they’re with me!”

  “Not anymore.” He eyed their clothing scathingly.

  Before the concert, outside the hall, we’d each bought tour T-shirts of the band. Immediately, Stella and Bria had pulled theirs on over their heads, but I’d just stuffed mine in my shoulder bag. What did I need with wearing a badge of belonging when I already had the special ticket to get in? I’d save that T-shirt, I thought, along with that pristine unused ticket, to be used in my time capsule.

  And now that sartorial decision had paid off.

  The bouncer spoke more to my friends’ chests than to their faces, as their chests were where the band’s name was emblazoned. “We don’t need any more fans in here,” he scoffed. “We’ve got enough of those already, don’t we. Besides, you both look too young.” His eyes narrowed at me in my sky-high platform shoes, skintight jeans, and midriff-baring baby T. “You’re sixteen, aren’t you?” I figured that must be part of his job, making sure that anyone who entered had passed the age of consent.

  Something about being on the tall side—I’d always found people took me as being older than I was, while shorter females, like Bria, were often treated as being younger than their age.

  I was, in fact, fifteen.

  “Only just,” I qualified, as if the qualification would somehow erase the lie or, better yet, make it truth.

  “Good enough.” He tugged my arm again.

  “I’m not going to leave—” I started to defend my friends. No matter how much I wanted this, it was all of us or none, right?

  But apparently they neither needed nor wanted my defending.

  “You’ve got to be joking.” Stella gave me a shove and I stumbled into the room. “You’re not going to not do this because of us.”

  “But what will you—”

  “So,” Bria said, waving, “see you back at the hotel!”

  The bouncer slammed the door shut behind me.

  • • •

  “You’ll want to take your shoes off.” The bouncer indicated my platforms. “Don’t want to mess up the carpets.”

  “Oh!” I said, feeling guilty. “Right!” But as I bent to undo the straps of my shoes, adding them to the lineup of those in the entryway, I was on an eye level to appreciate that the carpets were getting pretty messed up already. It hadn’t taken us that long to find the hotel after the concert had let out, but already the floor was getting trashed with dropped cigarette ashes, spilled drinks, and even some broken glass. It didn’t seem like whatever dents or marks my shoes might make could ever compare with that mess, so why bother. But then I thought: Maybe Denny, being so slight—and now that I was in the same room as him (oh my God), I could see how much smaller he was in person than when he loomed everywhere else—preferred to keep those surrounding him closer to his height?

  Now that I was in that room, I actually had to actively tell myself not to hyperventilate, which I was very much in danger of doing. But I couldn’t do that. Act too much the part of the fan, and Bouncer Boy would bounce me right out.

  And yet, I was so aware of Denny, I couldn’t stand it. A part of me was actually tempted to run back out the door. No matter what I’d thought before about being special, I wasn’t meant to be here. People should never meet their idols. And mere mortals should not come into the presence of Zeus.

  And yet, there I was.

  “Could I get a drink, please?” I asked. If I hadn’t wanted to be just another concertgoer hours earlier, wearing a uniform band T-shirt, I wanted desperately to look like I belonged now. And since everywhere I looked, people had drinks in their hands…

  “Do I look like your maid?” Bouncer Boy sneered. “And besides, didn’t you say you were room service?” Looking a bit disgusted with me finally, like I’d let him down somehow, he chin nodded at a bar set up in the corner. “Help yourself.”

  I studied the drink options available: various whiskeys, beer, even soda. I’d done my share of moderate drinking before—Stella’s basement, of course—but the buzz from the concert had long faded, at least the pot-induced one, and I wanted to keep my wits about me. Plus, I was in the process of formulating a plan. I decided I wanted to say hi to Denny, just that, and have him say hi to me back. Not such a massive aspiration, right? I figured, I was in the room—it had to be doable. But I also figured that if I just went up to him, it’d be lame. Everyone else was talking so naturally, like most of them knew each other—or at least knew one other person there—but I didn’t know anybody. And if I tried to approach him now, what if he looked at me like, “Who the fuck are you?” And maybe Bouncer Boy would even toss me out before I got the chance to say anything. So my plan was, I’d wait everyone else out. Let everyone else get progressively more stoned and drunk, fall asleep even, while I waited here with my one beer and—

  “Hey, new girl!” Denny’s voice came from across the room. It was only when I looked at him, looking at me as he said, “Yeah, you,” that I realized he was talking to me.

  Denny Springer, one of the most famous people on the planet, the most famous person in my world, was rattling an empty glass in my direction.

  “Can you bring me another ice water?” he yelled over the crowd. “With extra ice?”

  I think my eyes must have bugged nearly right out of my head.

  Ice? Denny Springer was asking me for some ice?

  As I pulled myself out of my trance, I practically tripped over myself, all thumbs, as I sought out a jug of water, sniffed to make sure it wasn’t a jug of vodka or gin or rum or something else deceptively clear, filled the glass, realized I’d forgotten the ice, dumped the whole thing, manically searched for the ice, located it, dropped some in the glass, then filled it with water.

  I had one job to do, and I was determined to get it right.

  Don’t drop this, don’t drop this, do not drop this, I exhorted myself as I carried the glass across the room, carefully negotiating the path cleared for me by the others like Philippe Petit walking on a high wire between the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral.

  I was halfway to my destination when I felt something sharp dig into my right heel. Involuntarily, I winced, wincing again when I took two more steps only to feel whatever I’d stepped on poke more deeply into my heel. Determined not to stop—I would not fail at this!—I forced the wince off my face, forced a smile, as I stepped ever onward. At last, when I was standing right in front of him, I held the glass forward to where he was sitting on the couch.

  He hadn’t even been looking at me—he’d been continuing his conversation with Lex—but when he saw the glass, he looked up long enough to acknowledge with a radiant smile: “Thanks.�
��

  He took a sip, moved to set it down on the table. And then, seeing the carpet behind me, he frowned.

  “What’s that…?” he said. Then up at me: “New Girl, what did you do to your foot?”

  Before I knew what was happening, he was rising from his seat and then pressing me down into the place he’d just vacated.

  “Oh, crap,” he said, raising my foot, looking at the deep gash in the heel, the shard of glass protruding from it. “I don’t know why Lawrence makes everyone take their shoes off,” he muttered. “It’s not like I don’t have to pay to replace the carpets anyway every single place we go. Does that hurt?” Then: “Lawrence!” he shouted. “I need the first aid kit here!” And to everyone else: “Give her space. Or better yet: get out.” And to me: “Do you need to go to hospital?”

  I couldn’t speak to answer. All I could do was stare as he cradled my foot, heedless of the blood dripping onto his own clothes. Then he was fiddling with a first aid kit. Lawrence must have brought it, but I hadn’t even seen him. If I’d registered anything at all, it was the equivalent of arms coming in from offscreen to deliver something before disappearing, and I only distantly heard the sounds of other people hastily departing. All I had ears for was Denny Springer, making soothing noises as he worked on my foot. All I had eyes for was Denny Springer—Denny Springer!—first cleaning my foot with antibiotic cream and then bandaging it up.

  “New Girl.” He snapped his fingers in front of my face. “Don’t go all deer-in-the-headlights on me now. I said, ‘Do you need to go to hospital?’”

  Dumbly, I shook my head.

  “Not much for talking, are you?” he said.

  I shook my head again.

  He looked at me a bit more closely, narrowing his eyes as though I’d tried to pull a trick on him.

  “You are pretty,” he observed.

  It was as though his words were coming at me on tape delay, and by the time they penetrated my brain, he was smiling, holding my hand as he raised me to my feet.

  There had to be someone else he was smiling at, someone else he was touching. It couldn’t possibly be me.

  “Well,” he said easily, letting go of my hand, “if you don’t need to go to hospital, do you want to just go?”

  Of course. The party was over—because I’d killed it—and now my heel was bandaged, everyone was gone, and it was time for me to…

  With no one else there, it was easy for me to find my discarded shoes. But as I bent to pick them up, I heard Denny’s voice calling to me from a different part of the room, and I looked up to see him standing in a doorway.

  “New Girl. I said, ‘Do you want to go?’” He tilted his head toward the room behind him and then, with one hand on the knob, gestured for me to enter. “If you’d like,” he added.

  No longer feeling the pain in my foot, I don’t think I hardly limped at all as I crossed the room again, now empty except for one other person.

  • • •

  Here’s one of those things that people generally don’t know about Denny Springer: what he looks like with his pants off. There may be rumors, it may get debated in the mags, but there are no pictures. And, true, some of the hundreds—thousands? thousands upon thousands?—of women he’s slept with have been known to talk, but it’s just their word against his, and he’s not saying.

  Back then, in 1977, there had been plenty of talk about Denny Springer’s cock. Hell, there’d been talk for as long as he’d been famous. People would look at that impossibly huge bulge in those impossibly tight jeans and say: “Can’t be real.” Nothing could be that big. Some people even claimed to know that he stuffed his pants with balled-up socks. A stuffed plush toy was another nasty rumor.

  But there now was Denny Springer, standing before me, removing his own T-shirt, stripping off his own pants, under which he wore no underwear.

  I know it’s rude to stare but…

  “It’s OK to stare.” He laughed. “I call it my embarrassment of riches.” Then: “Just don’t try to take any pictures.”

  And then he was pulling my baby T over my head—Denny Springer!—and lying me down on the bed so he could pull off my jeans. I’d had to lie down to put them on before going to the concert, and this was the only way they’d come off. And then his hand was between my legs and he was looking puzzled—“Gee, that’s very tight”—and then he was smiling as he pointed toward his own lips—“This mouth was made for two things, and only one of them is singing”—and then his mouth was on me, between my legs, and it was insane to have his mouth there because no one’s mouth had ever been there before—no one’s mouth had ever even kissed my lips before!—and the things that he was doing truly were amazing. There was just one problem as he entered me, which was not without its own challenges.

  Sleeping with Denny Springer. Of all the times in my life, I wanted to live in the moment. But I just couldn’t do it. The more I tried, the more outside my body I felt—watching my body with Denny’s rather than living inside of it. I kept trying to catch it, the moment, like racing after a horse’s reins as it gallops away, but I couldn’t, so even as I was living it, the moment was passing me by, part of my past.

  He was twenty-four, divorced. I was fifteen, never been kissed. Still hadn’t.

  There was one moment, when he was on top of me, he looked in my eyes and—I don’t know—it was like I was being seen for the first time.

  But then, that moment too fled past.

  “You OK, New Girl?” he asked a few minutes after he’d finished.

  Still having spoken not a word, I nodded.

  “Right, then.” He yawned, rolled over. “Traveling day early tomorrow. I need to get some shuteye, but you’re welcome to stay a bit if you’d like.”

  “My name is Mona.”

  “How’s that?”

  “My name. It’s Mona.”

  “Right, then. ‘Night, Mona. Sweet dreams.”

  When his breathing took on the even rhythms of sleep, I quietly put my things back on and left.

  Out in the hallway, still holding my shoes, I felt an uncontrollable smile break across my face.

  I’d just slept with Denny Springer!

  If anyone had asked me to right then, in that moment, I would not have traded that fact for anything in the world.

  If I’d known in 1977 that six years later I’d meet and marry Denny’s brother, I’d have done things differently, chosen differently that night in Cardiff. Of course I would have. But you don’t get to see the future. None of us do.

  • • •

  On my wedding day, for the first time in a long time, I was glad I’d never told Stella and Bria about that night in Cardiff.

  I’d deliberately wiped the massive smile off my face before entering our room in the flophouse of a hotel we were staying at, and when they eagerly asked for details of what had gone down in the Angel Hotel penthouse, I’d played it off nonchalant.

  “Oh, you know.” I yawned. “Just a bunch of people sitting around and getting stoned, talking rubbishy things.”

  “But what did you do?” Stella asked.

  “Did you get to talk to him?” Bria added breathlessly.

  “I got to bring him a glass of ice water,” I said.

  “Ice water?” Stella was incredulous.

  “And I said hi,” I said.

  From Bria: “You brought him a glass of ice water…and you got to say hi?”

  I nodded. The first was true of course, but the second was a falsehood—I never had gotten a chance to say hi.

  “Well,” Stella snorted, “I don’t think that quite ranks against my chewed-up guitar pick.”

  “Oh, come on!” Bria objected in my defense, hitting Stella over the head with a pillow, the case on which looked like it could use a good washing. “She got to be in the room with them…for hours!” Then she added: “Of course, ice water and hi are not exactly the dramatic interlude I’d been imagining…”

&nb
sp; “No, you’re both right.” I yawned again. “It really was no big deal, hardly worth talking about.”

  Of course, they noticed I was limping slightly and asked, so I couldn’t help telling them about cutting my foot on some glass, and then I really couldn’t help telling them about Denny bandaging said foot…

  “Denny Springer bandaged your foot???” they shrieked in unison.

  Honestly, it was plenty gratifying. I didn’t need or want more than that, not then.

  So, when it happened—Cardiff—I’d kept the best of it to myself, not wanting to share it. It was mine. In a way that nothing ever had been before in my life up to that point, it was all mine. As time went on, though, I did want to share—for the glamour, for the social cachet, to have my one moment in the spotlight, be seen by someone other than me; and Denny, of course. But by then, the moment had passed. They’d never believe me. They’d think I was making it up to compete with Stella’s chewed-up guitar pick from Lex or Bria’s cousin meeting Denny in a bar in Rome. But it was just as well they never knew the truth. My wedding day was chaotic enough, what with the Best Man being a last-minute no-show coupled with the revelation of who that Best Man was. If they knew the truth, they’d have freaked out. (“Oh my God! You slept with Jack’s brother! What are you going to do???”) As it was, they were freaked out enough. (“Oh my God! Denny Springer is Jack’s brother!!!”) Like I said, as far as freak-outs go, that was plenty.

  There was plenty for all of us to adjust to.

  No need to go all the way.

  • • •

  When’s the right time to tell a man you’ve slept with his brother?

  In the days when Jack and I were newly a couple, first sleeping together, first getting to know one another, we fell into the same trap many other couples do early on—we traded stories of earlier relationships. As if that ever did the world any good. And, as with many before us, the talk inevitably turned to tales of losing our virginity. It was Jack’s idea.