Another You (44 page)

Well, all right: interesting that once Gordon was seen clearly, he could see himself more clearly, also. Two mocking people: he used a vehicle, language, to mock; his brother lived his life by invoking a stereotype he knew was absurd. Gordon had done Marshall one better; he had lived his entire life in apologetic quotes to call attention to the absurdity of his position. This much was entirely clear. The only problem was that he couldn’t announce this revelation to Gordon, because Gordon had invested everything in keeping people at a distance through the pretense of being crude.

Their father had excelled at keeping others at arm’s length, also, but his method had been to intimidate by imperiousness, while Gordon had decided to be a beer-swigging good ole boy. Their parents—their father, their mother, Evie—would not recognize Gordon now. It was only an act, though, meant to be repellent. Underneath, Gordon was still observant and insightful. He looked at his brother and thought about what Gordon had said the first night he arrived in Key West. It was true: their father had married someone not at all like him. Though Evie had not been much like him either, the friction between them had still never been as obvious as the contention between his father and mother. If his father had put his hopes in either of them, it had been Gordon, but he sensed his mother cared more what became of him. Or should he see it differently now? Was it just a case of a mother’s favoring her baby? That had been what his father said to his mother, that night. He had heard them arguing—had run upstairs because they were arguing. He had been in the kitchen with Gordon, and then he had pushed his chair back from the table and run upstairs—how embarrassing, to remember his endless cowardice—and Evie had risen to leave as well, only to be called back into the kitchen by their father. It became a three-way argument, Evie calling his father a bully, his father complaining about their mother’s love for him, Marshall—all her love reserved for the person he humiliatingly called “the baby.” All she cared about was the baby, he remembered his father saying. She was obsessed with the baby, ruining their lives with her preoccupation with the baby—though it was an unfair criticism; she had not been as focussed on him as his father insisted. It might have been true that Evie fussed over him slightly more, but his father had not been objecting to that—it was quite specifically his mother’s attentions toward Marshall “the baby” that had infuriated their father that night.

A plane coming toward the airport descended quickly, motors roaring, and Marshall looked at it, there below the clouds. What a sky, blue with white clouds, the ideal sky, the sort of sky that was supposed to make people feel life was miraculous. Instead, the vastness of the mesmerically blue sky made him think that his birth had been an accident. Of course it had been: the perfect son already existed, and his mother’s attentions toward him—her attentions toward Marshall-the-Baby—clearly incensed his father. There was every probability his father had not wanted a second child; especially not one who was emotional, cowardly, his nose always in a book, welded to his brother’s side—not even clinging to their father, but dependent on Gordon, which must have offended their father. He had blocked out that night for so long for the obvious reason that he found it all so painful—his role in disturbing the family, his being the center of attention even when he absented himself, the thorn in his father’s side. That was why their father had insisted on talking about his wife’s having favorites when she was terminally ill—that was why he insisted on telling her her deficiencies as she was preparing to tell her sons she was going to die.

“Gordon,” Marshall said, “do you think he loved her?”

“The Texan?” Gordon said.

He looked at his brother. Gordon had pulled the brim of his cap low over his eyes and was resting, one knee crossed over another, hands clasped on his stomach. Amazing but not surprising: Gordon’s thoughts really did not return to their parents—to that time or that place. Certainly not to that night.

“Yeah, the Texan,” Marshall said, for the hell of it.

“Mm,” Gordon said. “He probably loves her. Yeah.”

“Do you think our father loved our mother?”

He could hear the slight annoyance, mixed with resignation, as Gordon sighed, “No. I doubt it.”

“Evie?” Marshall said.

“What’s this? Cupid’s love survey?”

“What do you think?” Marshall persisted.

“What does it matter?”

“I’m curious.”

“I realize that. How about going into the store and getting us a couple of beers? I want to take a ten-minute catnap, then maybe we can wander over to Mallory Dock, give you the required touristic
experience of watching the performers and the tourists strutting their stuff as the sun goes down. Beth’s selling air plants for a friend who’s out of town. You know what? I think Beth is a good person. I’m fond of her. I admire her. But I don’t think I love her, if I ever did.”

“You’ve read all those things,” Marshall said. “About your early life and how you form relationships later on, I mean.”

“I form relationships to get laid and to have one woman who doesn’t hate me, who isn’t after me night and day to marry her because I already have,” Gordon said. “How’s that for the confessional mode?”

“I’m not saying that anything that happened to us makes us unique,” Marshall said.

“I fucking think you
are
unique,” Gordon said. “How about two Coronas?”

Marshall got up, limping slightly on the first few steps because his left leg had gone dead sitting in the chair. Gordon probably did have the right approach to life: stretch out beneath the sky, don’t cause yourself any unnecessary problems in Paradise, have a cold beer and a brief nap. He and Hank nodded silently as Marshall passed him, heading into the office to get beers out of the refrigerator. He stepped carefully through the clutter, looking briefly at a calendar that had not yet been changed from January. A bare-chested woman holding a pink heart-shaped lollipop between her enormous breasts smiled down at him from the wall to the left of the refrigerator. On a bulletin board to the other side hung a photograph of Mr. Watanabe, Gordon, Hank, and six women in sparkling evening gowns with plunging necklines. They were in a nightclub somewhere, clustered around a small round table. Mr. Watanabe’s eyes, on closer inspection, looked like pinwheels. Gordon’s eyes … it frightened him to look at Gordon’s eyes. With a hand curled halfway around one of the blond women’s jewel-studded breasts, the other arm dangled at his side as if it were a useless appendage. Looking at the arm, you would be certain the limb had no feeling—that you were looking at a handicapped person’s flaccidly dangling arm. The more he looked, the more he realized Gordon was just very drunk; he seemed to be propped up in the chair, more like a mannequin than a real person, except that his eyes told you he was human. They weren’t just empty, they were dead. They were eyes that had died.

He shuddered as he pulled open the refrigerator door. A blast of cold air hit him, causing him to double up as he reached quickly in, taking two beers from several dozen bottles crowded onto the top shelf. He shut the door quickly and looked around for an opener. He saw one on the wall, under the calendar, and opened both bottles, letting the bottle caps fall to the floor amid ant traps, crumpled paper, and many other bottle caps. He carried them out, looking down so as not to meet Hank’s eyes again. It was as if he’d seen something shameful in the room, or as if he’d partaken in something shameful—a thought he didn’t want to come any closer to articulating.

A breeze had blown up outside, disturbing the surface of the water. From the roof, the sound of a staple gun punctured the silence. Gordon reached up for the beer without changing his position in the chair, and Marshall’s heart missed a beat, he was so delighted to see Gordon’s right arm move.
My God
, he thought:
I must have convinced myself something was really wrong with Gordon’s arm
. He stood there as if he’d awakened from a bad dream, grateful to be back in the world, silently embarrassed he’d been elsewhere. He handed down the beer, fascinated at Gordon’s hand as it gripped the long neck of the Corona. Elbow bent, he moved his hand to his mouth and swigged from the bottle. It was ordinary—the most quintessentially ordinary thing Marshall could imagine—but the motion seemed beautiful, inherently fascinating, and beyond that a relief. It was a huge relief. Gordon was not the Gordon of the photograph; that had been a sudden flash that produced a deceptive photograph.

The rooftop reggae devolved eerily into Jim Morrison, singing “Wishful Sinful.” For a minute, amid hammering, he listened. A stronger station had overtaken Bob Marley. It was Morrison in the lead, Marley second, darting in for a fuzzy word, a sung phrase, Altiss loudly rooting for Marley until a Skil saw overwhelmed both words and music When it resumed, Marley had triumphed, though Marshall’s thoughts were no longer on the music. Hearing Jim Morrison had reminded him of Gordon’s friend the bartender. He was replaying going into the Green Parrot, watching the ambidextrous bartender perform, frantically keeping up with drink orders while washing glasses and holding simultaneous conversations. It seemed that in Key West everyone was either completely wired or very laid back. How amusing, then, that high-energy Gordon was pretending to sleepwalk,
turning over the possibility of leaving his wife, travelling in his mind to places like Hawaii while he sat sprawled in a butterfly chair near the water’s edge, picking under a fingernail with one of the toothpicks he always carried in his shirt pocket.
What a shirt
, Marshall thought, appreciating the bizarre colors—a shirt that reminded him of a tequila sunrise, pinks settling into orange, a watery concoction of electric color that blurred more the harder you tried to focus.

“Man, with my eyes closed, I can tell you’re lost in thought,” Gordon said. He hunched his shoulders and sat up, raising the yellow aviator glasses, rubbing his arm over his eyes, pushing the glasses back on the bridge of his nose with two fingers. “You understand I don’t have any special knowledge about what never got said when we were kids, right? But you want my opinion anyway. Okay: my opinion is that if he ever loved our mother, he stopped loving her pretty fast. He felt bad when he knew she was going to die, but that’s something else. And Evie—as I’ve said, looking back, I think Evie was always his squeeze on the side. Guy needed to get laid, is my guess. Our mother seemed like a ghost long before she got sick and died. I don’t remember her in any season but winter. That Bible she carried around. Always so unhappy. I know what he felt like: if something doesn’t work out, next time you go to the opposite extreme.” Gordon rolled his head to the side, looked up at Marshall, standing with his back to the water, holding a bottle of beer from which he had not yet sipped. “Are all these questions because your marriage to Sonja is breaking up? I mean this quite sincerely: I’ve been through this stuff before. At the moment it seems like the end of the world, but it won’t be. Whatever happens, I don’t think you’re going to get any answers about the present by raking through the past. By thinking about the previous woman, yes—but you’ve only been married one time.”

“I don’t care about what I’m doing for a living. I don’t—with the exception of a madman who’s no longer my friend, I don’t have any friends except you. Sonja and I had a bad year, but I should have seen it was going badly. I should have cared, and I didn’t. I’m shutting down.”

Gordon shook his head. “You make it sound like you’re a dangerous nuclear reactor, man. Who do you know who loves what he does, loves his wife, loves every fucking thing in the world? Things will work out. You’ve got to think forward, not back.”

Marshall nodded.

“I should also mention that you find yourself in a slightly strange place, bro. Boats bobbing out there on the water, people on their rented pink motor scooters. It seems easy. People talk like it’s easy. There’s flowers and sunshine. It’s like an illustration in a fucking children’s book. The Conch Republic’s not necessarily the best place to find yourself when you’re undergoing self-doubt. You pick up that conch shell and hold it to your ear, you know what you hear? A roar. A hollow roar. If you’re already down, you’ll take it as the absolute truth.”

At Mallory Dock, the air was suffused with the odor of meat and onions frying on a grill, the roar of fruit and juice liquefying in a blender, the triple blast of a cruise ship calling for the last passengers so it could sail away before dark. Smaller boats crisscrossed the water, sailboats and motorboats, people clustered on deck as the boats blew back and forth, turning to keep the sun in sight, bands playing at the open-air bars on shore, recorded music or an amplified guitar drifting off the water toward land, people drinking swampy margaritas and cheap wine included in the price of the sail that would give them instant headaches. Near where they stood, a bagpipe player puffed his cheeks and began to finger his next song, drowning out the Bob Dylan imitation undertaken beside him by a barefooted man who stopped singing every half minute to berate people in the crowd for walking on the cord that attached his guitar to the amplifier. People grabbed each other’s hands, snaking through the dense crowd, yelling over their shoulders for others to follow, evading jugglers, backing off to provide a small circle of space to a man who raised a shopping cart containing four bowling balls, with a bicycle tied to the cart, from his shoulders to his forehead, then moved it from his forehead to his mouth, taking small, bent-kneed steps while finally tipping it enough to balance the entire shopping cart by its handle on his teeth. Children were lifted to parents’ shoulders, teenagers tumbled against each other’s bodies, using shoulders and legs as springboards, their T-shirts rolled to reveal tattoos of the setting sun inked into their biceps, along with skulls and crossbones, Merlins with crystal balls, long-haired, big-breasted women galloping on unicorns. Dirty, shoeless
men with caved-in chests stood squinting in the background, looking for abandoned hot dogs or half-full cans of Pepsi left on the ground. Dogs nosed through the crowd while others of their kind performed: a white dog in a bandanna who jumped over three Vietnamese pigs in graduated sizes, their tails braided, who in turn jumped over the expressionless dog, landing in a perfect line, one-two-three; a cat in red booties who jumped, at the crack of a whip, through a flaming hoop. He thought, suddenly, of Janet Lanier, telling him, “Your wife will be very sympathetic about the hoops you’ve had to jump through.”