Stephen Dixon: 30 Pieces of a Novel

The Son

He could do nothing today. Yesterday he could do nothing too. Sat around, napped a lot, read without wanting to, quickly put down the book, took walks, bought things at stores he didn’t need now but could later use. Then he thinks of his brother — this came on his last walk. What if he had lived? He had never thought of it before. Or if he had, he forgot. He’d call him if he were alive. “Hi,” he’d say, when his brother answered the phone, “how are you, how you doing?”—all that stuff. But what else? Beyond the how-ya-doing and — are-you. His brother’s job, for instance, if he wasn’t retired by now, and so on. And if his brother were retired, then what he was doing with his free time, anything interesting or new? What’s he been reading, seeing; what’s on his mind? Anything particularly fascinating happen to him, the last, let’s say, week, and how’s his health? And it doesn’t have to be “fascinating”; just anything he’d like to tell him about? Also, perhaps how glad Gould is to have a brother to speak to at such times. “Oh, yes?” his brother could say, and he’d say, “When I’m slightly depressed, just not feeling too good with myself and my work. More than slightly depressed, meaning more than ‘slightly.’ I’ve for the past two days mostly been napping, taking walks, sitting around, trying to read, buying things I don’t need, although nothing to bankrupt my family. But let’s not go into what’s been happening to me; I want to hear about you.” A lot of what he’d say to his brother would depend on where he lived. If his brother were living in Oregon, let’s say, then most of what they talked about would have to be over the phone. He’d want him to live closer. New York, D.C., Boston, New Jersey. Someplace that’d take one up to a maximum of eight hours by car or train to get to. They were close as kids, he was told and can faintly recall, personally close, and would be that way now, he’s sure. From everything his folks said, his brother had a terrific disposition from day one. “My obstetrician said he slid out smiling,” his mother said, “just as you say you saw your second daughter do, and she’s still as jolly and sweet as can be,” and he said, “She has her off days, or moments,” and his mother said, “So did he — not days; rarely for more than ten minutes — but for the most part he was sublime.” And he feels one’s disposition, if it’s a good one — he has nothing to back this up except casual observation over the years — stays much the same through life unless there’s a dramatic chemical imbalance along the way or something traumatic happens. Like losing a brother. That could do it, though it’d depend what age you lost him and how close the two of you were. So if everything had remained relatively the same they would have continued being close for a while. Then when his brother got to around twelve he would have started hanging out more with his own friends and a lot less with Gould. That would have been hard to take. The first child, of course, never has to go through it so isn’t as aware of the effect. His folks, mainly his mother, would probably have told him many times, “That’s what happens with boys at Robert’s age so you have to begin accepting it and not be so disheartened,” and maybe even done more things with him and shown him more attention, mainly his mother, till he grew used to the change and perhaps got closer to his own friends. Then they would have become close again when Gould started college, and later on, and stayed that way till today. Again, nothing to base it on, though he has talked about it with several of his male advisees at school who were in similar situations. Why didn’t his folks have more kids — he asked his mother this about ten years ago—“especially after Robert died? And if you had got to it right away the baby would have been four years younger than me, not much different than what Robert and I were,” and she said, “Two was plenty at first. I had my outside activities, professional things mostly, and your dad never wanted children that much. He would have been content with one, and if we’d had none he wouldn’t have minded either. He loved you both but would have been happy to just spend long hours at his work and, when we could, to take extended vacations with me. So it was my decision alone, and two seemed the right number we could afford, and I also figured two brothers would play with each other, and so forth. While one could be a nuisance and, if we ignored him when he had no one to be with but us, a problem that would get worse the longer we did little to correct it. But after your brother’s death, though I was certainly fertile — I had two abortions after Robert died — I swore off having another. Not even as a replacement child — the one you never would have had if a previous one hadn’t died — and only thought of putting all my child-rearing efforts into keeping alive the one I had left, you, which is why you might feel you’ve been smothered most of your life. But you wanted me to have a third, true? Even a sister?” “Sure. Someone around who wasn’t an adult. Then later for helping us take care of Dad and then he or she and I looking after you, not that you’ll ever need it, and just for me to know someone else was there.” But his brother. If he were alive he’d call him now, no matter where he was, and say what? “God, I haven’t seen you for more than fifty-five years. You must have changed some in that time. I’m listening; I’m not hearing anything. That was a joke. So how come no laughing, brother? though if I took time to think about it I’d probably think more of you for that. Haven’t spoken to you either in that time, though in my mind and dreams plenty. The former’s a lie. Might as well start out on the right foot right off. But dreams of you you should believe I’ve had a lot. You’re young, you’re older, you’re always better than I in academics and sports; you’re married, you’re happy, you’re showing me your first child; you’re much older, you’re on your last leg — one of Dad’s favorite expressions — you’re the same age as I when I last remember you, and remember you I do. Those dreams can’t sub for the real thing like talking to you now but are okay if that’s all you got. But you’re still so closemouthed. How come, from someone who was such a gregarious kid, suddenly no response? Grave’s got your tongue?” Their baths together. Sat opposite each other in the tub, sharing a single soap and washrag, feet flat up against the other’s and their wee-wees peeping out of the six inches of water. His father, after he told him this, said no one, from something that had happened when he was so young, could bring back so many details like that after more than thirty years. “But we took a bath a week for months, Mommy’s said, starting when I was three, and we always laughed about our penises sticking through.” “If Robert told me this today I might believe him, since he was six. But the memory of a three-year-old is ninety-eight percent blank, and to think you can recollect the one soap and washrag between you and depth of the water is nuts.” “I’m estimating the depth, since it barely came up to my waist.” “Even so.” Being hoisted out of the tub by his father (almost violently, but he didn’t tell him that), who said, Robert’s old enough now to take baths alone. “That’s also impossible for you to have remembered. I’d only possibly remember it if I’d done it to you, but I don’t. But if I did lift you out of the tub it would be only because your mother said your teeth were chattering and you were going to catch a cold or that I saw you two futzing around in there and thought one of you might drown.” Wonders if their wee-wees sticking above the water and their laughing about it and maybe even pulling on them till they were hard or who knows what had anything to do with his father hoisting him angrily out of the tub and never letting them take a bath together again. “We should ask Dad,” he’d say to his brother now on the phone. “Come on, that’s another joke; you gotta say something. I didn’t make this call just to hear my own voice. And the folks plenty of times said that even as a two-year-old, or maybe it was three, you had a highly developed sense of humor—’sophisticated,’ Mom said — catching on to some of Dad’s pranks and funny lines and Mom’s plays-on-words that kids twice and maybe thrice your age wouldn’t get; and I’d think something like that, unless you’ve taken a great physical or personal blow, lasts for life.” Slept in the same room with him for three years. First slept in a crib in his parents’ room. Then when he was around three months his crib was moved into Robert’s room, or what eventually became “the boys’ room.” He got a bed for his third birthday — it wasn’t delivered, or maybe it couldn’t be assembled for a while — but soon after it was, Robert died. He thought several times, when he was four or five, looking at Robert’s bed with the same winter or summer bedspread as his but no blanket or sheets though it did have an uncased pillow underneath — his parents kept it as a possible guest bed, though no adult guest ever slept in it, and also for his friends to sleep over sometime in the future, his mother said — did Robert die because they bought me a bed? Maybe thought it once. Robert could have felt that the crib, because it had rollers, was only temporary and one day it would be rolled out with Gould in it and the room again would only be his. “Boys’ room” might have meant “boy’s room” to him, meaning his, since Gould was what to the family? — the baby of it, never the boy. For years the bed remained neatly made beside his with one or the other bedspread on it, then both beds with identical spreads on them after he moved away, till his mother died and he emptied her apartment and sold or gave away the spreads and just about everything else in it except for a few treasures: some painted plates of fruits that had been on the dining room wall; a small bronze of a naked boy reading a book, which his mother said resembled Robert and was the only reason he kept it; three tiny Chinese or Japanese ivories of squatting figures working at different trades. If Robert were alive they would have split everything between them fairly and squarely. Better than that. One would have said to the other, “Take whatever you want. I’ll have a look at what’s left.” And the other would have said, “No, you choose first and as much as you like, and then I’ll see if there’s anything I want. Those Japanese or Chinese figurines, for instance. They’re beautifully crafted and very old and probably valuable, and I know you liked them as a boy. I used to watch you stare at them through the case and then later you made up stories for me about them.” “You did that too, and if they’re so beautiful and valuable, you have them. Don’t worry, there’ll be plenty left that I’ll like. Mom had great taste. Those painted fruit plates. The bronze boy leaning against a tree stump reading a book. She got them at auctions and I want you to have them too. And if your wife and kids see anything they like, then they can also choose before me.” “And your wife and kids; I want them to select things before me too.” Gould and his folks would go to the cemetery every other month for a few years to visit Robert’s grave. Then every four months or so. By the time Gould was in his twenties they only went once a year, on Robert’s birthday or a day close to it, and only that infrequently, for the most part, because they no longer had a car and had to hire a cab. His mother would always weed the grounds around the grave, brush the leaves and dirt off the stones, pick up any papers and other garbage that might have been blown into their hedges and on the path, cry, ask his father for his handkerchief though she always carried tissues in her bag, cover her eyes with her hands, and say a prayer for a dead son she’d memorized from the little prayer book the funeral home had given out at Robert’s funeral, and then open her eyes and say just about the same thing every time: “I will never get over it, Robert dear. Listen to me, my boy, I swear I will never get over the loss of you and that it’s forever made me heartsick, do you hear?” His father during all this would usually hold his hat, try not to jingle the change in his pants, stare at the grave a few seconds, and the rest of the time look around the cemetery and at the road nearby if there was a car or truck driving past and at the sky, especially if a plane was flying by. Gould would stand beside his mother just in case she started to collapse, which she did once, and a couple of times when he was in his teens he thought, If this is where your spirit’s supposed to be, I don’t feel it, though I wish I did. You could be a real help to me now and in my future in all sorts of ways. But if there is an afterlife or just that spirit hanging around, why would you want to stay here? It’s so ugly and windy and depressing and cold, and noisy and smelly from the passing cars. Though if you are here or anyplace where the folks and I go, could you give me some way to contact you? I’ll swear on the Bible, if that’s what you want, that I’ll keep it just between you and me. After about half an hour, his father would put his hat on and say something like “I think we’ve been here long enough, paid our respects, and all that, so what do you both say? I’d like to get a bite at that diner around here we always go to before we head back. I don’t know about your mother, but you must be hungry, Gould. I know that as much as I have for breakfast before we leave for this place, by the time this is over I’m always starved.” Then his mother would say, “We should get a bench so you and Gould can sit down and then we could stay longer,” and his father would say, “You always say that, and I always say, ‘Do we really need one for the few times we come out here?’ But if you really want one, order it, but nothing fancy.” Then his mother would say, “I’ll start calling around for one tomorrow. And as long as we’re out here, and this won’t take much time, I wonder if either of you would mind my visiting my brother’s grave at another cemetery on this road.” His father usually couldn’t stand any talk of Robert in front of him. When his mother, at the table, once spoke about Robert — that he was a quick eater and ate almost everything you put on his plate, especially carbohydrates, so the trick was not to give him too much initially and to go skimpy on seconds — his father said, “Please, do you have to?” and she said, “I’m just talking, it doesn’t have to concern you. Just continue eating,” and he said, “Goddammit, he’s dead, the damn kid’s dead, not a damn kid but what the hell’s talking about him going to do to help you or him?” “His name came up in conversation; you were busy with your soup and missed that part. Gould asked if Robert was fat — that he has this memory — and I was answering,” and his father said, “Baloney, and you know it,” and threw down his napkin and left the table, “probably to cry by himself in the bathroom,” his mother said, “for that’s been his problem since your brother died. And later on he’ll come out as if he hadn’t ruined our dinner and ask me to heat up the food he missed. Look how many years it’s been, but I can’t so much as say that today’s Robert’s birthday, if that day is, I’m saying, and that’s why I’ve lit my memorial candles, because as soon as I bring up Robert’s name he tells me to drop the subject or else he’s closed his ears. If you can’t mourn from time to time and admit that you’re mourning, and especially to someone who feels as sad about it as you, then you’re going to suffer. Because you were so young and didn’t get to really know your brother, you never had to go through any of this,” and he said, “I knew him, I remember him a lot. Robert. I remember he was heavy but not so fat. I have lots of other pictures of him in my head, and most of them with him laughing,” and she said, “Probably just the tiniest little memories. And the pictures, I’d think, would be mostly from old photos. He was a plump baby, to answer your question, quite heavy to carry in my stomach and with an enormous head and shoulders when he came out. He always had a large appetite, as I’ve said, or ate well and with no fuss, and I think he liked everything I made for him. He was always like that: never a problem in anything he did. But by the time you were born, or a year after, I’d slimmed him down considerably, having learned that fat babies make fat adults, and he stayed that way because of the diet and serving methods I’d devised for him, so you couldn’t remember Robert as heavy. Always taller than the other children his age, yes. On the growth chart his pediatrician mapped out for him, Robert was going to be six-four. That would have been something to see, since no one in Dad’s family or mine has been more than five-nine, and your growth chart has you topping off at five-ten at the most, though those things aren’t always exactly accurate and can also change.” But his brother. He’d call him now and speak to him. Or he’d be sitting where he is, at his desk in his bedroom, phone on the dresser, and thinking of Robert but not as if he Were alive. He’d be alive and the phone would ring and Gould would go to the dresser and pick up the receiver and say into it, “Don’t tell me, it’s my brother. I was just this second thinking of you,” and Robert would say, “That’s uncanny, for I was just thinking of you, only a few seconds ago, so decided to call.” Or he wouldn’t be thinking of Robert. He’d be sitting at his desk typing or staring at the clean paper in the typewriter and thinking of his work or reading over what he’d just written and the phone would ring and he’d say, “Damn, always interruptions…. Sally!” he’d yell out, “could you answer it?” and get no answer and go to the phone and pick up the receiver and say, “Hello?” and Robert would say, “Hey, there, you don’t sound too happy. Anything wrong?” or “Hiya, Gould, how you doing? I’m not interrupting anything, am I? Something in that hello,” and he’d say, “I was working, but nothing important,” and Robert would say, “And I’m not calling about anything important. Just to talk to you, which I like doing — I didn’t mean that disparagingly — and I can call back later, or when you want to you can buzz me,” and he’d say, “No, no, let’s talk now while we got the chance. I’m not working on anything that can’t be helped if I come back to it, after the breathing space a phone talk could give me, with more enthusiasm or greater and/or better ideas or whatever’s missing now and the piece needs.” Oh, jeez, how do brothers speak? But ones their age, both in the low sixties. If they like each other, maybe the way he just had it: affectionately, solicitous of the other’s feelings and time, and so on: you first; no, you. Hi, hey, how ya doing, what’s new? Nothing’s going on with me these days and I just felt like talking to you. But if you’re busy…. And he would have liked Robert. Everything that’s been said about him — well, he’s said that. “Such a sweet boy, and so beautiful,” his mother used to say. “His eyelashes, for instance. All children have beautiful eyelashes, but his went beyond that. They were like painted on, but real. There was never a sweeter, more beautiful boy in the world, excluding you. So let’s say you both — though to be totally honest, and this isn’t anything, so don’t worry, his eyelashes were more striking than yours — two beautiful, sweet, gentle, and intelligent boys. What unwanted competition you would be to each other. The girls would flock to you both when you hit your twenties and wouldn’t know which one to fight over,” and he said, “He could have them all, I wouldn’t mind. And my eyelashes are nothing; I never thought of them and I don’t want them to be pretty.” “Wouldn’t he have been a wonderful brother to have grown up with,” his mother said, years later. “The best, I’m sure, and to have around now, no matter how far away from each other you might have lived. No, that was a terrible thing to say, as if I had intentionally wanted to make you sad, which you know I didn’t,” and he said, “No, it’s all right and probably true.” So, say Robert had lived. He calls and says, “I’m flying in, if you’ve room for me. No big reason I’m coming. Haven’t seen you all in a long time, and I have a few days off and these Frequent Flyer benefits to use up in a month, and my desk and home life are clear. But if you’re busy …” He picks him up at the airport; they go out for dinner with Gould’s family, Gould paying for everything everywhere they go and Robert saying, “Come on, you gotta let me cough up once and to the best restaurant in town,” or however he says it. “It’s such a treat having you here,” Gould says, driving him around, showing him the city. “But you’re not interested in seeing things like the harbor and tulip garden and such, are you? I know I wouldn’t be if I came to your area, except for the art museum, and all I could take there is an hour before I’d want to go to its coffee shop for coffee.” “No, I came just to see you and your family, and maybe, while I’m here, your art museum also, but that’s all.” They say more, but what? Robert likes good wine and brings a few expensive bottles from Washington. That’s where he lives, not California or wherever he said. Also gifts for the kids: books he thought they’d like—“I checked with Sally first to see what they’ve been reading”—and books for Sally and him that Robert had recently read and liked. “What are you reading these days?” Robert would say on the phone before he left to see them. (‘“What books are you reading these days?’ Robert had said,” he means.) “We’ve got one of the best bookstores in America here, better and bigger than anything on the East Coast. You looking for something you can’t find there, just tell me. It’s got everything, even rare ones mixed in with the new, and you’re my brother and Sally’s my sister-in-law, so don’t worry about the cost.” What else do they talk about when he gets here and on the phone? When they were young: their parents, friends, block, neighborhood, shared memories and same public school through the eighth grade and bar-mitzvah teacher who rapped their knuckles with a ruler or swatted their palms with a pointing stick. “Remember the time you hit me over the head with your violin?” Gould says. “Mom threw a fit and the damn thing split in two, ending your music lessons and putting a deep gash in my head, one of about a dozen scars I have there but the only one from you.” “I never laid a finger on you like that,” Robert says, “not in my whole life, so wrong brother, brother. At most we recurrently wrestled on our bedroom floor, all the furniture pushed back, till the tenant below complained about her chandelier shaking and the noise. But only like athletes wrestled, for the sport and fun and no one getting hurt.” “You didn’t always beat me either,” Gould says. “And the older I got, the more evenly matched we became, till I was almost pinning you,” and Robert says, “I was always bigger but you got stronger than me. But I stayed heavier and sweated more, which was the key. A tough shrimp, I called you, and then, a tough lobster.” Gould flies to Washington to see Robert or because his work takes him there. Takes bottles of Spanish and Portuguese wine, paying much more for them than he ever paid for wine for Sally and himself, except on their wedding anniversaries. Takes a few books he read in the last few months. “You like to keep all your books and buy copies of the ones you liked for me, while I like to give mine away once I read them and to have an empty bookcase. In that respect, as Mom said, two brothers couldn’t be more unalike, since according to her we were always that way. Make what you want of it, but I married a hoarder like you. Anyway, read these and tell me what you think. Or just start this one and say why you tossed it away. There are only five really good writers going at any one time in the world, and she’s one of them.” “That’s ridiculous and so limiting, and being the reader you are I can’t believe you think this, unless it’s only your way of keeping your book costs down and your bookcases clean.” “There are dead writers; dozens of really good ones.” Meets Robert’s new wife. Robert has three kids from his previous marriage, two from this one, twins. “What do you think,” Robert said, “having a child when I’m well into my sixties?” and he said, “It’s your business. But you got a young wife, so she must be pressuring you for kids. I’d do it, exhausted and strapped as it’d make me, if anything ever happened to Sally and I subsequently hooked up with someone so young, as I’m already feeling blue that in a few years my kids won’t be around.” Okay, lots of things about him are set, similarities and differences between them are shown, but what do they talk about? They just talk and the talk comes, when they’re with each other or on the phone. “I saw a very fine movie the other day—” “I hate most movies; they’re all such drivel and so commercial.” “Not all, certainly not this one, and you used to like them.” “There are plenty of things I used to like and no longer do. And not many things to replace what I used to like either. But I was being rude. What about the movie you saw?” “I was driving on the expressway, turned on the radio—” “I hope you haven’t succumbed to a car phone yet, Robert.” “Not even a microwave, though I know we’ll end up getting both, but I already did get a PC. I’m a hoarder like you say, and it also helps me to get my creative juices flowing, though I doubt it’ll ever appeal to you. Too technological, electrical, visual and cold-looking, and you can’t pound away at the keys.” “I like my writing machine to fight back and make noise, but not as if it’s from the sound track of a cartoon. But I interrupted you before. I’m always doing that and you never do it to me. What did you hear on the radio?” “You’re too world-weary, Gould. You were always a little morose, even as a kid, but nothing to the extent you are now. In that respect, and if Mom were alive she’d confirm it, you’ve changed and I haven’t, so we were once the same but are now different.” “No, no, me morose? It was you, my boy, only you. I was always Master Happy-go-lucky Face, usually up at the crack with a jolt and smile and bustling and smiling like that till bedtime, people said. Actually, not you either, as I think the folks said you were kind of a quiet kid but had a lovely disposition, lovely, and nothing in my memory change purse says otherwise, though there had to be times when you were moody and disagreeable; nobody could be that good. As for today, you’re the same as you always were, I suppose, while I’m somewhat to a lot like you said. Maybe it’s chemical, but I’ll never take anything chemical to change it so long as it’s not thoroughly doing me in.” Robert writes long stories and short novels and gets most of them published by small houses for almost no payment, and very few reviews. He’s retired, has a decent pension and some savings, and will soon be collecting Social Security, and his new wife comes from money and his first three kids are on their own, so he can afford to live fairly comfortably. For more than thirty years before, he worked as a newsman. That’s how Gould got started in news. Took over Robert’s weekend copyboy job in a newsroom in New York after Robert graduated from college and went to work on a Wyoming newspaper. Why Wyoming? He’d sent out lots of résumés, and it was the only place that offered him a reporter’s job. Or Robert didn’t graduate. Quit school in his senior year, or even his junior year, saying that on-the-job experience was infinitely better for his work than any college journalism courses and a degree. Later, Robert told him about a news job in D.C. when he was working there for a wire service. Then got him a job back in New York as a writer for a network radio news show he produced. When the show folded, he helped get him a job on a news magazine a friend of his edited. “After this, even if I hear of the job-of-a-lifetime for you, I’m not saying anything, as I don’t want you becoming too dependent on me. You have to work the grapevine more, maybe even one day hear of a great job for me. But don’t tell Dad. He doesn’t know how capable you are; thinks of you as the family recluse and that it’s my unending duty to look after you and especially, since you followed me into this profession, to keep you employed.” He likes his brother’s fiction but he isn’t one of the five. No, that’s stupid. Then what? “Best I don’t show you my stuff,” Robert said, “since I know how you feel about it. The water’s lukewarm and not very bracing to swim in, and there’s certainly no chance of your drowning, which I’d think is what you’d aim for in what you read. If I mixed the metaphors there and became uncharacteristically bleak, since I don’t want to think of anything regarding you and drowning, it was because I thought I was losing my point. And you don’t even let your wife see your stuff-in-progress or recently completed, so it’d seem needy and one-sided of me to ask you to read mine. The truth is, we’re radically different in what we deal with and our approaches and techniques, so I doubt either of us could offer the other much useful criticism. Also the truth, or the way it looks to me: neither of us is really that remarkable at it and I don’t think we’ll ever be, sorry as I am to say it. We did too many other things for too long before we started taking this seriously, or that’s the way it was with me. As for you, you just wore yourself out working at various hard jobs to be able to afford to do it — but it’s just too much fun doing to quit, am I right?” “Same, same, but who knows that if you stopped doing it I might too. We were always so damn close,” and Robert said, “Just normal; don’t make us sound like freaks.” The bath. They took them together once a week till Robert was ten and Gould was seven. Or eight and five — he forgets. He could call Robert to find out, but it’s been so many years, he’s probably forgotten too. Anyway, what’s the difference? They were taking baths together long after most brothers their ages did. Their father wanted them to stop once Robert reached seven, or six, but Robert convinced him to let them continue. Their father liked to repeat the story, quoting the exact words he said Robert used. “‘Daddy,’ this brainy kid of mine said — the other’s brainy too. I’m not by bringing up what his older brother said trying to belittle him. But no kid of six ever had the ability to deliberate and exspritz the way Robert did—‘Daddy, you have to understand it’s safer, at Gould’s age, for him to be in the tub with someone, and my being there lets you and Mommy do other things. He can get very rambunctious, and if nobody’s watching he could drown. I also make sure he really soaps up his washrag and scrubs himself, which we all know he’s too young to do if he’s taking a bath alone.’” After a while the tub got too crowded for them. “This is getting uncomfortable,” Robert finally said, standing up and stepping out of the tub a minute after he got in it. “I don’t like sitting on my legs and wondering if half the water I’m washing myself with is your urine. From now on I’m taking showers and you can have the bath to yourself. Don’t forget to wash behind and inside your ears and to clean your poophole and pupik.” “I’m going to only take showers from now on too,” Gould said, “but alone.” “Alone, of course, what do you think I’m saying?” Robert took him to Ebbets Field to watch the Dodgers play. So? So the Dodgers were Robert’s favorite team, and when Gould was old enough to be interested in baseball it seemed natural to him for them to become his. Robert once said, “Who you rooting for this season?” and Gould said, “The Dodgers, who else?” “You better or you’re not my brother.” The folks trusted Robert alone with Gould outside at an early age. Gould trusted him more than he did anyone else. Well, not more than he did his mother. He trusted them the same. Or maybe, after a certain age, he trusted Robert a little more than he did his mother. He’d put his hand in Robert’s hand and let him take him anywhere. Same with his mother, but after a certain age he put his hand in Robert’s more than he did hers. He went to more places with Robert than he did with her, and it was Robert’s job to look after him and see he didn’t get hurt or lost. He rarely held his father’s hand. His father didn’t put out his hand to hold as Robert and his mother did. He can’t even remember holding it, while he can still remember what his mother’s and Robert’s hands felt like when he held them. He must have held his father’s hand lots of times. When they crossed the street together, for instance, the few times they crossed one together when Gould was very young and needed to hold an older person’s hand. He thinks they were almost always with Robert when they crossed the street, and his father usually said to Gould, “Hold your brother’s hand. And both of you watch out for cars and keep your ears peeled in case I suddenly have to tell you something.” He knows he held his father’s hand when his father was in the hospital and dying, but that was much later. Robert was there too. A few times they sat on opposite sides of their father’s bed and held a hand of his at the same time. Their father was in a coma and probably didn’t feel them holding his hands, and he can’t remember the feel of his father’s hand then either. But to get back to Robert: he was always very smart, responsible, gentle, sensitive, and, as a young boy, precocious. Also, he never beat up on him once. He doesn’t even remember Robert pushing him hard at any time or even shouting angrily at him, though he had to have, just as Gould had to have been angry at Robert lots of times when they were growing up, though he doubts he ever pushed him hard when he was angry. This was unusual, he heard, between brothers so close in age: that they never once got into a real fight. Anyway, Robert knew — at the age of ten, Gould thinks it was, but no younger; their folks never would have let him take a subway by himself or with Gould before then — how to get to Brooklyn from Manhattan to see these Dodger games. Their father, before leaving for work in the morning or, if he was leaving before they woke up, then did this the previous night: gave Robert enough cash for bleacher seats and a hot dog and soda apiece during the game and subway fare of course and a couple of nickels for Robert to tuck away someplace in case he needed to call him or their mother. But how’d Robert know how to get to Ebbets Field by subway? Gould couldn’t help him. All he remembers doing is holding Robert’s hand and being led from train to train and through lots of grimy passageways and up and down several stairways and then the short walk to the ballpark with hundreds of excited people from the aboveground Brooklyn subway station. Someone must have shown Robert the way a couple of times, or just once: Robert was that smart. But you don’t let a kid that age go out there on his own the first time with just written directions: Downtown Broadway local or express to Times Square, switch to the Brighton or Sea Beach or West End line or whatever train from Manhattan went to Ebbets Field (he forgets which one did, and anyway the line names might have changed since then and maybe even the routes). Did their father take them there once and that was how Robert knew how to go? He doesn’t remember that. He could ask Robert; he’d know because he was old enough then to remember something like that and he has a great memory for everything. Gould doesn’t think his father ever took him to any sports event except the boxing matches at St. Nicholas Arena a couple of times. Robert did. Maybe their father took them by subway to the ballpark the first time, gave Robert directions how to get home, and left them there or went some other place in Brooklyn for three hours — his sister’s on Avenue J — and picked them up after the game. Robert took him to hockey games at the old Garden on Sunday afternoons to see the New York Rovers play, a few college basketball games there too, again in the cheapest seats. “You’re kids,” their father used to say, “and your eyes are better than any adult’s, even when you don’t wear your glasses, so don’t say you can’t see from up there. When you get older and start earning your own money, you can buy better seats. But if you see from up there that some of the lower seats aren’t being used, run down and grab them. Anybody questions you, just say you lost your tickets to these seats, and if you can’t lie, then that you’re sorry and you didn’t know.” Football games at Randalls Island and other places, the Milrose track meets at the Garden a few times, and lots of Saturday afternoon movies at local theaters, another thing his father never took them to. So? So nothing, he’s just saying what Robert did for him then, how he filled in for his father, how close they were at the time and probably why they’re still so close today. His father did once take the family to Radio City to see the premiere of The Yearling . He got passes from a friend of an executive there when the friend couldn’t go. Robert and Gould weren’t allowed to get anything from the concession stand, their father said. “You should have thought of your candy sooner, like when we got off the bus and passed a store. They jack up the prices like crazy in these theaters and I’m not going to be a chump and fall for it”—something like that, putting the blame on them a little—“and that junk also rots your teeth faster than anything but sugar cubes bitten down on whole. So it’s one more reason you shouldn’t have any: I don’t want to stay up all night with you when your teeth start aching at one A.M.” Robert bought a box of candy on the sly and secretly shared it with Gould during the darker scenes of the movie. Their father also took Robert and him to a play once. Again, free seats. They went into the lobby, his father asked the ticket taker to call the manager out—“Vic Bookbinder to see him”—the manager came, greeted his father “like a monkey’s uncle,” as his father liked to say, said something like “So these are your two boys. Nice-looking kids, and big; that’s good,” and showed them three seats way off to the right in a top side aisle in the orchestra and told them to enjoy the show. Musical or play version of Alice in Wonderland at a theater in Columbus Circle when there were still big theaters there. They took the Broadway trolley to it, or that was another trip downtown with their father for something, maybe to buy clothes, which they did once a year with him in fall or spring. No, for that they took the subway to 18th or 23rd Street and Seventh or Sixth Avenue where their father knew people who got them into wholesale houses where boys’ clothes were made. Robert was a size “husky” and Gould wanted to be a husky too but was told he’d probably never be because he was too thin. Robert and he stood in the back of the trolley turning the nonfunctioning steering wheel as if they were operating the car. But does a trolley have a steering wheel? Why would it if it’s on electrified rails? How does one operate a trolley car? They did something back there that was fun while their father read a newspaper folded into quarters and watched out for their stop. Maybe they only sat in the motor-man’s seat, if there was one, and pulled a long rod back and forth or kept their hands on it as if they were moving it around and pushed buttons and flicked levers on the dashboard. But he definitely remembers turning a steering wheel, with Robert mainly hogging it and the dashboard controls and seat. After the show Robert asked what he thought of it and he said he liked it, especially the stage tricks with see-through curtains and the wind blowing them from somewhere and the different-colored lights making the scenes turn from night to day and inside to out and sunshine to storm. “I thought it was pure crap, made for sissies and girls.” “I didn’t like it that much either, now that I think about it,” Gould said. “But Alice was pretty and had a nice voice,” and Robert said, “I hate blondies, and the most when they’re so cutesy-piesy and tweety and sweet. They always look as if they have nothing to say, which might be why they sing so much. You’re probably going to marry a blondie, then, and be bored your whole life with her. Anyway, don’t tell Dad you didn’t like the play; it might hurt his feelings.” And The Yearling . “Don’t tell Dad what you thought of it, because you know it was one of the dumbest and slowest pictures you ever saw. All about a geeky boy and baby deer. Who could care? And you know they only made it to get our tears.” Robert took him to Bambi . Gould ducked under his seat when the fire started in the woods, or maybe it was when the mother got shot. “Don’t be a sissy,” Robert said, trying to pull him out by his collar. “Face life; this is what can happen, everything suddenly going from good to bad. And it’s a long cartoon and the animals are talking, so it’s not like there are real people and places up there. Nothing bad’s now happening anyway. If it does, don’t worry; your big brother’s here to protect you.” Gould came out. Soon the next frightening scene came, either Bambi’s mother getting shot or the woods on fire and Bambi running from it. “Put your coat over your head if you can’t take it; I’ll tell you when the so-called scary part’s over. But don’t jump under the seat again. Chewing gum’s there from the dirtiest mouths and all kinds of dried nose snot and other gook. Check your hair to see if any got in it and we have to go to the bathroom to wash it off…. That movie was for kids your age and younger,” Robert said when they left the theater. “I’m never going to another cartoon movie again. From now on it’s only real movies with older people saying and doing older things, even killing and kissing each other and rubbing their bodies together and having smart conversations and things like that. If I’m forced to buy an adult ticket, which you notice I had to today because I’m over twelve and big for my age so can’t lie about it anymore, then I’m wasting my time with these silly kid things.” “Then who’ll I go with?” and Robert said, “By yourself or with a friend.” “You’re my friend,” and Robert said, “You have others who are okay. Lookit, it’s bound to happen one day, so start getting it through your head. Plenty of times you’ll have friends you’ll want to be with more than me, and before that I’ll have mine. But we’ll always be brothers — tell me how you can take that away. And like brothers do, unless one really cheated on the other with money or did something for the other to detest him for life, which will never happen to us, we’ll see each other in the future and go to movies, but adult ones, and things like that, but not most of the time like it’s been.” “I understand that,” Gould said, although he didn’t get all of it. “You’re right; that’s what’ll happen and makes lots of sense,” but he worried about it, didn’t want to split up from his brother like that. He loved being with him. People used to say he worshiped him. All right, his father said it, mostly to tease him, but a lot. When Robert was fourteen he got a job as a movie usher in a theater downtown. The Broadway, he thinks it was called. Some Saturday nights he didn’t get home till one o’clock. Gould would wait up for him. “What are you waiting up for me for?” “I wanted to know how things went tonight and to make sure you got home.” “Oh, get out of here, I’m a big guy. And I’m fast and I know what to say and it’s only a few short stops on the subway. I don’t need some noodging shrimp worrying about me. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that, because I actually appreciate your concern, but it makes working late at night worse. Then I feel I have to hurry home so you’ll get back to sleep.” A little explaining: Robert was always tall for his age and got the job because he told the theater manager he was eighteen. He was six feet by the time he was thirteen and grew another two to three inches. One night after he got home he told Gould he’d had a long chat with Charlie Chaplin in back of the orchestra when the movie was on. Gould had made Robert a grilled bacon and cheese sandwich the way he liked it, under the stove broiler with the bacon previously fried semicrisp and drained on paper napkins. Made one for himself the same way: white bread pretoasted a little, sandwich grilled open-faced and then lettuce, sliced tomatoes, mayonnaise, and bacon put on and the two sandwich halves placed together and cut diagonally. The bacon actually put on during the last thirty seconds under the broiler and the cheese always Velveeta. They sat at the kitchen table eating the sandwiches and drinking milk. “How come? I didn’t think he spoke,” Gould said. “He does in this one because it’s a new movie and everyone important in it speaks. He made it; produced, directed, wrote the music — the whole thing. Monsieur Verdoux.” “What’s that mean?” “The title: it stands for Mister something, the name of the character he plays. He’s a murderer who locks up and kills his wives. Based on Bluebeard. So maybe it means murderer or Bluebeard in French. How would I know? I take German in school. Or it could be Bluebeard’s last name, if he was a real person, or his real last name in a book if it comes from a made-up story. Tonight was the first time it played in America. It was a big news event too because this is supposed to be Chaplin’s chance for a comeback here. He seemed so nervous. Paced back and forth in back, smoked when he wasn’t supposed to be smoking there, but I wasn’t going to tell him not to, which I would with anyone else. He was worried if the audience liked it and asked me what I thought. I said it sounds like they do and he said he’s only heard little titters, no large unified laughing, he called it. The critics will take this as a sign that nobody likes it, he said, and they’ll call it a major bomb. I said so far I haven’t heard anything but good things from people who have passed me. ‘Why are they leaving early then?’ he said. ‘It has to mean they didn’t like it.’ I said some people have to get home early, or maybe they were going to the bathrooms downstairs. ‘People go together to them?’ he said. ‘They can’t go alone to urinate during a movie? No,’ he said, ‘I’m afraid you’re wrong, young man; they were walking out.’ And then, what did I think of the movie? ‘Be frank,’ he said. ‘Don’t try to fool or flatter me.’ I told him I saw it twice already and it was very funny and interesting and well made, when I really thought it was boring, stupid, and slow and the other actors were all bad in it and the movie in one word stunk and I wouldn’t pay a quarter to see it, not a dime. He said, ‘Thank you for your honesty,’ when I wasn’t being honest. Or maybe he saw I wasn’t and knew I was being polite while at the same time making it obvious to him what I thought. ‘But in spite of your good review,’ he said, ‘I’m still worried about the movie’s fate.’ I said, ‘Listen, probably the worst thing you can do is stand here listening to every minuscule reaction from the audience and getting comments on the movie from people who don’t know much. I’m sure if you leave now or just stay calm and relaxed while you’re here, you’ll pick up all the newspapers in the morning and find the movie got four stars from critics who know.’ He said, ‘The truth is, the reviews are written already,’ and called me a smart fellow — smart, no doubt, because I knew the right things to say to keep him from getting more upset. Then he patted my shoulder and left the back of the orchestra soon after that, but not outside, unless he left through another door but the lobby exit, and most likely not because of my presumptuous advice either. He’s very short, you know, and old-looking, with white hair and bad teeth,” and Gould said, “I can tell about his height from all his movies.” “You’re taller than him already, or maybe a couple inches shorter, so you will be taller.” “Maybe it’s good in some ways to stay short; look how famous and popular he is, even with his bad teeth,” and Robert said, “I don’t want a brother who’s that much shorter than me. It’d look peculiar; people wouldn’t even think we’re related. They’d always be saying things when they’d see us together: ‘You two are brothers? You don’t look much alike: one’s a half foot taller than the other and you’re both fully grown.’ This is in the future, I’m talking here. Do what I did and keep saying you’re going to be tall, with me it was ‘very tall.’ And harp on it to yourself and eat the right foods — I’ll give you my food plan I kept to for years — and sleep a lot and do stretching exercises like hanging from overhead bars, and you’ll be tall, I guarantee it, but probably no more than six feet.” Robert was six inches taller than their father, who said he was the second tallest boy in his high school graduation class and played for his college basketball team. But that was then, when if you were five-ten you made center. Robert was better than he at everything, or Gould thought he could be if he tried whatever Gould was doing. He got into an elite public high school, excelled in all his subjects, was first-string end on its pretty good football team, and was also on the swim team and held an all-city record for some backstroke race for a few weeks. Fixed their radios and toasters, did some of the plumbing when the super didn’t come, tuned and oil-changed the family car, could read a two-hundred-page book in two hours and memorize a sonnet in a minute and pull out hundreds of great appropriate quotations from his head. But where was Gould in this? Waiting up for his brother on weekends. Setting his alarm clock for twelve-thirty so he wouldn’t seem tired when Robert came home at one. “Mommy says you shouldn’t take the subway home so late,” Gould said. “That the buses stop a block from your theater and go right up Broadway.” “And wait in the cold or rain a half hour, for that’s how long it usually takes? Don’t worry your little pointy head, I’ll be okay.” They called the grilled bacon and cheese sandwich “à la Roberto.” “I can make an à la Roberto for you if you want,” Gould would say when his brother came back from ushering, “and you won’t have to eat alone. I’ll have one too.” “No, thanks, just a grilled bacon and cheese sandwich, please.” “They’re the same thing,” he said, the first time Robert said this, and Robert said, “No joke, bumbo. Boy, when they made wooden heads yours must’ve been mahogany.” “Why mahogany?” They went to camp together for two summers. The counselors voted Robert all-around camper and best athlete the first year. Gould got a part in the big camp musical at the end of the summer, and after it, backstage, while Gould was wiping his makeup off, Robert said, “You really made me proud tonight. Even with that small role you stole the show with your acting and singing. Everyone in the audience thought so,” and he said, “Sure, you talked to everyone. Come on, nobody noticed me.” “No, I overheard them whispering during it — the parents—’Who is that kid, who is that kid? He’s a standout, a natural.’ You’re the ham of the family and I’m the bacon and grilled cheese. I could never in a hundred years sing as well as you did. When I was standing in back for a few minutes I heard your voice in the chorus soaring above everyone else’s,” and he said, “Now I know you’re lying; I don’t project at all.” The girls loved Robert. There was talk he was actually getting laid by a junior counselor named Gloria who was two years older than him. Someone claimed to see a rubber drop out of Robert’s wallet. He was fishing in it for money to pay for a soda at the camp’s canteen when it happened. “‘Well, look at this,’ he was supposed to have said,” a bunkmate of Gould’s told him. “Smiled, knowing everyone knew it was his, and nonchalantly picked it up, looked it over, and said, ‘Must have fallen to the ground out of some guy’s wallet or even a girl’s pocket. And for all the little kids to see? That isn’t nice. But still in its package and never used. Well, waste not, want not, and all that other cloddy stuff and stocky clichés about rainy days with nothing to do,’ and stuck it in his change pocket.” Another rumor had it that Robert and Gloria were caught on a blanket in the woods by some girl campers cutting through. “Gloria with her top off and boobs showing,” someone in Gould’s division told him, “and your brother with his swimsuit around his knees and a stiff dick a mile long. The head counselor called your parents to tell your brother to behave or he’d be asked to leave.” Robert was a camper-waiter then. Gould asked him later that day outside the mess hall, “Does Uncle Walt want you to leave camp?” and Robert said, “Who told you that?” “I heard, I don’t want to say where because I don’t want to get anyone in trouble.” “And if I twist your arm back till it’s about to come off?” and he said, “Then I’d tell you, but then you’d be using brute force.” “Of course I won’t do that, and it’s not important who told anyway. It’s over a counselor — you’ve seen me with her: Gloria Mendelowitz, a real dish — but it’s all worked out. I promised Walt I’d make sure to use a prophylactic. Just kidding ya. That we weren’t doing anything but the normal girl-boy horseplay, deep kissing and heavy petting of each other’s backs, and from now on we won’t even hold hands if anyone’s around.” “And the folks were called?” “Ah, easy as raising kittens. Dad told me I’m too young to get entwined and that my life would be screwed up if there was an accident, and Mom said to always remember to be respectful to the young lady and discreet about the situation.” “That’s good; it wouldn’t be the same here if you left.” Discreet, he thought after. There wasn’t a dictionary in the whole camp; he knew even without looking. He could have asked Robert what it meant but wanted him to think he knew so Robert could always use words like that and talk about serious things with him. So he asked his counselor—“I got it out of a book I’m reading; I think it means slow”—and the guy said it could be but he didn’t know. The next summer Robert worked as a waiter in the guest dining room of another camp. He visited Gould’s camp on one of his days off. Both were on the Delaware, Robert’s near Stroudsburg and Gould’s across the river in Flatbrookville, New Jersey. How’d Robert get to Gould’s camp? By hitching to Bushkill and then rowing a boat down the Delaware from the Bushkill landing and later rowing it back up? But there were rapids in between the landing and camp — Gould had canoed through them with a counselor and another camper — so a tough trip to make for just one guy, even Robert, who was a strong seventeen-year-old at the time and knew how to row and canoe. And how would he have got the boat, rent it? Doesn’t remember any renters of boats or canoes near the landing. But he came that day in a sport jacket and good pants, so he didn’t do any arduous rowing, he’s almost sure. (“Arduous,” another word he first heard from Robert.) He probably took a couple of buses and ended up in a town near Gould’s camp — Newton, for instance — and then took a taxi or called someone he knew in camp to come get him by car. Or a couple of people from camp might have rowed or canoed up to the landing to get him and then taken him back. He thinks he asked Robert that day how he got there and was told but forgot. Next time he speaks to him he’ll ask again and he’s sure Robert will remember. Actually, he’s not so sure, since Robert’s memory for small things like that a long time back isn’t as good as his. There: something he can do better than Robert and, he thinks, always could. If he asks, though, Robert might say — it’d be like him; he often doesn’t answer the question right away but asks why you asked—“Why’s it important? What’ve you got going that you want that information?” In words like that — bordering on the suspicious — and Gould would say, “Because it suddenly popped up, I don’t know from what, after more than forty-five years, and I wanted to get it straight in my head because I’m interested in the particulars of one’s journey and family history and stuff like that. And also, let’s face it, as Mom liked to say — and both of us always seem to say, ‘as Mom liked to say,’ and, while she was alive, ‘as Mom likes to say,’ after we say that let’s-face-it phrase — I’d also like to know if you came more to see Gloria than me, since she was working as a counselor there: Gloria Mendelowitz, your big love then”—if he asks, “Who’s she?” which, with all the women he’s known since he was thirteen, he might very well say—“or as much as or more to see me? But you probably can’t remember that.” “Don’t push your luck,” Robert might say, “as, let’s face it, Mom never used to say, for you might find my memory’s absolutely lucid on this matter, and I didn’t come at all to see you.” In fact, it all comes back. Robert hitched the entire way to Gould’s camp and got a ride back from someone there he knew from the previous year. And he definitely only came to see Gloria. She’d got a few hours off to spend with him; it had been prearranged weeks in advance with the girls’ head counselor, Robert told him that day: “They gave the okay only if she swore to stay on camp grounds and no empty cabins or woods with me.” He first saw Robert — had no clue he was coming — when he strode into the mess hall while the whole camp was eating lunch. “Robert, Robert,” Gould yelled, “over here!” (And “strode” sounds too — well, something: vigorous, decisive, self-possessed, almost pushy, while his walk was usually slow and shuffling. “Cool” and “composed” would be good words for it, but he’s talking about a walk so he’s sure he can find one better, like that “vigorous,” et cetera, business.) Several counselors and waiters from the previous year went up to him, shook his hand, punched his upper arms, clutched the back of his neck or pretended to, actions like that and lots of good-to-see-you’s and laughs. “Hey, there’s my big brudder,” Robert said, when Gould got permission to leave his table and went over to him. “What’re you doing here — you lose the job at your camp?” and Robert said, “As I was telling them, it’s my day off, so I hitched.” Gould said he could probably get an hour or two to be with him, and that’s when Robert said he mainly came to see Gloria: “You, you little stiff, I can see all year in the city. She I get to see once or twice a year when she visits New York or if I’m willing to shell out the dough for a train to Philly. So if you don’t mind, and if your feelings won’t be too hurt? And quick,” he whispered, putting his arm around his shoulder and walking him away from the others, “before she can hear us, have you seen her with any other guys?” and Gould said, “I never thought to look. Should I have?” Just then Gloria came over, big smile at Robert, took his hand and said, “Hiya, peanut,” which sounded so stupid to Gould and in some ways an insulting nickname to his brother. What an idiot she must be, he thought, good looks and great body as she’s got, and Robert said, “We’re going to take a walk, Gould, see ya later,” but he never did. He was hurt but he understood. Robert wants to be with a girl whom he’s probably already laid, so today he can at least kiss and pet and stuff like that and maybe even get more. Would he do the same if Robert were his younger brother and Gloria was his girlfriend and everything else was the same: hitching a ride here and so on? Probably, sure, but he would have been nicer about it and also not dumped him so fast. He would have spent an hour with him, then gone off with Gloria. Said, “Gloria, listen, I haven’t seen my baby brother in a month and I want to catch up on things with him.” Or taken her off to the side and said, “Hey, he’ll be hurt if I don’t spend some time with him, so I have to. We’ll still have a few hours.” Or said to them both, “Let’s the three of us sit outside and catch up on what we’ve been doing.” For an hour. That would have softened it a lot for Gould, even made the whole thing totally understandable: hour for him, two to three for her, what could be more reasonable? “Was that so bad?” Robert could have said to her after. “Was that really so bad? He’s a good kid. And let’s face it, he adores me and always has.” He thinks he cried when Robert left the mess hall with Gloria. Or just felt like crying, with that tight feeling in the throat and sore eye rims and so on. “What’re you crying for?” he thinks one of the boys said when he got back to the table. Or: “Are you about to cry about something? You look it. Your brother say something lousy to you?” “None of your business,” he thinks he said. That fall Robert started NYU, or maybe it was the next fall. That’s right: Robert was three years older than Gould but only two years ahead of him in school. That was because Gould skipped a year in the fifth grade. Robert could have skipped also — skipped every other year, he was so smart — but the Board of Education that year was only skipping students in the fourth and fifth grades to relieve the overcrowding in the school system. Something like that. Gould knows it wasn’t because he was that smart: about a third of the entire grade skipped with him. And his timing of the camp incident’s a little off. He had to be thirteen when it happened, since at fourteen he became a camper-waiter there himself. So again Robert must have got the job by claiming to be a lot older than he was. When Robert was a college freshman he started working on the school newspaper and quickly decided he wanted to be a journalist. A number of years later he said to Gould, “Don’t give yourself airs. No real newsman calls himself a journalist. You’re a reporter or newsman or news editor or whatever it is you do.” When Gould learned of Robert’s future job plans he thought maybe that’d be a good thing for him to become too. He went out for his high school newspaper but all he could get was the assistant business manager position, so he quit in a few weeks. He remembers one of Robert’s articles, which won some kind of college national journalism award. It was on underground streams in Greenwich Village, all of them having names like Mill Stream and Beaver Creek and Indian Run. So what’s that got to do about anything? Well, it’s when he thinks Robert first got interested in writing fiction. The article said that sometimes the streams break through basement walls and the owners or supers of these buildings, while they’re cleaning up, have found that Indian artifacts have been washed in with the water: clay shards, beads, arrowheads, once even a small decorated leather sack with tiny bones in it and another time a necklace made out of some animal’s teeth and jawbone. He asked Robert—“I’m sorry if I sound suspicious, but I think not to mention it would be even worse”—if that part of the article had been made up to make it more interesting, since otherwise it would have been a rather bland piece, and Robert said, “What a charge! You dumb enough to think I’d jeopardize my future journalism career by doing something so unethical? I did hours of research on it and conducted more than thirty interviews, practically went door-to-door in one mews,” and Gould said, “You don’t give any names or addresses of people who claim to have found these things,” and Robert said, “They all asked me to withhold them because they didn’t want amateur Indianologists traipsing through their basements and subcellars looking for this junk.” “Do you have notes, then?” and Robert said, “Not to show you. To someone who trusts me implicitly, yes.” “And you’d think you would have had a few photographs of these artifacts in the article instead of just maps where the streams were and old etchings of Indians of that era,” and Robert said, “Talk to the editor. As for me, I didn’t take a camera with me, not that I know much about shooting objects like that. I also doubt any of these people would have let me take photographs. They were wary of even speaking to me; besides that, most of the stuff had been given or sold or they were planning to sell it to the American Indian Museum and places like that, and I hear these museums charge you to photograph their collections.” “Oh, gee, how convenient all of that is, though for some odd reason I’m not quite believing it,” and Robert said, “Who asked you to? And what got into you to suddenly drill me like this? From now on don’t read my work and keep your two cents to yourself.” “Will do, sir, will do,” and saluted him. That was probably their worst argument ever — or one of, since how would he know which one was the worst unless they had once had it out with their fists, which they never did? — and because of it the only time they intentionally didn’t speak to each other for a couple of days, or one of the two to three times they didn’t. Considering how some brothers that close in age have fought and cursed each other furiously, that wasn’t so bad. How did they finally start talking again that time? One of them, he forgets which, said, “Hey, let’s bury the hatchet”—said, of course, something like this — and the other said, “And as the old joke goes, and so appropriate for our argument, not in the other’s head, right?” and they both laughed, and one of them said, “Good, done, brotherly brothers again,” and they shook hands, he doesn’t recall whose stuck out first. By then Robert had plenty of close friends and a number of girls he was seeing and hardly palled around with him anymore, and Gould had a few good friends too. But they ate at home most nights so saw each other at the dinner table and slept in side-by-side beds till Robert quit school and got a news job out of town. Robert snored all his life and almost every night. (So does Gould’s wife, but periodically, and the same kind, phlegmy or full of snot, but she stops when he nudges or asks her to and pulls the covers from over her head, and usually doesn’t resume snoring that night.) When Gould got tall enough to extend his foot from his bed to Robert’s he used to poke him with his toes. “What?” and Gould would say, “Your snoring’s keeping me up.” “Don’t kick me from now on, okay?” “I only tapped you with my big toe; I thought it’d stop your snoring without waking you.” “Just keep your feet off and especially don’t jab my kidneys; you don’t want to be blamed for my losing one.” Then Robert would go back to sleep and soon start snoring again. Gould would poke him with his toes a little lighter, and Robert would say, “What?” and the whole thing would start over, with Robert often saying drowsily, “Maybe I’m dreaming or something but didn’t I just tell you to keep your fat feet to yourself?” and Gould would eventually fall asleep between snorings. Robert also smoked in bed, the smell keeping Gould up. “Could you please not smoke?” and Robert would say, “I like to when I read. One of life’s greatest pleasures, those two together, and if you could add a cup of coffee, even better, so don’t deny me it.” “Maybe you could stop reading and turn out the light and not smoke in the dark and I could get some sleep .” “I’m not ready yet.” “Then please, just put out the cigarette? You know I’m allergic to it. You’ve seen how I wave the smoke away even when Mom and Dad smoke, and how I’ve gotten carsick in the car when someone smokes in it.” “You’re not allergic; and you only fake getting sick because you don’t like it. But you can’t stop people from doing everything you don’t like, particularly when it’s as normal a human activity as smoking.” “I am allergic; I do get sick. I can’t breathe, or not very well with it. Isn’t it elementary to you that the smoke reduces the oxygen in the room, just like the smoke from a fire does? Why do you think people get asphyxiated in one?” “It’s the fire that takes away the oxygen, not the smoke. But for you, my brother, I’ll open the window a few more inches while I smoke,” and Gould would say, “It’ll be too cold and I’ll have to get up for another blanket and I’m too tired to. Please, Robert, be a sport,” and Robert would say, “I’m sorry, but if you don’t like my smoking or a cold room, sleep on the living room couch.” “That couch is a sofa and too small to sleep on.” “Then start putting up with my smoking. I smoke, therefore I smoke.” “What’s that supposed to mean? If you think it’s philosophy or a joke from it, you’re wrong.” “It means I’m the elder brother and I have more prerogatives here than you, like smoking in the room that before you were wheeled into it in your crib was singly mine.” “Oh, that’s just such utter you-know-what shit. Smoke, go on, smoke your smoking head off. But before you turn off the light and go to sleep will you please get rid of the butts in the ashtray on our mutual night table? In fact, put the ashtray someplace else, like out of the room, and the butts into the toilet, if you don’t mind. I can’t stand the foul odor of either of those.” “If I think of it and don’t mind getting up, I will. But not out of the room, just to the dresser over there and the butts into the trash basket.” “What a nice brother”—turning over and moving his face as close to the wall as he could and burrowing his nose into the pillow. “You said it,” Robert would say. “The best; not one grown on trees. So for you, tonight, I will or I only might put this cigarette out now and chuck the butts and move the ashtray over there and maybe even wipe it clean and get rid of the cleaning rag before I shut out the light, though don’t think I’m starting a precedent. It’s only because I recently read not to smoke for a minimum of ten minutes before I doze off or else I could have horrific dreams and even do minor damage to my precious testes.” “I never heard of that, but it’s probably true.” Robert did most of his recreational reading in bed. Gould often read in his bed at the same time and was interrupted by Robert a lot—“Listen to this part”—and Gould would say, “I’m reading.” “So stop, because this, if anything I’ve read, is pure literature,” and Gould would say, “Maximum of thirty seconds, please; I’m really engrossed in my book.” Robert would count the lines or take a guess and say, “Minute and a half, and that’s at full throttle, so not faithful to the rhythm and words,” and he’d read: Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Gogol, Turgenev, Leskov, Chekhov, Herzen, Babel. He’d read nothing but the Russians and Thomas Mann since he was fourteen. He’d say, “You have to read this book, no two ways about it. When I’m done with it, which I will be in an hour, and if you’re not asleep, I want you to put yours aside and take up mine. Believe me, you won’t regret it.” Very often the book Gould was reading was one Robert had passed along and the one he had put down to start this one was a book Robert had also convinced him to give up another one of Robert’s for. “It’ll be overdue at the library before you finish it, but don’t worry; I’ll pay the fine. Just so you don’t dash through it and ruin what could be one of the sublime reading experiences of your life. Because if you’re like me — and in many ways you are, but not like you copycat — you only read a book once and know it instinctively from then on.” What’s he saying here? That if it hadn’t been for Robert, regarding literature and art — well, what he said. “I don’t understand this part,” Gould would often say from his bed, and Robert would rest his head back on his pillow, close his eyes, the book he’d been reading laid face down on his chest, and say “Read,” and Gould would read, invariably a book Robert had urged on him, and Robert would say, “That means …” He knew or made sense as if he knew, every time. He was a sharper reader and also able to articulate what he thought much better than Gould. Well, he was older. But he was always like this, always, in reading and listening, so that’s the way he was. Even today Gould calls Robert periodically to say, “There’s a passage in this book you sent me” or “told me to get,” or they can be talking on the phone about other things and Gould will bring it up. Robert said, one of these times, “We’ve been talking so long, I forget who called whom,” and when Gould said, “I called you,” he said, “Then read it to me, languidly as you want and I don’t care how long the passage is — I’m only kidding, because if there’s anything you know I’m not, it’s a cheapskate, especially with you.” Were all these books worth reading? How could they be? Then most? That word again, which was originally Robert’s: invariably, but he rarely told him the ones he couldn’t plow through or just didn’t like. Why not? Because he liked them to talk about things that interested them rather than didn’t. Not true. He didn’t want Robert thinking him a simpleton or someone of little taste, and Robert had a way of knocking down his arguments that made him feel like a kid. So what would he say if Robert asked what he thought of that book? “It was good, perhaps not as good as some of the others you gave me, but definitely worth my time.” Robert saw through it and didn’t persist, probably because he knew Gould didn’t want to get into an argument over it, and in fact he usually said, “I’ve just finished another one you might like better. Game for it or had your fill?” and he’d say, “Sure, right now I’ve nothing to read, since I just finished the one you gave me.” He ever give or suggest to Robert a book he’s read and liked? For reasons just mentioned, few, usually contemporary American ones he was somewhat enthusiastic about, and for almost all of them Robert said things like “Instantly forgettable, practically unreadable, a potboiler masquerading as a boiling pot, MFM (made for movies), or NN again (nothing new). Could be I’ve become too demanding, always wanting a book to do something to me that’s never been done. It’s what I like to do with my own junk, though it doesn’t seem to have done it to you, while this one has, to a degree. As another writer said, possibly the cleverest and most intelligent and stylish thing he ever wrote but which still wasn’t much, ‘If it doesn’t clutch you by the larynx and leave you speechless and with contusions on your neck’—I forget the rest,” and Gould once said, “That’s hardly the trenchant criticism I’ve come to expect from you, even if I never give it about the books you have me read,” and Robert said, “All right: it was crap, exactly like the last one you foisted on me, so why waste time talking about it when there are better things to do, like reading books worth discussing?” So what’s he saying here? That he probably became too picky and critical of most writing because of Robert all these years? Yes, why not, yes, for want of a more satisfying conclusion. (Oh, he hates the way he said that but doesn’t want to stop to reword it.) There was a woman friend of Robert’s whom Gould met on the street. She stopped in front of him, put her arms out, blocking him from getting around her, and smiled and said, “Robert, what’s come over you?” and he said, “Oh, I see. I’m Gould, Robert’s brother, if you’re referring to Robert Bookbinder,” and she said, “That’s right, I met you with him once at a party. How are things, and how’s Robert?” He didn’t remember ever meeting her and said, “I’m fine, Robert’s probably doing even better than that, as he’s on a news assignment overseas in his favorite city.” “The resemblance is remarkable. Same kind of hair, thin, but the way it waves. Unblemished skin, dark troubled intellectual eyes, wide-awake face, belligerent mannerisms about to erupt but always contained,” and he said, “That’s neither of us. We’re just a coupla pinheads, except mine’s got a few more scars on the scalp and he’s better looking and a bit brighter, politer, and taller by about three feet.” She said, “Not on your life. Stand with your back to me,” and he did, their buttocks touching, and she skimmed her hand off the top of her head to his, and said, “You’re the same height as he, or shorter by half an inch. So, long as I can’t get Robert to have coffee with — now there’s a conversationalist; I invariably walk away jittery with excitement and ready to tear down all sorts of metaphorical walls — how about you?” “Before I answer, was he the first person to say the word ‘invariably’ to you? He was to me,” and she said, “Don’t be silly. My mother said I learned to talk early and it was the first word I used.” Coffee at a nearby café. “We’ve been here before, you know, and same waitress,” and he said, “You must mean my brother,” and she said, “Of course. We were here numerous times. We called it our serious-talk place. But funny you and I should meet, after more than a year, practically in front of it,” and he said, “I live a block away, and again, you must have me confused with Robert.” She kept referring to him as Robert too. “I read the book you gave me, Robert, and loved it,” and he said, “Which one was that?” “Tell me about your recent work, Robert,” and he said, “Gould, not a common given name, so how can you constantly forget it?” and she said, “Easy. Don’t get upset. That, so far, is the only thing that distinguishes you from him. But when I see you I see Robert. You’re like identical twins, and when you sit that half-inch difference disappears. And your voices, weak r ‘s, even, and way you both nervously blink.” Asked him about people she and Robert knew. “Listen, you got it wrong again. I’m not Robert. Just look at my clothes. He’s always impeccably dressed, would never wear jeans. I’m pretty much of a slob. So remember that. Slobbiness: Gould. Nattiness: Robert. But Robert with mussed hair, mismatched, sullied clothes, granules still cornered in his eyes, an unshaven mess? He’d never leave his apartment like this, even if he’d just woken up, as I had, and was in a rush to the store for a pound of coffee and bottle of aspirins.” “True. The most immaculate man I know, but not in a squeamish or ultraprissy way. Just neat and clean. Washes his hands often and almost sacramentally. Can you explain that? You’re his brother. Fingernails groomed flawlessly and never protruding over the fingertips by more than a tiny bit. His hands always smell so nice, though, as if from cologne, but actually from French soap. He carries a special bar with him wherever he goes. Movie theater men’s rooms, for instance: squirt their goo into his palms? Please . Nothing but his own, not that I was ever in there with him to witness it. He said and I believed. Let me smell your hands.” “I don’t carry soap around with me and neither does Robert.” “He showed me, in an intricate silver box he also bought in France,” and she took his hands. “Soft. You have the face of a farmer and the clothes of a garbageman but hands like a patrician,” and he said, “My hands are rough and cracked, probably from cleaning my floors with ammonia without wearing rubber gloves, something I’m sure Robert never does: clean his own floors and toilet bowls and such.” “I don’t do this with everyone, you know, just comparison hand-smelling today,” and smelled his hands. “You’re not a slob; they’re fragrant and clean. The soiled clothes and unkempt appearance are no doubt to put off muggers and panhandlers. And sensuous, curious, and inventive”—pointing to various lines on his palm—“just like Robert. And here’s one you’ll like: long life, though at this juncture here it says you’ll be spending a few hours with a foot model tonight. My hotel’s quaint, though the room’s creepy, but I’ll order in anyway as I only have a hot plate. It’s been more than a year since I’ve seen you, so we’ve got a lot …” but move on and get to the point. Knew he was going to sleep with her that night. He asked what a foot model does—“Just feet?”—and she said they must be perfect and she’d show him later: not only her own feet but fashion photos of them with ankle bracelets, rings on her toes, toenails being polished, calluses being treated, but mostly her feet in sandals and open-toed shoes. The idea intrigued and troubled him. To sleep with someone Robert had slept with and would probably sleep with again? Would she compare them? She did. After sex, while they were lying in bed and she was smoking this smelly cigarillo—“I thought you liked them” when he waved away the smoke; “last time, you asked to try one and then practically smoked down the pack,” and he thought, Last time where? Here when she was with Robert? In the café with me when she didn’t smoke? — she said, “How peculiar, one brother uncircumcised and the other cut,” and he said, “So you’ve been with him? Then you must’ve done it in the dark. The whole family’s been ritualized, or should I say ‘slaughtered,’ except my mother and the girls,” and she said, “You have sisters?” and he said, “I was only—,” but move on. “One not too noteworthy sidelight, probably. He’s bigger than you by a good inch or two and several ounces, though he’s a horse,” and he said, “That could be true when he’s tumescent. In all my years of sleeping in the same room with him, taking baths together — we only did that till he was seven or eight, so it doesn’t count — but seeing him slip in and out of showers and towel himself off and put on pajamas and so forth, I’ve never seen him even semihard and I’d like to keep it that way.” “I wasn’t complaining about you, you know. I’m not small by any culture’s standards, but his could become difficult to endure, so in some ways you could say I prefer yours.” They made love again, and this time at the end she said, “Robert, Robert, Robert.” There could have been so many reasons for her saying it — she was kidding him? no, not at that point; it made her more excited, et cetera — that he didn’t bring it up. He was with her just that once. Thought of calling her a month after that when he felt desperate for sex but then thought, No, it’s too crazy, and those awful cigarillos. Next time they met was in the neighborhood bakery, and he said hi and she said, “I forget your name but I know your brother’s. How are you and how is he? Oops”—looking at the wall clock and grabbing her purchase—“tell me next time; I’ve got to run.” He said to Robert a few days later, “I forgot to tell you. I met a friend of yours,” and gave her name. “In fact that was the second time we met — actually, the third. But all three times she kept mistaking me for you and even addressed me as Robert,” and Robert said, “But we look nothing alike: height, build, face, hair. Same coloring — eyes and skin — and some bald patches appearing in identical places, but that’s about it. What’d you make of her?” and he said, “She seemed a bit goofy, maybe because she could never get who I was and my name straight, but okay.” “She’s deceptively intelligent, deeply so. And a good artist, I’m told; models lingerie for a living, so no doubt has a great slim figure.” “Feet,” he said she said, and Robert said, “Then great slim feet. Thinking of calling her or something? I think she lives in a hotel near you, so it shouldn’t be too hard getting her number,” and he said, “I thought of it. But then, for a variety of reasons not worth going into, didn’t think it a good idea,” and Robert said, “What were they?” and he said, “Really, nothing, trivial, minor,” and Robert said, “Ah, you’re probably better off.” But he’s gotten too far ahead. Robert, till he graduated elementary school, walked him to it every day. (He wants to leave it that way? At least “grade” for “elementary,” and “walked with him there every day.”) At first Robert was told to hold Gould’s hand when they crossed the street on the way to school and back. They must have done that till Gould finished third grade. “Only start crossing the street when the light turns from red to green, not when it’s already been green even by a second,” their mother told them. “Either of you know why?” and they both knew but Gould let Robert say it. “And start from when you’re on a sidewalk corner. Don’t jaywalk or wait in the street for the light to turn, I don’t care if you’re only two inches from the curb. And both of you hold on tight to your brother’s hand and never let go till you’re up on the other sidewalk. I ever see you crossing the street together not holding hands, you’ll hear it big from me. If there’s one thing I insist on, this is it. Losing one of you would be terrible enough, but just think what would happen if I lost you both at once.” Gould, when he wants, can still feel Robert’s hand around his — but hasn’t he gone over this? — and his mother’s hand but not as much his father’s, Robert’s the smallest and tightest. He was also going to say “the softest”; he forgets what he said about it before, but it’s not true: his mother’s was. Lots of times they stopped at a candy store on the way home from school, never to. Their mother, the morning or night before, must have always given Robert money to buy them sodas. A certain orange drink drunk straight from the bottle was the only soda Robert got at this store for a long time, while Gould liked cream soda of any kind, with two straws in the bottle. So what’s he saying here? Just move on. Robert always stuck up for him. Now this could be showing something. A big kid from another block was once threatening Gould on the sidewalk, he forgets what for, and suddenly Robert was running out of their building and up the areaway steps and over to them and without saying a word shoved the boy so hard that he fell against a stoop and hit his head. Robert must have been looking out their front window on the second floor — not “must have”; this is what he later told Gould — and seen from their gestures and expressions that Gould was being picked on and knew that if they got into a fistfight — because he was sure Gould would defend himself rather than back off, something Gould had once said he’d do because he knew that’s what Robert would — he wouldn’t stand a chance against this guy. “Come on, you want to mix it up with someone, how about me?” and the boy said, “You’re too big and I already got a bloody head, so it wouldn’t be fair.” “And starting with this little shrimp, compared to you, is fair? Look, nobody can order you to stay off this block, so just get lost,” and the boy said, going, “I’m getting my older brother after you — he’s twice your size,” and Robert said, “Oh, yeah, older brothers, we all have them. We’ve got two much bigger older brothers who’ll mash your older brother’s face in and, as a gift for getting him, mash in yours.” Later at home, Robert said — neither the boy nor anyone resembling his brother came around after that, or not while they were there—“Whatever I might have told you about fighting before was a lie or I said it in an unclear way. I don’t like fighting, and for sure not if the guy’s much bigger than me or just a musclebound ox. Then I’d talk or walk my way out of it, because I wasn’t born to get prematurely mauled or killed. I also wouldn’t feel anything but rotten if I hurt someone, as I did a little with that kid.” “You’re only saying that to keep me from getting hurt. But what if my life or Mommy’s or Daddy’s was at stake, you saying you wouldn’t jump in?” and Robert said, “For those reasons only, or if my own life was at stake but I was trapped with no escape. But none of that was the case with you today. Jesus, I can’t wait till you grow up completely so I won’t think I have to help you out every time,” and Gould said, “You will anyway, unless it’d turn an uneven match into an even more uneven one, but I’ll think over what you said,” and Robert said, “No, you won’t. You’re just being clever, using words, which you should have done with that kid. I’m through with you. From now on you’re on your own, or at least don’t get into these things by the window where I can too easily see you.” One time later on Gould was drunk at a bar and the bartender called Robert and said, “You want to come get your stupid brother? He’s being a stiff pain in the ass and we’re about to dump him into the street.” Robert ran to the bar and got Gould into a cab, though it was only two blocks from home. Next day he said, “Why do you want to get so soused? Bad for your liver and bad for your soul, and everybody there thought you were a prize putz. You also leave yourself wide open to thieves. I don’t want to be lifting your face out of the toilet anymore, in case you forgot that, do you hear me? Because did you — did anybody — ever have to do that for me?” “No. And as for ‘anybody’—” “So why do you drink so much?” and he wanted to say, Because when I was three I lost my one and only older brother and it screwed me up in a way I can’t explain. That would have got a laugh — or not — and Robert would have said, “What’s that supposed to mean? You trying to be clever with words again? Well, it’s not working. Or is there a hidden meaning behind it you’re trying to tell me? You lost him — meaning me — in the sense that you were once very close, if I remember — we were — playing all the time together and doing things like that, but he gradually grew away from you as older brothers tend to do,” and he would have said, “I meant nothing by it. I’m still hung over. Not still, totally, so not responsible for my words, and if I happened to sound calculating, it was just luck.” “So answer me a simple question then, one that shouldn’t be too taxing: why do you drink so much?” and he said, “I can’t answer that right now. As I said — didn’t I just say it? I seem to remember I did — my whole body feels like hell and my mind’s a blank spot.” “So don’t anymore, that’s all. I get another call like last night’s, I’ll tell the bartender to leave you on the street and not wait around for me to pick you up,” and he said, “I believe you and you’re right. And so next time they start to make that call and if I’m able to I’ll tell them to stop and just lift my arms up and let them drag me out by my feet,” and Robert said, “You want to be that kind of schnook, be it, but I swear when you wake up on the ground next time, don’t look around for me,” and he said, “All right, I heard, I heard. You’re finally going to desert me, and I’m not being a wise guy now if that’s what you’re thinking; I know it’s all for my own health.” Robert would do things like slip a ten-dollar bill into Gould’s pocket when he was going out on a date. “What’s this for?” and Robert would say, “So your chickie not only thinks you’re a sport at the movie theater when you buy her bonbons instead of jujubes, but so you can also have an extra good time in case anything else needing cash comes up.” “I don’t want it; I make enough on my own, working,” and Robert would say, “I earn more. So for insurance if you’re suddenly stranded alone in the Bronx late at night and want to take a cab home instead of getting killed waiting for the subway.” Robert would make him sandwiches for lunch when Gould was in a rush in the morning to leave for school. “Liverwurst with mustard and lettuce, right? Every day the same thing for years. When are you going to change? Mayonnaise instead of mustard, for instance. And why don’t you make your lunch the night before like Dad and me?” “We’re different, that’s all. You favor Dad, I favor nobody. Other differences: I jump out of bed when the alarm clock goes off, you crawl out or just sleep. But you always put it together in minutes, once you get started, while I wander around the joint wondering what I’m going to do and how I’m going to do it and what again is it I have to do?” “I don’t know about that. None of it sounds like either of us, except the leaping and sleeping. But I respect your right to come up with these misperceived impressions.” Another difference: Gould usually wanted the folks to say what a good smart boy he was, and Robert wanted them to say what a good smart boy Gould was. One dinner conversation, Robert saying, “Did you see those grades Gould got this marking period? Something, huh?” and their father saying, “They weren’t that hot,” and Gould saying, “I did the best I could, worked my head off, really tried; I’m sorry,” and their mother saying, “Don’t worry about it, dear, though I know you could have done much better.” “I don’t know why you two are giving him a hard time about it,” Robert said. “The New York City public school system stinks; we’re all products of it, so we all know that. It makes Labrador retrievers and memory experts out of everyone. That’s why getting just B’s and 80’s and Satisfactorys signifies you’re good enough to be good but not good enough to be excellent and fall for that failed kid-dismissive system. I wish we could pull him out of school and I had the time to educate him myself.” “Don’t be so harsh and smart and arty and act like a big shot,” their father said. “You’ll end up hurting your brother.” Gould liked wearing Robert’s clothes. Everything except the socks and ties was much too large for him but he still tried — shirtsleeves rolled up, top button of the dress shirts left unbuttoned, bomber jacket worn with two sweaters — but nothing he could do with the other clothes except a couple of belts that Robert, saying they were his least favorite, let him gouge a few more holes in and polo shirts that Gould said he liked to wear big. Robert taught him how to dress: knot a tie, fold a hanky for his jacket breast pocket, coordinate colors, when clothes should go to the dry cleaners—“Sniff the pants crotch and under the jacket arms. One faint whiff of piss or B.O. and out it goes”—which clothes could be put into the washer and dryer, even what the holes in French cuffs were for and then how to get the cuff links in once the shirt was on you, how to use a tie tack without leaving a visible hole. Gould first went to his father to learn how to knot a tie. “Speak to Robert. That’s what older brothers are for. You should start relying on him for things like jobs and clothes and how to shave and advice about girls and alcohol, and not just your studies.” Robert got behind him and said, “First I’ll tie it around your neck as if it’s on me. Follow my hands in the mirror but think reverse . Notice how I go around and loop it here and double it for an extra-fat Windsor knot, if that’s what you want. It’s the style right now, along with the Billy Eckstine collar, which makes you look more like a nightclub singer than a scholar — the girls I know like the latter — and then slip it in and tug it a bit but not too tight and you got your knot.” “How’d you get the inside strip shorter than the outside? That looks hard,” and Robert said, “Forgot to show you how to measure them next to each other,” and undid the knot. Taught him how to tie a bow tie. “Who taught you, since Dad never wears them?” and Robert said, “I had a dream where I tied a bow tie perfectly except for a little back piece hanging down. Then I woke up, thought it a good opportunity to learn how while I still had what seemed like practical dream knowledge, and went out and bought one and right at the store tied it perfectly the first time except for this little back piece hanging down.” Gould was sixteen and going out on a date. “Let’s see how you look,” Robert would usually say, and he’d have Gould stand in front of him and then turn around. “Tie’s sticking out in back,” and he’d fix it. “What’s with you and folding hankies?” and he’d take it out of Gould’s jacket breast pocket and refold it. Smell his cheek and say, “Too much aftershave; you reek like a gigolo. Splash some water on your face to adulterate it…. You got a nice shine on those shoes and, let me see, no smudges on your socks. What about your hands?” and Gould held them out, and he said, “Good, no shoe polish on your nails either — that’s where I mostly get it and then start smearing it on the rest of my clothes…. Hair could be parted a bit straighter, it takes a side trip about three-quarters there…. That shirt new?” and Gould said, “It’s yours, do you mind?” and Robert said, “Not too roomy for you? But I guess it’ll do. When you take it to the Chinese laundry tomorrow, you pay, and remember, no starch … Your pants need to be ironed,” and Robert took out the board and iron and showed him how. “Always use a dampened dish towel on them, especially the gabardine, or they’ll eventually shine like glass. Anyway, you’re a pretty sharp dresser now, and only two razor nicks on your face. Not bad, and nice and smooth”—feeling his cheek—“though I’d wash off the blood; your date might get queasy,” and Gould said, “No, she’s a very natural type and would probably just scratch it off with her fingernail and not say peep over it,” and Robert said, “The best kind, the earth girl, I love them. No futzing around with artifice and stringing you along and painting their toes. Doesn’t even blink when you break wind, am I right? What could be better, so long as you act the same natural way with her,” and Gould said, “Quite confidentially, it was a turnoff at first, if you mean when she did it — I’d never heard a girl break wind before but then never been with one so long and close. But it only happened twice and the second time I barely flinched,” and Robert said, “That’s my boy, but I bet you lie…. Now remember,” Robert said another time, “never feed a girl any lines. Act genuine; be honest. She doesn’t go for it, then she isn’t worth your time even if you have a chance to bed her. But don’t bed anyone who you know’s going to be hurt if you don’t want to bed her again or if all you want from her is to get her in bed, unless that’s all she wants from you too. Be polite and considerate all the time to girls. Help them on with their coats, carry their heavy packages, but not if they have something against it. Open doors for them, as you should for everyone; be last getting out of a place even if there’s a fire. And if there is a fire and someone’s in there and you think you can save them without killing yourself or getting burned badly, do it and then deny you really did anything. All this works better than being artificially tough and crass and stupid and boastful, though you’re not doing this as a ruse but because you are this way…. Let me see your teeth. I want to check for any specks on them,” and Gould would open his mouth. He was fifteen or sixteen, again going out on a date. “Your breath okay too? I’m not going to check for that, so tell the truth: I got some drops for it if there s a problem…. Your sideburns aren’t even. Get in the bathroom and I’ll do them with my barber scissors and razor,” and he evened Gould’s sideburns. “You’re not perfect but it’s getting late and you don’t want to make anyone wait, so I’ll release you. Have a ball. And here’s some moola in case of a lot of things; every kid your age can use a bit extra…. Remember that time a while back when I said that stuff about fire and being somewhat cautious about saving people?” and Gould said no. “Anyway, I said it and now think because of something I read in the paper that you have to risk your life if there’s a chance of saving someone in a burning building, let’s say, if there isn’t a hundred percent chance you will get killed doing it. This doesn’t go for standing up to a punk with a gun pointed at your head or any part of you except your legs. Then you got to just let him do what he’s out to do, except if it’s something horrible to the folks or your future wife or kids. Then you have to risk getting killed to save them from even getting shot in the legs or raped. My feeling is that your own death or something close to it will satisfy the guy or scare him off.” Whatever Robert had when they were little, he usually gave Gould half: candy, soda, cake, gum. “I don’t want any, thanks,” and Robert would say, “No, you got to take or just put it away. And I sort of expect the same from you, though if you don’t do it that doesn’t mean I’ll stop being my way,” and sometimes Gould would think, if he had the only candy bar or pack of gum, I really want to keep all of it for myself, but what’ll he say if he sees me chewing and I don’t offer him some? If Robert didn’t want it, Gould never told him to take it for later. Robert asked him for favors only when he absolutely couldn’t do the thing himself and it needed to be done immediately. He couldn’t pick up his new high school football jacket at the place that made them for the whole team, so asked Gould if he would. Gould thought it a lot to ask of him, since it was more than an hour’s trip to the East Bronx, but Robert said, “I’ve put it off and today’s the last day I can go to practice without it. After that the coach said I’m demoted or off the team,” and Gould said, “That’s dumb and you should tell him to jump into a lake and that you need another day. Or if it’s you don’t want to piss him off, make up a terrific lie; I’ll help you,” and Robert said, “Just do it for me, please? What do I ever ask of you? And you think you can cut down on your cursing?” Gould went to get the jacket from school. For some reason — but he knows the reason and thinks he knew it then — he said he was Robert Bookbinder when he handed over the pickup slip and rest of the money, and the man said, “This jacket’s for a kid several sizes larger than you. And it’s the size you ordered — I got it down right here — so we can’t be taking it back or making you another one.” “I got it big because I’m going to grow into it, and maybe out of it in a year too. I already grew six inches this year, which is how I made the team, and the doctor for my health checkup last month said another tremendous spurt’s on the way.” “You want to wear it now? You’ll be saving me the box and trouble tying it up,” and he said, “It’s a little warm out, but with my books to carry, why not? It’s a breaker, in a way, right? so I’ll start breaking it in.” He put it on; it was way too large but he felt great wearing it, and the man looked him over and said, “Fits better than I thought. Wear it in good health, Bob, and chalk up a winning season and don’t get hurt,” and he said, “I’ll try not to, and we will. In fact we’re shooting for the all-city championship; that’s how good we think we are this year.” In the bus and subway rides home he stood, rather than sat, so people could see how short he was and be impressed that a kid this small made the varsity football team of a public high school, even if it was one of the elite ones. Wow, some of them could think, he must be fast and strong and smart. If anyone asked him what position he played: left halfback, specializing in running back the kick and end runs. But this Bob , written in cursive inside a football on the front of the jacket; it looked nice when the man held the jacket up for him, maybe better than Robert would, but why that name? Robert always went as Robert and nothing else, at home and with his friends. Gould had heard people call him Bob and Rob a few times, but always by mistake, and after it Robert would correct them: “If you don’t mind, I prefer not to be so alliterated,” or “It sounds as if I’m a thief.” Maybe three letters were cheaper to sew on than six. Or there was something about him he didn’t know: that he went by Bob with his teammates and over the loudspeaker when they announced the players, which they do in the big games, Robert had told him, like against Clinton and Brooklyn Tech. He’d ask him when Robert tried the jacket on. “Hey, it says Bob,” he’d say, “how come?” When Robert saw the jacket in the coat closet that night, he said, “Didn’t this come in a box? A bag, anyway, and where’s the receipt? You didn’t wear it home, did you?” and Gould said, “No, why do you think that?” “You’re lying; I can always tell — born liars don’t make good liars,” and he said, “Okay, I wore it, because I had lots of other things to carry: my books and my sweater because it was so hot out. And I did some of my homework on the subway and bus and didn’t want to be dealing with this tremendous box the man there showed me.” “You’re lying again. I can always tell when you’re lying again. Piece of advice: tell the truth right off and you’re out of harm’s way. You wore the jacket because you hoped people would think you were a high school football player, despite how small you are. And if you’re going to lie, make sure you get your stories straight. You take off your sweater because it’s hot but you put on an even heavier jacket?” “I kept the jacket open. And just about everything you say isn’t true and I don’t know what your ‘harm’s way’ is. Because what was the harm? I took care of the jacket good, even hung it up on a hanger in the closet,” and Robert said, “Now you’re not lying; at least, most of what you just said shouldn’t be considered a lie. Self-deception and pretending to misunderstand and reversing the accusations and trying to talk your way out of a bad situation or lie aren’t lying. But boy, they’re things you also ought to work on fixing if you ever want to be an adult.” “I don’t have a clue what you mean,” and Robert said, “Now you’re lying again, because one thing you’re not is unconditionally stupid. And three lies in one brief conversation? I’d say your lying addiction is fatal,” and Gould said, “Enough with your predictions; they’re just insults in disguise anyway,” and Robert said, “More trying to squeeze your way out of it with cleverness rather than facing the situation. Brother, you’re hopeless,” and “Brother,” Gould said, after he turned around and went to their bedroom and slammed the door, “you’re full of shit and a rat. How did I ever like him?”—under his breath—“ask yourself: How did you?” “Okay,” Robert said through the door a minute later, “I was wrong in a lot of what I said to you and an apology’s in order, but just tell me, Where’s the jacket receipt?” and he said, “I forgot to get one, or the man forget to give me it. But I know it isn’t in any box or bag because I didn’t want one,” and Robert said, “Oh, God, when are you going to wise up?” Robert got his driver’s license soon as he was able to and started driving their father’s car. He once drove Gould and himself to Brooklyn to see some relatives. Double-parked the car on an avenue with lots of one-story stores — all the parking spaces were filled — and said, “I have to get some smokes; I’ll be right back.” No, said, “I got to take a leak. If the driver of either of the cars I’m blocking wants me to move, tell him I went into that coffee shop there for a bladder emergency and I’ll be right out. If he wants me to move this instant, show him the car keys and tell him you don’t know how to drive and your brother said he doesn’t want anyone else driving the car and you’ll run in to get me if he waits by our car a few seconds so we don’t get ticketed. Forget the part about the bladder. Just say I went in for health reasons and I’ll be right out; that wouldn’t be far from the truth. By the time he starts wondering what health reasons in a coffee shop, I’ll be back. If a cop comes, because I’m illegally parked, tell him the same thing and that I left my keys behind in good faith, just in case I was blocking a parked car or a fire truck had to get in here or something. But slide over behind the wheel so you look like the driver. There’ll be less chance a cop will stop for you then.” “Some of that’s unclear. What do I say to the cop?” and Robert said, “I haven’t time to re-explain; I’m about to pee in my pants,” and ran to the coffee shop. Gould was already behind the wheel, tried turning it, but it only moved a little. Of course, engine’s got to be running. He’d never started up a car. Fifteen; that’s almost like a disgrace. Never been taught how, either. But he thought he could do it from having watched his father and Robert. Because what’s the trick? Stick the key in, turn it, and car starts up. But keep the gearshift in PARK. That’s important, or else the car could jump forward. He’d seen that happen with his father. And make sure the hand brake’s engaged — that’s the word he’s heard them use — and it was. He stuck the key in and tried turning it to the right but it wouldn’t move — the gas pedal, stupid! — and he put his foot on the gas pedal while he tried turning the key, but it still wouldn’t move. What am I doing wrong? he thought, and put his foot farther down on the gas pedal while he tried turning the key and then tried turning it harder — and it broke. Oh, no! He tried getting the key’s broken front part out but it was stuck in there. Now what? Robert was coming back and Gould moved to the passenger seat, and Robert got in, held his hand out for the keys, and said, “How’d it go? Any customers?” and Gould said, “I’m very sorry,” and showed him the broken key on the ring, and Robert said, “You didn’t. Where’s the other part? Not in there, I hope”—pointing — and Gould nodded, and Robert yelled, “You schmuck!” and slapped him in the chest. It didn’t hurt but he’d never hit him like that before, or since he was a kid, and tears welled, and Robert said, “What’s wrong? I said what in God’s name is wrong? Damn, you asked for it. You put the key in upside down, you dumb idiot, and tried to start the car, right? That’s the only thing that could have happened. And when it wouldn’t turn you forced it. So now what am I going to do? Come on, you’re fifteen, what are you doing, crying? Okay, I’m sorry,” and put his hand on Gould’s shoulder. “I never hit you before or at least in anger, or at least not since I was six or so, that what you’re thinking? So it’s over, so you weren’t hurt, so stop blubbering like a baby. I said I’m sorry. Accept my apology — that’s the right thing to do — and then see if you can help me get the rest of the key out.” They couldn’t, even with Robert’s penknife. “Stay here. Policeman comes, or someone whose car I’m blocking, tell them what you did with the key and that I had to go get a locksmith or garage mechanic, but don’t leave the car even if you have to pee. You have to pee now, go to the coffee shop and I’ll stay here. And here’s a buck; get yourself a soda,” and Gould shook his head and Robert went to the coffee shop, probably to ask where the nearest locksmith or service station was. A locksmith came a short time later and got the key out. Robert had a spare key—“I was thinking of telling you earlier but didn’t want to ease your mind too soon; then you’d never remember what you did and it would only happen again”—and they drove off. “Always carry a spare. That’s my advice for the day, if not the century. Wrap it in something, seal what you wrap it in with tape, and tuck it into a part of your wallet or billfold, like the change purse if it has a zipper or snap, but where it could never fall out. That’s the way to never locking yourself out of your car. And whatever you do, don’t leave your car keys with your fifteen-year-old brother or son. God, can they be dolts. Excuse me. So, all forgiven, tears dried?” and Gould said, “I didn’t have tears. I just felt bad and only might have looked like a kid crying,” and Robert said, “Oh, yeah, like you really believe that, but now let’s forget it for good.” Each served as best man for the other’s wedding. “Listen,” Robert said, “I wouldn’t trust anyone with the ring, not even my dearest brother, so let’s say I give it to you right before I walk down the aisle — or the minute before, so nobody will see us and think I feel you’re unreliable — in a private room where you’re supposed to be helping me get ready.” “Anything you say, though I would encourage you to start trusting me. But if this will make you feel more relaxed for the main event, okay,” and Robert said, “It’s not that, or maybe it is, or something, perhaps, of what you said — now I’m confused. But just go along with my short-lived idiosyncrasy and uncertainty and inability this minute to understand why they suddenly exist, please.” Gould’s wedding, by comparison, was small, thirty people at the most in the apartment he and Sally had been living in for two years, and the day before it he asked Robert to hold on to the wedding rings for him—“I’m afraid of losing them. But then I always get flustered and forgetful when the big occasion is me; do you remember my bar mitzvah?”—and Robert said, “Not at all. And holding on to your rings would be irresponsible of me, because where would I keep them? Same place as you. In a box or plastic envelope in the top dresser drawer with my underwear and socks. But I’m in a hotel room for two nights with only so-so security, so do it yourself and spare me the possible ignominy of losing them or not taking the right precautions to prevent them from being stolen, and give them to me a minute or two before the ceremony. That’s what I did with you, though I don’t recall if it was for the same reason.” Robert started helping Gould get jobs while they were both in high school. (But he’s already mentioned something along those lines. Helping him get a raise, then.) Robert had got him a job delivering belts to dress and coat houses for the belt factory he was a shipping clerk at, and one day at work he said, “Look, this has gone on long enough. Go tell Mr. Wachterman you’d like a raise. When he asks how much, say thirty cents an hour would be equitable. And say ‘equitable’ rather than ‘fair.’ Not that you need a brain for what you do or that he doesn’t already think you’re bright. But these people always have to be reassured how smart you are by the words you use and big non-school books you carry. And they, not being too educated or interested in books, associate intellectual brains with goodness and honesty and quick thinking for practical rather than underhanded things, and he’ll feel he’s got a winner in you in that not only don’t you petty-steal from the firm, as most of the delivery boys do — scissors, buckles, and so forth — but he only has to tell you a route or something to do once and you got it down pat. And you deserve the thirty cents for the heavy bales you push and unload and the half year you’ve worked here at the same salary,” and Gould said, “I can’t ask him. He’ll fire me. When he thinks I’m ready for a raise, he’ll give me one; and whatever it is, I’ll take, since it’ll be more than I’ve been making,” and Robert said, “This is the Garment Center, you dimmy. Here, until you demand more, you slave for life at minimum wage, if they can’t finagle it some way where you get less. And if you are taken advantage of like that, I look bad for not having taught you about the dog-eat-dog practices that go on here and how to dance around them and get what’s rightfully yours,” and Gould said, “If I ever get to feel I’m not being paid equitably for what I do, and they don’t offer me a raise, I’ll tell them I’m leaving. If they then offer me one because of what I said, fine, I’ll tell them. But if they say, ‘Goodbye and good riddance to you, pal, because you’re nothing to us,’ fine again, because I’ll look for a new job,” and Robert said, “Bushwah; you’re just afraid of speaking up for yourself,” and he said, “Not true, I don’t think it’s up to me to make the first move,” and Robert said, “But I already told you how they think. As for getting another job, if you leave like that you’ll have a work record of quitting, which’ll make it harder for you. And if someone’s thinking of hiring you and calls Wachterman for a reference, since in your application you usually have to give the last two places you worked, you think he’ll give you a fair one? No chance. He’ll void all over you, say you were a sluff-off, slob, and petty thief: you name it. Because he’ll know you’ll have told the new place why you left — the money. So to counter it, because he wouldn’t want the company or him looking bad, he’ll say you were paid above minimum wage but still did a lousy job and finally quit, and if he were this guy he wouldn’t hire you. So learn something from me for once. The only credit you get around here is when you stand up for yourself without being high-horsey or saying it in a way their dimwit minds might think is disdainful or insulting,” and Gould said, “I still can’t ask for one,” and Robert said, “Then I’ll do it for you and maybe you’ll learn something from that,” and he said, “Don’t!” and Robert went to Wachterman’s office, knocked first, put on a deferential face, and straightened his tie, and came out a few minutes later and said, “I told him you were too shy and respectful to ask him yourself and he said he likes that quality in a young man, but more for a son-in-law who isn’t coming into the business, since it’s not anything that’ll make anyone more money. And then, though it hurts, he’s giving you twenty-five cents an hour more starting in two weeks,” and Gould said, “You were lucky he didn’t fire you,” and Robert said, “What are you talking about? They love me here and would never let me go. How do you think I got you the raise? I insinuated they’d lose us both if he didn’t come up with one for you,” and Gould said, “How’d you do that without actually saying it?” and Robert said, “Ways.” Robert went to lots of parties and often invited Gould — But first the work he did in a store window. Robert got a job in which he wrote The Autobiography of a Very Ordinary Young New Yorker , as he called it, in the window of a stationery store made up to look like a cluttered writer’s studio. He was looking for a Christmas job during his long school break, couldn’t find one that paid more than minimum wage, got this idea while walking past the largest stationery-typewriter store in midtown, and went in and proposed it. He’d sit in the window for a month from eight to seven, time off to go to the men’s room and to quickly eat his breakfast and lunch at the typing table, and write the first draft and then the final one using only the store’s merchandise. He told the owners it’d show that their typewriters can take eleven hours a day straight of heavy pounding from a guy who looks like a weight lifter, besides being a big draw and getting the store plenty of attention, a man completing a book-length manuscript in a store window on a main thoroughfare. The life he’d write about, he told Gould — and each page would be taped to the window for people on the sidewalk to read and there’d be scratch pads attached to the window outside for them to write comments and criticisms — would be partly his own, partly Gould’s, partly anything he could think up or include that would seem plausibly part of the autobiography. (So this, probably, was when he first thought of writing fiction, or did the store window come after the article about underground streams in Greenwich Village? Thinks about it. After, by about a year, as the article was written when Gould was still in high school.) There’d be a few heroics in the work: jumping in front of a bicycle that was about to run down a baby in a stroller, which Gould did the year before and busted his shoulder; giving mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to an already dead man who’d collapsed in a theater lobby, something their mother did without knowing how to do it when she was in her twenties; grabbing a thief on the street and holding him in a headlock for the police , which Gould and a friend did when a woman yelled that her pocketbook had been picked; facing down a robber with an umbrella and a samples case, which their father did in their building’s vestibule — but all things Robert would say he’d done and that the samples case was a book bag and the resuscitation saved the man. “Got to beef up the piece to keep the reader, though not make it too maudlin, since things like this never seem to happen to me, and it can’t be only because of my size.” So mostly just ordinary experiences while growing up in New York: family life, shul, the only Hebrew school student there the rabbi didn’t from time to time whack on the back of the neck; getting adult jobs when he was in his early teens, Charlie Chaplin, Oona O’Neill, whom he was more impressed at seeing that same evening because of her father; being beaten out of a cab by Peter Lorre (“You have to run faster than that, son, though I won’t argue with you if you insist it’s yours,” and he said, “Not at all, sir; it’s an honor to let you have it”—opening the cab’s door), then next day sitting in the Paramount Theater behind Sydney Greenstreet, who was laughing so hard Robert couldn’t make out what was being said on the screen. Wanted to tell him of the coincidence but thought it the wrong time and place. Boyhood crushes on movie stars (Gene Tierney, June Haver, Veronica Lake); bribing a third-grade classmate to show him one of her nipples in the narrow coat closet by giving her his last Indian penny; tips on how he meets women in bookstores (“Excuse me, but did you notice if that book you have was the last copy on the shelf, because I was interested in it too,” or “Excuse me”—since he never tries picking up a woman who isn’t browsing through the fiction, poetry, or literary criticism sections—“but do you have any idea which is the better version of Wordsworth’s Prelude , the 1805 or 1850?”); admitting he’s never been able to come up with a good way to pick up women in art museums except maybe to hang around the famous Ingres painting in the Met or the Tchelitchew at the Modern and ask the woman who’s looking at it — or if she’s only walking past, then to beg her pardon and stop her — if she knows how to pronounce the painter’s name; but nothing in the manuscript about sex other than the girl’s nipple, which he’d call “one side of her chest.” Brief account of each of the fourteen scars on his head: getting in the way of a swinging baseball bat or stickball broomstick or flying hockey puck (when he was playing on roller skates); falling on his mother’s pinking shears; several times failing to stoop as he went through a door; tipping over a chair he was leaning back on; crashing a party with his friends, and the girl’s mother — because he was the biggest, his friends pushed him in first — smashing a guitar over his head; frozen on one foot while playing Statues and falling off the top of a stoop wall into an areaway…. The ten people in his life he feels have done the worst damage to him, five of them his elementary school teachers and an assistant principal in the same school (“Principal with a P-A-L, for the assistant principal is your pal”). Short chapter on his family’s history: folks growing up on the Lower East Side and moving uptown when they got married and all his grandparents immigrating to America from small Polish villages, though his mother always held that her folks were Austro-Hungarian and only started speaking Polish to communicate to their help in New York. Ending with him walking by this store, disappointed at not being able to find work that paid more than minimum wage, as he wanted to save money to take a student ship to Germany in June to visit as many of Thomas Mann’s old haunts as he could afford, and getting the brainstorm, as he called it, for the job when he saw the typewriter and typing table and supplies in the window and immediately going into the store to speak to someone about it. Gould, on his lunch or dinner breaks from his Christmas salesman’s job in a midtown department store, often stood on the sidewalk in a crowd and watched Robert typing, closing his eyes in thought and then springing them open to jot down notes, sharpening a typewriter-eraser pencil, using some chemical solution to wash off the ink stains on his fingers after he changed the typewriter ribbon, which the store manager let him do twice a day because he wanted the print legible, putting things like manuscript pages and photographs and his Social Security and Selective Service cards and college photo-ID through a new machine called a Xerox copier — the manager wanted him to demonstrate this product, which wasn’t selling well yet, as much as he could and to show by his expression how easy it was to use and how much fun he had copying the personal documents and photos — taping new finished photocopied pages on the window and, for a few minutes at the beginning of every hour, reading the comments that were brought in to him and answering some of them by holding up a blackboard on which he chalked responses like Great suggestion for the hot-dog man scene, Jerry G.; I’m gonna use it if I ever rewrite this (he’d been told not to put off any potential customer by being insulting or oversmart with his comments); Astute interpretation of the introduction-to-death section of Little Robert, D. W. Darlene, and thanks for sticking with it; next few pages should be more peppy; You’re no doubt right about the spelling of “antecedant,” Jean, but just to make sure, I’ll check, first chance I get, in the new Webster’s New World Dictionary the store’s loaned me and sells here , and he held up the book; Not to worry, Dr. Ninski; the part about my appendectomy was clarified on an earlier page already removed from the window for lack of space . People sometimes tapped on the window to tell him something through it, and he’d ignore them if he was typing away furiously or would wave if he recognized that person from someplace, usually from some other time at the window, Robert said. Mostly, though, he’d just smile and point to a sign on an easel that said SORRY, CAN’T CONVERSE: WRITER AT WORK. MUST MEET MANUSCRIPT DEADLINE OF 6 P.M., DEC. 31ST. IF YOU HAVE COMMENTS OR CRITIQUES OF MR. BOOKBINDER’S WRITING, PLEASE RESTRICT THEM TO SHEETS POSTED ON THE WINDOW. THEY’LL ALL BE READ BY HIM AND GRATEFULLY RECEIVED. He spotted Gould once and waved him in and quickly scribbled on the blackboard My sort-of ghostwriting brother: he’s younger but has given me half my ideas for this, so let him through, folks . Gould went into the store and climbed into the window. “Nine more days of this agony,” Robert said, covering his mouth. “Worst idea I’ve ever had to make money, but I’m committed to it and don’t want to let the store down: they’re slave drivers but a decent bunch and they gave me a break. If I were really involved in the book and interested in completing it, it’d be different. There are already several senior and junior editors and literary agents sending in notes or calling the store to see it. They’ve either passed the window and noticed the crowds around it for an activity as lowly esteemed as writing or they’ve read the articles and seen the photos of me in a couple of newspapers, sitting here typing, and thought, By gum, this manuscript’s already got a ton of publicity before it’s published. But it’s hackwork I’m doing, a piece of uncompromising crap, as well as a death blow to my homage to Mann. If I did get to Germany partly from the dough I earned here and knocked on his door as I’d planned and actually got a few minutes with the great man, and he asked — over tea, even — as one of his questions, for in his fiction and essays and interviews he’s always questioning, how I had the means to get there, I couldn’t lie to him. He’s so sharp he’d see right through me. So I’d have to tell the truth and he, the quintessential artist and literary moralist, might become so repulsed by my vulgarization of the craft, and in his name too, that he’d ask someone in his house to promptly show me out, and who knows what that scene might do to his already frail condition and failing health? Anyway, I’m sick of the manuscript and the stupid attention it’s received and the people out there on the street and the inane questions I always have to answer, and the only thing I’m going to do with it soon as I finish it on the last day is take my name off the title page and drop it into the nearest ash can. What I’m particularly sick of is having to apologize to twenty to thirty people every time I have to use the WC. But listen”—and he gave Gould a few bucks—“if you have a little time left on your break, could you get me a turkey and Swiss sandwich on seeded rye, Russian dressing on the side, and a Dr. Brown’s celery tonic at the Stage Deli? The food the store’s been sending in is for the dogs.” Robert went to lots of parties, and when they were both working in Washington or New York he often invited Gould to them. He’d call an hour or so before and say something like “I’ve been thinking of you, and what popped into my head is you’re not doing anything tonight, am I right?” and Gould would usually say, “Nothing much. Reading, listening to music, drinking a little wine,” and Robert would say, “You stay home too much, I always tell you that; you ought to go out more. How else you going to meet women and not become the best read young solitary drunken reporter in the city? No matter how much you protest, you’re coming,” and he’d give the address and time of the party and Gould would say, “Won’t the host mind?” and Robert would say, “You’re my brother, so I don’t even have to work it out beforehand. You just show up at the door and if someone says, because tonight’s is a fairly fancy place, who are you? you say, ‘Robert Bookbinder’s brother, he told me it’d be okay,’ and they’ll let you right in.” Once Gould said, “You can’t tell the host I’m coming and to leave word at the door to admit me?” and Robert said, “I will, if you insist, though I don’t understand how you can still be so timid in these situations. You’re a newsman now, no more Mr. Copyboy. You push yourself through doors, into stories, stick your arm out farther than any other radio newsman’s and shove your mike into a legislator’s face and ask aggressive meaty questions that’ll get your news service scads of attention and then attribution on the wires later. He doesn’t answer, or not satisfactorily, according to you, you say you’re the press, sir, the goddamn press, and you want—” and he said, “Okay, okay, I get the point. But I like to relax from my work, and though I am pushy in news I don’t enjoy it.” At one party Robert pointed out a woman and said, “I’d think you’d be interested in that one. Sweet smile, nifty face, looks bright, nice figure and height, doesn’t smoke, dresses sedately, almost as if she owns horses, but with shoulders that say she’s a swimmer, and not a touch of makeup, it seems, or she knows how to apply it so that it looks natural. Couldn’t be better, the best bet for love interest at the party. I’d make a plunge for her myself but somehow I see you two as the perfect match, with your smile, bright look, and nice face and sedate clothes and no makeup. And you’re not seeing anyone now while I’m already in hot water, and I’m not boasting, over two too many girlfriends, so go over to her and say hello.” “I can’t just go over to a woman. I always feel so uncomfortable,” and Robert said, “It’s easy, and you’re a master at fabricating, so give her a good one. ‘My brother over there, the tall guy with the loud clothes and funny hat and shirttail sticking out of his fly and cigarette in each hand? He thought I should come over and introduce myself and tell you a few lies — he thinks I’m a master at them, though he called them fabrications — that’ll get you interested enough in me to want to start a conversation. You see, he thinks — he said this, and I always have to do what my older brother says, as he’s recently become the sole executor of our late parents’ estate and has complete control to cut me out of it and he can be quite imperious, though I suppose I don’t always have to repeat what he tells me — that we’d be a perfect pair together: “match,” he actually said. I corrected myself then, even if it might not have seemed important, because we’re both newsmen, but he wants me to be a better one than I am so says I should start practicing to quote everything exactly,’” and Gould said, “Sure, I can really see myself saying that, and I can also imagine what her reaction would be—’See ya, Schlermy,’ “—and Robert said, “C’mon, you know what I mean. And she has a very ironical and receptive look, besides the bright one, so I bet she’ll appreciate it for its humor and uniqueness as an opening line. Or simply say, though don’t say it simply, ‘My older brother there, the tall geek with the untied shoelaces and pants cuffs that don’t reach his ankles and two unlit cigarettes in his mouth and a lit one wedged behind each ear? Well, he thinks I should try to overcome my enfeebling shyness at starting a conversation with you by just strutting over as I just did, and also not to say “just” so much, which I’ll try but it seems almost impossible to do, being a third-generation New Yorker, and saying to you the first thing that enters my head and then taking it from there. He also said that if that displeases you I should of course apologize prostrately and skulk away backwards without bumping into anyone till I’m out of the room. And he’s really right, in a way, so I’m doing it,’” and Gould said, “Suppose she asks what do I mean ‘right, in a way,’ which puzzles me too?” and Robert said, “Tell her that was also something your brother told you to say and that it puzzles you a little too. But that your brother says many things you don’t understand, sometimes because they’re unclearly expressed and other times because of the deficiencies in your own comprehension, but there you are already talking to her, though that last part you don’t say unless you want to be underminingly honest.” “I can’t do it,” and Robert said, “Then I’ll do it for you because I know this isn’t something you should pass up,” and went over, took her arm, started talking, she laughed, he pointed to Gould — or he started talking, they laughed, he took her arm by the elbow and sort of swiveled her around to Gould and pointed at him — she smiled at Gould, he smiled back, Robert waved for him to come over, “I want to introduce you to someone,” Gould shook his head — or Robert said something to her and she laughed and said, “Gould, come on over, I want to introduce you to someone”—and he thought, “Wait a second, what the hell’s going on here?” and went over and said to her, “Excuse me, but what do you mean? I know this guy all too well,” and she said, “I was only saying what your cousin asked me to,” and he said, “You mean my brother,” and Robert said, “I thought I’d change it around a little, we’ve been brothers for so long. Big deal; the truth always comes out. It doesn’t but I thought I’d say that anyway. It seemed then — it doesn’t now, in instant retrospect — the right moment for a universal cliché for us to quibble over, but here we are talking together and who knows what possibilities are in the making?” and he said, “My brother’s always getting me in trouble — not ‘always,’ but a lot,” and Robert said, “If what he just said were the opposite, it’d be closer to a lie,” and she said, “Are you two really brothers?” and Gould said, “Same parents but different conceptions,” and Robert said, “So I guess my last remark slipped past without anyone’s regarding it,” and Gould said, “Because it wasn’t worth comment,” and she said, “That’s a terrible line, Gould, as old as the old ‘old as the hills’ one,” and Robert said, “Uh-oh, sorry for having said something that led to your first reprimand from her. Suddenly things don’t look promising,” and she said, “It wasn’t a reprimand; I was only joining the infectious teasing. Anyway, going back, you two look nothing alike,” and Robert said, “And for the most part, and please don’t tell me that wasn’t a reprimand, miss”—feigning indignation—“it was, and you cannot treat my brother like that so soon after you met him, no one can; he’s too nice a guy. And for the most part we act, think, read, comprehend, socialize, feign indignation, initiate conversations, scratch our heads and many other body parts nothing alike either. He’s the brighter, et cetera, down-to-earth one. I’m what he’s usually not, besides often dropping him in hot water, though never, so far, with women. But I’m getting out of here; you two speak. Gould, meet Cynthia. Cynthia — but you know his name. Here, shake,” and grabbed their hands and put them together and they shook. “Here, kiss,” and he pushed their heads together, and just as their lips were about to touch Gould ducked out from under Robert’s hand and said, “This is embarrassing and rude and I almost want to say a little stupid of you, Robert, but I’ll say it was a lot,” and she said, “Why, he was only kidding,” and he said, “Then you stay with him,” and walked away, Robert and Cynthia laughing. He was in another room a few minutes later when she came over to him and said, “Excuse me, but what was that all about, your anger at me and then storming away?” and he said, “I didn’t storm and my brother can be a jerk sometimes when he isn’t being ultra smooth. And if you want to know the truth, it’s also because I thought he ruined it for me with you. Since he was right; when he and I were talking about you before he went over to you, I was interested. How’s that for an unprompted unrehearsed line?” and she said, “Also terrible. He loves you and just wants to see you hooked up — the older brother looking out for the younger one; isn’t that what he promised your parents he’d do? — what’s so wrong with that? And he never would have let our mouths meet. I felt that big hand on my head was in complete control of the act and that he would have got us a fraction of an inch away from each other before he pulled our heads back.” They talked for a while, she gave him her phone number, and they ended up seeing each other for a few months. When Gould was seventeen he heard from a friend that Red, a hooker, wanted him to call her. “She said it was important, nothing bad, so you should feel good about calling, and she’s been trying to get ahold of you through some other West Side guys too.” “A hooker wants me to call her? I don’t know her, never even heard of her. Maybe it’s a new way of getting business,” and the friend said, “She’s not like that. I’ve been to her twice and she’s real class, educated, everything. Call her, what do you got to lose? If it is something suddenly fishy with her, you just don’t go to her, if that’s what she wants.” He called and said, “Hi, this is Gould Bookbinder and I heard from Ben Morton you wanted to speak to me,” and she said, “Bookbinder? Bookbinder? Oh, sure, you’re the sweet young man I’ve been trying to reach. I wanted to say thanks — you know — for all you’ve done for me. But I want to thank you personally, so do you have a half hour free tonight so we can talk?” and he said, “Thank me?” and she said, “Listen, Mr. Bookbinder, I can’t talk on the phone. I got the bath running and there’s also this little pest near me who might be overhearing, and he builds everything I say into mountains. So just come by, tonight at eight, okay? You remember the address? It’s where I always lived,” and he said, “No, I forgot, only your phone,” and she told him and he went, and when he was inside her apartment — she was pretty, maybe a little overweight and about twenty years older than him, but with this bright white skin and long shiny red hair that looked clean and young-looking the way it flowed over her shoulders — she said, “Before we begin, would you care to have a coffee while I’m finishing my tea?” and he said, “No, thanks, I don’t drink it.” “Soda, then? A beer, or shot of whiskey with ginger ale? I want to be extra hospitable and gracious because I owe you a lot. You’re a very kind young man, not asking for anything, just doing me favors,” and he thought of saying he doesn’t understand but didn’t want to ruin it if he was getting something for nothing like it seemed, maybe even money besides sex, so he said, “You’re welcome, honestly, and I’ll take a beer after all,” and she said, “For that I’ll have to wash my one and only stein, but I’m glad to,” and he said, “No need; I’ll drink it straight from the bottle or can,” and she said, “No, sir, a glass. It’s ugly when men chug it down like that, and a bottle makes them belch more, did you know that?” and at the kitchen table he drank his beer and she her tea and she said, “So, my personal thanks for sending so many nice young men to me,” and he said, “Yeah?” but must have looked surprised because she said, “Hey, hold it up. You are Bookbinder, the NYU guy I’ve been trying to reach? I haven’t made a boo-boo, I hope, because that’d be mortifying. I’d have to kick you out on your keister or, if you wanted to stay, ask you for ten dollars for a shortie,” and he said, “Yeah, Robert Bookbinder, who do you think?” because he was already plenty hot. “That’s good, because at first when you walked in — I don’t know if you caught my expression — but I wondered, Is this really the guy I thought? But then your face got to look more familiar, just six or so months older, and at your age that can change it a lot. Because, you know, after your one time here I started getting telephone calls from fellows who said you sent them. Though I don’t like doing that, seeing men who are almost kids and from a reference I wasn’t altogether confident with, their voices were always too sweet and earnest over the phone to refuse, and I had you in my little book that you were okay. And right with the first young man they were all such gentlemen that I kept saying, ‘Sure, baby, you can pay me a visit,’ and they kept coming, about ten of them and some of them a few times, and all using your name. So I want to reimburse your generosity, you can say, by giving you one on the house. Because I can’t pay you money — I don’t give commissions to anyone,” and he said, “I didn’t want money. Those fellows said they were looking for a woman, so I recommended you above all,” and she said, “As I said, that’s what I liked about you. You never called to ask for compensation. But tell me, how come you never came back on your own? You’d seen me once, that was enough? You should have known, even if you were prepared to pay, that I wouldn’t take your money after what you did for me,” and he said, “Thanks, I’ve been very busy. Schoolwork, every kind of thing,” and she said, “What sort of work you do besides your school? But fill me in later. Now you’re finished with your beer, let’s get washed up.” He never told Robert, and once, a few months later, just to see what Robert knew and if he’d level with him, he said, “If I ever… I don’t. I’m scared of getting V.D., even with a bag on. But if I ever — let’s say for a friend, and the friend isn’t me, believe me, though a couple of guys have asked if I knew of one — wanted to get the number of a prostitute who was fairly pretty and with a nice-enough body and didn’t charge too much and lived not too far away, do you know of any or know anyone who does?” and Robert said, “What guy our age goes to a prostitute anymore? Not only because of syphilis and the rest, which you don’t get if you have the bag on properly and don’t kiss her genital parts, but it’s the most blatant admission of being a social loser. You date, you form relationships; that’s how you get laid. And if you’re in a dry period, you don’t get desperate. That’s why I’ve been urging you to go to parties and fraternize more. If your friends are just whoremongers, get new ones who’ll introduce you to nice intelligent women who’ll eventually, if they like your company and see you’re not in it just for the sex, make it with you. You’ve been to a prostitute — don’t tell me. But if I were you I’d do everything I could to avoid them,” and he said, “You’re right, once, recently. And I can say that because of her looks and dumb chatter and phlegmatic performance, it wasn’t much fun before or during it, or, because of how much it cost, after,” and Robert said, “How could it be? She slaps some grease in, spreads herself wide, smells like hell from deodorants and other guys, makes with a few fake affectionate words, and after some quick jabs by you you’re left with yourself forever. I’ll have to start taking you to every party I go to.” He could talk to him about it now on the phone, if he’s home, but that’d be like saying, “Remember Red the hooker from about forty years ago? Don’t tell me you don’t. Our memories are getting shot from age but every guy remembers the whores he went to, even their addresses. Hers was Seventy-first, south side of the street, four or five doors up from Columbus. Oh, boy, how you lied to me, brother. ‘Avoid whores at any cost’ indeed.” But suppose someone at that time had used Robert’s name with Red when he actually had had no contact with her? Never thought of that, but why would anyone do it? Come on: to get even with him for some reason or because he was jealous of him and wanted Robert to look bad, and so on. “Robert the pimp,” some guys might have thought of him as, which if he had known of it would certainly have made him mad. But it almost had to be Robert who gave her name and phone number out and probably even said, “Tell her I told you about her.” But why, because he knew she’d end up giving him a free lay, even some money? If Robert did go to her after Gould had, what then? It’d mean he knew all along what Gould had done. Because she probably told him when he was there, or in an elliptical way told him this over the phone when he might have called to see if any guys had gone to her by using his name, that she’d already paid him back for what he’d done for her. “What do you mean?” he could have said, and in that same elliptical way she could have continued going around it till she gave a description of the Robert Bookbinder she’d seen and something about his mannerisms and voice that matched Gould. Wouldn’t Robert have mentioned it to Gould then, or sometime since? Maybe. Better he keep that can closed, he thinks. Robert often comes and stays with Gould and his family and they always have a good time; deep conversations, talk about things they did as kids, books they recently read or are reading, political things that are happening, and so on. So? So he’s saying they still like to spend time together. They once hitchhiked in Europe for a month, staying in youth hostels and student houses, going from town to town, country to country, museum to cathedral to cathedral to museum. They’ve just about always loved each other’s company. Their two families, when the kids were small, sailed across the Atlantic on the QE2 together at standby rates, ate at the same table, then rented a minibus in England and toured France for two weeks. Gould’s first daughter’s middle name is Roberta. Robert’s son’s middle name is Gould, which he’s objected to. “I don’t give a shit if it’s after my only uncle and he’s the closest person in the whole wide world other than Mom to you, what kind of name is that, Gould Bookbinder?” “It’s not Gould Bookbinder,” Robert said he told his son, “it’s Vincent Gould Bookbinder.” “I want it to be Vincent G. Bookbinder, and if people ask what the G’s for, I’ll say Gregor.” Gould, when he was in his early twenties, was dumped by a woman he’d been going with a few months. The woman and he met for lunch, she said she’s started seeing someone else, that’s why he hasn’t been able to reach her the last two weeks, someone she knew from before and was once almost engaged to, and she’ll probably marry him by the end of the year. No, the truth is, because she wants to be totally honest about this so he knows exactly where he stands, they’ve already made plans to get married sometime this month, that’s how sudden and strong their relationship’s become, and she’s very sorry what this is doing to him, when Gould started to cry, but he’ll get over it — he had to see their little thing together wasn’t working — so please don’t be so sad. He said, “Up yours,” and threw his napkin at her and left the restaurant and went straight to Robert at work. Robert said he knew how he felt, it had happened to him a couple of times, took him out for a drink, they sat at the bar and he put his arm around Gould’s shoulders and said things that after a while, and another drink, made him feel better, that it’s happened to almost everyone, in fact, and usually at the age Gould is now, if it wasn’t meant to be, it wasn’t, nothing anyone can do about it, he’ll meet someone soon if he keeps himself open for it, he’s a terrific guy, smart and good-looking and decent and personable, and it’ll be a more suitable woman, one not so quixotic and unreliable and flighty, or maybe this one will see all those fine qualities in him and change her mind, dump the other guy, or the guy might suddenly realize she was less than the ideal mate and drop her, though Robert hopes she doesn’t come running back, because she’s not good enough for Gould, that’s all it is, but give it a few days to a week for her to call, and try not to be so sad as she said, she doesn’t deserve it, and gave him a few tranquilizers—“You use them? I never would have thought”—and Robert said he just happened to have them in his book bag for a time several months ago when because of his work and love life he was under some stress, and to take three a day at eight-hour intervals and call him anytime he wants, at 4 A.M. if he needs to, and they’ll speak or meet. Robert and he took care of their mother when she was very sick. Long before that they helped her take care of their father, alternated giving him his shots, took him out for strolls, changed and cleaned him and fed and shaved him and other things. They were together when their mother died. Sat alongside her bed, each holding one of her hands till the end, cried on the other’s shoulder and chest after. Cleared out her apartment together. “Take whatever you want of hers, anything,” and Gould said, “You the same. You’re the older one. Mom had some beautiful antiques, and I don’t mean that in a funny way, coming after what I just said about you. And if all I get left with is some pots and pans, that’s okay too,” and Robert said, “Good God, Gould, what do you think I am, a vulture? Whatever I want to keep of hers is in my head, so I’m taking even less than you.” He once thought if Robert died before him he’d be as sad as when his mother and father died. When his mother died he was the saddest he ever was for anything, and he’d probably be as sad as that. Wouldn’t go to work for a week. That’s what happened after she died: he couldn’t. Hardly ate, drank himself to sleep for days. Didn’t do anything in that time but the essential household tasks and take a few short walks, crying and crying. In the market the one time he went, suddenly bursting out crying. In bed at night, or sitting in the dark in front of the memorial candle he lit for her, crying. Dreaming of her every night for weeks and during his daytime naps. But then at least he had Robert to speak to on the phone, each of them saying things like “Is it as bad for you as it is for me? I know it is, but I’m just saying.” That’s how he’d most likely act if Robert died before him, everything he mentioned about his mom. Now he thinks, What else would he be doing with Robert if he had lived? He’d probably call him up now and if Robert was the one who picked up the phone, he’d say, “Hi, it’s me, Gould, just checking in with you and seeing how you’re doing, as I’ve been thinking of you,” and Robert might say, “I know it’s you, don’t you think I recognize your voice by now, so why do you always give your name?” and he’d say, “Habit, I guess, something I do with most people — even with my wife, if you can believe it — though to my kids I always say, ‘It’s Daddy,’” and they’d talk, each telling the other some of the more significant or intriguing or funny or absurd things that had happened or interesting thoughts that had occurred to him since their last phone conversation, which might have been a few days to a week ago or even earlier today, though there’d have to be a special reason for one of them to call back the same day other than they’d been cut off or there was something important he forgot to say or he had said he’d get back to him with something, and then Robert would say, after a long silence when they seemed to have run out of things to talk about, or after no silence but when he thought the call had already cost Gould too much money, “So, that’s it from here, and I seem to have heard everything worth telling from there, unless you’ve something else to say, since I don’t want to take it on myself to cut us off, and I hope to see you soon,” and Gould would say, “No, no, I’m done, and same to you about seeing you soon, and much love to everyone at home,” and Robert would say, “Best to yours too.”