The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (19 page)

And so on, as if he were terribly bored with the whole business but willing to be good-humored about it. A lovable old pro. In fact it
was
rather impressive the way his manner changed as soon as taping began: his face went blank and he nailed it on the first take; then, the moment it was over, he plucked off his mic and sauntered away like Sinatra. The others responded to Scott with a kind of meek, long-suffering patience—he was older than they, and vaguely dangerous, and besides they seemed to know (even if Scott didn’t) that they wouldn’t have to suffer him much longer.

Sure enough he was fired the following week. Having seen what I saw, I wasn’t surprised; as for Scott, he affected to be at peace with it. “
Such
a bullshit job,” he said, going on about what an “embarrassment” it was to be associated with such a “poorly managed” enterprise. I replied that the competence of management wasn’t his immediate concern as an intern, a point he seemed to concede with a little chuckle. He asked me not to tell our mother about it, and for weeks he continued to leave her house “to go to work,” until finally he moved into a rental home owned by our father.

BURCK WAS PAINFULLY
aware that Sandra and her children didn’t like me and only tolerated Scott, but he wouldn’t let go of the hope that sooner or later we’d come to appreciate each other’s finer qualities. To that end he organized a family trip to Santa Fe for Christmas in 1992—the first time in years we were all together for more than a day or so, and this time Scott was included.

Two nights before I boarded the plane to New Mexico, I got in a bar fight. After a long season of cloistered tippling I was restless, and ended up sucker-punching a guy who’d called me a faggot during a pool game. Turned out he had a lot of friends. Happily the damage was mostly internal, a few creaky ribs, though I had enough of a shiner at the airport to confirm Sandra’s view of me as a dissolute character. My father held me off after a welcoming hug and whistled. I said he should see the other guy, that I’d been defending a friend and so forth (though of course the opposite was true, and in fact the episode had strained the one good friendship I had in New Orleans). While I stood there, quipping and lying, I happened to glance at Sandra’s face: for a moment it seemed pinched with such loathing—before flashing back to a tired smile—that I wondered if I’d hallucinated it. Her children were already heading off to Baggage Claim.

It was no hallucination. That night at dinner I found that if I looked away from Sandra even for a moment, her face would resume its scowl, a spectral presence in my peripheral vision. As for Kelli and Aaron, I couldn’t bear to look at them at all. For a while I spoke to my father as though he were the only one at the table, until his face hardened in such a way as to suggest I include the others. I managed a smile and turned to Kelli.

“So Kelli. What’re you up to these days?”

“What’re
you
up to these days?”

That was worse than I’d expected, and whatever I managed to stammer about my teaching certificate, etc., came out as disingenuous, affected, self-congratulatory—whatever bad thing they wanted it to be. When I was done Kelli went on talking to her brother as though she’d been pointlessly interrupted.

Scott arrived the next day, and we all went skiing. My father and I were decent intermediates, Kelli and Sandra could wend their way down the green slopes in a wary snowplow, Aaron was a hotdog, and Scott had never skied in his life. Still he insisted on taking the main lift to the top of the mountain without so much as a single lesson. Our father patiently explained to him about bending his knees and traversing to break his speed, whereupon Scott wobbled a few yards and fell down. Thus he descended in bruising increments. For my part I was glad to find I’d lost none of my old skill: I’d ski within inches of where Scott lay sprawled after his latest wipeout and swish a bit of powder onto his prone form; once, while he was struggling to get up, I jumped over him as if I couldn’t wait for him to get out of the way. Scott seemed to take it all in stride.

Finally, after we’d left him on the bunny slope with a beginners’ class, my father turned to me on the lift. His face was flushed with more than the cold.

“Stop making fun of him!”

I was startled by his vehemence, and muttered something about how Scott of all people could take a joke.

My father shook his head. “It’s not
good
for him. He doesn’t
need
that right now. Don’t you think his self-esteem is banged up enough as it is?”

I could scarcely doubt my father’s sincerity, but I still thought he was overreacting. I said it wasn’t a question of “self-esteem”: Scott had never gone skiing, for heaven’s sake; there was no reason he should expect to be any good. My father just shook his head and lapsed into a glowering silence. Years would pass before I finally got it: Scott’s incompetence as a skier, to which I had the bad taste to advert, was due to the fact that he’d never been welcome in the old days, when my father and I had taken a number of ski trips while Scott was banished, down and out. Our relative skill was a reminder that for long periods of time we’d conducted our lives entirely separate from his, as if he didn’t exist.

THAT NIGHT, AFTER
our parents went to bed, Scott and I abolished whatever benefit of the doubt our stepsiblings were willing to grant us. In the hotel bar for a nightcap, we made it clear to Kelli and Aaron that we meant to drink until we got drunk, and moreover to charge these drinks to our rooms (and hence our father).
Room
, rather: whereas Kelli and Aaron had separate rooms, Scott and I had to share a single. For this reason and certain ineffable others, we felt entitled, and anyway we were too broke to pay the tab ourselves.

But then, our father’s largesse was well-known to us all, the fact that he himself would hardly have minded: it was a vacation; it was Christmas; it was his treat. What Kelli and Aaron really wanted was a definite moral advantage, some rational vindication of a largely instinctive loathing.

“You’re ordering
another
?” said Kelli.

Scott and I tapped glasses and nodded. The fullness of her reproach was suggested by her refusal to look at us, a lofty sidelong sigh. Aaron sipped his one stale beer. And still they remained to keep us company, perhaps to keep an eye on us, to commit our enormities to memory.

THE NEXT MORNING
it was obvious they’d lost no time tattling on us. The three of them, Sandra and her children, dourly kept their distance; Kelli and Aaron seemed to be nursing their mother through a wasting illness. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that they despised me in good times and bad, drunk or sober, whether I was inclined to ingratiate myself or not. Hating me was dogma. As for Scott, he was simply weird and not much of a threat, though his weirdness had long ago lost its charm.

I wasn’t sure how much my father knew about the night before. It was possible Sandra had spared him the whole painful tale of our lavish drinking, or perhaps he was simply making the best of what was proving a pretty grim business. In any case he seemed cheerful enough, if a bit worried by his wife’s worsening mood.

Sandra and her kids stayed in town that day to shop and commiserate; my father drove Scott and me to the ski basin without them. I sat in the back of the car and brooded over the awfulness of it all while we listened to a mix tape of country-western tunes that Scott had made for our father. Scott was especially proud of the segues between songs—part of his deejay training—the way each song blended seamlessly into the next, how the whole tape seemed a kind of continuous country-western symphony. “Listen to that!” he’d say, one trembling finger aloft. “
Shit
. Wasn’t that
perfect
?” I thought of my brother, unemployed these many months, spending untold hours perfecting his segues; if Kelli and Aaron were with us, no doubt they’d have rolled their eyes or, worse, praised Scott exuberantly for his prowess. This increased my sense of grievance, though of course I too found Scott’s segue talk ridiculous.

I wasn’t much of a conversationalist as Burck and I rode the lift. In better days our incidental banter had been as easy as breathing, but now I felt sure my stepfamily was bent on dismantling our rapport piece by piece, until they could cart my father away, sift what they needed, and remake him in their own image. I was damned if I’d take it lying down.

“Look,” I said, after we’d dismounted at the top of the mountain. “I’m tired of being the bad guy in this outfit. Those stepchildren of yours slander me every chance they get, and I’ve never said a word against them . . .”

This was partly true: while I sometimes tried to entice my father into admitting their less endearing qualities—he’d oblige me only in the vaguest way (“Kelli can be pretty strong mustard”; “school isn’t Aaron’s strong suit”)—I was careful not to disparage them outright. But there on the slopes I opened the floodgates at last.

“I take a drink and the first thing they do is run to Mommy and tell her what a lush I am. I make a joke that Sandra doesn’t like and the first thing she does is complain to her kids. And they talk about what a
drunk
I am, what a
shit
I am, what a
shame
it is that such a good man should have fathered two rotten sons. I’m sick of it! What’d I ever do to them?”

My father listened with weary patience, but what could he do that he hadn’t done before? What could he say? Now and then he fogged the air with his unhappy sighs.

THAT NIGHT WAS
Christmas Eve, and Sandra had wanted us to walk along the “Christmas Trail” that went past shops and quaint adobe cottages on Canyon Road, lined on either side with the little paper lanterns called farolitos. It was what one did on Christmas Eve in Santa Fe; she’d been looking forward to it. By the time we set out, though, she was markedly subdued, and I knew my father had tried talking to her about my various complaints. No doubt she’d rebutted him with a bitter account of my drinking the night before, which had led to God knows what. I was glad I hadn’t been a fly on that wall.

The Christmas Trail was a sort of darkling carnival midway, with lots of Indians pretending to be picturesque local artisans, hawking their mass-produced wares. From either side of the flickering trail they leered and beckoned; jaded carolers were stationed at intervals along the path. Sandra’s shoulders sagged beneath the serape she’d bought that afternoon for the occasion. I was careful not to say a word, though my brother felt no such compunction.

“I think I’ll treasure this memory until the day I die, Zwieb . . . You carve that yourself?”—this to a cross-legged Indian who nodded guardedly, as though his English were none too good. “That guy back there carved one exactly like it! Is he your cousin or something? . . . Wow, this trail just goes on and on. Hell no, I don’t want to turn around; I hope it goes on forever! Don’t you, Zwieb?”

And he wasn’t even drunk. The worst part was the way he included me in his mockery, as though we were in cahoots about finding this Christmas Trail (and by implication Sandra herself) the epitome of kitsch. Sandra walked along like Christ en route to Golgotha, supported on either side by her Samaritan children. For the moment she didn’t want my father’s comfort; he was to blame for bringing me into the world, after all.

“Well, it
seemed
like a nice idea,” she’d sigh from time to time. “I just wanted everyone to have fun . . .”

All this was directed at me. As far as Sandra was concerned, my brother was little more than a hooting Id, a malicious puppet I used to torment her. And she may have had a point there, since his mockery was entirely for my benefit, and indeed the reason—or one reason—he hated her was because she hated me. Scott was nothing if not loyal.

And still there were four days left to our family vacation. We hastily opened presents after the Christmas Trail debacle, then went our separate ways. That meant I was stuck with Scott’s company for the rest of the trip. My father had wisely decided to devote himself to mollifying his wife.

If you were with the adult Scott for only an hour or so, it’s possible you’d leave the meeting with an impression of—well, not normalcy exactly, but a kind of refreshing eccentricity. Our first lunch alone together, the day after Christmas, was like that. We ate in the hotel restaurant (so we could charge the meal to our father) and drank nothing stronger than wine, which was enough to push me beyond our usual banter. I baited him about his ongoing joblessness, his refusal to get on with life at age thirty-two. Whether I was witty or cruel or both, he responded with the same good humor, as though he were simply glad to be spending time with me after the long separations of the past decade.

“I don’t know, Zwieb. For almost five years I worked hard in the service of my country. I figure I deserve some time off.”

“It’s been almost a year.”

“What about my job at Channel Four?”

“That lasted—what? Three months?”

“Three and a half. Also I worked at a few restaurants.”

“Just can’t find the right venue?”

He laughed. “I don’t know, Zwieb. When you’ve worked in the business as long as I have”—he said this as though he’d managed a string of renowned bistros in Provence— “you get picky. I just can’t stand being around fuckups.”

“And yet it may shock you to learn that there are those who consider
you
a fuckup.”

Still he laughed, which emboldened me to widen my field of attack. I began to recount every lurid highlight from his long career: the arrests, the car wrecks, the lost jobs, the drugs, on and on. “That was a long time ago,” he’d say, or “That car was a piece of shit anyway,” or “What? You’ve never been fired before?” or “What? You’ve never smoked a little pot?”

“Scott!” I said finally, throwing my hands up with a wondering laugh. “Face it! You’re a disgrace!”

His face mottled a little, but he looked thoughtful. “I don’t think that’s true,” he said. “I think I’m a very nice person. I’m just not—” He paused, searching the rafters for the right phrase; then he smiled. “I’m just not conventionally ambitious.”