Big Brother (29 page)

“It’s Italian. Given the price tag, the leather must have come from Kobe beef. But let me tell you, it was worth it. You look fantastic. You look like yourself.”

“
Was
it worth it? I don’t mean just the coat.”

“I have done one good thing. Maybe that’s what I want on
my
gravestone.”

Edison embraced me with fig-soft leather, and for a moment it did seem like his reincarnated trench coat: it had the same smell. I don’t know how long we might have remained that way if the doorbell hadn’t rung.

“Sorry I’m early.” Cody bustled in with a wrapped box, a sheaf of music under the other arm. “But I walked over, in case you need some help. Besides, I wanted to go over this riff I’ve been working up for the refrain of ‘The Boxer.’ You know, all those
lie-la-lies
sound kinda dorky, but the intervals have possibilities.” She dragged off her running shoes, and pulled a pair of dazzling high heels from her pack.

“You’re going to play tonight?” I asked. Pre-Edison, Cody would never have performed for a crowd.

“Of course! And Edison and I have been working up a duet. What else?” She slipped into the heels. “ ‘He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother’!” She gave Edison a high five and stepped back. “Hey, you look fucking sharp, man! Hip threads! And that coat is the shit!”

“Don’t look so bad yourself, sister.”

I thought the slinky, rhinestone-decked cocktail dress a little grown-up for her, but then, I would. At least she still enjoyed a girlish impatience, insisting her uncle open his present right away: a fat, numbered, limited-edition Miles box set of twelve LPs, including a bio, photos, liner notes, and soft, heavy sleeves. Edison was delighted. If the underappreciated castoff she’d been so excited about tripping across at a yard sale wasn’t the same as the set he’d lost to that self-storage joint, he didn’t let on.

“You’d better not have snuck any Mars bars, man,” she announced, sliding onto the piano bench. “ ’Cause I can’t wait to see my dad’s face plastered with fudge icing. Poor guy’s been on this
raw food
jag lately, and all I ever see him eat is carrots. Finally got him to admit his jaw aches. ”

N
ow, over the years I’ve been forced to conclude that most celebrations don’t work. The more carefully planned a signal occasion, the more likely it will trickle by on a pale tide of dilute well-meaningness. Christmases, birthdays, award ceremonies, and weddings are swallowed by planning and preparation on the one side and cleaning up on the other, and almost never seem to have actually happened. Speeches, applause, gift openings, presentations of plaques—somehow all these desperate gestures make the tribute fall only flatter, serve only to emphasize that an event has mysteriously failed to
occur.
I’m not sure what the problem is, besides a species-wide incapacity to seize the day, or a universal inability to anticipate that standing around with a drink in your hand is never going to be that great.

Yet once in a rare while the stars align, and a company convened for a purpose will be fully present. If we neatly lop off the very end of that evening—and let’s do—Edison Appaloosa’s Coming of Size party was one of those nights. I can’t remember any other gathering that pulsed so with pleasure on another’s behalf. For let’s not forget that our guests did not congregate in a vacuum, but in a particular place at a precise point in time, and in the American state of Iowa early in the twenty-first century there was nothing folks admired more than dropping 223 pounds in a single year. It was one of those rare social circumstances in which guests greeted their host at the door with, “Hey, you look terrific!” and meant it.

Most people arrived with food—lasagnas, Carlotta’s famous enchiladas, until we were running out of room on the barn-board table—and nearly everyone brought presents. Oliver, a handsome thirty-four-inch black belt pointedly lacking extra notches. Dr. Corcoran, a “World’s Best Patient” coffee mug. Novacek, alas, a book of two-for-one Pizza Hut coupons, on the premise that his scrawny tenant could now afford to splash out on garlic-butter stuffed crust. One of our bank tellers, who had herself tried every diet under the sun to little avail, produced a garish velour tracksuit that Edison wouldn’t be caught dead in, but he appreciated the nod toward his restored athleticism. Edison’s little fan club of students from Iowa City had discovered my brother’s discography online, and showed up with not only a top-shelf single malt, but copies of Edison’s own CDs that they wanted him to sign.

We waited until after nine to bestow his present from the employees at Baby Monotonous. I was determined not to be distracted by the fact that Fletcher had still not shown up.

“Look, man, I could see where I was headed.” Edison was holding court with the students beside the scale. “And it don’t matter if you do yourself in with smack, booze, or hot dogs. Coroner did the autopsy thought Bird was sixty years old, man. Poor fucker was thirty-four.”

I clapped. “Listen up!” Cody finished off “Mrs. Robinson” with a flourish as the crowd cleared a space. “I’m sorry for this to be so predictable”—I handed over the box—“but we worried that if you
didn’t
get one, you’d be heartbroken.”

Edison recognized the carton’s proportions; he’d packed enough of them himself. “What else? Edison Appaloosa,” he said before lifting the lid, “talking shit.”

I’d given my workers a heads up about the trench coat—which Edison had kept on all evening—and they’d sewn a miniature in sumptuous black leather, with the same raised collar and tie belt. A cigarette was stitched between two fingers, in acknowledgment that expecting him to drop his last bad habit was a bridge too far. I was especially pleased with the hair, which knurled in dark-blond curlicues as if the doll had been electrocuted, and on our slimmest model looked cool and rock-star, just as on Edison’s slender frame his real hair no longer imparted that Little Lord Fauntleroy quality of the spoiled toddler. He pulled the ring:

I was a
heavy cat
!

I’ve played with some
heavy cats
!

This Iowa trip is
deep
, you know what I’m sayin’?

Metheny is jive, man.

Wynton is jive, man.

Jarrett is such a douche. Bley is where it’s at.

Steely Dan ain’t
nothin’
without Wayne Shorter.

Where’s your ear, Panda Bear, that couldn’t be Ornette, it’s
tenor
sax!

Trouble is I never played with
Miles
, man.

Jazz
education
about
followin’
the rules,
jazz
about
breakin’
’em,
DIG
?

I lived on four envelopes of powder per day for six months. Beat that, motherfucker.

These cornfields are the shit!

Oliver had had a ball with the too-hip-by-half recording, but I’d had a disconcertingly difficult time writing the script. Though I’d thrown in the lines about the
heavy cats
and Miles as a nod to the boastful and sometimes bitter brother who was wheeled into Cedar Rapids Airport the year before, Edison Take 2 neither habitually trotted out celebrity colleagues, nor incessantly bewailed that if he’d only managed to associate himself with his field’s ultimate icon he’d be a star. He no longer carped about not having been born black. While the Edison doll I’d have crafted a year before would have sneered at Iowan hicks, he’d recently remarked at the fittingness of referring to the Midwest as America’s “heartland” with a straight face. At Solomon Drive, he’d been a slob; at Prague Porches, craving busywork, he’d become a neatnik. Curtailing his verbal incontinence had introduced my brother to the big wide world of listening to someone else. After our late-night confessional dialogues, he was far less prone to broadcast a numbing barrage about Charles Mingus or Chick Corea as a substitute for saying what he felt. I was at a loss to explain it, but he’d dropped a great deal more than weight, as a consequence of which my revamped brother was a challenge to parody. But if his double was only so witty, it was only so insulting, too, and Edison loved it.

The doorbell rang again, and my pulse womped. Everyone else was here.

I’d spent an atrocious proportion of the previous six months muttering indignant diatribes to my estranged husband, and when Cody let fly something cutting about her dad I lapped it up. I was furious with him, walking away when all I was trying to do was help my own brother, and I could get pretty unattractively self-righteous on this point. I’d even worried that when he showed up I’d lose my temper and ruin the evening with a shouting match. We’d never staged scenes in public in the past, but I was bursting with a sense of injustice, and maybe it wasn’t only Edison who had changed.

So it was a shock to open the door and melt. I’d forgotten how handsome he was—maybe not to every woman’s taste, but I found his Pinocchio pointiness appealing. He’d dressed in a nice shirt and slacks—respectfully, for Edison’s big night. His expression was anxious, his stance awkward. He wasn’t looking for a fight.

“Hey,” he said.

“Hey,” I said. We smiled.

“I brought a friend,” he said, and for one horrible instant before he stepped aside I thought he was about to introduce another woman.

“Tanner! You’re back!” I hugged my stepson, burnished with a California tan, and looking more grown-up, yet also chastened. “Is this for keeps, or just a visit?”

“For keeps, long as Dad’ll have me.”

“What happened in L.A.?”

“Oh, Pando. How long you got?”

“Not long enough for now. Go say hello to your uncle. Get yourself something to eat—there’s loads. Since you’re eighteen, and under parental supervision”—I glanced at Fletcher for permission—“you might as well have a drink.”

“Christ, is that
Edison
?” Tanner last saw his uncle a hundred pounds heavier.

“Essence of Edison.” Once Tanner left to clap my brother on the back, I lingered in the foyer. “Thanks for coming.”

“I said I would.”

“You always do what you say you’ll do.”

“Yes, though—that can be a problem.” He touched my elbow. “You look beautiful.”

“Thanks.” I wondered why he couldn’t have extended the compliment when it would have meant so much to me at Java Joint back in April.

“I haven’t nixed the whole idea,” Tanner was telling Edison. “But I couldn’t stand the idea of ending up like that. God, he never shut up about all this boring crap he did ages ago. Really started getting to me. Like, don’t take this wrong, but your dad is sad. I don’t mean depressed, even if he should be. I mean
sad
. And those actors from
JC
? Sinclair? Tiffany?
Loooooo-sers.
”

“He’s agreed to finish high school,” said Fletcher. “You were right.”

“My, I don’t hear that very often.”

“You might be hearing it a lot more often from now on.”

“That’ll be a change. That is, hearing anything.”

“Your brother looks fantastic. You’ve worked a miracle.”

“It’s not my accomplishment,” I demurred, though just then it did feel like my accomplishment. I’d never been good at drawing or painting; Edison Redux was my lone work of art.

Lacking a glass—all night, I’d yet to see him imbibe a thing—my brother rapped the scale for quiet. “Yo, since I see our doubting Thomas has made his appearance, it’s time for our little soirée’s
piece of resistance
. You folks ready, man?
Dig this.
” He shrugged out of his heavy coat, and handed it to me. He slipped off his shoes as well before stepping up to the stern arbiter of his whole last year. The needle swung up, down, up again, and settled: just over 161.

The room erupted. I have never attended a single sporting event, church service, concert, musical, or election victory rally that duplicated the same explosion of spontaneous joy. I don’t want to sound sacrilegious, but on a throne from Walmart my brother exuded a messianic promise for everyone in that room. What he’d done wasn’t only about becoming more attractive or less prone to diabetes. He’d proved it possible to reverse the most nefarious of misfortunes: those that you’ve authored yourself.

Edison raised his hand for the cheers to die down. “Listen, man. It’s been a long year. But it’s also been one of the best years. Maybe
the
best. I’ve got down with this Iowa thing. Like the doll says, ‘
These cornfields are the shit!
’ But otherwise . . .” If he’d rehearsed the speech in his head, he was getting emotional, and the prepared phrases had fled. “I’d never’ve been able to do this by myself, man. It’s fucking lonely when you can’t go out to eat with cats or even meet for a drink. You got no idea how time drags without food! And we all have those moments of weakness, know what I’m sayin’? I needed company, and moral support, and even somebody to figure out how to fucking
do
this, when losing two hundred twenty-three big ones—”

“Two-twenty-
five
!” shouted Cody.

“Well, you can imagine at the beginning it seemed motherfucking impossible. And then when I got on a roll, I also needed somebody to force me to get real. Since there was a point, I swear, I wasn’t puttin’ another bite in my mouth for the rest of my life, and without a gun to my head and a bowl of soup I might have died. See, most of all I needed somebody who believed in me more than I believed in myself. Who loved me more than I loved myself. Who was willing to put more on the line than I’d ever put on the line for anybody else. So I want you all to raise a glass, man.”

Oliver poured Edison a glass of wine, which, post-weigh-in, he accepted.

“To my sister, Pandora.”

“To Pandora!” our guests shouted raucously back, draining glasses in a gulp.

Edison pulled me up with him on the scale. I glanced behind us at the dial: together we totaled over a hundred pounds less than my brother had once weighed by himself. He put an arm around me and smiled wickedly at my husband.

“Now, as some of you folks know, Fletch here was
skeptical
that his wife’s, quote, ‘lardbucket’ of a brother had it in him to go the distance. The resolve of this, quote, ‘broke, homeless, self-indulgent food junkie’ was sure to collapse, because if you put Edison Appaloosa in a room with a plate of french fries, quote, ‘the spuds win every time.’ This cat was so sure he had my number—which at that time was three-eighty-six—that he promised to eat a whole chocolate cake in a sitting if I ever hit one-sixty-three. So now my pal here ain’t just gonna eat it; he’s gonna
fletcherize
the bastard. Cody—you wanna do the honors?”