Russell Banks - A Permanent Member of the Family

On their way to Ted and Joan’s they stopped at the Wine Boutique in Wilton and bought two bottles of Dom Pérignon. It was snowing in thin, gauzy sheets, slicking the roads slightly, and Ellen reminded Erik that he’d drunk three Heinekens already and told him to slow down. “If it keeps snowing, we may have to spend the night at Ted and Joan’s. Especially after champagne and whatever else they serve with dinner. They like to keep your glass filled,” she said. “It lets them keep their own filled without anyone noticing, I guess.”

“I detect a note of judgment in that. What would your master say?”

“My teacher.”

“Right, your teacher.” Ellen was a Buddhist, or as she said, a student of Buddhism. Erik was emphatically neither and enjoyed poking her for her devotion to her studies and practice and her roshi . Though they’d never married, Erik and Ellen had been together thirty-two years, nearly their entire adult lives. They’d met when they were in their early twenties in New York, when she was a design student at Pratt and he was living on the Lower East Side, the son of a plumber and grandson of a carpenter, a recent graduate of the Boston Museum School inventing himself out of whole cloth as an artist. From the start they were sexually liberated bohemians, and their life together had at times been turbulent and troubled. He had his love affairs and she, in revenge, had hers, but as the years passed it became evident to both that no one else would ever understand and accept them as thoroughly as they understood and accepted each other. They had no children, and the only thing that they periodically quarreled over now was how to train and care for their two female Siberian huskies. Ellen was maternal toward them, but Erik was the alpha in the pack — Ellen’s nickname for him was Big Dog.

When they arrived at Ted and Joan’s, the other two guests, Sam and Raphael, were already settled on the long, low sofa in front of the fire, drinks in hand. The men had married in June, not long after same-sex marriage was legalized in New York, and were still acting like newlyweds, rarely taking their eyes off one another. Sam liked talking about being married, especially in the company of married heterosexual couples. “Five years of living together, and every morning I wake up and look across the bed, and there’s my husband, and it’s brand new! But a little déjà vu, too,” he explained. “Like, hello? Haven’t I been here before?”

In his early fifties with a steel-gray buzz cut and trim, flat-bellied body, Sam looked more like an aging triathlete than a photographer of color landscapes that deliberately evoked the pastoral paintings of the Hudson River School. His photographs were the size of picture windows and sold individually for many thousands of dollars. Erik didn’t much care for them, however. He thought them soft, too easy on the eyes.

Sam’s husband, Raphael, had recently turned thirty and had been a student of Sam’s at Skidmore. He was writing a novel and had been at it since graduation, but thanks to Sam didn’t need to earn a living while he wrote it. Tall and slender, he was handsome in a dark, intense way, with a long aquiline face and pale skin and a mahogany mane of curly hair. He was an ostentatiously intelligent young man with a weakness for sarcasm that everyone knew was only a cover for his insecurity. It was not easy being married to a man like Sam, despite — or perhaps because of — his generosity and warmth, the unashamed pleasure he took from his well-tuned athletic body and his undeniable success as an artist and teacher. Ellen often defended Raphael this way.

Erik found Raphael’s sarcasm, what he called the young man’s smart-ass negativity, irritating, avoided sitting next to him on any occasion and spoke to him only when he had to. “If Raphael was a girl instead of a boy, a female ex-student living with Sam, and living off him, I might add,” Erik once pointed out to Ellen, “you women wouldn’t cut the kid so much slack.”

She had responded that if Raphael actually were an attractive female ex-student and not an attractive gay man, Erik would be interested in her opinions and would think she was witty instead of sarcastic. Erik said he couldn’t argue with that.

Ted took their coats, and Joan carried the two bottles of Dom Pérignon to the kitchen. “I better get down the whatchacallits, the flutes,” she called back. “What’s the occasion, anyhow?”

Ellen said, “I’ll let Erik tell you. Though he’s not supposed to,” she added and followed Joan into the kitchen.

Sam and Raphael and Ted all looked over at Erik, and Joan spun around and returned to the living room still carrying the two unopened bottles of champagne. Ellen waited just inside the kitchen door.

“Well?” Joan said. “Let’s hear it, Big Dog.” An endearment, coming from her. She liked Erik more than any man she knew, except for Ted, and Erik liked her back. They teased each other playfully and often. She felt warmed by his attention and charmed by it and showed him her pleasure, as if she knew it aroused him sexually. Joan was a certified touch healer, and Erik regarded her work as a self-deceiving hoax, but she didn’t seem to care. She had enough faith in the theory and practice of touch healing to treat almost any form of skepticism or disbelief as merely silly and defensive, and Erik’s stubborn, insistent materialism amused her — which sometimes led him to exaggerate it. “People have been healing others with the touch of their hands for millennia,” she often explained. It was a skill that could be taught, even to a man like Erik, who would probably excel as a touch healer, she pointed out, given the strength and sensitivity of his hands. She had offered him free instruction, but he did not take her up on it. She was a good-looking, full-bodied woman with thick red hair, and he knew where that would lead.

Ted handed Erik a glass of red wine, refilled his own and waved him toward the easy chair by the fire next to Raphael. Erik took the rocker in the corner instead, as if to avoid the limelight. No need for it when you’re the one everyone wants to hear. He took a sip of his wine and said, “Yeah, it’s true, I received some great news today. But you got to promise you won’t say a word about it to anyone else. Not till they release it to the press.”

“The press?” Ted said. “Excuse me? That’s me, for Christ’s sake! Are you releasing this great news right now, man? Or is it strictly off the record?”

“It’s off the fucking record, Ted! That’s what I’m saying. Otherwise I’ll stop right here and let you read about it in The New York Times next week.”

“Of course, it’s off the record, Erik,” Joan said. “Please! Teddy has great… what? Journalistic integrity!”

Erik wondered if she was already a little drunk. He knew that Ted and Joan had a drinking problem, but suspected that he had a drinking problem himself, so he ignored theirs in order to ignore his and left the gossip and expressions of concern to others.

Ted and Joan were Erik’s and Ellen’s oldest friends in Saratoga Springs. They had two grown children each from their first marriages and a handful of grandchildren whose framed portraits and summer camp and holiday photographs were all over the house, on walls, shelves, and on top of the Steinway where late at night Ted played Chopin, badly, usually a little drunk. Ted had begun as a reporter for the local newspaper, The Saratogian, the year Erik was hired at Skidmore and rose steadily to become its publisher and owner. He and Joan had a more than casual interest in the arts. They owned two of Ellen’s woven wall hangings, for which they had yet to find a proper wall, and three of Sam’s landscapes, one of which, Moonrise over Lake George, hung in the living room opposite the fireplace. Ted had twice brought up the subject of buying one of Erik’s installations and donating it to the permanent collection at the Tang, but because of space restrictions it could only be exhibited when there was no other show up, so Erik was reluctant to part with it. He wasn’t sure Ted was serious anyhow.