Ladies and Gentlemen

by Adam Ross

  “So finally the three of us sit down for coffee. Uzi, Lisa informs us, had been called away on business at the last minute and couldn’t join us, which was all we heard about him that afternoon. After we’d been talking for a while, Maria goes, ‘Wait, where’s the dog?’ And Lisa says, ‘Oh, we don’t let her play in the house.’ And Maria asks, ‘Well, is she out back? I didn’t see her.’ And Lisa says, ‘No. She’s downstairs.’ And Maria’s like, ‘What do you mean?’ And Lisa says, ‘During the day we keep her in the basement.’ So Maria looks at me, then at Lisa, and finally says, ‘Well, c’mon, let’s go see the girl.’

  “I’ll never forget this until the day I die. Lisa crossed her arms and led us down a narrow wooden staircase to the basement. It was dry and very cool, perfectly clean and bare, as if the house had been vacated or nothing in their lives ever made it to storage. A dim light was shining through the dirty transom windows looking out into the front yard and the flower garden. And in the middle of the room, in the near dark, I could see the kennel—probably the same crate they’d flown her over in.

  “A single exposed bulb hung from the ceiling above it, and the moment Lisa flipped the switch I could see the light reflected in the dog’s eyes through the bars. It was so small there was barely enough room for her to move. Utterly rigid, she looked at us with her ears pricked up, waiting for Lisa to come to the gate. There was so much love in her eyes, so much patience, as Lisa drew closer, her arms still crossed, and bent down to peer inside. We all stood quietly, and the dog, completely alert, frozen, just waiting, didn’t make a sound.

  “But we waited too. Maria and I were speechless, horrified, waiting like the dog for Lisa to do something, until finally she said, ‘There she is.’ She gestured toward the animal with her head. ‘That’s Eva.’ She waved at her halfheartedly, her other arm still pressed across her chest. ‘Hello, Eva,’ she said. This sent a pulse of movement through the cage, which scratched against the floor, jumped slightly. Then Maria looked at Lisa and said, ‘Let her out. Now.’

  “The moment Lisa opened the gate you’d have thought the dog was shot from a gun. She ran out and past us up those creaky stairs. Her back legs were asleep, so she lost her footing and tripped as she dragged herself up, her hindquarters splayed out behind her. And then, at the top of the landing, she waited for us in the kitchen.

  “The dog was completely out of control. She was so submissive that as soon as I got upstairs and made eye contact with her she pissed all over the floor. She was so desperate for company that she mouthed like a pup, jumping and pawing at us all, barking and running wild in tight circles as if she were chasing her tail, and then she squatted to shit. Meanwhile Lisa was leaning against the door, calmly watching the whole scene as Maria and I tried to settle Eva down. Lisa just stood there, slowly shaking her head. ‘You see? This is why we can’t let her in the house. She pees everywhere. She jumps. She knocks things over. She S-H-I-Ts on the floor. It’s just terrible.’ And I said to her, ‘My God, Lisa, how can you treat an animal like this?’ The dog had her mouth on my wrist, pulling at me. And Lisa told me, ‘Honestly, Nicholas, I was very patient with her, but it didn’t help a bit.’

  “Maria and I couldn’t stay after that. We looked at each other, and without saying a word we had this silent exchange: Do we take the dog with us? No, we can’t. But we will never speak with this person again.

  “So we left. We made these embarrassed, hurried good-byes, then drove down toward the bay. We didn’t say anything for several minutes. I think we were both in shock. And then Maria broke down, sobbing her heart out. You remember how you cried?” Nicholas said.

  But she wasn’t looking at him, just sitting there, looking at the image on the television screen, swirling her wine.

  “Anyway,” Nicholas said, “we haven’t spoken to Lisa since. She still sends us Christmas cards, though I don’t think she gives us a thought. I mean, I’m sure it never occurs to her that we’re people she no longer knows. We’re just another thing on her list of a million things to do.”

  It was snowing harder now than before. I could feel the heat escaping through the front door, could see the accumulation rising on the sill and honeycombing the panes, streaming down through the streetlight like so much dust.

  “So that’s the story,” Nicholas said.

  Carla and I cleared the rest of the dishes. We told Maria to stay in her chair and rest, and asked Nicholas not to move, though from the living room he said we should just leave the whole mess by the sink; he’d take care of it in the morning. Maria had leaned her head back against her chair, and within minutes she was asleep. We didn’t even consider waking her up to say good-bye.

  Carla and I walked home. It was beautiful outside, with no cars on the road and no traffic noise at all, and for a long time we just absorbed this quiet world falling around us. The tension I’d felt between us had dissipated in the cold, which forced us to lock arms as we slipped and slid together. Our laughter at each surprising misstep sounded like the only laughter on earth, and we spoke only of the night and the snow until we got close to home. We stopped to look at our house blanketed in powder, as if to make sure we’d taken its true measure. And then Carla said she loved me, that she wanted me to finish my book, that she knew I could. She wanted us to have a child soon. She hated Nicholas, I had to know she did, and she didn’t want her life to be like Maria’s. I assured her that would never happen. I gave her my word, and to make sure she believed me I enumerated all of Nicholas’s failures. I rehashed all the unpleasant things he didn’t know we knew about him, like I was going down a checklist of faults I didn’t have. I talked for a long time, longer than I should have. I kept talking even after my eyes no longer held hers, Carla staring instead at her feet. And in that moment of weakness, I hoped that she might look on me afterward and feel lucky.

  When in Rome

  Regarding my brother, Kevin, my father would always say, “You have to try to be available to him.” I thought he meant that there would inevitably come a time—a very bad time—when Kevin would need my help. Then, my father hoped, I’d have a chance to finally reach him, that he’d take my good advice, whatever it might be, and begin to turn his life around.

  I resented this, of course, and thought most of Kevin’s problems stemmed from the fact that, for as long as I could remember, he’d always been treated differently than I was, held to a lower standard, and that what my parents needed to do, just once, was to let him suffer some consequences. But our parents died suddenly last year, so lacking any last words on this, or anything else that might constitute their final wishes, I took this urging of my father’s to heart and promised myself that, despite failing miserably at it while they were still alive, I’d do my best to honor it in the future.

  Any older brother who’s telling the truth could list a million such failures, but there’s one instance I’ll describe in particular. I’d taken a job in Los Angeles during the summer after my second year of law school, mostly to be close to Kevin, who was managing a restaurant on Rodeo Drive. Kevin started working in restaurants when he was fourteen, busing tables on weekends, then working as a waiter; he’d go in right after school and return home late at night. He never had time for homework, though my parents always managed to act surprised when his dismal report cards arrived. At eighteen, he was managing his first restaurant, and there was good and bad in all of this. He never liked school much—he has ADHD and always resisted taking medication, with predictable results—so his success in this other realm helped his self-esteem. But he also got too great a taste of the wider world when he was too young, exposed to too many rudderless people and too much money, and this killed any interest he might’ve had in going to college. I’m not saying you can’t have a full life working in restaurants, and obviously countless successful people have forgone higher education. I just thought it was premature for Kevin to be narrowing his choices so dramatically. I always told him he’d regret not going to school, though I couldn’t really ex
plain why to him at the time, and in any case he never listened to me. Another thing my father would say about Kevin: he listens only when he’s in despair.

  As he was that summer. He’d been audited by the IRS in the spring, and it turned out he owed close to twenty-one grand in back taxes—which he didn’t have, of course—on top of tens of thousands in credit card debt. So much cash had passed through his hands during the six years of his working life that it didn’t make sense he had nothing to show for it. I didn’t realize that most of his money had gone to drugs and, at that point, was still going there.

  He was living with his best friend from high school, Troy Warburg, a guy who did him no good. They’d bonded as class clowns and poor students, both exceedingly popular. An impregnable force field surrounded their friendship, shutting the family out. What drove us all crazy was that Kevin didn’t seem to realize Troy actually had a future, which he did his best to squander. At Riverdale Country Day, he was one of the top defensive backs in New York State, but got busted for burglary his senior year and was subsequently expelled—a misdemeanor that a lot of top NCAA programs were willing to overlook. Then during his freshman year at UCLA, he and some friends stole his roommate’s keys, took his car for a joyride, and totaled it. Furious, the roommate pressed charges, getting Troy kicked off the football team and stripped of his scholarship. He transferred to Cal State Fullerton and dropped out after a semester. Troy’s parents were divorced, and his dad, a bigwig realtor in LA, gave him a job in his company and bought him an apartment in Los Feliz, near the Griffith Park Observatory. As soon as he was set up, Troy invited Kevin to live with him, an opportunity my brother jumped at, much to my parents’ dismay.

  I had my own reasons for disliking Troy that had nothing to do with his complicity in Kevin’s troubles, starting with his version of my character, which went something like this: I was selfish to the point of ruthlessness, perhaps even pathologically so. Everything I did or said was out of self-interest. Nothing I gave was free; everything I offered was part of some elaborate subterfuge. For example, when I counseled Kevin to do better in school, what I was really hoping to do was win my parents’ favor as a good son by forcing my brother to buy into a system where he always ended up second to me. In fact, my whole sense of self depended on oppressing Kevin, along with everyone else. Troy believed it was his duty to remove the foot I’d placed on his best friend’s neck. Otherwise, he concluded, Kevin could never be “his own man.”

  When it came time to argue my case, it didn’t help that Troy, at six-four, was a massive, biased referee who was always looking for an opportunity to intervene on Kevin’s behalf, preferably physically. I was a state-champion wrestler and not afraid of a fight, but I was a middleweight then, 158 pounds my senior year, and knew my limits. In high school, whenever Kevin and I got into it around him, Troy would wait for my brother to storm off, then bend down to get in my face and recite all manner of mangling threats—“A pop to the bridge of the nose,” he’d say, “sends a bone to Caleb’s brain.” He’d slap my chest with the back of his palm, or press a finger to my forehead, daring me to start something. I never did.

  “Call out the bully,” Troy liked to say afterward, “and he’ll always balk.” Thus he’d prove himself to be the brother Kevin would never find in me.

  But that night in LA: It was a Friday, and the three of us had gone to dinner at a Cuban place near Venice Beach called Versailles. Troy was mad for their garlic chicken, and he and Kevin got ridiculously stoned beforehand and were so utterly fixated on their food that neither of them could speak during the meal. Troy excused himself right before the bill came, so I paid. I didn’t care about the money, but Troy liked to stiff me whenever possible on principle. I’d learned to keep my mouth shut about it, since anything I said would soon be used against me in my brother’s court.

  We found Troy passed out in the back of his BMW. There was so much smoke inside the car that when we opened the doors it was like someone had set the leather on fire. I told Kevin I’d drive, but he assured me he was fine. “Besides,” he added, “I don’t want anything happening to Troy’s car.”

  As we drove toward the ocean, I was still in my suit, and exhausted. Leaning back in my seat, I asked Kevin where we were headed.

  “Nowhere in particular,” he said. “Just driving this fine machine.”

  At that time, he was wearing his hair long and looked like a skinny version of Vince Neil from Mötley Crüe. He made a cell phone call, perhaps to a girlfriend, and talked cryptically for a while. I paid close attention to the vast, low-slung, palm-tree-lined strip mall that was Venice Beach, trying without success to imagine myself living out here after law school. Troy occasionally piped up from the back, dreaming aloud in his stupor, mumbling incoherencies that sounded like an argument he was having with himself, then passed out again. After he’d been quiet for a time, Kevin relaxed. So long as Troy wasn’t a witness, it was all right for us to be brothers.

  “What kind of work are you doing now?” he asked.

  “Civil litigation, mostly.”

  He nodded.

  “Basically that’s when one party sues another,” I told him.

  “I know that, Caleb.”

  “I know you do.”

  “What kind of law will you practice when you’re done with school?”

  Kevin’s younger than me by three years, and when he asks questions like this his voice drops an octave and he stiffens his neck. Knowing so little about the professional world, he mimics the tone of authority—real man-to-man stuff—in order to hide his ignorance.

  “I’d love to work in criminal justice,” I said. “Defense, probably, where the representation can be so bad. But I’ve got some big loans. Maybe I can pay those off after a few years of private practice, and then I’ll look into it.” I liked to take the long view with Kevin whenever possible, to demonstrate that I was thinking about the future. He was so broke and owed so much to the government that I was worried for him.

  “Hold that thought,” he said suddenly. He pulled over, got out of the car, then stuck his head in the window. “I’ll be back,” he said, slapping the door.

  We’d stopped on a street that ran right down to the beach. I could make out the sand and the whitecaps that burst into visibility before dissipating to black.

  “Are we surfing?” Troy mumbled.

  I told him to go back to sleep.

  Kevin was gone for fifteen minutes. The interior lights flared on when he got back in the car, and I noticed the red irritation around his nostrils and traces of powder. I didn’t say anything at first, but after we drove for a few minutes I couldn’t help it.

  “You’re showing,” I said.

  He looked in the rearview mirror, then wiped the powder off with his finger, considered it, and rubbed the residue over his gums.

  “Much better,” I said.

  “I sense a lecture coming,” he said, turning to look at me

  “I wouldn’t think of it.”

  “Because nothing you have to say to me means shit.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “But I want you to understand that.” He was driving fast. “I want you to know.”

  I checked if Troy was asleep—he was—and then leaned toward my brother. “You’re sure?”

  “Fucking-A yes.”

  “Well, let me tell you something,” I said, holding his eyes as he blew through a traffic light that had gone from yellow to red. By the time he realized what he’d done, cars had already entered the intersection. Kevin did a mad slalom between them, spinning the wheel so hard you could hear his palms slapping the wheel. I was holding my breath—partially to keep from laughing—and clenching the door handle through horns and screeching tires, bracing myself in this Tilt-A-Whirl for the delicious jolt of impact that would crumple Troy’s car.

  “You fucking asshole!” Kevin said after we slammed, untouched, to a stop. “You could’ve gotten us killed!”

  I was bent double laughing.


  Then a squad car appeared out of nowhere.

  “Oh shit,” Kevin said, adjusting the rearview mirror to have a look. “Holy fucking shit.”

  A small part of me felt delighted, suddenly magnanimous and authoritative. I was about to take over, to calm him down and advise him, when he did something unbelievable. He reached into his jacket pocket and threw something at my chest that burst all over me, then jumped out and started walking toward the police.

  It was a plastic bag with at least two grams of cocaine inside. I remember holding my hands up, palms out, away from the gunshot wound of powder on my chest, and thinking—as the cops’ headlights and strobes illuminated the car’s interior—this was it. This was exactly how everything I’d worked for would get wrecked: by Kevin and his stupidity and his headlong rush to undo something that could never be undone. I sat there waiting for the cop to peer into the open window and end my life.

  Even now I could hear Kevin talking to the police.

  “My bad, officers,” he said. “My brother and I were screaming at each other, and I didn’t see the light. Okay, actually, he was screaming at me, but he does that all the time—which isn’t an excuse, so write me up.”

  I turned to look. Kevin had an arm over his face to shield his eyes from the glare, holding out the other as if to say stop. The cops were yelling at him to freeze. They’d pulled their guns and were approaching cautiously, one of them filling my side mirror, but Kevin kept talking.