Читать книгу Big Brother - Lionel Shriver - Страница 12

I shuffled downstairs the following morning, a Sunday, to find Edison in the kitchen, which Fletcher and I had swabbed down laboriously the night before and was once more a melee of mixing bowls.

“Morning, Panda Bear! Thought I’d earn my keep. Breakfast on the house.” He’d fired up our cast-iron griddle, above which he dribbled batter from a dramatic height. Once the batch began to sizzle, he pulled a cookie sheet from the oven that was towering with pancakes—chocolate chip, I would discover.

I usually had a piece of toast.

“Thanks, Edison, that’s very—generous.”

Tanner was not yet up, and Fletcher had fled to the basement. So I sat down next to Cody, who was parked before a stack of five. Thus far she had carved a single wedge from the top pancake and placed it on the plate rim. In a show of politeness, she cut a doll-size bite from the wedge and chewed elaborately. As well as pancake fixings—jams and sour cream—there was also a bowl of scrambled eggs, getting cold, and large enough to have decimated both cartons. If I wanted toast, that was on offer as well—piled and pre-buttered. I nibbled on a triangle. It oozed.

“Wow,” I said faintly as my own stack arrived—layered with more butter and drenched in maple syrup. Resourcefully, my brother had finished the open bottle and located our backup in the pantry. “Is there any coffee?”

“Coming up!” He poured me an inky mug-full.

I slipped up and looked in the fridge. I took my coffee with milk. The empty plastic gallon sat on the counter.

“Whatcha looking for?” Edison had already adopted a proprietary attitude toward our kitchen.

“The half-and-half.” Of which ordinarily I took a tiny splash on top of the milk, but straight would do for now.

“Sorry about that,” said Edison. “Needed some coffee myself, to power through the flapjacks. There wasn’t much left, and I killed it.”

I’d opened a fresh pint the previous morning. “Never mind, then. I’ll take it black.” I returned to the pancakes I didn’t want, fighting a burst of petulance. All I did want was my usual white coffee, and not this bleeding-ulcer-in-a-cup. I told myself he was trying to be nice, but it didn’t feel nice.

“Think I should take a stack down to Fletch?”

“No, he wouldn’t touch them. Not with the white flour, and especially not with chocolate chips.” My tone was a little clipped.

“I could make another batch with buckwheat and walnuts, no prob. We’d just have to get more milk.”

“No, please don’t make any more pancakes!”

Edison’s ladle froze; I might as well have slapped him. The rebuke rang in my ears, and I flushed with remorse. My brother had just gotten here and there had to be something terribly wrong for him to be looking like this and I wanted him to feel welcome and loved, which was the only way he would ever get a hold of himself.

I took my coffee to the stove and put an arm around his shoulders. It shocked me that it took a small but detectable overcoming of revulsion to touch my own sibling. “All I meant was—you should knock off all this work and join us for breakfast. I just had a bite, and the pancakes are terrific.”

The touch more than the verbal reassurance made the difference. “Vanilla flavoring,” he advised. “And you have to really watch these suckers, or the chocolate burns.” He insisted on finishing the batter, at which point Tanner emerged as well.

“Jesus fuck! This is fantastic!” Reviling his father’s preachy nutritional guidelines, Tanner exulted in white flour and chocolate for breakfast. Six pancakes would disappear down that scrawny gullet no harm done, and my stepson’s enthusiasm helped to turn the emotional tide. Edison basked in Tanner’s praise for his breakfast. I may have had more than I wanted, but that was a small sacrifice to make my brother feel appreciated, and Cody finally consumed half a pancake. Why, it seemed we’d have a garrulous, boisterous time together so long as we all kept eating.

At eleven a.m., aside from yet another kitchen cleanup, the day yawned. “So, Edison,” I ventured, “have you thought about what you’d like to do while you’re here?”

“Go cow-watching?”

“We don’t look at cows!” said Cody.

“Yeah, believe it or not the Midwest has electricity now,” said Tanner. “They’re even talking about bringing in something called ‘broadband’ so you can make contact with civilization right through the air—though I think that’s a wild rumor myself.”

“Tanner’s right,” I said. “There’s plenty to do in Iowa, you East Coast snob.” That said, I’d never been keen on activities for their own sake. I preferred work to play—a temperament I’d recognized on meeting Fletcher Feuerbach. I’d been catering a July Fourth cookout for Monsanto when a quirky, taciturn seed salesman fled the corporate chitchat to mind the grill. He helped clear and pack up, leaving me in no doubt that tying off trash bags and arranging leftover deviled eggs in plastic containers was his idea of a good time. Little wonder I brought him home, where he washed every single serving platter before he kissed me. For both of us, work was play.

“You can always practice,” I added. “Cody doesn’t monopolize the piano more than an hour a day.”

“Whoa, busman’s holiday!”

It wasn’t the response I’d expected. “I could show you Baby Monotonous.”

“Cool,” said Edison noncommittally, stabbing his gooey stack. “But I been working my ass off. Gigs, sessions, practice; until recently, booking the club. Keeping current with the scene, burning the candle at both ends. I’m pretty whacked. Don’t mind doing jack for a while. I was just glad a gap in my schedule made it possible to fit in a visit. Catch up, get reacquainted. Finally get to know these kids a little.”

Edison’s hectic version of his life jarred with Slack’s forewarning that my brother seemed dispirited, but I now interpreted that caution as concerning Edison’s girth. Besides, I was accustomed to finding my brother’s life opaque. I had no idea how one went about arranging a European tour. I didn’t know anything about all those names he threw around, Dizzy and Sonny and Elvin, and I’d learned the hard way not to ask “Who’s this?” when Edison played a track; he always took my head off because I could never remember whether “Trane” played the saxophone or the trumpet. Aside from courteously listening to his own recordings—once—before sliding their cases into the section of our music collection that gathered dust, I didn’t listen to jazz, and I didn’t fathom who did go to those clubs when the pianist wasn’t their brother.

“What’s your schedule?” I asked. “I mean, coming up.”

“This tour of Spain and Portugal. Three solid weeks on the road. Takes more out of me than it used to. Haven’t taken a sabbatical since I hit New York in 1980. Truth is, Iowa could be the ticket—if that’s okay with you. Somewhere I got a legit excuse to beg off more gigs in the Village: a fifteen-hundred-mile commute. Recharge the batteries. Smell the coffee.”

With lots and lots of half-and-half.

“Now, when’s the Spain and Portugal tour again?” I asked neutrally.

“Early December.” His answer was muffled with pancake.

That was in just over two months. If I was understanding Edison’s concept of a sabbatical correctly, and he intended to stay with us until heading off on this tour, that would make for an awfully long “visit,” but it was also not an ellipsis. We just had to go the distance without everyone in this family gaining fifty pounds.

“You’re not maintaining an apartment at the moment, I gather.” I was diffident. “So where’s all your stuff? Your piano?”

“In storage.” This answer, too, was thick with chocolate chip. “I got your classic cash-flow crisis, dig? Royalties from SteepleChase in the pipeline. And plenty work on the horizon, of course. So I, uh.” He wiped maple syrup from his mouth. “You know. Appreciated the little loaner.”

“Oh, no problem!” That had been hard for him to say. “And if you need …”

“Well, yeah, now that you mention it—a little, you know, pocket change …”

“Sure, just tell me …” The kids were on their computers, but they were listening. I didn’t want to embarrass him. “Later today.”

However happy to slip him whatever he needed to tide him over, I’d never been in the parental position of giving my older brother an allowance. Edison had always been the big spender. On my visits to New York he’d never let me pay for anything, putting me on the guest list for his own performances and inveigling me into dives with cover charges for free because he was known, flashing C-notes at waiters and taxi drivers. Now the one with means, I felt a loss that must have been mutual. He’d liked his being the big spender. He’d liked his being my protector. So had I.

Yet what bothered me while scrubbing burnt drips of batter from the stove wasn’t giving Edison a “loan.” So far, no one, not even my impolitic stepson, had addressed my brother’s dimensions head-on. I myself had not once alluded to Edison’s weight to his face, and as a consequence felt slightly insane. That is, I pick him up at the airport and he is so—he is so FAT that I look straight at him and don’t recognize my own brother, and now we’re all acting as if this is totally ordinary. The decorousness, the conversational looking the other way, made me feel a fraud and a liar, and the diplomacy felt complicit. Now in order to have a convivial morning together I’d eaten a breakfast five times more filling than usual, and Tanner’s and my gorging had provided cover for Edison’s eating far more. That cliché not mentioning the elephant in the room was taking on a literal cast.