The Splendid Things We Planned: A Family Portrait

by Bailey, Blake

  Over the holidays Scott insisted I come along to a club where Thomas’s band was playing, and when I heard how good they were, and said so, Scott looked very pleased—as if his own life had been vindicated by proxy. But the most notable thing about that night was meeting Andrea. I picked her up: from our balcony table I saw her standing near the stage, alone, short and a little too fleshy, with long disorderly hair and (I noticed on closer inspection) a slight overbite. But the overall effect was strangely appealing. Tipsily I took her hand and led her back to our table without a word. Turned out she was an old friend of Thomas, home for Christmas; the rest of the year she lived in Seattle. For some reason we got to talking about Russian literature, and I happened to mention Nabokov’s concept of poshlost (philistine vulgarity). Andrea was impressed, and later we went back to Scott’s house and screwed in his bed.

  To Andrea I remained the guy who talked about poshlost. That spring she moved back to Oklahoma City and became Thomas’s (platonic) roommate, and hence Scott’s companion as well. Meanwhile she wrote me a lot of long, carefully articulate letters, the most common theme of which was my brother’s bad behavior. Among other things she told me that Scott called her almost every night, drunk, and invariably became abusive (“fucking whore,” etc); then, just as invariably, he’d call her the next day and apologize. Also she reported that their friend Thomas wasn’t quite the good angel Marlies had figured him to be. According to Andrea he drank a fifth of bourbon every night, sometimes crouching by his bedroom window with a loaded shotgun.

  By the time I saw Andrea again, the following summer, she’d moved back to her mother’s house, and no wonder: among the first things I noticed there, in the kitchen, was a heavy marble table with a ragged crack down the middle, as if it had been roughly toppled to the floor. Somehow I knew this was the work of either Scott or Thomas, her two great friends.

  “Scott or Thomas?” I asked.

  “Scott,” she replied.

  EVER SINCE SCOTT’S discharge from the marines he and Marlies had been making each other miserable (more miserable, I mean). Over the years Burck had adopted a tolerant, kindly, only somewhat deploring attitude toward Scott, while my mother had become all the more brazen. When she and Scott were together it was just a matter of time before they went from cooing and canoodling—there was always a lot of that—to a hideous crescendo of bilingual abuse. I kept advising my mother to practice Buddha-like detachment, to give up hope in other words, or at least (like Burck) let go of her headier illusions. But she was incapable of this. “He was a wonderful marine!” she’d say, or “If only he could stop drinking”—this when called upon to defend him. At other times she’d look weary, haunted, and say, “Ah God, what have I wrought?”

  That Christmas I remember standing in the kitchen with Marlies as we listened to Scott (in the other room) opening his first beer of the morning; I could picture his petulant concentration as he poured. “This is going to be awful,” my mother sighed. “Families are the devil’s work!” I told her to relax and let him drink; with any luck he’d pass out early. Such were our hopes for a happy holiday.

  But Scott was in good fettle. We sang carols at the piano while our mother cooked, and I was glad to hear that Scott had finally stopped trying to sing like Robert Plant—perhaps he’d noticed that his own voice was pretty bad, and hence put the worst of his rock-star dreams to rest. Later we opened presents, and Scott and I were both pleased with what we’d gotten each other. I’d splurged on a hefty tome titled 75 Seasons: The Complete Story of the National Football League, with the great Cowboy halfback Emmitt Smith on the cover. “Zwiiieeeb,” Scott sighed happily, skimming the pictures, casting ahead to the happy hours he’d fill this way. “This is exactly what I wanted.” (So Marlies had told me.) He closed the book, clasped it to his bosom, and kissed me on the cheek—a poignant reminder of the unself-conscious way we used to kiss as children. Scott’s gift to me was no less apt: a CD of Elvis’s Christmas hits (I dig Elvis), the jacket a snowy pop-up Graceland. We sat on the floor and sang “Blue Christmas” together, or rather I sang while my brother provided the Jordanaires backup (“oo-ooo-oo-ooo-oo”). A photo of that moment is my second favorite of Scott and me.

  I PRESSED MY luck with another meeting a few days later. We met at his place, and for some reason the little house was especially grim that day: furnished with the stuff of our childhood—the cheap foam-cushioned sofas and wooden stools (in storage all these years) that we’d had when our father was an ill-paid prosecutor in the AG’s office. A kind of gloomy museum. The paneled walls were mostly bare. In the study was an old portrait of Scott and me, ages twelve and nine, taken at a studio in Vinita (Scott looks jaunty with the knowledge that he’s still more handsome than I).

  It wasn’t a place I could bear in the pearly winter sunlight of 3:00 P.M.—so off we went, the drinks on me. What I remember most about that afternoon was the way we kept getting cut off at every bar, usually after the first drink. I hadn’t been cut off since my college days, and only then in the wee hours when I could hardly balance myself on a stool. But strangers, especially bartenders, were able to see Scott more objectively than I: they knew at a glance he was bad news. And Scott was mostly stoical about this, as though he’d gotten used to it by now. Once—we’d been cut off again, the third or fourth time, and had promised to leave as soon as we finished our pool game—he sized up a shot and said, with a low chuckle, “I know there’s something fucked up about me, Zwieb.” It was the only time I can ever remember his admitting as much.

  Finally we were both so drunk there was no question of being served anywhere. Hungry, we stopped at a seedy takeout place on our way back to Scott’s house. While we sat in a booth waiting for our order, I lapsed into a crying jag, rather like the one I’d had in Santa Fe. The nominal reason was my father’s desertion of me, and Scott was as sympathetic as ever: he assured me that Papa would come to his senses, and said the usual hard things about Sandra. He stroked my head and dabbed at my cheeks with a paper napkin. The fact was, I wouldn’t have cried, then or before, if not for Scott’s presence: the prospect of a night in his company, in that hopeless little house, was crushing.

  And yet I hadn’t foreseen the worst. After a few french fries I passed out on Scott’s sofa—or rather I fell into a kind of preliminary stupor wherein I was just conscious enough to notice a tongue in my mouth that wasn’t my own, yet dazed enough to think this might be a good thing. Perhaps it was Scott’s breath (tainted with beer and fried food) that brought me up short. I shook my head and pushed. Sitting up, I saw Scott return to his chair.

  “Were you kissing me?”

  He shrugged. “It’s no big deal.”

  I didn’t know what to say. I made a show of eating my food.

  “You want a beer?” Scott asked. He was watching TV now.

  “No, thanks. I’d better get going actually.”

  “Sure you can drive?”

  “Oh yeah. I’m not that drunk anymore really.”

  Outside I had to walk in front of Scott’s living room window on the way to my car. I couldn’t resist a glance inside: he was staring at the TV with owlish concentration, but stiffly flourished a hand as I passed.

  part IV

  stille nacht

  A year later Scott was in a medium-security prison. The one time I visited, he went on about the lawsuit he was bringing against the Oklahoma City Police and Department of Corrections. “That’s going into my lawsuit!” he liked to say, calling himself “the white Rodney King.” His own quixotic posturing seemed to amuse him (ditto my mother, in a different way perhaps), while at the same time he seemed quite serious.

  Things had fallen apart a few months after our good Christmas in 1994, at a time when my parents were relatively hopeful. Scott had decided to go back to school. He seemed to realize that he’d never get a decent job without a college degree, and by “decent job” he meant something interesting and exotic, not a mundane compromise like the marines. He planned to maj
or in music and become a record producer. He was picky about schools, too. He refused to attend community college and was “too old” for a vo-tech like the Drahn School of Business; however, his failure to last a full semester in two previous tries at four-year colleges made a third try problematic. Fortunately our father knew someone on the board of trustees at Oklahoma City University, and after a certain amount of haggling he was able to arrange Scott’s enrollment for the fall 1995 semester.

  Scott seemed excited, full of plans. When I saw him that summer he showed me a mahogany lectern he’d bought on credit so he could do his homework standing up, because of his bad back. Well in advance, too, he’d gotten a number of textbooks for his classes on musical theory and the like, along with some noncurricular material about the record business. But it also seemed to depress him, vaguely, that by the time he graduated he’d be pushing forty, and not-so-deep down he doubted he’d graduate at all.

  “What about the time I . . . ?” he’d say to our friend Andrea, whenever she tried to encourage him. Because she went out of her way to seem unshocked by the many disasters of his life, Scott compulsively told her the worst, the better to talk her out of having faith in him. “But you’re so smart,” she’d say, or “That was a long time ago. Put it behind you. It’s never too late to start over.” And Scott would nod—receptively, pensively—then say, “But what about . . . ?”

  The bad news came in late August, a few days before Scott’s classes were scheduled to begin. My mother’s old boyfriend, Dave, called me in New Orleans.

  “I think you’d better sit down,” he said. “There’s been an accident.”

  For a terrible moment I thought he was talking about my mother, who at the time was visiting friends on Long Island. Then I thought he meant my father, worse still, since we’d yet to reconcile; in Marlies’s absence it made sense that Dave would be the first to bring news, since at the time I doubted even tragedy could compel Sandra to call me.

  “Your brother had a car wreck.”

  This was something of an anticlimax, given what I’d been hearing from Andrea, and I remember feeling miffed at Dave for that melodramatic “you’d better sit down.”

  “Really? Is he dead, or what?”

  He wasn’t dead. The rather wacky facts of the case were these: Scott had managed to re-create (and improve on) his colossal smash-up of the Cadillac fourteen years before—that is, he’d lost control on an exit ramp and driven almost head-on into a concrete embankment (no mere guardrail this time). Had he been driving his old BMW, he would have been killed instantly; but his BMW was in the shop. He’d finally gotten around to having it painted, also on credit. As for the rental he drove—at suicidal speed, stone drunk—it was a late-model Ford and therefore had an air bag, which saved his life.

  Dave noted, however, that Scott might have some brain damage. “The bag hit his head pretty hard. His face looks like he fell asleep on a waffle iron.”

  “Is he conscious?”

  “Yes and no. He talks, but he doesn’t make much sense. Repeats himself a lot. You know, his short-term memory is shot.”

  “You told Mom?”

  “Oh yes.” Dave allowed himself a chuckle. “You can imagine: ‘That asshole! He can rot in the hospital for all I care!’ Etcetera, etcetera.”

  “Did she say Unkraut vergeht nicht?”

  “In so many words.”

  But when I spoke to my mother that night, she seemed drained of her usual bluster. She’d been having such a good time on Long Island; it made sense that Scott would spoil it.

  “Pam’s children are so sweet and normal,” she said.

  Pam was her American “sister,” part of a nice Port Washington family that had taken care of my mother as a wayward nineteen-year-old, newly arrived from Germany. Pam, like her parents, was nothing if not conventionally middle class, conventionally decent, and so represented a sort of Road Not Taken in Marlies’s life. Once or twice in New York I’d met Pam’s children—two grown daughters and a son—and I can vouch for the fact that they’re all likable, handsome young people with good jobs.

  “Such beautiful manners!” said my mother. “I mean they wait on me hand and foot. ‘You need another drink, Marlies?’ ‘Here, take my chair.’ That sort of thing.” She sighed. “Even before I heard of this latest . . . shit with Scott, I was thinking how nice it would be to have kids like that.” I was about to point out the invidious implications of that remark when she added, “I mean can you imagine Frank calling his mother a cunt?”

  Frank was Pam’s son, and I certainly couldn’t imagine him calling his mother—or any woman, ever—a cunt. At the same time I couldn’t imagine Pam saying any number of things that Marlies was apt to say on a routine basis, and I was tempted to suggest as much. But I let it go.

  “If only Scott could stop drinking,” I said with only moderate sarcasm, “he’d be just as nice a boy as Frank.”

  “Bullshit!” my mother replied, and when I asked whether she planned to cut her vacation short and see about Scott, she was even more adamant: “Hell no! That asshole! He can rot in the hospital for all I care . . .”

  I felt reassured by this return to form. If Scott’s latest mishap had the effect of waking my mother up, of distancing her from Scott’s awful life, then it was a good thing.

  AFTER A WEEK or so, the worst effects of Scott’s head injury had worn off, and he began calling me on the phone. His voice was a bit slurred and he still repeated himself a lot, but he was coherent enough. What he mainly lacked was the capacity to censor himself, to sift the truth as we all must (alcoholics and drug addicts especially) in order to put forth an acceptable public self. I didn’t listen very carefully, but what I heard was pretty sordid: he missed drugs the way a glutton missed snacks, and spoke in rhapsodic detail about freebasing and needles and so forth; he said a lot about sex that I simply tuned out. Andrea—who often called with updates I didn’t particularly want—was glad to remind me of anything I might have missed. For example, she assured me that Scott had hustled his body for drugs, quite a bit in fact, and quoted him as follows: “‘They have something you want, you have something they want.’” I tried not to imagine the kind of people who’d barter drugs to fuck my brother.

  Later Scott denied all this—certainly he didn’t remember saying it—but there was no denying what was found in his house. There were dildos of every conceivable size, shape, and color: double-dicked, stubbled, strapped, gargantuan, wan, uncircumsized, black, white, yellow. And then there were my brother’s crack stems, twenty or so, all of them blackened with use. There was also a small box of photos: Scott, nude, striking a number of homoerotic poses—e.g., leering over his shoulder with comic salacity while he thrusts his buttocks toward the camera and spreads his cheeks for a good view of his anus. Years later my mother showed me these and couldn’t help giggling: “What an old sow!”

  It was Sandra who discovered that last item—for that I would have liked to be a fly on the wall. She and my father had decided to evict Scott while he was still in the hospital, and Dave was good enough to help her box up his things and haul them back to a storage shed at my mother’s place. (“Let this be a lesson to all of us,” Dave said afterward. “Make sure you hide your dildos and crack pipes before you take off on a drunk-driving spree.”) I’d always assumed such lurid artifacts were the main reason Burck and Sandra had decided to banish Scott for good, and I considered this rather rash and bigoted, all the more so in view of my bitterness toward them at the time. Scott was sick: what he needed was a nice mental hospital where he could watch TV in a haze of medication; more to be pitied than censured.

  But, according to Andrea, my father couldn’t have been more callous. “If you call me here one more time,” he said to Scott (as Andrea told it), when the latter persisted in ringing his office from the hospital, “I’m gonna have the DA come down there and drag your sorry ass away in leg irons.” Andrea’s version of events seemed contrived to persuade me that my kindly, liberal-minded
father had reverted at last to a mean old Babbitt: poshlost.

  But this was not the whole story, as I learned some years later, during one of my rapprochements with Burck.

  “I think it was the head injury that did him in,” he remarked one day, as we sat by a pond at his ranch with Jack, Sandra’s Australian Cattle Dog. “When we visited Scott at the hospital—”

  “You guys went to the hospital?”

  He gave me a puzzled look. “Well, of course we did. We were worried about him. But he was just”—my father winced at the muddy water, shaking his head—“repulsive. Worse than I’d ever seen him, and I thought I’d seen the worst. He yelled at the nurses like I wouldn’t yell at Jack. His language was beyond disgusting. Beyond abusive. Finally he said something to Sandra that I—well, that was just it as far as I was concerned. That was it.”

  He coughed, then abruptly bent over in his chair and clapped his hands. “C’mere, Jack! C’mere, boy!” The dog panted and gamboled at his feet.

  IT WAS TRUE Scott wasn’t a model patient at the hospital. He constantly complained about pain—indeed had suffered a certain amount of trauma to his neck and other parts, never mind his head—and was duly medicated, which snuffed whatever remained of his inhibitions. He staggered around the halls, bellowing, more or less in the nude, whenever he sensed the nurses were neglecting him. He badgered other patients too. Finally (so said Andrea), he and Maryam were caught screwing in his bed, and maybe that’s what led to his expulsion—either that or indigence, once my father made it clear he didn’t intend to pay Scott’s bills anymore.