The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (12 page)

“But Scott,” I said later, during a candid chat, “almost every surface
in
the place was glass.”

“That’s what made it so tempting, Zwieb. Haven’t you ever felt that way?”

I confessed I hadn’t.

“Well,” said Scott, slugging my shoulder a bit too hard, “maybe
you’re
the one who’s fucked up!”

So Scott left the scene of the accident and walked, in whatever condition, back to his apartment and smashed all the glass. The illusion of spaciousness would have collapsed once the mirrors were broken, and because he felt hemmed-in and guilty (I guess), Scott departed, walking a mile or two to my father’s house. I like to imagine his progress through Nichols Hills, a kind of monitory apparition to the residents of that affluent banlieue. “An advocate,” as Cheever wrote of one wretched, drunken protagonist, “for the lame, the diseased, the poor, for those who through no fault of their own live out their lives in misery and pain. To the happy and the wellborn and the rich he had this to say—that for all their affection, their comforts, and their privileges, they would not be spared the pangs of anger and lust and the agonies of death.”

Kelli was alone at my father’s house when Scott arrived. She was sitting in a big chair by the front window, doing her homework, when she sensed she was being watched, or maybe she heard something. In any event she turned around and saw Scott’s face in the window. Kelli was too polite to scream at the sight of her own stepbrother; I imagine she even summoned a weak smile. Scott let himself in and sat at her feet. There was glass dust in his hair and tiny points of blood all over his face and scalp, but otherwise he seemed fine. He held Kelli’s hand and petted her leg as he told her what he’d done that day. Finally Sandra and my father came home, and Scott seemed happy to see them.

BY THE TIME
I came home for Christmas that year, everything was back to normal. Scott had found yet another apartment near Todd the Tortoise and was now adept at using public transportation. One day we sat at his little card table—placed with a certain geometric nicety vis-à-vis his other belongings—and after he’d discussed the Cadillac crash and its aftermath as if he were explaining some esoteric hobby, he went on to describe his daily routine. Each morning he awoke at five forty-five, showered, and ate cereal at his card table while watching Bullwinkle on a six-inch TV. Then he made a snack for later and walked five blocks to catch a bus that took him to the Drahn School of Business. His classes ended at ten thirty, and if he had to work a lunch shift at the restaurant there was a different bus to catch; otherwise he went home, ate, read (
Rolling Stone
,
Stereo Review
, or
Tiger Beat
) and napped until the dinner shift. A coworker took him home at night, when Scott would carry his little TV to bed and watch Carson until he fell asleep.

I asked him what sort of drugs he was doing these days, and Scott reared back and said “
Zwiiieeeeeeeeb
” in a tone of antic mock-reproach. The exchange was typical of our grown-up dynamic: that is, I tended to remark on the seedier side of his life with a kind of derisive sangfroid, as though he were incapable of shocking me further, and my brother would wax indignant in a way that was meant to rebuke my cynicism while implying that I was at least somewhat correct. We had a similar sense of humor.

But this time he insisted I was mistaken. When did he have time for recreational drugs? And where would he get the money? Certainly not from our father, who’d cut him off without a sou after that Cadillac business. Scott paid his own bills including his fees at Drahn, he said, showing me a couple of report cards as evidence of his new seriousness: straight A’s. I imagine most of his fellow students were the kind of dim hicks who used to amuse Scott in high school, and probably he enjoyed the mild challenge of shining in their midst. But once the challenge was over—he got his diploma the following May—he never mentioned the place again and never to my knowledge sought employment relevant to the skills he’d acquired.

MEANWHILE THERE WERE
inklings that all was not well, or not as well as Scott would have one think. That spring, while he was in the home stretch at Drahn, he was arrested on a charge of disturbing the peace. He’d been spotted dangling from a horizontal flagpole at the top of Fifty Penn Place—perhaps the tallest building in the northwest suburbs of Oklahoma City—the first three floors of which were occupied by posh shops and cafés. Quite a little crowd had gathered below, a lot of genteel lunching ladies, I imagine, an audience that would have pleased Scott.

In May my mother finished her bachelor’s degree magna cum laude, a few days after I came home for summer vacation and Scott got his Drahn diploma. She particularly wanted the three of us, her ex-husband and two sons, to attend her graduation in Norman. It would be a nice little reunion, a way to acknowledge that things had turned out not-so-badly, what with Burck’s happy marriage, Marlies’s degree, and Scott’s slow but steady progress in the world (despite the odd misadventure). As for me, well, I’d made it through my first year at Tulane with middling grades, but that was about the best anyone seemed to expect at that point.

The plan was to pick up Scott at his apartment in the Earl Hotel—his last sleazy apartment, we hoped, now that Drahn would surely land him at least among the lower rungs of the middle class. He didn’t answer the door, so my father and I let ourselves in. A number of things were wrong. Scott was lying on a ratty sofa, eyes and mouth smiling as if in greeting. He was wearing his old vagrant uniform of checked trousers (gone in the crotch) and yellowed T-shirt. He looked at us and laughed, and for a moment I had a sense of being ludicrously overdressed; that was the year I affected bow ties and madras trousers.

Then Scott began to talk: his phrases, or riffs perhaps, had all the cadence of normal speech, but not a single word was intelligible as English (or German). He went on and on, pausing to laugh from time to time. He remained recumbent.

My father considered him there on the sofa. “Son?”

Scott gave him a wavering look, sort of rocking his body from side to side. He was talking the whole time.

“
Son?
” My father patted his cheek as if to wake him.

“He’s not asleep,” I said.

“Hm.” My father sat on the edge of the sofa and stroked Scott’s hair a moment, staring into that beatific face of his. Scott’s speech had become a kind of happy crooning. Finally my father rose and walked out the door without a word. I followed, shutting the door behind me. The crooning pursued us down the hall.

The following Monday, Scott called my father at his office and asked why we hadn’t picked him up the other day as planned. Burck ventured to explain.

“I was sleeping!” said Scott. “You should’ve woken me up!”

“We tried. Your eyes were open the whole time.”

“I was
sleeping
,” he insisted, and went on about how disappointed he’d been when he realized he’d missed Mom’s graduation, etc. He even became tearful about it, and my father ended up apologizing.

THAT SUMMER BURCK
and Sandra went abroad for a month or so. They’d arranged to pick up a BMW right off the assembly line in Germany, whence they planned to drive it around Europe before putting it on a boat to the States. In the meantime a few family friends were supposed to check on Kelli and me, though I don’t think anyone was very diligent about it. We were old enough to care for ourselves, while little Aaron was away in Dallas with his father.

We’d moved to a new house in Nichols Hills with a pool, and most of my weekend time was divided between swimming, reading, and tippling, while Kelli was off with her boyfriend for the most part. I enjoyed myself. I liked being alone, but I also liked having friends over to share my happiness; that summer was perhaps the closest I ever came to achieving a golden mean in this respect. It made me feel benevolent.

One day I was entertaining five or six friends when my brother called. He had tickets for the Cheap Trick concert that night and wondered if I wanted to come. This was a novel invitation and rather touching, though I wasn’t interested for any number of reasons; still, I wanted to make some sort of reciprocal gesture. I explained that I was busy that night (true), then asked if he’d like to come over and spend the day with me and my friends. It was the first time I’d ever willingly exposed others to the adult Scott, who seemed moved by the offer.

He rode over on a motorcycle he’d recently bought cheap from one of his coworkers. Full of my own benevolence, I pretended not to mind that he was drinking a beer as he rode up, sans helmet and license to operate a motorcycle or any other motorized vehicle. I looked at his eyes, assessed the slur in his voice, and figured he’d taken maybe a bong hit and drunk three or four beers. It could have been worse, and besides he seemed so happy to see me, just to be there, that I couldn’t bring myself to remark on the fact that he was half in the bag by noon and should be more careful, at least around my friends.

Everybody tried to be nice to Scott. They knew he had problems and knew, too, that there was something momentous about his being here at the pool—this brother whose existence I rarely acknowledged. My friends acted as if they’d been enlisted in a secret charity, as I suppose they had. Scott sat on the edge of the shallow end, near the gazebo and beer, while, one by one, my friends swam over to chat with him. After a few hours I began to relax a little—even to cast ahead to other such occasions, to plan a whole summer project of easing my brother into the social mainstream and presenting him, at last, to my proud father.

I was in the kitchen when I caught a glimpse of Scott lurching toward the bathroom. He caromed off a wall and splashed beer all over the floor, righting himself like a fullback pawing his way into the end zone with a scrappy bit of second effort. I dropped what I was doing and waited outside the bathroom. He was in there a long time, then burst out the door and collided with me full speed.

I got back on my feet and glared at him there on the floor. He was laughing and wanted me to laugh with him.

“What’ve you been taking?” I asked.

Scott looked hurt. “Whaddya
mean
? Justa few beers!” His head wobbled with denial.

“You are so full of shit.”

“Justa few
beers
. . .”

I went outside and asked my friends to leave—all but sweet-natured, redheaded Matt, my old pot-smoking companion, who came closest to being a confidant where drugs and my brother were concerned. Matt wanted to tell me something in private. The others didn’t have to ask what was wrong, as they’d already noticed (while I was gloating over my benevolence) that something odd was happening to Scott.

We were all standing around the driveway saying sheepish good-byes when one friend pointed to the roof and laughed. I looked. Scott had somehow clambered up there with Aaron’s banana-seat bicycle, which he was now poised (if that’s the word) to ride into the pool for our entertainment.

“You think that’s
funny
?” I said to my friends, all of whom had succumbed to a kind of sickly mirth—these people whose parents had never divorced and whose siblings were a lot of regular guys and gals just like themselves. “Get the hell outta here!” I started herding them into their cars, giving one of them an extra push when he paused to glance back at my brother, who’d apparently sensed he was losing his audience and rolled off the roof without further ado.

He wasn’t badly hurt. Ours was a largeish one-story house whose eaves were maybe eight feet off the ground. I found the little bicycle crumpled at the edge of the pool, its front wheel wanly spinning, while my brother sputtered “Fuck, my knee!” (laughing) and splashed around a bit before losing his balance and slipping underwater.

“
What’re you, fucking six years old?
” I yelled, when he came to the surface again. “What’ve you been taking?”

“Justa few
beers
. . .” Plaintive.

My friend Matt waved me inside. He seemed reluctant to speak. For maybe five minutes we just stood at the sliding door watching my brother, who was trying to mount a Styrofoam raft with a singular lack of success. Twenty or so times he jumped on belly-first, only to slip off the side or capsize, hugging the thing for dear life; then he tried hiking a leg over, both legs, both sides, many times . . . Plainly Scott lacked the coordination to board that raft—he fell fifty times, a hundred, it wasn’t going to happen—but he seemed to find meaning in the effort per se. The raft was his thing. At some point I changed clothes and rejoined Matt at the sliding door. Scott was still at it. He reminded me of a trick-riding clown I’d seen at the Vinita rodeo.

Finally Matt spoke: Scott, he said, had been shooting heroin in the bathroom. How did Matt know? Well, because Scott had offered him some.

“And what did you say?” I asked.

“I said no. I told him thanks, but no.”

“And what did he say?”

“He told me not to worry about needles. He said he’d, you know, do it for me.”

I thanked Matt and asked him to leave. Then I went outside and sat on a chaise longue by the pool. Scott had towed the raft to some steps in the shallow end, where he hoped to mount it in a sitting position; he stood on the top step and eyed that slab of Styrofoam as if it were a stabled bull.

“Having trouble?” I asked.

He spotted me there on the patio and broke into an ecstatic grin. We might have just encountered each other on the streets of a foreign city: What a surprise! Wie geht’s, old man? . . .

“So now you’re a junkie too?”

The smile wavered as he parsed this; then he looked plaintive again. “Whassa matter?” He looked at me with infinite self-pity: Why did I have to ruin everything? If he was happy, why couldn’t I be happy too?

I went inside and phoned our mother. I explained the situation. At first she didn’t believe me about the heroin, but when I told her what Matt had said (she knew Matt) and reminded her of what Burck and I had seen that day at the Earl Hotel, she believed it. She advised me to keep him there. I said it wouldn’t be easy. I told her about the motorcycle and the Cheap Trick concert; moreover I had a dinner engagement with an old family friend, the fat chef/magician at the Grand Boulevard Restaurant, Scott’s former employer.