It’s about a five-hour drive from Akron to South Bend. Things get a little tricky on the outskirts of Cleveland, but after that you just stick to I-80. I stopped for gas and a Subway sandwich and reached my brother’s apartment around two in the afternoon. He lived in an old hotel, which had been dolled up and turned into residential units. This was part of a compromise with his wife, who didn’t like the thought of their kids living downtown (in South Bend! that hub of degenerate America), so after they separated, he picked a supervised building to calm her down. But it meant he could only afford a two-bedroom; both girls had to sleep in one room. I had never been there before.
I don’t see my brother often but whenever I’m about to … I feel this onrush of eagerness. All day it came in waves, as the miles strung out behind me. The highway takes you north of the city, and I turned off and drove past Notre Dame, then nosed along, following my phone and staring out the window at every stoplight. South Bend is pretty wide open. The river is like another blue highway between roads. There are public gardens on street corners and low-rise banks and apartment blocks. It’s funny to think, we grew up in the same house, but this is where he made his life.
The Hoffman is opposite a Burger King, where I left the car. Later I had to move it underground—his apartment comes with visitor parking.
Eric’s working day is unpredictable. Sometimes he’s in the office, but he also spends a lot of time visiting schools, not just in South Bend but across St. Joseph County. When I spoke to him on the phone, he promised to leave a key with the super. It took me a while, but I found the super and got the key and let myself into his empty home, which was on the sixth floor and had a view of the river from the kitchenette. But the whole place still felt like a hotel, the carpeting, the furniture, the pillar holding up the living room, the windows that you couldn’t open. At least the girls’ room had toys on the floor and pictures on the wall—kid pictures in crayon and watercolor, stuck on with Blu Tack. What was nice about the apartment was that you got the feeling he didn’t care what it looked like to other adults, but that was also a little depressing.
I left my backpack on the floor and lay down for a minute in one of the bottom bunks. When I woke up, Eric was leaning over me. The curtains were closed; it was still sunny outside, and the glow of the afternoon came through in dusty lines.
“I didn’t know if I should wake you. It’s after five.”
“Hey.” Then I said, “That’s all right. I didn’t sleep much last night. It’s nice to see you.”
Eric and I are six years apart, the same age gap as my children. Whether you want to or not, you end up reproducing the structure of your childhood. In Eric’s case, that meant he didn’t really remember our father, I mean, remember him as somebody who lived with us. The guy we spent two weeks in the summer with, in his house in Orange County, where he had another two kids, much younger, and a new wife, and basically didn’t want us around … that guy, Eric knew well. But the other guy, on his first marriage, when Dad still thought, Maybe I can live a life where I haven’t made any unforgivable mistakes, where whatever we’re going through is just the normal headache—he didn’t remember him.
When Dad left, Eric started sleeping in Mom’s bed. Because he kept waking up with nightmares, she said, but really because she didn’t want to sleep alone. This was tricky, because Eric still wet the bed. Even at 7 years old; he had a bladder problem, and eventually my parents bought rubber sheets for him, so Mom didn’t have to keep washing his bedclothes. But when he started sleeping with her, the same thing happened. I was old enough to help with the household chores, which included laundry. So sometimes I had to deal with their wet sheets. Every night she put him to sleep in his bed, and then, when she went up a few hours later, carried him to her room. They had a relationship from which I was basically excluded, not that I really wanted any part of it. Eric had to absorb a lot of her craziness and unspent love.
The truth about Dad was, he didn’t like small kids. He just didn’t like them, which made it ironic that when he started an affair with Lisa, who was 20 years younger and worked in the L.A. office, he eventually moved in with her and had two more kids. But he didn’t mind teenagers, and that’s what I was when he left. He taught me how to play cards, not just basic poker, but old-school games like casino and bridge. He had a funny way of laying down a winning card. He didn’t say anything, but just set it down a little heavily, so you noticed. He could shuffle a deck in mid-air, which I spent hours practicing. Sometimes, on Saturday afternoons, he took me and Eric to Phillies games, but since Eric got carsick and generally made himself a pain in the neck, eventually he just took me. When he left, it was harder for me to say, the guy’s a jerk. Not that this was Eric’s point of view, but there wasn’t a big gap in his life after Dad walked out, as there was in mine.
It probably sounds like I resented my kid brother, which wasn’t the case. I felt sorry for him and guilty about him. He was one of those kids who always gets what he wants and isn’t happy about it. For one thing, he was a very fat kid until he hit puberty. I mean, fat enough that it was an impediment to certain activities. If I tried to talk to Mom about it, she just got stressed out. It was one more thing going wrong in her life. And she couldn’t say no to him, anyway, if he wanted soda for supper or another bowl of mint chocolate chip. Part of why I went to Pomona was to get the hell out of New Jersey; also, maybe, because I thought I might see more of my dad. But that didn’t really happen. Even though the campus is less than an hour’s drive from Newport Beach, maybe I saw him five or six times in the whole four years. But I didn’t know that when I went.
I felt bad about Eric, though, I really did. Leaving him alone with our mother, when she was in that state.
But he turned himself around. He lost a lot of weight. When I flew home the summer after freshman year, I almost didn’t recognize him. He used adolescence as a chance to make certain decisions about himself, and who he wanted to become. So, no to all the cookies and Cokes, which my mother found hard to take—it was like a rejection of her love. He never liked sports but started jogging in the mornings and lifting weights after school. Even as a fat kid, he’d had a kind of social confidence, he didn’t mind attracting attention, which he found ways of putting to good use. At some point I came home to a world in which my dumb kid brother was the star of the school play and reading Walker Percy on the pot, so you couldn’t get him out of the bathroom.
All of this came at a price, and not just for Mom. Somehow he didn’t seem comfortable with this new identity in front of me. For example, he’d made Mom join a church, St. Hedwig on Brunswick Avenue, just to get her out of the house, he said, so she could meet new people. But I think he also liked the idea of having a mission and a community, neither of which I’ve ever been a big fan of. So on Sunday mornings over the holidays I had to decide: Do I go along or not? Eric made it pretty clear, essentially saying to me, I don’t expect you to follow this new direction our lives have taken, which was reasonable of him. But I think he also meant, Leave us alone. So I left them alone. On the whole I was grateful that he’d found a way to turn his unhappy energy outward, even if it meant I didn’t get to play big brother. That’s fine, that’s okay, I mean, for eight months a year he was on his own. He couldn’t rely on his big brother very much.
Still, every time I was about to see him, I felt this rush of childish eagerness clutching my heart, which was replaced, when I did see him, with something more complicated. A feeling like, we both have to protect ourselves against this level of intimacy.
He wanted to know how long I planned to stay, if I could stick around and see the girls, who came after school every Wednesday. But I told him, “I’m leaving tomorrow. I have to get to Denver.”
“For what?”
“To see Brian Palmetto. But that’s a longer conversation; it can wait.”
I sat in his living-room area, on one of the low couches. He made me a cup of Celestial Seasonings. “What do you want to do?” he asked.
He took off his shoes and stood on the thick carpet in his socks. Because of all those years of acting, he had good physical balance; he moved like an athlete. He also looked too skinny, if you ask me.
“I don’t know, show me your life.”
“What does that mean?”
“We can drive around, I wouldn’t mind seeing the city.”
“You’ve been driving all day.”
“Well, you can drive.”
So that’s what we did, but first I had to move my car from the Burger King into one of the Hoffman’s visitor parking spots. So we got in my car, then we got in his car. Eric drove an old Camry. It was basically his office, he spent a lot of time on the road. There were papers on the passenger seat, which he told me to throw in the back. “You see how I live,” he said. But it pleased him, I think, to sit behind the wheel; it made the power relationship a bit easier.
We drove across the river to the girls’ school, which took up several blocks behind a spear-topped iron fence. “That’s where all my money goes,” he said. You couldn’t see much. There were trees in the way, and wide lawns, and vague collegiate-looking buildings in the distance. We parked for a minute on the other side of the street, in front of somebody’s house. It was 6 o’clock. People were coming home after a working day, and we watched a couple of cars pull out of the long school drive.
“But the girls are happy,” he said. “At least at school.”
“Is it a Catholic school?”
“More or less. Officially nondenominational. It’s where Terry went. They’re basically having her childhood … without the father.” He laughed; he had a sweet, unhappy laugh. Eric, unlike me, had lost most of his hair and cut what was left pretty short, so he looked like a monk or a long-distance runner. To me, he still looked like a kid, boyish and somewhat intense, but I realized that if I met him now I’d think, a middle-aged man.
“You want to see the house?”
“Sure. Won’t that be a little weird?”
“We can just drive by.”
“Maybe you could call and say their uncle’s in town.”
“I’ve learned it’s better if you stick to the script.”
Terry and the kids lived in Granger, about 20 minutes away, by the Michigan border. But first he took me past her parents’ place, which isn’t the house she grew up in but where they moved after retiring. It was on a cul-de-sac with a circular drive at the end, which was around a patch of green lawn with a flagpole sticking out of it and an American flag flapping around on the pole. “Can you believe it?” Eric said. “You couldn’t make it up. Thirty years ago, none of this was here, this wasn’t even a place.”
“What are they like?”
“Who? Terry’s parents? I don’t know. I can’t describe them and sound like a sane person. We go to the same church.”
“I didn’t know you went to church anymore.”
“Sometimes I take the girls.” He was circling the flagpole. Eventually he said, “They still introduce me to people as their son-in-law.”
In Granger, there were no other cars, the streets were wide and curbless. Most of the houses had extensive lawns, and sometimes at the end of a block, there was open grassland, dotted with trees, so you couldn’t always tell where one yard began and another left off. “That’s it,” Eric said, slowing down. “With the Honda in the driveway.” In fact, all you could see of their house was the gray metal door of the garage.
We turned a corner but the rest of it was screened by trees. I had a slightly creepy feeling of déjà vu.
“I can’t remember how long you lived there.”
“Three years. First we had an apartment in Edgewater. Then we moved out here. I actually have a job offer in Chicago, but if I take it, I’ll never see the girls. Except maybe like Dad, for two weeks in the summer. I don’t know. We can park and get out, nobody will see us.”
He pulled over by the side of the road, but we just sat there, under the trees. Eric turned off the engine.
“I may have walked out on Amy,” I said.
“You may?”
“About 10 years ago, she had an affair with a guy from … our synagogue. I told myself, when Miri leaves home, then I can go, too.”
“You waited 10 years?”
“It may have been more like 12.”
“Now you’re just showing off.”
One of the downstairs lights in the house came on; dusk was setting in. Eric said, “That’s the bathroom light.”
“I forgot to give them to you, but I bought a few things for the kids.”
“That’s nice.”
“Mostly candy, but I got them a Frisbee, too. In case they didn’t have one already. I don’t know.”
“That’s nice.” Then he said, “Terry always drives them to her parents’ house. It’s a 10-minute walk but she always takes the car. She won’t even let the girls bike over there.”
“Why not?”
“Traffic,” he said. We sat in the dark car by the side of an empty street. “She lives in a world of fear. I couldn’t take it anymore.”
“You’ve done this before.”
“The apartment isn’t really a place I want to be in the evening, if the girls aren’t there. So I drive around.”
“Listen,” I said. “I need to cut loose a little. Is there somewhere we can get a beer?”
So that’s what we did. He turned on the engine and we drove into Edgewater, his old neighborhood. Nothing seemed very far away in South Bend, it’s a shrinking city. We went to a place called Kelly’s, where it was easy to park. Just a small windowless building on the corner of a large lot. I said to Eric as we walked in, “Can you eat here?” and he said, “You can eat.” There was a pool table at the back, and a couple were playing pool. But other than that, it was fairly empty, it was Monday night. Just some people at the curved bar—guys in trucker hats and women in shorts.
“I come here because Terry never would,” Eric said. “They had a big shooting outside a few years ago.”
“Is this where you take all your dates?”
We sat down near the pool table; a waitress came over. I ordered a French-dip sandwich and an IPA with a stupid name. Eric went for the fish basket. We had a couple of pints before the food arrived. One of the things I forgot about my brother is that he giggles when he drinks, he gets happy pretty fast, until it turns into something else. We watched the people playing pool, the girl was better than the guy. He wore a Fincher Landscaping shirt, short-sleeved with a collar, and looked about 25. She was older, late 30s, early 40s, on the heavy side but well made-up, with straight dyed-black hair and bright-red lipstick. A little Goth-y, but, like, now she had a job.
Maybe they weren’t a couple, but he kept trying to flirt with her. He said, “Play me again. I gotcha this time, I’m just screwing around. Oh come on.” He kept putting quarters on the table.
“Terry says I have anger issues, but I think what I need to deal with is the stuff that makes me angry, that’s what I need to deal with.” Everything seemed funny to Eric. “I don’t know, I’m working on regulating my moods. Regulating my moods.” He repeated himself, too.
“Tell me about this job in Chicago.”
“The company I work for has headquarters in Evanston. It’s a step up the ladder, but it means not going into schools anymore. It’s a lot more money.”
“That’s great, that’s wonderful.”
“I don’t know. I need to do something different. But it’s not, like, back in college, I dreamed of working for an educational charity.” That made him laugh, too.
“Nobody ends up doing what they wanted to do.”
“Didn’t I sell you a house on Carroll Street?” It was the woman at the pool table; she was talking to me. “Come on, help me out here,” she said. Fincher Landscaping was looking over at us. He had soft brown hair like a loose shower cap, I don’t know why this image occurred to me. He was about 6 foot 4. “You had a little girl,” she went on. “I didn’t think the marriage would last.”
“Excuse me?” I said.
“I’m just messing with you. How old is she now?” She rested her cue against the wall, which was covered in seven-inch singles around a framed Milwaukee Brewers Robin Yount jersey.
“Who?”
“Your daughter.”
“Eighteen. I just dropped her off at college.”
“Wow,” she said.
“I think you’ve got me mixed up with someone else.”
“Help me out here,” she said again. “Want to shoot some pool?”
So the three of us ended up playing cutthroat. I mean, my brother and me and this woman, Sharon Donnegan—that’s how she introduced herself. She worked for Wayman Realtors. Fincher tried to argue with her but she said, “I’m sorry, I ran into some friends,” and eventually he went over to the bar and watched us from there.
Eric never had much hand-eye coordination, that was one area of childhood he left to me. Even as a teenager, when he got in shape, he was a get-in-shape kind of kid and not really into sports. Sharon and I were roughly on the same level, but she won the first two games, which gave Eric a lot of joy. He was drunk enough that he said things like, Look at you, getting beat by a girl, which he wouldn’t have said sober. But he also liked calling her a girl, I think he thought it sounded flattering or flirtatious. “Where’d you learn to play like that?” he said, and she said, “My dad was in the Air Force. Every base had a table.”
“How’d you end up here?”
“I guess I’m just lucky,” she said.
I felt bad for Eric, I didn’t think she was interested. When he missed a shot, he asked her what he was doing wrong. “Your back stroke is all over the place,” she said, and he said, “Show me.”
The waitress came and he ordered three more beers. I told him, somebody’s got to drive us home, I don’t mind drinking Coke. And Sharon wanted a hard seltzer.
“I’m sorry, I drink like a girl.”
In the end, she took over the order, because Eric was having trouble making himself understood. He wasn’t that drunk but he was trying to manage too many interactions at once. So he had another IPA, and I had a Coke, and she had a Vizzy. It was about 10 o’clock at night, I’d been in the car all day, I wanted to go home—or at least, to my kid brother’s rented apartment, where I could sleep in my niece’s bottom bunk. Eric said we need to play again, to maintain the honor of the Layward brothers.
“Are you guys brothers? You don’t look alike,” Sharon said.
“He’s a lot older than me, he let himself go.”
I think Sharon liked me; it’s awkward to write this, but she gave me that impression. And maybe that’s why, when Eric said, “Show me,” she finally said, “All right, line one up,” and stood behind him with her hips against his ass and her hand on his elbow and slowly guided his cue. While giving me a look, maybe she wanted to make me jealous, I don’t know. Stir up some kind of fraternal rivalry for her attentions. I couldn’t tell if Eric was having a good night, letting off steam, or just descending deeper into unhappiness. He kept wanting to use my phone.
“Where’s yours?”
“I don’t carry a phone,” he said.
“You don’t carry a phone? It’s not like a gun.”
But he borrowed mine and started taking pictures—mostly of Sharon, bending down over the table. I won the third game. “So what are you doing here?” she said, when Eric went to the bathroom.
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing. Seeing my brother.”
“And then what?”
“Tomorrow I’m driving to Denver.”
“What’s in Denver?”
“A guy I used to play basketball with.”
“Aren’t you an open book.”
He was in the bathroom a long time. “You want another drink, or you want to go somewhere else?” she said. For a second I wondered what it would be like. She had a pale face, which the lipstick made look even paler, and I could see, when I stood next to her, the soft white skin of her scalp between the grains of her hair. She was younger than Amy and obviously less attractive, but you got an energy from her, like she was still interested in what might happen next, which I didn’t get from Amy anymore.
“I think I should take my brother home.”
“You think?”
But that’s what I suggested, when he came out of the bathroom. He looked pretty pale himself, he didn’t look good. But he didn’t want to go home. He said, “We can’t abandon Sharon to the vicissitudes,” in one of his theatrical voices. I don’t know who he was channeling. Some English actor. “You’ve got a pretty good accent,” Sharon said. “My mother is actually Scottish, at least, that’s where she was born.”
He tried a Scottish accent, but it wasn’t really coming.
“Who is this guy?” Sharon said.
“He used to work in Hollywood.”
“No kidding.”
“Come on, Eric. Time to go home.”
“You go, I’ll stick around with … Sharon. We’re having a good time. Everybody knows how to have a good time except you.”
“I don’t think she wants you to stick around.”
“She can say what she wants,” Eric said.
She looked at him, she looked at me. It was a Monday night in Kelly’s Bar, she probably had work in the morning. I don’t know who goes out on Monday night, or why.
“I think I should probably head out, too,” she said. “I just need to use …” and she did a little curtsy, “… the ladies’ room.”
“Are you all right to drive?” I asked.
“I’m fine, I’m just around the corner.”
“We can wait for you,” Eric said.
“That’s all right. You boys run along.”
So we left.
In the parking lot, we had an argument about who should drive. I’d had two or three beers, Eric probably had a couple more. They affected him more than they affected me, he was a very skinny, very nervy person. Eventually Eric gave me the keys but he wanted to wait until Sharon came out, to make sure she was okay.
“Don’t you feel a little creepy,” I said, but we waited a minute and then drove home.
The drive was only five minutes, we probably should have walked. Maybe it would have sobered Eric up. As soon as we started, his mood fell off a cliff. He sat hugging himself against the seat belt and looking out the window. I didn’t actually know the way, I kept saying, you have to tell me where to go. We crossed over the river and I tried to follow it into town. He said, “You didn’t have to put her on the spot like that.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Everybody was having a good time.”
“Eric, I don’t think she was into you.”
“So why’d she ask us to play?” After a minute he said, “You always think women are hitting on you.”
“Come on, Eric.”
“You were always like that, even when we were kids. You always thought, other people were embarrassed by us.”
By us I guess he meant him and Mom. “That’s not true at all.” But I don’t know, maybe it was. He was 12 years old when I left for college, I didn’t really know him as anything other than a fat little kid. He was always whining about something; I felt bad for him. He just wanted and wanted and didn’t get, until Mom gave in. Sometimes I tried to redirect the conversation from their constant interplay. I tried to get Mom to teach him self-restraint. But he didn’t change until I left.
All that was 35 years ago. At a certain point with these family dynamics, you’d think the statute of limitations would run out.
We parked in the underground garage, which had an elevator. It was almost midnight, we were almost talked out. Back in his apartment, he said, “Do you need me to change the sheets? They’re pretty clean. Anyway, you already slept in them.”
“No, that’s fine. Hey, it’s nice to see you.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m sorry if I got it wrong tonight. I’m getting a lot of things wrong right now.”
We were in the girls’ bedroom. He sat down on one of the small chairs.
“I don’t meet many women these days. I’m spending a lot of time in my own head.”
“What about this job in Chicago?”
“How can I leave the kids?”
“They’ll be all right. We were all right.”
“It was all right for you,” he said.
“You turned into a totally different person. You got your shit together. I can’t tell you … how impressed I was, every time I came home. I thought, If he can do that to himself, he can … he’ll be fine.”
He looked at me with tears in his eyes. “I just miss having a woman in my life. I miss having somebody to be nice to.”
“You’ve got the girls.”
“That’s pretty much my only function right now.”
“No. No.”
But I didn’t know what else to say. He let me use the bathroom first, and then I lay in bed with the lights off and listened to him moving around. Eric warned me he wasn’t much of a sleeper, he watched a lot of TV.
Lying there, in the kids’ bed, with the top bunk crowding down on me, I remembered something my dad once did. When I was about 12 years old, he took me out to Cadwalader Park to have a sex talk. We had just moved to Trenton, I thought he wanted to show me the neighborhood. But he explained about wet dreams, we talked about masturbation. Everything you think or want turns out to be normal, don’t worry about that, he said. I was 12, none of these biological changes meant much to me. Look, this is just a stage you have to go through. I’m sorry about it but there’s nothing you can do. You just have to go through it. I tried to concentrate on my jump shot. If I missed, at least it gave me a minute to chase down the ball.
I’ll give you some free advice, which you’re not going to listen to, my dad said. But I listened. At some point you have to learn to control the sex urge, otherwise you let yourself get bossed around.
Who was he talking to? Me? Two years later, he ran off to California and started a second family with the woman from the L.A. office. Maybe he had already been having an affair.
He died in February 2020, just before everything shut down. Complications from diabetes; I don’t really know what he died from. He had a stroke, then he went to the hospital and never came out. I always thought he looked after himself pretty well, for a man of his generation; his wife was somebody you could trust to be on top of things, medically. Despite the way he left us, he was basically a conservative person, always trying to protect himself against things going wrong. Walking out on Mom was the one big romantic gesture of his life.
Eric and I shared a hotel room, none of our wives or kids came to the funeral. We stayed at the Ramada, just off Route 55 and about 10 blocks from the beach.
It was a very alienating experience. Everybody else at the funeral—he was cremated and half his ashes were scattered off a boat deck into the Pacific—belonged to his California life, his second life. (Later they erected a gravestone in Pacific View Memorial Park, where Kobe Bryant is also buried, but that was after we left.) We had two half sisters we barely knew, who were now 30-something women and much closer to Dad than we ever were. The younger one, Sammy, wore a Philadelphia Eagles hard hat to the ceremony, the kind where you can strap a couple cans of beer or soda to the ear holes and drink them through a crazy straw without moving your head. It seemed inappropriate to me, Eric was very upset. It turned out Sammy had given Dad the hat for his birthday; he still rooted for Philadelphia sports teams and used to wear it in front of the TV on Sunday afternoons.
“What’d he drink?” I asked her.
“He didn’t really fill it up, it was just for shits and giggles.”
“I didn’t even know he was a football fan.”
“Oh he loved the Eagles, he watched every game.”
She was the kind of person who is determined to have a good time at a funeral, because it’s supposed to be a celebration of a happy life. Even if I had no personal connection to her, I don’t think I would have liked her.
Because of jet lag, Eric and I woke up early after the funeral. Maybe we were both hungover. The heavy hotel curtains made it hard to tell the time of day. Eventually I got up (my bed was nearer the window) and pulled them back. So from about half past four we watched the California light slowly grade into morning. The traffic noise increased. We dozed a little, I looked at my phone. It was a long night. Eric said, “From their point of view, I don’t think we ever really existed.” And I told him, which I probably shouldn’t have, the story of those last few weeks before Dad walked out.
“He told me he was going,” I said. “He wanted to tell you, but you were too little, he thought you might tell Mom.”
“But he knew you wouldn’t.”
“I guess he knew I wouldn’t.”
“What did you say?”
“I don’t know, I don’t remember. But I’ll tell you a terrible thing, I felt excited for him. He was very excited, that’s why he told me. He couldn’t keep it a secret anymore, from all of us. He had to tell someone. Maybe I was just excited because it was me. I was 14 years old. It just seemed like … one of those glimpses of adult life, which at that age … I wanted to know what was really going on. That’s how it felt to me, but I also don’t think … I didn’t think he’d actually do it. When he left I was so ashamed, I couldn’t even look at Mom. She thought I was upset because of Dad but really I just felt guilty. Have I told you this before? I don’t think I’ve told anyone, except Jill.”
“No, you didn’t tell me. I’m sorry,” Eric said.
“Why are you sorry?”
“That you had to deal with all that, it wasn’t fair.”
It’s not what I expected him to say. I thought he’d be mad or jealous.
Later he said, “Why Jill?”
“I don’t know. It just seemed like one of those things you tell your college girlfriend.”
We had different flights out—I was going to JFK from LAX, he’d flown into John Wayne. They had direct flights to Chicago, where he’d left the car. After that it was just a two-hour drive to South Bend. We had breakfast together in the hotel restaurant, then got different cabs. That was the last time I’d seen him, before now.
In the morning, I could tell the atmosphere had shifted. Whatever window of communication had opened up between us had closed again. It was just another working day, he liked to leave the house by 8 o’clock. I was still in boxer shorts when I walked in.
“What happened to you?”
He was making coffee in the kitchenette. The toaster popped.
“I don’t know. It’s just something that started happening.”
I guessed he meant my face, which was swollen and leaking water through the eyes—I had to squeeze them just to see.
“Have you been to a doctor?”
“Of course I’ve been.”
“What’d he say?”
“He thought I might be middle-aged.”
“That was his diagnosis?”
“Eventually. They ran a lot of tests. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”
“You need to do something.” He felt happier, showing his concern.
“I know.”
I drank some of the coffee he’d made and put another waffle in the toaster. There were a couple of stools under the kitchen counter. If you sat with your back against it, you could see the river. Funny how the eye is drawn to water—it’s just a very flat part of the view. But the surface shifts a little, slowly. Eric had disappeared into the bathroom. When he came out again, he looked like one of those people you meet whose job is to be friendly and helpful. With his pale, almost clean-shaven head, and his Adam’s apple sticking out.
He stood in the living-room area, and I got up to hug him but stopped a little short—he carried a messenger bag across his chest.
“Just close the door behind you,” he said. “Are you coming back this way?”
“What do you mean?”
“After Denver … presumably you’ve got to get the car back to New York.”
“I haven’t really thought that far in advance.”
“Well, if you do, you know where I live.”
“It’s good to see you, Eric. I hate to … I don’t know, I hate all the distances.”
“Well, this is America.”
“Where should I put the presents for the girls?”
“Just leave them in their room. If it’s candy their mother won’t like it, but that’s her problem.”
I wanted to say something else but didn’t know what.
After he left, I loaded the breakfast things in the dishwasher and showered. There were rubber letters stuck to the side of the tub. Then I stripped the bed and packed my backpack and left.
Driving out, I followed my phone for a while, but then, outside Waterford, I stopped for gas and turned it off. The route was pretty much just a straight shot west. I was thinking about Eric but at some point realized that I was talking to Amy about him. The whole time I felt like I was in communication with her. She said, How’s your brother, and I said, Not great. We went out to some bar and he got drunk. There was a pool table and we started playing pool with some woman. Eric got a little … he was very attentive, which I don’t think was appreciated. I didn’t like seeing that.
It’s fine, right? He’s single … he’s allowed to try.
No, but it feeds into this whole dynamic we used to have, where I was …
What? What were you? Did she want you instead?
I don’t know and I don’t really care; she wasn’t important. I’m just worried about Eric.
You worry because it makes you feel better about yourself. You always have to be the responsible one.
That’s not fair, that’s not true. I mean … look at me now.
This article has been excerpted from Benjamin Markovits’s new book, The Rest of Our Lives.
