Nathan Hill - The Nix

“It’s not really my business,” you say.

“That’s what I told myself too.” She looks at you again with those green eyes of hers. “But that’s not entirely true. You and I, we’re…complicated.”

“I don’t know what you and I are,” you say, and she smiles, leans back on the kitchen counter, and breathes a big dramatic sigh.

“They say when one twin dies the other twin can feel it.”

“I’ve heard that.”

“It’s not true,” she says, and takes a big gulp of wine. “I didn’t feel anything. He’d been dead a few days when we found out and I didn’t feel a thing. Even after, even long after, even at the funeral, I didn’t feel what everyone thought I should feel. I don’t know. I guess we’d drifted apart.”

“I’d always meant to write him, but I never did.”

“He changed. He went to military school and became a different person. Stopped calling, stopped writing, stopped coming home at holidays. He disappeared. He’d been in Iraq for three months before any of us even knew he was there.”

“He was probably happy to escape your father. But I’m surprised he wanted to escape you.”

“We disappeared from each other. I don’t know who started it, but for a while it was easier pretending the other didn’t exist. I’d always resented how he used people and how much he got away with. He’d always resented my talent and the way adults gushed over it. Everyone thought I was the special one and he was the screwup. Last time we saw each other was at his graduation from college. We shook hands.”

“But he adored you. That’s what I remember.”

“Something came between us.”

“What?”

Bethany looks at the ceiling and tightens her lips and searches for the right words.

“He was being, well, you know. Being abused.”

“Oh.”

She walks over to one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and stares out, her back to you. Beyond her, the radiance of downtown Manhattan, quiet this time of night, like embers smoldering after the fire’s gone out.

“Was it the headmaster?” you ask.

Bethany nods. “Bishop wondered why he was targeted and I wasn’t. Then he started getting mean with me. Implying that I was happy about it. Like it was a competition between us and I was winning. Every time I had any kind of success he reminded me that life was so easy for me because I didn’t have to deal with the things he had to deal with. Which was of course true, but he used it as a way to minimize me.” She turns around to look at you. “Does this make any sense? It probably sounds horribly selfish.”

“It’s not selfish.”

“It is selfish. And I was mostly able to forget about it. He went to military school and we drifted apart and I felt relieved. For years, I ignored it. Like it never happened. Until one day—”

She lowers her face, gives you this look, and suddenly you understand.

“You ignored it,” you say, “until the day my story was published.”

“Yes.”

“I’m sorry about that.”

“Reading your story was like realizing a terrible dream wasn’t a dream.”

“I’m really sorry about that. I should have asked your permission.”

“And I thought, my god, you only knew us for a few months. And if you understood so clearly what was going on, how awful am I? For ignoring it?”

“I only understood it much, much later. I didn’t know at the time.”

“But I knew at the time. And I did nothing. I told no one. And I was angry at you for dredging it all up again.”

“That’s understandable.”

“It was easier to be angry at you than to feel guilty, so I was mad at you for years.”

“And then?”

“And then Bishop died. And I just felt numb.” She looks down at her wineglass, traces its edge with her fingertip. “It’s like when you’re at the dentist and they give you some really serious painkillers. You feel fine, but you’re pretty sure underneath it all you still hurt. The hurt is simply not registering. That’s how life has felt.”

“All this time?”

“Yes. It’s made music pretty weird. After concerts people tell me how moved they were by my playing. But to me it’s just notes. Whatever emotion they hear is in the music, not me. It’s only a recipe. That’s how it feels.”

“And what about Peter?”

Bethany laughs and holds up her hand so the both of you can take a good long look at the diamond, sparkling in kitchen’s recessed lights, those million tiny rainbows inside.

“It’s pretty, isn’t it?”

“It’s big,” you say.

“When he proposed, I didn’t feel happy about it. Or sad about it. I guess if I had to describe how I felt I’d say it was the sensation of having one’s interest piqued. His proposal felt really interesting. ”

“That’s not exactly poetry, is it.”

“I think he proposed to snap me out of my funk. But it backfired. And the funk became more terrifying because it does not seem like something I am able to snap out of. Now Peter’s pretending it doesn’t exist, and spending a lot of time away. Hence London.”

Bethany refills her wineglass. Outside, the moon has risen over the jagged sweep of Brooklyn. Blinking lights in single file across the sky are aircraft descending into JFK from points south. In the kitchen there’s a very small framed drawing of a bull that might be an actual Picasso.

“Are you still mad at me?” you say.

“No, I’m not mad at you,” she says. “I’m not anything at you.”

“Okay.”

“Did you know that Bishop never even read that story of yours? I never told him about it. I was furious at you on his behalf, but he never read it. Isn’t that funny?”

You feel relieved by this. That Bishop never knew that his secret was not a secret to you. That he had his privacy, at least, till the end.

Bethany grabs the wine bottle by the neck and walks into the living room and plunks herself down on the couch, doesn’t even turn on a lamp or anything, just plunks herself down in the semidarkness so that you can’t really see the plunking so much as you hear the crackling of the expensive leather (alligator, you guess) as Bethany comes to rest on top of it. You sit across from her on the very same couch you were sitting on earlier today listening to a hyper Bethany and Peter simulate a happy relationship. The only light in the apartment comes from the two little spots in the kitchen, and the glow of the surrounding skyscraper windows — not nearly enough to see by. When Bethany talks, her voice seems to come out of the void. She asks you about Chicago. About your job. What your job is like. If you enjoy it. Where you live. What your home looks like. What you do for fun. And you answer all her small-talk questions and while you’re talking she pours herself another glass of wine, and then another, swallowing the wine with the occasional audible gulp while saying “uh-huh” at the key moments in your stories. You tell her the job is fine except for the students, who are unmotivated; and the administrators, who are ruthless; and the location, which is suburban-drab; and come to think of it you don’t really like your job at all. You tell her you live in a house with a backyard that you never use and pay someone else to mow. Sometimes kids run through your backyard playing various games and you are fine with that and you see that as your contribution to community civics. Otherwise, you do not know your neighbors. You’re trying to write a book for which you’ve already been paid, which presents certain motivation problems. When she asks what the book is about, you say, “I don’t know. Family?”

By the time Bethany opens the second bottle of wine you get the sense she’s trying to gear herself up for something that requires courage and that the wine is helping her do this. She begins reminiscing, talking about old times, when you were kids: playing video games or playing in the woods.