Both Ways Is the Only Way I Want It (7 page)

“How much money do you think you have?” George asked.

“You know, I was just enjoying this beautiful day,” Aaron said.

“Is it close to a million? Just ballpark. Not counting real estate.”

“George.”

“
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers
. I read that in college. It had a big effect on me. Do you think you’re wasting your powers, getting money, when you could be out here all the time?”

“Why do you do this?”

“Do what?” George asked. “You never want to talk about anything real. You just cut me off. Like you must have a guess about whether Claire’s fucking. I know you think about it.”

Aaron imagined taking his brother’s parka in his hands and swinging him forward off the chairlift. He was strong enough, and had surprise on his side. They hadn’t brought down the safety bar over their legs. The only danger would be George pulling Aaron down with him. Aaron might break a leg, tear an ACL, become one of the miserable patients he saw every day, facing the loss of their mobility and their youth. He could be arrested, even. But at least it would all be over between them, no more attempts at family vacations, no faked brotherly love.

“She has a new boyfriend, you know,” his brother said.

That was news to Aaron, and hearing it from George was like the stab of a pocketknife in his heart. Not a wound that would kill him, but quick and painful and precise. He pretended it wasn’t news.

“You didn’t know, did you?” George asked. “He’s premed. He’ll be a sawbones like you. You’d think she’d be proud to tell you.”

“Why ask us here?” Aaron managed to say.  “Why ask for a family ski trip and then do this?”

“I’m just trying to have a real conversation, like human beings,” George said. “About real things. To be close, like a family for once, instead of just riding up the lift saying ‘What a beautiful day’ like a bunch of tourists from Minnesota.”

“I’ve said nothing of the kind.”

“She’s an adult, you know? You treated her like an adult when she was a little kid and you treat her like a little kid now that she’s not.”

Aaron was startled. “Is she complaining?”

“No—
I
am! You think you’re always right about everything, but you’re not. I know a few things, too, you know? You’d think I’d be allowed to ask you a fucking question now and then.”

Aaron stared at his brother in amazement, but they were at the top of the hill, and had to lift their ski tips and shuffle forward on the icy ramp as the chair discharged them, a process that always felt infantilizing to Aaron, because he had learned it when he was a child, or because it was so awkward to lose momentum after the majesty of riding through the air. George seemed to experience no discomfort, but then he was used to it. It was his job.

They stood at the top of the lift, at the top of the mountain, with people poling past them. Aaron had a headache, and wished he’d never agreed to come skiing. Would he never learn? A small child in a helmet, ski tips together in a snowplow, dropped bravely off the edge. Claire had been that young when she started, her hair bunching out of a purple headband. She had been so brave and so small, and now she was sharing a bed with a callow premed who might not understand—who couldn’t understand—how important it was to her father that she stay safe and protected and well.

“I tried to get Claire to smoke pot with me once, but she wouldn’t,” George said.

The air felt very thin in Aaron’s lungs.

“Most kids would have taken the joint,” George said. “I think she knew you wouldn’t want her to. She’s loyal to you.”

“Is this your peace offering?”

“If you want to see it that way.”

“Let’s just ski.”

“I bet she’s smoked some by now.”

“Take me on the good runs.”

“That’s a bad idea.”

“You can bait me, or you can protect me,” Aaron said. “But you can’t do both. Where’s the good snow?”

George shrugged, and they skated and sidestepped and skied to a place where the slope divided: an easy blue-square run on the left, and a black diamond posted on the right, with a rope strung between two poles, barring access.

“This is the best run here,” George said.

“It’s closed off.”

“We’ll go under the rope.”

“I could lose my ski pass,” Aaron said. “You could lose your job.”

“It’s not closed for avalanche. They’re just roping it off to keep down the broken legs, because all the once-a-year bozos are out for the long weekend.”

“Like me?”

George shrugged again.

“Let’s stay on what’s legal,” Aaron said.

“I thought you wanted the good stuff.”

“Not if it’s off-limits.”

“The best runs are always off-limits,” George said. “Off-piste.
Interdit
.”

“
Interdit
?” Aaron said. One bike trip at twenty, and George thought he was on the French cycling team.

“It’s not a bad run,” George said. “I promise. I take it all the time. Even you can do it.”

Aaron looked to see if anyone was coming down the mountain behind. No one was, so he followed his brother, ducking under the orange rope that George held for him, feeling a little dizzy as he straightened. Then his head cleared and they were on the other side. The whole mountain was below them, the trees in sharp focus, ice crystals floating in the air. He felt a rush of exhilaration at having broken the rules. He had been such a good student, a dutiful doctor, a faithful husband. Maybe he should have flouted authority more in his life, been more like George, ducked the ropes, been the Fire. The slope didn’t look that bad. A little steep.

George had already taken three neat turns straight down the steepest part. Aaron carved his way around the side; he didn’t have George’s control. A few times his edges skidded, and his legs felt shaky. The snow was deep but not always soft. Aaron’s headache had returned, or he had begun to notice it again. He felt thirsty, in spite of the two beers. He regretted the beers.

They skied down to a second steep slope, George still well ahead, and Aaron stopped to catch his breath and rest his knees. Bending over to stretch, he had an attack of vertigo, followed by nausea. For a moment he blamed the burger, but then he recognized the feeling, and understood his growing headache. Bea had been right, that he had forgotten what altitude sickness was like, and how quickly it came on. She had brought a physician’s sample of the pills, but he had told her he didn’t need them, and was too old to be stressing out his kidneys. He sat dizzily against the hillside, to rest a minute.

He heard a shout, and squinted at the small figure of his brother below, against the white slope. The distant George patted his hand on his head to ask if everything was all right. They had learned the signal as kids in canoes. Aaron didn’t think he could stand, but he patted his head anyway:
Everything’s fine
. He tried to push himself to his feet, slid a few yards on the backs of his skis, and collapsed into the snow again. There was another shout from George, a more urgent hand signal, which Aaron didn’t bother to answer.

If they’d had it out when they were younger, really whaled on each other, then maybe it would be out of their systems. They could be civilized to each other now. But George had always been younger, and Aaron too restrained to take advantage of his greater strength. By the time they were the same size, Aaron was in college and didn’t think about his brother. And if he
had
thought about it, he’d have realized that George could already beat him. He lifted his head and patted the top of it, to show that he was on his way down, but George had started side-stepping up the mountain. He was coming at a good clip. The nausea surged again, and the remains of Aaron’s burger came out in a soupy mess in the snow, between his knees. He coughed, with the taste of bile in his throat. George would never let him forget being rescued from his own puke on the closed black-diamond run. The story would be hauled out every time they were together:
Remember that time
? George would regale Claire with her father’s weakness, and Claire would be caught between them, sneaking her father guilty looks.

He struggled to his feet and stood uneasily, resting on his poles. Then he dug his edges into the hillside and tried to ease into a turn, but lost his balance and fell to his downhill side. It all happened very quickly. The skis went into the air as he rolled, and rolled again. One ski released and skidded free, and the other wheeled with him, and then he slammed into something that turned out to be his brother. They tumbled, and came with George’s help to a tangled stop.

Aaron groaned, and tried to sit up. He felt warm wetness near his eye, and took off his glove to feel a gash on his forehead that must have been from the edge of a ski, though how and whose, he wasn’t sure.

“Why didn’t you move?” he asked his brother.

“I didn’t have time,” George said. “You could have died, hitting a tree.”

“I could have died hitting
you
.”

“That’s my fault?”

“I have to get to a lower elevation,” Aaron said. “The altitude.”

“Were you puking?”

“No.”

“I saw you.”

Aaron looked down the hill. He could see the lodge in the distance, the parking lot full of tiny cars. It was such a long way. “I have to get my ski,” he said.

They tried to stand, and Aaron put his hand on his brother’s shoulder for support. George snarled at him like a wounded dog, and pushed his hand away. “It hurts,” he said.

Aaron reached to investigate the pain in George’s shoulder—it was what he did all day—and George knocked his arm away with a hard blow, and then they were grappling, oddly, clumsily: one of them on two skis with one good arm, and the other on one ski with one glove, weak with nausea. But they were fighting, finally, and it was an odd relief. George shoved an open, gloved hand into Aaron’s face, the cold leather squishing his nose. Aaron grabbed George’s hair with his bare fingers. They teetered and swayed on the skis, scrabbling for purchase on each other’s slippery coats, trying to stay upright and also shove at each other. George connected once with Aaron’s ribs, without leverage, and they almost went over, then compensated as if they were dancing: slapstick fools. They slid sideways down the hill a few feet, plowing snow. George tried to push him away, but Aaron got an arm around his brother’s legs, and they fell in a heap. George, protecting his shoulder, nearly crushed Aaron’s windpipe with his elbow.

They lay panting and coughing in the snow. Aaron waited for the icy flush of adrenaline to fade, and remembered the time he had been assigned to keep an eye on George, who was still in diapers, in the front yard. Aaron was no more than seven, absorbed with the fort he was building, and his little brother had wandered off and fallen into a ditch with some water in the bottom of it. Aaron was sent to bed without dinner when a muddy George was recovered, and their father didn’t speak to him for days. He regretted the punishment, but he had also been disappointed in a way he couldn’t have articulated then, that the problem of his brother hadn’t solved itself.

IN THE BIG
comfortable new lodge—a hideous pimple on the nose of the mountain, according to George—there was a massive stone fireplace surrounded by couches and chairs. On the walls were heavily framed oil paintings of western scenes: cowboys and Indians on the Plains. Bea sat on the upholstered arm of one of the chairs, looking concerned and exasperated. She’d bought a can of recreational oxygen for Aaron in the lodge’s gift shop: not an old man’s green tank but a sporty blue cylinder, like a can of shaving cream. He was bruised and sprained and had three stitches in his forehead, but he felt beautifully high on the oxygen in the deep, soft couch, and his headache was gone. The young doctor who stitched him up told him he could have broken his neck in that fall. He could have died, or spent his life in a wheelchair, and he should stick to slopes he could ski. Aaron accepted the insult and the medical condescension with equanimity. He was intensely happy to be alive and whole. Beneath all his bruises there was the good, honest muscle soreness of skiing, and beneath his wife’s consternation was love, and worry. He might even love his brother in a mood like this, and he looked at George with curiosity, to see if he did.

His brother lay sideways on the other couch, with his head in Jonna’s lap and his feet on the cushions. He had cadged a Vicodin somewhere, which he couldn’t possibly need for his shoulder. He had a torn labrum, probably, and it would need surgery, but it was easily fixable.

“I can’t believe you took him outside the ropes,” Bea said.

“He wanted to go!” George said. “You heard him begging me at lunch. You can’t tell him no.”

“He looks like he’s been in a prizefight.”

“I’ll be all right tomorrow,” Aaron said. “Back on the slopes.”

“You’ll be lucky if you can walk tomorrow,” Bea said.

Claire came in with a tray of white porcelain cups. Her smooth face was freckled from the day in the sun, her hair freshly braided, and she had changed into jeans and a blue fleece pullover. She was the best thing Aaron had done. “I had them spike the coffee,” she said.

“Sweet Claire,” George said. “Heart of my heart.”

“Whiskey, caffeine, and Vicodin?” Bea asked.

“It won’t kill me,” George said.

And it was true, nothing would. The knowledge broke over Aaron in a wave, through his oxygenated good mood. They were bound like two dogs with their tails tied together, unable to move without having some opposite effect on the other, unable to live a single restful minute without feeling the inevitable tug. George would be courting Claire from his nursing home, lobbing insults at Aaron from cover, inhabiting his dreams. Right now he was sipping his spiked coffee complacently, while Jonna stroked his hair.

“Tomorrow I’m going to be the Fire,” George said to Claire. “And chase you around the lodge.”

Claire rolled her eyes and smiled at her uncle, a smile that gave Aaron a twinge of jealousy. She took the tray back to the bar—responsible girl. Surely she was using birth control with the premed boy. Aaron didn’t want to know what kind, just as he didn’t want to think about the images George had put into his head. He felt the hot coffee and whiskey make their way down to his stomach before the double warmth was more generally absorbed. Bea wasn’t going to stroke Aaron’s hair; she wasn’t even going to sit next to him.