I Am No One You Know (5 page)

Certain boys were Mr. M—’s targets. You could see why certain boys were not Mr. M—’s targets for he never dared single out any strong-willed or defiant boy, or any boy from a prominent family, and
boys of limited intelligence he ignored; but you could not always predict which boys, out of a number of possibilities, he would choose to torment. Vulnerable boys, shy boys. Shyly stubborn boys. Smart boys. Small-boned boys. Boys with girls’ faces. Rarely homely boys. Never handicapped boys. Never Italian or Negro boys. First he’d call on you in class and if you gave the right answer he’d call on you repeatedly until at last you gave a wrong answer. You stood at the blackboard trying to solve a problem, chalk trembling in your fingers. Mr. M—’s scorn was so playful, his mockery so comical, you weren’t always certain why you were being laughed at by even your friends. Your face burned, your eyes stung with moisture. You felt your bladder pinch with the need to pee. Once summoning me forward to his teacher’s desk at the front of the room. Making of me a witness to his red-inked pen darting and swooping over my math test like a miniature deranged hawk. I had mis-numbered the questions! I was a careless boy! Might’ve had a grade of ninety-eight but now had a grade of forty-eight and this would be duly noted on my midterm report card to be sent home for my mother’s signature. Tears welled in my eyes. My nose ran. Disgusted Mr. M—tossed a tissue at me. It might have been a used tissue, out of his baggy pants pocket. Wipe your nose, Mr. M—said. Stand up straight, Mr. M—said. What a careless boy you are, not nearly so smart as you think you are,
I’ve got your number.
For it was so, there were boys (but never girls, and we never wondered why) of whom Mr. M—could boast
I’ve got your number.

Almost time for dinner, Dad. My brother spoke brightly as if he’d made a new discovery, and it pleased him.

Dad? It’s that time.

We re-entered the E-wing. We’d circled the garden not once but twice, slowly. The
tomatoes
had been admired, and the mysterious
zinnias.
I had forgotten that time wasn’t fixed like concrete but in fact was fluid as sand, or water. I had forgotten that even misery can end.

Got your number, got your number.
Just ahead the sunken-chested old man with the singed face, the thick-lensed glasses taped to his head, was leaning on his cane. Again we must pass close by him. For he would not give way. For he wished to block our way. The white-haired old woman was gone. The gnome-sized individual was sitting,
back against the wall. Here was Mr. M—wizened as a scrawny child. His face had lost its fat, his cheeks were papery thin and flushed as if with fever. I saw how, as his eyes lighted upon us, Mr. M—’s expression turned hopeful, shrewd. For the first time I saw how his dentures glared like cheap porcelain. Boys? Take me with you? Take me with you? He lurched near me, his palsied hand groped for my arm, and I shoved him from me. Mr. M—’s fetid breath in my face, that made me gag. Don’t touch me, I said.

Shoving him from me I said, You’re not going anywhere with anyone, you old bastard. Your place is here, you get to die here.

My brother turned an incredulous face to me. Yanking at my arm to pull me away from the tottering old man who gaped at me as if he hadn’t heard a syllable of what I’d said.

Norm! For Christ’s sake.

My brother was so rattled, he had trouble punching in the code to unlock the doors.

Second time, he got it. There was a bleating and pleading behind us we ignored. As soon as the doors opened we stepped through. We walked swiftly along the corridor to the lobby not looking back. My brother was cursing me under his breath. I’d never heard him so angry at anyone. God damn, God damn you, are you crazy, God damn you.

Why didn’t you warn me, I asked my brother. You knew who he was.

Who who was? What? That pathetic old guy? He’s nobody.

You knew. You know. God damn
you.

We burst through the lobby doors. We walked to my brother’s car in the parking lot without speaking. Without glancing at each other. Not a backward glance at the Manor. Inside the car it would be hotter than hell. My brother had insisted the windows be shut, the doors locked. At Meadowbrook Manor! Disgusted my brother threw himself behind the driver’s wheel not looking at me and I had a choice, to climb inside that car beside him or to walk back to his house which was at least three miles, and along the country highway in the sun.

It wasn’t much of a choice.

T
HERE!—THE PHONE
is ringing.

The call usually comes between six and seven, weekday evenings exclusively. Steven will hear the phone and Holly, in the kitchen preparing dinner, will answer it quickly, before Steven or their eleven-year-old son Brandon can get to a phone. He’ll hear his wife’s urgent voice, an anxious hello and then subdued murmurs of sympathy or encouragement, finally silence, for the person on the other end of the line is doing most of the talking.

The conversation will never last less than twenty minutes. Once, Steven recalls, it lasted nearly an hour, and might have gone longer if Steven hadn’t come into the kitchen to interrupt.

Tonight Steven is sitting in the family room adjacent to the kitchen with four-year-old Caitlin in the curve of his arm, listening to his daughter read aloud from one of her new, beautifully illustrated story-books, a tale of imperiled but magically empowered talking animals, and he tries not to be distracted by Holly in the kitchen. He loves these reading sessions with Caitlin with a fierce, fatherly sense of privilege; he remembers with what stunning swiftness Brandon’s early childhood passed, how abruptly his son became a boy, no longer a little
boy, whose measure of self-worth is drawn from his boy-classmates and not from his adoring parents.

Steven resents this caller who interrupts Holly in the kitchen though she has asked him not to call her at that time; she loves cooking for her little family, as she calls the four of them; every evening for Holly means a serious, not elaborate but conscientious dinner, seafood, fish, omelettes, fresh vegetables, whole grain rice, thick spiced soups, her reward, she says, for a day of purely mental work performed for the benefit of strangers. But dinner will be delayed on those evenings when the call comes. The children will become hungry, impatient; Steven will have a second drink; when finally they sit down to eat he’ll see his pretty wife’s melancholy eyes, the downward cast of her smile, and feel rage in his heart for the person responsible.

By his watch, nearly thirty minutes have gone by.

As Steven enters the kitchen, Holly is just hanging up the phone. He sees her wiping guiltily at her eyes. “Honey, was that your brother? Again?” Steven tries to keep the exasperation out of his voice: in the little family Daddy is wise, compassionate, mature beyond his thirty-seven years, inclined to settle disputes with a laugh, a well-aimed kiss. Holly is the emotional parent, quick to laughter, tears, effervescence, worry. She says, taking up a spatula and stir-frying vegetables in a large aluminum wok, “Don’t ask, Steven. Please.”

“Of course I’m going to ask. Owen just called, didn’t he, last Thursday?”

“Well, he’s having a serious crisis. The anti-depressant his doctor has been prescribing isn’t working out, he’ll have to switch to another drug and he’s anxious, insomniac—” Holly frowns at the simmering vegetables, avoiding Steven’s eyes. “He’s all right, I think. There’s no talk of—you know. He’s just lonely. He says he has no no one to talk with except—” Holly’s voice wavers. She doesn’t want to say
no one but me.

“But why does he have to call at this time? He knows it’s a difficult time. With dinner, the kids—” Steven is trying to speak reasonably. Holly stands silent, and he realizes that his brother-in-law has probably been calling her at other times, too; possibly he calls her at work. But Steven isn’t supposed to know this.

Holly says apologetically, “Honey, I’ve tried to explain but Owen
says, ‘I don’t know the time. It’s a luxury to be conscious of clock-time.’ ”

“What’s that supposed to mean? That gnomic remark?”

“He can’t sleep at night, sometimes he sleeps during the day so it’s ‘night for day’ for him, he says. He calls when he gets too lonely and can’t stand another moment of himself. He isn’t like
us.
”

“Couldn’t you explain that you’re busy? You’re tired, exhausted? You want to spend some time with your family?”

“But I’m his family, Owen would say. His only family.” Holly speaks sharply, despairingly. The spatula slips from her fingers, falls clattering to the floor; Steven picks it up. “He says he’s ‘haunted’ by our mother, hears her voice with some of the drugs he takes. I wish you could be more sympathetic, Steven.”

“Honey, I am. I try. But it’s been years, he’s twenty-nine years old, he seems incapable of growing up. He has no self-respect, no shame, he’s never paid us back that fifteen hundred dollars he borrowed for a down payment on—”

“Steven, you can’t be throwing that back on him, on me. Not now. When you’re doing so well. We’re doing so well. When we have everything, and Owen has so little.”

“I do feel sympathy for him, honey.” Steven tries to stroke Holly’s hair and like an offended cat she eases away. “I feel very sorry for him. But I feel sorry for you, too. He’s eating you alive.”

“What an ugly thing to say,” Holly says, shocked. For a moment the lurid image hovers before them in their cozy, comfortable suburban kitchen: an enormous mouth devouring Holly. She says, tears in her eyes, “You just don’t understand, Steven, how desperate Owen is. He has tried so hard with his art. He has tried to make lasting friends, he’s tried to fall in love. Don’t smile—he has! He’s tried to be—well, normal. But ordinary life is like a maze for some people. It’s biochemical, he’s inherited it from our mother’s side of the family. He was telling me just now he’s terrified of the future. He feels as if he was born with a hole in him, in the region of his heart, he tries to fill, it’s his duty to fill, and nothing will fill it.”

“Nothing will fill it.” It’s a statement of Steven’s, not a question. Nothing will fill the hole in his brother-in-law’s leaky heart.

Even if Owen devoured Holly, and Steven, and their children—nothing would fill it.

But Steven doesn’t say this, it’s an insight he’ll keep to himself. The last thing he wants tonight is to upset Holly further and ruin their family evening. Unlike his predator brother-in-law, he wants Holly to be happy as she deserves.

And now Caitlin comes bounding into the kitchen, eager to help Mommy. And Daddy has to deflect her with a task, setting the table. It’s a game, but, for Caitlin, a risky one, for if she gets so much as a single fork in the wrong position, she’ll be crushed with a childish mortification that touches Daddy’s heart. No one wants so desperately to be perfect as a four-year-old girl.

Brandon too enters the kitchen, simulating casualness but glancing worriedly at his parents. “What’re you guys fighting about?” It’s a joke, Brandon is teasing, but beneath his teasing he’s in earnest, anxious to know, so Mommy and Daddy protest in a single voice—“ ‘Fighting’?—
nobody’s fighting.”

T
HOSE EVENINGS WHEN
Owen telephones are the only evenings when Steven and Holly, who have been married twelve years, come dangerously close to disliking each other.

Owen, all that remains of Holly’s original family. The family that predates the little family.

Owen, Holly’s younger brother by two years. As a child Owen was so much Holly’s responsibility, in a household in which both parents were alcoholics, that he came to take for granted his sister’s un-critical love, her indulgence, generosity, forgiveness. And blindness to his faults. He has grown into a snakily attractive young-aging man with lavishly blond-streaked hair trimmed up the sides, with a small pigtail at the nape of his neck. Though he’s a clerk at the Green Earth Co-Op and complains of having no money, he wears black silk shirts that hug his narrow torso, stone-washed designer jeans, ostrich-hide boots. (“Gifts from friends,” Owen explains with a droll smile, “—parting gifts.”) He’s shy, and cheeky; he’s self-loathing, and self-absorbed; in profile he’s strikingly handsome, seen head-on, he has a pinched, narrow fox-face with small features, a pouty mouth that breaks into a dazzling smile as if on cue. Owen’s laughter is wild and
extravagant. (Brandon has begun to imitate this laughter, unconsciously.) Owen’s tears spill easily. His teeth are small and faintly discolored, the hue of weak tea. He’s frightened of blood: and nearly collapsed once when Brandon, tumbling from his tricycle in the driveway, had a sudden nosebleed. In the final month of Holly’s pregnancy with Caitlin, when Holly was grotesquely, comically swollen, like a boa constrictor who’d swallowed a hog, Owen was hardly able to look at his sister without flinching. “Owen, please understand: pregnancy isn’t a medical pathology,” Holly tried to tease him. When Caitlin was born, he sent flowers but avoided seeing Holly for weeks, on the pretext of illness; in fact, as he confided in Steven, as if man-to-man, he dreaded seeing his sister nursing the infant. “It’s so atavistic. Primal. It must
hurt.
Ugh!”

Steven has to concede he’d been charmed by Owen until a few years ago. In his early twenties Owen had been a serious artist, a figurative painter. That he lived on scholarships, fellowships, art colony grants, and occasional loans from his sister made sense at the time. Owen was young, Owen was “very promising.” If, in time, he came to rely upon these loans—of course, they were gifts—from Holly and her husband, this too made sense. (And he gave them paintings—not always his best paintings, perhaps.) He seemed perhaps bisexual, not exclusively gay; at least, he played at being attracted to the girls Holly introduced him to. If sometimes he stared long and longingly at Steven, Steven took care not to notice.

Once in their kitchen he overheard Owen say to Holly, “I love Steve. I love him as much as a real brother. Thank you for bringing Steve into my life.”

Steven was suffused with warmth, tenderness. Though later he would wonder if Owen, who calculated so much, had calculated these words being overheard.

Though he drives a new-model Toyota (another parting gift from a friend?), Owen lives in a dismal rented apartment. He’s a clerk at an organic foods co-op, a “servile, fawning” job he detests and will probably not keep long. His life appears to be cruising bars, sudden intense friendships, abrupt “misunderstandings” and dismissals. He’d been in and out of AA, rehab clinics. (At Holly’s and Steven’s expense.) Artist-friends have long since vanished. An MFA program at Temple
University in Philadelphia “didn’t work out.” Owen lives amid a shifting phantasmagoria of gay acquaintances, friends, lovers. Gary, Oliver, Mark, Kevin. If Steven remembers the name of Owen’s new friend, by the time they speak again and he asks, “How’s Kevin?” he’s likely to meet with a stony silence from Owen, or a blithe, “How should I know, Steve? Ask him.”

Yet Owen can be warm, charming. Steven tries to remember this. When Brandon was small he played with him for hours, filling in coloring books of his own invention with fantastical acrylic colors. For her third birthday he gave Caitlin a handmade painted book,
Frog & Beans,
one of Caitlin’s prized possessions. (“Owen should have been a children’s book illustrator,” Steven said, “he has a real talent for this.” Holly said, offended, “Don’t you dare ever tell him that. He’d be
wounded.
”)

What Steven fears in Owen is that he has the power of weakness: the power to set Steven and Holly against each other, the power to subtly erode the little family from within. Only recently has Holly confessed to Steven that when they were children in Rutherford, New Jersey, Owen set small fires in their neighborhood and at school. When he was sixteen, he and another boy parked in the boy’s car, ran a hose from the exhaust into the car, and drank themselves unconscious, expecting to die of carbon monoxide poisoning; but they were found in time. And there had been other suicide attempts over the years…“Owen suffered from terrible nightmares as a child,” Holly says. “He’s never been secure. Our mother was sick so much, and sometimes deranged.” Steven listens quietly, not about to say
Yes but you aren’t suicidal, why’s that?
“Our father died when Owen was eight.”
Your father died when you were ten, why not see it from your perspective for once?
“ ‘Small mother with claws’—Owen calls her.”

“Who?”

“I’ve been telling you. Our mother.”

“I think the phrase is Kafka’s. ‘Small mother with claws.’ ”

Holly frowns, annoyed with Steven. “I guess we shouldn’t discuss Owen. It brings out something petty in you.”

Steven says, stung, “Holly, what’s ‘petty’ to you is crucial to me. I hate it that you aid and abet your brother’s weaknesses. He gets sympathy
from you for being pathetic. If you’d encourage him to be strong, independent, to have some masculine pride—”

Holly bursts into incredulous laughter. “Steven, listen to you. ‘Masculine pride.’ I can’t believe this, you sound like a parody. Owen
is
prone to illnesses, he
is
‘weak’ compared to you. If that makes him less of a man, that’s a pity.”

Steven says, trying to keep his voice even, “Remember a few years ago, that Christmas we were snowed in, and Owen helped me shovel the driveway? He wasn’t weak then, he surprised us all.” It was true: Steven and Brandon had bundled up to shovel snow after a two-foot snowfall in northern New Jersey, and, after a while, as if reluctantly, Owen had joined them. He shoveled awkwardly at first, then got into the rhythm, cheeks flushed and nose running, joking with Steven and Brandon, quite enjoying himself. As if he’d forgotten himself. Steven had felt an unexpected bond between Owen and himself as the men shoveled the fifty-foot driveway, talking frankly of life, ideals, politics, family. He’d felt that he had established a new, significant rapport with his brother-in-law, of a kind that had made no reference to Holly.
I like him. And he likes me. That’s it!
But the rapport hadn’t lasted. What was genuine enough in the buoyant cold of a bright, dazzling-white winter day soon dissolved, and not long afterward there was Owen calling Holly to complain of his depression, his insomnia, “faithless” friends, yes and he needed money…

Holly says, annoyed, “Oh yes: the snow-shoveling. Fine. But my brother is a little more complicated than that, I hope.”

Steven accepts this in silence. He has brought it on himself, he knows. It’s pointless to argue with Holly about Owen: she loves him in a way impenetrable by Steven, in a way that pre-exists even her love for Brandon and Caitlin. You can call this love morbid, or admirable; a symptom of childhood pathology, or an expression of adult loyalty. But there it is.