The Brothers

The brothers always spend a week in the summer on the Massachusetts coast, close to the place where their grandfather used to live. But Benny insists he can’t go this year.

George stands in the doorway of Benny’s kitchen. “Bullshit,” he says.

Water is boiling for instant coffee. The kettle rattles above the blue flame of the stove. Outside, a bleak spring rain has turned the courtyard of the apartment complex into mud.

Benny says, “I don’t have a swimsuit.”

This is a lie, and obligingly—willingly—George does not laugh. “Not even a pair of shorts?”

“Nope.”

“We’ve got ourselves a problem,” George says.

“I could swim nude.”

“Possibly.”

“People might be offended.”

“They can eat crow,” George says. He frowns. “Isn’t that the phrase?”

“It’s a phrase,” Benny says. “But you used it wrong.”

Benny’s ex-boyfriend used to say that the brothers never talked seriously. To hear them, Louis mused, you’d think their lives were just jokes and gags. A vaudeville act. But that didn’t seem right to Benny, and still doesn’t. Louis wouldn’t understand, anyway, being an only child.

He imagines Louis scowling. That’s unfair, Ben.

His voice still comes back to Benny in this way: phrases he used often, or his view of a situation sailing unrequested through the air. Luckily, Louis is rarely kind. The selective malice is a relief. How horrid it would be, Benny knows, to remember all of the good things Louis did or said.

Of course, there is pleasure in wallowing. There’s the luxurious sinking that comes with depression, as if Benny just might drown in it.

George showed up two days ago. Benny was lying under blankets in the bedroom and listening to Sarah Vaughn records.

“You poor sap,” George said. He came because Benny wasn’t answering the phone. Neither, for that matter, was Benny’s friend who always seemed to be around.

(You think your brother is the country mouse, Louis said in that airy space in Benny’s mind where only headaches seem to form. Of all people, George knows. He’s a dentist, kid. He sees inside us all.)

A week’s white noise from Benny was enough for George, as it turns out. Maybe it was because their parents were so old now, one had to worry if communication ceased from their end. You had to assume the worst. Yes, Benny’s the younger brother, but George has always been practical in that way, eager to call and eager to check in, willing to take time off from work to come to the city.

“You shouldn’t have come,” Benny said. An infinite blankness was stretching out from the center of his chest, as if he had felt as deeply and as wholly as he ever would or could, and now that he’d excised those emotions, there was nothing left to fill him.

George shrugged. “I was worried. I didn’t know what was going on.”

“I’m worn out,” Benny said. That was true enough: he’d exhausted himself thinking. In these supposedly amicable break-ups, there was no one to blame, which had seemed so civilized until Benny was alone. Then everything just felt so fucking unfair. Heartbreak was no time for diplomacy. He wanted to storm the Bastille; he wanted to invade Normandy and skewer crusaders on fields slick with blood. Or, at the very least, he wanted to point a finger and make ridiculous claims and run Louis’s name into the ground.

“What happened?” George asked.

Benny closed his eyes, as if by not actually looking at George, his brother wouldn’t be sitting beside him.

George cleared his throat. He said, “You’ve become Miss Havisham, you know.”

An image floated through Benny’s mind from a black-and-white film he and his brother watched as children one summer: a frail, white-haired old woman in a crêpe wedding gown drifting through tall porticos and cob-webbed hallways, past lit candelabras and stacks of food that had gone moldy on a...