Brotherly Love (35 page)

The place smells damp.

Beyond the light switch are the drapes. Jimmy
mentioned once what his wife spent for drapes, Peter can’t remember
the number. He pulls one a few inches open and holds it in place with
a chair, and looks at the staircase. He knows that is the direction.

All the doors are closed upstairs, and he opens them
as he moves toward the noise, lighting the hallway.

The door to the bathroom opens half an inch and
stops. There is a hook-and-eye lock, he thinks perhaps it was put
there to keep the dogs out. He pushes through. An easy push, the
sound of the hook hitting the tile floor, the sudden coolness of the
room. A half-empty bottle of Beefeaters gin is standing next to the
tub, a few inches from Jimmy Measles’s hand. Beside it is a martini
glass and the atomizer.

The pill bottles are in a line across the sink, all
empty. The tops have been dropped on the iloor. Jimmy Measles is
sitting under the shower, his head resting against the back of the
tub, the cold water splashing off the swell of his stomach. He is
still in his underwear, a pastel shade of blue today which sticks to
him like another skin.

Along the line where his weight presses into the
porcelain, his blood has settled and the color is darker.

Peter turns off the faucets and sits down on the edge
of the tub, Jimmy Measles’s hand almost touching him. For a moment
he believes he is lying on the cold porcelain too.

He would leave the room now if there were someplace
else to go.

The water drains out of the tub, out of Jimmy
Measles’s shorts. Peter picks up the Beefeaters and empties it.

It’s a better gesture, finishing the bottle.

He thinks dying must have
come up on Jimmy quietly or he would have done it himself.

* * *

G
race is waiting for him
outside a Presbyterian church in Cherry Hill. She smiles as he walks
through the heavy wooden doors, relieved.

"How you doing?" he says.

"I don’t know yet," she says.

He understands that she cares about what has happened
to Jimmy Measles—they have been calling him James Katz for the last
half hour; he still can’t think of him with that name—but she
keeps more of herself back than she gives away, even now, to Jimmy or
anyone else.
 
He finds nothing in
that to resent or regret because she has never pretended it was some
other way.

"Are you going somewhere?" she says.

The church empties. Only eleven people have come for
the service, including Grace’s sister and her son. Halfway through
the service, the child began to cry, and the sister took him outside
to wait in the car.

Nine mourners.

Peter is reminded of the club, Jimmy Measles and all
his friends.

"I wouldn’t mind," he says.

A familiar smell is in the air around her. It teases
the edge of the things he remembers, just beyond his reach. They walk
away from the church toward a Mercedes parked up the street.

He stops before they get to the car and looks at the
sky—a clear, cloudless day, with the moon hanging just over the
line of the church roof—and when he begins to move again he is a
step behind her. He finds himself staring at the small of her back,
fastened to that spot where she is in perfect balance—where all her
movements come together, and cancel each other, and leave her, in
that place, completely still.

They are at the car.

She opens the door, and drops her head inside. He
hears her say, "You go on, I’ll catch a ride." She closes
the door and they walk to the Buick.

She doesn’t ask where he is going, even when he
enters the Garden State Parkway outside of Atlantic City and turns
south. She puts her hand on his leg, as light as a glove, and leaves
it there all the way south to the end of the peninsula, where New
Jersey stops at the ocean.

"Cape May," she says, looking around.

He drives to the house and takes her inside, leading
her by the hand through the door. The doors and windows have been
closed a month. He takes her upstairs and then to the bedroom where
he sleeps. She sits down on the bed.

He lifts her skirt to her waist and peels the
stockings off her legs, stopping at the bottom to take off her shoes.

He kneels on the floor, feeling her watching him. He
reaches behind her and finds the small of her back, and pulls her
into him, the soft cushion of hair beneath her panties pushing into
his mouth and nose. He holds her there until he feels her hands on
his head, touching his ears, the back of his neck, asking him for
something more. He moves the panties aside, tearing them, hearing her
breathing now.

His hand presses into the small of her back, and he
feels it there first. Even before the shaking is in his mouth, his
hand senses it coming, from the distant parts of her body, and as it
narrows it surfaces.

She wraps her legs around
his head and shakes—a hooked fish coming to the top, to that other
place, and then she breaks the surface gasping for breath, gasping in
the new light.

* * *

S
he is lying on her
stomach, her face resting against the back of her hands. A piece of
her hair falls across her eyes, and she stares at him through it.
"You’re nothing like Michael, are you?"

He does not want to think about himself and Michael.
He gets up to open the window. There is a breeze off the ocean and it
fills the thin white curtains and pushes them into his face. The tide
is coming in, and he can hear the sound of the water and the sound of
the wind. He crosses behind the bed, out of her line of sight, and
then covers her carefully with his own body, fitting himself against
the cool rise of her bottom, and then puts himself inside her.

Her face is still resting against the back of her
hands, and when he is fully in she closes her eyes. They lie still
for half a minute, the only movement in the room is the rise and fall
of their breathing, and then slowly he feels her tighten, squeezing
him a long time, letting go, milking.

Her bottom moves, and she
takes him slowly along the edge of a circle inside her, no more than
an inch around, and it seems to him now that she knows what he is
feeling. And that thought, more than the feeling itself, finally
pulls him away from Jimmy Measles lying in a spray of cold water, and
fills him with an old stillness that lifts him in the direction of
the surface.

* * *

I
s this where you bring
girls?" she says.

He shakes his head. "This is where I come to
sleep."

She sits up and looks around the room, the sheet
falling into her lap. The sun has set and the sky outside his window
is deep and black. He senses them falling—this house, the woman,
himself. The stillness returns.

"Jimmy couldn’t sleep," she says, the
first mention of his name since the church. "He had doctors all
over the city, none of them knew about each other. They all gave him
prescriptions."

"I saw the bottles," he says.

It is quiet for a moment. He notices the fine hairs
at the base of her back.

"He had to have the television on," she
says.

Peter stares at the wall behind her. Then at the
ceiling. Everything is exactly where it was, but everything is
changed. Jimmy Measles is fresh in the room.

"What did you think, when you saw him‘?"
she says.

He shakes his head.

He feels her watching him, waiting for him. He is
reminded that she asks for more than she gives.

"He was cold," he says. "I turned off
the water and sat down, and the coldness just came off him. I didn’t
touch him but I felt it, and it made me cold too."

"He looked the same?" she says.

It takes him a moment to remember. "There wasn’t
a lot of light in there," he says. "They’d cut off the
electric." He takes a deep breath, trying to get it out of his
head. "I’ve seen him looking worse."

She puts her hand on his leg again, the way she had
in the car. The room seems to breathe, the curtains rise and fall.

"I’m glad it was you that found him," she
says.

She moves over him then, climbs over his chest and
sits on him. She pulls his penis from beneath her and lays it on his
stomach in such a way that it might belong to either of them. She
traces a line up the underside with her fingernail.

She raises herself off him, and then guides his hand
underneath.

"Just one finger," she says. "Close
your eyes and put one finger inside."

He does, and she squeezes it.

She rides his finger, and he is wet to the wrist.

"Pretend," she says, and he feels the
weight of his penis change on his stomach, heavier at first, and then
suddenly light as it fills and lifts itself off.

And then he is inside her again, but the newness of
it has washed off, and beneath it is the purpose.

He can’t bring her with him this time, and when he
has gone to the surface and come back, he looks at her in the half
dark of the room, and sees that she is crying.

And he knows that for a
little while Jimmy Measles has his wife back.

* * *

H
e returns to the gym, the
first time since he washed Leonard Crawley’s blood off the ring
floor. It is Friday, five weeks to the day.

Nick is sitting in a chair by the window, still in
his work clothes, his elbows resting on his knees, bending into an
open newspaper as if he were sitting on a toilet. Harry is jumping
rope. It is a few minutes past six o’clock; the place is always
empty on Fridays in the summer.

Nick sees him as he clears the staircase, and drops
the paper on the floor. "Peter," he says, getting up,
"where you been?"

Peter looks around the room, everything familiar. The
ring, the pictures on the wall, the towel lying under the bench, the
hand wraps hanging from the chinning bar. It feels as if he has been
gone a year.

Nick crosses the gym, smiling. "Hey, how you
been? This place, it’s like a fucking museum here the last couple
of weeks." He puts an arm around Peter, smelling of gasoline,
and pats his back.

Peter is washed in relief.

The buzzer sounds and Harry quits jumping rope. There
are welts across his back and shoulders where the rope has hit him.
He is soaked in sweat. "You got time to move a couple rounds?"

Peter says.

Nick ties and tapes his gloves, and then twenty
minutes later he unties them.

Peter sits on the bench, trying to even his
breathing. He closes his eyes and rests his head against the wall.
Harry thanks him for the work and crosses the room to hit the heavy
bag. Nick tugs at the gloves. "You going to live?" he says.

The question terrifies him.

He smiles and rolls his head against the wall. "It
was up to me," he says, "no."

The gloves come off, and his hands feel cool and
light, and he stands up and walks into the shower.

He stays under the water a long time, letting it run
into his mouth. When he comes out Harry is still hitting the bags.

He sits down with Nick and they watch his son work.
"He looks like he just got up from a nap," Peter says. The
punches have a heavy sound, interrupted now and then by a sharp
crack—an air pocket created between the glove and the leather bag.

"That was bad news about Jimmy Measles,"
Nick says after a while.

Peter checks his side, where some of the skin has
scraped off against the ropes. He takes a deep breath to see if
anything hurts.

"He got into something," he says, "he
couldn’t get out."

Nick thinks of him up here, talking to four people at
once over by the lockers. "He always seemed like he could get
out of anything," he says.

Peter wipes fresh sweat off his head.

"I liked havin’ him around," Nick says
later. "He was a character."

Peter says, "His only trouble, he was ashamed of
himself. I think about it now, it seems like everything he did was to
hide what he was."

"That guy could make you laugh," Nick says.

"Yeah, he could."

Peter tried to remember when Jimmy Measles had made
him laugh.

"Where you been?" Nick says, a different
question than what he asked before, when he came in.

Peter shakes his head. "You know, Michael
brought the guy up here and got you upset."

Nick nods at that. "Something’s different, you
don’t know how to act." He looks at Peter and smiles. "Maybe
three times in your life something new happens and you know the right
thing to do. The rest of the time . . ." He shrugs.

Peter falls quiet, looks around the gym.

"Anyway," Nick says, "nobody got hurt.
It wasn’t anything but his jaw was broke, right?"