Envy (3 page)

But Will didn't—couldn't—articulate any of what he knows about himself, his essential self, in a five-hundred-word essay. Not any more than did the alumni who submitted their brief, sanitized promos, admitting none of the missteps or misfortunes or unfulfilled longings that might have added texture to their whitewashed autobiographies. No one wrote in to say he'd lusted after his neighbor's wife, and then married her. Or that he'd suffered all his life from gender dysmorphia and was now a woman, no longer Joe but Joanne. Or that, in the wake of her daughter's diagnosis of schizophrenia, she'd fallen into a profound depression that was cured only when she walked out, left her family, abandoned them because, after all, how much was a person expected to endure?

Will scans each page of the reunion book and flips to the next, skimming over advanced degrees and promotions; residencies and relocations; awards and more awards; marriages and births; travel to Turkey, to Tuscany, to Majorca, to Machu Picchu, the Galápagos; marathons, triathlons, thrills of victory, agonies of defeat; PTA committees and car-pool purgatories, these last not so much complaints as advertisements disguised as complaints:
Look at our
children; are they not the ultimate wealth and accomplishment?

Many of the photographs are reproduced from holiday greeting cards, families carefully arranged around sparkling trees, hair combed, eyes bright. Without conscious intent Will finds himself lingering on the faces of those few who admit a family misfortune, looking for evidence of losses on which they don't dwell but make curious asides, rather like sneezing: quick, helpless convulsions that interrupt a text or are bulleted absurdly within the résumé format. These references are abbreviated and in every case weirdly upbeat, their authors clearly having determined to present a hard-won silver lining rather than the lowering black clouds of fate: “Lost my brother to cancer in 1993, and learned a lot about how strong I am!” “Our daughter Kyla, 12, has cystic fibrosis and she is Awesome!!! She is doing Great!!!” “Two brain surgeries, 1999 and 2001—if anyone out there is suffering unexplained neurological symptoms or has been diagnosed with NMH, e-mail me! I love to share!” After each of these plucky announcements, followed by at least one exclamation point (a few decorated with little happy-face icons, as well), the afflicted's life story veers without transition back into the mundane.

This is what Will has come to understand as his problem: transition, an obstacle on the page as in reality, because he insists on it, and there are unbridgeable divides in a life. Things don't add up; they don't segue; they follow chronologically, one upon another, without obeying the more important logic of meaning and sense and, well, acceptability.

“Not this year,” he said to Carole when she asked about their Christmas card the November after Luke had drowned. For the ten previous years they'd sent out a photo greeting, not without a guilty, sheepish irony (at least they'd hoped irony was the evident subtext) because both he and Carole understood and intended to acknowledge that such cards were inherently obnoxious, even if, to them, irresistible. So they hadn't dressed their best or used a perfect vacation shot but instead posed in their everyday clothes, each wearing a goofy Santa hat, Carole with little if any makeup, the kids' hair un-brushed, Will looking effortfully (and thus less than completely successfully) candid. And they trusted that this casual, studiedly haphazard quality would be taken as an apology for the cards' inherent bragging—
Please forgive us our pride, the pleasure we take in our two
perfect offspring. Overlook, won't you, the vulgarity of our publishing their
inestimable worth. Our living golden calves—how beautiful they are! Our
sacred objects! You must understand that we cannot help ourselves. We can't
not exult.
Will shudders with the recognition, feels the flesh crawl on his neck. How foolish to flash a target at the jealous gods—to not merely disregard but show off the chink in their armor.
Aim here!
Here where we presume our divinity and yet are most mortal!

“No,” Will said to Carole. “Not this year.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Why!”

“Yes, why?” Carole set her coffee cup on the table and looked at him in that unnerving way she has, her eyes wide with what appeared to be genuine curiosity.

“Because . . . because . . .” He remembers spluttering in outrage, in the face of her calm. “Because one of us is missing! One of us who was in last year's card is gone!”

“Dead,” she clarified.

“Dead. Yes. Yes. Dead.”

Carole nodded. “Well, everyone knows that. All our friends, they know about Luke. And we could maybe acknowledge him with a, I don't know, something on the—”

“Like what! R.I.P? His initials? His dates? Like a gravestone? A little gravestone in the mail! Happy holidays, and in case you forgot, our son drowned last summer! But don't let that bother you—go ahead and have a wonderful new year!”

“No, that's not—”

“I'm not going to do it.”

“You aren't letting me talk. I think we should. For Samantha.”

“Why for Sam? It's not as if it's good for her. It's sad for Sam.”

“It's sadder if we don't.”

So he caved. He tried to arrange his features into an acceptable expression, an expression of what he couldn't say. He's never looked at the photograph Carole picked and had reproduced above their greeting. Two hundred copies.
Peace on Earth,
they probably said, as in years past. Even now he can't figure out what kind of artifact that particular photo greeting might be, or the level— depth?—of its bad taste. Or maybe it wasn't in bad taste. Maybe it was just what Carole claimed it was: an impossible response to an impossible situation. Apparently she doesn't get stuck there, at Impossibility, the way he does. There is no conceivable transition, so she doesn't insist on it. She's pragmatic in that impressive, fearsome, and always surprising way that women are, the way they preside with equal industry and competence over tea parties and deathbeds.

At home, in the magazine basket by the couch, is
Yoga Journal,
a publication that continues to resurface from under the others because both of them thumb through it, Carole as a disciple, Will as a bystander at once fascinated and incredulous. “A Vedanta Paradigm for Transforming Negative Emotions,” the most recent cover promises. Will has reread this article several times, attempting to translate phrases like “the classical citta-vitri-eroding yogic approach” into psychoanalytic terms. But he gets tripped up by discussion of topics like “heart energy” or “the consciousness that has no content” and ends up casting it away in irritation.

He did attempt to recap the last twenty-five years for the reunion book, but he couldn't leave out the drowning, nor could he tell it. What was the previous sentence? What was the one that followed? Will began a letter over and over again, getting no farther than a paragraph before he deleted it from his computer file. According to an online survey, to which 37 percent of the class of 1979 responded, 41 percent of the 37 percent are more spiritual compared with when they graduated, 9 percent less spiritual, 50 percent about the same. Forty-seven percent of them have achieved about what they expected to achieve, 28 percent have exceeded their life expectations, 20 percent are a little disappointed in themselves, and the remaining (unaccounted-for) 5 percent are, he guesses, either apathetic or in despair. Sixty-four percent of them are on their first marriages, 19 percent have remarried, and while the autobiographical dispatches indicate that a few alumni have lost a spouse or a child, no statistical breakdown of tragedies is included in the survey. Nine percent have earned a Ph.D. Forty-one percent choose relaxing vacations, 18 percent cultural, and 25 percent adventurous; 3 percent don't vacation at all. Eighty-two percent claim reading as a favorite pastime, 31 percent “creating,” whatever that means.

Perhaps it means gardening or knitting or drawing or, like Sally Henderson, building the world's largest freestanding structure made from discarded plastic bleach containers. Will looks carefully at the picture of Sally standing next to the door of her bleach-bottle tower. Her smile is more rictus than evidence of pride, baring her teeth against a looming threat. Haven't studies of evolution demonstrated that a smile is the pallid descendant of primate rage? A warning of aggression? Will flips quickly through the book, trying to see smiles separate from faces. Are any of these people happy, really? And if they are, how can one tell?

11:57 by the digital clock on the television set. He's missed the ecumenical Sunday service, and if he doesn't hurry, he'll miss brunch in the big tent, as well.

What was it that Luke had seen? he wonders, head bent under the shower's needling spray—the white and shining and exalted Luke of Will's dream. Was it a thing worse than grief, something degenerate and disgraceful, that a child can't allow his father?

The boy in the dream: Will knows he's no more real than a wish, or a fear. And yet, he might ask himself, of what else are we composed?

4

“So why didn't you stay the whole weekend?” Carole asks him when he comes to bed. “I thought you were looking forward to this thing.” The way she says the word
thing
betrays her feelings about reunions, that they are all, without exception, events to be avoided whenever possible.

“I was going to stay. I'd made plans to meet up with a couple of guys, maybe even play some racquetball after the picnic. But, I don't know, after the main attraction, the cocktails and dinner thing on Saturday . . .” Will trails off. He should tell her about running into Elizabeth. Instead, he finds himself talking about Mitch. “After the hundredth person approached to ask me about my famous brother, I got a little tired of the whole thing,” he says. Carole makes the face she always does when he mentions his brother, something between a wince and a frown.

“That must have been crummy.”

“Well, I should have known. Prepared myself. I guess I was so wrapped up in my own fantasy of his appearing that I didn't consider the more likely scenario.”

“Where'd they hold it?” she asks, having apparently decided to move them along to a less loaded bedtime topic. “They'd have to use a basketball court or something for a reception that big.”

“There were tents. A separate tent for each class.”

“Tents? Ick.”

“You don't notice when it's crammed with people. And at least there's fresh air.”

“Yes, you do. You do notice.” Carole wrinkles her nose. “Even if it doesn't rain, they still have that dank, tenty sort of smell, like old sneakers. Aside from the temporary, makeshift feeling of a Red Cross relief effort.”

Will shrugs. “The other thing was, after I'd mingled and reconnected and seen how much hair the men had and if the pretty girls had grown up to be pretty women, and who'd gotten married more than once, or twice, and who'd turned out to be gay, and all the rest of it—after that, it seemed like the next day's activities would be sort of redux. Like those picnics the day after a wedding, when everyone just wants to go home.”

“Uh-huh,” Carole says, picking up her book. She turns the page.

“So, instead, I hung out at the hotel and watched triple-X movies on pay-per-view.”

“Yeah?” she says. Will pulls the book from her hands. “Hey! What are you doing!”

“You're not listening to me.”

“Yes, I am.”

“What did I say, then?”

“That you mingled and it was . . . it was like a picnic.”

“No. I said I left and watched triple-X movies at the hotel.”

She looks at him. “You did?”

“No! I just said that to see if you were paying attention.”

“I'm sorry, Will,” she says, and she moves closer to him. “I know a way back into your good graces.”

“Do you? How?”

Carole slides one hand under the waistband of his pajama bottoms.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah. But first give me back my book.”

“You don't need it. Not now.”

“I want to mark my place.” She pulls her hand out of his pants, lets the elastic go with a little snap, but instead of returning the book, Will lifts it high out of her reach. “Give it,” she says, “or I'm downgrading you to a hand job.”

“What? No way!”

Carole makes a grab for the paperback, and Will rolls out from under her, keeping it out of reach. He opens to a random page, reads aloud in a voice of breathless suspense.

“‘Glatman jerked the ligature around Christine Rohas's slender neck. His knee in the small of her back, he pinned her to the ground, facedown in a field where, only hours before, the local peewee championship was played. Swiftly, he bound her ankles and through the loops threaded the end of the rope trailing from her neck. One brutal tug, and . . .' ” Will closes the paperback to consider its lurid cover, which promises
sixteen pages of shocking photos!
“I really don't see how this can compare to my report of who from the class of 'seventy-nine went bald and who didn't.” Carole lunges, and the fitted bottom sheet springs off one and then another mattress corner as she tries to wrestle his arm down.

“Now, how is it that you can square something like this with higher consciousness and feminism and yoga and all that?” he asks, holding the book far above her head. Carole gets up on her knees, but as soon as she pries one hand off the cover, the other has it fast.

“I don't,” she says.

“Stop it. You can't pull hairs out of my arm.”

“Why not?” Accidentally, Carole kicks the bedside table, toppling a stack of exemplary reading material: professional journals, novels chosen by her Thursday book group,
New Yorker
s of varying vintage, arts and education sections pulled and saved from the
Times,
all lying untouched. The books she actually reads, with titles like
Hillside Stranglers, The Greenriver Killer, Beauty Queen Slasher,
she keeps hidden from view, on the top shelf of her closet—enough true crime to fill two banker's boxes with the rape and murder, or murder and then rape, of young women—cheap paperbacks whose covers bear snapshots of the victims taken in happier times, on holidays and at high school graduations, mementoes from a family album. “Basically, this is porn,” Will says, paging through the photo insert.

“Okay, it's porn.”

“Otherwise, why hide it?”

“Because it's not for children, obviously. It's not for Sam to see.”

“Meaning unsavory. Subject to parental censorship.”

“Yes. I admit everything. Now give it.”

“Lowbrow. Do you admit to lowbrow?”

“Yes.”

“You'd die of embarrassment if your book group caught you?”

“I don't know that I'd die.”

“You wouldn't like it.”

“I wouldn't like it. Let go, Will, you're tearing the cover.”

He lets her have it. Lying on his side, he props his head on one elbow. “They don't turn you on, do they?” he says.

“Sexually, you mean?” Carole looks at him, raises an eyebrow.

“Sure. You know, sex so radically sexy it's fatal.”

She shakes her head. “Disappointed?”

“A little. What about recipes? I thought women liked to read recipes.”

“Boring.”

“Romances?”

Carole turns out the light. “Don't you think I deserve a secret vice?” she says, sliding her hand under his T-shirt and stroking his chest. “A teeny-weeny vice that doesn't hurt anyone?”

“No.”

She tugs on the waistband of his pajama bottoms, and Will lifts up, off the bed, slides them down. “I want you to have big fat vices. Give in to your basest impulses.”

“Do you?” She pulls her nightgown over her head. “What do you imagine those impulses might be?”

“Hard to say.” Will shudders as her mouth touches him. The hairs on his arms and thighs lift his skin into gooseflesh at the wet heat of it, that shock of pleasure that never wears off. “Probably nymphomaniacal.”

“Huh,” she says, substituting hand for mouth. “You don't think that secretly I might be a compulsive shopper? Or, um . . . let's see, a gambler? A glutton maybe?”

“No. Not for food, anyway.”

“Why not?”

“I can tell that you're a sex addict,” he says, “by the way you can't let more than a few seconds go by without taking me in your mouth again.” With his hand on the back of her neck, Will guides his wife's head back to where he wants it.