by Jeff Hobbs
“Well, in L.A. we do it because we’re frustrated with traffic, Stanton,” Aidan pointed out with a harsh and condescending emphasis. “We want to get home. It’s not because we’re pissed off at the world. That’s the difference.”
“Maybe that’s what traffic is,” Suzanne said in her feathery voice. “A little microcosm of each city.”
Aidan shot Suzanne a glance that said: you are not helping me.
“So are you saying that L.A. isn’t an angry place?” Stanton pointed this question directly at Aidan.
“Not like New York, my man.”
“So I guess the rage that caused your city to burn in 1991 was predicated on just wanting to get home for dinner?”
“I don’t get it,” Aidan said.
“Car horns in New York? It’s just noise. You supplied a meaning for something that doesn’t exist. It’s kind of like a lie and I’m just pointing out that I don’t think it’s true.”
Aidan Hoevel replied, “You are so off base, dude, that I can’t even respond to that.”
“Boys, boys.” This was Angela Hoevel, distant and meek.
I meet Mrs. Hoevel (she kept her married name after the divorce) when she visits Yale halfway through our junior year, and the three of us go out to lunch at an upscale Mexican place near campus. She is a portly woman with pale skin and long blond hair fading into gray. When Ethan introduces me outside his dorm Angela Hoevel shakes my hand as she laughs, “And I’m Ethan’s mother, Mrs. How-evil,” and I giggle politely even though I don’t understand what she’s getting at. As we walk across Elm Street to the restaurant, and as we sit in a corner booth in the back, and while Ethan and I dig into the chips and salsa, Angela Hoevel keeps laughing.
Her laughter is marked by a lack of infectiousness that—I know from Ethan—is rooted in the moment forty-three years earlier when Angela McGinniss is born in Ireland to a frightened and poor Catholic couple, and she carries their fear with her when she escapes Dublin and sails across the Atlantic to New York City. She loses it momentarily when she lets a man named Aidan Hoevel hit on her at a bar in Hell’s Kitchen, where she has gone with a few friends after a grueling day at her temp job. (By coincidence that bar—which would close a few years later—actually existed on the block that The Riverview Tower would later be erected on.) After a brief courtship she eventually marries the small-minded, mean-spirited Aidan Hoevel (not a big stretch, since this is really the only kind of man Angela McGinniss has ever known) and then moves with him to Los Angeles, where, through a friend’s generosity, he starts selling real estate and where they have two sons, Aidan Jr. and Ethan—“Irish twins” born less than a year apart. A few years after Ethan is born, Aidan Hoevel Sr. predictably decides that, with his real estate properties thriving in Long Beach, he likes drinking and having sex with other women besides his wife (who hasn’t lost her pregnancy weight, he keeps chiding), and so he abandons his family after agreeing to give Angela one of his town houses located a few miles south of Long Beach, because it is the fastest way to get out of their lives. He then inhabits another town house of his across town (living suddenly with a young secretary in his booming business), making it absolutely clear that he never loved Angela and that he does not want any part in the lives of their sons.
And Angela Hoevel, instead of going back home to Ireland, stays there in Long Beach without any family or money for help, and she devotes her life to her sons. She does this because the weather there is gorgeous, their home is spacious and has a backyard for the boys to run around in, and also because Angela Hoevel is something akin to agoraphobic.
Ethan becomes the one who loves his mother and wants to protect her and do everything in his power to please her, the one who performs well in school, who never breaks curfews, who only brings quiet, well-behaved friends (boys like himself) to the house on Fourth Avenue.
Aidan Jr., on the other hand, is the one who toilet-papers the house across town that his father inhabits, the one who on Halloween tosses a brick through the bay window of that house with the words fuck you carved into it six times, once on each face, the one who vows to embarrass his mother by losing his virginity at fourteen, the one who focuses his rage through a reckless philosophy: do whatever you want to do and make sure to let as many people down as you’re able to while doing it.
After a semester of community college, Aidan drops out and signs on as a ship hand on a three-year-long expedition tracking the “state of the world’s natural resources” (whatever that means) and Angela Hoevel is actually happy to be free of him until Aidan calls to borrow money for a plane ticket home just two weeks into that three-year-long expedition—during the summer and fall that Ethan heads east to Yale on a scholarship—having been kicked off the freighter for “disruptive behavior” (which Aidan never defines to her).
While Ethan is taking his first engineering class and making sure to call his mother once a week, Aidan is—in no particular order of importance—living at Angela’s, working part-time gigs as a mechanic, occasionally bartending, and screwing half the female population of Redondo Beach.
So it is infinitely surprising to both brothers when Aidan Hoevel (who’s just been kicked out of an older divorcée’s condo and is now back at Angela’s, freeloading, stoned, deciding his next move) is the second person to whom Ethan comes out.
“Should I tell her?” Ethan wonders out loud before the words I’m gay have even registered with Aidan. “Don’t I have to tell her?”
“You tell her,” Aidan says icily as he stomps around the town house with the cordless phone pressed hard to his ear while his mother watches Judge Judy upstairs in the enclosed solitude of her bedroom, crying behind the closed doors (as she tends to do nightly), “and I swear to God I will never speak to you again. I will no longer have a brother. Are you listening to me? Do you understand? If you wreck Mom with this, I will never forgive you.”
Aidan’s reaction shocks Ethan into silence, and the silence leads them to a mutual conclusion: they’ll keep it as it has always been (Ethan the model son, Aidan the fuckup).
With this promise, Aidan relents enough to tell Ethan (under the presumption that Aidan is the more worldly of the two), “Maybe you need some time away from that fucking liberal place—maybe you need to go abroad” (even though the farthest Aidan ever sailed from California was Mexico City) “and get your head screwed on straight.” His unfamiliar gentility belies the true motivation: Aidan wants his fag brother as far away from home as possible.
So Ethan Hoevel goes dutifully to Peru. He never tells his mother he’s gay and begins to believe that maybe Aidan is right. After all, Angela is Catholic, and even though she never instilled the fear into her boys, she never lost the faith—the only day she risks the world outside is Sunday—and having a son who “lies with men” might send her straight into the hell of her nightmares.
Of course what happens then is completely unexpected and, to Aidan Hoevel, horrifying: Ethan comes back to New York and his face starts appearing in magazines his mother has never heard of, and some of Angela’s friends start sending her photographs (taken by Bruce Weber or Terry Richardson or Ryan McGinley) which she then pins on the refrigerator in the kitchen while giggling with pride. Meanwhile, Aidan Hoevel is faced with these articles whenever he visits his mother, and between the lines—a place that Angela doesn’t know exists—starts to see the secret slowly emerging from its hiding place. With Ethan’s fame, Aidan Hoevel must confront the fact that the truth can be delayed but it cannot be stopped.
And since Aidan Hoevel fears change—he fears it immensely—his revelation makes him start hating his brother in the same way he will always hate his father, and nausea washes over him every time he sees the framed photo of the five-year-old Irish twins in matching red soccer jerseys on the mantelpiece above the fireplace.
Since Ethan had refused to engage his brother in any conversation whatsoever, the Fourth of July afternoon was revolving around Aidan and Stanton, and their asinine digressions were ti
ring everybody except Angela Hoevel, who giggled as Ethan poured her another glass of Riesling. She took a long sip (downing half of it) and said again, “Boys, boys.” The more Angela Hoevel laughed, the more it revealed that her terrible life had been saved by her son Ethan’s success (for instance, the pseudo agoraphobia that had practically made her a prisoner in the house south of Long Beach vanished when she was near him).
She noticed me standing shyly by the elevator and struggled to her feet. She was heavier than I remembered but she moved fast and suddenly I was receiving the hard hug of the inebriated Angela Hoevel, who was nearly lifting me off the floor as she cried out, “Oh, you look just the same as you did—when was it?—seven, eight years ago?”
“Eight,” Ethan said, studying me with a blank expression. “Mom—could you let go of the guest, please?”
“Well, you look eight years younger, Mrs. Hoevel,” I said as courteously as possible.
Angela introduced me to Aidan, who did not remember me, and Suzanne, who was very pretty in that So-Cal way: dirty-blond hair, tan, a thin body made for the beach. Aidan shook my hand hard and said, “Hey, man.”
“How’s your tooth?” Stanton smiled at me but didn’t get up.
Before I could answer, Ethan stood. “We’re all here now. Let’s go up to the roof.”
Ethan ushered us toward the kitchen and stairs. Everyone except our host and me walked up the spiral staircase that led to the roof. When Ethan handed me two bottles of Domaines Ott to carry up along with a tray of burgers and hot dogs, our eyes met and he smiled nervously, and all the questions I had about receiving an invitation to this lunch were answered.
I was the buffer between his old life and the new one he had created.
I was the buffer between the family and the boyfriend.
“Question, Ethan.” He looked up. “Did you ever fantasize about inviting Samona to this lunch? I mean, couldn’t she have made things easier here than I’m capable of making them?”
He just smiled and shook his head. “Yeah, but I couldn’t get rid of Stanton. He knew they were coming.”
As I climbed the stairs, I reasoned that Ethan was using me and I somehow deserved it; I would owe Ethan for the rest of my life because of how I’d failed him.
“L.A. sucks,” Stanton was saying on that beautiful July day as we arranged ourselves around a massive tree trunk that had been transformed into a dining table, and it sat in the middle of the roof deck surrounded by six chairs Ethan had designed. “All people do there is make terrible movies and bad fashion statements.”
“That’s why we have you hip New Yorkers to tell us what’s cool then, right?” Aidan was taking charge of Ethan’s grill. As he squirted a steady stream of charcoal lighter with one hand and used the other to alternately smoke a cigarette and drink a beer, he made a face. “What’s a ‘good’ fashion statement anyway? I don’t even know what that means.”
“Well, first of all, volcano red does not work for anybody, okay?” Stanton scanned Aidan’s T-shirt while Suzanne and Angela giggled pleasantly.
Aidan took a drag off his Marlboro and winked menacingly at Stanton.
I heard a deep sigh from Ethan before he asked me, “So—how’s life been treating you the last few weeks?”
I was surprised. “The usual—a constant struggle.” I shrugged. “But I guess I get by.”
Aidan threw his cigarette into the grill, waited a moment, and shook his head with disgust. “It didn’t catch.” He lit another cigarette and threw the match in, this time igniting the charcoal, which sent a fireball puffing up toward Aidan’s face. He stepped back and then settled into one of the chairs that circled the table, trying to shift into a comfortable position. Immediately: “How do you sell these things? They make my ass hurt.”
“Actually”—I breathed in, ignoring him—“I just got a job with this hedge fund.”
Ethan was watching me, waiting. “Which one?”
“The Leonard Company,” I said casually.
Ethan sat forward, shocked. “What?”
“Don’t freak. I’m just working part-time on their Web site.”
“How did this happen?” Ethan leaned forward, animated in a way I didn’t expect.
“David Taylor helped me pin it down,” I said. “Do you remember David Taylor?”
“No. Who is David Taylor?” Ethan said, slowly shutting himself off again.
“He went to school with us,” I said, savoring this. “He married Samona—Samona Ashley.”
“Samona. Is that a black chick’s name?” Aidan asked.
Ethan smiled and regained his cool. My lame little joke was over.
“I think it’s wonderful that you all can stay in touch with your college friends,” Angela Hoevel said. “That’s wonderful. Yale was just as wonderful as I imagined it would be.”
“Well, Mom, it’s a very liberal institution.” Aidan pushed himself off the chair and was now standing at the grill again, turning over the briquettes with a tong. “There are a lot of liberal activities going on there that bring people together.”
Silence hung over us once Aidan stopped talking. No one knew what to say.
“So you’re at this Leonard Company?” Aidan turned to me. “How could you take a job like that?”
“Well, it’s just freelance, Aidan. I’m working from home.”
“Hedge fund?” he went on, not listening. “You work your ass off. You never see the sun. Jeez—is that what four years at a liberal arts school gets you? A crummy freelance job in an office with no light?” Aidan tilted his face toward the bright afternoon sky. “I like the sun.”
“Aidan Junior is working very hard these days, too, aren’t you, honey?” Angela Hoevel leaned boozily toward her eldest son.
“Ethan, will you stop pouring her wine?” Aidan asked, before telling his mother, “Mom, I told you never to call me Junior, and frankly I don’t think anyone in this crowd would care.”
“Oh, please tell us, Aidan.” This was Stanton.
Aidan Hoevel had gotten a new job in the sales department of an “energy trading firm” where supposedly the “free energy market” had caused a demand for people like Aidan to help “expedite” the sale of “energy parts.” The way Aidan explained this made no sense to any of us, but he went on. “Do you understand? It happens over the phone. It’s like trading a couple of apples for an orange.”
The burgers were hissing on the high flames now. Ethan excused himself to get the coleslaw and potato salad from downstairs.
Stanton piped up, “So you’re in…telesales?” He snickered.
Angela Hoevel cut off Aidan’s angry retort with a laugh, and then she waved her hand around and we all stared at her, incredulous, until Aidan said, “Look, it’s a pretty good job.” His needy gaze fell on me. “I mean, it’s not up there with being a writer” (Aidan gestured at me) “or designing clothes” (Aidan gestured at Stanton) “but I do okay for now.”
“Wait a minute.” Stanton’s eyes were closed as if he were hearing but not processing what Aidan was saying. “I don’t get it. And you’ve got something in your stubble.”
Aidan wiped his face. “Look, my brother makes furniture for a living and this guy’s a writer for a hedge fund or something and you make clothes—jeez, what’s so fucking impressive about any of it?”
His semiarticulateness astounded me. I glanced at Ethan as he returned with the two bowls. He set them on the table, and then he stared out over the river, sipping a glass of wine. The Hoboken ferry was chugging along, filled with people coming into Manhattan to enjoy the pretty holiday.
“Do any of you guys ever think there’s someone out there with a bomb in his backpack?” This was Suzanne, staring at the skyline, spacing out. “Do you think there’s someone with a bomb in his backpack boarding a subway as we speak?”
“All the time,” I said. “Because there probably is someone out there with a bomb in his backpack and he’s waiting.”
“Oh, do you really think that?�
�� Angela Hoevel asked this as if she were disappointed in me.
“Don’t worry, Mom,” Aidan said, turning away from her to grab another beer. He popped open the can and started slapping slices of cheese on the burgers. “It’s not gonna happen to you.”
Before they left, Angela asked Ethan whether he had kept his senior project. She wanted to see it. Suzanne and I followed Ethan and his mother into the design studio while Aidan used the bathroom and Stanton cleared the table.
Through the thin fiberglass wall, we heard the low murmur of Stanton confronting Aidan at the bathroom door. “I know what you’re doing and I don’t really like you.”
We also heard Aidan’s far less muted reply: “Dude, do you really want me to kick your flaming little ass?”
Ethan shook his head, exasperated, but Angela didn’t appear to notice. She was gazing intently at Ethan’s senior project, which was perched on a high shelf over his desk. She asked me to bring it down, but I couldn’t look at it because, even though the wing still seemed sleek and futuristic, it would always be haunted by our past.
Ethan ended up pulling out a chair to reach it. As he wiped the dust from the glass, Angela leaned forward until her face was almost pressing against it.
“Can you make it move?” she whispered.
“I have to plug it in, Mom,” Ethan complained.
I finally focused on the thing and the failure it represented.
“But who knows when I’ll get back here again?” Angela murmured.