Ask Bob: A Novel

by Peter Gethers

  * * *

  Here’s another human truism: Most of us want to be exactly what we aren’t.

  Nonhuman animals are capable of doing all sorts of things that aren’t so great. I have not treated any large zoo animals—no lions, tigers, or gorillas—so I have never dealt directly with an animal capable of ripping apart human flesh or doing serious damage to our musculoskeletal system. I have, however, dealt with a pit bull who once took out a small child’s eye, as well as an otherwise lovely Chesapeake Bay retriever who picked up a small wirehaired fox terrier and broke its neck. I have treated a cat gone mad, who suddenly began to leap upon and claw the humans it had lived with for nearly ten years in bliss and contentment. I have seen animals fight to the death, and I have been bitten, scratched, growled at, and hissed at countless times. But I have never seen an animal be anything but true to its own nature. Animals do not lie. I cannot say the same thing for people. Not people I’ve observed or talked to or even loved. Or maybe it’s just that lying is, in fact, a deep-rooted part of human nature.

  I don’t know when Ted began to make things up. I don’t know when he became disenchanted with who he was. But I’m fairly certain that the former followed soon after the latter.

  Once, when he was home from college, we were in his room, talking about things. We’d always been confidants, although I was usually the one confiding; Teddy tended to absorb information rather than reveal it, using what he learned, at some point, to get something or just wreak havoc. He was nervous during this conversation, jumpy, but then Teddy had become perpetually nervous and twitchy—he always seemed to be breathing harder than the situation called for, as if something dangerous was lurking nearby. At one point he told me a story about some restaurant he liked to go to near the University of Wisconsin campus.

  “It’s great,” he said. “I go in there for breakfast, like, almost every day, and I don’t even have to order. As soon as I walk in, they just bring me a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich on an English muffin.”

  Somehow I knew he was lying. He looked uncomfortable, and his eyes were flitting around the room as he talked. I don’t know how I knew, because it seemed like such an inconsequential thing to lie about, but I did. So I asked him a couple of questions.

  “But what if you don’t want the sandwich that day? They’ll just bring you something else?”

  His shoulders twitched a bit and he said, “Oh, yeah, yeah, they don’t care.”

  “So you know the waitress?”

  “Yeah, I see her, like, every day.”

  “What’s her name?”

  He took a couple of breaths that were even deeper than usual and said, “Andrea.”

  “And what makes the sandwiches so good?”

  “They use Canadian bacon. Cook it perfectly. And they put jalapeños on it. I mean, they do for me, not for everybody.”

  I was certain that none of these answers were true, but the details he provided were both trivial and vivid, which is probably why the conversation stayed with me. When Teddy graduated from Wisconsin, I went out there for a couple of days to be with him; the first morning, I asked him to take me to the restaurant that made the great egg sandwiches. He looked at me like I was crazy, and then maybe something deep in his brain remembered. Or didn’t. Maybe he just knew I was questioning him about something he’d made up, without knowing exactly what it was. So he looked at me blankly and then, distracted, said, “Oh, it closed a few months ago.”

  It’s not hard to create an alternate reality. You start by telling small falsehoods. I went out with Cindy last night—she let me get to second base. Or: I did fifty push-ups. And then they get a little bigger: I went to Harvard … I was in the Gulf War … I’m running for president and I never cheated on my wife. If they hear it often enough, people will accept almost anything as fact. If you can convince other people that you’re one thing, it’s awfully difficult for them to ever accept you as something else. But this also explains why family ties can be so binding and restrictive and scary. It’s almost impossible to convince your family that you’re someone other than who you really are.

  In college, Teddy got into trouble almost from day one. Nothing serious, nothing criminal. Just a series of fuckups, followed by a string of lies to try to avoid punishment for the fuckups. But he always got caught. He wasn’t allowed to buy a car; he bought one anyway and the insurance company called our dad to verify some information. Busted. My father told him it was a mistake to live with his girlfriend, so Ted told him he wouldn’t. Then my dad came to visit and, of course, realized Ted was living with the girlfriend. Busted again. Each time he got caught, his relationship with my father got worse. Each time he uncovered a lie, my father lost more faith in what Ted said, and Ted became less likely to tell the truth.

  When it came to Ted, my father grew more and more controlling and increasingly unforgiving. Their relationship turned into an epic battle of wills, but in the end my father had a much stronger will, at least in the two-man war in which they engaged.

  Euthanizing a small animal in its owner’s arms is painful, but watching two human beings spend their adult lives doing their utmost to dominate and destroy each other is tragic.

  The more my brother’s life—and, I suppose, my father’s—went in uncontrollable directions, the more controlling my father became with everyone in the family. It never got physical, not even close; there was no melodrama and nothing overtly traumatic. But my dad’s anger became a nearly constant presence in our lives. I escaped the brunt of it, partly because Ted was there to absorb it. But I also never took my dad’s temper all that seriously, maybe because I never really cared about being accepted the way Ted did. I didn’t argue with my dad; his neurosis seemed amusing to me, and distancing, so I didn’t pay much attention to him when he tried to dominate. My brother couldn’t do that. He had to resist, and then he had to capitulate.

  The insurmountable barrier that ultimately sprang up between them came when my brother quit his job as a grade school teacher to become an actor. Oddly enough, Ted was a fantastic teacher. He related to the kids; he loved their enthusiasm and the way they looked up to him. I think what he thrilled to the most was being perceived, for the first time in his life, as the most adult person in his surroundings. But after his third year of teaching, one day he simply walked away from it. He’d never taken an acting class in his life. He’d never even shown much interest in anything related to acting—I don’t think he watched TV or went to more than two or three movies a year, and I’m not sure if he’d ever seen a Broadway show in his entire life. Nonetheless, he moved to New York and decided he was now an actor. Ted’s sudden career change drove my dad crazy—like all parents, he hated to see his child repeat his own mistakes. Even so, he tried to help Ted as much as possible. But every time he offered his help, the war grew more intense. Ted wouldn’t deign to appear on my dad’s soap opera; he was only interested in theater or what he called “quality film work.” My dad offered him a part at his upstate summer theater, but Ted rejected the job; he said the role wasn’t big enough.

  Ted got a few small parts in off-off-Broadway shows. I remember one in which his character killed his father and left him to die in a heap of garbage—very inspiring, and I think that was the only play he actually invited the whole family to come see. But that was it. He started going out to L.A. periodically, usually for “pilot season,” but nothing seemed to come of it, except now, he told me in a phone conversation, he knew the woman who ran a great breakfast stand at the Farmer’s Market, and she would put jalapeños in his egg sandwich without his having to ask.

  Ted never studied acting, never showed any interest in the process or the actual work, and never discussed acting or actors or films when we’d get together and talk. We talked about restaurants where the staff knew him and women who wanted to fuck him; we talked about the great grass he was getting and his new best friend. But every six months or so he’d have a newer best friend who I’d never heard of. When I’d ask him ab
out his previous best friend, he’d always say, “Oh, he turned out to be a real asshole.” I’d rarely find out why except in the vaguest terms: The guy had gotten pissed off at something Teddy had done, or he hadn’t done something Teddy wanted him to do, or the guy’s girlfriend or wife had gotten pissed at something Teddy had or hadn’t done. They always disappeared from Ted’s life as quickly as they entered it.

  Teddy also got cruder. It was as if he lost any kind of self-censor. He told inappropriate jokes. He would tell embarrassing stories about other people—often in front of them.

  One weekend when I was in college I came into the city to see him. Well, I was really there to see this woman named Robin, who’d been dating a friend of my parents’. I was nineteen and she was around twenty-seven, and the guy she was dating was probably fifty. But a month or so before, she’d come to my college town in Vermont—she produced TV commercials and they were shooting something set on a small college campus—and we’d hung out for a week. After a few days of having fun, we went to bed together. She was my first older woman (and, now that I think about it, my last; I was not exactly a Don Juan) and I felt incredibly sophisticated and excited. At that time, having sex with anyone would have made me feel incredibly sophisticated and excited, but because Robin was seeing a friend of my dad’s and our affair was illicit, it was particularly exhilarating. Naturally, she asked me not to tell anyone. Naturally, I told Teddy at the first opportunity. What was the point of doing something thrilling and illicit at age nineteen if you couldn’t share it with your older brother?

  Before coming down to New York to see Ted that weekend, I invited Robin to dinner with us, assuring her that my brother knew absolutely nothing about our little fling. Right before she arrived, I reminded him that mum was the word.

  Actually, I got so nervous that all I could say was “Look, you’re not gonna say anything, right?” When he didn’t answer right away, I said, “I mean, you promised.”

  He looked at me, annoyed, as if I’d insulted him big-time. But I had to get this out.

  “I’m serious, Ted. It’s important to me.”

  His face softened. “I know. Don’t worry.”

  When I still looked worried, he punched my arm, playfully, but just enough to hurt and let me know he was still my older brother.

  I apologized. Robin joined us—she’d met Ted before, as the date of our parents’ friend—and sat down, and before we ordered, while she was studying the menu, Ted said, “So, you fucked my little brother’s brains out, huh?”

  It was not a good moment. She was embarrassed and hurt and angry, and she left halfway through the meal. I was livid. When I confronted Ted, he just said, “Fuck her if she can’t take a joke.” And then: “Oh yeah. You already did.”

  I didn’t speak to him for a few weeks after that. But Ted had a talent for making you forgive him. He also had this amazing knack for making you believe that almost anything that went wrong was your own fault. In this instance, he convinced me that I’d made a serious error—and violated Robin’s confidence—by telling him about my two-night stand. The fact that he had violated my confidence was irrelevant. In time, it became a story he’d tell to show off his willingness to stretch any normal limit. He also used the story to subtly prove some kind of weakness on my part: My trusting him became part of the joke, as did my inability to find the whole thing zany and crazy and hypocrisy-puncturing. From my perspective, I was just a kid who’d lucked into a wonderful and wild thing that Ted had destroyed for his own amusement. In Teddy’s version, he had simply used the truth to seize the high ground: I was having an illicit affair; I was lying; I was cheating and so was Robin. All he’d done was call us on it. If we couldn’t deal with it, too bad for us.

  There was enough truth in his version to stop me cold.

  * * *

  When I was twenty and Ted was twenty-six, he got married.

  It was all very sudden and, of course, my father thought it was a big mistake, which is probably what helped to make it so sudden. My father said Ted should slow down, so my brother rushed right into it.

  The surprising thing was that Karen, Ted’s bride-to-be, was absolutely wonderful. Actually, most of the women Teddy attracted were pretty wonderful: beautiful and smart and caring. They all shared certain traits. They would shake their heads at Ted’s wildness and unpredictability—they knew there was something off about his insistence on always blowing things up—but at the same time they were attracted to it. I think it’s because they all believed they could tame him. The look on their lips and in their eyes always said, “Oh, well, that’s Ted, what can you do?” But on a deeper level that look also said, “Well, I am going to do something—I’m the one who’s going to change him.”

  Much of the time, Ted had a kind of puppy-dog, sappy, “I’m in love” expression when he was around his girlfriends. I always thought it was fake and kind of awful—as if true love and devotion weren’t enough on their own and he had to demonstrate them as visibly and publicly as possible. But the recipients always seemed to eat it up with a spoon. When that look disappeared, though, it sometimes got scary; his puppy-dog demeanor could instantly turn into a pit bull’s rage. I once saw him throw a punch at his college girlfriend while they were having an argument. She’d caught him in a lie and wasn’t backing down as he tossed out his excuses. She was standing against the wall, demanding an explanation, and his fist suddenly flew through the air, a short, violent jab. It missed her face, as it was intended to, and rammed into the wall, cracking the plaster. It must have hurt like hell, although Teddy was so wired he didn’t let on. Her face showed real fear; she didn’t know the punch was going to go awry when it was launched. But I also saw her next expression, one that manifested itself instantly: I’m sorry. It must have been my fault. Teddy calmed down and whispered to her and, within minutes, they were making love in the bedroom while I was standing in the living room next to the cracked plaster wall, not knowing what to do and feeling like a total schmuck.

  Karen fit the pattern, and I couldn’t understand it. She was a very special person: sweet, observant, and clever. Not an intellectual; her looks and interests had taken her in a different direction. But she was smart, and in my eyes she was rich. Though she was only twenty-six, she was a senior publicist for a big record company. She raked in the bucks and the perks, and she and Ted lived very well. They got a gorgeous apartment—at least by my college standards, which were admittedly pretty low—on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. They had a refrigerator with an ice machine built into it, which I thought only millionaires could afford. And Karen used a salad spinner to dry her lettuce, which seemed the height of luxury. (Not that I ever actually made a salad, but if I had I would have washed it in the sink and dried it with a paper towel—if I’d ever thought to dry it, which I wouldn’t have.) Sometimes she traveled to Europe and South America for work, and her friends were models, photographers, songwriters, musicians, and filmmakers. They were all successful, which meant that Teddy was always the slight outsider in this group, always on the verge of success rather than actually riding a wave of success. Always up for a part, always ready to make it when he finally landed the big job. But somehow never actually working. His role in this new crowd was to shake things up, to make the outrageous statement, to point out hypocrisy, to raise his middle finger to authority. To be the wild man.

  But that role can grow old quickly, especially as we gradually turn into the people we’ve always rebelled against, which is what happens all too often at some point in the aging process. Karen came from middle-class, midwestern WASPs who weren’t thrilled with her marriage to an out-of-work Jew who had told his fiancée’s mother that he’d agree to get married in a church if he could wear a gorilla suit. By the time Ted and Karen got married, Karen had already done her rebelling; now she was ready to return to the fold. So before too long Ted began to annoy her with his behavior. He would do anything for a laugh—embarrass her publicly, torture her in private—and always make her fe
el uncomfortable and guilty when she didn’t see the humor in what he did. And worse: He would point out that she was reacting the way her parents would have reacted. That was one of Ted’s strengths; he manipulated you into feeling that you were behaving like your parents.

  Once, he threw her a surprise birthday party. I helped organize it. Ted and Karen were supposed to go out to dinner, and just before they left I was supposed to show up at their apartment with Karen’s best friend, a gorgeous model named Melissa. (Unfortunately for me, no chance of a repeat older woman–college boy fling; she liked me fine in a pat-on-the-head, cute-younger-brother way, while I pined away for her love and attention.) But when we rang their doorbell, we were accompanied by thirty of their best friends, all carrying different kinds of food and drink. (Ted had cleverly made sure that he wouldn’t have to pay for a penny of the party.) What none of us knew was that Ted had bought Karen a beautiful pearl necklace as a present—using their joint checking account—and he’d spent the previous hour trying to convince her to open the door wearing nothing but the pearls. She kept saying, “But Bob will be there,” and Ted kept saying, “Oh, don’t be such a prude—he’ll go wild.” Amazingly enough, he almost talked her into it, but then at the last second she changed her mind and threw on a T-shirt and a pair of jeans before opening the door to be greeted by a huge crowd shouting, “Surprise!” She turned to Ted in a fury, started screaming at him, and bolted into the bedroom. He just looked at the crowd and shrugged, as if he had absolutely no idea what she was so upset about.

  I saw Ted and Karen often, and over time Karen and I became close friends. We’d talk on the phone at least once a week, and she would confide in me. I’d stay with them when I came to the city. Ted would watch TV or strum his guitar—he could play several instruments well, but he was a superb guitarist—while Karen and I chatted. And despite Ted’s obvious flaws, I was still a little in awe of my big brother: his lifestyle, his gorgeous wife, his joie de vivre, his seeming unconcern over his lack of direction and success. His seeming unconcern about anything. As far as I could tell, he had everything he wanted and needed—at least up to this point in his life—and he was embracing it all with a lusty bear hug.