TWENTY-EIGHT
VIVIAN HAD SOME KIND of Japanese off-road vehicle that seemed only slightly smaller and less robust than the amphibious vessels they used for landing troops on D-Day. Even so, he cringed when I closed the passenger door and complained that I’d slammed it.
‘Do you want to slam it a bit harder?’ he said. ‘There’s a woman in Provincetown who didn’t hear you that time.’
I opened the door and shut it again as delicately as a surgeon lowering a new heart into a patient’s rib cage. ‘Better?’
‘I bet you don’t shut the door of your car like that,’ he grumbled as we turned out of the driveway of my uncle’s house for perhaps the last time in our lives. ‘Not that that shit-box would ever have made it as far as Boston.’
I began to regret having accepted the lift, but the alternative would have been a taxi and then the bus.
We drove mostly in silence to the ferry port at Westwich.
Vivian’s prepubescent girlfriend fell asleep on the back seat with her feet on the sofa-sized armrest that separated me from my brother. She remained comatose all the way to Westwich, slept through the ferry crossing, and only opened her eyes briefly when we arrived on the mainland.
I felt a slight ache at the thought of leaving. The dense pine trees that stretched away on either side of the highway and the dusty golden light of late afternoon on the Cape seemed so familiar that I found it painful to think I might revisit it again only as a memory.
‘Dad was ill,’ Vivian said, apropos of nothing, as the car rumbled up Route 6 towards Boston.
‘Judith didn’t mention anything.’
‘I imagine he didn’t tell her. You know what he’s like.’
‘Is he all right?’
‘He’s over it now. I had my assistant call you at the time but she said some fucking Russian guy kept answering the phone.’
‘You had your assistant call me?’
‘You never return my calls anyway, so what difference does it make?’
‘What was wrong with him?’
‘He had a medical in Boston while he was over for Patrick’s funeral — he must have felt he was next in line for the big guy with the sickle. He called me up afterwards to brag.’ Vivian lowered his voice in an impression of my father’s drawling mid-Atlantic accent: ‘“Blood pressure one forty over eighty-five, they said I had the eyes of a fighter pilot, I could have run on that treadmill all week. Nothing wrong with your genes, Vivian.”’
I laughed in spite of myself. Vivian smiled. When he was funny, he was also strangely remote from me: it reminded me of the distance between us.
‘Turns out he didn’t quite get the all clear. They ran tests on everything, you know what American doctors are like: fingers up the back-bottom, checking the old chap, cholesterol levels, chest X-rays, blood sugar and God knows what else. He had some sort of discoloration on his arm and they wanted to check that out, too. Anyway, the stool sample showed up little traces of blood, so they had to have him back for a colonoscopy, and found a tumour.’
‘Oh.’
‘Yeah, that was my reaction. He was in hospital a week while they removed it. They did what’s called a “resection” — they just cut out about fifteen centimetres on either side of the lump and then join the two ends together. The procedure itself is no big deal, actually. I went to see him a couple of times, including on the day of the operation. I was with him when they wheeled him into the operating theatre. He was all groggy just before he went under. I was holding his hand and he kind of whispered something to me. I had to bend down to hear it. I’ll give you five hundred bucks if you can guess what it was.’
‘“Veni, vidi, vici”? “It is a far, far better thing …”?’
‘That’s two guesses and they’re both wrong.’ He paused for dramatic effect. It was a serious story and my suggestions were unwelcome. He paused, as though waiting for my flippant remarks to disperse. ‘He was whispering, “Bolder than Mandingo”. Bolder than Mandingo! Remember that dumb game? He was making a joke. They could have been his final words. I was proud of him.’
‘I’ll have to ask him about it when I see him,’ I said. I knew that Vivian hadn’t been trying to make me feel like a disloyal son, but I did anyway. I wanted to tell him that I was going to see our father now, but I was afraid it would have sounded defensive, or like a boast.
Vivian stretched forward over the steering wheel and then settled back into the seat. ‘This reminds me of when you slashed my arm with your Swiss Army knife,’ he said.
I found myself repeating the explanation I gave at the time. I had been sixteen, and travelling up to Maine with Vivian and my father. ‘It was an accident. I didn’t mean to cut you. I was just threatening you with it.’
‘Just threatening me? Just threatening me? Ha!’ He laughed to himself for what seemed like a long time. ‘Just threatening me. Did you hear that, honey?’ Lolita in the back said nothing. She was listening to a Walkman. ‘I must remember that.’
I stared out of the window trying to think of a similar outrage that Vivian had committed against me so as to erase his moral superiority, but I couldn’t remember any. The cruellest thing my brother had done had been completely unintentional. He had grown four inches taller than me by the time I got back home from my first term at university. And he not only had usurped my height, but had taken on a kind of sneering superiority in his way of speaking that can only have been an imitation of me. Everything he didn’t like was dismissed as ‘sad’ or ‘tragic’, which was slang for ‘contemptible’, and while I still caught glimpses of the old, soft Vivian when I overheard him talking to his friends, I never saw it again myself.
About a year after that, I found a diary in the drawer of his desk when I was looking for a pencil sharpener and leafed through it — pretending to myself that I wasn’t sure it was a private notebook — and found myself referred to as ‘that weirdo Damien’. I carried on reading it in the hope of finding something complimentary as an antidote, but only discovered further remarks in the same vein and a couple of short sentences where he said I was so staid that he felt sorry for me. I think I was hurt, apart from anything, by how little I featured in his internal life, more than by the tone of my few appearances there.
‘What was the kid’s name?’ my brother asked suddenly.
‘Which kid?’
‘The kid at your cook-out.’
‘Nathan?’
‘Nathan.’ My brother pronounced it with a sonorous finality, as though it were the tag on a folder of observations he was tucking away into a mental filing cabinet. ‘I’m hungry. There’s a couple of Twinkies in the glove compartment,’ he said.
I opened the packet and passed one to him: sticky and corn-coloured like a barely damp bath sponge. He stuck half of it into his mouth. ‘Want one?’ he said — except his mouth was so full it sounded like Wampum?
‘No thanks.’
At the airport drop-off I hugged him awkwardly. ‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said.
‘No sweat. Judy and I are flying back to LA in a week, but please look us up if you’re out there.’
‘Did you give her a sleeping pill?’ I said.
‘She’s had a busy week,’ he said.
‘Up early for kindergarten?’
‘Don’t spoil it, Damien.’
‘Sorry.’
We shook hands.
‘I promise to return your calls if you promise not to have your assistant make them,’ I said.