adjusted the floor lamp at the end of the sofa to its dimmest setting. When they were relaxing in the evening they both liked there to be only one light source in the room, and a mild one. She sat opposite him, with some finality this time, put her feet up on the coffee table, and pushed the lap of her sundress down hard between her thighs as she settled.
“Would you mind if we talked about Rex?” she asked.
“God no, it’s fine.”
“You don’t mean it.”
“Oh God. Yes I do!”
“Really, what’s all this God this and God that all of a sudden if it’s so perfectly okay with you as a topic?”
“You don’t understand. I want to talk about the man because I know you love him. You love him! His wit, his… whatever you love in the man. You love his letters. You know nothing about him except what he
He could see her getting more composed by the second. She drew her feet off the coffee table. She sat up straighter.
“Look, I enjoy your brother. His letters.”
“But you don’t know the first thing about him. You have no framework for him. None.”
“You two never got along, I know that.”
“That isn’t quite right. First we did and then we didn’t, due to him.”
“Could you say what happened?”
“This is the way the week ends for me. Hell. Too bad I don’t drink scotch anymore.”
“Well, you can,
“Forget I said that. I’m sorry, Iris. Truly and no kidding.”
“All right.”
“Okay, when I say you don’t know anything about Rex let me be concrete. Here’s what his favorite reply to something you asked him to do was—Nokay. That gives you a hint. Nokay, and he would look at you I guess in order to see whether you thought he’d said yes or no. I guess that was a moment he enjoyed.”
“That’s so trivial, Ray.”
“Maybe it is, but it’s indicative. He was unremitting with stuff like that. You know the song with the line
Iris nodded.
“Oh, also for mealtimes… Is the soup dung yet? Or, This soup is really swill, for swell, obviously. But sometimes Rex
“I could make that,” Iris said. “But no doubt she put butter in the cream sauce and that’s why it tasted so good.”
“Who knows? By the way, what
She waited for him to resume.
He said, “Wait, I had something else about Rex that fits in here. Let me think for a second.
“I know what it was. Tell me this wasn’t diabolical. He goes to any kind of performance, the gamut, from school assemblies to recitals, what have you. What he loved to do and what you could count on him trying to do was to start a half-assed standing ovation whenever he could. He would stand up and begin clapping maniacally like someone overcome with the dance or the accordion solo or the talk or whatever. And then he would stare around in disappointment at the rest of the audience. And then he would subside, looking crushed on behalf of the performer. Sometimes he’d get a handful of other people to join him and the effect would be even worse. The point was to show that the audience didn’t really like the performer all that much, except for Rex. I hated to sit next to him at anything. And I’d grab his knee to try to force him to stay when I thought he was about to erupt. And of course if I left a bruise it’d be displayed later to my father. And I would be in the spot he loved me to be in. How could you explain using force against someone who had merely wanted to jump up in a moment of enthusiasm? He bruises very easily. You grab him with ordinary force and in fifteen minutes his skin looks like paisley.
“And Rex was always doing cartoons. One I remember showed a guy supposed to be me rushing downstairs his arms spread and shouting Dad’s dead! And sitting there in the living room with his back to the stairway, reading, this character who’s Rex, who says
Iris said, “But didn’t you find any of this amusing, at all?”
Ray thought, This is a mistake: She thinks he’s funny: One person can destroy a family: You can destroy a family through the exercise of your sovereign wit, she doesn’t get it: I was his enemy, I was the traitor, I was in the Scouts, I was a traffic monitor…
“But all these things happened when you were still children. We’re talking about a child, here.”
“But not every child sets out to torment his family members to the brink of distraction. I didn’t. There was something wrong with him. He was younger than I, but he sure wasn’t following in my footsteps. In Rex you’re dealing with a person with an absolutely gargantuan ability to resent things. Such as that I was named after our father. Rex thought there was something
“Oh, so were you Ray junior? I didn’t know that.”
“No, I wasn’t. I’m not. I was Ray, my father was Raymond, simple as that. But my brother’s sense of injustice was so exquisite he actually complained about the situation.”
“It can be sort of strange with children and names. I knew a family there were four girls in and their names were Ruby, Pearl, Opal, and Doreen.”
“Why do I think that sounds like something from Rex’s cabinet of stupid marvels?”
“It isn’t. It’s mine. They lived in our neighborhood in Seattle.”
“Maybe the parents couldn’t think of another mainstream precious stone to name the fourth girl after.”
“In case you’re interested, your brother is house-sitting in Marin County. Talking about names reminded me