Five

Leo reaches for a white paper plate, using his thumbnail to separate it from the stack. People stand in groups around him in the synagogue’s basement. The burial had taken less time than he imagined. Who knew funerals were so fast? This business of death is efficient.

But this is the type of thinking that would make Nora and Stephen wince. They think he is a heathen for not dabbing his eyes and staring off in regret. Only a barbarian consults his watch at a funeral. Only a barbarian is tempted by the food.

The buffet table bisects the room. Black trays with clear plastic lids display their contents: smoked fish, pasta salad, sandwiches. A catering company probably has an in with the synagogue. Shivah trays. So good, you will die. Leo disguises his laugh by coughing into his shoulder. Aunt Sharon must have made the arrangements. His mom had glanced at the table, her lips pursed in disapproval.

Leo reaches for a sandwich, a cross-section of turkey and lettuce and tomato speared with a toothpick, green plastic wrap on its end. Is it decorative? For safety? Did that little bit of green protect you from the toothpick’s point? He contemplates this, about to take a bite, when he feels himself being watched. He looks up. What? he thinks, as Nora meets his eye accusingly.

Nora’s eyes flash their code. Memo to Leo: Be the hero. Don’t eat the hero. He drops the sandwich like a dog.

The morning has been filled with such rebukes. How Stephen and Nora carried on at the cemetery! Murmuring to each other, eyes lowered. Their gestures composed a ballet, a great performance of propriety. Meanwhile, he watched as Nora tugged at her outfit during the service, so anxious to get everything right. Arms crossed? No, better straight. She darted nervous looks at June, attempting to mirror her movements. And what was so respectful about that? The dead don’t care if we slouch. But there Stephen and Nora stand, so upright and stiff, too pious for food.

Leo has given in to their small demands, not minding the way anyone else in his position might. Whether you stand straight or talk in a hushed voice at a funeral is meaningless. But not causing a scene? That, as they say in the MasterCard ads, is priceless.

The dead probably want us to do whatever we think offends them. Eat, cough, laugh. The dead probably long for such acts. All those stirrings and scratchings—glorious when you can no longer do them. These are the fidgets and falterings of what it means to be human. When we are most ourselves, our faulty selves, and finally relent.

“Go ahead,” the dead might say. “Let one rip.”

In the far corner, Nora and Stephen stand huddled together. Their friendship bobs between them like a current, keeping Leo at bay.

He feels a tap at his arm. Magnified eyes under oversize glasses, and what can only be a wig, sitting at an angle that is just slightly off.

“A sad day,” the woman remarks.

“Thank you for coming,” he replies, holding out his hand. “Leopold.”

The old lady comes up to his elbow. She takes his hand using just her fingers, the pressure nonexistent.

“Oh, I know who you are. I saw pictures.” She shows no sign of relinquishing his hand, and he has the strange feeling of having loaned it to her.

“You’re from Pine Grove?”

She nods. “A couple of us came over. The shuttle made a special trip.”

Perhaps at a certain age, he reflects, you dispense with names.

“But where is Stephen?” She peers around the room.

Leo gestures with his free hand and she follows his gaze. Stephen and Nora have been joined by another old-timer, a fluff of white hair over a stick of a body, like a Q-tip.

“There he is!” A smile breaks out across her face. Her lips are frosted pink, a horror against her yellow teeth. “A wonderful grandson, to visit so often.”

“Right,” Leo mutters.

“I don’t mean it that way. You kids are busy with your own lives. She knew that.” The woman brushes away the thought. She has pink polish on her nails, which appear large and rounded, like coins. “It’s just that those visits meant a lot to her. She kept to herself, you know. But when Stephen was there, she’d light up. A kind soul, your brother.”

“Oh, sure.”

“Well. Our condolences for your loss.” The woman pauses, nods. “She will be missed.” With that she begins shuffling down the buffet.

Leo feels the faint trace of her fingers, his hand finally released. “Our condolences,” she had said. Was she speaking for the lot of them, a bingo club or mah-jongg group? Was she their ambassador? Or had she once been married, her husband now gone but still causing her to default into an automatic we after so many decades together? Maybe she was the resident busybody at the nursing home, the one who kept tabs on everyone and attended the funerals. Grandma Portman had probably frowned at her pink lipstick and nails, her ridiculous lopsided wig.

Grandma Portman was impassive. Leo couldn’t tell if she enjoyed seeing them at Delancey or if she didn’t want to be there. He wouldn’t have been offended if it were the latter; he simply wanted to know, either way. It was her inscrutability that bothered him.

Stephen probably knew the answer. Who visited a nursing home like that? Monthly would be one thing, but weekly! Stephen probably wanted to live out there, where his old-man wardrobe of cardigan sweaters and houndstooth blazers would fit right in.

For months, Stephen claimed to be too busy to make it to Sunday brunch. It usually ended up being Leo and Nora and his parents, a strange double date, Nora so sullen that he had to work extra hard to cover for her. Leo didn’t mind. But the whole point of brunch was for the family to be together. What good is living in the same city if you never see each other?

“Work,” Stephen always said apologetically when he begged off. Like he knew the meaning of the word. Yet he’d found time for Grandma Portman. Leo imagines Stephen doing the rounds, making balloon animals and performing card tricks. He imagines Stephen being greeted with applause.

He should’ve asked that old woman about Stephen’s visits. But what would Leo have wanted her to say? Why Stephen visited so much? What he and their grandmother had in common? Leo pauses, considers. Why he kept it a secret, really.

It wasn’t something the woman could have explained. Stephen wouldn’t have told the residents he was there on the sly. Sitting in the common room, he wouldn’t have said, “This is just between us here, okay?”

“You should ask him,” Nora had said in he car. Couldn’t ask him at a funeral, though, he wishes he’d replied. That’d hardly be appropriate. Or: You ask him, if you think it’s so easy.

Leo drifts to a corner table with soda bottles. The plastic cups are cherry red and lined with bright white, the kind they used for beer pong back in the day. How happy the frat house had felt, always full, bustling with life. Leo used to make the guys laugh by collecting the cups after a party and drinking their contents.

He pours himself a Coke and takes a sip. Talk: as if that would mend matters. The carbonation offers its sharp bite.

“It’s better, I think, that we not say anything,” his dad had declared that morning as Leo stretched. His dad was the true runner, with muscular calves that bifurcated like the halves of a heart. Leo used to try to build his up when he was in high school, doing calf exercises on the stairs, until it occurred to him that—as with so much else in life—he hadn’t inherited his father’s genes. No amount of work could give him what nature had withheld. “Sure, Dad,” Leo had replied. His dad nodded, knowing he could trust his son.

There is valor in letting things slide. This is what Leo has learned from his father. It is why his mom gets her way with the remodels and shopping sprees, why she gets to have the party tonight. We look the other way in love.

Leo glances at Stephen and Nora across the room. Leo believed her when she said she hadn’t known about Stephen’s visits, but she also didn’t seemed surprised. “Aren’t you offended?” he wanted to ask her. “Don’t you think it’s strange? He’s supposed to be your best friend!”

But some part of him thinks that Nora is sympathetic to secrets.

She first told him about the pulling a few weeks after her mom’s funeral, leading him into the bathroom. “Look,” she said tearfully, parting her hair in the mirror. He knew, before he turned, to brace himself—that whatever this was, it wouldn’t be good. He kept his face still as the shock ran through him.

The bare spot was the size of a quarter, white scalp visible through fine tendrils. It wasn’t like a bald spot on a man, but horribly unnatural looking, like a face without a nose. He kept his breathing steady, the lightbulbs over the vanity gaping. Then, meeting her eyes in the mirror, he took her into his arms.

There was a name for it. Trich-something. Whenever he types the first few letters into the search engine, the computer supplies the rest. A trick, he always thinks. It fooled you, duped you. You lived with it every day without knowing it was there.

Nora’s pulling is like an addiction, a dark secret they gloss over. What bothers him is not the strangeness of her desire to pluck herself clean (did it have something to do with her mom’s chemo? He’d hoped one of the shrinks would ask) but that because of it, he has to tiptoe around her. He isn’t supposed to ask about it because there’s always the fear of making it worse. “You pulling?” is the most he ever says. Two words. “You tired?” “You hungry?” “You pulling?” He utters them casually, not really thinking it helps—surely she does it in private, at night—but because it helps him. Those two words were like a release valve letting out steam.

Nora was horrified when he told his family about it. It didn’t matter that the websites specifically recommended family support. “My parents are sophisticated about this stuff,” he assured her. He refrained from voicing his surprise that Stephen hadn’t already known. Because shouldn’t best friends confide in each other?

Apparently not. Apparently Stephen and Nora didn’t talk about reality. “You want to come with me to Pine Grove today?” “Nah, I’m planning on pulling out some more of my hair.” Theirs is a different model of friendship, one Leo cannot grasp. Where it is perfectly understandable to have surprises surface. Where it is okay to have kept things hidden all along.

“Nothing ever happened between us,” Nora told him early on. “Just so you know.” Leo was relieved to hear it. Stephen and Nora had been best friends since her freshman year. It was hard not to imagine a drunken night, a onetime hookup they vowed to forget. “I know all about the appeal of upperclassmen,” Leo teased. “I fell for one myself.” Nora gazed back at him, her eyes level.

Nora wasn’t Stephen’s type, anyway. Occasionally he brought a date to a wedding, always a ridiculous model type, an art-history or French major who made June’s nostrils flare with jealousy. Nora was pretty—brown hair, green eyes—but unthreatening. She was pretty in a way that drew you in rather than turned you off.

Stephen’s girls knew their beauty. They were like ostriches with their long, skinny legs, parading around on high heels. They wore plunging necklines to reveal bony torsos. Their hair moved in sheets. They were delicate creatures, used to getting their way. Stephen’s indifference posed a challenge to them.

“He’s never said a word to you about it?” Leo once prodded. “About what?” Nora asked. “His love life! Why no one sticks!” Nora shot him one of her looks, protective and fierce. “That’s his business, Leo,” she said firmly.

Maybe. But when you keep your business a secret, it becomes everyone’s business. It becomes the thing people worry about, the elephant in the room.

And that’s what Nora and Stephen share. They are the kids at the playground who go off by themselves, whispering behind a bush, refusing to play with everyone else.

That would be fine if they made their reasons clear. But neither of them feels compelled to explain their behavior. They don’t mind leaving puzzles in their wake. “Wasn’t the whole point for you to do opera?” Nora’s dad had said when she graduated. Nora glared at him, but Leo felt a twist of sympathy for the guy. Leo knew what it was like to be on the outside, scratching your head.

Leo’s job, like a janitor’s, is to push along, never asking questions or complaining about the messes. Never mind that he wants to be a source of support. Your problems are my problems, he wants to tell Nora. Your skeletons are my skeletons. That’s what love is.

They rely on him to remain steadfast. And how they take him for granted, their beloved dope! They don’t see the gift of his predictability. They’ve never had to worry about him or been thrown for a loop.

His parents do it, too, teasing him constantly. He is goofy Leo to them, with a humdrum job and a love of sports. They depend on him for it, but turn up their noses as well. Leo is like the corner Wawa: unexciting, but convenient. Always available.

Growing up, Stephen had been a vortex of need. From as early as Leo can remember, the family catered to Stephen, shaping itself around him. He fought with their parents often, hiding out at the Strand on weekends. He wrote poetry and tacked his dark creations to his bedroom wall. He pierced his ear in high school, a silver loop in the cartilage, up high. And didn’t that mean something, depending on which ear? Or was that only for earrings that went through the lobe? Their parents stayed up late conferring about it, wringing their hands. Leo made himself a promise to never cost them sleep.

Teachers used to call home to make recommendations about this gifted, brooding boy. Stephen wasn’t like the others. He wasn’t like the preppy kids at school who took Ritalin so that they could stay up late studying, twitching with ambition. He wasn’t like the usual misfits—the theater nerds and tech geeks. Stephen was a scholar, the teachers agreed. Michael and June fretted over their delicate bird—asthmatic, astute—while Leo played with his LEGOs and joined lacrosse.

Leo didn’t mind. He didn’t care, even back then, that the attention was on his brother. He admired him, the way Stephen got those awards: best essay, best science project. Then puberty hit, and frail Stephen began to grow. Girls turned their heads. Guys looked at him grudgingly. Leo was relieved for his brother, suddenly tall and handsome, no longer a target in the halls.

Stephen never seemed to notice him back. Not when Leo made the basketball team (“Aren’t you too short for that?” Stephen had asked). Not when he got elected class representative. And certainly not after they moved to Philly, with Stephen halfway out the door to college.

If Leo was the puppy of the family, Stephen was the cat, regal and haughty.

Then the three of them had that summer in Philly, and everything changed.

The funny part was that Leo had by then given up on the idea of being friends with his brother. His freshman year, he’d pledged Pi Kappa Alpha. “You’re such a Pike, dude,” they told him. Brotherhood, he realized, could be found in other ways.

These guys appreciated him. They noticed him. They loved him. His unwavering normalcy was no longer a weakness, and Leo felt more sure-footed. He might never be a bigwig like his dad, and he wasn’t book smart like his brother. He didn’t have his mom’s looks or care about her frilly world of privilege. But, for the first time, he felt like those things didn’t matter.

Going into that summer, Leo was focused on Nora. He was thrilled that she was staying at Delancey, that they’d get to spend more time together. He accepted her close friendship with Stephen. There was no point in objecting to it or acting jealous. That would be, as the Pikes liked to say, a dick move.

So Leo played it cool, tuning them out when they went on about Yale, mentioning shared profs and friends, dorms and events whose names Leo didn’t recognize. He smiled and sipped his beer, pretending not to mind.

What he didn’t expect was for the three of them to find a dynamic all their own. Philly seemed to open up for them that summer. They ventured to neighborhoods he hadn’t known about in high school: the narrow strip of bars on Sansom, the little pockets of Old City. They would meet for happy hour at the Nodding Head or a picnic at Rittenhouse Square, crowding together on a blanket. Leo realized that he and his brother were finally doing that elusive, brotherly thing of hanging out without its being a big deal. Trivia night at the corner bar, karaoke at the place on Chestnut, Nora bringing down the house with a roar. Even a baseball game once, a season opener, Phillies vs. Braves, the three of them sharing a bag of caramel corn.

Leo felt some part of him stir that summer, some missing piece click into place. That summer felt golden and whole. He worked for a software company during the day and came home to Nora at night. They hung out with friends and went to bars. The difference was that Stephen was with them, too. Leo saw a glimmer on the horizon. This was how life could be.

When their exclusionary bubble reared its head, Stephen and Nora laughing at some inside joke, Leo reminded himself that they’d been friends before he entered the scene. They talked like he wasn’t there because it was their habit. He shrugged it off and issued a smile.

Just as he did today.

Stephen and Nora liked to play Mr. & Ms. Etiquette, policing his uncouth ways, but they never thought about how they could be inconsiderate, at times rude. Not to a bunch of strangers they would never see again, but to the person closest to them.

Memo. He feels it coming from across the room. Do not belch and then blow out your Coke.

His own parents aren’t so particular. His mom, itching to get back to the city, will whisper to his dad at the earliest possible moment. His dad will nod while looking out at the room, a politician getting input from an aide.

His parents wouldn’t care if Leo ate sandwich after sandwich. They wouldn’t care if he left early to squeeze in some work at the office. Nora fears them too much, convinced that the right combination of outfit and makeup and conversational morsel will produce some effect on them. But maybe that’s how girls are, always trying.

His dad is the last person to sweat that stuff. He did the prayer thing because it was how he’d been raised, but it wasn’t some display of reverence, the way it is for Stephen. When his dad surveyed the room, it was to check on Sharon, to make sure he had talked with each person there. His dad understands that funerals are a time for family, a time to gather the people around you—not to prove how devout you are.

Follow-up memo to Leopold: phones are to be put away.

He slips his Palm back into his pocket. It makes her less anxious, he figures. So he resists the urge to scroll through his email—a workday, his in-box piling up, a mountain to conquer later. Resists checking for pregame updates. (Malone out with his knee!). A travesty that Game 5 is tonight, tip-off at nine, the heart of the party, with an upset in the air. How could you not root for Detroit? The city of underdogs. He won’t be able to sneak up to the TV without his mom tearing him a new one, and his dad isn’t a basketball fan. “League of thugs,” he always says when Leo mentions the NBA.

Leo has resisted other things as well. “Nice out here,” he’d wanted to remark that morning as they glided through the suburbs. The trees looked like broccoli. The potholes disappeared, the road smooth beneath them. He wanted to suggest a quick detour to look at houses, imagining which one might someday be theirs. But Nora’s face had been set, her eyes distant, and so he had refrained. He let her have her space, just as his dad was letting his mom have the party. Because that is what you do.

It is enough for him, what he has. He gets impatient sometimes, wanting to run out into their future, because he can see it waiting—the house, the lawn, the tricycle resting on the drive. They aren’t ready yet, he knows. The hiccup of the past few years—well, who could have seen that coming?

And so he must be patient, bide his time. Try not to let those thoughts creep in when he worries if there will ever be a wedding. Of course there will. The doubts materialize when they’re out like this, at a social event, when he can feel people look at them and wonder.

“No date yet?” Aunt Sharon had said, eyeing him, hefting her mass up the hill after the burial. She was wearing a muumuu that his mom had smirked at. “Well, what’s the rush, anyway?” She lit a cigarette, pausing to exhale through her nostrils. “It’s better to wait. You kids are too young.”

Twenty-seven isn’t young, he wanted to retort. And who was she to be giving advice? None of his friends are married yet, true. Dave had howled in protest when Leo announced the engagement. “You’re in your prime!” Dave had said, aghast.

They didn’t see that waiting was pointless. Because if he and Nora want the house, the kids (three, he imagines, playing out different combinations of boy/girl), they have to start taking steps. He isn’t supposed to mention it, but Nora’s birthday is approaching in August, her twenty-eighth. And after the wedding, the honeymoon (Hawaii, he imagines, lush and warm, too hot to quarrel; lethargy; flowers of idleness), she will be that much closer to thirty.

It’s just a matter of time, he always tells himself. He has to be patient and not press, be patient and seem unconcerned. It is what the Pistons have been doing, defense beating offense, patience beating pizzazz. Hold back, wait. The meek shall inherit the earth.

He is part of a delicate operation with Nora that he himself barely understands. Is she better? Recovered? Not worse? It is a complicated dance requiring him to tread lightly, so lightly, on the balls of his feet. He cannot worry about his game plan, about the points on the scoreboard, because then any momentum will be lost. He has to bide his time, feel out Nora’s rhythm. The pesky questions must be kept at bay. Stephen had started hanging out with him, after all, just when Leo had stopped caring.

That is the economics of life, the market of the heart driven by supply and demand, just like everything else. When you want too much, too openly, life sees your hunger and contracts. You have to conserve your desire, hold it close. Not mind as time unfolds, testing you. Not mind the sparseness, the seeming lack. No roses without thorns.