“You think so?”
He sat down next to me, and the merry-go-round shuddered slightly under even his delicate weight. We started to spin, slow but definite, pushing off with the soles of our shoes.
“Lynnie,” he said, his voice urgent and guileless, “what does it mean to have beliefs if you don’t act on them? Doesn’t every single moment of our lives come with a choice attached? You might say these are philosophical questions with no practical bearing, but what I’m trying to tell you is that philosophical questions are the only questions there are.” He lay back against the spinning platform and spread out his skinny arms, the cloth beneath his armpits yellowed with sweat.
“Where are you living?” I said.
“I sleep wherever. Sometimes I camp. I scrounge food from dumpsters. I don’t want to get mired down in trappings. I don’t want to consume.”
“Except for Wild Turkey.”
“Flexibility,” he said, “is the difference between ideology and dogma.”
Across the street, a light went off and slipped us further into darkness. I couldn’t see his face anymore, and but for the rank smell I might have doubted he was there. I let my feet drag in the dirt to stop the spinning. “Listen,” I said. “Speaking of flexibility, I really wish you’d come home. Just for like an hour or something.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Wylie, you’re being so stupid,” I said. “Of course you can.”
We wandered slowly back to the apartment, talking about nothing in particular. Sirens rose and fell in the distance, and the wind flapped my hair across my face and into my mouth. By the time we arrived the party was in full swing, music playing, Irina slow-dancing with Angus, the baby cradled in between them. There was some Wild Turkey left, and also beer and gin. The dog, annoyed by all the commotion, got up and padded into the other room to sleep.
Seven
We all lay sprawled on sleeping bags, the sounds of breath and snores mingling in the quiet with the rising clatter of birds. Sledge woke me by licking my ankle and prodding his wet nose repeatedly against my foot. Irina was next to me, her head inadequately pillowed on Wylie’s stomach, with Psyche pillowed in turn on her more ample body. Angus was nowhere to be seen. Sledge licked me again, this time on the cheek, and whined in my ear. I didn’t know why he always picked me. I rolled over, got a dangerous close-up of Stan’s hairy armpit, and rolled back again.
It was my second hangover in as many days, but either I hadn’t drunk as much last night or I was getting used to the condition. I felt surprisingly fine. I opened the front door and followed the dog down the stairs to the gravel parking lot. The sun was bright yet mild, the street empty, and morning glories I hadn’t noticed before bloomed full and blue. Sledge nosed around in the weeds and relieved himself on a prickly-looking shrub with orange flowers. Above me, the apartment door opened and Wylie stepped onto the landing, squinting. “Are you leaving?”
I shook my head. “Not unless you come with me.”
He made a face. “You can’t make me.”
“I can try.”
He walked down the stairs, glacier-slow, scowling all the while. At the bottom he called to the dog, who ignored him, being otherwise occupied pawing the dirt and then sniffing it, over and over. Finally he lost interest and trotted to my side, sitting down on his back legs, his face attentive and alert, apparently awaiting further instructions.
“Man, he really likes you.”
“It’s unrequited.” I climbed the stairs, and Sledge followed me. I made like I was going inside, and when he scampered in, I closed the door behind him. On the other side of the plywood I could hear his shocked and aggrieved complaints. Having outwitted him gave me an undignified but real sense of satisfaction. Then I went back down and faced Wylie. “Listen,” I said. “You can come now or a week from now, but you do have to come home. I mean it, I’m not leaving until you do. I honestly don’t care if you want to vandalize golf courses and eat food out of dumpsters, but you can’t not talk to Mom. Seriously, you can’t do that.”
In the ensuing silence a jet plane cut across the sky, heading for the Air Force base, trailing a precise white line.
My brother turned his scowl to the ground, to the plane, and reluctantly back to me. “She doesn’t understand.”
“I don’t care,” I said, holding up the keys to the Caprice. “The car’s parked on campus. Let’s go.”
We pulled up at the condo just as my mother was leaving for work. At the sound of the car maneuvering boatlike into the driveway she turned from locking the front door and froze.
After a single night in Wylie’s apartment the small condo loomed like a four-star resort: elegantly furnished, indulgently large, with washed windows and manicured grounds. For a second I felt a glimmer of revulsion, an almost physical sensation akin to nausea, or a sneeze, and shook my head at my new sympathies. I was turning into the eco-freak Patty Hearst.
Wylie got out of the car and faced her, saying nothing. She looked like she wanted to scratch his eyes out; he looked like he was waiting for her to do it. I felt ignored and beside the point, which almost came as a relief.
“You look terrible,” she said to Wylie.
“So do you,” he said.
I could see him looking her up and down, passing judgment on everything from her office job to the big brown purse weighing down her right shoulder. Back in Brooklyn, on the receiving end of all those late-night messages, I thought that Wylie had patterned himself on our father, with his scientific terminology and pseudo-academic pursuits. But now, seeing the two of them together, it occurred to me that he was much more like our mother, with the same rigid insistence on getting his way, the same tendency to withhold his emotions from the world. She unlocked the door and held it open.
“You’re coming in this house, right now, and you’re not leaving until I say so.”
Wylie glanced at me and snorted, and I said, “Please.”
As he passed her, she wrinkled her nose and told him in a level, furious voice that he looked disgusting and smelled like a farmhand, and that she shuddered to think by what behavior he had come by such a smell. She said she hadn’t raised him to live in a ditch and disappear for months at a time, and asked whether by doing these things he hoped to send her to an early grave. “Is that your goal?” she kept saying. She elaborated on this theme for the next half hour, while Wylie stood in the living room, head bowed, in the posture of a martyr. Finally, as the barrage showed no sign of letting up, he started for the white couch, and she said, crisply, “If you think you’re going to set your filthy behind on my clean furniture, then you think wrong.”
She called Francie at the office to explain she’d be late due to “unforeseen circumstances,” and then turned on the shower and stood outside the bathroom tapping her foot until Wylie stepped inside.
While he was showering she made scrambled eggs, fried bacon, brewed coffee, and put bread in the toaster — each gesture, from stirring the eggs to putting juice on the table, executed with the oppressive accuracy of the truly angry. Not knowing what else to do, I set the table, which was getting to be my main contribution to the household.
When Wylie came into the kitchen his hair was flowing loosely down below his shoulders, still wet and gleaming red-brown in the morning sun. He was wearing a pair of khaki shorts and a plaid short-sleeved shirt I recognized — my heart turning over in my chest — as my father’s, and he smelled like strawberry shampoo. Our mother nodded at a chair, and he sat down, in what seemed like the first step in some ritual indoctrination. I kept waiting for her to bring out the clippers and shave his head, like at boot camp, but instead she brought out a spatula and served eggs. Wylie and I ate enveloped in stiff silence, throughout which she would not stop staring at him, even as she sipped mechanically at a cup of coffee. I shifted in my seat. She stared and stared.