“Hey,” I said. “Eli. Did you ever think maybe you should be a vet instead of a human doctor?”
Eli smiled, his eyes still on the cat. “When I was little, that’s what I wanted to be. A vet. We had this girl who used to take care of us during the summer, Sylvia, she was so great with animals. I always said my plan was to be a vet and marry Sylvia.”
I reached over and touched my fingers to the kitten’s head. Her fur was still spiky with dog slobber. She opened her eyes and glared at me with an adult cat’s disdain.
“Maybe you still should,” I said. “Be a vet. You love animals so much.”
“I like people, too,” Eli said. “I want to help. More than just animals. You know? The world.”
“Well,” I said. “What you just did was brave. Saving this kitten. That was helping the world.”
Eli smiled. “Maybe I’ll do both,” he said. “After Harvard Med I’ll go to vet school. Open up a whole family practice—people on one side, pets on the other.” We stood up and started walking back down Ninth Street, the idea of a hike abandoned.
“What are you going to name her?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” Eli said, then started listing possibilities. But my thoughts had turned back to Charlie. Remembering his face, the way his fingers grasped my upper arm as he kissed me good-bye, I told myself I wasn’t worried. Tomorrow at the latest: the letter would be in my hands. I walked all the way home with Eli, stopping at Delilah’s to buy kitten food, barely talking at all.
TWO WEEKS LATER, NO letter from Charlie had materialized. I checked my mailbox twice a day and started to wonder if I’d given him the wrong address. Or maybe Charlie had lost it in his travels. I tracked Eli down at a Thursday night Pub Club, a weekly party thrown by the Deltas. It took me a half hour to find him. At ten o’clock, in the basement of a packed fraternity house, Eli had just poked a hole in the side of a beer can and was about to bring it to his lips.
“Hey,” I said, tugging on his sleeve.
“Brett,” he said, visibly happy to see me. “Want to do a shooter?”
I could barely hear him over the music. I stood on my toes and yelled into his ear. “I need to get Charlie’s number from you,” I said.
Eli paused and looked around like he wanted to put down his beer can. But he’d already poked the hole, and as soon as he let go it would spurt everywhere. So he shrugged and went ahead with the shooter while I waited patiently. Then he took my arm and led me over to a corner.
“Brett,” he said, yelling over the noise. “Charlie wasn’t even supposed to be there for the party. I didn’t think you would meet him. And you know, there’s a reason I didn’t plan on introducing you two. I wish I’d been there when you did meet, I mean, I wish I’d gone into the kitchen with you.”
The other day, at Dot’s, I hadn’t wanted to hear anything Eli had to say about Charlie. Now I felt like I needed to, but at the same time my heart knocked in agitated protest against everything I immediately knew he’d say. I didn’t want it shouted, here at this party.
“Can we go outside?” I said.
We moved through the crowd together. Eli kept his hand just at my back, not touching me but letting it hover there, like he was guiding me. We stepped through the back door into the parking lot that bordered an alley. People milled about in thinner numbers, and we sat down on the curb. When Eli spoke, it was quiet, cautious, like he knew I didn’t want anyone else to hear.
“I love my brother. He’s a very cool guy. But he’s not reliable. And with women he’s not . . . he doesn’t follow through.”
With women. In my mind, an endless stream of us unfolded, before me, and after. Eli said, “I would have told you before if I knew, if I had any idea you two would get together. But by the time I found you guys—”
“It was too late.”
“Yeah.” He shrugged. “He’s a helluva handsome guy, Brett. And decent. I mean, he doesn’t mean any harm. But he’s just not so keen on commitment. You know? He kind of lives in the moment.”
I stared at the pockmarked pavement. Eli ruffled my hair, a brotherly gesture.
“Wow,” I said. “I feel so stupid.”
“Don’t. It’s not your fault.” He let his hand rest there on top of my head. “It’s Charlie. This is what he’s like.” A beat before he added, “I should have told you. He’s sort of a womanizer.”
This almost made me laugh. I’d never heard anyone except my mother use that word.
Eli went on. “He doesn’t mean to be, I don’t think.”
“Except we just throw ourselves at him.” The words sounded more bitter than I meant them to, and even as I spoke them I thought: had I thrown myself at Charlie? It hadn’t felt that way. More like, I’d just made it easy as possible for him to reel me in, not the barest struggle on the line.
“What would you do if I asked for his phone number?” I said. “What if I asked you for his address?”
“I would give it to you.” Eli’s voice sounded very quiet, concerned, and a little bit reproachful. I could picture him—fifteen years from now, a doctor, with a soothing but faintly admonishing bedside manner, telling his patients not to smoke or eat fatty food.
That subtle admonishment helped me face the fact that if Charlie wanted to reach me, if he wanted to keep me in his life, he would have already done so. If Eli gave me his phone number, all I would do was humiliate myself further. Still, I brought my knees up to my chest and leaned my head into them, not able to prevent my teenage heart from asking, Why? Why don’t you love me?
THAT SHOULD HAVE BEEN that, but over the next days I couldn’t help waiting. Part of me waited to stop wanting Charlie to write. Another part waited for him to change his mind. Every day, I checked my campus mailbox, which only stood empty or held a magazine or a letter from my mother. In a particularly weak moment, I called Information, but there was no Charlie Moss listed in Hyde Park.
One evening Eli called. He’d won a BURST award to do research work for a biology professor and wanted to celebrate. I met him at the Sink—he’d already ordered a large veggie pizza and a pitcher of beer.
“Congratulations,” I said, sliding into my chair. Eli filled my beer mug as I grabbed a slice of pizza.
“Thanks,” he said. “I’m very stoked. This will look great on my med school application. Even if I do fail Russian Lit.”
“Good to know,” I said. Eli was still resisting my attempts to help, holding out for my writing the entire paper. He picked up the plastic teddy bear on our table, tipped back in his chair, and squirted honey onto a shred of pizza crust. We drank the pitcher of beer and ordered another. A few people from school joined us, including a girl named Wendy whom I thought had a crush on Eli. She had applied for the same BURST award.
“I’m glad you got it if it wasn’t me,” she told him.
Eli ordered more beer and poured her a glass. I watched them through fuzzy eyes, wondering if he would take her home, if she would fall in love with him, if he would blow her off. “No,” I said out loud. “That’s Charlie.”
“Brett?” Eli asked. “Are you okay?”
Wendy looked over at me. I expected a glare for interfering, but she mostly just looked sympathetic. She would be a nice girlfriend. I thumped my head onto the table. Eli patted my arm.
“Do you want me to walk you home?” he asked.
“No.” I pushed back from the table and stood up, hoping Eli would pick up on Wendy’s cues and go home with her. Someone should fall in love, if I couldn’t.
Back in my dorm room, instead of passing out, I stayed up late with Yeats and Coleridge, determined to erase Charlie’s memory with poetry. But the next day in class, the pages of my text were soggy and tearstained and blurred before my eyes as I remembered the sorrows of Charlie’s changing face. I’d thought he loved the pilgrim soul in me. But it turned out only the reverse was true.
Until that moment I had resisted poetry, my mother’s specialty. But right then I gave in. Novels need a logica
l arc, a progression of events, whereas all poetry requires is a moment, a feeling, a complex and unreconciled reaction. In other words, all I ever had of Charlie. Without the ability to write poetry myself—my critical faculties already overdeveloped—the only thing left was for me was to study it.
“Why?” I used to ask Charlie, years later. “Why do you think that one night made such an impression on me?”
“I don’t know,” he always said, sometimes with a shrug. “Maybe it was the bear.”
IT WASN’T THE BEAR. And it wasn’t my youth, or the fact that I’d been a virgin, though certainly all those details played their role. When I think back to that night—or really any night with Charlie—it was the way he could be so utterly convincing. That he felt exactly the way I’d been waiting for someone to feel about me. Smitten.
That night, after we’d escaped the bear, we left the skis back at Eli’s house and walked to my dorm, holding hands. My mouth still carried the chocolate-tinged remnants of Charlie’s spiked cocoa, but I wasn’t drunk, not at all, except on his nearness. We walked through the overlit halls of my dorm, and into my small, dark room, and although I’d said no to more than one boyfriend, I didn’t utter a word of protest as Charlie eased my sweater over my head, and I knew I wouldn’t, not even a token one. Light from the courtyard spilled through the blinds, illuminating his serious face, his blond curls, the fair stubble across his jaw. How could I even consider letting a word like no intrude upon this moment? Instead I told him, because I thought it was information he needed, that I had never done this before.
“Well, then. We don’t have to do this.”
“No. I want to.”
Charlie stroked my hair away from my face, staring at me long and hard before kissing me softly, gently. It was all I could do not to say I love you, I love you, I love you, over and over again. It never occurred to me that he wasn’t employing the same struggle. His face, his eyes, his tenderness—completely absorbed and entirely believable.
LIKE THE GENTLEMAN HIS brother wasn’t, Eli persisted in our friendships with phone calls and invitations. When he started dating Wendy, she didn’t object to our continued friendship, but it made me sad to be around them sometimes—Eli was a sweet and solicitous boyfriend, pulling out chairs and picking up checks.
“You can ask me about Charlie, you know,” Eli said. “If you want to.”
A Saturday, the two of us were in a classroom in Muenzinger. I had my own core curriculum worries and couldn’t pass Psych 101 until the rat I’d been assigned learned to get through a maze.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I’m trying to leave it behind me. You know?”
“It’s a good plan,” Eli agreed. He scooped up the rat gently, repositioning it midway in the maze. “If he can remember from here,” Eli said, “then maybe he’ll remember from the beginning.”
“Wait,” I said. “Which is the good plan?”
“Leaving it behind you. But I think the rat would do better if you gave him a name.”
“The rat doesn’t know if he has a name or not,” I said as the rat found himself faced with yet another tiny wall.
“Maybe he does,” Eli said. He picked the rat up and returned him to the middle. “I think you should try it.” As I was about to speak, he said, “And don’t name him Charlie.”
I laughed. “Fine. How about Templeton?”
“Something less expected,” Eli suggested. “Something smarter.”
“Templeton was smart.”
“Something nicer.”
“What’s Latin for rat?”
Eli cradled the animal and raised it to his nose. Its whiskers twitched, and its long, furless tail wound around his hand. I shuddered a little.
“Julien,” Eli said, feeding him a piece of the cheese we’d placed at the finishing point. “It’s a good, smart name.”
He put Julien back at the beginning of the maze, installed a new piece of cheese at the end, and let him go. Newly christened, Julien executed the maze once, twice, three times. So of course I had no choice but to write Eli’s term paper on the homicidal fickleness of Count Vronsky. In fact, on the day Charlie died that very paper lay upstairs in a box in their father’s house, its edges curled and yellow, its print faded except for the clear, red, encircled A.
AT SOME POINT THAT spring, Eli and Wendy broke up, and I acquired a boyfriend named Franc, a Swedish chemistry major who dressed, I would realize years later, like Charlie—in batik T-shirts and crinkly Indian button-downs. I told myself that I didn’t think about Charlie anymore, but truthfully his disappearance lived on—tucked somewhere between my ribs as a palpable and continuing ache. Although Franc had a jealous streak and often objected, Eli was still my main friend, the person I spent the most time with when I wasn’t studying. Eli was quick to laugh but also willing to be silent; the two of us could walk for miles together without ever saying a word, and at the same time, when we wanted, we could talk about anything. Only the topic of Charlie was a strange blank between us—Eli careful since that day in Muenzinger to omit his brother’s name when discussing future plans, or telling me stories about his past.
“You don’t have to pretend he doesn’t exist,” I said one day in April. We were playing hooky to ski on the last day of the season at Monarch. On the chairlift, our legs dangled heavily as we rode up over the slopes, rocks peeking treacherously through the snow that remained.
“Who?” Eli said, and we both laughed. Then he said, “It’s too bad, though. If it weren’t for all that, you could come to the Cape this summer for a visit.”
He’d told me about his house there, right on the bay, the summers sailing and swimming and building sand castles. “I like to build them out on the rocks at low tide,” he said, “and then watch the water swarm around them, so they look like they’re floating. They look like ancient ruins.”
“Sounds beautiful.”
I was half hoping he’d invite me anyway. Maybe if he did, Charlie would realize that he loved me. The chairlift slowed down and we glided off, slightly different directions, before turning our skis and meeting at the top of Ticaboo. Eli did not mention the Cape again—not that day or any other time. I understood that he didn’t want to exclude me but protect me.
That summer, living at home in Randall, Vermont, I waited tables at the new French bistro and did some research work for my mother. An old high school friend and I drove to Maine to hike up Mount Katahdin. On the way back, when we stopped on the rocky coast, the water was too cold to contemplate swimming, and I wondered how it was on Cape Cod this time of year, if Eli and Charlie were swimming. I got a few emails from Eli but none inviting me to visit and none mentioning his brother. I wondered if they talked about me at all or if my name was something to be carefully avoided.
In the fall, Franc and I picked up more or less where we’d left off, and for the first couple months of school so did Eli and I—to the extent that Franc could bear it. “He hovers too close to you,” Franc would say, and he wasn’t a fan of Eli’s birthday gesture, filling my room with balloons. I tried to explain it wasn’t romantic, just whimsical, but with the language barrier I had a hard time explaining the difference between the two words. It became easier to spend time away from Eli, who was very busy anyway, with the work he had to do for his BURST grant. So by late October, when I ran into him at a Pub Club, it didn’t seem strange that we hadn’t seen each other for nearly two weeks.
“Brett,” Eli called to me from across the room just after I’d poured my first beer. Franc was back in his off-campus apartment, studying for a sociology exam. I turned toward the sound of Eli’s voice. The sight of him startled me. Two weeks didn’t seem nearly long enough to justify his physical change. He had shorn his blond hair into a buzz cut and lost a considerable amount of weight, making his jaw appear pronounced and razor sharp. I remember thinking that the only way to lose so much weight so quickly would be to stop eating altogether.
“Eli,” I said. “Your hair. And you’re so skinny.”<
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“Brett,” he said again, intense and happy. He slammed his red plastic cup into mine, a toast that made my beer slosh onto my shoes. We both looked down at the amber liquid, sinking into my white sneakers. Then Eli did it again, laughing. This time I didn’t have enough beer left to spill. I stepped backward, attempting to smile, which ended up more as a grimace. On his jeans, which hung from his hips on the verge of falling, were scribbled words in different color pen.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “You look so different.”
“I’m fine,” he said. “I just need another one of these.” He reached for my empty red cup. “Looks like you do, too.”
“I’ll get them,” I said, escaping sideways into the crowd. As I waited in line for the beer, I glanced back over my shoulder. Eli stood, still watching me. I saw him take his sunglasses out of his pocket—Ray-Bans now, he must have lost the Vuarnets—and slip them onto the bridge of his nose.
I walked back and handed him his cup. He held it in his hand, not saying anything, just staring at me hard through his dark sunglasses.
“Why are you wearing those indoors?” I said.
Eli didn’t answer. I lifted my hand and tapped lightly on one lens. Still no response. I decided to play along, staring back, until I couldn’t stand it anymore.
“What?” I finally said. I punched him lightly in the solar plexus.
Eli grabbed my sleeve and said, “Come up to the roof.” His voice sounded so furtive I almost worried he planned on making a pass at me.
“Why the roof?” I said. “Let’s just stay here at the party.”
“Come on,” Eli said. “I have to tell you something about Charlie.” The buzz of the party seemed to halt for a moment. For so long, he had been careful to avoid that name. Now Eli and I stood in this private little bubble of my too-intense feelings.
“Why can’t you tell me here?” I said. My voice sounded deeper. Grim. I didn’t want anyone telling Franc I had gone up to the roof with Eli. And I told myself that I didn’t want to know anything about Charlie, though at the mention of his name my focus had instantly sharpened. Worse, I felt like I wasn’t talking to Eli, my careful friend, but to someone new, and not careful at all.
The Last September: A Novel Page 5