Big Brother (19 page)

It had seemed lucky at the time, but his getting the big breaks when he was only twenty or so wasn’t lucky at all. When things go swimmingly at that age you think it’s just the beginning, because you’ve been instantly recognized as one of the Chosen People. I was increasingly antagonistic to this designation, not only for Edison, but for myself and my kids. No, nothing was wrong with feeling valuable in some way, if deservedly so. But Edison had always regarded himself as exceptional in a manner that was indolent and presumptuous. His character would have profited in his twenties from, say, working on the assembly line of an air-conditioner plant. I had never worked harder than when running Breadbasket, and in sweating over four gallons of tomato sauce I came to appreciate the hard work of others around me—the deliverymen, the bakers, the postal workers, most of their toil unsung. No one ever told them that they were special.

Tanner expected the same instant recognition the moment he bestowed his literary largesse on Steven Spielberg. The only cure for this ignorant arrogance is fetching lattes for a decade and staying up nights slaving over scripts you now realize no one wants to read. Only gradually do you come to appreciate that the occupation you aspire to is harder than you thought, that the supply of other young, self-anointed apples of their own eyes is inexhaustible, and that you’re not as uniquely gifted as you’d thought. It’s surely a fine emotional art—dousing your hollow hauteur without quenching the fire in your belly altogether—but the kids who master it come out the other side both shit-hot at their professions and bearable as human beings.

There must have been a jazz equivalent of paying the dues that my brother was now forking over in middle age, and he’d have fared better to have had the callowness beaten out of him when he was young enough to bounce back. A surprisingly large number of up-and-comers in every generation fancy themselves geniuses waiting to be discovered, and having that baseless self-regard ratified while on the penumbra of adulthood can be ruinous. I hate to say it, since I remember my school days as forlorn, and then in our teens we lost our mother, but the truth is that Edison and I grew up spoiled, basking in the glow cast by a father whom all of our classmates recognized off the set. What my brother had needed when he ventured out on his own at seventeen was a good kick in the pants, and I could connect our spoiled upbringing, and the seamless continuation of this pampering when he obtained high-profile come-hithers as a fledgling performer, to his current size.

I remembered Edison from that era, when at eighteen I visited him for the first time in New York. He had energy, and older musicians fed off his sense of discovery at the keyboard. That freshness was electric, and contagious; I could see why they all wanted to play with him. Only later would I pose the perfidious question: Had his surname opened doors? The series then airing its last few seasons, he must have raised bemused eyebrows with “Appaloosa.” I wouldn’t dismiss my brother’s talent, but one revelation you’re denied when the waters part too readily in your youth is that lots of people are talented. Even an irrelevant novelty can single out one from the pack.

In any case, it must have come as a shock when, rather than rocket further into the jazz stratosphere, by thirty he’d started to founder. (I was staggered he’d resorted to calling himself Caleb Fields, even briefly.) I’d never envied people who peak early, condemned forever more to reminisce about a stellar past they’d not been savvy enough to appreciate as parvenus. Arguably, by mid-career Edison would have been better off falling flat on his face, obliging him to make a go of something else. By his mid-forties, he couldn’t imagine himself doing anything but play jazz piano, and he’d found just enough work all these years to keep him in the game. It was a trap. I’d seen the type in the entertainment world of L.A., people who get so far and no farther, seething resentfully on the margins at people who direct real Hollywood movies or act in real Broadway plays. These near misses often get just enough reward here and there that they won’t give up, but their occasional small successes are in some ways worse than nothing. Failure affords release.

“So,” I introduced over the day’s final packet of Blip-Sup, which we had learned to sip at a contemplative pace. “When we left off, you’d become a conceited prima donna and suffered the consequences. What happened next?”

“Well, this is out of order . . . Just promise you won’t freak out.”

“On five hundred and eighty calories a day, I don’t have the energy to freak out.”

“Sigrid. When she was pregnant. Like, eight months. Anyway, she walked into one of my rehearsals, and I was high.”

“On what?”

“I don’t mean pot, which would make for a piss-poor story. The real thing.”

“You took
heroin
?”

“You promised you wouldn’t freak out! And I don’t mean I was a junkie. Takes an average of
ten years
to get
physically
addicted to that shit, which out here in
Iowa
nobody would realize.”

“We have one of the worst meth problems in the country, so don’t pull rank.”

“Anyway, big deal, I tried it. You know why Bird was so great, don’t you? He was high. So you have to try getting high to understand the music. He could play that out because he didn’t give a shit. You want me to ‘not care so much what other people think of me’? Score me some smack.”

“You can’t imagine I’m going to buy the idea that taking heroin is an obligation of your profession, like practicing scales.”

“Yeah, well, Sigrid didn’t buy that, either. I’d already pushed it being . . . you know, not always what you’d call considerate. With the kid on the way, the smack was the last straw. She turned heel that afternoon and packed her bags.”

“Did you keep taking it?”

“Nah. It was a little
too
good, if you know what I’m sayin’. Made me nervous. You think I got no discipline—”

“I never said that, Fletcher did. And look at you: two days on eight envelopes of guck.”

“It was a short flirtation, few months max. Never touched it again. For Sigrid, it was too late. I made one big appeal after Carson was born, but I made the mistake of getting wasted on JD first. ’Cause I was nervous. Not the best way to present my case. She wasn’t impressed.”

“Did you . . . did you drink a lot?”

“For a while. But I pulled up short from that, too. Can’t play too good plastered. Got sloppy.”

“I’m just getting the impression that it’s always been something.”

“Please don’t say I got an ‘addictive personality.’ ”

“I didn’t. You did.”

“A large pepperoni pizza, in the scale of things, seemed the least bad option. I could still play the fucking piano.”

“But when did you stop buying slices and order the whole pie? More to the point, why? When you visited us four years ago, you were trim as ever.”

Edison rubbed his face. “It’s hard to get the chronology right. The last time I came to see you, I may not have been playing at the top—like, maybe I hadn’t got into the Vanguard in ten years. But that’s mainly because the owner never forgave me for walking offstage when some bozos by the bar kept blathering through the whole first set. I was totally within my rights, too, and if it had been Jarrett? She’d have backed up the musicians, and tossed those bridge-and-tunnel rubes out on their ear.”

“Edison. You were going to explain why you started to overeat.”

“I’m tryin’, man, I’m tryin’! But I gotta set the table, if you know what I’m sayin’. Point is, I still had connections, still had a rep. Lotta cats, even younger cats, were
grateful
to play with me. But you got any idea what a place like Cornelia
pays
? Like, on a weekend, maybe a hundred bucks. That’s before dinner and cab fare. The Jazz Gallery pays
zilch
. Clubs like Barbès in Brooklyn, I’m lucky to walk out with forty. I was playing every sorry gig I could get my hands on, but I was slipping behind, man. Coming up short on the rent. Once I got three months in arrears, if I didn’t do something I was gonna get evicted. So I didn’t see no other way out, man. I just didn’t see no other way out.” Edison was shaking his head with his chin in his hand. I gave him time.

“So,” he resumed. “I sold the fucking piano.”

“Oh, no!” Edison’s Schimmel was the first major purchase he’d made with the proceeds of those more lucrative early years, and it was his most prized possession. At under six feet, the piano wasn’t quite a grand, but it had tyrannized his every relocation. “I thought you said it was in storage.”

“I did
store
it, didn’t I? In somebody else’s house.”

“What was it worth?”

“More than I got for it,” he said bitterly. “I swear the day they hauled that sweet instrument outta my place was worse than the day Sigrid walked. And the
timing
was sorta dark. See, once the movers left, I shuffled off to get me some ciggies. And what’s on the newsstand, fresh that day?
New York
magazine. My own sister grinning from the cover. A little more
rounded
than I remembered, so it took me a second.”

“You should be glad I could stand to drop a pound or two,” I said coldly, “or you wouldn’t have any company on this diet.”

“Touchy, touchy! I call myself a fat motherfucker, you can handle
rounded
.”

I
was
touchy—and irritable. I envied Edison his cigarettes, the distraction, the occupation of his hands. Sugarless mints didn’t do the trick. Uncut by passing the macaroni, pure talk was draining. At least the literal draining of herbal tea and diet soda meant I had to keep heading for the bathroom. I now looked forward to peeing: it was something to do.

“I asked you what set off this food bender,” I said on return, “and you keep talking about something else.”

“No, I’m
not
talking about something else. That day—I’m selling my piano to stay alive, which is cannibalism, man—it’s like gnawing your own arm to keep from starving. At the very same time my kid sister’s rolling in it, some kind of industrial—magnate! Talk about rubbing it in! Well, far as I can pinpoint it, that’s where it started. I beelined to a joint on the corner that served a mean rack of ribs. Corn muffins, mashed potatoes. Soon as I polished off that first rack, I ordered another one. Then I had the mud cake. Think I had two of those, too. It just seemed—like I deserved it, like a good feed was the least I could ask. I don’t even remember feeling full.”

“I don’t get it. What did an article about pull-string dolls have to do with you?”

“You can’t be that stupid. You obviously find it incredibly satisfying, so go ahead. Enjoy. One of us should get something out of it, and it ain’t gonna be me.”

I squinted. “You’re not blaming me for your getting fat, are you?”

Edison rolled his eyes. “It’s not about you, it’s about me in
relation
to you, dig?”

Okay, I didn’t want to play innocent to the point of seeming an idiot. Siblings did use each other as yardsticks. Yet I’d never begrudged Edison his accomplishments, which I’d so venerated that for years I’d turned a willful blind eye to the fact that he’d been struggling. If I’d ever preened about running my own catering business, it was only to impress him. I was dumbfounded why having been born three years later would make so much difference. “I wasn’t trying to
beat
you.”

“Well, you did. If you beat me without trying, that’s even worse.”

“What good has it done me? Travis hates me. And keeps pretending I’m nothing but a housewife. You hate me, from the sound of it—”

“Gimme a break! Maybe I wouldn’t get much of a kick out of making dolls. But to say hitting the big time all over these magazines as a nationally celebrated
entrepreneur
, and making I don’t know how much bread in the process, to say that hasn’t done you ‘any good’—well, babe, that’s just ridiculous. Travis hating you—in the way that you mean—well, I want Travis to hate
me
like that. It’s a compliment, that level of resentment. You make him mad. I make him laugh.”

“If you really want to impress Travis—or make him ‘resent’ you, which I guess is the next best thing—then you lose that weight.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake, anybody can go on a
diet.
”

“No, anybody can’t. It’s the one thing most people can’t do. Haven’t the last couple of days been hard? They’ve been hard for me. I can’t stand it. All I can think about is food.”

“Being slimmer of the year,” he said, “ain’t what I ever wanted to be famous for.”

“Maybe nobody dreams of growing up to be formerly fat. But they sure don’t dream of growing up to be fat. If only because—when you walk down the street, it’s all people see. You big as a house, but in any meaningful way you’re invisible.”

“Maybe I like it that way.”

“That makes a lot of sense. Jazz pianist with ambitions to international renown seeks above all to pass by unnoticed.”

“It does make sense, if you understand me at all.” Edison lit another cigarette. I was starting to regret letting him smoke in the apartment, which already stank, and his consumption had skyrocketed. But yanking his last crutch would have seemed like abuse of the disabled.

“ . . . You didn’t buy it, did you.” It wasn’t really a question.

“Buy what?” He knew perfectly well.

“
New York
magazine. Your own sister on the cover, and you grabbed your Camels and walked away.”

“It was five bucks!”

“You wouldn’t have bought it if it was ten cents.” The jibe had a dolorous cast. “But back to the piano. I don’t understand why before selling the Schimmel you didn’t come to me.”

“You have no idea. You’re so used to being the middle kid in our family that you can’t get your head around what it might be like to be me.”

“If I were in dire straights I wouldn’t hesitate to come to you, if I thought you could spare the money.”

“Exactly.”

“I don’t understand.”

“No, you don’t.”

“This is all some . . . birth-order nonsense?”