Everybody Loves You (15 page)

Ned didn't land the New York job. He ended up in Boston, which he said he preferred. To what, I wonder? New York? Paris? His past? He was married and had a little boy; and that got me amazed. Here was a man, flesh of my flesh, only three years older than I, who had already set upon his course of leaving his mark upon the world—and I was still worrying over whether I would ever come upon a copy of the Capitol
Pal Joey
with the original cover. We were brothers, but we weren't entirely related, if you see what I mean.

It turned out that even a Boston television anchorman has to come to New York periodically for Meetings, and lunch with Ned and Jim became a regular feature of my life. At one of these, looking toward the summer, Ned invited us up to stay with him on Martha's Vineyard. Jim said no, but I was curious. I wanted to see what else I wasn't entirely related to, Ned's wife and son. I had a good time and went again the next year, and it became an annual visit—more than a visit, a tithe. After three or four of these trips, I felt certain that if I tried to stick out a summer without visiting the Neds, they would hale me into court. I had become a participant in their season, a member of my own family.

A certain weekend would be assigned me, set aside, built around the things I was likely to do and say. Ned was a man of Significant Draw, and the trip's logistics were Advantageous. Zesty, highly inflected metropolitan types, doing this important favor for a friend of a friend of a friend, would pick me up in front of my building, the car packed with cold collation, ambition, and wit. Crowded cars, rigid stages. This is traveling. I hate it but—sometimes—I do it. There was usually one guy too many (besides me), and someone would get stuck with a liverwurst sandwich, and one of the women would want to stop when no one else did, and one of the men would drop a truly ghastly ethnic slur of some kind (no one would say anything, but the silence was a hiss). Then, too, the car trip from Manhattan to outer New England must vie with the Damascus-Peking caravan line for density of tedium. Still, eventually I would land at the ferry slip, thinking of some story I might get out of the car people. Soon enough I would be standing on the top of the boat, and I would see my brother and sister-in-law standing with my nephew. I would wave. My brother, whom I understood very well in our youth but now think of as This Guy I Know, or Mr. Mordden, or even (Hey) Mister, waves back. He is jaunty, confident, always taller than I remember. He's going to age poisonously well. He's even getting just a bit gray; good career move. My sister-in-law points me out to the little boy, and he'll gaze at me with wonder and suspicion and bashful delight.

*   *   *

So that's what I'm doing on a beach in Massachusetts: sitting in their kitchen at the “breakfast bar,” finishing my morning coffee.

Curtain up, and my sister-in-law says, “I wish you and your brother got along better.”

“We get along quite well for two people so near yet so far, don't you think?”

“I mean, I wish you acted as if you liked each other. I know you do like each other, of course.” She rinses out the name mugs: Ned, Ellen, Toby. How come they can find a Toby and I can't find an Ethan? “It's just so nice to see him … relating?” A paper towel to dry the mugs. My sister-in-law is very neat; her theory of eating implements is, they're either in use or in the cupboards. None of that wet stuff hanging in the porte cochere, or whatever they call those plastic racks next to the sink. You wash it, you dry it. You're brothers, you relate.

“Ned really isn't a big relater,” I say. “I expect the television camera has spoiled him. He's gotten so used to addressing a population, he probably doesn't know how to talk to one person anymore.”

My brother, I gather, is a very hot item among analysts of the 18-to-49 female demographics, but we never mention this to him because he has a fierce aplomb, always did. No wonder he left home without explaining why. Frankly, I don't think he ever did know how to talk to one person; anchormanning is perfect casting for him.

Still, he has a perfect marriage: his wife likes everything about him and his son is so young that his occasional testy rebellions pass for standard-make puerile mischief. I think there may be a problem on the brew there, but my sister-in-law sees the three of them as a gang of fun-loving pals. She is very proud of Ned's fame, too. She sends me his clippings. She used to accompany these with warm little notes, trying to explain why she is doing this. Then I told her that in publishing, where time is the first concern, we just write FYI (“For your information”) on something and send it off. Amused, she has made it a household joke: she will hand me a bowl of rice pudding, indicate the whipped cream with a spy's nod, and murmur, “FYI, friend?”

Anyway, I already know why she is doing this: loyalty and love. She's terrific, but she feels too hard. “You know,” she begins, “last night…” She looks away, looks back at me.

“Okay, yes,” I say, “but please don't cry.”

I always know when she will. It's not really crying; she leaks for joy. It's like those sudden, momentary thundershowers in London, when you look up and see the sun right through the rain. It'll be over shortly. But you still get wet.

“It was just so nice,” she says, “to be all together. And Toby loves it when you read to him. He won't let anyone else, you know. We have so much trouble getting him to bed in the city. It's different when you're here.”

“It's always different where I am. It's in my contract.”

“Now, don't make a joke of it. It was so sweet. And I know you know that, so don't look away, either. You and Toby look so cute together, too. And you read so well.” She is leaking.

“Toby and I aren't that great a team,” I put in. “He's very tough for six. I only read to him so he won't grouch at me.”

“Oh, that's not true.” She gazes happily around the tidy summer kitchen: the mounted utensils, the standing machines, Toby's watercolors on the wall, Smurf stickers on the fridge, all their little heads carefully cut off. “Grouch at you? It's family! We've got to be our own best friends!”

“I wish you wouldn't enthuse just after breakfast.”

“When he has a nightmare … of course, he doesn't often. But when he does, do you know he speaks your name? As if he's worried about you? I've heard him.”

“Toby speaks my name?”

“Not Toby. Your brother.”

Alarmed, I head for the beach. There's not much else to do out here but eat, sleep, and bake on the sand. You'd think an anchorman would be at a loss here: nothing but individuals to swank around for, at, with. What a waste of an act.

And God knows, Ned's got one. The first time we were alone together as adults—at lunch at my neighborhood joint, the Mayfair, at Fifty-third and First—he broke a copious silence by telling me a sure way to fascinate a woman: immediately after, read her a story. He recommended
The Velveteen Rabbit.
He said the combination of the aggressiveness of cock and the sweetness of the fairy tale overwhelms them. Wrong. It isn't the combination—it's the paradox of the aggressive and the sweet working for and against each other.

But he's definitely onto something here. Sometimes I try to visualize Ellen lying next to him, listening to him read
The Velveteen Rabbit.
I can see it. I can see it more easily than I can see myself on this patch of beach among—forgive me, Ellen—strangers. Still, I'm a game guest. I bring a quart of Johnnie Walker Red. I make my own bed, first thing up, even before the toothpaste. I spell them in looking after Toby. I take us all out to dinner on my last night. And I read my nephew stories.

It started by chance. One evening after dinner, three or four years ago, I happened to pick up an ancient Oz book lying next to me on the couch. As I leafed through it, Toby came up and said, “Mine.” His father looked over from six newspapers, including the
Manchester Guardian.
“No, Toby, that's mine,” he said. But my name was written on the front free endpaper.

“Read,” Toby urged me.

I demurred with some evasion and he hit me.

“Better read to him,” my newscaster brother said, not unamused.

I did read to him, and he listened carefully. All three of them do; and they watch me as they listen. It's like reading one's work in a bookstore. They even unplug the phone. After a while, Toby puts his head in my lap, and after a longer while he falls asleep. Then I carry him upstairs and his parents follow, his mother to dote and his father to stand in the doorway, framed in the light from the hall as if he had moved from the news to a suspense series. It's film noir; it's coming too close. Sometimes Toby murmurs reproachful excerpts as I put him to bed—“Why didn't you tell me the secret?” or “You are not playing fairly.” Surely these are not meant for me, precisely. Not precisely. By then, my brother has moved into the room to put his arms around my sister-in-law from behind. These soft noises there, as I tuck Toby in. He likes to be tightly wrapped, like a present. Then I turn to face them, hugged together as they are, and for a moment I fear they won't let me out of the room.

The beach is always quiet here, nearly deserted on weekdays. I open my spiral notebook and pursue the tale of the moment—about, as usual, things I have seen, done, said. I have got to try writing
fiction:
about the encounter of Nabokov and Tolstoy in heaven, perhaps “The Goblin Who Missed Thanksgiving.” I do not want to write anymore about people I know, people with feelings that I have been tricked into sharing. I should write books like those I read to Toby, set in fabulous places among bizarre creatures. You can say anything you want to in such tales and no reader will wonder who you are. You could be the Velveteen Rabbit.

My sister-in-law comes along after a bit with Toby and several tons of beach equipment. There are flagstaffs to stick in the sand and pails of two sorts, the metal kind decorated with merry scenes and the plastic kind with a side pocket for the toting of a shovel. There are rubber balls, a Slinky all coiled up in itself, picture books, drawing tablets, and remnants of a hundred miniature zoos, forts, shopping centers, and such, the pieces recombined in Toby's imagination to form the characters of some dire cosmopolitan epic.

I burrow deep into my notebook as my sister-in-law pulls out the old Modern Library Giant edition of
Ulysses,
the orange jacket encased in plastic. She maintains the reading level of an academic, but is hurt if you ask why she doesn't do something besides be married to my brother. Or she would be hurt if I dared ask. I've delved into
Ulysses
so often I recently took it up in Italian to keep the quest venturesome. (
Ulisse,
translated with astonishing resourcefulness by Giulio de Angelis. It comes complete with notes and commentary, just as I do.) Yet my sister-in-law knows it better than I, can even recite the chapter titles in order. She holds absolutely still when she reads.

Toby ignores us, digging, patting, piling. A grand, circular moat. A lump of sand in the center. Flags at the perimeter. Soldiers, rustics, exotic animals, and Hollywood extraterrestrials lining up to get in. Toby growls to himself as he works, like a dog fussing at a sock. “I'm making a sand tower,” he announces at one point.

When my sister-in-law excuses herself to ready dinner, Toby and I dart suspicious glances at each other. He waits till she disappears over the dunes, then says, “Do you want to help me dribble?”

“Sure.”

He hands me a pail and leads the way to the sea. “Look out for octopus,” he warns.

He's going to grouch at me, I know. He always does.

“You fill it with water,” he says. “It has to be just right. Not like that!”

He keeps pushing me.

“Like this,” he shows.

It takes me eight dips to satisfy him; apparently the water has to fill the pail tight to the rim without spilling. How often in this life one must negotiate a walk along the blade when the topic at hand is absolutely nothing at all. How often one plays one's life for trivial stakes. With certain people, everything matters.

“Now, watch,” says Toby.

This is dribbling: you ease the bottom end of the pail upward, leading the water to plop onto the sand, creating a mason's effect on the walls of your fortress. You decorate your power.

“Now you,” says Toby, with a sense of challenge.

“Why don't you show me? I don't have the feel of it yet.”

Growling, he grabs my pail and throws it off to the side. “I didn't like that water,” he explains.

I return to my story, a sad tale of growing up and pulling away in a small southern town. Toby busies himself with his dribbling.

In the city, the scene is fury, speed, and ice, sheer ice. Holding your own, you may accidentally alienate one of the four or five most influential people in your professional or social or romantic life, and you may spend years working off the blunder. But on the beach, nothing happens, and everything is forgivable. The happy time crawls past. You can't go wrong.

“Hey, Toby,” I ask, “what's on for dinner?”

Toby looks out at the sea. “No, there won't be any dinner for us at all. Can birds swim?”

“Why won't there be dinner?”

“My daddy is mad at Mommy and they aren't going to feed us. I heard them crashing last night, so that means they're mad at someone. Do they like you?”

“Your mother does.”

“Is she your sister?”

“No. Your dad is my brother.”

“I don't think he likes us.”

Toby's dog comes snorting up the beach from the west: a large, wirehaired terrier who moves with the frozen despair of an old man and the mild curiosity of a baby, named, by the child, with a child's logic, Tober.

“Get away, Tober!” Toby screeches. “Get away, you sneaky hound!”