All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  My going to kindergarten a year before Dan nudged us apart, as did overheard jokes about our paternity, for though we were close in age we looked nothing alike, to the point where that was our most notable characteristic, the one people fixated on—our physical dissimilarity. Under “comments” in his baby book, our mother had written the first things said about him at birth, among them: He’s so different from Philip. I had our mother’s dark features, he had our father’s strawberry blond hair and fair skin. Our personalities and interests formed as distinctly as our looks. I became a reader, asthmatic and sensitive, squeamish around farm animals, more comfortable baking cookies than baling hay. Early on he showed competence with his hands, unafraid to plunge his arm into a sow and extract a piglet, quicker to learn how to drive a tractor or run a grain auger, more instinctive with tools. Being the older brother meant never wanting to show weakness in his presence, so I scooped manure and castrated pigs alongside him, outwardly capable, inwardly doubtful. I’m sure anyone could have seen which of us was touched by a faint delicacy of manner, and anyway our 4-H projects told the tale. Dan always showed a hog at the county fair, while I played at artsier things—black-and-white photography, model airplanes.

  The one thing we’d always taken for granted, that we would someday be farmers, became the one option unavailable to us the year I turned twelve. The bankers lost their patience; we held a sale, packed our things in boxes, and left the only home we’d ever known to the wind and time. We’d been found wanting, not in work ethic but in financial viability. Old Lady Leysen rented the land to a neighbor, and that was the end of another homestead. No one would ever live there again. The buildings would eventually be burned to the ground as part of a training exercise for the local volunteer fire department, leaving only a metal Quonset hut and a concrete silo as headstones to mark our failed efforts, the rest of the rooms of our childhood consumed in flame.

  As much as I missed certain special places on the land, places where I felt the first tendrils of connection to things more enduring than the human-built world, I was also secretly relieved when we left. I’d never felt sure of myself in the more complicated work of the farm, never gained a feel for it, the way Dan had instinctively. A fresh chance at self-invention appealed to me. I can’t say how Dan felt, though of course I can guess. I never asked, and he never said, but I had cause to wonder if in the loss of the farm he lost something of himself he could never recover.

  As a teenager I became obsessed with sports. I trained for basketball and track in the humid clamor of the high school weight room; I pored over copies of the Sporting News after I finished my homework at night, dreaming of one day seeing my name in print, if only in the local sports pages. Dan focused his efforts on the wood shop, becoming skilled enough to hire on summers with his shop teacher, with whom he built furniture and cabinets. As a wrestler, he viewed my passion for basketball as something of a retreat from manlier pursuits. Insofar as my teenage mind believed anything with bedrock conviction, it was that the fast-break style of the Los Angeles Lakers in the Showtime years was the pinnacle of team-sport artistry, and Dan countered by claiming that the Detroit Pistons—known as the Bad Boys, for their intimidating physicality and brutish antics—were his favorite team. He spent the weekends tinkering with cars, an investment of time and energy that confounded me, since he would smash them up during races at the county fair each August, undoing all his hard work in a few loops around the track.

  No one was surprised when I went away to college and he chose the path of blue-collar work. It was the natural move for each of us, and after he accepted our aunt and uncle’s invitation to move to New Mexico and bunk with them while he got himself settled, he existed only on the far edge of my consciousness. We were brothers in our early twenties, each of us making his own way in the world, more than a thousand miles apart. I suspect he thought of me as infrequently as I thought of him.

  After the champagne baptism, we drank beer and made dinner and spoke of work and school and other such pleasantries. We played a game of Monopoly with Emily and her parents, settling into the banter of good-natured competition, affectionate teasing of the kind that made everyone around us laugh. The elation from our early morning flight continued to hum in my mind. The whole day had about it the character of a festive reunion. Beer flowed, old stories were retold, others told for the first time. Late in the evening, when Dan asked about my work as a reporting intern for the Fargo Forum the previous summer—our mother, he admitted, had sent him some of my clips—I had enough beer in me to tell him the truth, which was that the whole experience had been something of a farce.

  One Monday morning, shortly after my feature on the city’s pet groomers was splashed across the entire face of the B section, along with color photos of poodles and dachshunds undergoing various forms of makeover, I decided I’d had enough. One month remained of my internship, one month more than I could stand. I skipped breakfast and went straight to a sports-medicine clinic. To a kindly but perplexed nurse, I explained that I was with the drama department at the university. We were putting on a play in the fall, and in the play there was a character who wore a sling on his arm. Our prop room lacked a sling. I asked if she might let me borrow one, or, if that wasn’t an option, whether she might take cash for it. She seemed to pity me for some reason, perhaps the transparency of my lie; she let me have the thing for free. I told her I’d stop by with a couple of complimentary tickets in the fall, before the play opened, and she pretended to sound pleased.

  Half an hour later I appeared in the office of the managing editor, empty shirtsleeve dangling at my side like a flag of surrender. I explained my history of shoulder trouble (true), told him in detail how I’d dislocated it over the weekend in a game of pickup basketball (false), and informed him that I needed to leave immediately to see my doctor back in Minneapolis about the likelihood of major rotator-cuff surgery (preposterous). The old man stabbed out his cigarette and lit another, wheezing as he shifted his enormous girth in his chair. He peered at me over the top of his half-moon glasses.

  I’m sorry, I said, but I can’t stay. I can’t even take notes anymore.

  You can use a tape recorder, he said.

  I don’t have one.

  We’ll get you one.

  But I can’t even type, I said, wiggling my pathetic chicken wing for emphasis.

  Sure you can, he said. You’ll just have to use one hand. Hunt and peck. Half the monkeys in the newsroom type that way.

  His arguments were futile. By noon I’d packed my car, having worn the sling the whole time in case a colleague from the paper drove past the empty frat house—Alpha Gamma Rho, the farm-boy fraternity—where I’d rented a room for the summer. I was thirty miles down Interstate 94, smoking a celebratory joint, when I remembered I wasn’t really injured and didn’t need the sling.

  Hearing this, Dan snorted so hard that beer geysered out of his nose. He’d never thought of me as all that amusing, and though I’d done my best to leave out the boring parts of the story, I hadn’t expected to hit his funny bone quite so squarely. His reaction proved contagious. We laughed until our faces were wet with tears. I couldn’t remember the last time we’d done so. Maybe we never had.

  The joint, he said. It was the joint. I can see you lighting it, no hands on the wheel.

  Soon afterward, perhaps wanting to be funny in his turn, he mentioned—apropos of the coming holiday—that he planned to take an out-of-town trip over the long weekend, to a balloon rally in the northwest part of New Mexico, since he wouldn’t have to work on Martin Luther Coon Day.

  My shock was immediate and visceral. I wanted to believe I’d misheard him. Dan had a smirk on his face, a look of mischievous pride, that assured me I had not misheard. No one else seemed to notice or care. He may have thought it a harmless joke, but for me it was neither harmless nor a joke, so I went to the fridge and got another beer, then another as the conversation limped on. I performed some elaborate mental contortions to avoid
placing the blame for the remark where it belonged, with the owner of the mouth that had uttered it. I settled on the notion that he was taking his cues on the postures of masculinity from the men he was hanging around at the time, men you might call, to be gracious about it, illiberal. With time and maturity he’d see the folly of their crude worldview. He’d shake off those bits of boilerplate prejudice he’d borrowed in the project of crafting a self and become his own man.

  We returned to being out of the loop with each other the moment I left on the long drive home. When I arrived back at school that January I briefly considered sending him a note of thanks, along with a photocopy of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but I figured he’d take it as a calculated insult, the high-minded snobbery of his college-boy brother, so I didn’t bother with the essay or the note. Emily called off their wedding not long afterward, a fact relayed to me by my mother, so our plan to gather as a family that summer dissolved.

  The following autumn my telephone rang at home. It was Dan, calling to catch up. We hadn’t talked in most of a year. I was half drunk and in no mood for chitchat, so I lied and told him I was deeply invested in a Monday Night Football game. I told him I’d call him back at halftime and I hung up the phone. For reasons that remain obscure to me, although they surely had something to do with the words Martin Luther Coon Day, I never returned the call.

  This would always remain the final exchange between us: his calling to connect, my turning away.

  A few months later, on the day that turned out to be his last, I arrived in New York for a summer internship at the Nation magazine. I’d arranged the job in part so I could spend time with my girlfriend, who’d already graduated and left for New York ahead of me; it was also meant to be my springboard into an honest-to-god career, the last bit of polish on my résumé before I returned to Montana to finish my degree.

  Marie and I had become involved after working on our college newspaper together. Amid late nights of intense work in a hothouse office, I’d fallen hard for her, in a way I hadn’t for anyone in my life to that point. She was a smart editor, a varsity tennis player with the legs that entailed, fluent in French, with a daring sense of fashion shaped by a semester in Paris. With her hair cut short and a cigarette in her hand, she looked like the brunette twin of the movie starlet Jean Seberg, another midwestern girl with an air of irrepressible sensuality. She called me chéri and undertook to expose me to the spiritual dimensions of gourmet coffee and good red wine, an education I can only think to call erotic in its devotion to sensory pleasures, to smells and tastes and textures, most of them a major revelation for a descendant of the first farmer of Canada. Some nights, early in our courtship, we’d sneak away from the paper for a couple of hours, fix dinner at her place, share a bottle of Bordeaux, then return to the office to meet our deadline. Our attraction, shy and halting at first, was the headiest thing I’d ever been a part of, the affections we’d hidden from our colleagues, the long hours engrossed in the creation of something real—an actual newspaper—and of course the moment long after midnight when our work was done and we were finally alone. We had dreamed of New York even then, walking across campus together in the quiet of snowy nights, and now the summer was ours, the city was ours, a possibility I’d been imagining for a very long time.

  After Marie and I had reacquainted, I called my mother to let her know I was in New York safely. We talked for a bit about my travels—I’d come by car all the way from Montana—and then she told me, with an edge of concern in her voice, that she’d talked to Dan earlier in the day, around lunchtime. He’d told her that his new girlfriend had decided to break things off. Wendy was ten years older than him and hadn’t signed the papers on her divorce, and although her two kids liked Dan, they were confused by the sudden appearance of a man they couldn’t help viewing as their father’s replacement. Everything had happened too quickly between them, and she needed a break to put her life in order. My mother did her best to cheer him up, my father too, and when they hung up they figured he’d have a few bumpy weeks. Eventually he’d find someone else, someone more suitable, ideally unmarried and closer to his own age.

  Still, my mother said, he sounded pretty down. It might cheer him up to hear from you.

  I told her I’d call him.

  I hung up the phone and thought, Sure, I’ll call him—silly kid brother and his silly troubles with women. I’ll call him in a few days. Next week, maybe. I’d been reunited with Marie for a couple of hours. We’d spent nine months apart, writing letters across the distance between us, and to find myself at last within reach of her touch made me want nothing else. Anything aside from that could wait.

  The next morning I went to the offices of the magazine, thinking it was going to be my first day on the job, not having received the news that the interns’ start date had been moved back one day, unaware it would be more than a year before I’d return for my internship, by which time Marie would be gone for Paris again, our love but a memory. I spent an hour at the office, met some of the editors, grabbed a stack of back issues. In possession of a free afternoon I hadn’t expected to be free, I was at a loss for what to do with myself. The city seemed huge and half mad, a roiling carnival of commerce, an immense performance of human longing. I called Marie from a pay phone. We made a dinner plan, a celebration of our reunion. I walked all over Lower Manhattan, tuning in to the pace of street life, browsing amid the evocative, moldering-book smell of the Strand. I found an open bench in Union Square and unfolded a copy of the Times—my new hometown paper. Tears of happiness welled in my eyes as I sat there on that bench. Everything had come together, exactly as we’d planned it.

  Late that afternoon, in the final minutes of my innocence, when he was already gone and I didn’t know it, I puttered around Marie’s apartment in Queens, listening to her Rickie Lee Jones albums, holding her clothes to my face, savoring the scent of her, delirious with longing. I was getting dressed for my first-ever dinner in Manhattan when the telephone rang.

  I muted the Rickie Lee Jones. I picked up the phone. I knew from my father’s quavering voice that whatever he was about to tell me would change everything.

  The known facts were these:

  He’d spent the afternoon with friends, drinking.

  He’d spoken to Wendy in the evening by phone.

  He hadn’t shown up for work the next morning.

  He’d died alone in his apartment.

  He’d done the deed with a gun.

  The week surrounding the burial was a maelstrom of tears and bewilderment and wild speculation about what had gone so wrong inside his head that he would choose to point a gun at it, and most of that time, mercifully, remains a fog in my memory. One moment stood out, though, a moment that would define my life in the years to come. It happened on the afternoon of the wake, when one of my uncles, in a moment of thoughtless candor, told me that if the family had been forced to choose ahead of time which of us was more likely to off himself, the odds would’ve favored me. At first I had no idea what to make of this extraordinary statement, except to wonder whether everyone’s sorrow might have been a little less intense, a little less violent, if the death had been mine. People said a lot of foolish things in the midst of their initial shock, but this one stayed with me: the idea that I’d bucked the odds and lived. In moments of self-pity, I allowed myself to wonder whether I’d failed the family by not performing to expectations. Viewed from a different angle, my uncle’s words offered up the rest of my life as an unexpected gift, an opportunity for the most radical improvisation. I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I didn’t end up another corpse in the casket with a hole in his head. Anything went. Anything was permissible, as long as I lived.

  It soon became clear that the manner of his death had turned him into something of a cipher. People saw him one way or the other: sufferer or coward, victim or murderer. He either succumbed to outside forces or succumbed to the darkest impulse within. In the days after his death, when people’s expl
anations were forming and quickly hardening—little stories they thought they could live with—I often felt I was the only one who vacillated between the two extremes, pitying him one hour and hating him the next. Everyone else, it seemed, had chosen, or was clinging to a brave front of certainty. The gunshot was a mistaken impulse, the gunshot was a calculated rebuke. He slipped over the edge, he was pushed over the edge. He was broken by a battle with depression, he was broken by the sudden loss of love. He clung too tightly to other people, he didn’t know how to reach for help. The list of explanations was as long as the list of people who’d known him, and each seemed to me a simplification, perhaps even a lie.

  I understood these accounts were attempts by those who loved him to soothe the pain of a sudden, inexplicable absence, but I took it as my duty to preserve some ambiguity, if for no other reason than to allow him an inner life of some complexity, resistant to easy answers and summary judgments. I hoped that time and patience would one day reward me with the truth but I was in no hurry to get there. The question for me was never, Why did he kill himself? He killed himself, I assumed, because his life became unbearable. The question, therefore, was why his life had become unbearable, and since I knew very little about his life at the end, and even less about his frame of mind, I couldn’t answer that question, and maybe never would. The proximate cause of his suicide—the breakup of an eight-month relationship—struck me as both too pat and maddeningly sketchy, a combination that led me to fixate on his final moments, improvising on the known facts, searching for a way into the mystery. I imagined his final hours again and again, long after a finer mind would have found peace or given up. I didn’t want to find peace. To have found peace, I thought, would have meant giving up my obsession with him, but that obsession had become the one thing that gave my life meaning.