Envy (23 page)

“We already have a place for guests.”

“So then you have a study.”

“Each of us has an office.”

“Well, get a billiards table or a, a, a big fish tank or something, for heaven's sake, but don't leave it like this because it's not good for anyone.”

At dinner she enlisted Carole's support, and both women argued for not only stripping but renovating Luke's bedroom and then giving it to Will. “Look at all the options!” his mother said in her most chipper “Heaven Help You” voice. A mini-gymnasium with a treadmill and a set of free weights. A library for all those psychoanalytical texts he had moldering in the basement. A music room with a piano. A video and DVD haven with a gazillion-dollar, high-resolution, holographic, plasma screen monstrosity.

“I just cannot sanction your sitting up there in the shadows and dwelling on all that, that tragedy, or taking naps on that sad little bed.” Will's mother began crying. Carole picked up her glass and let it hang in the air, neither taking a drink nor putting it back down on the table.

“Lukey's bed isn't sad,” Samantha said to her grandmother. “It's nice and it's funny and it has pictures of Snowy, and Snowy is cuter even than a bug dog.”

“Pug,” Will said. “Pug dog. And you're right, sweetie, it isn't sad.”

“Well.” His mother wiped her eyes and polished the lenses of her glasses. “Well, hell's bells,” she said.

Elena came in, she dusted, and every so often she ran the sheets through the wash, but Will would not let the room be changed. He took the occasional nap on the bed, not getting in but lying on top of the comforter. He noticed Sam was coming in, too, gradually removing all the Legos and the board games and those few construction sets she found worth carrying back to her room. Will found a note she'd left on her brother's desk:
Dear Lueky, if you want yore legos thier
in my room. Love, Sam. P.S. monoply is ther too. When he tried to pick it up he found that she'd taped it to the desk's surface.

Upstate, his mother ran out of improvements to impose on her own house (those she did make barely noticed by his father) and, after forcefully reorganizing her friends' pantries, reimmersed herself in her cleaning business. Since then, she's never referred to Luke's room, she rarely speaks of Luke himself, and she's developed a tic that attends anyone else's mentioning her grandson, a sort of helpless salute: her right arm flies up as if to block her eyes from an intense, sudden glare and then falls back to her side.

Will picks at the corner of a glossy fold-out from
Swim
magazine and peels it carefully away from the wall until the last corner lifts off. Where the photograph covered the blue paint is a clean rectangle, unmarked by the little-boy grime of the life that had unfolded in Luke's room. He steps back, all the way to the door, and considers the one blank spot. Then he folds the poster along the creases of the two original folds that allowed it to fit within the borders of a magazine.

The metal trash can in the corner, the one decorated with Yankee insignia, is empty, clean, and after a moment he balls up the poster and drops it in and listens to the sound it makes when it strikes the can's metal bottom, a low note that lingers in the silence.

24

The waiter is on his hands and knees, using a napkin to gather shards of the broken glass. “I am so sorry,” he says.

“It's all right. Really.” Will stands from the table. “It's only water.”

“I hope it's not a bad omen,” Will's father says wryly, a joke, although not the kind he makes ordinarily.

“Oh no,” the maître d' says, having rushed over. “No no no. We will make it into a good one.” He sends the waiter away, returns with two glasses on a tray. “An auspicious Pinot Noir,” he says, his expression indicating that the wine is at least expensive, if not lucky. “
Very
auspicious. With our apologies.”

Will sits back down. “Nice restaurant,” he says. “Too nice.” He gestures at the extravagantly appointed room beyond the table. “Is this an occasion of some sort?”

“No occasion. Figured it might be fun.” Will's father takes a sip and puts his glass down. “Truth is, I'm going back upstate. Wanted us to go out on a bang.” He fiddles with the knot in his tie, adjusting it around the unfamiliar confines of a snugly buttoned collar. “An occasion for expensive indigestion.”

“Upstate? As in back upstate to Mom?”

“Yup.”

“Wow,” Will says. “Why? I mean, don't get me wrong, when it comes to my parents I'm just as conventional as the next guy. I want you and Mom together, in the same old town, same old house, et cetera. Did something happen with Lottie?”

“No.” His father smiles, and the smile looks genuine, if a little foolish. “Nothing like a disagreement, if that's what you mean. Turns out this is a thing she does.”

“What is?”

“Acquires works by some new face, then acquires the face. Moves on.”

“You were just one in a series?”

“Something like.”

“Was that . . . are you—”

“I'm fine.” Will's father swats the air in a dismissive gesture.

“Yeah?”

“Yup.” He nods. “I want to get back to work full-time. I get antsy when I'm down here. City's crammed with stuff I don't want to take pictures of.”

“Huh.” Will looks at his father. “So that's it? Back to Mom? Return to status quo? No questions asked?”

“Unless you know something I don't know.”

“What could I know? It's not like I discuss you or any of this with her. I just thought, well, that she might be a little ticked off or something.”

“Why? She wasn't before.”

“You keep saying that. I keep finding it hard to believe.”

“Well, Will.” His father turns his palms up. “It's true.” He picks up the menu in its black leather folder. “Know what you're having?” he asks.

“Hanger steak.”

“I'll do the same.” His father closes the folder, places it on the edge of the table.

“I thought you were trying to get off red meat.”

“Gave up. I was sick of arguing with the doctor. Went on Tricor. Lipitor? I can't remember which. The thing is, once you're taking one of these damn cholesterol pills, then you feel like it's home free, anything goes.” He smiles. “I had eggs for breakfast,” he says. “Eggs Benedict.”

“Does it work that way, really?”

“No, of course it doesn't. Anyhow, your mother will put the kibosh on all that. So, what's eating you?”

“What's what?”

“I said, what's eating you.” Will's father leans forward over the table. “Something's on your mind. What is it?”

“That obvious, huh?”

His father shrugs. “You're doing that thing you do.” He points at Will's left hand, thumb and finger pinching the skin over his Adam's apple. Will gives his hand a shake as if it might dislodge the habit. He takes a deep breath.

“Well, Dad, here it is.” He stops, takes a swallow of water. “I got in touch with a couple of women who I used to know. Date, I mean. And I found out that they . . . they were with Mitch at the same time as they were with me.”

His father doesn't say anything. Then he says, “What's brought this up? And why would you do that? Look people up?”

“Why?”

“No, not why. How? What I mean is, how'd all this get started?”

“The reunion. The Cornell thing I went to last summer.”

His father takes a sip of wine, puts the glass back down on the table, turns it slowly as if considering some aspect of its manufacture. “So,” he says, “these girls, these women, they were dating you and your brother at the same time?”

“Not dating, Dad. Fucking.” He says the word again, one he's never heard his father use. “Fucking. Mitch and Elizabeth—that's who I saw at the reunion—they were fucking at the same time that she and I were fucking.”

“Now, why would she do that?”

“Well, obviously, that's a very compelling question to which I wanted the answer. Mitch tricked her at first, and then she said it felt liberated and counterculture.”

“I don't mean the sex part. I mean, why's she bringing it up now? Why talk at all about this, this . . . why discuss what's twenty-five years in the past?”

“Why ask that?” Will says. “Why is that your first response?” He returns his father's mild expression with a frown. “I started it. I started the whole thing by asking her—Elizabeth—something I probably shouldn't have.”

“What was that?”

The waiter comes to them and silently sets their plates before them.
“Très
chaud,”
he says. “Please to be careful. Hot hot hot.” Will waits for him to leave and then turns back to his father.

“Remember last time we had lunch? When I told you about a patient whose treatment I was about to terminate? A young woman who made a pass at me? Kissed me?”

His father removes his knife from the meat in front of him and lays it on the side of his plate. “Yes,” he says, and he doesn't lift the bite on the end of the fork but lays that implement down as well. He looks at Will. “What does that have to do with the, the Elizabeth woman?”

“They're connected.”

“The girl and the woman?” Will nods. “Well, that qualifies as ominous,” says his father. “As in a genuinely bad omen.”

“Except she wasn't an omen, in that omens predict. She was more like a . . . a . . .” Will surprises himself by starting to cry, not audibly, but tears fall from his eyes; he can't speak.

“A what?” his father asks, after giving him time to stop.

“A wish,” Will says. “Not an omen, a wish.”

His father picks up his fork and turns it in his fingers, looking at the cold morsel of steak. He puts it in his mouth, chews slowly in the manner of a person savoring what he eats. “I don't understand,” he says after swallowing.

“No.” Will shakes his head. “I haven't said anything understandable.” He draws a deep breath. “In June, at the reunion, I got a class book that included letters from anyone in the class of 'seventy-nine who bothered to send one in. I went through them all, reading the ones written by people I remembered, a few friends. I came across Elizabeth's and read it closely—normal, right? she'd been my girlfriend—and in it I find references to a child born seven or eight months after we split up.” Will stops. He looks at his father, who has cut his steak into precise squares and is eating them, one after another, no potato, no sip of wine, no salad, nothing between bites of meat.

“I'm listening to you,” he says. “I'm paying attention.”

Will drinks from both his water and wineglass. “So, are you beginning to understand?”

“Keep talking.”

“I make the obvious conclusion. And, while I didn't admit this to myself in the moment—I wasn't aware of it—when I don't see Elizabeth the first night of the reunion I'm surprised by how disappointed I am. But the next evening, during this big reception, I do see her. We catch up on twenty years or so—pleasant, chatty, a little flirtatious. That tipsy, floaty kind of banter that can slide into a situation where you find yourself saying these, these things, and then later you wonder how it could have happened, how you could have been so, so— well, so the way you were.

“It's only a matter of time before I've told her about Luke. You know what's coming next. I ask if she was pregnant when she left me. And I ask if she might be willing to give me a sample of her child's— it's a girl—her daughter's hair.” Will sees his father's expression. “I know, I know,” he says. “Stupid. I hear myself tell you the story, and I know I've opened up what should have remained closed. But, honestly, Dad, while I was talking to her, at the reunion, it seemed like a natural enough desire. To know. It even seemed rational. Not risky or out-there.”

“You wanted the hair for DNA testing?” his father asks.

Will nods.

“She give it to you?”

“No. She was pissed off. I should have backed down then, but I didn't. For some reason I just couldn't let go of the idea, couldn't give it up, and we part. Not amicably. We—I—well, the conversation deteriorated into something of a scene, raised voices, et cetera.”

“Christ, Will, do not tell me—do not”—Will's father puts his hand up in a
Halt!
gesture—“do not connect the two stories into one big mess.” He flags down a busboy and points to his empty wineglass.

Will slides his glass across the table. “Here, finish mine.”

“You haven't eaten your meal,” his father says.

“I can't eat and talk at once. So, for a month, two months, nothing. I do end up apologizing, via e-mail—no reply, and I'm increasingly relieved. I'm even—I have that little burst of excited happiness, like when a car just misses running you over—I know I've narrowly escaped screwing up my life.”

“Enter the French-kissing patient.”

“Enter the French-kissing patient. With whom I terminate treatment, and who stalks me, calls my office, my home, until, one day, she buzzes and, thinking it's a different patient, I let her in. Then she . . . well, she manipulates me into a sexual encounter.”

“How the goddamn hell does she do that!”

“Shhh! Stop yelling.”

“Don't tell me to be quiet! In your office! Your office! You had sex with her in your office!”

“Dad—”

“I want to know how the goddamn hell a twenty-year-old child can manipulate a forty-seven-year-old goddamn psychoanalyst into having sex with her in his goddamn office!”

“Twenty-four. And you know why I didn't throw her out right away? I'll tell you. Because she started saying ‘please, ' and ‘give me another chance, ' and it never occurred to me that she wasn't being sincere. The only thing I thought of, actually, was how when we were kids Mitch could always wear me down if he begged me long enough.

“Right after this, after the sex, she tells me who she is—Elizabeth's daughter, Jennifer. But that's not all she says. She says Elizabeth wasn't involved with me alone. She was also having sex with my brother and with two other guys. And since Mitch and I are twins, we'll never know, because the DNA could only show that it's one of us, not which one.

“I meet with Elizabeth, who confirms what her daughter said and is irate. Basically accuses me of being a rapist, a liar, and a nutcase. After talking with Elizabeth, it occurs to me that Mitch, who, incidentally, slept with Elizabeth not once but many times—slept with Elizabeth almost the entire time she was sleeping with me, tricked her into it at first, pretending to be me—Mitch could have had sex with other girlfriends of mine.” Will shakes his head. “I don't know why, but I always thought of him as a—well, almost as a eunuch or something. He never seemed like he had a sex drive at all. I mean, when we were kids, there was the usual stuff. I knew he whacked off. He knew I did. We shared a bedroom. But by the time he was fifteen, sixteen, somewhere in there, he—it just seemed like he turned it off. Or funneled it all into swimming—that's what I assumed. The way an athlete—a real athlete who works out all day—is said to dampen physical desire, expend that energy another way. For a while I even thought he might be gay—”

“He wasn't gay,” his father says. “And he wasn't a eunuch, either.”

“I guess not.” Will leans back to look at his father. “What do you know about it?” he says, but his father doesn't answer.

“Go on,” he prompts Will.

“The first time with Elizabeth, at first she didn't know it wasn't me, because it was dark and there was no way to tell the difference between us in the dark. After all, she expected it to be me—it's not like she's going to, say, quiz him for answers only I'd be able to give. So the first time he tricks her.” Will watches his father drink the last of a third glass of wine. “Aren't you at all drunk?” he asks.

“I wish I were.” He stands. “However, I'll take the opportunity to use the men's room.”

Will watches his father make his way through the tables, trying to decide if he expects the man he sees—white-haired, favoring his left hip—to help him pull himself together. Yes, he decides, he does. There may be no reason beyond habit, ancient filial hope, but this is enough. His father returns, sits in the opposite chair, crosses his arms. “All right,” he says. “Let's get to the end of this.”

“Okay. So. I use the Internet to search for whoever I can find from a list of all the girlfriends I remember—camp, college.” Will looks at his father, who nods, makes a rolling gesture with one hand that says, Go on.

“I find a woman, Lisa Christianson, who lived not too far from us. I saw her the summer between junior and senior years, when both Mitch and I were home. That was the summer he got permission to use the high school gym, the pool and everything, and I was working for that landscape guy.”

“The dairy Christiansons?”

“The same. She's upstate now, running a bonsai nursery with her husband. I e-mail to tell her I'd like to drop by. I drive up, go to Lisa's place, we talk, and guess what? I'm right. I can't believe it—well, I can, it's the reason I went up there—but I'm right, Mitch did have sex with her. Same idea. Tricked her the first time. Sometimes they even had sex on the same night I'd taken her to a movie or dinner. I drop her off at home, at eleven, conscientious because her dad was old-fashioned about those things. Two hours later—two hours after I've played the role of gentleman and fool—Mitch's screwing her.