Envy (5 page)

Mitch was encouraged to stay, but the twins left together, and though there was little discussion of what had happened, it was that summer, before eighth grade, that Will and Mitch and their parents became aware of what should have been apparent for some time: his and Mitch's mutual, even symbiotic, maladjustment. Because Mitch had to bear the birthmark physically, Will had assigned himself its psychic burden.

“Hey,” his father says, “where'd you go?”

“Nowhere. Actually, I was thinking about that summer I got kicked out of camp.”

“What about it?”

“I don't know. I guess it was the beginning of my being aware that things between Mitch and me were pretty seriously screwed up. That I didn't respond to people on my own terms, or for my own sake, because I'd fallen into the habit of empathizing with Mitch. As if nothing were happening to me, not really, or not independently. I know, I know,” he says, seeing his father's expression. “You've heard this before. And what's the use in going back over it? I just wish the two of us had talked more. Or at all.”

His father is still shaking his head, as if the very fact of his other son is baffling, unknowable. “I guess nothing else gives him what he gets from swimming,” he says. It's not unusual for Will's father to make non sequiturs, voicing only the last in a series of thoughts.

“What's that?” Will asks.

“I don't know. Beauty, maybe. Excitement. Simultaneous fulfillment of his life and his death wishes.” Will says nothing. His father pulls a credit card from his wallet. “This one's mine,” he says, and he lays the card on the check, motioning to the waiter. “What's the word for the death wish?
Thanatos
?
Eros
and
thanatos
? Life and death?”

Will nods. “What else are you reading, Dad?
Frankenstein
with a little Freud on the side? A dash of Ferenczi?”

His father smiles as he signs the receipt and slides out from the banquette; he stands and his napkin falls from his lap onto the floor. Will picks it up and lays it on the table. He looks at his watch. “You want to walk a little ways? I'm running early.”

“Sure. Samantha still seeing that woman?” his father asks, alluding to Laura, the child psychologist.

“No, no. She hasn't gone since last spring.”

“Yeah? That's good, no?”

“I think so. It's hard to say with kids. It's, not as if Luke's death won't stay with her for all her life. Inform who she becomes. But for all that, she doesn't appear unhappy. I'm always looking for symptoms, of course, signs of depression, anxiety, but she seems okay. Genuinely okay. I see her in the school yard. She skips, giggles, plays with the other little girls. She's the president of their jump-rope club. In two years she's going to set a world record, she says, but she doesn't have to start practicing until she turns nine.”

“Sounds normal to me,” his father says.

Will points to
Frankenstein.
His father is patting the book through his pocket. “Is this classics thing an attempt to suck up some culture so you have something to talk about with, with—what's-her-name, Carla?”

His father grins at him. “Charlotte,” he says, “and we don't need things to talk about.”

“Nothing?”

“Not much.”

They stand just inside the restaurant door, looking out at the people on the sidewalk, the taxis, the buildings that look like walls of glass. A thick fog swirls down the avenue. “It's very strange,” Will's father says, “having sex with someone other than your mother. I hadn't done that in, well, decades.”

“Forty-nine years,” Will says. “Almost fifty. A half-century. Golden anniversary coming up.”

His father smiles his disarming smile. “I'm not sure if the sex is better,” he says. “Maybe it's just different. One thing—it's reacquainted me with my body, sort of yanked me back into it, like I haven't been for as long as I can remember. Started trimming my toe-nails with attention. Flossing my teeth. Upgraded my underwear.”

“How's Mom feel about it?”

“You know, Will, she's very happy being a businesswoman. She likes it a great deal.”

“So much so that she doesn't care if you're cheating on her?”

After Will's father sold his veterinary practice, and perhaps in response to his having embarked on a new, solitary career as a photographer rather than settling into leisure with her, Will's mother transformed herself into a dervish of housework, not so much a woman as one of those tornadoes that blew out of a bottle of, what cleanser was it? Mr. Clean?—something advertised in the late sixties, when he and Mitch came home from school on winter afternoons and watched too much television. Not that she'd been uninterested in hygiene before, but her commitment had ebbed as much as it flowed, never reaching an obsessive standard. But, having scrubbed their house in Ravena until there was no carpet left to pull up, no floor to strip or tub to scour or window to wash, she turned her attention to other people's homes, creating a business, overnight it seemed.

Heaven Help You
is the name of Will's mother's cleaning service; her business card includes a graphic of an antic mop wearing a halo. She'd started out with two young women and now employs twelve, sending them forth in teams of three, charging one hundred dollars an hour and clearing 20 percent of the gross. Will went back to his hometown some months after she'd established herself, and the whole place looked cleaner to him. As if his mother's frenzy for order and cleanliness had penetrated as far as the town council, there were new litter barrels on the corners, and a shining yellow street cleaner came by, spraying water on his bumper as it turned its massive brushes against the curb.

As they exit the restaurant, Will's father reaches out and touches him gently on the chest. “Cheating implies that I'm being dishonest. I'm not. I asked her permission.”

“You're kidding.” They walk out into air heavy with moisture.

“No, I'm not. I'm not kidding.”

“I guess I missed that part.”

“Oh? What part did she tell you?”

“I don't know. How many are there?”

Will's father doesn't answer this.

“I called to talk to you,” Will says. “She gave me a number in Manhattan, and when I asked whose it was, she said, ‘Your father's girlfriend's.' ”

“Huh.”

“I tried to get her to talk to me, but no dice.”

“She thinks you blow things out of proportion.”

“So she told you it was fine with her if you went ahead and had an affair?”

“What she said was she trusted me to determine how important it was for me to do this. And that if I decided I really did need to, then she accepted that.”

“
Need
to?” Will asks.

“Okay—want to.”

“And is there parity? If Mom decides she needs or wants to explore sex with another man, is that all right with you?”

“Of course. I'm not a hypocrite.” Will's father stops walking and looks up at the slice of sky over the avenue, a luminous gray band. Already his vest is covered with a layer of fine droplets. “I don't think she's all that interested, though.”

“That's lucky.” Will manages to say this without sounding peevish. It must be that he's feeling guilty for having facilitated his father's entry into the art world, and thus his arrival at infidelity to his mother.

After a period of trial and error that he now calls his apprenticeship, Will's father had come to Brooklyn with a shirt box filled with what he judged were the best among his photographs, and asked Will if they could go together to a gallery in Manhattan.

“I don't think it works that way, Dad,” Will told him, not wanting any part in what he was sure would prove a disappointment.

“Well, how does it?”

“You can't just walk in off the street. I'm sure you need an introduction or something, a—”

“Maybe,” his father said, and he smiled. What did he know? the smile said. He was a retired veterinarian. But Will lived in the city. He must know someone, didn't he?

Yes, actually, the mother of a friend of Luke's, yet another someone eager to inoculate herself against whatever it was that had fallen upon Will and his family. She'd gladly do a favor—
Anything!
Just
ask!
—to address the difference between them, the fact that her child was living and his was not. An editor at
Art News,
she knew a number of gallery representatives, and in a gesture akin to throwing salt over her shoulder, she took the box of prints into her clean hands. Will could assure his father, she told him, that she would be responsible for their handling.

To Will's astonishment, within a few months, his father's work was picked up by a small gallery on Greene Street, his photographs mounted, framed, and hung on a freshly painted wall, celebrated with an opening announced on creamy, deckle-edged invitations and catered by attractive, hip young men and women who carried trays crowded with glasses of champagne, caviar rolled into tiny blini, and slices of honeydew wrapped in prosciutto sliced so thin it was almost invisible.

Henry Moreland was an instant and happy success, his work favorably mentioned in
Art News
and
Photography,
his show recommended by
Time Out,
embraced not just because he was old but because he was a retired animal doctor. Having been a humble sort of savior, a man who'd never cultivated connections in the sniping New York art world, never sucked up to anyone or done anything to invite spite, Will's father was forgiven his talent. Gracious at the opening, he introduced Will's mother—wearing a new dress and salon-styled hair—to people she would never see again, among them the woman with whom he'd embark on an affair. Will and Carole had watched all this from where they stood, on the party's periphery, grateful to have Samantha between them, the necessity of answering her questions, of collecting her half-eaten hors d'oeuvres and finding her a cup of water that didn't sparkle, of wiping up her spills and asking her again to please not point, not even at people whose clothes were designed to awe and confound.

The crowd of flushed celebrants; the trays of filled champagne flutes; the indecipherable praise; the little cards that read “Price available upon request”: none of this was what Will's father had imagined for his old age. But, on the other hand, as his modest smile implied, it wasn't unwelcome.

“Dad?” Will says now, as they stop for a red light, “when you're working, taking a picture or printing it, do you ever feel something's being revealed to you? That your consciousness is heightened— augmented, maybe—by a force outside of your own intellect? That you understand something you hadn't before?”

His father looks at him. “I don't know. I can't tell what you're talking about. Do you mean something to do with God?”

“It wouldn't have to be. It could, but it wouldn't have to.”

They walk in silence for a block, then cross Forty-seventh Street. Ahead are the bright lights of Times Square, mesmerizing, each neon shape bleeding into the fog and creating its own aura of color. So many more giant screens than there were even a few years ago, it seems to Will. On the side of one building a series of portraits appear, each for a second or two. He watches to see what the monumental faces are selling. Insurance of some kind, life insurance, or health. Or maybe it's financial planning, mutual funds. Beyond them, he can just make out the shadowy outline of 1 Times Square, the building on top of which the glittering New Year's Eve ball slides down a flagpole, its audience, five hundred thousand strong, counting down the seconds to their lists of resolutions, or at least to clean slates. Will has never understood why a giant disco ball is the country's chosen symbol of time moving forward, and shouldn't the big orb go up rather than down? So un-American to descend. America was all about upswings and bootstraps and mind-over-matter, a confidence so profound—or was it blind?—it ensured the country would always be out of step with the rest of the world.

“Are you talking about inspiration?” his father asks. “Whether it comes from within a person or from without?”

“I don't know. What's inspiration?”

His father frowns thoughtfully, says nothing.

The photographs his father takes mystify Will. Whenever he visits, he looks at his father's most recent work, going slowly through the images, many of which he can place in the town where he grew up: benches he's sat on, signposts he's swung from, mailboxes and sewer covers and barber poles. But no sculptures or fountains or fancy weather vanes; his father prefers the artless and unassuming among possible subjects, and points his camera at things that stay put. There are no people and no animals, not even trees that aren't incidental, blurred background. Only objects, humble objects strangely transformed by his father's vision. It must be the light, Will has decided, the angle of the sun, the time of day, perhaps a filter that removes light waves of a particular length. What else could elevate a seemingly inventory art into a catalog of yearning? Even a lamppost looks as if, unfulfilled by life as a lamppost, it's on the brink of evolving into something else, something truer and brighter and realer. By virtue of a silent, invisible intent, it seems to shimmer, caught just at that moment before it disappears, changes, becomes another thing, or a nonthing—animate, potent, and unexpected.

Or maybe it isn't a function of light; maybe it's just projection. Maybe what Will sees is his own need to believe in a father who has the ability to alter the world around himself, or, at the least, to show Will what a new, illuminated world might look like.

“Well,” his father says, “aside from painting and music and what have you, aren't you asking the old God question? Whether or not God exists outside of faith? Independent of our faith?”