Envy (22 page)

“The fall of 'ninety-nine. Just before Thanksgiving.”

“I'm, I'm very sorry. How old was she?”

“Thirty-eight. It pretty much destroyed my folks.”

“I'm so sorry,” Will says again.

“Yeah. Thanks. Me, too. Anyway”—she shakes her head as if to clear it—“later, after the bites stopped itching so much, I told myself I had to talk to you, or to Mitch. Sort of sort it all out. I mean, I just didn't know what to think. Or even how to feel.”

Will slouches down in order to rest his head on the low sofa back. Without raising his head he asks her what she thinks about it now.

She snorts. “Well, obviously, it didn't have much to do with me. Whatever it was, was between you two. I was just the chump.”

“By why didn't you ever talk to me?” He tilts his head to see her face. “How could it have gone on for six or eight or however many weeks without my knowing about it?”

“Because when I went to your house to talk to you, your brother was there, and he made me promise never to bring it up. He told me it was this thing the two of you had, you and him, and the deal was that talking about it, even mentioning it, wasn't allowed. He said that if it ever came up, everything would be over between us—all three of us. Not a bad idea, right? But the thing is, I was scared. Scared of Mitch. He seemed—not that he was ever violent or abusive, he wasn't—but I could tell he had that capacity. He never yelled at me or punched walls or anything direct like that. He just had this . . . this . . . I don't know. This concealed rage. Except every once in a while I'd catch a glimpse of it. He'd overreact or something, you know?”

“Yes,” Will says. “I do. I do know.”

“Over and over, I almost said something to you, but then . . . I just couldn't. I thought maybe you knew. And I was afraid you might be angry, too. And remember how I had plans for that August? I was going to go down to Virginia, where my mom's sister lived. But then Uncle Rob had a fall, broke his leg, and I ended up staying home. So it wasn't over when I told myself it would be, but then there was only a few weeks left before school, and I, I just went through the motions, you know?”

“Did you go on dates together? Movies? Out to dinner?”

“No, that was only with you. With Mitch it was always just sex. Sex at night. Late.” She shakes her head, frowning. “Weird, I know. Like I had this boyfriend who was split into two halves, one who took me out for ice cream or whatever and one I had sex with.”

“But,” Will can't help saying, “but we had sex, too.”

“Of course, of course. I didn't mean we didn't. Just that—”

“Just that it wasn't sexy sex. Sort of comfortable and safe, like a back rub or an old armchair.”

“No. That's not what I meant.”

“My brother, the demon lover.”

“Will.” She says it with two syllables. Wi-ill. “Come on, you can't not know it was all about his face. Anyway, I wouldn't have been so passive if I'd been older. But it's hard for girls—you can't know. As a man, you don't realize that there are a lot of things girls feel they have no choice about.”

“No,” says Will. “I do get that.” He closes his eyes, and for a while neither of them speaks. It's so quiet in her house that he can hear the faint buzz of an appliance in another room, a clothes dryer, maybe.

“Hey,” she says. “I'm alone here today. Like I said, Sean's gone to pick up some stuff, and I have no help.” She brings her hands together in another little clap, an awkward, hearty gesture. “So I have to get back to work. But you can . . . I think it would be a good idea for you to take a nap or even just a rest before you get back on the road.”

“Yes,” Will says. “I should do that.”

“You stay there.” Lisa stands up. “I'll get you a blanket.”

23

After parking the van, its sides streaked with mud, Will sits for a few minutes in the driver's seat.

Inside the empty house, he stops to use the bathroom and then heads upstairs to Luke's room, undisturbed for more than three years now. Not untouched, because once a month or so, Elena, who cleans the rest of the house, comes in to dust and vacuum. Hired after Luke died, she's never asked about the child who does and does not occupy the room. Either she refuses to trespass where she might cause pain, or her nascent English cannot accommodate the questions she would ask in her own language.

Will sits on his son's narrow bed. Characters from
The Adventures
of Tintin
—Snowy, Captain Haddock, and Tintin himself—pursue one another across the bedding that Carole discovered by chance in a SoHo boutique. Will found he couldn't object to the price tag, not really; he loved Luke's discovery of the 1930s comic by Hergé, his reading and rereading and then reading once again English translations of all the old adventures, sitting up in bed, literally bundled within the romp of imagined intrigue, asking endless questions about Soviet spies and Shanghai gangsters.

In the bookcase are other favorites of Luke's,
A Wrinkle in Time
by Madeleine L'Engle, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Lord of the
Rings.
Religious stories, all of them, David and Goliath tales of good battling a vast and seemingly uncontrollable evil, of love prevailing only at the eleventh hour (the fifty-ninth minute, fifty-ninth second), the moment of absurd, laughable—necessary—hope.

Tintin sheets, fantasy novels, and the mythic athlete-hero: Luke's bedroom is papered with posters of Derek Jeter, Jason Giambi, Alfonso Soriano, Yankees mostly, out of geographic loyalty, but there are stars from other teams as well. Suzuki, A-Rod, Bonds, Sosa. Of course, now A-Rod was a Yankee, Soriano gone, Will can't remember where, because he can't watch baseball, can't listen to it on the radio or follow the box scores, not anymore. Not yet. Luke had been so earnest and credulous in his love; his adulation of Sammy Sosa, for example, blinded him to the man's obvious deceit.

“Lukey,” Will remembers saying, gently, “there were maybe thirty or forty bats to choose from, and Sosa took the one corked bat. It's just not likely for that to have been an accident.”

“It was just a mistake,” Luke said, not even defensive.

Over the desk was a huge black-and-white poster of Muhammad Ali, with the caption “Impossible is nothing,” the fighter in his beautiful prime, white satin trunks luminous against his velvet skin. “That's how Jesus looks,” Luke had told Will, prompting a spasm of guilt that he and Carole had never managed to get it together to send their kids to Sunday school or provide them any religious instruction whatsoever.

One entire wall of Luke's bedroom is consecrated to Mitch, the uncle he never met, the one he discovered in a magazine article, a man with the same last name as himself and his father, a man bearing his father's familiar face, except for the livid splash of purple, which, in two dimensions at least, presented itself as the distinctive feature of a superhero, a demiurge endowed with powers that, like any other immortal's, marked his face and body. Spiderman was masked by webbing, the Hulk prone to shirt-tearing episodes of swelling green muscles, and Mitchell Moreland had an arresting yin-yang face.

“I don't get why you guys don't even talk to each other,” Luke complained to Will, unable to reconcile himself to the injustice of having an uncle who was a bona fide sports star and never getting to see him, not even on a holiday, not even once a year. The more Luke pressed for rapprochement, the more terse and defensive Will had become, unable to manufacture a seemingly casual that's-just-the-way-it-worked-out response.

With a child's unerring ability to identify, aim for, and repeatedly strike his parents' weak spots, Luke became a clamorous Mitchell Moreland fan, loudly celebrating Mitch's exploits and media conquests, making a show of tearing pages from magazines, sending away for not one but three pairs of swim goggles endorsed by Mitch's signature and acquired with proofs of purchase torn from boxes of a cereal no one could stomach but which Carole bought under the duress of an aisle 5 (breakfast foods) tantrum. Carole sidestepped public conflict even more determinedly than the domestic variety, and having threatened a supermarket tantrum, Luke hadn't even had to work all that hard for the five or ten or however many box tops torn from the inedible vitamin-rich whatevers.

In the year before he drowned—irony, irony, yes, Will does recognize irony—Luke discovered that he could use the cable guide to hunt for mentions of Mitch on ESPN or ESPN2 and he found the rerun of an interview that included tape of swims Mitch made between 1990 and 2000, a sports documentary that aired once during school hours and again at 2 A.M., necessitating a video recording, which, as they didn't get ESPN, Will had dutifully petitioned a friend to make, resisting the temptation to say the show had been canceled. For faithfully fulfilling this promise, he was repaid by Luke's replaying it over and over and over, not so much for its entertainment value (there was so little), Will suspects, as for its ability to dissolve his parents' composure.

Every so often Will visits Luke's room and lies on the Tintin quilt, staring at the Wall of Mitch, as he's come to think of it, a sort of private Wailing Wall whose cracks he wants to find, chinks into which he can thrust little folded prayers, or, more likely, questions. Questions like,
What the fuck happened? Tell me why. Tell me how.

Or: What's the meaning of having a brother who swims with the unnatural ease and grace of a fish and a son who in an instant slipped from the safety of a little boat—a boat his father failed to balance— and drowned? How can Will accommodate the coincidence of his identical twin, a disfigured copy of himself, vanishing onto the page and into the broadcast, multiplied into a legion of virtual incarnations who swim into the death of human, familial attachment, and a son who failed to swim and sank to a terribly nonmetaphoric death?

Is irony the only vantage from which to observe these irreconcilable facts? Irony isn't what Will wants, nor what he's come to understand he needs. It isn't transition. It isn't a way from here to there. It grants no solace, no transcendence. It's cheap. It's a last resort. It's a word to apply to the limits of human comprehension, a word that makes the inadequacy sound like sophistication.

“He's so cool. It's just not fair that I never get to meet him or anything.” That Will couldn't explain his estrangement from Mitch made Luke regard his father with suspicion. It must be that Will had blundered somehow, insulted and alienated Mitch. Or maybe, Luke never said but implied, it was because a star like Mitch might not have had time for a brother who was a shrink. Some of Luke's friends—“Who?” Will demanded. “Who?” “Parker, that's who.”— said that psychoanalysts were just plain psycho and that they were also homo and freakazoid. And if Will was a psycho-homo-freakazoid, then why would his cool brother want anything to do with him?

“Look,” Will said to Luke, “you're right. Mitch is cool. He's famous and cool, and a lot of people admire him. But that wasn't always true. Because of the way he looked, the way his face was marked, he had a hard time as a kid. He was shy. He didn't have friends. He spent a lot of time alone. And when he was older, when he was a teenager and then a young man, he spent all his time swimming, hours and hours of swimming by himself, which was not only a way for him to stop feeling bad about his face but helped him make himself into a great athlete. And now that so many people admire and respect him and don't care about how he looks, or maybe they even think his face is cool because it's his—now that all those things are true, maybe Mitch just doesn't want to be with the people he was with when his life was hard and he was unhappy. Maybe Mom-Mom and Granddad and I remind him of a painful time, when he was young and living at home, and when kids at school either didn't talk to him or they teased him, and when he was so self-conscious that he was afraid of girls, afraid they'd never see him behind the birthmark on his face. It could be that now he's started over, now that he has a new life, he prefers not to be with us because that would force him to remember the old one.” Will stopped, realizing that, faced with Luke's grave, assessing stare, he'd begun to repeat himself. “Do you understand what I'm saying?” he asked.

“Yes,” Luke said. “But I don't think you're right.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“Because why?”

“Because that kind of person who would just go away and never talk to his mother or father or brother—that would be a coward.”

“He would be a coward.”

“That's what I said.”

“No, you said
that
instead of
he.
”

“Okay, okay, so
he
would be a coward, and a person who goes to the Bermuda Triangle and swims in water with sharks where whole airplanes have disappeared can't be a coward because, you know, a great white shark could easily kill him. It would take—it would be like you killing a little bug or something.”

“But, Lukey, there are different kinds of bravery. I agree absolutely that Mitch is brave—very brave—but I think it's a kind of bravery that he had to invent to help himself feel better about the early part of his life. Did you know, a lot of people who were unhappy as children turn into adults who achieve great things? Like Abraham Lincoln. Or President Clinton. Mike Tyson. Well, maybe Mike Tyson's not such a good example. No, actually, I take that back. He is. Because Tyson's way out of the misfortunes of his youth was his talent as a boxer, but even though he developed that ability, made it bigger and more powerful, he remained a complicated man; he couldn't really do what he wanted to do, which was escape his past. That's what all these people wanted to do—to get away from the unhappiness they'd lived through as children. And what they accomplished helped, it made them feel better, but it didn't erase what came before. And if that's true about Mitch, then his not talking to me or your grandparents wouldn't be cowardly, it would just be choosing to leave us behind.”

Luke shook his head. “But it would still make him a jerk. And I know he's not a jerk.”

“Why?”

“Because only jerks run away and hurt people's feelings like that. Like the way Mom says me and Sam have to not chase balls into the street or stick paper clips in electric sockets or get into a stranger's car, because if anything happened—”

“Well, yes, but Mitch is a man, not a little boy, and he hasn't run away or been kidnapped. He's just stopped calling or visiting.”

“But why? Why did he?”

“I don't know for sure. I told you what my guess is.”

“I think you're wrong. I think it's something else.”

“Don't you imagine that as I grew up with Mitch, who is my own twin brother, I might know him better than you? That I might be able to guess his reasons a little more closely? Because actually you've never met him. So probably I do know him better.”

Luke shook his head. “No.”

“Why?”

“I just don't think you do, that's all.”

A month after Luke drowned, Will's mother came to stay with them, and—just to keep busy, she said, just to be useful— cleaned their house. She began with the ground floor and worked her way up, at last arriving at the top-floor bedroom where Luke had slept and where she stopped and stared, her momentum destroyed so that Will had his chance to save the room from being dismantled.

“William!” she called down the stairs. “Will-yam!” She was waiting on the landing. “Have you seen this!”

“Well, yeah, Mom, obviously.”

“I must never have come up here. You and Carole and the kids were always with us on the holidays, and I can't remember the last time your dad and I visited you in the city. So I must never have seen all this. And I have to tell you, William, if I had seen it, I would not have approved.”

“No,” Will said. “I don't imagine you would.”

“But apparently you didn't consider this”—she waved her hand at the wall—“a, a, an unhealthy fixation. At least not enough of a problem to make him take it down.”

“Mom,” Will said. “It has nothing to do with my approving or disapproving. Carole and I agreed not to interfere because we found that even the slightest suggestion that we weren't pleased by Luke's interest in Mitch only intensified it. You know how kids are, Mom, they have this radar for psychic wounds.”

“Well,” she said. And she walked quickly across the room and had already torn down two posters by the time Will caught up with her.

“Hey!” he said. “You can't do that!”

Will's mother tried to pull her wrist out of his grasp. “Let go!” she said.

“No! Don't touch it! Don't touch any of it. And give me those.” Will took the posters from her hand and smoothed out the creases. “Christ, Mom, it's been, what, a month? Leave it. Leave it.”

“William. You of all people, with your jealous private parts and unconscious hostilities and whatnot. You should have been the first to put a stop to it.”

“Well, it's a little late, Mom, wouldn't you say?”

“For Luke, yes. But there's Samantha to consider. You can't leave the room as it is, with all this, this . . .” She closed her eyes, waiting for the right word. “Memorabilia,” she said.

“I am, actually. I'm leaving it just as it is.”

“Why!”

“Because.”

“Because why!”

“Because I haven't finished looking at it.” Will leaned against the doorjamb, his arms crossed.

“Well, I'm talking to Carole about this. I think it's plain wrong. There's no point in morbid staring. You select a few special things and put them away, along with his schoolwork and report cards and all those condolence cards you got. You can take everything out and look over it when you're ready. The rest you take down and give away. Or, if it's not something another child can use, you throw it away. And you have this room repainted. You change the furniture around, maybe get a nice little table or a reading chair, and then you have a guest room.”