“No doubt. You know Jamie’s girlfriend?”
Lia furrowed her freckled brow. “That redhead- the one who makes indy films or something?” I nodded and Lia nodded back. “She’s been in. I heard they were a thing but I didn’t know for sure. She’s hot.”
“She in here lately?” A shrug. “They get along pretty well?”
“I don’t know; they seemed to. I don’t pay attention.” She looked at me, curious for the first time. “Why do you want to know all this stuff? Jamie’s not in trouble, is he?”
I shook my head. “I’m just trying to get in touch.”
Lia studied my face and looked worried. “Look, he’s a good guy,” she said, “and I don’t know how to reach him.” And she disappeared into the kitchen.
Lia didn’t come out again, and the bartender and the other waitresses had less to say than she did. I hung around for another half hour, and watched people troop in, in twos and threes, frosted and windblown and happy to join the lifeboat party.
It was close to eleven when I left, and the route home was straight into the wind. Even with head down and jacket zipped high, the cold was crushing. In two blocks my face went from frozen to burning numb, and in two more my limbs followed suit. By Avenue B, walking had devolved into an endless struggle with the next step, and all sense of time was lost. The wind pried at my lungs and howled around my ears as I pushed forward, and Lia’s words repeated in my head-“Look, he’s a good guy”- and echoed alongside the last thing Orlando Krug had said-“Just tell her to call me.” After a while, I wasn’t sure who had said what.
I had a hard time with the key to my building, and I stood for a while in the lobby, catching my breath while pricking pain spread across my face. I rode the elevator up and opened my apartment door and Clare was standing across the room. She was holding a towel and looking at me and at the sofa, and her expression was a mix of puzzlement and disgust. I stepped inside and the smell of vomit hit me. I looked over the back of my sofa and found the source: my brother David, spattered in puke, slumped over, and passed out.
20
We got his clothes off- the sopping cashmere overcoat, the sodden English shoes, the Italian suit, soaked and stained from the knees down- and cleaned him up as well as we could with a damp washcloth. I levered him into sweatpants and a T-shirt, and Clare put sheets on the sofa and covered him with a blanket. He muttered and flailed a little, and threw up once more, but I’d wrestled less cooperative drunks before.
“He showed up maybe twenty minutes ago, and I didn’t know what to do with him,” Clare whispered. She was in the kitchen, drinking tonic water and watching David sleep. “He was leaning on the buzzer and saying he was your brother, and he was covered in snow from the chest up. I couldn’t just leave him out there.”
I nodded. “You don’t have to whisper,” I said, “he’s gone. From the look of him, he must’ve walked uptown.”
“Good thing he didn’t stop to rest along the way- they’d be chipping ice off him for a month.”
“Did he say anything?”
“Besides that he was your brother, nothing that made sense. Is he like this a lot?”
“Passed out drunk, you mean?”
Clare nodded.
“This is the first I’ve seen it, but…I don’t really know what he’s like.”
Clare looked at him and looked at me and shook her head. “Jesus.”
I came awake in the middle of the night. Clare was breathing slowly beside me, and we were both sunk deep into the mattress. Beneath the wind and shaking windows, I heard a stifled cough from the living room, and the rustle of bedsheets. I got up carefully and pulled on a T-shirt and went out.
David was cross-legged on the floor. He was wrapped in a sheet and his back was to one of my bookcases. His skin was pale and his hair was damp-looking. He had a book in his lap and he was turning the pages. He looked up at me. His eyes were still confused, and his face was somehow out of focus. I closed the bedroom door.
“You should sleep,” I whispered.
“Things were spinning,” he said quietly.
“You want anything?”
“Water, maybe.”
I went to the kitchen and filled a glass. I carried it over and David took it and drank. I looked at the book he held. It was a big coffee-table volume with frayed covers and a cracked spine, a collection of BrassaД photos I hadn’t opened in years. David set the glass on the floor and turned a page, to a picture of a fog-wrapped Paris avenue. He turned again, to a picture of a woman under a streetlamp.
He laughed softly. “The first time I went to Paris, I had in my head it was somehow going to look like this. I was just out of college and, boy, was I disappointed. I was expecting fog, and hookers on every corner, and I thought it would be all smoky and romantic. Then I saw that fucking Pompidou Center. After that, I didn’t feel so bad that Mom hadn’t let me spend junior year there.” There was a sheen of sweat on his forehead, and he shivered as he spoke.
“I didn’t know you’d wanted to.”
“Oh, yeah,” he said absently. “Instead, I did an internship at Beekman Quist that year.” He turned another page- a sedan idling on a cobbled street. He chuckled to himself. “There was a receptionist there who gave me head in the supply room every Friday afternoon. Now, that was educational.” He reached for his glass and emptied it.
“You want more?” I asked. He nodded. When I returned, he was examining the book’s cover.
“I used to look at this thing all the time,” he said. “It was on Daddy’s desk.” He turned it over and ran his fingers over the torn dust jacket. “It’s really falling apart now.”
“You should get some sleep,” I said.
David ignored me, and turned the book over again, and opened the front cover. There was a bookplate pasted inside- a white rectangle, yellowed now, with a line drawing that was supposed to be the Widener Library. Printed across the bottom were the names Philip and Elaine March. Our parents.
He looked at me. “How’d you end up with this?”
“I’m not sure. I ended up with most of Dad’s books.”
He nodded vaguely and ran his fingers over the bookplate, over their names. “What was it with them, anyway?” he said.
“I don’t-”
“I mean, why stay together, if all you do is fight? Why get married in the first place, for chrissakes? And why have children, when you don’t have a single fucking clue of what to do with them- or any interest in finding out? You’d be better off on your own.”
Old questions, and I certainly had no answers. I shook my head. “You should get-”
“And what the hell were they looking for in their kids, anyway, that they could never seem to find in me? Did I not have the password, or something- the secret charm?” He looked up at me again, and his eyes were shining and angry. “How did that happen, Johnny? How is it that you got all the fucking glamour, and I got none?”
He took the glass and drank the water in one swallow, and a shudder ran through his shoulders. He squeezed his eyes shut and held his head in his hands. His skin went from white to gray, and I knew his world was spinning, and that he was fighting to hold on. I went to the kitchen and came back with a garbage pail. I took the book from David’s lap and held the pail while he retched.
By morning the storm had passed, and the city was a frosted fantasy of wind-carved snow and glistening ice, achingly bright under a lapis sky. Squinting out the windows at the GaudГ curves and spires, I forgot for a moment about David, who was in the shower, and had been for a long time.
“You think he’s drowning himself in there?” Clare asked. She wore yoga pants and a sleeveless T-shirt, and her hair was pulled into a loose ponytail. She looked maybe twenty.
“Feel free to check.”
