I WAS SURPRISED to find Zap there, but I was even more surprised to find Jennie. My brother always shows up when you least expect him, but Jennie has always been very predictable.
Zap trembled as he opened the door. “I used the key,” he began with apologies. “I hope that’s O.K. I tried to phone. I didn’t scare you, did I?”
I shook my head. “What’s up?”
He shook hands with Sean. “Nothing. How you doing?”
“Fine,” Sean said, “just fine.”
Neither of us knew Jennie was there until we heard a toilet flush and turned around as she walked out of the bathroom. There was an incandescence about her as she came down the corridor. It was as if she had an aura, like Sean’s plastic shift, only this was a kind of white Day Glo, the type that radiates from Halloween skeletons. I knew that I’d seen her radiate that way years ago, when I walked into a steamy drafting room in my father’s office and saw Jennie with Zap; Jennie’s body seemed to invent the light.
Sean seemed to be almost as stunned at seeing Jennie as Jennie was at seeing Sean. “What’re you doing here?”
“I got myself a baby sitter and came in to look at graduate programs in biology.”
“Yeah, I bet. I need a beer.” And he stomped into the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Zap stared at the ground. “Can we go for a walk?”
“I don’t want to go for a walk. I just got back from a long weekend. What are you doing?”
“Zap asked me to meet him,” Jennie answered. “And I wanted to get away. It’s no big deal.”
Zap looked as if he were suffering from permanent jet lag. His hair was frizzled, his beard stubby. “She wanted to get away.”
“Did you tell Tom?”
She grew nervous and began rubbing her eyes. “No, no, I told him I was coming to see you and look at schools.”
“I don’t think I like this . . .”
“Look,” Zap said, “would you please take a walk with me?”
It was dark as we strolled, both of us with our arms folded across our chests, toward Central Park. When we reached Central Park West, we walked along the parkside on the brick sidewalk and I was aware of how unsmooth the brick was beneath my feet.
“You can’t just do this,” I said. “You don’t seem to understand. There are others involved.”
“I’m not doing this alone,” he protested. “Jennie wanted to come and I don’t even know what’s going to happen.”
“I don’t think I can tolerate this in my house.” And suddenly I felt a terrible rage grow in me, as if I were being invaded by thieves. “What’d you do with Anna?”
“Anna’s in Pennsylvania. That’s over with. But if you can’t tolerate this in your house, all right, we’ll go to a motel. We’ll check into the Plaza. But I want to spend a little time with her and she wants to spend time with me.”
“When are you going to grow up? You can’t always have everything you want.”
Now he was shouting. “I’m almost thirty-one. I want something concrete in my life.”
“I’ll get you a cement mixer.”
“I’ll go to a hotel.” He kicked a stone. “I’ll get right out of your life.”
I raised my hand, prepared to strike my brother, and he looked at me with a strange look I’d never seen. “You were always the favorite.” He lowered his voice. “It was always Debbie this and Debbie that and why can’t you be more like Debbie.”
I stopped. “Are you crazy? That was Renee. You don’t know what you’re talking about. I was the one who was like you, remember? Peas in a pod?”
“Well, you aren’t like me anymore.”
Zap had always been rebellious. Even before he was born, three doctors with stethoscopes resting on our mother’s womb shook their heads at one another, and my mother was certain she carried a dead child. The doctors reassured her. Not dead; just misplaced. They resorted to an x ray and found the baby upside down with his right hand raised high above his head in a posture one doctor prophetically noted resembled the Statue of Liberty.
By the time we got back to the apartment, we weren’t speaking. I’ve thrown alarm clocks and forks at my brother in moments of adolescent rage, and he’s been known to clobber me for general stupidity, but this anger was different to us. We had nothing more to say.
Sean was nursing a beer in the kitchen and reading the back of a cereal box. Jennie leafed through a copy of Progressive Architecture in the living room. I wasn’t absolutely certain that either knew the other was in the house.
She smiled at me, then grimaced, pointing toward the kitchen. I went into the kitchen, where Sean had just eaten a bowl of Rice Krispies. “No nutritional value,” I said.
“Tom’s my friend. What am I supposed to tell him?”
I patted him on the shoulder. “Do you want to go to bed?”
“Look, this is serious. What am I supposed to tell Tom? He’s my friend.” He crushed the beer can with his hand and tossed it into the wastebasket across the room, missed, and cursed under his breath.
I really didn’t know what he should tell Tom, but we both wanted to get out of the house. Even though it was late, we decided to see a film. We went to see a disaster of a disaster film in the neighborhood, something about a volcano, and all Sean did was criticize the special effects, cross and uncross his legs a dozen times, refuse to eat popcorn, and when he held my hand, he tapped his finger on my fingers.
When we got home, they’d gone to bed. Or at least they had disappeared into the spare room. Sean and I crawled into bed. He pulled me close to him and asked me if he could stay with me for a while. “You mean live here?”
“Just until I find a place . . .”
We drifted onto separate pillows. “It’s just that . . . I don’t know. Sure, you can stay here while you look for a place but I need more time . . .” I heard dry leaves swirled on the street outside. I’d never really thought it could be winter again. “It’s just that I keep thinking . . .”
“About Mark?”
I sighed. “That’s right. I keep thinking maybe I should see him. Oh, I don’t know.”
“Don’t worry about it.” Sean rolled over to the other side of the bed. “I’ll have a place in twenty-four hours.”
The Trim Time Health Club is located in the basement of an office building. Specifically, it is located on the third-level basement in one of the darkest, most mildewed, drain-clogged dungeons ever to go by the name of health club. It has the honor of being rated by The New York Times as the worst health club in the city. I’ve been a member for the past three years.
It’s a kind of health club for derelicts. Huge women with breasts that droop to their waists like the ears of a floppy dog emerge from cloudy vapor and disappear somewhere into the dressing room. Identical black twins, who look as if they’ve been cut from the same cookie cutter, move in unison. Ballerinas and homosexuals float by in the pool on red kickboards. A miniature madwoman in her seventies does a pas de deux to silent music in front of the mirrors of the equipment room.
Jennie and I undressed discreetly in the main locker area with the other women, women with snakes tattooed on their spines, women with scars on their breasts and bellies, women who hid themselves in a corner so that the rest of us couldn’t see, women who stood nude in the two public phone booths, making calls with anxious faces. Jennie and I slipped out of our clothes, careful not to look at one another. I’d always admired her shapely yet firm body, and I could tell from the corner of my eye that she hadn’t lost it.
We shuffled down the stairs in our clogs. At the Trim Time, you don’t want to walk around barefoot for fear of slipping in the slime or contracting some vile growth between your toes. We jumped into the pool just as someone sailed over our heads. “Jesus!” Jennie exclaimed, watching the man usurp our lane. “You’ve gotta be quick around here,” I replied, trying to keep her gaze away from the dead cockroach that was floating past us in the wash drain.
We’d gone about ten lengths when we both paused to notice a little, rather terrified-looking man standing in a corner in a pink bathing cap, jerking back and forth, his hand groping for something in front of him as if he were trying to catch a fish. But whatever its flaws, there are no fish in the pool at the Trim Time Health Club.
“Look at that,” Jennie said, a little perplexed and intrigued. “That’s disgusting. Do you think he’s dangerous?”
Is a masturbating man dangerous? Only if he’s doing it in public, I guess. I was fairly certain he wasn’t dangerous, but I thought perhaps I should inform the guard, who weighed in at about two-eighty. Her name was Agnes, and when I told her that a man was playing with himself in the pool, she frowned, put down her copy of Mademoiselle, rose on her elephantine legs, and peered down at the man. “This is a pool, buddy, not a peepshow.”
The man raised his hands, trembling, looking terribly apologetic. He said he couldn’t find the tie to his swimsuit.
I slipped back into the pool beside Jennie. “God,” I said, “I don’t know why I did that.”
“You never can tell.” She tried to console me.
“He was harmless.”
I felt depressed and the water suddenly felt cold and filled with chemicals. My skin broke out in bumps. I looked in the direction of the man, who had ceased to jerk but was standing perfectly still, dejected, facing the corner of the pool, and he looked at me and stuck out his tongue. Jennie stuck her tongue back at him, defending me. “He’s nuts,” she said.
What does it mean when our private acts are suddenly made public? Or when a private act is inadvertently observed? The bathroom door is left unlocked and we are caught on the toilet. Or touching ourselves. Or touching someone we shouldn’t be touching. There seems to be no end to the secrets we need to keep.
In the steam room I lost Jennie in a thick, white mist; all I could observe was a vague, ghostly form. I was pretty certain I could get her to talk to me in the sauna as soon as the twins and the other women left, but we stopped to get a drink of water on our way from the steam room and she screamed because she almost stepped on a Japanese water beetle that lay dying on its back near the drain. She was a little revolted by the time we got to the sauna.
The twins and the two other women were in the sauna when we got there. One of the women was very fat and had wrapped herself in a wintergreen plastic trash can liner. She was a glob of sweat. The twins were dancers with perfect, taut black bodies, and everything one did the other repeated. The fourth woman was black and had white cream all over her face. She looked like a frosted cake. The twins got up, stretched, touched their toes three times, and left. The masseuse came in to get the fat lady in the trash can liner. The lady with the cream on her face stood up after a while and said she was going to faint. She staggered out.
Jennie assured me that had she seen my health club, she never would have felt uptight about taking me to the Tall Grass. I told her Mark wanted me to join the New York Health and Racquet and that I told him I didn’t think a civil rights attorney needs gilt mirrors with rotating strobes in order to stay in shape. But Mark liked the nautilus machine and the coed sauna, so he went ahead and joined Health and Racquet and I joined Trim Time and maybe that was when our problems first were made visible.
I rubbed baby oil on Jennie’s back. She let her head float as I massaged her neck muscles. “Let me do you,” she said, turning around after a while. She began at the base of my neck, working into the muscles of my spine. I let my eyes close, then opened them quickly, thinking for a moment that I saw the face of the little masturbating man, staring at us scornfully, about to go and tell the masseuse what we were doing.
“You know,” Jennie said, “there are some things you just can’t share with a man.”
“I know. Is there anything you can’t share with a woman?” Jennie laughed. “Just one as far as I can tell, but you can probably do that for yourself.”
“Probably.” I laughed.
We sat naked now, facing one another, sweat in beads on our torsos and legs, with the glow of athletes about us, as if we were training for some important match.
I extended a leg, trying to put my head to my knee. “What do you think you’re going to do?”
“About Zap?” Jennie was also trying to put her head on her knee, and I was stunned to find that our former drum majorette was as stiff as I. “I’m not leaving Tom, if that’s what you mean.”
I nodded. That was what I’d meant.
It was one of those clear, cold nights that happen rarely in Manhattan, the kind of night they use in the fake sets for Fred Astaire when stars are light bulbs, mimicking the tall buildings, and Fred and Ginger waltz across some nonexistent footbridge in Central Park when no one in his or her right mind would be in the park. Those nights are almost magical and the streets can whisper as if they’re calling your name.
I thought I heard mine being called as Jennie stopped in front of a folk art store on Columbus to admire a little vase she thought she’d like for her living room. It was a pale, earthenware vase, done in brown and blue. “Look.” She smiled happily.
“Jen, what happened last night?”
Both of us kept looking at the vase. “Nothing happened, I’m afraid. It’s difficult to talk about . . . I couldn’t . . .” Her voice trailed off and she kept her eyes fixed on the little vase. I raised my eyes, looking into our faces reflected in the glass. We were many years older than when I first saw Jennie walking a raccoon on a leash, and I almost expected to see two strangers on the brink of old age, but instead I saw nothing in our faces that wasn’t completely familiar to me.
Jennie was starting to loosen up as we turned down my street. A homosexual couple in purple body shirts walked by us, hand in hand, and Jennie commented how times had changed. “Who would have thought I’d have a fling with your brother?”
“Oh, it’s a fling?”
She laughed. “I’m not sure it’s even turning into that. I’m not very good at this sort of thing, I’m afraid. Maybe I’m too uptight. He just had this thing in his head about me. Anyway, it was lousy. Or at least I was lousy. And I told him, well, I let him know I was going back to Tom. He didn’t put up much of a fuss.”
We both felt relieved and lightheaded as we walked up the steps to my apartment. We were laughing as we walked into my living room. We stopped laughing when we came into the kitchen and Sean motioned for us to be quiet because he was on the phone with Tom. “It’s for you,” he said, passing the phone to Jennie, and he and I left the room.
Zap sat in an armchair in the spare room, reading an old magazine. Sean knocked on the door. “I think you better go to a movie,” he said. “Tom’s coming over.”
Tom arrived almost an hour later. He looked awkward and strange, like the country mouse visiting the city mouse. “Well, hello,” he said. He looked around. “So this is where you live?” I nodded and I could tell from the way he said it that he didn’t like my place.
“Would you like something to drink?”
“I think I’d like to talk to Jennie for a few minutes first.” Sean and I went into the kitchen and gave Tom and Jennie the living room to talk in. For some reason I had expected to hear shouting, but it was very quiet in the living room. I washed the dishes in the sink while Sean read a film magazine. It was almost an hour before Jennie came into the kitchen and said, “Tom’s leaving. He wants to talk to you before he goes.”
I pointed to myself. “Me?” She nodded.
Tom sat alone on the sofa, a beer can in his hand, looking more thoughtful than I’d ever seen him look. He stood up as I walked in the room. Then he sat back down and motioned for me to sit beside him on the sofa. He reached across and squeezed my hand. “I know Zap went out to a movie, so I don’t want to stay here much longer. Jennie told me what happened. She told me . . . everything. But I already had decided that I’d forgive her no matter what. I’ve been impossible. I’ve been terrible all year. I mean, I guess I should be angry, but for some reason I’m not. We’re going to try and work it out again. I told her to stay here tonight and talk to Zap.”
He shook his head. “She’s not going to sleep with him again. I believe her. I have to believe her. I’ll lose her if I don’t believe her. God, I feel like hell.”
He called to Jennie that he was leaving, and she came into the living room. “Are you sure you’ll be all right?”
He nodded. “I’ll be home when you get there tomorrow.” They started to kiss, so I walked into the kitchen.
Sean sat alone at the table and looked up at me as I walked in. “That’s the hardest thing Tom ever had to do,” Sean said.
To my surprise Zap wasn’t very upset when Jennie announced that she was going back to the farm the next day. I was sitting with her when she told him that Tom had come over and she was going back. During the day she had registered for her class. “Hey, look,” Zap said, “I’m sure it’s for the best. In fact, I know it is.” He offered to sleep on the couch, and Jennie accepted his offer. Later that evening, while Jennie was taking a bath, Zap sat on the sofa, strumming his guitar. I sat down beside him and asked how he felt.
Jennie, Zap told me as we sat on the sofa, was as cold as a freezer and dry as a desert and he’d waited twelve years for a thrill that had probably never existed in the first place. Now he could get on with his life^ Like a morphine addict going cold turkey, he shook as he told me that for all practical purposes nothing had happened between them. “It’s funny,” he said, putting down the guitar. “I don’t really want her anymore.” I rose to go to bed and asked if I could get him anything. He shook his head and put his hands on my waist, pulling me to him. “You were always my kind of woman,” he mumbled, “and I was always your kind of man.”
I stood there for a few moments, uneasy, uncertain of what to do next. Then I took my brother’s hands off me and walked away.
When Jennie was leaving the next day, I handed her the little vase she’d admired in the window of the folk art store on Columbus Avenue. When she opened the box, she started to cry. “God, I feel like I’ve messed everything up. I never should have come here.”
I gave her a hug. “You haven’t messed anything up.”
“Are you sure? I’m afraid that everything has changed.”
“Nothing has changed,” I assured her, pretty certain that everything had. “If you need me, you know I’m here.”
She said she knew and I watched as she got into her station wagon, which looked so incongruous on West Sixty-eighth Street in New York. She started the motor and disappeared back into the hinterlands of South Dakota, with Zap and me, who were hardly speaking, waving good-bye.
For the next three days Zap, Sean, and I lived together in a kind of somber melancholy. Sean read the real estate ads in the Times every morning, assuring me he’d take the first place he found. He left for work at nine. I went to the office at about ten. Zap wandered around Manhattan, trying to decide what he wanted to do with himself until the University of Illinois agreed to let him return to medical school in January. By the time we saw one another in the evenings, we were exhausted and no one really talked about anything.
But on Saturday morning, several days after Jennie had gone back to the farm, I woke up early and went into the kitchen, thinking I’d make a nice breakfast and surprise Zap and Sean. I opened the vegetable crisper and found a rotten tomato. It had been sliced the week before and left unwrapped in the refrigerator. It was smushy, with a black and white mold growing around its top, and it seemed at the moment, that rotten, vile thing, to encompass the cosmos as I held it in my hand. I knew it was my brother’s tomato. I knew he’d used it to make sandwiches the week before, used it as part of his seduction, his havoc, that red tomato. An awful, diseased tomato.
He can’t do anything right. He wastes his life. He sleeps with married women he can’t have and who don’t really want him. He obsesses about things he doesn’t even care about and neglects the things he should care about. He can’t finish anything he’s started. He can’t wrap a goddamn tomato in Saran Wrap. It was at that instant that Zap had the misfortune of walking into the kitchen, smiling. “Hi,” he said. “Want me to make us some breakfast?”
His smile evaporated when I held the tomato, shaking it at him, as if I’d just found heroin or a copy of Screw in the vegetable crisper. “Sure, why don’t you make omelettes with this. Look at it, look what you’ve done. What’s the matter with you anyway?”
He squinted, as if the light were very bright. I was shouting at him. “Couldn’t you cover it up? Do you know how these things can smell?” So this is what it is to grow old, I thought. You get angry at all the things that don’t matter because you can’t get angry at the things that do. You scream about tomatoes. “You’re just wasting your whole goddamn life. Well, I’m sick of it.”
He was furious and I watched as his face turned red and rotten before my eyes. “Yeah, and what’re you doing? Years with some uptight attorney who dumps you for some skinny drip. Nobody ever liked him in the first place, except maybe Mom. And now you’re with a real man and you don’t even notice him, but you notice some crappy tomato. So what if I tried to have a little fling and get Jennie out of my system? At least I’m trying to get on with my life.”
“At least I’m honest. At least I don’t go around messing up other people’s lives. At least I finish the things I start.”
“Do you know who you remind me of . . .”
I knew I reminded him of our father. I shut up.
Zap closed his lips tight, pursed them together as I’d seen him do with only one other person in our lives. He closed himself off to me, the way I’d seen him close himself off to our father when he screamed at him. Then he opened his eyes and I saw a strange and distant look, one that was oddly familiar to me, and I saw my brother as I’d seen him in my first childhood memory, staring at me from across our playpen, trying to put words together, and I was sure at that moment in that kitchen, holding a rotten tomato, that he was thinking now the same thing he’d been thinking back then and that if I could translate that infantile expression from across a rubber padded playpen or a grownup’s kitchen into words, I’d come up with something that resembled, “What the hell am I doing here with her?”
By noon he’d packed his things and said he was ready to leave. He was going to take a Greyhound back to Chicago, back to Illinois Med, where he’d return for the last time to medical school and would emerge a few years later a pediatrician engaged to a physical therapist. Before he left, I made him some sandwiches. Tomatoes were significantly missing. I insisted on going with him to the Port Authority, but before he walked out the door, he tossed the set of keys he’d had made at the Home Safe Locksmith to Sean. “Here,” he said, “you keep them. You might need them. Take care of my sister for me.”
Sean shook his hand. “She really doesn’t need much taking care of.” He clutched the keys in his hand.
We stood in line at the Port Authority and Zap shifted uneasily on his feet. It was clear he wanted to get away from me. I felt as if we were going off to school together for the first time. He wanted to buy some doughnuts, so I told him I’d hold his place in line and waited while he bought a bag of whole wheat and coconut-covered doughnuts. While he was gone, they opened the door and the bus driver began checking tickets. Maybe I should go and let him stay, I thought. I put his knapsack on my back and made my way to the door. Who would I sit next to? The thin priest ahead of me? The thick black woman with too many bags behind me? As I reached the gate, he arrived. Zap took his knapsack off my back and handed the driver his ticket. He climbed on board, flung his pack onto the overhead rack, then slipped off the bus to say good-bye.
“Well, I’m off now.” People pushed past us to get on the bus.
“You should have flown. I would have paid for it.”
“This is all right. I need the time to clear my head.” In his jeans and army jacket he looked as much like Zapata as he ever had. “Look,” he said, “no hard feelings, O.K.? I’m sorry about all of this. I can be so damn impulsive.”
“Will you let me know where to find you?”
He kissed me on the forehead. “I’m always just around the corner.” Then Zap climbed back on the bus, wedged into a window seat beside the large black woman, who’d talk to him about Jehovah all the way across the Midwest, and headed toward some destiny he thought awaited him, leaving me to fend for myself in this foreign land.
That night I walked through the apartment while Sean slept, searching, it seemed, for Zap. I thought to myself how if he were here, I’d crawl into his bed, the way I’d done before our parents separated us. I’d say I couldn’t sleep because there was a wolf in the room and he’d make a space, move his leg over slightly.
But we were grownups and I knew it could never be the same. I could never again crawl into his bed and say, “Move over; there’s a wolf in my room.” And I knew that Zap was right now somewhere in the middle of the state of Pennsylvania, wide-eyed, nose pressed to the cold glass, seeing nothing outside, and thinking the same thing.