by Pete Nelson
Staring at the telephone was no more productive now than it had been when he was a pimply-faced teenager, and led him to the same conclusion: “Just call — you’ll think of something.” He dialed again. Twice, his finger slipped from the hole in the rotary dial and he had to start over.
“Hi, this is Tamsen. Please leave a message, and if this is Paul, I went out, but feel free to call and wake me up, or else call me in the morning. Beeeeep …”
“Hi, it’s me,” he said. “I’m home and it’s about ten o’clock your time. Just calling to say good night. I was thinking I might ramble on and see if I could fill your entire tape but that would be wrong. We went straight to the hospital from the airport and had dinner there. My mom is actually staying there tonight, so I’ve got the house to myself. It’s a little spooky. I’ll tell you all about my dad when I talk to you, but the basic word is, he’s stable and resting and not likely to get any worse, so there’s no emergency, exactly, except that they still don’t know how bad it is. There’s positive indications and negative ones and they’re still doing tests. I’ll keep you posted. We’re all sort of spent. I had a little spat with my brother, which I will also tell you about later.
“Anyway, I really was going to ramble on and on to see if I could make you laugh at how I just kept going on and on and on and on, but actually I won’t do that. I wish you were here. I’m in my father’s office, which used to be my bedroom, mine and Carl’s, and I’m looking at all these awards and honors he won, and it’s making me think I really need to get some honors and awards. Maybe when I get home, I’ll see if I have an Old English font and print myself up some awards to hang in my studio.”
This was good. He spoke slowly. He could imagine the smile on her face. She’d said she loved the way he made her laugh. This was worth points.
“I know I promised not to ramble on and on and fill up your whole tape, and I won’t, I swear, but right now I wish you were home. If I was there, I’d get Casablanca from Blockbuster and put it in the VCR because you said you’ve never seen it, and then I’d rub your feet while we watched it. Tell the truth, it’s a little weird to be sitting on this bed, having fantasies about you. I don’t know if I told you this, but all the prepubescent fantasies I had as a kid generally involved situations where girls were forced to sleep with me, where we’d be trapped in cave-ins or shipwrecked on a deserted island or stranded by a plane crash at the North Pole and I’d rescue these various damsels in distress and none of them ever voluntarily offered their affections. They only kissed me because I saved their lives and because I was literally the last man on earth. Doesn’t say much for my self-esteem, does it? Anyway, we can talk further about this, but I’d really hate to ramble on and fill up your entire tape.”
He paused, counting slowly to five.
“Gosh. It’s really cold here. Is it cold there? It’s cold here. How much snow did you get? I’m really sorry to just ramble on and on like this. Seriously. Anyway, I shouldn’t ramble on and on and on, but I wanted to tell you I miss you and I wish I could talk to you. To tell the truth, part of me hopes my dad gets better so that someday he can meet you, because it would make me sad to think he never did …”
He caught himself. He’d broken an unwritten rule, a tacit clause in their agreement to live fully in the present moment and not talk too much about the future. He needed to put the cat back in the toothpaste, as his mother, prone to malapropisms, might have said.
“Okay, now I definitely think I shouldn’t have said that. Don’t get me wrong, I would love for you to meet my family, obviously, someday — not right now, necessarily — and I’d obviously love to meet your mom and all that, but we’re probably not at that point yet in our relationship where we can start talking about meeting each other’s families … not that there’s any reason …”
“Beeeeeeeeeeep.”
“Sonofabitch!” he said, slamming the phone back in its cradle.
It had been a long day. He hoped he would be back on his game tomorrow.
4
King Carl
That’s what you fought about?” Stella said. “Paul — a fortune cookie?”
“There was a little more to it than that,” Paul said.
“Not even that he ate your cookie,” Stella continued. “I can understand getting mad at somebody if they ate your cookie. You’re telling me he was trying to get you to eat your own cookie — do I have that right? I’m just trying to understand this.”
“He’s controlling,” Paul said. “He thinks he knows what’s best for everybody. I suppose he means well, but it’s so irritating.”
When Paul got back to Northampton, he’d taken the trash out, watered his plants, and then dumped the contents of his suitcase into the laundry basket. He’d played the messages on his answering machine, the last of which was from Tamsen, saying she wanted to drive up to see him that night. He’d called her back, got her machine, told her he was heading to the Bay State for a beer later and to find him there, and then drove to collect Stella, who’d been staying with her friend Chester, the retriever with the heart of gold and the brain of stone.
Her first question, once he’d lifted her into the car, was how his father was feeling. He told her what he knew. He’d visited the hospital every day during his stay, sometimes with his mother, sometimes with his sister or alone, reading out loud to his father from the newspaper and adopting a disparaging tone when mentioning those goddamn Democrats, which he assumed his father would find therapeutic. On Paul’s final visit, his father had been conscious and awake, his eyes open and able to follow people around the room, but he was otherwise unresponsive. Paul had sat by his father’s bedside and held Harrold’s hand (he hadn’t done that since he was four) and felt it twitch slightly.
“I think he was glad we were there,” Paul had explained to Stella, “but it was hard to tell. It’s very strange when you can’t look at someone’s face and guess what they’re thinking. You don’t realize how much that matters until it’s absent.”
“How’s your mom dealing with it?”
“She’s upbeat, actually,” Paul said. “Everybody’s rolling up their sleeves and saying, ‘Let’s get to work.’ ”
“Why do you need to roll up your sleeves?”
“It’s just an expression.”
Stella silently considered Paul’s report, then said she thought something was still bothering him. That’s when he told her he’d had a fight with his brother, adding the story about the fortune cookie because he thought it was funny.
“I don’t think it would have killed you to eat the cookie,” Stella said dryly. “Just to keep the peace. That’s all I’m saying.”
“It’s the principle,” Paul said. “That’s what you would have done?”
“And the fortune too,” she said. “That would have solved both your problems. Besides, if you eat something you don’t want to eat, you can always swallow grass and throw it all up later.”
“Easy for you to say,” Paul said, but she was right, again. Blessed was the peacemaker. “In humans, they call that bulimia. Plus there wasn’t any grass. There was snow on the ground. What do dogs do in the winter when they need to throw up?”
“Change the subject if you want to,” Stella said. “I just think you have a really strange relationship with your brother. It sounds so petty. And I mean that in the pejorative sense. Don’t you love your brother?”
“Of course I love my brother,” Paul said. “I just wish he lived in New Zealand.”
“Is that a nice place?” Stella asked.
“It’s a very nice place,” Paul said. “Good location too.”
As Paul drove, he thought of all the times, growing up, when he’d wished far worse for his brother. The time Carl had walked away from the chessboard, refusing to either finish the game or officially resign, with Paul two moves from checkmate and about to beat his brother for the first time in his life at anything. Then there was the time Carl stole the shoelaces out of Paul’s sneakers
when his own broke, or finished the milk when Paul still had cereal left, or licked the centers out of the Oreos and then put them back in the bag, or the times he’d made Paul burn his marshmallows making s’mores by outfencing him over the campfire with his roasting stick (for years, Paul pretended he liked burnt marshmallows). Yet despite the basic sibling rivalry stuff of early childhood, for the first ten years of his life, Paul had wanted to do everything Carl did, wear the same clothes, get his hair cut the same way. When Paul entered junior high and the war between them intensified, Paul couldn’t help thinking, “This is how you repay me for a lifetime of adoration?”
He looked at Stella, who was staring at him, her head cocked.
“It’s hard to explain,” he told Stella. “Do you remember when you were just a puppy and you lived on a farm with your brothers and sisters, and you were” — he had told Stella once that she was the runt of her litter, and that had hurt her feelings — “the nicest dog in your family, but your older brothers were bigger than you, so if there was a bowl of food on the floor or a table scrap, they ate it first and never let you have any?”
“Vaguely,” Stella said.
“Well, it’s sort of like that,” Paul said. “With people, you get in these relationships and you never grow out of them.”
“With dogs, you don’t have to grow out of them,” Stella said. “There’s a social order. That’s what you want. I understand if you don’t know what your place is. That could be confusing.”
“It never bothered you when your brothers got to eat first?”
“They were bigger,” Stella said. “It was more important to me to be the nice one. And maybe it’s not my place to say, but I always thought you were the nice one too. That’s why we get along.”
He reached across and scratched her beneath the ear. She leaned into it.
“There’s nothing wrong with being omega,” he said. “It’s the people who are humbler than thou who bug me. Besides — that wasn’t what the real fight was about. That was just when I got my hackles up.”
She looked puzzled.
“These,” Paul said, reaching across again and grabbing Stella’s fur behind her collar.
“That’s my neck,” she said.
“Hackles are the feathers on a chicken’s neck.”
“Do I look like a chicken to you?”
“Horripilation, then,” Paul said. “The way your fur rises when you’re trying to look tough to avoid a fight. To scare the other dog off.”
“It doesn’t sound to me like you were trying to scare your brother off,” Stella said. “It sounds to me like you were trying to make your brother mad. If you didn’t want to make him mad, you would just have eaten the cookie. It wouldn’t have killed you.”
“All right already,” Paul said. “Next time, I’ll eat the cookie.”
“So what was the real fight about?” Stella asked.
“Money,” Paul said. “About which I couldn’t care less, by the way. He had us all over for Sunday brunch after church because it was my nephew’s birthday and they didn’t want to reschedule the party. He has this huge house in a very wealthy neighborhood in Edina. It’s very intimidating.”
“But of course, you couldn’t care less,” Stella said.
“It’s just different,” Paul said. “His neighborhood is full of lawyers and bankers and doctors. They make more money than I do.”
“So why don’t you become a lawyer or a banker or a doctor?” she asked.
“That horse left the barn a long time ago. It’s like you were saying,” he told her, “about roles. I like what I do, but I never know what I’m doing next. It’s feast or famine.” His literary agent, Mauricio Levine, was good at encouraging Paul to keep a cheerful outlook. “Just remember what Churchill said: ‘The secret to success is learning how to go from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.’ ” Maury had brought Paul his first big break, a chance to finish Windows 95 for Morons when the original author died suddenly of what Maury called “an unrelated illness.” Paul still wondered how it could have been related. They needed to come up with an option book. Paul suggested Love for Morons, but unfortunately the publisher already had a husband-and-wife team working on it who’d been married and divorced four times, to each other, which Paul had to agree was hard to top. The editor finally suggested Nature for Morons. “These things are golden, but finish it quick so you get paid, because I think the publisher is going out of business,” Maury advised. “That’s publishing,” he added.
“With Carl, there’s no famine. It’s all feast,” Paul continued. “I’m not saying he hasn’t earned it. He works really hard. Probably too hard.”
Paul’s brother had always pushed himself, “always biting the candle off at both ends,” as their mother had once said. He never slept, always training for something, a marathon, a 10k, a half Ironman. His clean good looks, kind eyes, and gentle manners had won him plenty of East Coast girlfriends in college, though when he finally hooked up for good, it was with Erica Stephenson, a fellow Minnesotan in the same law school class at Yale. As a Yale undergraduate, Carl had striven mightily to be accepted in the right circles, invited to the right parties, granted access to the Old Boy network. Yet when his fiancée said she wanted to practice law in Minnesota, to be near her parents, Carl gave up any thought of signing on with some high-powered Boston or New York or Washington, D.C., law firm. Paul wondered if Carl regretted his decision. No one would ever know it if he did.
“You work really hard too,” Stella said. “I think you should be paid as much as a lawyer or a doctor.”
“I couldn’t agree more,” Paul said. “I’ll bring it up at the next meeting. Be glad you never had to get a job.”
“I live with you, don’t I?” she said. “That’s work.”
“Lucky for me, you’re a working breed,” Paul said.
“Half,” she corrected him. “My other half is sporting. So what was the fight about? What about money?”
After the birthday party, Carl had told Paul he wanted to have a word with him in his office. Carl’s home office featured an exquisite L-shaped rosewood desk console, with the biggest computer monitor Paul had ever seen. The walls were decorated with all the various awards Carl had won over the years, beginning in kindergarten. Carl’s athletic trophies sat atop the bookshelf, along with photographs of Carl, exhausted, crossing finish lines with his arms up in the air and his red armpit hair showing. Paul was surprised to see that his brother had bought ten copies of Windows 95 for Morons,with one propped upright on display atop a Stickley bookcase.
“He said he and my dad had been working on a living will as a way of avoiding estate taxes,” Paul told Stella. “My dad wants to give his money to his children while he’s still alive, not to the government. If you die, the government takes a huge chunk of your money so your family can’t have it.”
“I’d like to bite the ass of whoever thought of that,” Stella said.
“You’re not alone,” Paul said. “Anyway, after he retired, my dad started playing the stock market and changing his investment strategies. Rolling stuff over, whatever that means.”
“Even I know what roll over means.”
“Different kind of roll over,” Paul told her. “Carl said it looked like my dad was going to gift each of his kids with a little over three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Is that a lot?” Stella asked.
“It is to me,” Paul said.
“You want all the money you can get, right?”
“Sure,” Paul said, “though they’ve done studies that prove people with a lot of money aren’t any happier than people who only have a little.” She gave him a tilted quizzical look. “It’s human nature. You just always think you want more. And then you get more and that makes you want more still. It’s better to be content with what you have.”
“Well, duh,” Stella said.
“That’s your nature,” Paul said. “For humans, it’s harder than it sounds. I had a bit of a
falling-out with my dad a few years ago on this very subject. I called home to ask for a loan because Karen and I had gotten into some financial trouble. I was making the do-what-you-love-and-the-money-will-follow argument, and my dad said, ‘Sometimes you need to think of somebody other than yourself. Sometimes you do what you have to do for the people you love, particularly when doing what you love isn’t working.’ He saw me as a failure. Needless to say, I never quite got around to asking for the loan.”
“Needless to say.”
“I don’t claim to be Mr. Financial Genius,” Paul said. Stella gave him a look that he ignored. “That doesn’t mean my brother has the right to exclude me from the decision-making process.”
Paul explained that Harrold had, in the process of drafting a living will, granted Carl durable power of attorney. Carl told Paul, in his office, that he thought it would be a good idea, given the present uncertainty, to postpone the disbursement of the living will in case something bad happened to Harrold, some worst-case scenario where they needed the money to pay for extended care. Paul had countered that the point of a living will was exactly to prepare for worst-case scenarios, and that if their father had another stroke and didn’t survive it, the money would go to pay the estate taxes, which was exactly what Harrold didn’t want.
“He made it sound like I was being greedy. Or cold.”
“But you’re neither of those things,” Stella said.
“Thank you,” Paul said. “That’s why it hurt. Then he dropped the real bomb. He told me he was going to fire Arnie Olmstead, my father’s broker. Arnie’d worked with my dad all his life. He goes to our church. They used to carve balsa-wood totem poles together when we were all in Indian Guides.”
“What’s Indian Guides?”
“It was this YMCA program where white guys dress up and pretend they’re Indians,” Paul said. “Fathers and sons. The point is, Carl was using his power of attorney to take over my father’s investments.”