Envy (25 page)

His father nods. “Well, all right. I accept that. Your anger. Do you want me to go on with—”

“Yeah, let's get to the end.”

“I tell Carole if she can stand for your brother to be at the service and the reception, then what I propose is, I'll tell Mitch that I know what's happened, that Carole's told your mother and me, and that he'll have to leave directly after the wedding. He's—he has to leave. If he doesn't comply, then he'll face rape charges. I suggest that she, since she's not reporting the rape, not being examined by a doctor or giving a sample of—a swab to determine whose sperm—maybe she can keep, I don't know, underpants or a nightgown or whatever might have Mitch's, uh, seminal fluid on it.

“There's nothing like that, she says, and anyway, what good is it if he's your twin? Obvious, right, but I'm so rattled I'm not thinking straight. She agrees to the plan, and I escort her to her room, check to make sure it's empty, safe, and then leave her there. I tell her to keep the chain thing on until you get back—I'll be talking with Mitch.

“Mitch answers his door. Pretends to have been asleep. He must know why I'm there, but he pretends he's confused, doesn't understand what I'm talking about. He's innocent, Carole's crazy. She was probably having sex with you and the both of you were drunk or something. ‘Search me, ' he says. ‘Search the room. There's no mask or anything here.' ‘Of course there isn't, ' I say. ‘What does that prove? Besides, Will is still at the stag thing, there's a roomful of family and friends who've been with him all night, and they know he didn't leave to spirit Carole back to the hotel for a, a romantic interlude.'

“So then he admits what he's done. He's without remorse.” Will's father shakes his head, turns up his empty palms. “Carole's ashamed. He's not. How to square that? My own son—he seemed like no one I knew. He wouldn't speak of the motivation—the hatefulness— behind the act. He seemed like a, a sociopath, a person you read about, not anyone you know, certainly not someone you're related to. A person without the ability to imagine, let alone care about, another human being's feelings. Or to . . . to realize that other people's feelings are as important as his. Not that he's showing any emotion, he's not. I'm confused by him, the whole thing. Way out of my depth, whatever's happening inside that head.

“I tell him the conditions under which he can avoid being apprehended for raping his brother's fiancée on the eve of their wedding, and he agrees to them. Except he's not going to go to the wedding, he says. He's going to leave right that minute. Because if he stays through the next day, if he goes to the wedding, if he has to dress himself up as your best man, he'll tell you himself. Which”—Will's father makes what his mother calls his Abe Lincoln face, pained by human failings and more or less resigned to everything turning out badly.

“Which is probably what should have happened. But, well, we . . . I . . . I thought I could just get rid of it. Him. That Carole could tell you when and if she wanted to. And I was disgusted. Didn't want to look at him, wanted him out of, out of the picture, so to speak. Out of the frame.” He shakes his head. “I didn't have much of an idea what would happen down the line, but I didn't imagine he'd never contact any of us again. I thought he'd just go off for a while and by the time he came back we'd've had time to figure out a, a . . . well, we'd've figured something out.

“End of story,” Will's father says. He covers his face with his hands. “Christ, I'm sorry. What a mess.” He takes his hands away, looks around the restaurant. Ten or twelve of the waitstaff are gathered around a table in the back, talking quietly and eating. Otherwise the place is empty.

“But why?” Will says. “Why?”

“Why what?”

“Why did he? How?”

“For the obvious reason, I assume. I don't have any other explanation. What else is there besides your unmarked face? The ease with which you moved through life when he was unhappy, struggling. He hid his anger—hid it from all of us. I think he must have been about six when he became self-conscious, aware of it—the thing—like he hadn't been before.

“You protected him, tried to make friends for him. Any situation, you always went on ahead of him, told other kids about his face and not to tease him or you'd make them sorry. At school, you'd pick out a few, bring them home to play. Punched a couple, the ones that said anything. But I don't know that any of that mattered to Mitch. Or that he noticed how you worked to save him from being hurt. How you loved him. Maybe all he saw was that you had a face that was perfect and he was a monster.”

Will shakes his head. “I never understood why you and Mom were so complacent about the whole thing. Why you never tried to get it fixed. Why you didn't take him to New York, or even Albany, to see if you could get something—anything—done about it.”

“We did! For God's sake, Will, of course we did. Your mother took him to a plastic surgeon in Albany for a consultation. Took him down to New York as well.”

“When? When did you?”

“Well, the first time you would've been two. But she kept trying, after that she kept trying. The time you and I went fishing—you must remember, I know you do, because it was such a bust, we didn't catch even one fish and you just about got sun poisoning—that was the time your mother and Mitch went to the doctor in Albany. Then, another time, you and me at Saranac, and your mother with Mitch in New York City seeing a different plastic surgeon, guy that specialized in scars, birthmarks—cosmetic stuff. The thing was so extensive, he said, the vascular involvement, and at the time lasers were so rudimentary, that if he'd undertaken to fix it, the result would likely have been just another kind of disfigurement. We got as far as considering replacing that whole area of skin with a graft from his buttock, but it was a whole series of operations, too expensive, frankly, for us to manage. Long, painful, and it's not as if the result would have been a normal face.

“If we could have bought him a face that looked the same as yours, well, then we'd have mortgaged the house, the practice, whatever it took, but while it might have been better, it wouldn't look like a face someone was born with. And because you're twins, the injustice was that Mitch would always see an ideal version of himself, across the playground, the classroom, the dinner table. He couldn't escape you. We thought about boarding school, separation, but . . . I don't know. You were so protective of Mitch that we were afraid to send him out into the world by himself. We made mistakes. Probably we made mistakes. Hell, of course we did. But they weren't from lack of trying. Or for lack of seeing and caring about what was happening.”

Will shakes his head. “My brother fucked my girlfriends, and he fucked my wife on the night before we got married. And my father and mother and wife keep this secret from me. For fifteen years. I have . . . I don't even know what my response to this is. Right now, I don't feel a thing. I'm too . . . too . . . I don't know what I am.”

25

On the subway, Will isn't thinking of Jennifer, or of Mitch and Elizabeth, or Mitch and Lisa, or even Mitch and Carole, but of the first Halloween that his brother refused to wear the mask he'd chosen for himself. Their mother had never dressed them in matching clothes or encouraged them to regard their being identical—nearly—twins as special or even interesting, and they'd never worn costumes that were even slightly similar. Typically, Will was the grotesque of the two—not the kind of monster whose external ugliness cloaked virtue but one whose face represented a malignant soul. That year he wasn't any recognizable miscreant, not Mr. Hyde or Count Dracula or Dr. Frankenstein's terrible mistake, but a freak of his own making. Hunchbacked under ragged clothes topped by a repellent werewolf mask guaranteed to frighten the smaller children, he had green rubber gloves covered with putrescent warts and lumps.

Mitch was to be Clark Kent, not yet Superman but the earnest reporter on the verge of becoming Superman: the phone booth moment of transformation. He had on a suit that was a little too small (it had been purchased for a cousin's wedding the previous year) and a white shirt torn open to the waist to reveal the superhero's big red-and-yellow S emblazoned on his true-blue chest. Over his own face, Mitch wore a mask with Superman's blandly handsome countenance, with its cleft chin and iconic squiggle of black hair, hair too filled with vigor to remain tamed by brilliantine or whatever it was that supposedly kept the rest of it in place.

“I want to trade,” Mitch suddenly said.

“No way.”

“Come on. Please.”

“No,” Will said. “I hate being the good guy.”

“I'll rake tomorrow.”

“Unh-uh. No deal.”

“Come on, Will, please. Did you see how many leaves there are? It'll take all afternoon.”

“No.”

“I won't go unless you trade.”

“Fine. Don't go. What do I care?” Will took off his gloves to tie a shoelace that had come undone.

“Come on, Will. Please.”

“No.”

“All the raking, then. Not just tomorrow, but after, when the rest of the leaves come down.”

“No,” Will said. “No, no, no.” Stalwart until Mitch cried, something Will couldn't stand and on which he tried and failed to turn his back. The sight of his brother giving up against his grief, the suddenness of Mitch's losing the ability to hide it: this had always had the power to dismantle Will. When Mitch cried, Will felt guilty and cornered and like he had to do something—anything—to stop it.

“Okay,” he said, “here.” He handed Mitch the mask, the gloves, the hunchback from last year's Igor costume, a cushion to which their mother had sewn two loops of elastic, one to go around each arm and hold it in place, and the ragged, grave-moldered cloak inherited from another year's vampire.

Will put on the Superman shirt and over it the dark suit; he adjusted the plastic do-gooder face. Without talking, he and Mitch went downstairs, stood patiently and listened to the usual cautions, and received quick hugs, each getting the embrace meant for the other brother. Will felt something different in his mother's arms, a communication that wasn't meant for him: an extra little squeeze of protective love and what was almost a tremble of maternal hope, the bodily equivalent of a prayer—please, please don't let them tease him. That's okay, Will told himself under the mask as the two of them went out the door and down the walk. That's okay with me. I don't mind because he needs that. Mitch needs more—more love, an extra cookie, a longer good-night kiss—a little more of everything. Still, he was stung—jealous enough that he knew he wouldn't have been able to hide it, and grateful his face was hidden.

They joined the neighborhood boys on the corner. As if by agreement, neither of them told the other kids that they'd traded costumes but continued under their masks to pretend to be each other. For Will it was a night of silent watching; he learned how seldom other children interacted with his brother. And it must have been, he imagines, a night of discovery for Mitch as well, jostled amiably, joked with, spoken to.

Later, at home, they dumped out their pillowcases to compare hauls, made a few trades, and argued with their mother about exactly how much candy they were allowed to eat that night, only Mitch complying with the limit she set. Then Mitch went up to their room, probably to sort through his baseball cards, shuffle past one after another hearty, handsome face, while Will stayed up with his father, watching
Creature Features'
s Halloween Marathon, and making his way steadily through his candy, methodically unwrapping and chewing what seemed imperative to get rid of and yet was too valuable to just throw out. It took until midnight to make himself good and sick.

“Well, that's a first, just about,” his father said, holding Will's head over the downstairs toilet. “I can't remember the last time you threw up.”

Will wonders how old he was that fall. He remembers that he'd felt very sorry for himself, so much so that he cried before he got sick, cried because he knew he was going to be sick and that it was his own fault. He didn't understand what he'd done to himself, or why.

The following year Halloween fell on a Friday, and the school held a party in the gymnasium. Will went; he convinced Stacey Davis to come with him to the stairwell, where she poured the contents of a red PixieStix onto her tongue and then let him lick it off before it melted away. Mitch stayed home and handed out candy. He wore a rubber political mask—Richard Nixon, Will thinks it was.

Mitch, his twin, the solitary swimmer, champion of the rights of manatees and hair seals, a man who can withstand whole days in the ocean. Does he remain the boy who traded ten or fifteen hours of raking and bagging leaves for one night of wearing the ugly mask instead of the handsome one? Did he hate Will already by that Halloween, or did that come later, the next year, when he stopped going out in costume, seemingly content to stay home?

Will's parents had done what his father called “their level best” to offset Mitch's antisocial nature. They pushed him into chess club, debate, Young Scientists of America, anything the A- and B-list kids, who filled the yearbook staff, football team, pep squad, and band, left to the losers and dorks, unfortunates who Will and Mitch's parents assumed would be less likely to focus on Mitch's face. Neither of them anticipated that the pariahs might be crueler than their pretty, popular classmates. They didn't understand that one untouchable resented being forced to make do with the damning company of others, that they were all venomous in a way that the luckier, more likeable kids never were. Always, Mitch capitulated to their mother's relentless goading—she called it “enthusiasm.” He'd go to these gatherings once, only once, and then refuse to return.

And now, a new picture to add to the others, the image of his brother masked and slipping through the night to steal not just another girlfriend but his wife. An act of hatred? Of desperation? Would it even be possible to parse out one from the other?

So we've both lost a son, Will thinks, referring to himself and to his father. Scenes flash through his head like snapshots—or maybe they are snapshots, images he remembers from the old family albums. The three of them, Will and Mitch and their father, playing touch football in the backyard. Sitting together on the beach, shading their eyes with their hands. Will mugging from behind the wheel of the old station wagon and Mitch sitting on the hood, his turtleneck sweater pulled up so that only his hair showed.