I Know This Much Is True (48 page)

“Look, everyone in this entire country’s getting wasted except for little saints like you,” I said. “We do our work. It’s not a big deal.”

“Well, fine then. Tell that to Lou Clukey.”

“
Screw
Lou Clukey! I’m not afraid of him. And I’m not afraid of Ray, either.” I clamped my eyes shut and rolled over toward the wall.

“And screw you, too. Next time I want my conscience to be my guide, I’ll call up Jiminy Fuckin’ Cricket. Okay, Thomas?”

“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Excuse me for worrying about my own brother.”

I rolled over and hung my head back down again. “Look, no one but
me
has to worry about
me,
” I told him. “You got that? I’ve been taking care of myself my whole life.
You’re
the one everyone around here has to worry about. Not
me.
Remember?
You’re
the one who’s messed up.”

I was sorry as soon as I said it. I pictured him back in our dorm room, pacing and shaking in front of that smashed typewriter case.

. . . Saw him sobbing at the kitchen table while Ray slammed into him about his grades. Saw him sulking at work because I wasn’t willing, anymore, to stay joined at the hip.

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Thomas said he wanted to know what that was supposed to mean.

“What?”

“What you just said. That I’m messed up. That everyone has to worry about me.”

“It just means . . . it means you ought to take care of your
own
screwed-up life instead of butting into mine. . . . Look, just take a hit or two off a joint yourself once in a while. It’s no big deal. Join the human race, for Christ’s sake.”

Neither of us said anything for several minutes. It was Thomas who spoke first.

“Can I ask you something?” he said.

“If it’s about marijuana, no. The subject’s closed.”

“It isn’t about that. It’s about you and your girlfriend.”

I rolled over in bed. Looked up at the ceiling. “What about us?”

“Are you and she . . . going to bed with each other?”

“Why? You gonna give me a big speech about premarital sex now?”

“No. I was just curious.”

“What Dessa and I do is none of your business. . . . Curious about what?”

He kept me waiting for several seconds. “About what it feels like,” he said.

“You
know
what it feels like. Don’t tell me you never woke up in the middle of a wet dream or reached down and had a little fun with yourself. You’re not
that
much of a saint, are you?”

“I didn’t mean that,” he said. “I meant, what it feels like to be inside of a girl.”

The room was still for a while. Then I surprised myself. “It feels good,” I said. “It feels unbelievably good. It’s like . . . this private connection that you get to share with another person.” In the morning, I would call Dessa and apologize. Maybe send her some flowers, buy her a mushy card. Or maybe I’d go down to the Dial-Tone and wait for her to get off work. “It’s like . . . it’s like you’re magnets.

Your body and her body.”

I lay there, in the dark above my brother. Got hard just
thinking
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about her. “When she gets excited . . . she gets wet inside.”

I reached down and touched it the way Dessa touched it. Ached for her. Her want, her wetness. “She
wants
you inside of her,” I said.

“She gets ready, so that by the time you’re in, it’s like . . . it’s like this . . .”

I was struck, abruptly, by the intrusion of it: my brother elbowing in on one more thing of mine. Thomas wanting another chunk of
my
life instead of going out and getting one of his own.

“Like what?” he said.

“Like
nothing.
Like none of your
business.
If you want to know what it feels like, then go find some girl and fuck her brains out. And get high first, too. That makes it even better. Now shut up and go to sleep.” I flipped over onto my stomach. Sighed. Calmed back down again.

Several minutes went by. “Dominick?” he said. “Are you awake?”

I didn’t answer him for a while. A minute or so. “What do you want?” I said.

“About you smoking pot? I’m just worried, that’s all. I just don’t want anything bad to happen to you. Because you’re my brother and I love you. Okay?”

I didn’t answer him—didn’t even know
how
to answer. His out-of-the-blue declaration of brotherly love disarmed me. Embarrassed me. I could buddy up with whoever I wanted to for the summer, pedal up there and screw Dessa seven nights a week, but I was
never
going to be rid of Thomas. . . .

He fell asleep long before I answered him, which I did, finally, half out loud and half to myself. In the dark, in the midst of his snoring. “I love you, too,” I said.

“
You know what gets to me when I remember that conversation? That
little talk we had in the dark, him and me? What gets me is that, back
then, he was still there.
”

“
Still there in what respect?
”

“
Still able . . . still able to care about someone other than himself. I
guess the disease must have already started claiming his brain by then.

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That had to have been what that typewriter stuff was about. Right? . . .

But there was still someone home in Thomas’s head that summer. And I
squandered it. Wasted the last weeks he had. Hindsight, right? Twenty-twenty. . . . But all I wanted to do that summer was to cut loose from
him. Be one of the guys—one of the Three Dumb Fucks in the back of the
city truck. Be Dessa’s lover. I was just so tired of . . .

“
Later on? After the disease took him to the mat, he lost that ability to
care about other people. Worry about anyone besides himself. His enemies.

. . . Well, he did and he didn’t lose it. I mean, hey, he’s always trying to
save the world, right? Save civilization from spies and Communists and
all that happy horseshit. He
still
cares about people in some weird way, I
guess. But he lost the ability to care about . . . well, about me, I guess. He
just . . . those voices. They just drowned out everything else. . . .

“
I remember the morning of my wedding. Mine and Dessa’s. I got
ready early and drove down to the hospital in my monkey suit—me and
Leo. He was real bad then; he couldn’t go to the wedding. So Leo drove me
down there. Waited outside in the car and I went in by myself. In my
tuxedo. And I told him, I said, ‘ You know, Thomas, if things were different, if you weren’t so sick,
you
would have been my best man.
’ ”

“
What was his reaction?
”

“
Oh, I don’t know. Nothing much. He was just kind of out of it—

zoned on whatever they were giving him back then. Librium, I think. I
forget. . . . I’ve got all that stuff written down—his history of medication
and all that. You should see all these folders I’ve got on him. A whole filing
cabinet full. My mother and I started it together and then, after she died,
I more or less kept it up. Took over his records. . . .

“
I remember the morning I drove down to Settle to tell him Ma had
finally given up the fight. Ray and I went, but Ray cut out of there pretty
quick. And Thomas was—I didn’t know
how
he was going to react. But
he was . . . what? Philosophical about it, I guess. I mean, he understood.

He
got
it that she was dead. It was just . . . you know what he did? He
started showing me that stupid
Lives of the Saints
book of his.

Comparing Ma’s death to . . . talking like she was some stupid saint who’d
lived five hundred years ago and been tortured by Pope What’s-His-Face
or whatever. Like Ma was someone out of his stupid saint book.
”

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“
Do you want a tissue, Dominick? They’re right there. Help yourself.
”

“
I’m okay. . . . You know when I did get a rise out of him? The night I
went down there after Angela was born. I went down there and handed
him an “It’s a girl” cigar. Told him he was an uncle. He liked that, I
remember. Uncle Thomas. Big smile on his face. . . . He, uh . . . he never
even saw her. My daughter. We just hadn’t gotten down there yet. I mean,
three weeks? We were
going
to go that weekend. Drive down there and
show her to him. But then she died.

“
Mostly, I can just accept it, you know? That total absorption of his—

the way his illness finally did what I’d been trying all my life to do: separate the two of us.
Un
twin us. But I’ll be honest with you. There have
been times when I’ve ached to have him back again. When I’ve needed
him bad.
”

“
Here. Take a tissue.
”

“
That night the baby died? And then, a year or so later, when the bottom fell out. When . . . she says to me, ‘I have to breathe, Dominick. You
suck all the oxygen out of the room.’ Try hearing
that
from the person you
love. The one person you need more than. . . . Well, anyway, I just . . .

I just wanted to throw down my armor for once, my defenses, and
share . . .
”

“
Share what, Dominick?
”

“
My brother’s love. I just wanted to tell him, ‘I’m scared shitless,
Thomas.’ And hold him. Hold on to my brother for dear life. Because, you
know, he’s my
brother.
Right? Only, by then, he wasn’t Thomas anymore. By then, he was just the paunchy guy with the institutional haircut
and the gray pants and shirt. Jesus’ apprentice. The guy that the FBI and
the KGB and the aliens all wanted to destroy.

“
You know what the funny thing is, though? I look back . . . I look
back at that summer the four of us were cutting lawns and playing
graveball. Playing tag. And I think . . . I think how it could have tagged
any one of us. . . . Ralph. Leo. Me, especially.

“
Why did it tag him and not me? His identical twin. His other half.

That’s what I’ve never been able to figure out. Why
Thomas
was ‘it,’ not
me.”

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20

f

1969

Ray jerked my brother around about school until mid-August, then announced one night at the supper table that he’d help him finance one last chance. He handed a two-thousand-dollar bank check to my mother for Thomas’s and my tuition bills, due that week.

“God bless you, Ray,” Ma said and burst into tears. Ray loved that: being the big hero. The savior.

Thomas told Ray he wouldn’t regret it, honest to God. He’d learned his lesson. From now on, he was going to stay ahead of his assignments and get to bed earlier. He’d get out of his room and take walks when he was feeling nervous. He’d go to the library and study with me. In the midst of all Thomas’s suppertime resolutions, I made a silent promise of my own: he was going to make it or break it without my help. I wasn’t going to hold Thomas’s hand or walk him to the library or cover for him the next time he took out his frustrations on our typewriter.

I wasn’t going to live with him, either. Three weeks earlier, Leo and I had driven up in secret to the university housing office and asked
321

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about the possibility of our rooming together at South Campus. Now they’d notified us that the change had gone through. Beyond that, I was planning to haul my ass up to Boston College every weekend to be with Dessa—to make sure I didn’t lose out on the best thing I had going in my whole life.

The problem was wheels. If I wanted to see my girlfriend, I couldn’t exactly pedal my bike up the Massachusetts Turnpike.

Hitchhiking was cheap but unreliable. It could get crazy, too. I’d had a string of bad experiences bumming rides: a guy who said he had explosives in his trunk, a driver whose acid-head wife thought my head was on fire. There were all kinds of wackos out there waiting to pull over and give you a lift. I needed a car.

I’d managed to save almost eleven hundred dollars over the summer. Ray and I agreed that I’d add five hundred to the loan he was giving me to cover college costs. I was planning to use most of what was left to buy a secondhand clunker and some insurance. The rest was for living expenses. But now another thought kept spinning in my head: getting Dessa a diamond for Christmas. So what if I
was
only nineteen? I’d turn twenty over the holidays. How much surer could I be that she was the one? That I was the one for her? She’d said it herself: I was the only guy she felt safe with. In a recurring fantasy, I pummeled those other two jerks she’d gone out with—beat the shit out of them for having hurt her. From what I gathered, the dulcimer player was still living up in Boston; he could walk right back into Dessa’s life. Or she could meet someone new—some faceless guy I hadn’t even bothered to beat up in my daydreams. If I could buy a car for around two hundred, I reasoned, and get a part-time job once I got to school, then I could start the engagement ring fund right away. Not that I could buy her anything like that boulder her mother wore. Not in a million years. But as well off as the Constantines were, Dessa didn’t really care about material stuff.