MY TWIN BROTHER does not look like someone who recently attempted suicide. He stands by the nurse’s station, trim, suntanned, smiling, the muscles of his cyclist’s arms bulging from the sleeves of his canary madras shirt. With his sandals and his gym bag slung by a strap from his shoulder, he looks as if he’s just wrapped up a two-week stint at Club Med.
“How are you?” he asks shaking my hand, his grip strong and assured as ever, the grip of a college dean greeting freshmen on orientation day. As always, Lloyd’s handsome face comes as a bit of a surprise to me, since I happen to own an identical face, with a little less flesh on mine and a scarred chin (courtesy of Lloyd’s practicing his baseball swing in the living room when we were nine). Otherwise we look pretty much the same, except that I’m a few pounds thinner. And while Lloyd’s good looks seem to me solid and durable, mine blur and waver like a photograph in a developing bath or a reflection in water. At least to me they do.
“Fine,” I say to him. “How are you?”
“Great,” he says. “Just great.”
I believe it. Yet ten days ago he lay sprawled across the Duncan Phyfe bed he and his wife had shared until the month before last, his belly full of Château de la Chaise and diazepam, the empty wine bottle and prescription vial on his nightstand. Had Lisa, who’d moved into a neighbor’s house, not come by to borrow a casserole dish, he would be dead, probably.
“Well, I’ll bet anything this must be your brother, Edward,” says the young, attractive duty nurse. Red hair, freckles. His type.
“Amazing deductive powers these psychiatric nurses have, don’t they? This is Dana,” says my brother, introducing her like she’s his date.
“Your brother is something else,” says Dana with a sly look.
“Bet you’re glad to be getting rid of him,” I say.
“Now why would you say that? I’m going to miss him. Your brother’s a sweetheart,” says Dana. “And I bet you’re every bit as sweet.”
“He’s not,” says Lloyd. “I’m much sweeter. There’s no comparison. Come on,” says Lloyd to me. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
“You all take care,” says Dana, watching us go.
We float through the bay of gleaming paint and chrome that is the visitor’s parking lot, where I have lost the rental car. It’s hot as hell in Alabama. As we comb the lanes in search of a white sedan (I’m not even sure if it’s a Ford or a Chevy), already Lloyd’s impatience starts to flare. “The spaces are numbered,” he reminds me. “Didn’t you make a note of the number?”
“No, Lloyd,” I say. “I didn’t take note of the number. If I had taken note of the number, we’d be in the car by now.”
We locate the car. A Honda. Lloyd stows his bag in the trunk. The upholstery is hot as a griddle. As we fasten our seat belts, my brother says, “Is there air conditioning in this thing?” I — who asked for the very cheapest subcompact and can scarcely afford it — shake my head.
“Great,” says Lloyd.
With that “great” I realize several things. First, that near-death experiences notwithstanding, my brother is still as much of an asshole as ever, and second, that in coming here I have made a big mistake. It was not my idea. It was our mother who phoned me in tears, begging me to drop everything, as if I had anything worth dropping, and hop on a plane. “He is your brother, Edward.” She would have dropped everything herself had “everything” not included a kidney dialysis machine. So I’m dispatched. Heck, I’ve got nothing better to do than fling paint at canvas.
Lloyd directs me through a series of increasingly posh neighborhoods, into one of quaint Victorians with gabled roofs — some made of tin — with wraparound porches out of a southern-fried fairy tale. I hardly recognize his home, Lloyd, who’s quite handy, has done so much with it. There’s the new picket fence, white to go with the trim, the house itself yellow like his madras shirt, with cantaloupe and nutmeg accents to complete the gingerbread effect. He’s added a porch swing and a red mailbox and wicker furniture. The roof of the porch is painted blue to match the sky. I swing the car past the pachysandra that swoops up to but stops just short of the edge of the house, like a well-trained dog. As we creep up the drive (“Slowly,” says Lloyd, “or you’ll displace the gravel”), my brother fills me in on the latest improvements to his neighborhood, the new cupola on the Episcopal church (the old one struck by lightning), the first Starbucks in town, the Salvation Army store, which, after years of petitions to the zoning board and letters to editors, he and his neighbors have finally succeeded in shutting down.
“When you buy a house, you buy the neighborhood. That’s one thing I’m grateful for,” says Lloyd. “I’ve got the best neighbors. We’ve cleaned up most of the riffraff, with one exception.” He thumbs the house behind his: the neighbor Lisa has moved in with, a woman with a passion for sparrows and motorcycles. “I’ve offered her twice what that house is worth, but she won’t move. There’s something wrong with her.”
I nod. I live in a rental in Marble Hill, the Bronx.
As we carry our bags to the door, Lloyd tells me all the trouble he went through to get his new patio bricks. “You’d be surprised how hard it is to find bricks like these. The ones they make today are either too big or they’re too perfectly shaped. They have no character. They don’t make bricks like these any more.” We stand in the sliced shade of my brother’s pergola.
“How’s your place?” Lloyd says as we step into what he calls the mudroom. “Still got that crazy lady living next door?”
He refers to a woman with nine cats and at least one dog that never sees daylight; I hear it barking through the thin wall that separates my bedroom from her kitchen. I also smell its shit, along with the shit of all those cats, whose litter box or boxes are emptied all too infrequently. The stench leaks into the hallway, so bad at times I have to hold my nose while turning the key in my lock.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s still there.”
“Jesus. How can you stand it?”
“It’s gotten better,” I lie.
In the mudroom two bicycles hang on racks along with spare tires, a bicycle pump, caps, gloves, helmets, and a collection of jerseys in bright acidic colors, like flags on steroids.
“Tomorrow we ride,” says Lloyd.
When we were kids, Lloyd and I had this running vaudevillian shtick. One of us is a millionaire, the other a pauper. As a snowstorm rages outside (to the tune of the second movement of Suppés Poet and Peasant), the millionaire sits by his cozy fire, wearing a quilted smoking jacket and slippers, swirling brandy, puffing a cigar. Meanwhile, the pauper claws at his door begging to be let in. When we were kids, the gag used to crack me up.
Lloyd shows me around his house, each room a museum display with the velvet ropes down. Art-pottery vases and Eastlake frames; wallpapers by Charles Renee Macintosh; beaded curtains strung with tourmaline, amber, and hornblende (the replacement white wool threads stained with used tea bags to match the weathered originals); mosaic tables; tapestries; and stenciling everywhere. My brother’s home is a meticulous study of Victorian clutter: no displaced books or strewn magazines or empty coffee cups or other signs of human habitation. The wicker wastepaper baskets yawn empty. An ornate coffin with coffered ceilings and central air conditioning. “Nice,” I say.
My brother points to a pair of paintings over one of his three working fireplaces, both minor Hudson River School artists, asks me what I think of them. Lloyd owns two of my paintings, one of a fruit stand, the other of the Henry Hudson Bridge. They hang in his downstairs bathroom.
“Hungry?” he says, opening a bottle of wine in his kitchen. “I’ve made reservations at an Italian restaurant nearby. You may want to dress up a bit.” He nods at my attire: a pair of cargo pants and an army green T-shirt.
In the garret guest room I put on new jeans, a clean pullover, and black sneakers. My best pair.
“Those are your dress clothes?” says Lloyd when I return. He sips wine, shakes his head. “Grab something from my closet, why don’t you?”
My brother’s closet, a room larger than the bathroom in my apartment: shelves lined with shirts, trousers, sweaters, all organized by season and color. Silks and linens of every conceivable hue, spread out like the colors on my palette. I choose a vermilion and gold striped shirt with cuffed sleeves and navy linen pants — both loose on me.
“Here,” says Lloyd, handing me a pair of cuff links inscribed with his initials. “And please try not to spill anything on that shirt. It’s raw silk. I got it in Hong Kong. It’s expensive.” He takes a pair of shoes out from his closet rack, hands them to me. I’m about to ask him if he wants to talk about things when he squints at me and asks, “Did you shave this morning?”
In Lloyd’s bathroom, using his gold safety razor, I shave. While doing so, in the steamy mirror, I see not myself but my twin. It’s Lloyd who looks back at me from the thin coating of mercury, Lloyd who cuts himself behind the ear, Lloyd who, while shaving, sips a glass of Pinot Noir in the kitchen and waits for himself impatiently there.
I apply the styptic pencil, slap my cheeks with Lloyd’s cologne. I slap them again, hard.
By foot, the restaurant is ten minutes away. We walk past an old Coca-Cola bottling plant, recently converted to condominiums. Lloyd points out more improvements to the neighborhood. “So Lloyd,” I interject more than once, or try, but Lloyd just plows ahead, telling me what this or that piece of property sold for whenever and what it’s worth now. When we get to the restaurant (Il Pappagallo), the proprietor, Maurizio, who wears a doublebreasted suit and stinks of cologne, greets me and my brother expansively and says, in Neapolitan Italian, how he can truly see that we are twins.
“Effettivamente non e vero,” Lloyd contradicts him. “I’ve never seen the motherless lush in my life.”
Maurizio gestures with his fingers in his mouth, Italian sign language for “feed me more of your bullshit.” He and my brother laugh. Then he escorts us to Lloyd’s favorite table, a well-lit one to the rear of the restaurant, far from the bar and the piano. It is understood that my brother, who makes eight times what I do, will treat, and so he commandeers the wine list, running down the selections, all red, of which I know absolutely nothing. Yet for appearance’ sake I venture opinions. For my brother it comes down to the Barbera or the Barbaresco, but I hold out for the Ecco Domani Sangiovese — the cheapest wine on the list, it so happens.
“I’m treating,” says Lloyd.
“I know,” I say. “It’s just that I happen to like humble wines.”
“Humble?” says Lloyd. “And Barbera is arrogant?”
“I prefer something simple, that’s all,” I say.
“What do you mean by simple? You mean void of character?”
“I mean simple. Honest and simple.”
“The Sangiovese is shit,” says Lloyd. “There’s no comparison. If you’re going to go for something basic, get the Chianti.”
“Shit,” says Lloyd.
“Why don’t we order by the glass?” I suggest. “That way we can both get what we want.”
With a grimace Lloyd summons the waiter.
“The Barbera’s fine,” I say, seeing I’ve gone too far. “Let’s get a bottle.”
“You want your own glass, you’ll get your own glass.”
The waiter arrives. Lloyd orders a glass of the Sangiovese for me, a bottle of Barbera for himself. I’m not even sure he’s supposed to be drinking. Did they give him pills, medication? Just what did they do with him in that hospital for ten days besides pump his stomach? Read nursery rhymes? Flirt? Maybe with a glass or two of good wine in his pumped belly he’ll finally get around to talking about it. Meanwhile, we have the menu to contend with. To make up for the wine I follow Lloyd’s recommendations slavishly, ordering the fish stew although I like neither stew nor fish.
From there things don’t go too badly. I’d even go as far as to say that things proceed cordially, with Lloyd sharing his wine after I’ve drained my glass dry, and the subject turning — for no good reason — to Paris, a place I’ve been to once, when I was eighteen, and about which I remember only sleeping in a railroad station and stealing uneaten croissants from café tables. “There’s this wonderful two-star hotel near the Place des Vosges,” Lloyd tells me, “the most charming little hotel. Room no. 25, on the top floor. You can put two chairs out and sit on the balcony. That’s where you should stay,” he says, tapping the tablecloth for emphasis, though I’ve no plans to go to Paris anytime soon. So far this year I’ve had three group shows and sold one painting. If I make my rent, I’ll be thrilled.
Lloyd is telling me the story of some woman he met in Paris, when he was on a Fulbright there, with whom he had a fling, about how comparatively natural Parisian women’s attitudes toward casual sex are. “There it’s considered a common courtesy,” he says, “you know, like offering a glass of water to someone who’s thirsty.” He has just made this pronouncement when I notice him looking with horror toward the far end of the restaurant and turn to look that way myself. At the entrance a woman has just hung her coat on the rack. A well-built woman with an oval face and long, red hair.
“That’s her,” says Lloyd, and I know who it is: the assistant professor with whom my brother allegedly misconducted himself. She came to his office in tears, overwhelmed. My brother assured her too demonstratively — a hug, so he describes it. The next day she filed charges of sexual harassment. The campus newspaper got hold of the story and published their two photographs, his with a one-word caption, “Accused.” The local Herald picked up and ran its own significantly different version, which Lisa read and gave credence to, prompting her to move into the neighbor’s house. Days later my brother swallowed a dozen diazepam tablets with his favorite table wine.
She takes a seat at the bar.
“Why did she have to come here?” says Lloyd. “She knows I like to eat here. She’s doing it on purpose. I know she is.” His face is red.
“Relax,” I say.
“I’m not supposed to be anywhere near her. I’m not supposed to look at her. She’ll say I’m harassing her. It’ll cost me my job. Which is just what she wants. Bitch.”
“You were here first,” I say.
“It doesn’t matter. The burden is all on me. She can do whatever the hell she wants. I had to sign a gag order. I can’t even defend myself. That’s how the system’s designed, for her ‘protection.’ It means she can smear my name across the face of the moon, and I can’t say a thing since that would be ‘retaliation.’ Nice, huh?”
“It’s a tough spot to be in,” I say, thinking maybe now we’ll talk. But Lloyd just sits there simmering, his face as ruddy as his wine. “Come on,” I say pointing to his entrée. “Don’t let it ruin everything. Ignore her.”
“My dinner’s already ruined,” says Lloyd tossing his napkin on his plate. “I can’t eat with her here. Let’s go.”
We hurry past the bar and out the door. The woman doesn’t see us.
I go to sleep drunk and hungry.
In sixth grade my brother and I pulled the ol’ switcheroo. Mr. Barnes, my regular teacher, was sick that day, and we had a new substitute. Due to overcrowding, class was held in a so-called portable unit, one of a dozen one-room buildings erected in the parking lot. As the substitute took roll, Lloyd sat at my desk. When my name was called, he got up, went to the window, opened it, and jumped out. The substitute was still recovering from this act of gross impertinence when she heard a knocking coming from the supply closet. She opened the door and I calmly stepped out. She ran off to get Mr. Cleary, the vice principal. We never saw her again.
This story represents one of the few moments when, instead of fighting each other, Lloyd and I pooled our resources to triumph over the outside world. Otherwise we were by no means the Doublemint twins. We did not walk around in matching sweaters with matching tennis rackets slung blithely over our shoulders. As far back as I can remember, we were adversaries, even in our mother’s womb, where we fought for the oxygen and other nutrients in our briefly shared blood — a fight I lost, born second and anemic, the runt of the litter. From there my memories grow bleaker, like that of wrestling each other in Coach O’Leary’s gym class, with everyone gathered around the mat to watch us go at it like trained cocks. I still have nightmares — terrible ones — with me looking up from the ground where I sit covered in blood and dirt at a ring of faces looking down, laughing and nodding, having just witnessed one of our Spartacus-like spectacles. My brother is nowhere in the dream; I’m alone under all those faces. The person I’ve beaten up is myself.
I smell bacon frying. Lloyd has cooked breakfast for us. Wearing a pair of his pajamas, I descend the spiral staircase woozily. He hands me a bowl of oatmeal: hand-ground, organic, the best oatmeal in the world, cooked in the microwave and served with a splash of milk and maple syrup. I hate oatmeal but force myself to eat it anyway. While I do, Lloyd adjusts the seat on one of his two bicycles. The kitchen table is strewn with bike parts: gears, seats, seat poles, derailleurs, spread out like surgical or torture implements, those gears especially, with their shiny, sharp teeth. That table is the one messy area of my brother’s tidy home, the one area given over to a passion stronger than his obsession with domestic pomp and order.
Today we are to go riding together. I am not looking forward to it, am dreading it, in fact. He bangs at a lug nut. I ask him what he’s doing.
“I’m adjusting this seat for you.”
“We’re the same height,” I remind him.
He shakes his head. “Cycling stretches your legs. Since I’ve been cycling and you haven’t, I’m probably a half inch taller than you.”
“We’re the same height,” I repeat.
“Trust me,” says Lloyd.
After breakfast I walk through some brambles into the neighbor’s yard. The neighbor: Polly, who makes costume jewelry and runs a little store in town. It is with her that Lisa, my brother’s wife, has taken refuge. Unlike Lloyd’s yard, Polly’s is weed and dandelion strewn. My guess is she hasn’t done a thing to it in years. The house fares no better. A Gothic Victorian similar to Lloyd’s, it looks more like the house on Green Acres, with missing shutters, a sagging porch, rusting tin roof, and paint that looks like it’s been blowtorched. Bird feeders everywhere. A motorcycle leans against the back porch. I am to speak to Lisa, convince her that my brother is a good egg, to come back home. Another unpleasant task my mother has put me up to. Wind chimes dangle limply by the door. There’s no bell. I knock.
Polly, tattooed and smoking, answers.
“She doesn’t want to see you.”
“You’re mistaken,” I say.
“I’m not mistaken. She doesn’t want to see you, Lloyd. You know that.”
“I’m not Lloyd, I’m his brother.”
“Would you please tell Lisa that Edward is here?”
“It’s not working, Lloyd. I’m not falling for it.”
“Just tell her, okay?”
She gives me a “whatever” look, mashes the cigarette under a slipper. “Wait,” she says and goes back inside. A minute later Lisa, wearing a robe and a blank expression, takes her place. She has classically Waspy features: fair hair, freckles, a small nose with microscopic nostrils. She is usually soft-spoken and agreeable, meaning that she can’t stand to argue and would just as soon tell you what you want to hear.
“Hi, Edward,” she says.
“May I come in?”
We sit in the breakfast nook having coffee while Polly bangs things around. The table is scattered with Lisa’s vitae and job applications. She’s got her degree in political science and has been trying to get a job with the state government. Her small eyes are thick with mascara. Sunlight swims in through the window, highlighting Lisa’s already highlighted hair. The highlights flash around her head like a school of minnows. The robe parts delicately, revealing a splash of freckles between her breasts. She sits with both hands wrapped round her coffee mug, waiting.
“I’ll give you three chances to guess why I’m here,” I say.
“I’m not going back,” she says.
“You’re sure?”
“It’s not as simple as it seems,” she says.
“What is?”
“He’s in love with her.”
“Who?”
“Clarisse Dorfman.” The woman who has brought charges against him. “He denies it, but I know.”
“Anyone can have a crush,” I say, stupidly.
“Lloyd can’t take no for an answer. You know that.” The way she says it implies that I can indeed take no for an answer. Lisa assumes I’m not like my brother, and she’s right. I like to think that she would have preferred to marry me, except for my income. For the record, she’s not my type.
“It seems more like he hates her,” I say. Lisa says nothing. “Think about it, Lisa. My brother’s made a mistake, and I’m sure he knows it. You both love each other. And you’ve got a lovely home.”
“It’s his home,” she says with a sigh. “He picked out every last piece of furniture, every vase and pillow. He doesn’t even let me put my books on the shelves. My paperbacks. He says they don’t fit in. I have to keep them on my own shelf in the guest bedroom.”
To which I can only shrug.
“He’s not like you,” says Lisa. “You’re much more … gentle.” A word chosen with utmost care in place of “wimpy.” I have always let others push me around, always. “Anyway,” she goes on, “I don’t think our marriage would have worked even if that woman hadn’t come into the picture. Lloyd and I haven’t —” She is about to say that she and my brother have not had sex in (fill in the blank) months. She needn’t; I can see it in her eyes. She does not love him, that much is clear. I doubt she ever really loved my brother. She married him because he is dean of the School of Liberal Arts and Sciences and because they both love antiques. But what do I know about love? My last girlfriend said I need to see a shrink, that I have a “commitment disorder.” I’m not even sure that there is such a thing and yet am prepared to believe it. But for me a psychologist is out of the question, and has been ever since two of them threatened me with my own suicide. The first said I wouldn’t see thirty-five; the second said forty. I am now forty-two and believe that I owe my survival to spiting the nasty fuckers.
“It was nice of you to come down here,” she says. “You’re a good brother, Edward. I’m sorry he did what he did.”
“I’ll survive, somehow,” I say, and realize too late that she probably meant that she was sorry for Lloyd, not for me. Whatever, I have stood up; I am leaving. I have fulfilled my brotherly obligations, more or less. Lloyd is a selfish bully, and Lisa is a poster child for passive-aggression. They’re better off without each other. I kiss her on both freckled cheeks and let myself out into the scorching day to find Lloyd in his gravel driveway, mounting the two bicycles on the back of his Jeep Cherokee.
The last time I rode a bicycle was eight years ago, my last visit here, and then I swore I’d never, ever do it again. Lloyd fixes me up with a bright-colored jersey, cleated riding shoes, cap, fingerless gloves with Velcro straps. He gives me a special lineament to rub in the crotch padding of my riding breeches, says it helps prevent chafing. He pumps air into all four tires, then mounts his bike, four thousand bucks worth of brakes, gears, and other components made by Italian companies with three-syllable names ending in the letter i. In the parking lot of a Baptist church, as recorded bells spill their notes into the sky, he has me practice my dismount. “Twist your heel out, like this!” he shouts, showing me. “And always be pedaling when you change gears.”
He hands me my helmet and sunglasses. “You look good. Just try to keep your arms bent and your elbows down. And don’t hold the handlebars like this,” he says demonstrating. “If you hold them like that, I’ll have to ditch you out of embarrassment.”
“Don’t,” I say.
“I’m kidding.”
“I mean it.”
“Jesus, Edward, when did you become so humorless?”
“Just don’t ditch me,” I say.
We ride out of the parking lot. While leaving I note the name of the church, just in case. Lloyd rides behind me to check my form and see when I shift gears. “Great,” he says. “That was a perfect gear change you made just then. You’re a natural cyclist.”
“Twenty miles, you said.”
“Something like that.”
“You said twenty.”
“It’s about twenty, give or take.”
The last twenty-mile ride we took turned out to be forty miles, after twenty of which he ditched me, leaving me to find the very longest way home. I was sore for a week. I couldn’t sit and could barely walk.
“Just stay with me, okay?” I tell him.
Lloyd shakes his head. “Jesus, Edward, you want me to put it in writing? You want me to swear an oath?”
We’ve gone four miles when my ass starts to hurt. I can never get used to bicycle seats. As far as I’m concerned they are designed to cause maximum pain. The saddle grinds into my anus, mashing my prostate. I wave for Lloyd to pull alongside me. When he does, I tell him my butt is already sore and say I doubt I’ll make ten miles, let alone twenty.
“I am trying,” I say. “This is the result.” I point to my ass.
“It’ll pass. Keep going.”
With that he pulls ahead of me. Under his black tights Lloyd’s calf muscles are enormous, like a pair of boxing gloves, I think. Under his lime green jersey his distended belly hangs like a hammock. I watch him shift into high gear and pull far ahead. “Hey!” I yell. For the next three miles or so I manage to keep him in sight despite my asshole feeling as if it’s going to burst into flames at any moment. My shoulders and back are sore, too, as are my arms and hands from gripping the handlebars. I keep shifting positions, trying different configurations, standing off the seat when I coast downhill, sitting sidesaddle, or something like it, though this saddle is so slim it doesn’t have any sides. Hot air whistles in and out of the helmet, while high overhead white clouds float uselessly in the sky. I pass a trailer park where a lady hangs wash. I want to pull into her yard, invite myself over for lunch, romance and marry her, sire her children, anything to get off this fucking bicycle. Another long hill, this one shooting straight up like a tsunami. Halfway up I’ve got to pedal standing, which I don’t mind since it gives my crotch a rest. But soon my legs start to give out, and I’m wobbling all over the place until all forward motion ceases and I forget I’m wearing cleats and the bike goes down and me with it, crying out as the side of my leg and my elbow break the fall.
“Goddammit!” I shout.
My leg is all scraped and filigreed with blood. My elbow is a mess, too. My body holds so many pains I can’t distinguish one from the other; they all blend together along with a massive dose of adrenaline. Lloyd is nowhere in sight. To my left a man-made pond with a dock and an aluminum rowboat, to my right a stand of sickly, scruffy trees. I have no idea where on earth I am. Oh, right. Alabama. A trailer truck passes, swirling grit into my eyes. I finish the climb by foot, then hop back on the bike and start pedaling again when I realize that the liquid drooling from my eyes is not sweat but tears. My brother has ditched me again, but that is not why I’m crying. I’m crying because he almost ditched me for good this last time. How could he do it? How could he go to sleep in that bed with his stomach full of wine and pills, knowing he might never wake up? Did he not think of me, his brother? Did he not see that it was my stomach, too, that he filled with poison? That his eternal darkness would be every bit as much mine, forever? Then to act as though nothing had happened. That’s the worst part of it: that he can pretend it was nothing, that it means so little to him; that I mean so little. Jesus Christ, Lloyd, I want to scream, shout up at the useless clouds. You’ve killed me; you’ve killed me; you’ve always killed me. You’re killing me now. You’ve been killing me for years. Since I was born, you’ve been killing me. Stop killing me, Lloyd. Please. Stop killing me. Stop killing me. Stop killing me.
A black man with a pickup truck gives me a lift into town. He drops me off near the Baptist church, and from there I pedal slowly to my brother’s house. It is dusk. I’ve never known such exhaustion. There is something exquisite about it. I walk the last dozen yards up my brother’s driveway. His Cherokee is there; a cognaccolored light burns in the snifter of his study. I walk around and let myself in through the back door. “Edward?” I hear him say. He appears then, greeting me in a sky blue kimono, his head slicked back from the shower, grinning. “What happened?”
I walk straight past him and up the spiral staircase, steadying myself.
“Edward?” he says. “Hey, come on!” His voice climbs the stairs. “I thought you were behind me.”
In the upstairs bathroom I swallow two Advil. It occurs to me as I do so that in my medicine kit I myself have a prescription for diazepam. Among other things, Lloyd and I share insomnia, and we’ve both found that no other drug works as well. There are, it turns out, exactly twelve pills left in the vial. I take one, and then another. To take all twelve at once suddenly seems like not such a bad idea.
Then I think of those two psychiatrists, and of my mother, and even of Lloyd, and finally, somewhere down the line, of myself. I put the pills away.
Monday. My plane leaves at noon. Lloyd has to go to work. He asks me to come with him. He wants to show me his office. All morning I’ve been girding myself. I’ve had enough of Lloyd’s bullying. At last I am going to tell him off. I’ll tell him, in no uncertain terms, what a selfish bastard he’s been, that I’ve made this visit only at our mother’s request and under great duress and that I never want to see him again, ever. Kill yourself as many times as you like. Unless you look in the mirror, you won’t see my face again.
We walk to campus. I am wearing Lloyd’s raw-silk shirt and linen trousers: he wants me to keep them. He knows I’m angry with him; that’s why he’s so quiet. For once, he feels himself in the wrong, but it’s too late. I’ve made up my mind; I am determined. As we cross the quadrangle (still mostly deserted at this hour of morning), I’m reminded of another campus and another visit with my brother, twenty-five years ago, when he was a graduate student and I had already quit school to become a full-time bohemian. It was summer, and I had decided to hitchhike crosscountry. The campus was in Illinois, but it looked just like this one. Without asking I borrowed a pen, one of a dozen old fountain pens my brother kept in his desk drawer, my nineteen-cent Bic having sprung a leak. When he found out, Lloyd called me a “moocher” and a “libertine.” I called him a “greedy capitalist pig.” He told me to hit the road. It was near midnight. I crossed the dark and empty campus, headed for the highway with tears blurring my eyes, not sure which of us I hated or pitied more.
In his office Lloyd shows me his computer, the stacks of journals where he’s published most recently, the photos in thin diploma frames capturing his meetings with important men. I wait for a lull, for a patch of calm water in his white river of self-aggrandizement; then I will strike: I will unleash the full force of my fury.
But the moment passes, or never comes. It’s a quarter to ten. I need to be at the airport by eleven. My bags are in the rental car.
“I have to go,” I say.
He throws his arms around me as I stand there with my own arms hanging, not knowing what to do with them. As he holds me that way, I find myself thinking, Aw, he’s not such a bad guy, while every sore muscle in my body clenches in opposition to this sentiment. He is a bad guy; he’s a terrible guy; he is the worst brother in the world. I hate him, I hate him, I hate him.
“It’s been great having you,” he says. “I missed you.”
I nod. “I have to go,” I say.
As I’m recrossing the campus, I see her. Clarisse Dorfman. She’s headed straight for me across the sunny quadrangle, a defiant look on her oval face, her long red hair barely swaying, her eyes fixed on a point somewhere behind me and to my right. Then it dawns on me: she thinks I’m Lloyd. As she’s about to walk past me, a huge, highly scented lotuslike flower blooms under my solar plexus. I turn, smile widely, and say,
“Hey!”
She walks right past me.
“Hey! Hey!”
She walks faster. As she does, with a smile on my face and an élan vital greater than any I would have thought myself capable of, I yell:
“I love you, I love you, I love you!”