Envy (20 page)

“There was nothing like that,” Will says.

“Oh, I don't know, William. And neither do you. Under such circumstances you must have been distracted. ‘Thinking with the little head' would, I believe, be the appropriate expression. Consider this. You're a forty-seven-year-old man. She's a girl of twenty-four. Who do you think anyone would believe?” Without waiting for an answer, Elizabeth turns and starts walking away, toward the platforms.

20

How long before it occurs to Will that if Mitch slept with Elizabeth, he might have slept with other girls—other of his girlfriends?

On the crowded train home from Philadelphia, Will has a backward-facing seat and blames this for contributing to his sense of disorientation. He stares silently out the window, watching the string of fenced yards unspool backward into the distance, as if they were moving and he sitting still. Squalid little houses, some of them, sagging laundry lines and broken toys spread across the withered grass. Something that looks like half a house slides past, rooms missing walls, naked and flimsy under the pale afternoon sun. As for Will, a big chunk of his own foundation, the block of certainties upon which he'd piled all sorts of other assumptions he'd made about his life, has officially been removed. Is this melodramatic? Yes. Still, he wonders if the chunk was a keystone, and how much of the rest of him will go down with it. Isn't this how patients describe breakdowns? First that vertiginous sense of losing one's footing, then the teetering, finally the plummet. How bad would it be? How far?

Will reviews his list of worries, something he pictures like a pull-down menu on a computer screen, growing ever longer. Now it includes the possibility that Jennifer has saved his semen, that his brother betrayed him with other people, that even as he struggles to direct his patients to deeper levels of self-awareness, he doesn't know essential aspects of his own life.

Incest. He has a patient whose background includes her father's molesting her; having seen her for fifteen years, he's still surprised by the malarial quality of the damage, the way it won't fade, arrives without warning and dismantles her. “I'm no better than a dog on a chain,” she said. “I can only get so far before it yanks me back. I'm forty fucking years old, and it is never ever going to go away.” But Jennifer isn't a child; he didn't force himself on her; he didn't know. And it might not be true. Please, let it not be true.

And now what? What's he supposed to do now? He doesn't understand Elizabeth's casual attitude toward sleeping with twin brothers, her lying to him and, presumably, to the man she married. And what to make of her suggestion that he and Mitch were not entirely distinct from each other, not enough anyway to be considered separate individuals? Didn't that have to be bullshit, a tidy lie to ease her conscience? And yet, hasn't Will himself feared their overidentification? Still, his deepest sexual transgression—with the girl, possibly breaking taboo—was unknowing. While Mitch's, also in defiance of taboo, was conscious, deliberate.

Will remembers his own lust at twenty, twenty-one. His brother's would have to have been the same, wouldn't it? Same biology, same wiring. And Mitch had always been too self-conscious about his disfigurement to even talk to a girl. Too proud to allow anyone the tiniest sliver of compassion for him, because he could never feel sympathy as distinct from pity.

He should just let the whole thing go, shouldn't he? If he can't do this out of generosity toward Mitch, if he can't summon forgiveness, then perhaps he can out of a sense of self-preservation. Let go before it develops into exactly the kind of obsessive pursuit he's heard patients describe as the prelude to a crisis. Because Will has enough crises. Infidelity. Impotence. Incest!

Every time he approaches the idea of Jennifer, whatever analytical ability he possesses disappears. Thoughts don't proceed in logical argument; they ricochet around inside his skull, cracking into one another like pinballs and destroying every coherent mental construction in their path. Images of Carole and Samantha jumble with parts of Jennifer he wishes he'd never seen, paranoid scenarios of sex police knocking at his door, incarceration in dank jails filled with rapists and pederasts, his old, respectable colleagues replaced by new ones: criminals, perverts. Perps.

He takes out his cell phone and dials Daniel's number, gets his voice mail, and leaves a message.

What does it mean to be caught in two simultaneous snares of obsessive thought, both concerning sexual transgression? Thoughts of Mitch with one woman competing with thoughts of himself with that same woman's daughter, a daughter who isn't much older than her mother had been when her mother was involved with Mitch and Will. Were these a patient's parallel obsessions, Will would have to agree with Elizabeth's initial, knee-jerk diagnosis: the whole construct must represent an unconscious strategy for avoiding an even more unacceptable and unbelievable something. But what? Luke's death? It's been three years.

Of course, that argument does tend to collapse in the face of his fury over Mitch and Elizabeth having been involved twenty-five years ago. And, if his patients are at all representative of the human condition, the past isn't past until it's lived. Not lived through,
lived.
Felt.

Fuck it, Will thinks. Fuck me. Fuck you, William Moreland. And fuck you, too, Mitchell Moreland. You have made a big fat fucking mess, so fuck you. He hits redial, gets Daniel's voice mail again, and hangs up. Then he reconsiders and hits redial to leave a second message. “I have to talk to you,” he says. “I have to talk to you tonight.”

How is a person to ignore information that changes everything? It's not as if he's made any of this up. And it's no small deceit that Elizabeth described—Mitch's entering her house after dark, pretending to be Will, and penetrating Elizabeth's room, her bed, her body, a trespass followed by the confession that he wasn't who she assumed—no, not a confession. Confession implies shame, and the scene Will imagines doesn't include his brother's feeling ashamed. When had Mitch ever betrayed any form of regret? Mitch was angry, angry enough to have always spoken in a soft voice and moved with silent grace. If he hadn't been conscious of his rage, some part of him knew he was carrying explosive cargo and carried it very carefully. So carefully that even his twin—or especially his twin: his obligingly, willfully blind twin—hadn't felt it.

Will had been nearing the midpoint of his training analysis before he could attempt to address his brother's peculiarly thoughtful and deliberate passage through the years, leading up to college, acts of what seemed to be impulsive, helpless generosity accomplished with a nearly visible tremor of determination. Mitch hadn't lied when he said he couldn't resist carrying an old woman's groceries to her car or mowing the neighbor's lawn while that neighbor recuperated from surgery. When he first began to question his brother's motives, Will misunderstood these as acts of hypocrisy, but in truth they'd been far more insidious. They were opportunities for Mitch to cloak his misanthropy, to disguise his hatred for the unmarked faces all around him. Hide it from himself before anyone else. Because, like anyone dedicated to a performance, Mitch was his own first audience, the one person above all others whom he had to convince.

In the dark, in Elizabeth's bedroom, having just fucked her, Will's brother wouldn't have confessed his identity; he'd have announced it—crowed, in effect. He would have loved how it felt to steal Elizabeth. Loved the discovery enough to do it again, and again.

If in fact this was a discovery.

If Elizabeth was the first of Will's girlfriends that Mitch seduced.

Will closes his eyes. His head aches and he succumbs to a flight of hypochondria, hurrying through the relatively benign and less interesting causes of cranial miseries—eye strain, sinus infection, food allergy—to arrive at potentially fatal diagnoses, like critically high blood pressure, which would explain why he always feels his collar tightening during the course of a day. Then there's the even more affecting brain tumor, which he accessorizes with tableaux of his confinement in a hospital bed, Samantha playing with the buttons and making his pitifully bandaged head and wasted legs go up and then down. Stoic and pale, Carole resists going over all the papers and insurance documents he wants her to review before his death, insisting that he can make himself better, if only he will try to believe in the possibility of recovery, and swallow ayurvedic potions.

Will gets out a pad of paper and begins a list of some of the girls he's dated. The ones Mitch could maybe have crossed paths with.

April Pedly
Marna Yardham
Esther (Newton?)
Christine Johnson
Elizabeth Fuller
Julie Applegate
Lisa Christianson
Jean McMinnamin (sp.?)

So, start with April, the girl with whom he lost his virginity. April had been at camp with them, not the camp from which Will had been expelled, but the one he and Mitch attended the following summer, when they were fifteen. Pale and lanky—languid—her limbs a little too pliable, she'd seemed lacking in vitality, a doll whose batteries were drained. But Will had found her blue eyes extraordinary. Blood-shot and red-rimmed from allergies, they suggested not hay fever so much as a consuming, destructive passion. In the context of her enervation, they seemed to indicate a secret love marked by epic, unrequited weeping in her bunk on the girls' side of the camp.

Penetrating the divide between the boys' and girls' sides hadn't presented a problem. The junior counselors, who lived in the cabins with the campers, never even tried to prevent the consummation of nighttime pilgrimages through the little copse of struggling maples and birch trees that separated the two clusters of cabins—too much of a hassle, not to mention a loss of sleep, and for what? Under the trees the ground was lush with poison ivy, and if that didn't dampen lust, what could? Of course, any kid who wanted to advertise himself as an initiate into the mysteries of sex didn't wear socks or long pants because he considered a poison ivy rash to be a badge of honor. Anyone with raw and oozing shins claimed, in effect, to have gotten his rocks off. Now that Will thinks about it, there must have been more than a few boys who went only as far as the copse, exposed their unprotected legs to the oily green leaves, and then headed back, seeking to enlarge their reputations rather than their experience.

Will made at least five nocturnal visits to the girls' side, summoning the wan and ectomorphic April from her cabin. She slept lightly, wheezing by a window whose flimsy screen could be removed with little effort. After they'd done it—not so much a memorable initiation as his confused fumbling toward what must have been a painful disappointment for April, a few stabbing thrusts and then he pulled back enough to come on rather than in her—Will hurried back to his bunk. The next morning he showed off the broken skin above his sock lines, barely waiting past breakfast to prop his red legs up on benches and fence rails, scratching exhibitionistically, silently bragging that he was no longer a virgin.

Will never told Mitch about visiting April—he never spoke with his brother about any of his romantic quests, even the failed ones, because he didn't want to hurt him or underscore his isolation, his imprisonment behind his face. But Mitch knew—of course he did, because everyone knew who was getting any and how often. It would have been a simple thing for Mitch to lie awake until he was sure that Will was asleep in the bed above his, that Will wasn't going through the copse that night. Then, in the shadows, only too easy to slip out and over to the girls' side, legs well protected, pants tucked into socks. Who slept in which cabin was practically announced by the camp post office, where mail was sorted into boxes labeled with the names of the cabins. Perhaps April, Will's first, was also Mitch's first, and camp the setting in which he acquired the cover of night as his M.O.

Given the pressure of the moment—the hurrying, the excitement, the lust—it would have been easy to mistake Mitch for Will. As long as Mitch chose a night when the moon was new or the sky overcast, as long as he kept within the shadows, April, like Elizabeth, would have had no reason to suspect the boy who came to her might be anyone other than Will. In retrospect, she didn't seem a very perceptive girl, not the sharpest blade in the drawer. But that's not fair. Probably it was just that April, like the rest of them, was self-involved to the point that she paid little attention to anyone but herself. At fifteen, the prospect of getting laid was more than enough to eclipse every competing thought, and even older lovers are blind to a lover's true identity. The bed trick was one of the oldest in the book—all the way back to Genesis. Abraham, Leah, Rachel.

So, April, then. Will uncaps his pen, staring at the little houses that flash by his window, each a white square, identical except for the odd detail, racing past like single frames of a film. Will and Mitch sharing the same girl. Almost like fucking each other, Will thinks, allowing the thought for only a second. Funny how you could hold one of the houses in your vision, follow it for a beat or two, so long as you picked only one from out of the stream. One second was enough to note two or three details: the empty plastic pool, the red tricycle next to the round, red barbecue. For an instant he could see all this, and then it was gone. And, for a finger snap of consciousness, Will understands that, driving into the red-eyed, pale-lipped April, Mitch had chosen the wet center of a girl as the place for the brothers' brief reunion. What better than this primal consummation for two who were once one, two who would always remain a single idea for a person?

The epiphany—if that's what it is—lasts no longer than the image of the one little house among many; it arrives, departs, and is replaced by another. And maybe it's more a conceit than a truth, a projection of Will's, not Mitch's but Will's, desire for the return of his absent twin, the version of himself defaced. The birthmark had robbed Will's brother of a face, left him faceless, humiliated, having suffered a literal loss of face. Well, whatever the thought is, Will has no time to explore it before it's gone, returned to his unconscious, out of reach, but not before a few synapses have fired in its wake, a sequence that summons a wave of tiny contractions, minute
erector pili
muscles, one per follicle, each lifting a single hair on the back of his neck, together raising his hackles; Will shudders. It's the deep sort of shudder imaginatively linked to a stranger walking over one's future grave. He shifts in his seat, makes a check mark next to the name April Pedly, indicating that he's thought through a scenario and concluded that betrayal was plausible, if not proven.