his.
At this point I’d retreat to my mother’s bedroom, where she kept a piano she’d acquired to make me feel more at home during my rare visits (with the result that I played piano rather than talk to her). I relished my solitude while it lasted. Once the argument had petered out in the other room, my brother would join me there at the piano, or rather stand behind me and knead my shoulder with one hand while he held his hard-won beer with the other. He cherished dreams of becoming a rock star—all that bouncing around on his toes was, I believe, by way of regaling a phantom audience. The vocal style he most emulated was that of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. I could almost stand hearing “Stille Nacht” sung in a nasal falsetto, ditto having my shoulder patted and prodded and probed, but the combination was unsettling, and soon I’d have to end our recital. I would either go for a walk before dinner (the environs included a parking lot and university golf course), watch a bit more TV, or pretend to take a long shit. The last was the only definitely private activity, so there I’d sit while a cat pawed under the door as if begging me to rescue her from Scott.
Dinner was served late in the afternoon. Scott would take his place at the table and survey the victuals with a look of tipsy discernment, then raise a glass to the chef. Their latest brawl momentarily forgotten, Marlies would return the tribute with a kind of sad, proprietary smile, suggesting that Scott was a pain in the ass, all right, but a gracious young man and her own son for better or worse. We’d eat. There was a pork roast, say, with crispy skin and scarlet flesh just so; lovely sweetbreads of an ideal chewiness, never mushy, cooked with mushrooms in a wine sauce; new potatoes and red cabbage and brussels sprouts and a cauliflower steeped in mock hollandaise. My brother would chew each morsel of meat with endless care (eyes fixed on the middle distance), then fastidiously remove the residual fat from his mouth and place it aside, for all to see, on a little plate he’d fetched for that purpose. When I asked him about it—this novel quirk—he explained with old arrogance that he’d rather not die of congestive heart failure, thanks. I was about to ask whether he followed the same procedure when eating in public, and (if so) whether he’d ever been denounced as a repulsive idiot, but my mother derailed me by leaning forward on her fists and hissing “Oh Scott, you’re so full of shit .”
After the plates were cleared and the snarling subsided, we decided to go see a movie, a comedy. We had a long night ahead of us, and the thought of spending it, just we three, in that little condo was out of the question. Also it would force my brother to sober up a bit. We wanted to laugh and forget ourselves, however briefly, and few things are more depressing than being thwarted in this simple wish. My brother sprawled between us stinking of beer, not just refusing to laugh but sighing and smacking his lips and scratching his balls (inside the pants), so that a number of people got up and moved. When we got home again and Scott discovered we were out of beer, he started on the Scotch.
At some point he lurched into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and began picking his face. He still had a lot of pimples, the kind that swell beneath the skin and really explode when given a good hard squeeze. Scott kept the door open so he could talk to us the whole time: “You’d think by now this shit would go away . . . How’m I ever gonna get laid ? . . .”
This went on for almost an hour. At some point my mother asked me, in an urgent whisper, if I wanted to go to midnight mass. I did. Scott heard the sounds of our departure, the zippered coats and jingling keys, and stuck his puckered bleeding face out the door. “Oh,” he said, when Marlies explained where we were going. “Save me a wafer.”
We hadn’t been to church together, my mother and I, since
At this point I’d retreat to my mother’s bedroom, where she kept a piano she’d acquired to make me feel more at home during my rare visits (with the result that I played piano rather than talk to her). I relished my solitude while it lasted. Once the argument had petered out in the other room, my brother would join me there at the piano, or rather stand behind me and knead my shoulder with one hand while he held his hard-won beer with the other. He cherished dreams of becoming a rock star—all that bouncing around on his toes was, I believe, by way of regaling a phantom audience. The vocal style he most emulated was that of Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant. I could almost stand hearing “Stille Nacht” sung in a nasal falsetto, ditto having my shoulder patted and prodded and probed, but the combination was unsettling, and soon I’d have to end our recital. I would either go for a walk before dinner (the environs included a parking lot and university golf course), watch a bit more TV, or pretend to take a long shit. The last was the only definitely private activity, so there I’d sit while a cat pawed under the door as if begging me to rescue her from Scott.
Dinner was served late in the afternoon. Scott would take his place at the table and survey the victuals with a look of tipsy discernment, then raise a glass to the chef. Their latest brawl momentarily forgotten, Marlies would return the tribute with a kind of sad, proprietary smile, suggesting that Scott was a pain in the ass, all right, but a gracious young man and her own son for better or worse. We’d eat. There was a pork roast, say, with crispy skin and scarlet flesh just so; lovely sweetbreads of an ideal chewiness, never mushy, cooked with mushrooms in a wine sauce; new potatoes and red cabbage and brussels sprouts and a cauliflower steeped in mock hollandaise. My brother would chew each morsel of meat with endless care (eyes fixed on the middle distance), then fastidiously remove the residual fat from his mouth and place it aside, for all to see, on a little plate he’d fetched for that purpose. When I asked him about it—this novel quirk—he explained with old arrogance that he’d rather not die of congestive heart failure, thanks. I was about to ask whether he followed the same procedure when eating in public, and (if so) whether he’d ever been denounced as a repulsive idiot, but my mother derailed me by leaning forward on her fists and hissing “Oh Scott, you’re so full of shit .”
After the plates were cleared and the snarling subsided, we decided to go see a movie, a comedy. We had a long night ahead of us, and the thought of spending it, just we three, in that little condo was out of the question. Also it would force my brother to sober up a bit. We wanted to laugh and forget ourselves, however briefly, and few things are more depressing than being thwarted in this simple wish. My brother sprawled between us stinking of beer, not just refusing to laugh but sighing and smacking his lips and scratching his balls (inside the pants), so that a number of people got up and moved. When we got home again and Scott discovered we were out of beer, he started on the Scotch.
At some point he lurched into the bathroom, leaving the door open, and began picking his face. He still had a lot of pimples, the kind that swell beneath the skin and really explode when given a good hard squeeze. Scott kept the door open so he could talk to us the whole time: “You’d think by now this shit would go away . . . How’m I ever gonna get laid ? . . .”
This went on for almost an hour. At some point my mother asked me, in an urgent whisper, if I wanted to go to midnight mass. I did. Scott heard the sounds of our departure, the zippered coats and jingling keys, and stuck his puckered bleeding face out the door. “Oh,” he said, when Marlies explained where we were going. “Save me a wafer.”
We hadn’t been to church together, my mother and I, since
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