Ladies and Gentlemen (20 page)

“They’re just going to pack my nose until a specialist can see me.”

“All right.”

“Not all right,” the cabbie protested. “Very not all right! You messing up the seat!”

“Let me come up to your apartment and get a towel or something,” I said.

“Sure. I can get Ruth Ann to stop at the Koreans’. What do you need?”

“Lots of gauze.”

“Give me your phone.”

He called Ruth Ann while I bunched the front of my shirt to my face. I rested my head against the seat and let the blood run down my throat; it was thick as honey and filled my belly until I felt sick.

Ruth Ann met us at the door in a T-shirt and jeans. For 4:00 a.m., she looked perfectly awake.

“Look at you two,” she said. “Y’all have just been beat
up.
”

I took out my BlackBerry and phone and sat down on the couch, making an effort not to look while Ruth Ann fawned over him and kissed him, something I could never bring myself to watch.

When Kevin went to the bathroom, she slid next to me. “Let me have a look at you, Caleb. Can I touch your face?”

I’d stopped bleeding. “No,” I said, “it hurts too much. Just give me the gauze and I’ll get out of your hair.”

She brought me the gauze and watched while I plugged my nostrils. “Did he tell you?” she asked.

“Yes.”

She was staring at my face. “It’s not a final thing.”

“What does that mean?”

“I love your brother.”

“I do too.”

“But I have to
manage
him,” she whispered. “I have to
mother
him. He gets … stuck. I don’t want to do that my whole life.”

“Then don’t,” I said. My eyes were swelling shut. “Just don’t drag it out.”

Kevin had emerged from the bathroom. His shirt was off and his face was clean, but his lip was still bleeding. “Maybe I do need to go to the hospital,” he said, then brightened. “Caleb’s going to help me,” he said to Ruth Ann.

“Help with what, sweet?”

“Legal representation. I mean, if I need it.”

Ruth Ann blinked twice, and looked at him so blankly, I could see her filing away this new fuckup or piece of bad luck for her closing arguments. She had a mug of hot tea in her hands toward which she shifted her attention, sipping it carefully.

“Well, bless his heart,” she said.

I got up. “I’m going home.”

“Here,” Ruth Ann said, “I’ll walk you out.”

She held the front door open, flipped the switch on the strike plate so that the latch bolt wouldn’t lock automatically, took my arm, and led me to the elevator. I pressed the button, and we watched the car rise floor by floor.

“I’ve been confused,” she said.

“That’s okay.”

“You don’t hate me? You’d be able to forgive me if Kevin and I worked things out?”

“Of course.”

“Why don’t you let us take you to the hospital?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“All right,” she said as the elevator arrived.

I just looked at her.

“I’m going to kiss you,” she said. “I’ll do it gently.” She kissed my cheek and I let her smell envelope me, that alchemy of shampoo, perfume, and the earthy sweetness of her makeup. Strangely, Ruth Ann was the closest thing I had to a woman in my life. I stepped into the car and turned around, and she waved as the doors started to close. “You’re a good man.”

My father’s older brother, Saul, died of colon cancer when he was fifty-two. I met him twice in my life, and both encounters were unmemorable. Divorced, he lived in California near where his three grown children had settled, and we never visited his family there. Like his father, he was afflicted with poor health. He was overweight and suffered early-onset Type II diabetes; he had a heart murmur and, in his late forties, developed chronic stomach
pain, which he put off seeing doctors about because he feared them, so he died of a treatable disease. In my view, Saul’s fragility and mismanagement of his body explained my father’s daily exercise regimen, a half-hour set of calisthenics that we called his Jack LaLanne routine, and his dietary rules: one glass of wine at dinner, and no deli food whatsoever. “Pickled meats,” he’d say, “smothered with pickled cabbage, plus a pickle on the side, all of it washed down with a cream soda. As much salt in that meal as there is in the sea.”

There’s a reason I bring up Saul here. My father always said he wanted Kevin and me to be close, which seemed somewhat hypocritical because neither he nor Saul ever made any effort at all; and my father, like Kevin, always portrayed himself as downtrodden. Saul was four years older, and although I didn’t know him much better than I did their parents, who died before I was born, my father’s stories about his brother’s abuse were legion. When my father was eight years old, for example, and had just learned to roller-skate, Uncle Saul took him to the Steuben Street hill, a giant descent in Middle Village—they grew up in Queens—where the big kids raced everything from soapbox derby cars to sleds. They also set up a slalom of soda bottles, which skaters bombed down forward and backward, weaving their legs through magically, and my father, who wanted to try a run, had asked his brother to hold his arm while he got the feel for the turns. But after a few yards Saul let him go. He kept his balance long enough to reach lethal velocity, then crashed into a parked car’s fender and knocked out his two front teeth. And once, playing tag at their house, when my father tapped him “it” through one of the windows opening onto
their patio, my uncle slammed the pane shut and broke his hand. On a trip to Ocean City, Maryland, Saul convinced my father to sunbathe with him on their hotel’s roof deck. He lathered him in baby oil and offered him a reflector for his face, which my father obediently tucked under his chin; he said he’d be back with lunch in a few minutes but didn’t return for an hour—a desertion that put my father in the hospital yet again, this time with second-degree burns. I admittedly took a sick joy in these stories. Such casual abuse came easily to me when Kevin and I were younger. To this day he bitterly recalls the time I convinced him to rescue a bee drowning in my cousin’s pool, and, to my delight, it stung him the moment he plucked it from the water. But these stories also helped me make some sense of their characters: both had total recall of every transgression they’d suffered at their brothers’ hands, and their memories, it seemed to me, were their worst enemies. “I’ve a grand memory for forgetting,” says Robert Louis Stevenson. What happiness in that statement! When we were boys, Kevin’s carefully nurtured sense of injustice drove my dad crazy, which conferred on me this bit of wisdom: we are quickest to object to things in others that we don’t wish to recognize in ourselves.

My favorite Uncle Saul story occurred in Miami. My father was thirteen at the time, already fitter and taller and stronger than his brother, growing in both stature and confidence. One day they went swimming together and, after idiotically racing fifty yards out, got caught in a vicious undertow. Boys are always nearly killing themselves like this, and of course there were no lifeguards present, so my panicked grandparents, seeing their children sucked down the beach and, for all they knew, out to sea, ran to the
hotel to get help. The current drove my dad and uncle into a coral reef, which they climbed in exhausted desperation, cutting themselves badly. They were safe, though, and should’ve waited there for help, but since they couldn’t see their parents they panicked. Saul convinced my father that he could leap far enough off the reef to clear the current, or at least would have enough strength to swim through it, a remarkably stupid idea that my father accepted at face value. He was almost immediately slammed back against the coral, slashing his arms and legs to ribbons, only to pull himself up and, at his brother’s urging, try it again. His fourth attempt was interrupted by the hotel’s pool lifeguards, who’d paddled out in a rowboat. It was back to the hospital for my father, and the next year Saul went off to college, for all intents and purposes exiting his brother’s life.

Which brings me to my uncle’s death. After Saul learned he was terminal, he invited my father to spend a week with him in London. In his forties, he’d befriended a very wealthy cousin of ours named Lee who’d made a fortune in the car-wash business. They both liked food and women, serial philandering having blown up their marriages, and in many respects they were brothers who’d chosen each other. They spent the last decade of my uncle’s life carousing together and since by then Saul had only a month to live, this London trip was clearly the last fling, and Lee rented them a townhouse. My father and uncle hadn’t spent this much time under the same roof since their teens, and I had always been curious about this trip. During the two years that Kevin and I weren’t speaking, I asked my father about it, because I wanted to believe this might shed some light on my failed relationship with Kevin.

When I asked what he remembered about that week, my father thought about it for a long time and finally said, “Not much.”

“No talks you had? What sort of stuff you did?”

He considered this and then brightened.

“Well,” he said, “one night we went to these boxing matches at this private club Lee belonged to. It was a black-tie thing where they served dinner beforehand. They’d set up tables around the ring, so close that when the boxers hit each other you’d occasionally get sprinkled with sweat and blood. The room wasn’t that big, but it was oak-paneled and stuffy, and the acoustics were amazing. When a guy got hit you could actually hear the air getting knocked out of him, and just by that sound you realized how strong they were, how fast and powerful. It was the most beautiful and violent spectacle I’ve ever seen. And at the end, no matter how brutally they’d beaten the shit out of each other, they hugged at the final bell.”

Recalling this, he smiled, but he hadn’t answered my question. They’d arrived together at the end, after all, and I wanted to know what they’d said, if anything, whether there was a reconciliation, a last grasp at closeness, or if they’d even tried. He didn’t say, though, and I could tell he didn’t want to talk about it anymore, and this now makes me think of Kevin. Because these distances between siblings, I suspect, might be a birthright that’s as strong and arbitrary and ineluctable as love; yet because we feel we must honor this accident of our relatedness, we try to swim against it again and again.

After I left Kevin’s apartment that night, even before the elevator reached the lobby, I realized I’d forgotten my BlackBerry and cell phone on the arm of the couch. I went back upstairs and
checked the door to make sure Ruth Ann had locked it. She hadn’t, and I stepped inside ready to reprimand them of how very dangerous this world had just proven itself to be.

And there they were: Kevin, Ruth Ann, and the kid who’d mugged us—the busboy from the restaurant with the do-rag. They were standing around the kitchen table with the money piled on it like a sandcastle.

I walked up the stairs, stared at the three of them for a second, then collected my stuff off the couch. “Can I have my watch back?” I asked.

The kid looked at it, then took it off his wrist and tossed it to me.

“He wasn’t supposed to take that,” Kevin said.

Ruth Ann had fixed her eyes on the floor.

“We needed a credible witness,” Kevin explained.

“I get it.”

We stood there for a time. With the gun stuffed under his belt, the busboy stared me down. I was still afraid of him.

“How do you know I’m not going to turn you all in?”

Kevin shrugged, then smiled until his lip split open again. “Because we’re starting from scratch.”

I turned around and let myself out, careful to set the latch bolt; then I closed the door and checked it to make sure it was locked.

It was breezy outside. Kevin lived near the East River, and when the wind blew the air tasted so thickly mineral that it was like you’d just put a penny in your mouth. I figured I’d hurry home, clean
myself up, repack my nostrils, drink some coffee, watch the sun rise, and head in to the office. There is no early where I work, no “first one in.” We’re round the clock. But I would impress Chuck with my diligence, we’d bond over my wounds, and I’d work my way back into his graces.

Meanwhile, I’d leave the suit and shirt hanging on the door for the cleaners. I wished I could see their faces when they inspected this job, and that almost made me want to drop it off myself: the suit and shirt lying on the counter, the fabric starched with coagulation. For a while they’d wonder what the hell had happened. They’d pick up the pants at the waist, the jacket at the shoulders, shaking their heads at how they’d been set up to fail. It would be impossible to remove all the blood.

In the fall of 1980, my parents enrolled me in seventh grade at the Trinity School—a tony, Episcopal private school in Manhattan that was all boys until ninth grade. So my two best new friends, Abe Herman and Kyle Duckworth, were thirteen-year-olds on the cusp of, among other things, coeducation.

Beanpole thin, with a chest so concave a dog could lap water from its indentation, Abe Herman had the gift of imparting debilitating self-consciousness upon anyone within ear- or eyeshot. We sat directly across from each other in English (discussion-based classes at Trinity were taught in the round), and I often marveled at how Abe could unseat the confidence of even the most assured students simply by shaking his head and piteously staring at them while they spoke; or, if he was really in the mood for disruption, shielding his eyes with his hand, as if stupidity that intense could somehow blind him, and looking in the opposite direction. You might think this was motivated by envy, that Abe was shy or inarticulate and his scorn was a preemptive strike against those who would scorn him, but that wasn’t the case. Abe was brilliant. Annoyed by his behavior and frustrated by his ability to silence
anyone in class, our teacher, Ms. Cheek, would pounce on him in response, assuming an advantage in the element of surprise: “Well, then, Mr. Herman, what do
you
think Marc Antony is telling his countrymen here?” And Abe, leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed, would smile broadly to show off a mouth fat with braces. “I think that Antony is using irony to stab Brutus and Cassius the way they stabbed Caesar. I think he’s using his sharp tongue to rip their honor to
shreds.
” He would stare at Ms. Cheek, who, defeated like the rest of us, could only shake her head in unintentional mimicry.