The Incurables

If Laughter Were Blood,They Would Be Brothers

If Laughter Were Blood, They Would Be Brothers Paul shows up at Harlem Tropic at ten, his first visit since he was last in Ryeville, in August. Stephanie isn’t here. There’s a wedding party in the club, which is wood-paneled and smells of oranges, and the bride and groom are dancing in a corner. They’re in their late forties, Paul guesses, their dances like the ghosts of more enthusiastic dances. Before long, the band finishes its set with a drum-dominated version of a James Taylor song. The lead singer screeches the words like someone in distress. Paul finds a booth across the dance floor from the club’s main entrance and orders a Heineken. The wall to his left holds a framed print of Van Gogh’s “Sunflowers ” and a painting, probably by a local artist, of a pair of naked lovers sitting side by side in bed, their 125 _ If Laughter Were Blood, They Would Be Brothers 126 lower bodies covered by silver-white sheets, their hair dissolving into different visions of twilight. Paul is thirty-six, but he’ll be thirty-seven before the dorm at Georgia Southern College is painted, its rooms scraped like the inside of a pumpkin, then covered with the same gray primer and paint he’s been using since he first came to Ryeville twelve summers ago with a crew of two, which included Shelly, his then fiancée. Shelly owns a seafood restaurant in Monroe, Louisiana, now. She’s married. Two children . Three? Although Paul has regular, if small-time, painting work back home in Sherman, Ohio, his main employment during the school year is as an adjunct communications instructor at Ohio Eastern University. He’s grown tired of this job, too. After ten years’ worth of excuses to postpone his next move, he’s been fantasizing about living far from Sherman. He’s conjuring West Coast cities—Los Angeles, Portland, Seattle—when Stephanie walks in. Despite the four years he’s known her, he has never become entirely accustomed to her handicap. He watches her as she moves, her real leg, her right one, supporting her prosthesis by­ alternately bending and straightening, and her waist moving in abrupt contortions. He has never seen her fall; still, even now, he often half holds his breath in anticipation. Stephanie doesn’t seem to see him, and she stops to talk to a couple at a table beside the stage. They offer her a seat, and she sits with her profile toward Paul. Her face is thin, with freckles like miniature pennies. Her shoulder-length hair is the same copper color as her freckles. Paul thinks he should approach her, ask her to dance, as he did the first time, four years ago. (He saw her dancing with Tim, the nightclub’s septuagenarian owner, so he knew what she was capable of.) In recent years, however, he has always allowed her to spot him across the club, to come over to his table to resume the relationship they always suspend when he returns to Ohio after the painting is done. He waits, but for the longest time, she doesn’t see him, doesn’t come over. If Laughter Were Blood, They Would Be Brothers 127 _ Alex shoots foul shots underhanded, too tired to shoot them the regular way. He has worked ten hours, rolling oil primer, and his arms ache. His cheeks still bear the impressions of the mask he’s worn, and his chin, where its rubbery bottom has rubbed all day, is dotted with pimples. He’s twenty years old, but his face makes him look fifteen. He’s sure girls would find him repellent now. Of course, he doesn’t see many girls here, except at meals. He eats at the back of the cafeteria, at the “painters’ table,” in his paint-flecked white shirt and pants. The summer students living in the dorm eat at one long table at the front of the cafeteria. He’s had his eye on one girl; she has long black hair and tan skin that glistens like it’s oiled. He held the door open for her once as she left the dorm. When she said thank you, he noticed her accent. He imagines she’s from a tropical island where people speak Spanish, have midday siestas, and eat dinner at midnight. The basketball court is directly outside the dorm room where he’ll be living for...