Brother On Sunday

She is on the phone. He can see her reflection in the bathroom mirror, the headset wrapped around her ear as if she were an air-traffic controller or a Secret Service agent. “Are you sure?” she whispers. “I can’t believe it. I don’t want to believe it. If it’s true, it’s horrible…. Of course I don’t know anything! If I knew something, I’d tell you…. No, he doesn’t know anything, either. If he knew, he’d tell me. We vowed we wouldn’t keep secrets.” She pauses, listening for a moment. “Yes, of course, not a word.”

“Tom,” she calls. “Tom, are you ready?”

“In a minute,” he says.

He examines himself in her makeup mirror. He raises his eyebrows, bares his teeth, smiles. And then he smiles again, harder, showing gum. He tilts his head, left and right, checking where the shadows fall. He turns on the light and flips the mirror to the magnifying side. A thin silver needle enters the reflection; there’s a closeup of skin, the glistening tip of the needle, surrounded by a halo of light. He blinks. The needle goes in; his hand is steady on the syringe. He injects a little here, a little there; it’s just a touchup, a filler-up. Later, when someone says, “You look great,” he’ll smile and his face will bend gently, but no lines will appear. “Doctor’s orders,” he’ll say. He recaps the syringe, tucks it into his shirt pocket, flips the toilet seat up, and pees.

When he comes out of the bathroom, his wife, Sandy, is there, in the bedroom, waiting.

“Who was that on the phone?”

“Sara,” she says.

“And?”

“The usual.”

He waits, knowing that silence will prompt her to say more.

“Susie called Sara to say that she’s worried Scott is having an affair.”

“Scott?”

She nods.

He says, quite honestly, “Of all people, I wouldn’t think Scott would be having an affair.”

“She doesn’t know that he’s having an affair—she just suspects.” Sandy puts her cover-up into a tote bag and hands him his camera. “Can’t leave without this,” she says.

“Thanks,” he says. “Are you ready to go?”

“Check my back,” she says. “I felt something.” She turns, lifting her blouse.

“You have a tick,” he says, plucking it off her.

Somewhere in the summer house, a loud buzzer goes off. “The towels are done,” she says.

“Should we take wine?” he asks.

“I packed a bottle of champagne and some orange juice. It’s Sunday, after all.”

“My brother is coming, after all,” he says. His brother, Roger, visits the beach once a year, like a tropical storm that changes everything.

“It’s a beautiful day,” she says. And she’s right.

Tom sits in a low chair, facing the water, his feet buried in the sand. Just in front of him, hanging from the lifeguard stand, an American flag softly flutters. His sunglasses are his shield, his thick white lotion a kind of futuristic body armor that lets him imagine he is invisible. He believes that on the beach you are allowed to stare, as though you were looking not at the person but through the person, past the person at the water, past the water to the horizon, past the horizon into infinity.

He is seeing things that he would otherwise not allow himself to see. He is staring. He is in awe, mesmerized by the body, by the grace and lack of grace. He takes pictures—“studies,” he calls them. It’s his habit, his hobby. What is he looking for? What is he thinking while he does this? This is something that he asks himself, noting that he often thinks of himself in the third person—a dispassionate observer.

The beach fills up, towels are unrolled, umbrellas unfurl like party decorations, and, as the heat builds, bodies are slowly unwrapped. He, of all people, knows what’s real and what’s not. There are those who have starved the flesh off their bones, and those who have had it surgically removed or relocated. Each person wears it differently—the dimpling on the thighs, the love handles, the inevitable sag. He can’t help noticing.

Around him, his friends talk. He’s not listening carefully enough to register exactly who is saying what—just the general impression, the flow. “Did you have the fish last night? I made a fish. We bought a fish. His brother loves to fish. I bought a necklace. We bought a house. I bought another watch. He’s thinking of getting a new car. Didn’t you just get one last year? I want to renovate. Your house is so beautiful. His wife used to be so beautiful. Do you remember her? Could never forget. Tom went out with her once.”

“Just once?”

“He doesn’t have the best social skills,” his wife says.

Now they are talking about him. He knows he should defend himself. He lowers the camera and turns toward them.

“Why do you always say that?”

“Because it’s true,” Sandy says.

“It may be, but that’s not why I only went out with her once.”

“Why didn’t you date her again?” she wants to know.

“Because I met you,” he says, raising the camera like a punctuation mark.

The intensity of the sunlight is such that he has to squint in order to see, and at times he can’t see at all—there is a blinding abundance of light and reflection. He thinks of a blind girl who lived in his neighborhood when he was growing up: Audra Stevenson. She was smart and very pretty. She wore dark glasses and tapped her way down the sidewalk with her cane, a thick white bulb on the end of it. He used to watch her go down the street and wonder if she wore her glasses at home. He wondered what her eyes looked like. Perhaps they were very sensitive; perhaps she over-saw—that’s how he thought of it. Maybe she wasn’t blind in the sense of everything’s being black but blind in that there was too much light, so that everything was overexposed and turned a milky white with only spots of color punching through—a red shirt, a brown branch, the grayish shadows of people. He asked her out once. He stopped her on the street and introduced himself.

“I know who you are,” she said. “You’re the boy who watches me go home.”

“How do you know that?” he asked.

“I’m blind,” she said, “not dumb.”

He picked her up at her house, hooked his elbow through hers, and led her to the movie theatre. During the film, he whispered in her ear, an ongoing narration of the action, until finally she said, “Sh-h-h. I can’t hear what they’re saying if you keep talking to me.”

After the date, Roger, who was two years older, made fun of him for being too shy to ask a “regular girl” out, and, no doubt, for going on a date long before Roger himself ever would. No girl was good enough for Roger: Rita’s eyebrows were too thick, Sara’s chin too long, Molly’s eyes too wide, Ruthie’s laugh too high-pitched. Every girl was just one twist of the genetic helix away from having a syndrome of some sort. Roger mocked “Tom the younger,” as he liked to call him, loudly, as Audra was walking away, and Tom was so mortified, so sure that Audra had heard every word, that he never spoke to her again.

Behind him, they are still talking. “Arctic char. Orata. Sea bream, Chilean sea bass, swordfish, Ahi tuna. Mole sauce, ancho chili, a rub, a marinade, a pesto, a ragout, a teriyaki reduction.” They love to talk about food and exercise—running, biking, tennis, Pilates, trainers, workouts, cleansing diets. The one thing they don’t talk much about anymore is sex; the ones who are having it can’t imagine not having it, and the ones who aren’t having it remember all too well when they were the ones having it and saying they couldn’t imagine not having it. So it has become off limits. Also not discussed is the fact that some of them are having sex with one another’s spouses—i.e., hiding in plain sight.

He is only half listening, thinking about how life changes. If he met these people now, he’s not sure he would be their friend, not sure he would have dinner with them every Saturday night, play tennis with them every Sunday, vacation with them twice a year, see the movies they see, eat at the places they eat at, do whatever it is that they all do together just because they’re a kind of club—all while worrying about what will happen if he strays, if he does something other than what they expect of him, and he doesn’t mean sex, he means something more. He looks at his friends; their wives all wear the same watches, like tribal decorations, trinkets of their status. The gold glints in the sun.

He is looking at them as they absently sift sand with their hands, and imagining them as children in cotton hats, pouring sand from one bucket to another as their parents talk over and around them. He is thinking of their parents, now either dead or single in their eighties or attended by new “companions” they met in physical therapy or on Elderhostel vacations. He looks at his friends and wonders what they will be like if they make it to eighty. The men seem oblivious of the inevitability of aging, oblivious of the fact that they are no longer thirty, of the fact that they are not superheroes with special powers. He thinks of the night, a year ago, when they were all at a local restaurant and one of them went to grab something from the car. He ran across the street as though he thought he glowed in the dark. But he didn’t. The driver of an oncoming car didn’t see him. He flew up and over it. And, when someone came into the restaurant to call the police, Tom went out, not because he was thinking of his friend but because he was curious, always curious. Once outside, realizing what had happened, he ran to his friend and tried to help, but there was nothing to be done. The next day, driving by the spot, he saw one of his friend’s shoes—they had each bought a pair of the same kind the summer before—suspended from a tree.

“What time is Roger coming?” someone asks.

“Not sure,” he says.

A friend’s wife leans over and shows him a red dot, buried between her breasts.

“What do you think this is?”

“Bug bite,” he says.

“Not skin cancer?”

“Not cancer,” he says.

“Not infected?”

“Bug bite,” he says.

“And what about this?” She shows him something else, as though hoping for bonus points. This spot is on what his father jokingly used to call “the tenderloin,” her inner thigh.

“Isn’t it funny that your father was a butcher and you’re in the business of dealing with human meat?” another of the friends asks.

“It’s all flesh and blood,” he says, pressing the spot with his finger. “Pimple.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.”

“Not skin cancer.”

“No.”

“Does it look infected?”

“If you leave it alone, it’ll be fine,” he says.

He is forever being asked to step into the spare bedroom, the bathroom, the kitchen, even the walk-in closet, because someone wants to show him something. It’s as though they were pulling him aside to make a confession. Mostly the answer is easy. Mostly whatever it is is nothing. But every now and then he’s surprised; they show him something that catches him off guard. “How’d you get that?” he asks.

“You don’t want to know,” they say.

But, of course, in the end they tell him more than he wants to know.

“Was your father really a butcher?” the visiting sister of one of the friends asks.

“Yep. And he really talked about women’s bodies like they were cuts of meat. ‘Boy, she’s got good veal cheeks! That girl would make one hell of a standing rib roast, trussed, bound, and stuffed.’ And then he’d laugh in a weird way. My mother thought of herself as an artist. She signed up for a life-drawing class when I was eleven and she took me with her, because she thought I’d appreciate it. I just sat there, not knowing where to look. Finally, the instructor said, ‘Draw with us?’ I’d never seen a bare breast before—drawing it was like touching it. I drew that breast again and again. And then I glanced at my mother’s easel and saw that she’d drawn everything but the woman. She’d drawn the table with the vase, the flowers, the window in the background, the drapes, but not the model. The instructor asked her, ‘Where’s the girl?’ ‘I prefer a still-life,’ my mother said. ‘But my son, on the other hand, look how beautiful he thinks she is!’”

“Was she being mean?”

He shrugs.

“She shouldn’t have taken you to the class,” Sandy says. “She was teasing you.”

“I thought maybe I’d take Roger out on the boat this afternoon,” one of the friends says. “Sound like fun?”

“Only if you capsize,” he says, cryptically.

The friend laughs, knowing that he isn’t kidding.

Ahead of him on the beach, a boy is spreading lotion on an older woman. He imagines the viscous feel of lotion warm from the sun, gliding over her skin—friction. He imagines the boy painting the woman with lotion, and then using his fingernail to write his initials on her back. He thinks of a time in St. Bart’s, when Sandy was lying nude on the beach while he painted, and he picked up his brush and began making swirls on her skin. He painted her body and then he photographed her walking away from him into the water. In the sea, the paint ran down her skin in beautiful streaks of color. Later, one of the friends, the one with the boat, confessed, “I got hard just watching.”

“You should try it sometime,” he said. “With your wife.”

“Oh, we did, that night, but I didn’t have any paint. All I could find was a ballpoint pen. It wasn’t the same.”

“Drink?” Sandy asks, snapping him back into the moment.

“Sure,” he says. She pours a combination of orange juice and champagne into a plastic cup and leans toward him. He can smell her, her perfume, the salty beach. As he takes the drink, it splashes up out of the cup and onto his arm. He licks it, his tongue tickled by the carbonation, the flavor of citrus, of wine, mixed with salt and sweat. He thinks that it’s strange he can’t remember ever having tasted himself before. His tongue rakes the fur on his forearm and picks up a tinge of blood from a scrape this morning. The flavor is good, full of life.

“Is Roger still with that woman?” one of the wives asks.

“His hygienist?” he asks.

“Is that who it was?” the friend asks.

“Yep, he left his wife to fuck the hygienist.”

“And he’s still with her,” Sandy says.

“She must rinse and spit. I assume she doesn’t swallow,” he says.

“Stop, you’re being crude.”

He wonders when Roger is coming. On the one hand, he’s dreading his arrival; on the other, he’s starting to think it’s rude that Roger’s not there yet and hasn’t called to say he’s running late. Tom closes his eyes. The sun is high. He feels it baking him, and then, suddenly, a shadow, like a cloud, crosses over him. He shivers. One of the women, Terri, is standing in front of him, holding out a plate of muffins. “High-protein, high-fibre. Take one.” She had breast cancer a year ago—a mastectomy—and, six weeks later, they were all on their annual St. Bart’s adventure. When everyone went to the beach, she stayed in the house. They all talked about her behind her back, worrying that they were doing something that made her uncomfortable. Then, on the third day, just before lunch, she walked out onto the beach and stood before them. He took a picture. She unbuttoned her blouse. He took another picture. Her husband started to get up, to stop her, but one of the women grabbed his arm, holding him back. Terri unbuttoned her blouse and opened it, revealing the remaining breast and the red rope of a scar. Click, click, click. He shot her again and again. In the end, what was amazing about the images was not the scar but her expression—terrified, defiant, vulnerable, her face in a dance of emotion, frame by frame. He gave her a set of prints—it was one of the rare times that he was the one to take someone aside, into his study. When she opened the package, she wept. “For a million reasons,” she said. “For what was lost, for what remains, for how you saw what no one else did—they were all too busy looking at my boob.”

“A meal in a muffin,” he says, biting it. “It’s perfect.”

In front of them, a woman is stepping out of her shorts. One side of her bathing suit is unceremoniously wedged in the crack of her ass; she pulls it out with a loud snap. Her rear end is what Sandy calls “coagulated,” a cottage cheese of cellulite, and, below it, spider veins explode down her legs, like fireworks.

“Do you ever look at something like that and think about how you could fix it?” Terri asks.

“The interesting thing is that the woman doesn’t seem bothered by it. The people who come to me are bothered by their bodies. They don’t go to the beach and disrobe in public. They come into my office with a list of what they want fixed—like it’s a scratch-and-dent shop.”

“Maybe she doesn’t realize how bad it looks?”

“Maybe,” he says. “And maybe that’s O.K.” He thinks about Botox and Restylane and lasering spider veins and resurfacing a face, and sometimes he feels like a conservator, like the guy he once sat next to at a dinner, who worked at the Met, touching up art works when they chipped or when the ceiling leaked on them.

He thinks about the time he volunteered to go on a mission with a group of doctors who were heading to an impoverished spot to do good for five days—a kind of spiritual recompense for the fortune that modern elective cosmetic procedures had brought them. He fixed cleft palates, treated skin rashes, gave routine immunizations. “I’ve heard of it,” his mother said. “What’s it called again, Doctors Without Licenses? Maybe next time you could take Roger—he’s an excellent dentist. Everyone needs a good dentist, rich or poor. It would be nice if the two of you did something together.”

“Do you think he’d rather play tennis?” the friend asks. “Would it be more fun for Roger to play a round robin or to go out on the boat?”

“I have no idea,” he says.“I’m not Roger.”

“He always gets like this when his brother comes,” Sandy says.

“Since I was five, Roger has been stealing my friends.”

“Your friends are nice to him because he’s your brother. Roger can’t steal them.”

“Roger thinks they’re his friends. He tells everyone that he was my parents’ favorite, that I was an afterthought, an accident.”

“Were you?” someone asks.

“All you have to do is get through it,” Sandy says. “It’ll be over soon.”

“Not soon enough,” he says.

“You have nice friends. Who wouldn’t want them?” the visiting sister says. As she rolls over, her top drops off. His eyes are reflexively drawn in—her nipples are large and brown, more beautiful than he would have imagined.

“Hey, there.” A booming voice goes off like a bomb in his head.

“Roger.”

“I thought I’d find all you flabby asses here. If it’s Sunday, they must be at the beach.” Roger smiles, his hundred-thousand-dollar smile. Click. Tom catches the poppy seeds at the gum line. Click. He’s got Roger’s pink shorts with embroidered Martini glasses. Click. Roger is wearing crocodile tassel loafers. “Tommy, can you put the fucking camera down and actually say hello?”

“Hello. Are you on your own? We thought maybe you’d bring what’s-her-name, your hygienist? We were just talking about her.”

“She’s got her kids this weekend. Twins.”

“Roger, come sit next to me.” Sandy gives her chair to Roger and pours him a drink.

“Breakfast of champions,” Roger says, sipping the mimosa.

“We were wondering when you’d get here,” Tom says.

“I stopped to hit a bucket of balls. Oh, God,” Roger says, “isn’t that Blarney Stone?”

“Who is Blarney Stone?” the visiting sister asks.

“That rock star—what’s his name?” someone says.

“Yeah, I think it is,” he says, and now they’re all squinting and staring at an exceptionally pale, skinny figure in a form-fitting swimsuit.

“That suit must have been made for him,” Terri says.

“As skinny as he is, he’s still got a little paunch,” Roger says. “Do you remember how Dad used to do a thousand sit-ups every morning in his underwear?”

“It wasn’t a thousand, more like a hundred.”

“Whatever. He thought of himself as a perfect specimen.”

“Yes. And Mom used to say, ‘Your father is a beautiful man.’ It gave me the creeps.”

Tom puts his camera back in the bag.

“What do you make of that guy?” Roger points to someone farther along the beach.

“Don’t point,” Tom says, horrified.

“Poliosis,” Roger says.

“Actually, that’s piebaldism—dark and light patches on the skin. Poliosis is the white forelock.”

“Like Susan Sontag,” the friend’s sister says.

“Roger, what appeals—boat or tennis?” the friend asks.

“I don’t know. Tom-Tom, what do you think?”

“Boat,” Tom says.

“If brother says boat, I go with tennis. A word to the wise: never do what brother says.” Roger laughs alone.

Tom stands. “I’ve got a headache. I need to go home. Go on the boat—the water looks rough, it’ll be exciting—and I’ll see you later.”

“Should I come home with you?” Sandy asks. “Are you O.K.?”

“It’s just a headache from the champagne. I don’t usually drink at breakfast.”

“I’ll come with you,” Sandy says.

“Don’t,” he says firmly, hating her because he knows she doubts that the headache is legitimate. “I’ll see you later. We’re all set for dinner?”

“All set,” Roger says. “I made the reservation myself.”

Later, Tom and Sandy argue about it.

“Of course I knew your headache was real. I offered to leave with you.”

“You offered to leave because it was the thing to do in front of the others, but you didn’t mean it.”

“I’m not doing this,” Sandy says. ”I can’t prove that I meant what I said. You should take me at my word.”

“You think I’m faking a headache because Roger is here, but you’re the one who brought champagne to the beach. Who does that, who pours people drinks at eleven in the morning when everyone is just sitting there baking in the sun?”

“Now you’re blaming me for your headache,” Sandy says. “Next, you’ll say that I tried to poison you.”

Roger knocks on their bedroom door. “Excuse me,” he says, knowing all too well that his timing is lousy. “I forgot my floss. Can you imagine that, a dentist forgetting his floss? Have you got some I could use?”

“No,” Tom says.

Sandy goes into the bathroom and returns with floss.

“Thanks, sweetie,” Roger says.

“No problem,” she says. Roger leaves the room. “Can we just stop for now? Let’s just get ready for dinner.”

“Nice that Roger picked the best place in town. Is he paying?”

“I have no idea,” Sandy says.

“Do me a favor and don’t do that thing where you order two appetizers and then I get stuck paying the same as if you’d ordered a rack of lamb.”

“Am I supposed to order something I don’t want?”

“In this case, yes. Order something to special-treat yourself. Have the fish.”

“Why don’t you just order two main courses? Instead of getting a starter, why don’t you just leap right in and have a fish and a steak?”

“Because people would notice. They’d say, ‘Oh, you should pay more, you ate double.’ They never notice when you eat less.”

“This is the least of your problems,” she says, spraying herself with perfume.

Tom sits on the other side of the table, leaving Roger to the friends. When the waiter offers them the wine list, Roger takes it, studying carefully.

“See something appealing?” Sandy asks.

“The wine list is mediocre at best,” Roger says, “but I’ll find something. That’s the true test, finding quality where there is none.”

At the table next to them, an old couple are having dinner with their adult child; the couple are in their eighties and refer to each other as Mommy and Daddy.

“Daddy, what are you going to have?”

“I don’t know, Mommy. How about you?”

“I’ll have the snapper,” the son, who must be sixty, says.

“I’ll go with the sole, as long as it’s not soaking in butter—it’s not soaking, is it?” Mommy asks the waiter.

“It’s perfect for you,” the waiter says.

After the first course, Tom gets up to go to the men’s room; one of his friends follows him. Here we go again, he thinks, imagining that the friend is going to show him something—a fungus between his toes, a Ditzel on his chest. He doesn’t turn around.

When they are side by side at the urinals, the friend says, “I’m leaving Terri.”

“What are you talking about?” Tom says, genuinely shocked.

“I can’t stand it anymore. I’m miserable.”

“Is it because of the cancer?”

The friend shakes his head no. “Everyone will think that’s why, but it has nothing to do with it. I was going to leave last year, before she got sick.”

“Did you meet someone?”

“Yes, but that’s not why.”

“It’s always why. Men don’t leave unless they’ve met someone.”

He shrugs. “Terri doesn’t know.”

“About the other woman?”

“About anything. I’m telling you first. I don’t know what to say to her. We’ve been married for twenty-six years.”

“That’s a long time.”

“She’ll be fine,” he says, ”once she gets over the initial shock.”

At the sink, Tom checks his face in the mirror. “When are you going to tell her?” he asks, watching himself talking.

“I don’t know,” the friend says. “Please don’t tell Sandy. The girls can’t keep a secret.”

“Not a word.”

And they go back to the table.

“Everything O.K.?” Sandy asks.

“Wonderful,” he says, reaching for the wine.

“If you have a headache, maybe you shouldn’t drink,” she says.

“Trust me, I need a drink.”

At the end of the meal, at the table next to them, Daddy is asleep. He has basically fallen asleep in his scallops, a dot of sour cream on his tie.

“Daddy,” his wife says, waking him. “Do you want some dessert?”

His head lifts, as if he had only been looking for his napkin under the table. “Do they have vanilla ice cream?” he asks.

“We do,” the waiter says.

“And what do they get for that?” Daddy asks.

“Six-fifty,” Mommy says, looking at her menu.

“I’ll have it at home,” Daddy says.

And the son says to the waiter, “We’ll take the check.”

Roger pays for dinner, and they all thank him.

“You didn’t have to,” Sandy says.

“I know I didn’t.”

“You can buy them dinner, but you can’t buy their friendship,” Tom hisses into Roger’s ear.

“Shall I drive?” Sandy asks.

“I’ll drive,” Tom says.

“You drank,” she says.

“Not so much.”

“Enough,” she says, taking the keys.

Back at the house, Tom and Roger are having a drink in the living room, a nightcap and a cigar. Sandy excuses herself for a moment, and when she comes back the brothers are on the sofa, pummeling each other.

“What happened?” she asks.

Neither says a word.

What happened was that Roger said something like “Really too bad about Sandy. She used to be such a looker.”

And, not sure that he was hearing it right, Tom said, “What do you mean?”

And Roger said, “Well, you know, she’s let herself go, and I imagine that, for someone like you, it must be depressing. I never was all about a great figure or a pretty face. As you know, for me it’s the smile—they’ve got to have the smile.”

“I think you should leave,” Tom says.

“Well, that would be awkward, wouldn’t it?” Roger says.

“Not really.”

“If I leave, I’m not coming back—ever,” Roger says.

Tom is giddy with the idea but says nothing.

“When Mom hears about this, she’s going to be very angry,” Roger says.

“You’re fifty-three years old and still threatening to tell Mom?” Tom says.

“Fine, you little fucker, how about I call your friend Bobby and tell him I can’t go on the boat tomorrow because you kicked me out of the house? And I’ll call your other friend and tell him you were staring at his wife’s one boob.”

And, with that, Sandy says, “Get him,” and Tom punches Roger. ”You ungrateful little … son of a … ”

“Butcher and an artist,” Roger says.