Big Brother (5 page)
That sobered them up. As we walked back downstairs, Cody dragged on my hand. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “What I said, I didn’t mean it.” She was close to tears. I assured her with a squeeze that I knew she hadn’t. Prone to self-recrimination, Cody was all too capable of tossing sleeplessly that night, berating herself for having been mean about her uncle even out of his earshot. I’d only ever seen her try to be nasty to impress Tanner, and she was lousy at it. At school, she perennially befriended the social dregs out of compassion, pulling her own mid-level status down several notches in the process.
We sat down to dinner. Fletcher passed his shrimp dish, in a tangy tomato, zucchini, and eggplant sauce over bars of baked polenta. As a special concession, he allowed the rest of us to spike it with Parmesan. The guest, Edison helped himself first, after which our largest rectangular baking pan was half empty. I took a tiny serving to ensure enough remained for everyone else, and Cody did likewise—unless the totem of excess at the end of the table was putting her off her feed. Me, I still had an appetite, but couldn’t meet my brother’s eyes; simply looking at him felt unkind. So I stole glances when he was occupied with his food, terrified he’d catch me staring—at the rolls of his neck, the gapes between straining buttons on his shirt, the tight, bulging fingers that recalled bratwurst in the skillet just before the skin splits.
I announced that Cody was studying the piano, and she said she “sucked,” but that she’d be grateful if Edison would give her a few lessons. He acted game—“Sure, kid, no problemo”—but his tone was surprisingly cool, considering that he’d usually jump at the chance to show off. I encouraged Fletcher to show my brother what he was working on in the basement later, though Edison couldn’t come up with anything to ask about cabinetry besides, “What’s the latest project?” (another coffee table) and “What materials?” (though Fletcher was doing some striking work with bleached cow bones, his terse reply was “walnut”). There’s nothing more leaden than this sort of exchange, and awareness that Edison didn’t care about the answers to his lame questions made Fletcher protective and closed.
Yet Edison grew more animated when I pressed Tanner to tell his step-uncle about his interest in becoming a screenwriter.
“The feature film industry is a total crapshoot,” Edison advised, rearing back in the recliner. “Half the time when after years of frustration the project’s finally lined up with casting, crew, everything, some douche pulls the money. Most Hollywood screenwriters just do rewrites of other people’s rewrites, and never see a script shot. You should think about TV, man. They get shit out the door. Travis, our dad—I guess you’re sort of related, right? Wouldn’t count on a guy who sells Pocket Fisherman on Nick at Nite to provide you a lot of contacts. But he may still know people who know people, and that’s the way it’s done. Me, I got friends out there who went into the industry, including one guy at HBO. Be glad to put you in touch.”
If I could have gotten away with it, I’d have been pulling the ridge of a flattened hand across my throat. Tanner’s expectations were already unrealistic. I didn’t want him encouraged.
“Thanks,” Tanner grunted skeptically.
“Tanner’s met his step-grampa,” I said. “A cautionary tale.”
“What’s that mean?”
“An unpleasant story that should keep you from making the same mistake.”
“What’s so
cautionary
about my grampa being a TV star?” I noted that in this instance Tanner had dropped the “step.”
“
Was
a TV star,” I said. “He spends most of his time opening used-car lots and doing Rotary Club lunches—”
“Lecturing on
environmentalism
, believe it or not,” said Edison with a laugh. “Chump never recycled a Coke can in his life.”
“—or,” I went on, “printing truckloads of anniversary T-shirts, when Travis Appaloosa is the only man on God’s earth who knows or cares when the first episode of
Joint Custody
aired on NBC. TV Land used to occasionally have him on in the graveyard slot, but he burned that bridge by badgering the channel to run
Joint Custody
marathons the way they do with
Twilight Zone
and
Andy Griffith
. Last time I talked to him he’d gotten a fire under him about putting together a reunion show like
The Brady Bunch
did—only the child actors Travis worked with grew up to be wasters, bar one, and the mayor of San Diego has better things to do. Cautionary. I’ll say.”
I knew I’d been going on, but someone had to counter the deadly proffering of Edison’s helping hand. I was loath for our kids to feel exceptional for the wrong reasons, and so to fall prey to the same unjustified sense of importance from which I’d suffered as a kid. While superficially self-effacing, my keeping my parentage under wraps at school may have been even more corrupting than Edison’s bannering of his father’s identity at every opportunity. I’d still smugly carried around the fact that my father was
Travis Appaloosa
like a secret charm, an amulet to ward off evil, when really it was no better than a pet rock.
Even more averse than I to playing up my Burbank connection, Fletcher changed the subject—turning to the one topic sure to fill out the rest of the meal:
all that jazz
.
“Hey, I’ve played with some heavy cats, dig?” Having scraped out the remains of the polenta, Edison upended the bowl of Parmesan on top. Tanner and Cody locked eyes, which bulged in unison. “Stan Getz hired me for three years—paid better than Miles, believe it or not. But just my luck the really iconic recordings haven’t been the gigs I’ve been on. So nobody remembers that, yeah, Edison Appaloosa played with Joe Henderson—because I wasn’t on
Lush Life
. Paul Motian, too—and it’s hardly my fault the guy has pretty much stopped playing with pianists. And, man, I could shoot myself over the fact that nobody,
nobody
thought to record that jam session with Harry Connick, Jr., at the Village Gate in 1991.
Harry Connick!
Rare for him to sing in those days. Crack pianist himself, and said I had ‘the touch.’ Okay, he wasn’t big yet. But Jesus fucking Christ, I could have been everywhere.”
I didn’t enjoy the thought:
He sounds like Travis
. It bothered me that my brother was still trotting out the same list of musicians that I’d learned years before to impress aficionados. It was a list, apparently, that Edison recited to himself.
“Thing that really gets me in New York these days,” he went on, Parmesan pasted in the corners of his mouth, “is this obsession with ‘tradition.’ Some of the younger cats, they sound like fuddy-duddies. Studying all these chords and intervals like those mindless fucks in madrassas memorizing the Koran. Ornette, Trane, Bird—they were iconoclasts! They weren’t about following the rules, but tearing them up! Personally I blame jazz education. Sonny, Dizzy, Elvin—they didn’t get any degrees. But these good doobies coming out of Berklee and the New School—they’re so fucking respectful. And
serious.
It’s perverse, man. Like getting a Ph.D. in how to be a dropout.”
We didn’t usually have wine with dinner, but tonight was an occasion. Edison had opened the second bottle—which made Fletcher’s jaw clench—helping to explain why my brother was dropping consonants, slurring vowels, and adopting a drawling cadence like the honorary African-American he considered himself to be. Most of the founding fathers of jazz were black, and Edison claimed being a white guy was a disadvantage in the field, especially in Europe, where “real” jazz musicians had to look the part.
“ . . . See, what Wynton’s done by bringing in Jazz at Lincoln Center is cast the genre as elitist. As
high
culture,
high
art.
Elitist
, can you believe it? A form that came straight outta whites-only water fountains? But that’s the drill now, man. Middle-aged boomers hit the Blue Note when they’re too out of it to keep up with hip-hop and figure they need to ditch pop for something more sophisticated. It’s a pose, man . . .”
As my mind wandered, I considered the script for an Edison doll:
I’d have been famous, man, if only I was black!
I’ve played with some heavy cats.
Jazz prodigy my ass! Sinclair Vanpelt couldn’t play “Chopsticks.”
Yeah, as a matter of fact, Travis Appaloosa
is
my dad.
I can’t
believe
no one recorded the Harry Connick jam.
Yo, pass the cheese.
Well, that last line would be a recent addition. I collected the plates, while Edison heaved from the maroon recliner—again—to head to the patio to smoke. So Tanner had once more to get up, push his chair in, and maneuver out of the way. It was chilly for the end of September, and each lumbering departure and reentry lowered the temperature by five degrees. The central heating couldn’t keep up, and Cody had to slip upstairs to get us both sweaters. I was reconciled that Tanner and Cody had to negotiate a world in which people smoked. Given that my brother was not only chronically short of breath but also himself a
heavy cat
, the kids probably wouldn’t view him as a role model. But Fletcher tensed every time we went through all this brouhaha for an unfiltered Camel. He didn’t want anyone smoking around the kids.
I unveiled my pecan pie. Fletcher wouldn’t have any, but it used to be my brother’s favorite dessert as a boy. If glutinous with corn syrup, the pie was already baked; besides, look at him: what difference did it make? Although I guessed that’s what he routinely told himself.
“Edison, you want ice cream with this?” I called plaintively. But I knew the answer.
I
lay on my back in bed while Fletcher folded his clothes, which without the maroon recliner he had to stack on his dresser. Finally I said, “I had no idea.”
After slipping between the sheets, Fletcher, too, lay in a wide-eyed stupor. We seemed to be experiencing a domestic posttraumatic stress, as if recovering from an improvised explosive device planted at our dining table.
“I’m starving,” said Fletcher.
A bit later he said, “I rode fifty miles today.”
I let him get it out of his system. After another couple of minutes he said, “That polenta dish was huge. I thought we’d have scads left over.”
I sighed. “You should have had some pie. Before Edison finished it off.” I nestled my head on his chest. For once his build seemed not a reprimand, but a marvel.
“What
happened
to him?”
I let Fletcher’s question dangle. It would take me months to formulate any kind of an answer.
“I’m sorry,” said Fletcher, stroking my hair. “I’m so very, very sorry.”
I was grateful that he opted for sympathy over judgment. Sympathy for whom? For his wife, first of all. For Edison as well, obviously. But maybe—in a situation I’d unwittingly gotten us into and had myself contrived as horrifyingly open-ended—for everybody.
I
shuffled downstairs the following morning, a Sunday, to find Edison in the kitchen, which Fletcher and I had swabbed down laboriously the night before and was once more a melee of mixing bowls.
“Morning, Panda Bear! Thought I’d earn my keep. Breakfast on the house.” He’d fired up our cast-iron griddle, above which he dribbled batter from a dramatic height. Once the batch began to sizzle, he pulled a cookie sheet from the oven that was towering with pancakes—chocolate chip, I would discover.
I usually had a piece of toast.
“Thanks, Edison, that’s very—generous.”
Tanner was not yet up, and Fletcher had fled to the basement. So I sat down next to Cody, who was parked before a stack of five. Thus far she had carved a single wedge from the top pancake and placed it on the plate rim. In a show of politeness, she cut a doll-size bite from the wedge and chewed elaborately. As well as pancake fixings—jams and sour cream—there was also a bowl of scrambled eggs, getting cold, and large enough to have decimated both cartons. If I wanted toast, that was on offer as well—piled and pre-buttered. I nibbled on a triangle. It oozed.
“Wow,” I said faintly as my own stack arrived—layered with more butter and drenched in maple syrup. Resourcefully, my brother had finished the open bottle and located our backup in the pantry. “Is there any coffee?”
“Coming up!” He poured me an inky mug-full.
I slipped up and looked in the fridge. I took my coffee with milk. The empty plastic gallon sat on the counter.
“Whatcha looking for?” Edison had already adopted a proprietary attitude toward our kitchen.
“The half-and-half.” Of which ordinarily I took a tiny splash on top of the milk, but straight would do for now.
“Sorry about that,” said Edison. “Needed some coffee myself, to power through the flapjacks. There wasn’t much left, and I killed it.”
I’d opened a fresh pint the previous morning. “Never mind, then. I’ll take it black.” I returned to the pancakes I didn’t want, fighting a burst of petulance. All I did want was my usual white coffee, and not this bleeding-ulcer-in-a-cup. I told myself he was trying to be nice, but it didn’t feel nice.
“Think I should take a stack down to Fletch?”
“No, he wouldn’t touch them. Not with the white flour, and especially not with chocolate chips.” My tone was a little clipped.
“I could make another batch with buckwheat and walnuts, no prob. We’d just have to get more milk.”
“No,
please
don’t make any more pancakes!”
Edison’s ladle froze; I might as well have slapped him. The rebuke rang in my ears, and I flushed with remorse. My brother had just gotten here and there had to be something terribly wrong for him to be looking like this and I wanted him to feel welcome and loved, which was the only way he would ever get a hold of himself.
I took my coffee to the stove and put an arm around his shoulders. It shocked me that it took a small but detectable overcoming of revulsion to touch my own sibling. “All I meant was—you should knock off all this work and join us for breakfast. I just had a bite, and the pancakes are terrific.”
The touch more than the verbal reassurance made the difference. “Vanilla flavoring,” he advised. “And you have to really watch these suckers, or the chocolate burns.” He insisted on finishing the batter, at which point Tanner emerged as well.
“Jesus fuck! This is fantastic!” Reviling his father’s preachy nutritional guidelines, Tanner exulted in white flour and chocolate for breakfast. Six pancakes would disappear down that scrawny gullet no harm done, and my stepson’s enthusiasm helped to turn the emotional tide. Edison basked in Tanner’s praise for his breakfast. I may have had more than I wanted, but that was a small sacrifice to make my brother feel appreciated, and Cody finally consumed half a pancake. Why, it seemed we’d have a garrulous, boisterous time together so long as we all kept eating.
At eleven a.m., aside from yet another kitchen cleanup, the day yawned. “So, Edison,” I ventured, “have you thought about what you’d like to do while you’re here?”
“Go cow-watching?”
“We don’t look at cows!” said Cody.
“Yeah, believe it or not the Midwest has electricity now,” said Tanner. “They’re even talking about bringing in something called ‘broadband’ so you can make contact with civilization right through the air—though I think that’s a wild rumor myself.”
“Tanner’s right,” I said. “There’s plenty to do in Iowa, you East Coast snob.” That said, I’d never been keen on activities for their own sake. I preferred work to play—a temperament I’d recognized on meeting Fletcher Feuerbach. I’d been catering a July Fourth cookout for Monsanto when a quirky, taciturn seed salesman fled the corporate chitchat to mind the grill. He helped clear and pack up, leaving me in no doubt that tying off trash bags and arranging leftover deviled eggs in plastic containers was his idea of a good time. Little wonder I brought him home, where he washed every single serving platter before he kissed me. For both of us, work
was
play.
“You can always practice,” I added. “Cody doesn’t monopolize the piano more than an hour a day.”
“Whoa, busman’s holiday!”
It wasn’t the response I’d expected. “I could show you Baby Monotonous.”
“Cool,” said Edison noncommittally, stabbing his gooey stack. “But I been working my ass off. Gigs, sessions, practice; until recently, booking the club. Keeping current with the scene, burning the candle at both ends. I’m pretty whacked. Don’t mind doing jack for a while. I was just glad a gap in my schedule made it possible to fit in a visit. Catch up, get reacquainted. Finally get to know these kids a little.”
Edison’s hectic version of his life jarred with Slack’s forewarning that my brother seemed dispirited, but I now interpreted that caution as concerning Edison’s girth. Besides, I was accustomed to finding my brother’s life opaque. I had no idea how one went about arranging a European tour. I didn’t know anything about all those names he threw around, Dizzy and Sonny and Elvin, and I’d learned the hard way not to ask “Who’s this?” when Edison played a track; he always took my head off because I could never remember whether “Trane” played the saxophone or the trumpet. Aside from courteously listening to his own recordings—once—before sliding their cases into the section of our music collection that gathered dust, I didn’t listen to jazz, and I didn’t fathom who did go to those clubs when the pianist wasn’t their brother.
“What’s your schedule?” I asked. “I mean, coming up.”
“This tour of Spain and Portugal. Three solid weeks on the road. Takes more out of me than it used to. Haven’t taken a sabbatical since I hit New York in 1980. Truth is, Iowa could be the ticket—if that’s okay with you. Somewhere I got a legit excuse to beg off more gigs in the Village: a fifteen-hundred-mile commute. Recharge the batteries. Smell the coffee.”
With lots and lots of half-and-half.
“Now, when’s the Spain and Portugal tour again?” I asked neutrally.
“Early December.” His answer was muffled with pancake.
That was in just over two months. If I was understanding Edison’s concept of a
sabbatical
correctly, and he intended to stay with us until heading off on this tour, that would make for an awfully long “visit,” but it was also not an ellipsis. We just had to go the distance without everyone in this family gaining fifty pounds.
“You’re not maintaining an apartment at the moment, I gather.” I was diffident. “So where’s all your stuff? Your piano?”
“In storage.” This answer, too, was thick with chocolate chip. “I got your classic cash-flow crisis, dig? Royalties from SteepleChase in the pipeline. And plenty work on the horizon, of course. So I, uh.” He wiped maple syrup from his mouth. “You know. Appreciated the little loaner.”
“Oh, no problem!” That had been hard for him to say. “And if you need . . .”
“Well, yeah, now that you mention it—a little, you know, pocket change . . .”
“Sure, just tell me . . .” The kids were on their computers, but they were listening. I didn’t want to embarrass him. “Later today.”
However happy to slip him whatever he needed to tide him over, I’d never been in the parental position of giving my older brother an allowance. Edison had always been the big spender. On my visits to New York he’d never let me pay for anything, putting me on the guest list for his own performances and inveigling me into dives with cover charges for free because he was known, flashing C-notes at waiters and taxi drivers. Now the one with means, I felt a loss that must have been mutual. He’d liked his being the big spender. He’d liked his being my protector. So had I.
Yet what bothered me while scrubbing burnt drips of batter from the stove wasn’t giving Edison a “loan.” So far, no one, not even my impolitic stepson, had addressed my brother’s dimensions head-on. I myself had not once alluded to Edison’s weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so—he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit. Now in order to have a convivial morning together I’d eaten a breakfast five times more filling than usual, and Tanner’s and my gorging had provided cover for Edison’s eating far more. That cliché
not mentioning the elephant in the room
was taking on a literal cast.
