You might be wondering why my brother hasn’t turned up in these prophecies until now. Any idea what it is like to grow up the homely older brother of the most gifted, the most talented, the most revered kid on your block? Any idea what it is like to look at the basketball hoop in the driveway and to see your brother sailing past it, in slow motion, grinning an unspeakable grin, dunking the ball with his offhand, finishing a soda, lighting a firecracker, all at the same time, while the Cosa Nostra kids from up the block curse under their breaths for having again lost the two-on-one? Any idea what it’s like having your own brother beat you in a drug deal in which he sells you a mixture of oregano and fresh basil and then, to give credence to his salesmanship, smokes some of it with you and comments on its potency?
My brother Jack refused to speak to me in the cinder-block halls of New Rochelle High, unless these halls were empty, unless we were alone, and even then he would answer only yes or no to questions having to do with what time we were to be picked up, or the hour of a certain dentist appointment. My brother carried a golf club everywhere he went, a seven iron, and swung at me with it. My brother swiped twenty dollars from my mother’s purse, to wager on the ponies, brought back forty dollars from O.T.B., put the twenty back in her purse, left a ten in the offertory plates at Mass on Sunday. My brother never liked me, as he never liked American cars, black jeans, health foods, girls without makeup. My brother Jack never liked to talk about what didn’t go his way, or about our father, or about my second sight. He was handsome. He liked tailored suits. He liked his socks to match his shirt.
I am well pleased with my two sons, my mom said wearily, when the two of us fought, like the time I chased him around the entire house with an ax, threatening, cursing him/swinging the ax, I’m going to bury this thing in your skull, and then I’m going to watch your brains run out and I’m going to eat your brains. He locked himself in the bathroom, and I was banging on the door with the dull side of the ax, until I had managed to put the ax through the door, and he was yelling, Christ, he’s insane, Mom, can’t you get him to back off; my mother waited patiently, until the hitch in my swing, the dormancy in me, when I turned to her, Why has everything been so easy for him?
My brother and I fought the whole next ten years, my brother Jack and me, as I correctly predicted, threats shouted at holidays, even after I met my wife, even after my marriage ceremony (my best man was Joey Kaye, the guy whose dad paralyzed Bobby Erlich for life). My brother missed my wedding because he’d been at a club in the Village called Silver Screen, where he said whatever he had to say in order that he might persuade one Elise, an alcoholic, to go to a motel in Yonkers with him, where he was doing lines with her on a pocketbook mirror and watching motel pornography, the swooping arc of enhanced breasts, a nipple coming in and out of focus, simulated yelps of longing. He had never seen a girl with such large tattoos, and in such unusual spots. Was it her or was it the actress on the screen who was so vocal? Elise wanted to be an actress, and her uncle had incested her, but she made him phenomenally happy for two hours, and he her, at least until they ran out of their talc, and then when she woke in the morning my brother was back at the car dealership, moving the Beemers, as he said, wearing an Armani double-breasted suit, totally forgetting that he was supposed to be at my wedding. I know all these things.
One day some years later, who should come knocking at the back door but my brother Jack, wearing clothes that eerily resembled the garb of detectives from a popular television show of the period: a designer suit in pale blue and a polyester T-shirt of dusty rose. He was at the back door, see, while my wife and I were eating deviled eggs and sprigs of parsley; here he was wearing pastel colors, smiling in a way that signaled bad news ahead.
What’s he doing here? my wife said, loud enough that he would not mistake the words. She’d never forgiven him for missing the wedding and for sending us a set of plastic nesting bowls as a gift, and she rose up from the table on the porch, her green paper napkin still tucked in her neckline, and hastened indoors, where she turned on some opera, loud.
He rapped on the aluminum siding, though I was two feet away. We were in plain sight of one another.
Who do you think it is?
Oh, hey. A long-lost relative. A good-looking guy with a flimsy pretext.
Thought I’d drop by.
So you did.
What the hell’s going on? he attempted. Iwanted to say that I feel bad about things, you know? I feel bad about things and I want to straighten it out. I thought I’d come on over and we’d have a talk. We could set things right again and we could hoist a few beers together. Talk about it all.
He was still out on the step, and he was shading his eyes, though wearing sunglasses. He had a scrape on his cheek. There was an earnestness to his simulations.
That’d be great, I said, but Tanya and I have an engagement, if you want to know the truth, so I only have a couple of minutes.
What kind of engagement?
Precious Jewels and Stones show. At the Coliseum. Going to be a big rush on the first day.
It went on like that, each of us maneuvering for a purchase. One guy makes a slip, the other guy grabs for the handhold, crowds in. Soon my brother Jack began to warm to his ulterior motive. He was always a guy who couldn’t sit still for long.
Why don’t you come out front here, Jack said. Igot something I want to show you.
The screen door slapped at its frame. I figured I’d get it over with. We went around the alley, between Frattelli’s place and ours. Fratelli’s garden hose coiled by the edge of his lawn. Frattelli’s excessively healthy floribunda, a spigot on the side of our house still dripping, though I had put a washer in there only a week before. I wanted a life with a minimum of fuss. Woe to them that are wise in their eyes.
It was a gold Porsche.
Mergers in the automobile business will continue apace, and soon General Motors will be making Bentleys, and the same barely functioning engines that are under the hoods of American cars will soon be under the hoods of fancy foreign models, and it will be good for stock prices, and even good for the Gross National Product, but not good for cars themselves. That’s the limit of my interest on the subject. What’s a car, my fellow-Americans, but a system for conveyance, as I was recently telling Sasha Levin of Forest Hills, before she had time to complain about her under-performing account; I’ll buy any car, a Reliant K, a Breeze, a Cavalier, I don’t care too much, and Tanya doesn’t either, and we tend to leave bottles rattling around in the footwells in the back seat, to take up the space where the kids should have gone. A Porsche to me was just another car, and mainly I saw behind it some Organized Crime Figure or Junk Bond Trader who rode your bumper and talked on a cellular phone while flipping you the bird. I didn’t want to have anything to do with Porsches, or Jaguars, or Corvettes. I looked back at my house. I saw my wife, Tanya, in a window upstairs. A curtain fell across her face.