Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim (14 page)

When it came to weddings, she psychically read the prospective bride and groom, divining their innermost selves and using her findings to tailor unique, personally significant vows.

“Well, I, for one, think that that is really beautiful,” Lisa said.

“I know you do,” the psychic said. “I know you do.”

The marines filed out of the gazebo, and we moved in to take their seats. “Who does that woman think she is?” Lisa whispered. “I mean, come on, I was only trying to be polite.”

“I know you were,” I said. “I know you were.”

J.D. the DJ was stuck in bridge traffic, so the ceremony commenced without the prerecorded wedding march. Lisa predictably started howling the moment the bride rounded the Coke machine and came into view on the arm of her father. The dogs followed suit, and determined not to join them, I looked beyond the psychic’s shoulder, to a small patch of ocean visible through the trees. It was the place where, twenty-two years earlier, my brother had come very close to drowning. We’d been horsing around at high tide and looked up to find ourselves on the other side of the waves, drifting farther and farther from the hotel. It wasn’t natural to be out that far, and so I swam for shore, thinking he was right behind me.

“Greetings, friends and family,” the psychic said. “We stand on . . .” She looked at the bride, towering over my pint-size brother. “We stand on tiptoes this afternoon to celebrate the love of . . . Paul and Kathy.”

He wasn’t supposed to be out at that time of day, especially with me. “You wind him up,” my mother said. “For God’s sakes, just give it a rest.” When accused of winding up my sisters, I’d always felt a hint of shame, but I liked the fact that I could adequately enthuse a twelve-year-old boy. As an older brother, it was my job, and I liked to think that I was good at it. I swam for what felt like the length of a pool, then stopped and turned around. But Paul wasn’t there.

“This love cannot be bought . . . in a store,” the psychic said. “It cannot be found . . . under a tree, beneath a . . . shell, or even in a . . .” You could see her groping for a possible hiding place. “Even in a . . . treasure chest buried centuries ago on the . . . historic islands that surround us.”

A swell moved in, and my brother went under, leaving only his right arm, which waved the international sign language for “I am going to die now and it is all your fault.” I headed back in his direction, trying to recall the water-safety class I’d taken years earlier at the country club. Think, I told myself. Think like a man. I tried to focus, but all that came to me was the instructor, an athletic seventeen-year-old named Chip Pancake. I remembered the spray of freckles on his broad, bronzed shoulders and my small rush of hope as he searched the assembled students for a resuscitation victim. Oh, choose me, I’d whispered. Me! Over here. I recalled the smell of hamburgers drifting from the clubhouse, the sting of the life jacket against my sunburned back, and the crushing disappointment I felt when Chip selected Patsy Pyle, who would later describe the experience as “life-changing.” These are not the sorts of memories that save lives, so I abandoned the past and relied instead upon instinct.

“We ask that this marriage be blessed with as many graces as there are . . . grains of sand in the . . . ocean.”

In the end, I just sort of grabbed Paul by the hair and yelled at him to lie flat. He vomited a mouthful of seawater, and together we kicked our way back to the beach, washing ashore a good half mile from the hotel. Lying side by side, catching our breath in the shallow surf, it seemed a moment in which something should be said, some declaration of relief and brotherly love.

“Listen,” I started. “I just want you to know . . .”

“Fuck you,” Paul had said to me.

“I do,” Paul now said to Kathy.

“I just never thought I’d see this day,” Lisa blubbered.

My brother kissed his bride, and the psychic looked out at her audience, nodding her head as if to say, “I knew that would happen.”

Cameras clicked and a wind kicked up, blowing Kathy’s veil and train straight into the air. Her look of surprise, his frantic embrace — in resulting photographs it would appear as if she’d dropped from the sky, caught at the last moment by someone who would now introduce himself as the luckiest man in the world.

At the reception my brother danced the worm, throwing himself on his belly as the Dudes chanted, “Party, fat man, party.” My father delivered a brief, awkward speech while waving a rubber chicken and again the cameras flashed.

“I cannot believe you,” I said. “A rubber chicken?”

He claimed he’d been unable to find a rubber rooster, and I explained that that wasn’t really the point. “Not everyone has the ability to improvise,” I said. “Where were your notes? Why didn’t you come to me for help?”

If I was hard on him, it was because I’d wanted to deliver the big speech. I’d been planning on it since Paul was a boy, but nobody had asked me. Now I’d have to wait until his funeral.

At one A.M. the room rental ended and plans were made to move the reception onto the beach. Kathy changed out of her gown while Paul and I took the dogs for a quick walk across the front lawn of the Atlantis. For the first time since the wedding we were alone, and I wanted to force a moment out of it. The operative word here, the source of the problem, is force. Because it never works that way. In trying to be memorable, you wind up sounding unspeakably queer, which may be remembered but never the way you’d hoped. My brother had spent his life saving me from such moments, and now he would do it again.

A light rain began to fall, and just as I cleared my throat, Venus squatted in the grass, producing a mound of peanut-size turds.

“Aren’t you going to clean that up?” I asked.

Paul pointed to the ground and whistled for the Great Dane, which thundered across the lawn and ate the feces in one bite.

“Tell me that was an accident,” I said.

“Accident, hell. I got this motherfucker trained,” he said. “Sometimes he’ll stick his nose to her ass and just eat that shit on tap.”

I thought of my brother standing in his backyard and training a dog to eat shit and realized I’d probably continue thinking about it until the day I die. Forget the tears and brotherly speeches, this was the stuff that memories are made of.

The Great Dane licked his lips and searched the grass for more. “What was it you were going to say?” Paul asked.

“Oh, nothing.”

From their perch atop an endangered dune, the Dudes emitted a war cry. Kathy called out from the door of her room, and together with his dogs, my brother set forth, spreading a love that could not be found under a tree, beneath a shell, or even in a treasure chest buried centuries ago on the historic islands that surrounded us.

Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Denim

Possession

F INDING AN APARTMENT is a lot like falling in love," the real estate agent told us. She was a stylish grandmother in severe designer sunglasses. Dyed blond hair, black stockings, a little scarf tied just so around the throat: for three months she drove us around Paris in her sports car, Hugh up front and me folded like a lawn chair into the backseat.

At the end of every ride I’d have to teach myself to walk all over again, but that was just a minor physical complaint. My problem was that I already loved an apartment. The one we had was perfect, and searching for another left me feeling faithless and sneaky, as if I were committing adultery. After a viewing, I’d stand in our living room, looking up at the high, beamed ceiling and trying to explain that the other two-bedroom had meant nothing to me. Hugh took the opposite tack and blamed our apartment for making us cheat. We’d offered, practically begged, to buy it, but the landlord was saving the place for his daughters, two little girls who would eventually grow to evict us. Our lease could be renewed for another fifteen years, but Hugh refused to waste his love on a lost cause. When told our apartment could never truly be ours, he hung up the phone and contacted the real estate grandmother, which is what happens when you cross him: he takes action and moves on.

The place was dead to him, but I kept hoping for a miracle. A riding accident, a playhouse fire: lots of things can happen to little girls.

When looking around, I tried to keep an open mind, but the more places we visited, the more discouraged I became. If the apartment wasn’t too small, it was too expensive, too modern, too far from the center of town. I’d know immediately that this was not love, but Hugh was on the rebound and saw potential in everything. He likes a wreck, something he can save, and so he became excited when, at the end of the summer, the grandmother got a listing for what translated to “a nicely situated whorehouse.” His feeling grew as we made our way up the stairs and blossomed when the door was unlocked and the smell of stagnant urine drifted into the hall. The former tenants had moved out, leaving clues to both their size and their temperament. Everything from the waist down was either gouged, splintered, or smeared with a sauce of blood and human hair. I found a tooth on the living-room floor, and what looked to be an entire fingernail glued with snot to the inside of the front door. Of course, this was just me: Mr. Bad Mouth. Mr. Negative. While I was searching for the rest of the body, Hugh was racing back and forth between the hole that was a kitchen and the hole that was a bathroom, his eyes glazed and dopey.

We’d shared this expression on first seeing the old apartment, but this time he was on his own, feeling something that I could not. I tried to share his enthusiasm — “Look, faulty wiring!” — but there was a hollowness to it, the sound of someone who was settling for something and trying hard to pretend otherwise. It wasn’t a horrible place. The rooms were large and bright, and you certainly couldn’t argue with the location. It just didn’t knock me out.

“Maybe you’re confusing love with pity,” I told him, to which he responded, “If that’s what you think, I really feel sorry for you.”

The grandmother sensed my lack of enthusiasm and wrote it off as a failure of imagination. “Some people can see only what’s in front of them,” she sighed.

“Hey,” I said, “I have” — and I said the dumbest thing — “I have powers.”

She pulled the phone from her handbag. “Prove it,” she said. “The owner has gotten three offers, and he’s not going to wait forever.”

If finding an apartment is like falling in love, buying one is like proposing on your first date and agreeing not to see each other until the wedding. We put in our bid, and when it was accepted I pretended to be as happy as Hugh and his bridesmaid, the grandmother. We met with a banker, and a lawyer we addressed as Master LaBruce. I hoped that one of them would put an end to this — deny us a mortgage, unearth a codicil — but everything moved according to schedule. Our master presided over the closing, and the following day the contractor arrived. Renovations began, and still I continued to browse the real estate listings, hoping something better might come along. I worried, not just that we’d chosen the wrong apartment but the wrong neighborhood, the wrong city, the wrong country. “Buyer’s remorse,” the grandmother said. “But don’t worry, it’s perfectly natural.” Natural. A strange word when used by an eighty-year-old with an un-lined face and hair the color of an American school bus.

Three months after moving in, we took a trip to Amsterdam, a city often recommended by the phrase “You can get so fucked-up there.” I’d imagined Day-Glo bridges and canals flowing with bong water, but it was actually closer to a Brueghel painting than a Mr. Natural cartoon. We loved the lean brick buildings and the wispy sounds of bicycle tires on freshly fallen leaves. Our hotel overlooked the Herengracht, and on checking in, I started to feel that we’d made a terrible mistake. Why settle in Paris before first exploring the possibility of Amsterdam? What had we been thinking?

On our first afternoon we took a walk and came across the Anne Frank House, which was a surprise. I’d had the impression she lived in a dump, but it’s actually a very beautiful seventeenth-century building right on the canal. Tree-lined street, close to shopping and public transportation: in terms of location, it was perfect. My months of house hunting had caused me to look at things in a certain way, and on seeing the crowd gathered at the front door, I did not think, Ticket line, but, Open house!

We entered the annex behind the famous bookcase, and on crossing the threshold, I felt what the grandmother had likened to being struck by lightning, an absolute certainty that this was the place for me. That it would be mine. The entire building would have been impractical and far too expensive, but the part where Anne Frank and her family had lived, their triplex, was exactly the right size and adorable, which is something they never tell you. In plays and movies it always appears drab and old ladyish, but open the curtains and the first words that come to mind are not “I still believe all people are really good at heart” but “Who do I have to knock off in order to get this apartment?” That’s not to say that I wouldn’t have made a few changes, but the components were all there and easy to see, as they’d removed the furniture and personal possessions that normally make a room seem just that much smaller.

Hugh stopped to examine the movie-star portraits glued to Anne Frank’s bedroom wall — a wall that I personally would have knocked down — and I raced on to the bathroom, and then to the water closet with its delft toilet bowl looking for all the world like a big soup tureen. Next it was upstairs to the kitchen, which was eat-in with two windows. I’d get rid of the countertop and of course redo all the plumbing, but first I’d yank out the wood stove and reclaim the fireplace. “That’s your focal point, there,” I heard the grandmother saying. I thought the room beside the kitchen might be my office, but then I saw the attic, with its charming dormer windows, and the room beside the kitchen became a little leisure nook.

Now it was downstairs for another look at the toilet bowl, then back upstairs to reconsider the kitchen countertop, which, on second thought, I decided to keep. Or maybe not. It was hard to think with all these people coming and going, hogging the stairwell, running their mouths. A woman in a Disneyland sweatshirt stood in the doorway taking pictures of my sink, and I intentionally bumped her arm so that the prints would come out blurry and undesirable. “Hey!” she said.

“Oh, 'Hey' yourself.” I was in a fever, and the only thing that mattered was this apartment. It wasn’t a celebrity or a historical thing, not like owning one of Maria Callas’s eyelashes or a pair of barbecue tongs once brandished by Pope Innocent XIII. Sure, I’d mention that I was not the first one in the house to ever keep a diary, but it wasn’t the reason I’d fallen in love with the place. At the risk of sounding too koombaya, I felt as if I had finally come home. A cruel trick of fate had kept me away, but now I was back to claim what was rightfully mine. It was the greatest feeling in the world: excitement and relief coupled with the giddy anticipation of buying stuff, of making everything just right.

I didn’t snap out of it until I accidentally passed into the building next door, which has been annexed as part of the museum. Above a display case, written across the wall in huge, unavoidable letters, was this quote by Primo Levi: “A single Anne Frank moves us more than the countless others who suffered just as she did but whose faces have remained in the shadows. Perhaps it is better that way. If we were capable of taking in all the suffering of all those people, we would not be able to live.”

He did not specify that we would not be able to live in her house, but it was definitely implied, and it effectively squashed any fantasy of ownership. The added tragedy of Anne Frank is that she almost made it, that she died along with her sister just weeks before their camp was liberated. Having already survived two years in hiding, she and her family might have stayed put and lasted out the war were it not for a neighbor, never identified, who turned them in. I looked out the window, wondering who could have done such a thing, and caught my reflection staring back at me. Then, beyond that, across the way, I saw the most beautiful apartment.