The Condition

by Jennifer Haigh

  Thanks for the hand, said Scott. You saved me an extra trip.

  There was an awkward pause.

  What are you going to do? Jordan asked.

  Scott shrugged. I know a guy who does carpentry in Massachusetts. He needs a helper for the summer.

  Again Jordan looked ready to cry.

  Hey, it’s not so bad, Scott said, thumping Jordan’s skinny shoulder. I kind of like it.

  Jordan looked unconvinced. Scott watched him as he drove away, his arm raised in a limp wave.

  He remembered, now, describing the scene to his father: Jordan standing at the curb, Aaron Savitz’s Beamer pulling into the parking lot, the fat fuck recognizing him just in time to flip him the bird. Frank had laughed at this, manly gin-fueled laughter. Now, sitting in bed with a raging hangover, Scott marveled at this fact. He couldn’t recall the last time, any time, he’d made his father laugh.

  He’d been stunned, last night, to find his parents on the porch of the Captain’s House, in what could have been either a friendly hug or a passionate clinch. Scott wasn’t sure which would have surprised him more. He’d noticed, then, the new Saab convertible parked at the end of the driveway. Dad’s Nobel Prize. In that moment a feeling had gripped him, half forgotten from childhood. He wanted to rush his father, head down like a billy goat; to charge and pummel and wrestle him to the ground, not in anger but in the purest delight. His father had returned.

  And then it hit him: Ian. This is how Ian feels.

  Now, lying in bed in the Whistling Room, he thought of all the times, exhausted and fed up and demoralized by his day at Ruxton, he had pushed his son away. I can do better, he thought. He had no interest in climbing mountains like that ass Dashiell Blodgett; he would not cure cancer or become wealthy or save anybody’s life. But with Penny’s help, he had made two entire people, something neither Gwen nor Billy had managed. He was Ian and Sabrina’s father. Perhaps this was mission enough.

  It had cut him when, at the last minute, Ian refused to come to the Cape. He wants to go climbing, Penny had explained. You know how he gets. Ian was an obsessive kid; a few times a year he chose a new object for his fixation—the skateboard, the Power Rangers—and pursued it with alarming enthusiasm. Now that his uncle Benji had introduced him to rock climbing, they would be inseparable all summer, or at least for a few weeks.

  What can I do? Penny shouted over the neighbor’s lawn mower. She was standing barefoot in the driveway, watching Scott pack the Golf. Just go, and have a good time with Sabrina. Ian will snap out of it eventually. You know he loves you, Scotty. This is just a phase he’s going through.

  And what about you? Scott slammed shut his hatchback. Is Uncle Benji a phase for you too?

  Penny ignored his sarcastic tone. We belong together.

  Are you kidding? Next door the mower stopped; Scott lowered his voice. He’s your stepbrother, for God’s sake.

  He’s my best friend.

  Scott flinched, thinking how, in the early days, Penny had called him “my partner in crime.” Now Benji was her best friend. It was the cruelest thing she’d ever said.

  He thinks I’m smart, Scotty. He likes the way I dress. He doesn’t care if I watch TV. You still don’t get it, she said, seeing his blank look. He loves me exactly the way I am.

  I love you! Scott exploded. Eleven years, Pen! You don’t think I love you? Are you—he nearly said “retarded.” Are you crazy?

  Penny sighed. Yes, fine, crazy. And I can’t cook and I don’t read the newspaper and I like the wrong things and say the wrong things and I have no idea why you ever wanted me in the first place and if I hadn’t gotten pregnant you’d have bailed ten years ago. Am I right? She didn’t expect an answer; she was only pausing for breath. I’d be some girl you picked up out West when you were young and stupid. You wouldn’t even remember my name.

  Scott opened his mouth to speak.

  I guess you love me, she said, but, you know, why? I’m not a Drew. I didn’t go to Pearse. I can’t talk to your mother.

  My mother? Scott blinked. Jesus, Penny. For the hundredth time: my family doesn’t hate you.

  Maybe not, she allowed. Maybe they just don’t understand why you married me. I don’t blame them. For a long time, I didn’t get it either.

  Scott stared at her, his heart loud. He and Penny had never been known for subtlety. It seemed strangely appropriate that the final aching moments of their marriage happened in the front yard, with a UPS truck idling in the street.

  You think you’re a loser, and I make you feel better. You need somebody to look down on. That’s why you’re always lecturing me. It makes you feel smart.

  Scott flushed. After eleven years of listening to him pontificate, Penny had finally schooled him.

  Benji makes me feel good. And you, basically, make me feel like shit.

  The lawn mower resumed.

  Penny, no. He felt suddenly shaky, flooded with panic. That’s not right. I never meant to— He groped for words. I need you, Pen. Don’t leave me.

  Penny was not a crier. Her clear blue eyes were perfectly dry.

  Don’t worry, Scotty, she said. You’ll be just fine.

  SCOTT DRESSED and went downstairs.

  “Well, good morning! It is still morning, isn’t it?’ His mother kissed his cheek, took a swipe at his uncombed hair.

  “Have a seat, son.” His father had already been to town, picked up the Globe and the Times. He sat at the table parsing them into piles: front page, national, local, arts. Sabrina sat beside him braiding friendship bracelets, breakfast half eaten on her plate.

  “Coffee?” Scott asked.

  His father chuckled. “I’ve had a whole pot, myself. Didn’t much help.”

  “Where is everybody?” He’d resolved to talk to Gwen alone, at the first opportunity. To grovel, if necessary, for her forgiveness. He had no dignity left to lose.

  “Billy should be here any moment. As for your sister, I have no idea. The last I heard she was planning to rent a car at the airport. I expect her later today.” Paulette handed him a glass of orange juice. “Darling, do you remember this?”

  “My lobster glass!”

  “I saved it,” she explained. Years ago, before the house was put on the market, she and Martine had sorted through the old china closet. The mismatched dishes weren’t worth keeping, but she’d made a point of nabbing the children’s favorite drinking glasses: Scott’s lobster, Gwen’s CrisCraft. “I’m afraid I couldn’t remember which one Billy liked,” she admitted. “A lighthouse maybe? Or was it a fish of some sort?”

  This made it even better.

  After his eggs Benedict, his grilled tomatoes, Scott lingered at the breakfast table, glancing through the papers. To his astonishment his parents did not interrogate him about work. Penny’s name was not mentioned. Instead they reminisced about summers past—the time his uncle Roy capsized the Mamie Broussard; the time Martine’s boyfriend, given his own room for propriety’s sake, fell down the stairs and broke an ankle while sneaking out of hers. Stories Scott had forgotten, or hadn’t been told in the first place—the one about Martine’s boyfriend had been deemed too risqué. As the youngest he’d been a victim of censorship, sent to bed hours before the other cousins, when the sky was barely dark. He’d been keenly aware of the vacation life buzzing around him, the teenage and adult Drew life from which he was excluded: movies at the open air in Wellfleet, midnight sails, barbecues on the front lawn, the house swollen with guests. I’m missing everything, he often complained at bedtime. Be patient, his mother admonished him. Your turn will come. But by the time Scott was a teenager the house had been sold, the family dissolved. His father and brother and sister, the Drew aunts and uncles and cousins, were all gone.

  He recalled, now, that feeling of injury, outrage at the injustice. What a relief to sit with his parents as pleasant adults, lingering over coffee, not stewing over the myriad ways he’d disappointed them, the shamed certainty that he would never be enough. He tried to remember th
e last time they’d sat this way, himself and Paulette and Frank, laughing, remembering. Never, he realized. This had not happened in all his life.

  Childhood was over. What a fucking relief.

  At that moment his mother froze. “Did you hear that?” she cried, springing out of her chair. “Billy is here!”

  She hurried out the front door, patting her hair, Frank quick on her heels. Scott sat a moment, staring into his empty lobster glass. He rose heavily and followed them out to the porch, just in time to see the car roll up the lane.

  Scott glanced at his Golf parked in the shade, the dented side panel, the rust spreading up from the undercarriage like an aggressive cancer. Go ahead, asshole, Scott thought, eyeing Billy’s gleaming Mercedes. Park next to me.

  “There’s somebody with him,” said Frank.

  The car stopped. Billy stepped out of the car. Then his passenger, a dark-skinned man in pale linen trousers.

  Paulette shaded her eyes. “Who on earth is that?”

  The two approached the porch. Then Billy stopped short.

  “Dad,” he said.

  “Hello, son.” Frank stepped forward, thumping Billy’s shoulder. Paulette leaned in for a kiss. Billy seemed momentarily confused, like a wealthy tourist mobbed by gypsies in port.

  “Mom, Dad,” he said, disengaging himself. “This is my partner, Srikanth.”

  The dark-skinned man offered his hand.

  For three days Billy had rehearsed the words in his head. Mom, there’s somebody special I’d like you to meet. This is my partner, Srikanth.

  He’d agonized over special, which made Sri sound retarded. And partner, which sounded so businesslike. But he detested the word boyfriend—he was not a teenager. And lover made him want to run screaming into the street.

  Of course, partner was open to misinterpretation. For Billy this was part of its appeal. His mother was welcome to misinterpret the relationship, if she wished to. What mattered was the saying. Billy would say the words, and Sri would hear them. His family could think what they liked.

  Sri asked him one last time, as they turned off the highway to the No Name Road: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Of course,” Billy said.

  But a moment later he saw the Prize parked in the driveway. Then the screen door flew open and both his parents were waiting on the porch.

  “What is he doing here?” Billy said.

  He felt, but ignored, a sudden urge to hang a U-turn in the driveway, to test the Mercedes’s vaunted acceleration by flooring it back to Manhattan.

  It was too late to change his mind.

  He said the words he’d rehearsed, and waited. After a stunned moment, his father had shaken Sri’s hand.

  How ironic, how unsettling, how flat-out astonishing that it was Frank who saved the day, who sent Paulette down to the beach with Sabrina and a very strong Bloody Mary, who asked Sri a series of polite, then interested, then rabidly fascinated questions about his work.

  Jesus, his father. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, Billy watched the scene unfolding in the living room. His father sat opposite Sri on the hideous new couch (stripes?), in rapt attention. Sri’s eloquence on the subject of gene-expression patterns seemed to have eclipsed the fact that he had sodomized Frank’s son. A casual observer would have said that Frank was in denial, but Billy knew that the truth was more exotic. He’d understood for years that something was wrong with his father, some basic human quality missing. (The way he’d treated Paulette. Remember? The way he’d treated Gwen.) Now, suddenly, Frank’s odd detachment looked for all the world like virtue. The old man was not incapable of love. He simply reserved his love for the natural world, the subtle mysteries that governed it. It was a type of love that did not lead to happy marriages, or successful parenting; yet it was a sublime thing, beyond the capacity of most humans: to love what had nothing to do with oneself.

  And yet.

  Watching his father nodding, smiling, laughing in hearty approval, Billy remembered the wretched Thanksgiving Lauren McGregor had suffered in Concord, his father’s warmth and welcome, the intuitive way he had put her at ease. Now he offered Sri the same kindness.

  His father was kind.

  BILLY DIDN’T get loaded in the afternoon, not normally. Not ever. But he was in Truro; he was an adult now; and at the Captain’s House, adults drank. Cocktails at five, earlier on weekends. Those golden summers of his childhood: it had somehow never occurred to him that his grandfather and Mamie and Roy and Martine, probably even his mother, had spent them half in the bag. How else, really, could you spend an entire summer with your family? There was wisdom in the old ways, he reflected, improvising a second pitcher of Bloodies. A different sort of System.

  He took the pitcher out to the front porch, where his brother was waiting. It was a spot where nobody ever sat because it offered only a view of the road. For Billy this was its appeal. He liked having his car in plain sight, his keys jangling in his pocket. There was comfort in knowing he could get behind the wheel at any moment and roar down the No Name Road, heading toward the highway.

  “What’s Dad doing here?” he asked Scott.

  “He was here when I pulled in last night. He and Mom were on the porch.” Scott hesitated. “They might have been kissing.”

  “Mom and Dad?” Billy flinched. On a day when it seemed nothing could shock him, this did. “Are you sure?”

  “No,” Scott admitted. “And they seem totally normal together. Which itself is abnormal.” He held out his empty glass.

  “Where did he sleep?” Billy demanded.

  “Captain’s Quarters. Mom slept in Fanny’s Room.”

  Billy filled their glasses. He waited for Scott to speak. When he could wait no longer, he took a long gulp of his Bloody Mary. He was about to discuss his sex life with his brother. Some distant, sober part of him was stunned and horrified.

  “Seriously, man,” he said finally. “All these years, you never had a clue?”

  “Nope,” said Scott.

  “How is that possible?”

  Scott shrugged. “You had girlfriends. Lauren.”

  Lauren?

  “That was fifteen years ago,” Billy said, a bit testily. “I haven’t had a girlfriend since Reagan was president. That didn’t throw up any red flags?”

  “Shit. I didn’t realize it was that long ago.” Scott reached into his pocket for a pack of Camels.

  “You are not,” Billy said firmly. “Don’t even think about lighting a cigarette.” He could scarcely breathe as it was.

  The whole situation was breathtaking. He was dazzled by his brother’s self-absorption, his unapologetic thoughtlessness. For twenty years Billy had agonized, monitored his behavior, censored every conversation. Packing for family gatherings (is this shirt too gay?) had triggered cluster headaches. How misguided, how laughable to think that anybody was paying attention. He could have preened around the Christmas tree in a feather boa for all his brother would have noticed. You’d think Scotty was running General Motors or brokering peace in the Middle East, he was so preoccupied with his own affairs. But being a fuckup took focus, Billy realized. You couldn’t make such a royal mess of your life simply by letting things happen. You had to work at it.

  “Penny knew,” said Scott. “She always said you were gay. It used to piss me off.”

  “Penny?” In a family of bright people, Billy would have tagged his sister-in-law as the dullard. Yet only she had seen the obvious.

  “Where is Penny?” he asked. Until now he hadn’t noticed her absence.

  “She didn’t come.” Scott drank long from his glass. “She’s leaving me. She’s having an affair with her stepbrother.”

  How to respond to a revelation of this type? Billy stared for a long moment at the ground.

  “Quality,” he said finally.

  He allowed Scott to tell him the whole story: the stepfamily in Idaho, the chat room, finding the two of them in Sabrina’s bedroom. Somewhere in the middle—the
camping in Yellowstone, the paisley tattoos—Scott scrabbled in his pocket for a cigarette. This time Billy didn’t say a word.

  He listened. He forced himself to take it all in, the myriad ragged, deeply unsettling details. This was his brother’s life, the little brother his System had kept him from knowing. He understood, then, that the System had outlived its usefulness. For years it had served as a kind of container, a way of organizing his love and anger and weird loyalty, his unpredictable and overpowering tenderness for the four people who had always known him, his mother and father and Scotty and Gwen.

  AT MAMIE’S Beach the tide was going out. The lowest of the clouds had parted, revealing a white disk of sun.

  Paulette and Sabrina made a slow tour, stopping to pick up a perfect shell, a bit of colored glass. Paulette walked slowly, pleasantly wobbly from the strong drink. Sabrina ran ahead, gleefully barefoot in the soft sand. For no good reason Paulette missed her sister. Martine had loved whizzing along the shoreline in her kayak. As a girl she’d pored over the framed nautical map hanging in the entryway of the house. There’s Pamet Harbor! she would exclaim, pointing. Mamie’s Beach. Full-Moon Cove.

  How do you know? Paulette demanded, to which Martine simply shrugged.

  You just look, and figure it out.

  Paulette had tried this, but the correspondences eluded her. The formations on the map looked nothing like the sandy beaches and inlets she saw before her. In her mind they were entirely different things.

  They had spoken two days ago, in honor of Paulette’s birthday. Martine, as always, had asked after the children, and for the first time in years, Paulette had confided in her sister. Billy’s so distant lately. He’s always in a hurry. I’m lucky if he calls once a week. Martine—Paulette ought to have expected this—had been inadequately sympathetic. Cut him some slack, will you? You’re not his only concern. You have no idea what else is going on in his life. Paulette wondered, now, if Martine knew something she hadn’t. Yet as far as she knew, Billy hadn’t spoken with his aunt in years.