was eleven years old and barely awake, yet still I recognized this as a supreme masculine moment: the patriarch informing his firstborn son that another player was joining the team. Looking around my room, at the vase of cattails arranged just so beside the potpourri bowl, he should have realized it was not his team I was playing for. Not even a girl would have decoupaged her own electrical sockets, but finding it too painful to consider, my father played through, going so far as to offer a plastic-wrapped cigar, the band readingIT 'S A BOY. He'd gotten one for each of us. Mine was made of chewing gum, and his was the real thing.
'I hope you're not going to smoke that in here,' I said. 'Normally I wouldn't mind, but I just Scotchgarded the drapes.'
For the first six months, my brother, Paul, was just a blob, then a doll my sisters and I could diaper and groom as we saw fit. Dress him appropriately and it was easy to forget the tiny penis lying like a canned mushroom between his legs. Given some imagination and a few well-chosen accessories, he was Paulette, the pouty French girl; Paola, the dark-wiggedbambina, fresh from her native Tuscany; Pauline, the swinging hippie chick. As a helpless infant, he went along with it, but by the age of eighteen months he'd effectively dispelled the theory that a person can be made gay. Despite our best efforts, the cigar band had been right. Our brother was a boy. He inherited my sports equipment, still in its original wrapping, and took to the streets with actual friends, playing whatever was in season. If he won, great, and if he lost, big deal.
'But aren't you going to weep?' we'd ask him. 'Not even a little?'
We tried explaining the benefits of a nice long cry — the release it offered, the pity it generated — and he laughed in our faces. The rest of us blubbered like leaky showerheads, but for him water production was limited to sweat and urine. His sheets might be wet, but the pillow would remain forever dry.
Regardless of the situation, for Paul it was always all about the joke. A warm embrace, a heartfelt declaration of concern: in moments of weakness we'd fall for these setups, vowing later to never trust him again. The last time I allowed my brother to hug me, I flew from Raleigh to New York oblivious to the sign he'd slapped to the back of my sports coat, a nametag sticker reading, 'Hello, I'm Gay.' This following the hilarity of our mother's funeral.
When my sisters and I eventually left home, it seemed like a natural progression — young adults shifting from one environment to the next. While our departures had been relatively painless, Paul's was like releasing a domestic animal into the wild. He knew how to plan a meal but displayed a remarkable lack of patience when it came time for the actual cooking. Frozen dinners were often eaten exactly as sold, the Salisbury steak amounting to a stickless meat Popsicle. I phoned one night just as he was leaning a family pack of frozen chicken wings against the back door. He'd forgotten to defrost them and was now attempting to stomp the solid mass into three 6-inch portions, which he'd stack in a pile and force into his toaster oven.
I heard the singular sound of boot against crystallized meat and listened as my brother panted for breath. 'Goddam. . fucking. . chicken. . wings.'
I called again the following evening and was told that after all that work, the chicken had been spoiled. It tasted like fish, so he threw it away and called it a night. A few hours later, having decided that spoiled chicken was better than no chicken at all, he got out of bed, stepped outside in his underpants, and proceeded to eat the leftovers directly from the garbage can.
I was mortified. 'In yourunderpants?'
'Damned straight,' he said. 'I ain't getting dressed up to eat nofish-assed- tasting chicken.'
I worried about my brother standing in his briefs and eating spoiled poultry by moonlight. I worried when told he'd passed out in a parking lot and awoken to find a stranger's initials written in lipstick on his ass, but I never worried he'd be able to make a living. He's been working for himself since high school and at the age of twenty-six had founded a very successful floor-sanding company. The physical work is demanding, but more tiring still are the nitpicky touch-ups, the billing and hiring, and endless discussions with indecisive clients. When asked how he manages to keep all those people happy, Paul credits the importance of compromise, explaining, 'Sometimes you got to put that dick in your mouth and roll it around a little. Ain't no need to swallow nothing, you just got to play on it for a while. You know what I'm saying?'
'Well. .yeah.'
At an age when the rest of us were barely managing to pay our own rent, he had bought a house. At thirty- two he sold it and traded up, moving into an established neighborhood inside the Raleigh beltline. Four bedrooms and the place was his, as were the trucks and sport-utility vehicles that spilled from the driveway and onto the lawn he paid to have mowed. All this from a business philosophy based on the art of a blowjob.
Paul referred to his house as 'the home of a confused clown,' but to the naked eye, the clown seemed absolutely sure of himself. There was the farting mound of battery-operated feces positioned on the mantel, the namesake rooster inlaid into the living-room floor, the bright-green walls, and musical butcher knives. 'No confusion here,' you'd say, tripping over a concrete alligator. It was an awfully big place for just one clown, so I was relieved when told that a girlfriend had moved in, accompanied by an elderly pug named Venus.
My brother was overjoyed. 'You want to talk at her? Hold on while I put her on the phone.'
I prepared myself for the voice of a North Carolina girlfriend, something like Paul's but lower, and heard instead what sounded like a handsaw methodically working its way through a tree trunk. It was Venus. Months later he put me on the phone with their new dog, a six-week-old Great Dane named Diesel. I spoke to the outdoor cats, the indoor cats, and the adopted piglet that seemed like a good idea until it began to digest solid food. They'd been living together for more than a year when I finally met the girlfriend, a licensed hairdresser named Kathy. Erase the tattoos and the nicotine patch and she resembled one of those tranquil Flemish Madonnas, the ubiquitous Christ child replaced by a hacking pug. Her grace, her humor, her fur-matted sweaters — we loved her immediately. Best of all, she was from the North, meaning that should she and Paul ever conceive a child, it stood a fifty-fifty chance of speaking understandable English.
They announced their engagement and designed a late-May wedding tailor-made to disappoint the Greeks. It would not take place at the Holy Trinity Church but at a hotel on the coast of North Carolina. The service would be performed by a psychic they'd found in the phone book, and the music provided by a DJ named J.D. who worked weekdays at the local state penitentiary.
'Oh, well,' his godmother sighed. 'I guess that's how the young people like to do it these days.'
I flew in from Paris two days before the wedding and was sitting in my father's kitchen when Paul came to the door dressed in a suit and tie. A former high school classmate had committed suicide, and he'd dropped by the house on his way home from the funeral. Since I'd last seen him, my once slim brother had gained a good sixty pounds. Everything seemed proportionately larger, but the bulk seemed to have settled about his face and torso, leaving him with what he referred to as Dick Do disease. 'My stomach sticks out further than my dick do.'
The added weight had softened certain features and swallowed others altogether. His neck, for instance. Obscured now by a second chin, his head appeared to balance directly upon his shoulders, and he walked delicately, as if to keep it from rolling off. I told myself that if I looked at my brother differently, it was because of the suit, not the weight. He was a grown man now. He was going to get married, and therefore, he was a changed person.
He took a sip of my father's weak coffee and spit it back into the mug. 'This shit's like making love in a canoe.'
'Excuse me?'
'It's fucking near water.'
Then again, I thought,maybe it is just the weight.
I drove to the coast early the next morning with Lisa and her husband, Bob. Being the oldest and the only one married, she'd bumped herself up a notch, assuming the dual roles of experienced older sister and designated mother of the groom. To mention Paul, Kathy, or even Atlantic Beach was to inspire an upwelling of tears, followed by a choked 'I just never thought I would see this day.' From Morehead City on, she pretty much cried nonstop, provoked by the landmarks of our youth. 'Oh, the bridge! The pier! The midget golf course!'
Paul was to be married in what used to be the John Yancy but was currently called the Royal Pavilion. The remodeling had been extensive, and what had once been a modest ocean-front hotel now boasted reception rooms
