The Latecomer, page 31
“I’m glad you’ve made such a good new friend,” was all Lewyn could think of to say, though this, predictably enough, only made his brother turn from him in evident disgust. There would not, of course, be a reciprocal query from the other child’s bed under the peaked ceiling. No How was your freshman year? or What are you going to major in? let alone Have you happened to fall in love with a person who may just possibly be as clever as I am, and much, much nicer to boot? Lewyn, the aimless and pudgy brother who’d taken his leave one year earlier, bound for a college of least resistance and without a single affinity or interest, let alone a vision for his future? Lewyn, who’d never kissed a girl let alone had sex with one (whether or not she provided the condom)? That Lewyn was not the Lewyn who had reappeared, and there was much about him of potential interest to Harrison (even if that interest were of the teasing and disbelief variety), but Harrison never asked him a question and Lewyn, who had some pride now in addition to his other new attributes, declined to make an unforced offering.
“Must be nice for you and Sally,” Harrison said pointedly on the morning of the birthday. “Having each other so close by. To lean on,” he finished with a kind of flourish.
“Yes!” said Johanna. They were all—except for Salo—in the kitchen, drinking coffee. The baby was in her highchair, and Johanna was feeding it something vile and brown. “I’m happy thinking of the two of you, meeting up to study or have coffee. Even just running into each other by accident.”
“Weirdly,” Lewyn said, “it never happens.”
“Big campus,” Sally said, blowing into her mug. “Anyway, we were both doing our own thing. Busy. You know.”
“Busy doing what, exactly?” Harrison said. “I’m curious. What’s a real college like? What do people do there?”
Then he grinned, in case either of them might have thought he was sincere.
“Well, it’s like this,” Sally said. “People spend years keeping their heads down, working really hard so they can get into an Ivy League school, doing sports and music and community service and getting straight As. It’s been the only thing for so long, and then they get in, and now here they are together in the same place, all these high-achieving good boys and good girls who’ve delayed adolescence, and they’re like, Now what am I supposed to be trying to accomplish? And they kind of realize they’re on their own—no more parents or coaches or advisors keeping them on the straight and narrow, and suddenly it’s Billy has a keg in his room.
“Well, not your room,” Sally said. “’Cause you had a Mormon roommate.”
Her brother nodded. Then he frowned. Had he told his sister that his roommate was Mormon? He tried to remember, but there was nothing there.
“Wait,” said Harrison, “you had a Mormon roommate?”
Beside him, Sally let out a breath. It was only ten in the morning with the rest of the day to get through, somehow, without showing her hand. Or exploding from sheer stress.
“Yes. Very nice guy. We got along great.” Even to himself, he sounded defensive.
“Great with a Mormon,” said Harrison. “That makes sense.”
“What do you mean?” Johanna asked him. “You think your brother’s like a Mormon?”
“No!” Lewyn said, perhaps too quickly.
“Are you?” said Harrison.
“No!” he said again. “But there’s nothing wrong with being a Mormon. It’s no stranger than what we believe.”
“I believe nothing,” said Harrison. “I believe people are idiots with a pathetic need to feel special. Apart from that …”
“Well, that’s not nothing,” Sally observed.
“You know what I mean.”
“Do you not have a pathetic need to feel special, Harrison?”
“Sally,” said her mother.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Sally, and she left the kitchen and went down the old log steps to the beach and began to plow furiously west, grinding her bare feet into the sand. There was a knot of people at Gilbert’s Cove but apart from that she was alone, her thoughts churning. For the first time since waking up that morning, she thought about the fact that she was now nineteen, perilously close to an age without a “teen” at the end of it, and what would that be like? Incontestably an adult, no mitigation of youth available (or tolerated), no excuse for the kind of unmistakably bad act she was about to commit against her brother, who—she hardly needed to remind herself—totally deserved it. She moved even faster, losing her breath to the wind, putting more and more distance between herself and them. One final year of “teen” and then beyond to the open country of adulthood, where she would be, at last and forever, without the brothers she loathed and that baby she had not enough feeling for even to pity, without deceitful Salo or countdown-to-hysteria Johanna—our parents in their pointless facsimile of family life. Liberated at last. She was terrified.
Johanna shushed her when she made it home; the baby, apparently, was asleep. Our father was still in his little office upstairs, and the boys (she was nonchalantly informed, as if it weren’t a colossal deal) had borrowed her car to go to the Katama General Store in Edgartown.
“I’m sorry, what?” Sally howled.
“Quiet!” her mother said. “I told you, she’s sleeping!”
She’s sleeping. Dad’s in his office. Harrison and Lewyn took my car.
“You let them take my car? I told you, it’s my employer’s, not mine, and I gave her my word no one else would drive it.”
This was not true, but it might have been true!
“They won’t be long,” said our mother, as if this were the relevant point. “I thought I might need the Volvo.”
“Mom!”
She imagined the elderly Ford blowing a tire on a stone in the road, or just giving up the ghost at some random traffic light in Edgartown: a line of Mercedes going wild on their horns, a Vineyard cop requesting the registration and some irate hedge funder calling up Harriet in Ithaca to berate her, all of which was bad enough.
Rochelle’s ferry was due in ninety minutes.
“Relax,” said Johanna. “They know how to drive.”
“Perfect,” Sally said, with extravagant sarcasm.
“Could you come out and talk with me for a bit?”
Johanna meant the full-court press: more coffee on the back porch, in Adirondack chairs painted gray to match the ubiquitous gray of Vineyard shingles and relentlessly uncomfortable to sit on. The porch overlooked the beach she had just steamed up and back, trying—and failing—to exhaust her nerves.
“What is it?” she asked. She had sixty minutes to reclaim her car and pick up her roommate before Armageddon. “I had some things I wanted to do later. I mean, if I get my car back.”
“I thought you and I might take Phoebe over to the carousel,” said our mother. “We talked about that, didn’t we? On the phone?”
“Sure,” Sally nodded. “But not today.”
“Why not? I can come with you on your errands. Give us a bit of girl time. Do you need anything for school? There are a couple of new shops in Edgartown.”
Sally winced. It had been a full year since the last time Johanna had tried to take her shopping. “Mom, no.”
“Well, there are some antique stores. I’d be glad to buy you something nice for your room. I love that you’re getting interested in beautiful things.”
“That’s okay. The place I’m living in is furnished.” (Like Historic Deerfield, she nearly added.) “But maybe tomorrow?”
By tomorrow, who knew whether anyone in her family would still be speaking to her. The thought of it filled her with a kind of horrified giddiness.
“Maybe. Also, I need you to come and sign some papers. There’s an attorney in Edgartown who works with our firm in the city. I just need for you to sign them while you’re on the island. Lewyn took care of this back in the spring.”
Sally looked at Johanna. “What kind of papers?”
“Well, guardianship for your sister, in case anything happens, God forbid.”
She felt, suddenly, very cold. “That’s what you want? Me?”
Johanna nodded, but she seemed reluctant to look Sally in the eye. “Yes, of course. Who else?”
“Well, you might have asked. I mean, I wouldn’t choose me to take care of anyone.”
“This is not anyone. This is your sister.”
She could be anyone, Sally thought. “What about Uncle Bruce and Aunt Debbie?”
“What about them? They barely know her. They even asked me not to bring her to Passover last spring. They said they weren’t set up for a baby. You’re her sister. Harrison and Lewyn are her brothers.”
“And you want all three of us to take care of her? That’s insane, Mom.”
“Well, it’s not desirable,” our mother said tersely, “but these aren’t things you leave to chance. You can’t do that with a baby. You have to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. I don’t know why I’m always the only one thinking ahead. The rest of you just waltz along without ever once considering our family. Just sign the fucking papers, Sally. For me.”
Sally looked at her. This Johanna was not the same Johanna she had left behind, only a year before.
“Mom? Are you okay?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said our mother.
“Just tell me, why the urgency to do this now? You aren’t planning to hand over our sister and disappear, are you?”
The “our sister” was a gift to Johanna.
“Wouldn’t you take care of her?” our mother said.
I’m in college, was all Sally could think to say in response, but her heart was beating so fast, she could barely follow her own thoughts:
Is this my responsibility?
Is this mainly my responsibility, because I’m the girl?
Are you making Harrison promise, too?
Where was our father in all this?
But she knew exactly where he was. He was somewhere else, with someone else: a beautiful woman with a lovely back who had once—it was unbearable to remember—overwhelmed her with kindness in a museum bathroom. For years she had carried the burden of our father’s secret. She might have shared it with her brothers at any point, she might have wielded it against both parents as a powerful weapon, but she never had. Perhaps the satisfaction of not telling had been one tiny bit greater than the satisfaction of telling. The thought of it now, though, nearly made her explode.
“And what about Dad? I mean, if something should happen to you, shouldn’t he be the one to raise his own daughter? I mean, you have a child together!”
“We have four children together.”
“You don’t have to stay,” she told Johanna, and it was only when she heard it out loud that she thought she might finally understand what this conversation was about.
“I know that,” Johanna said, confirming it.
“Mom.”
“We have the Lobster Tales people coming over around four. We should be here for that, they might need help carrying stuff down to the beach. Will that give you time for your errands?”
Sally looked at her watch. Rochelle’s ferry would dock in forty-five minutes. And the boys, where the fuck were they with her car? With Harriet’s car.
“Can I borrow the Volvo?” she asked.
She would pass Harrison and Lewyn on the Edgartown Road, but her head was so full she didn’t notice, and the boys, in Harriet Greene’s old Ford, didn’t notice her, either. They were on their way back from Katama with two bottles of Champagne for that night’s “celebration” of their birth. The Champagne was Veuve Clicquot. Harrison had developed a preference for Veuve Clicquot in Virginia, he informed his brother as he handed over Johanna’s credit card.
“So that’s what you did down there?” asked Lewyn when they returned to the car. “Guzzle Champagne and toast the little people?”
“I don’t know that I’d waste good Champagne on the ‘little people.’ I think sharing ideas with thinkers who are focused on improving our country is pretty much all I’ve been wanting to do since they let me wash off the finger paints in elementary school. Not that there’s anything wrong with art.”
Lewyn eyed his brother, who was driving. Harrison’s hands were not, he noted, in the sanctioned ten-and-two position.
“Well, I’m glad to see that college has broadened your worldview.”
“College has extended my worldview. College has deepened my worldview. I think that’s how it’s supposed to work. Is that how it’s working for you?”
Lewyn smiled. “I’d say so. I’ve made some interesting friends. I’ve found something I care about, intellectually.”
Harrison snorted.
“And I have a girlfriend.”
His brother flinched. Yes, there was pleasure, deep pleasure, in the moment. Lewyn saw Harrison struggle not to turn his head.
“Really.”
“Really. Thanks for your good wishes.”
“No, I’m just … well, little Lewyn. I can’t say I’m not a mite surprised.”
“You don’t need to say it. Because who could possibly be interested in me, am I right?”
Harrison smiled. They were passing the airport. A private plane was gliding in to land.
“Is that how you feel about yourself?”
Lewyn set his jaw. He could catch Harrison off guard, for some fleeting advantage, but he could never outmaneuver his brother. Not in the long game.
“You’re such a charmer, Harrison.”
“Thank you.”
“I mean, who else could say something like ‘a mite surprised’?”
“Who else indeed,” Harrison agreed, grinning at the road ahead.
“And your own love life, if I might inquire?”
“Well, I had some very pleasant evenings with one of the young ladies at the center in Virginia.”
(This was a considerable exaggeration. Harrison had indeed flirted with a cute Sweet Briar junior named Maddie, an intern in the director’s office. He had even considered asking her out on a date, but there wasn’t a single evening of presentations or even unscheduled conversation—especially unscheduled conversation—that he had been willing to miss. So he’d let it go.)
“Well, that sounds … a mite pleasant indeed.”
“Yes. But no. This is not so much on my radar right now. I’m more concerned with the cerebral. And as you’re well aware, I got an earlier start on this type of thing.”
The light changed. They turned toward home.
“I believe it has been mentioned,” said Lewyn. “What was it, sixth grade?”
“Don’t be absurd.”
“And she provided the condom.”
“That is hardly the salient fact,” said Harrison, taking obvious pleasure in not denying this. “Please don’t think I’m unhappy that you’ve caught up a bit. I’m relieved, actually.”
“Well,” Lewyn shook his head, “I’m sorry to have worried you.”
(It was here that our parents’ Volvo sped past them in the other direction.)
“Not worried,” Harrison said. “But of course I was ever so slightly concerned about you both. You ripped your heart out over that airhead actress at Walden. What was her name?”
Of course Harrison knew her name. The girl, by then, had starred in two independent films and been on the cover of New York magazine. Not even Harrison could miss that. Besides, she hadn’t been an airhead, more’s the pity.
“And Sally of course. I worry about Sally. She’s never even had a boy ask her out.”
Lewyn’s antennae rose. It was right there. Right there. And he was helpless against it. And the words hammered away inside him, howling for release—say it, say it. It wasn’t a question of whether it was right. He knew it wasn’t right. But he was operating on a far more primitive level. Say it, say it, say it. So he did. What else was he capable of doing, really?
“I wouldn’t read much into that, Harrison. Sally’s a lesbian.”
Silence. More explosive than anything even Harrison could have thought up to say, and Lewyn listened to that, feeling the pleasure rush, rush, all through his body. Speechless, both of them. Lewyn sensed the tightness in his cheeks and knew he was smiling. No, grinning. Madly.
“How do you know that?” said his brother through clenched teeth.
“My girlfriend told me.” This was a grace note, a twist of the dagger, with a flourish!
Harrison was looking over at him. This was unsafe driving.
“Yo, watch the road,” said Lewyn.
“And how does your girlfriend know?”
He sounded skeptical, but of which element—the revelation about Sally or the fact of Lewyn’s girlfriend—it was hard to say.
“That, I decline to answer,” said Lewyn, settling into this wholly unfamiliar perch: the upper hand.
“Well, how do you know it’s true, then, Lewyn?” said Harrison. He seemed to be reaching for his customary smugness, but he couldn’t quite get there.
“We both know it’s true, Harrison,” he said.
He loved this. He was admiring the words even as he said them. Then he started admiring the words he didn’t say: You mean you never figured that out? And you, The Smart One? Maybe not quite as smart as you think you are …
“I can’t say I’ve given Sally’s sexuality much thought, to be honest.”
“Clearly.”
They turned off the road onto the long, shared driveway, passing the Alberts’, the McConaughys’, the Lowells’, and the Abernathys’. The Abernathys were long gone, but none of them had ever laid eyes on the new owners, Houstonians who had vastly overpaid for their overblown “cottage” but were never there.
“Not that it matters,” Harrison tried one last time before the final turn to the house.
“Obviously,” Lewyn parried. “Except, you know, to our sister.”
And maybe, it occurred to him, to our parents. He wondered if Johanna and Salo knew about Sally. True, they hadn’t had the advantage of intimacy with their daughter’s roommate or known the strange and wondrous pleasure of Rochelle Steiner’s sweet head close by on a shared pillow, slipping into sleep but still speaking, confiding, connecting. But perhaps they’d noticed something Lewyn and his brother had been too obtuse or uninterested to see. Salo, so fixated on his solo navigation through life, and Johanna, frantically absorbed in her Potemkin family—they were probably as clueless on the matter of Sally’s inner life as her brothers had been, though it did seem to Lewyn that they must care more about Sally and her prospects for happiness than he and Harrison did, and perhaps be paying closer attention. A mite closer attention.
