Envy (10 page)

9

Why did Mitch contribute a page to the Class of '79's reunion book? Perhaps he'd intended to come and then changed his mind? It wasn't as if he needed it for the sake of PR, and yet his bio, organized like a résumé, highlighted all his aquatic triumphs since graduation. No mention of Will or of their parents, and no photographs of a wife or kids; Mitch is unmarried. Will has wondered if his brother has so thoroughly sublimated his libido that he remains a virgin, his poor nuts routinely immersed in water as much as forty degrees below body temperature. Mitch's testicles would do well to permanently relocate somewhere warm, ascend as far as his kidneys, perhaps, or go south to cruise the Caribbean. But this is Will's fantasy. Despite Mitch's awkwardness with girls, it's likely that he enjoys the usual trappings of celebrity, athlete groupies who find his exploits so sexy that he needn't bother to woo them, or even go through the motions of getting to know them.

There's no picture of Mitch in the reunion book, nothing from a family album anyway, nothing that shows his face, just one of him in the water, as well as a small if not exactly modest reproduction of his
Sports Illustrated
cover, a silhouette that reveals how long his torso is, and how comparatively short his legs, especially if measured against arms with a span of more than six feet. “Who is Mitchell Moreland?” a cover line demands. Mitch has been profiled in
People
and is a routine feature in
Swimming World, Outside,
and some other environmentally concerned magazine, Will can't remember its name. By swimming distances unimaginable to the average person, and selling his exploits to wealthy sponsors and patrons, his brother has raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the Sierra Club, Greenpeace, Audubon, Flora and Fauna International, World Wildlife Fund, and others, a long list included in small type at the bottom of the page. He endorses products for the Nature Conservancy, and that share of company profits is distributed among charities that benefit endangered marine life. The swimwear company that sponsored Mitch's “Challenge: Bermuda Triangle” pours funds into not-for-profit organizations whose goal is to slow environmental damage, a useful means of diverting attention from this same company's overseas factories that employ children as young as nine and routinely dump pollutants into the Third World's unprotected waterways. The summary of Will's brother's accomplishments makes Mitch seem as if he's his own invention, which, Will guesses, is not far wrong.

In Will's experience, identical twins are either insufficiently differentiated, with a single personality floating, amoebalike, between two bodies, or each goes to great lengths to separate and prove his ascendancy. Through grade school, Will and Mitch were, in retrospect, too close to know where one brother left off and the other began. Like conjoined twins, they shared a vital organ, not the kind filled with blood, but a sensory apparatus that, without substance, processed and secreted emotion. At least this is what Will remembers. Maybe it's a conceit, something he's invented in the wake of his brother's desertion—a fantasy projected backward onto a past that had never held such extremes of intimacy. Odd that the culture would fixate on traumatic false memories, child abuse, sexual assault. In Will's experience, false memories tend to be happy.

He knew he wasn't always or even usually kind to his brother. He used to bait him, looking for a way to shatter whatever it was that connected them. Sometimes Mitch didn't want to fight, and Will would go at him until it was impossible for him to resist. Until it was a matter of losing face. He'd plant himself between his brother and whatever Mitch was doing, knock the book out of his hands, mess up the carefully organized pieces of the model he was building.

“Quit it,” Mitch would say.

“Make me.”

Around the house they'd run, Mitch on Will's heels. They were evenly matched—of course they were—so it was Will who determined how many laps. Because once they'd begun, once Mitch had lost control and lunged, someone had to win. Finally, Will would slow and then Mitch would get close enough to trip or kick him, to shove him to the ground.

His brother's fists found their mark with enough force that Will heard them from the inside out; the sound they made traveled through his body and arrived on the wrong side of his eardrums. Blows to his back that were so hard they made him cough. Kidney punches he could taste, like metal, a taste that filled his mouth with saliva. He never cried. A couple of times Mitch had gone on hitting him long enough that he thought he was going to puke, but he didn't cry.

Swimming changed all that. Hard to imagine they'd started out with the same measure of raw physical aptitude, which didn't add up to talent, clearly not. Will had never liked swimming, never wanted—needed—it; Mitch swam like someone who anticipated shipwreck. Didn't seem to take pleasure in dominating his opponents, not that Will could see, anyway. Packed his trophies away like dry goods: necessary, uninteresting.

Before Will had completed the course work required for a doctorate in clinical psychology, Mitch, by then an industrial engineer employed by a cranberry-processing plant in Maine, was swimming up to eight hours a day, Saturday through Wednesday. Swimming a forty-hour week. Having qualified for the 1980 Olympics, Mitch didn't get to go to Moscow. In protest of the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan at the end of 1979, the United States boycotted the games. Mitch claimed he wasn't, like all the other athletes, bitterly disappointed. Naturally, he'd wanted the validation of his place among those who qualified, but he was impatient to get on with his single-minded pursuit of a more lonely and remarkable quest, a prize unavailable to ordinary swimmers, swimmers who tested themselves only in the controlled environment of pools.

Sour grapes, Will suspected, but if he was correct in his conclusion, what began as an unconscious strategy to offset dashed hopes became not only vocation but monomania. Without yet knowing what it was he was training for, Mitch began spending entire days in the frigid water off the coast of Maine, so compulsive that he rarely changed his schedule to accommodate bad weather, so focused that he interpreted the loss of his job as an opportunity to devote all his time to what he'd come to understand was his real, perhaps even ordained, purpose. He'd spent so little of his salary over the previous two years that, as he told their parents, he could finance his own sabbatical. And, as though he were blessed by the gods, or by one god— Neptune—before Mitch had run through his own money, the Bar Harbor Oceanographic Society adopted him as a kind of mascot merman whose remarkable stamina they put to use for fund-raising. Sponsors paid by the minute for Mitch to breaststroke, crawl, and butterfly through the cold Atlantic surf. He was a local hero, and then an international one, turned pro after the '84 Olympics, got his Wheaties box, the athlete's emblem of fame, arguably a prize of greater value than the gold medals that buy it. For its part, Post Cereals used his face in profile, concealing much of the purple stain.

For a decade Mitch kept in touch with Will and their parents. Even when he left Maine for bigger, international seas, he came home for holidays, and he continued to correspond with Will, writing him long letters crammed with details of his training schedules, the various diets he undertook to maintain an ideal percentage of body fat. Then, when Will and Carole married, Mitch took off. He came to the rehearsal dinner, and the stag party that lasted into the early hours of the wedding day, but he didn't show up for the ceremony itself.

Since then, something in his parents' voices, or perhaps it was their expressions, always strikes Will as resigned to Mitch's behavior. If asked to describe this quality, he'd say it's a look he'd expect to see on the faces of people who own shares of a company that has tanked, a bought-high-sold-low-let's-make-the-best-of-this-and-move-on kind of look.

“You didn't get a call from him?” Will asked when he and Carole returned from their honeymoon. “A letter? Anything?”

“Nothing,” his father said.

At the rehearsal dinner, Mitch, who was to have been the best man, stood to ring his knife against a glass. Once everyone was quiet, he began a toast. “To my brother—older, wiser, and more accomplished than I . . . by eight minutes.”

Even in his drunk and overwrought condition, Will was embarrassed by the rancor he heard in his brother's voice. Mitch continued on in the expectable, formulaic vein and made the usual benedictions— he flattered Carole, called attention to Will's undeserved good fortune, recounted boyhood stories. A transcript would show that his words were unremarkable. But his tone stunned Will, who listened closely, straining to catch a note of affection, but there was none. As his brother spoke, Carole looked into her lap. Will reached for her hand and squeezed it.

“You okay?” he whispered, and she nodded, squeezed his hand in return, her face betraying nothing.

Carole was twenty-four when they met, one of those girls, Will is sure, who always seem older than they are. In Carole's case this was because of her serene and unruffled,
unrufflable,
countenance, a look of such profound calm that she still has no need, ever, to hide her feelings—often they don't register on her face. Certainly, they never distort it. Dark brown hair, a distinct widow's peak that imparts a heart shape to a face with a wide forehead and wider cheekbones, large hazel eyes, a straight nose, and a small, if not exactly pointed, chin. Pretty features, but then, as now, what made Carole beautiful was her expression of tranquillity, a calm that didn't partake of late-twentieth-century multitasking, of frantic jabbering on cell phones while scurrying among sidewalk crowds, grimacing down subway stairs, PalmPilot in one hand, Financial Times in the other. No, Carole still seems exactly as she used to, as if she's slipped out from between the pages of a Victorian novel, or out of the frame of a centuries-old painting, any wrinkle of trouble or doubt smoothed away by the writer or artist.

Wherever they went together—often as not those grimy, chaotic places where students gather because beer is cheap—her face was immediately distinct from all those around it. Unflushed. Unadamant. She seemed to have nothing to prove, and this made Will want to prove everything; it made him want to fuck her. And immediately, from the first date, they made love a lot. A lot a lot, to the point where dates weren't going out but staying in, and when the Chinese food arrived, or the pizza, or the delivery boy from the market came with eggs and orange juice, whoever answered the door was wearing only a sheet.

From the neck down Carole was lustful and energetic, but Will wonders if on some level he hasn't always been aiming at her face, driving toward it. Not that he wants to rupture her countenance, not at all. He wants to plunge through it, as one would the reflective surface of water. Sees himself come out on the other side knowing what he didn't before. He is changed, while she, she of course remains the same. Like water, Carole's face, where he enters it, comes back together, bearing no trace of him, no more than a ripple that catches the light and then vanishes.

Maybe Will's obsession with sex, his sexual fantasies about his female patients, aren't the formulaic, knee-jerk symptoms he's assumed they are. Maybe they aren't just a manifestation of his guilt over Luke's drowning and his desire to be punished, revealed as a danger, humiliated by his peers. Maybe they're more than an escape route from his hyper-intellectualizing everything. Couldn't it just as easily be that all that sex represents his search for Carole, for the anger that must be there, deep under her skin and therefore something he has to force his way toward, into? Unconsciously, maybe he feels that her refusing to make love face-to-face means he has to reach her, arrive at her anger, through a surrogate twice removed from Carole herself, aggression displaced first into fantasy and then onto an object other than his wife.

And as long as he's training his reductive, psychoanalytical apparatus on himself, wouldn't it all relate to his unflappable mother? As we children of the twenty-first century know, she's the first woman he wanted to enter, or rather reenter, return, regress, revert, relapse, the first whose mysteries he was determined to plumb, whose body was once and ought still to be his.

At the rehearsal dinner Will saw that at last Mitch had become a man with a measure of poise, an ease with people that success had afforded him. But being able to stand, unflinching, before a crowd had required approval that blurred into awe, a counterweight to all that had preceded it. Will listened carefully to his brother's comments, a retrospective that included their years together at camp, their first jobs, and first girlfriends.
Girlfriends
—that word was a surprise. Will was sure Mitch had never had one. Well, perhaps in the context of a twin brother's imminent wedding, he'd needed to invent a romantic history.

Effective therapy for
Nevus flammeus
should be initiated in early childhood, because with time, port-wine stains can darken and thicken, acquiring a pebbly texture. Among birthmarks, they aren't accidents of pigment but vascular abnormalities that affect three of every thousand people. Their cause is unknown; there's no genetic predisposition for these spreading patches of malformed, dilated blood vessels, so close to the surface of the skin that they color it pink or red or, as in Mitch's case, purple.

Used as Will was to his brother's face, it scared him when they were kids. Not during the day when he could see it, but the idea of it would take hold of him at night. In the dark he couldn't stop seeing it grow until it had covered his brother, bled over the beds and into the shadows, splattered the walls and run down the stairs. He'd lie still as a stone, too frightened to go to their parents or even to call out to them. In the morning—he knew this, in his fear he could see it— their house and everything in it, and everyone, their neighborhood, the used-to-be-blue sky, it would all be stained and ruined, and who could stop a thing like that?