The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait (20 page)

Later we went back to our room, where we could indulge in more serious drinking out of the public eye. While I lay on the bed and soaked, skimming a book or magazine, Scott sat on the floor and railed at the TV.

“Knocker down and piss on her! . . . You know what you
look
like? You have any idea? . . . Fuck . . . Piece a shit. What a mind-blowing piece a shit . . . Admit it! You’re a fucking lesbian! And you!
Faggot
. . . Right, like I’m gonna buy your fucking beer cause your
tits
are so big . . .”

Some of this was meant to amuse me, I guess, but most of it was so much oblivious ranting. It occurred to me that this was how Scott spent his days: getting sloshed and talking to himself, or rather the TV, which I suppose served as a surrogate for the world he’d rejected and vice versa. It was a very depressing spectacle. I tried not to look or listen, but this was impossible of course, and I found myself becoming angry—angry at my father for conceiving this little get-together in the first place, for putting me in a single room with my crazy brother; angry at my brother for being so noisily, depressingly crazy; angry at my stepfamily for everything. I wanted to dash my brains out against the wall.

Finally I had to get out, but there was no shaking Scott. He thought I was enjoying the whole binge as much as he, and it might have been risky to disabuse him: much of his weird anger at the TV, I realized, was by way of blowing off steam after the beating he’d taken at lunch. So we went bar-hopping. And since I couldn’t bear to hear him talk, I talked about myself. Scott was a good listener: he nodded a lot, his eyes welling up when I began sobbing about my ex-girlfriend Kate who never wrote me anymore, and we seemed to agree that the world was a pretty fucked-up place. My last memory of that night was Scott holding me upright while I puked in the snow.

The next morning our father let himself into our room—we’d failed to appear at breakfast—and found us passed out amid a reek of liquor and vomit. Wearily he told us to get packed and ready to go within an hour, and hardly spoke during the long drive back to Oklahoma. (Sandra and her children stayed in Santa Fe to enjoy the rest of the vacation.) In the car I read aloud from Joseph Mitchell’s
Up in the Old Hotel
, my Christmas gift to our father. Scott especially enjoyed “Professor Seagull,” Mitchell’s profile of the Greenwich Village bohemian Joe Gould, a Harvard graduate who’d led a skid-row life as a matter of choice. Scott let go with a lot of wild, wheezy laughter and I joined him, what the hell, as if Gould reminded us, amusingly, of our mutual disgrace.

THERE WAS NO
question of my seeing Sandra and her kids after that, and eventually Burck dropped me too—worn down by the daily grind of Sandra’s subtle and not-so-subtle persuasion to the effect that I was a worthless character. That I was sane and sober enough to hold a responsible job—I’d been hired as a teacher of gifted students at a good magnet school—didn’t cut much ice. Actually there had been one more Christmas, a year later, when I’d spent a single evening in my father’s company; Sandra and her children had already departed for Santa Fe, minus the Bailey men, leaving me a chirpy card lest I take their absence amiss. My father, in a grim mood, informed me of their misgivings in a way that let me know he emphatically shared them, and afterward sent me the following note: “You are a very serious alcoholic. You will disagree. I am right; you are wrong.” I replied in a spirit of jaunty demurral, and that tore it. We hardly spoke for the next five years.

Sandra wanted me out of the picture, and now she had her wish. As a matter of recompense, perhaps, she renewed her efforts to be a bountiful stepmother to Scott. It came as no surprise that he was invited, and I was not, to our father’s lavish sixtieth birthday party, held at the ranch in Chandler, Oklahoma—Breeze Hill—that he’d bought a few months before. Scott’s date was Maryam, the crazy girlfriend who’d phoned me in New Orleans and threatened suicide. She made a lasting impression by never once letting go of Scott’s arm.

Scott needed all the support he could get. More than a year had passed since he’d lost his job at the TV station, and he seemed less and less apt to do anything about it. “I live the life I love, and I love the life I live,” he liked to say, sighing into a comfy old recliner in front of his TV. He was living off a VA disability pension of roughly five hundred dollars a month (for an injured neck and related back problems) as well as handouts from our parents; he was also amassing a lot of credit-card debt, which explained the elaborate stereo system and brand-new desk in his study, where he claimed to make extra cash as a freelance copy-editor. Up to a point, his serene acceptance of his own inertia was convincing: he liked the little house that he “rented” from our father, and the fact that he wasn’t “conventionally ambitious” became a point of oft-repeated pride. He also found comfort in Maryam, to say nothing of their churchgoing (they both attended Crossroads). More than ever he affected a kind of smug disapproval over the fact that I wasn’t “saved,” particularly when I tried to needle him about his lazy, aimless life.

I doubted he had the inner resources to keep it up. He was an intelligent person who’d never bothered to cultivate intelligent tastes. His life had shrunk around three basic interests: pop music, peckerwood religion, and the Dallas Cowboys. (The last was a great passion of his childhood, and now, in his mid-thirties, Exley-like, he again spent autumn weekdays pining for the excitement of Sunday afternoon.) Naturally it took more and more stimulants to persuade Scott that life held something good in store. When drunk or high, he doubtless took refuge in the same old fantasies: I picture him prancing around his house naked, the stereo booming, his bottle a makeshift microphone as he imagines a sea of pubescent fans. Meanwhile his old friends had moved on with their lives—even Todd the Tortoise had started a family and gotten a steady job. Chance meetings with such people were an awful ordeal: “Freelance stuff,” Scott would mumble when asked what he was “doing” these days, and his oily face would burn with humiliation.

His only true remaining friend (that I knew of) was a skinny guy with a goatee named Thomas, who played in a western swing band and spoke French. By the time I met Thomas, I’d heard all about him: my mother dropped his name as a good angel in Scott’s life, as proof that Scott was still worthy of “interesting” friends, and even my father deemed Thomas “a nice enough guy” (the latter’s band played at his sixtieth birthday party). I liked Thomas all right. He was a little too carefully articulate—out of proportion, I thought, to his actual intellect—and had a tendency to romanticize my brother as a brilliant quirky fellow who couldn’t be satisfied by ordinary occupations. Thomas supported himself by waiting tables at an upscale restaurant; he was the one who’d gotten Scott those short-lived waiting jobs that he’d mentioned during our lunch in Santa Fe. Thomas seemed to admire my brother’s integrity for refusing to work with people he didn’t respect.

Over the holidays Scott insisted I come along to a club where Thomas’s band was playing, and when I heard how good they were, and said so, Scott looked very pleased—as if his own life had been vindicated by proxy. But the most notable thing about that night was meeting Andrea. I picked her up: from our balcony table I saw her standing near the stage, alone, short and a little too fleshy, with long disorderly hair and (I noticed on closer inspection) a slight overbite. But the overall effect was strangely appealing. Tipsily I took her hand and led her back to our table without a word. Turned out she was an old friend of Thomas, home for Christmas; the rest of the year she lived in Seattle. For some reason we got to talking about Russian literature, and I happened to mention Nabokov’s concept of
poshlost
(philistine vulgarity). Andrea was impressed, and later we went back to Scott’s house and screwed in his bed.

To Andrea I remained the guy who talked about
poshlost
. That spring she moved back to Oklahoma City and became Thomas’s (platonic) roommate, and hence Scott’s companion as well. Meanwhile she wrote me a lot of long, carefully articulate letters, the most common theme of which was my brother’s bad behavior. Among other things she told me that Scott called her almost every night, drunk, and invariably became abusive (“fucking whore,” etc); then, just as invariably, he’d call her the next day and apologize. Also she reported that their friend Thomas wasn’t quite the good angel Marlies had figured him to be. According to Andrea he drank a fifth of bourbon every night, sometimes crouching by his bedroom window with a loaded shotgun.

By the time I saw Andrea again, the following summer, she’d moved back to her mother’s house, and no wonder: among the first things I noticed there, in the kitchen, was a heavy marble table with a ragged crack down the middle, as if it had been roughly toppled to the floor. Somehow I knew this was the work of either Scott or Thomas, her two great friends.

“Scott or Thomas?” I asked.

“Scott,” she replied.

EVER SINCE SCOTT’S
discharge from the marines he and Marlies had been making each other miserable (
more
miserable, I mean). Over the years Burck had adopted a tolerant, kindly, only somewhat deploring attitude toward Scott, while my mother had become all the more brazen. When she and Scott were together it was just a matter of time before they went from cooing and canoodling—there was always a lot of that—to a hideous crescendo of bilingual abuse. I kept advising my mother to practice Buddha-like detachment, to give up hope in other words, or at least (like Burck) let go of her headier illusions. But she was incapable of this. “He was a wonderful marine!” she’d say, or “If only he could stop
drinking
”—this when called upon to defend him. At other times she’d look weary, haunted, and say, “Ah God, what have I
wrought
?”

That Christmas I remember standing in the kitchen with Marlies as we listened to Scott (in the other room) opening his first beer of the morning; I could picture his petulant concentration as he poured. “This is going to be awful,” my mother sighed. “Families are the devil’s work!” I told her to relax and let him drink; with any luck he’d pass out early. Such were our hopes for a happy holiday.

But Scott was in good fettle. We sang carols at the piano while our mother cooked, and I was glad to hear that Scott had finally stopped trying to sing like Robert Plant—perhaps he’d noticed that his own voice was pretty bad, and hence put the worst of his rock-star dreams to rest. Later we opened presents, and Scott and I were both pleased with what we’d gotten each other. I’d splurged on a hefty tome titled
75 Seasons: The Complete Story of the National Football League
, with the great Cowboy halfback Emmitt Smith on the cover. “
Zwiiieeeb
,” Scott sighed happily, skimming the pictures, casting ahead to the happy hours he’d fill this way. “This is
exactly
what I wanted.” (So Marlies had told me.) He closed the book, clasped it to his bosom, and kissed me on the cheek—a poignant reminder of the unself-conscious way we used to kiss as children. Scott’s gift to me was no less apt: a CD of Elvis’s Christmas hits (I dig Elvis), the jacket a snowy pop-up Graceland. We sat on the floor and sang “Blue Christmas” together, or rather I sang while my brother provided the Jordanaires backup (“
oo-ooo-oo-ooo-oo
”). A photo of that moment is my second favorite of Scott and me.

I PRESSED MY
luck with another meeting a few days later. We met at his place, and for some reason the little house was especially grim that day: furnished with the stuff of our childhood—the cheap foam-cushioned sofas and wooden stools (in storage all these years) that we’d had when our father was an ill-paid prosecutor in the AG’s office. A kind of gloomy museum. The paneled walls were mostly bare. In the study was an old portrait of Scott and me, ages twelve and nine, taken at a studio in Vinita (Scott looks jaunty with the knowledge that he’s still more handsome than I).

It wasn’t a place I could bear in the pearly winter sunlight of 3:00
P.M
.—so off we went, the drinks on me. What I remember most about that afternoon was the way we kept getting cut off at every bar, usually after the first drink. I hadn’t been cut off since my college days, and only then in the wee hours when I could hardly balance myself on a stool. But strangers, especially bartenders, were able to see Scott more objectively than I: they knew at a glance he was bad news. And Scott was mostly stoical about this, as though he’d gotten used to it by now. Once—we’d been cut off again, the third or fourth time, and had promised to leave as soon as we finished our pool game—he sized up a shot and said, with a low chuckle, “I know there’s something fucked up about me, Zwieb.” It was the only time I can ever remember his admitting as much.

Finally we were both so drunk there was no question of being served anywhere. Hungry, we stopped at a seedy takeout place on our way back to Scott’s house. While we sat in a booth waiting for our order, I lapsed into a crying jag, rather like the one I’d had in Santa Fe. The nominal reason was my father’s desertion of me, and Scott was as sympathetic as ever: he assured me that Papa would come to his senses, and said the usual hard things about Sandra. He stroked my head and dabbed at my cheeks with a paper napkin. The fact was, I wouldn’t have cried, then or before, if not for Scott’s presence: the prospect of a night in his company, in that hopeless little house, was crushing.

And yet I hadn’t foreseen the worst. After a few french fries I passed out on Scott’s sofa—or rather I fell into a kind of preliminary stupor wherein I was just conscious enough to notice a tongue in my mouth that wasn’t my own, yet dazed enough to think this might be a good thing. Perhaps it was Scott’s breath (tainted with beer and fried food) that brought me up short. I shook my head and pushed. Sitting up, I saw Scott return to his chair.

“Were you
kissing
me?”

He shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

I didn’t know what to say. I made a show of eating my food.