or dying off and their successors, far from being the sort that the masters of the manor might have known, weren’t even the sort whose names they could have heard without alarm.
My place in this succession was unusual. I had come later than the first generation but earlier than the second. My house was higher than the others, my grounds larger.
But not by as much as they had been. Bud’s land had until recently belonged to me. Selling off an acre of the property had seemed like a perfectly good idea. The builder was trustworthy and the price was right. Besides, I hadn’t figured on staying. The prospect of looking at what had once been mine didn’t concern me.
“Lucky for you we’re in a hurry,” Bud said as we were beginning our third lap. “Otherwise I’d find that shortcut.”
We turned off the residential streets and onto an empty boulevard over which traffic lights hulked from braided cable. The lights had four and five and even six different lenses that flashed the alert or blinked for prudence or pointed to new roadside oases: to a turquoise and orange ice cream parlor-cum-motor lodge, to a transmission service endorsed by a former middleweight champ—or onto the highway itself.
I haven’t sensed anyone’s inner clock ticking so loudly at a red light as Bud’s. Trivialities already consumed enough of life, I could hear him thinking, without this automated bureaucracy adding to the sum. And being behind the wheel of a machine that strained at idle as much as he himself did must have made him even edgier. When it stopped, that car didn’t sit so much as crouch like a sprinter on the starting block. The lights went our way and we flew down the boulevard past the motel and the rest, up the highway ramp, and over a buckle in the road that stirred the memory of a wreck I’d been in some years earlier. “Let’s get there in one piece!” I exclaimed.
He didn’t answer. He gave no sign that he’d even heard me. He saw daylight and went full throttle. The space closed up and he hit the brakes. He had to, though he didn’t have to slam them. The tires screeched.
“Take it easy!”
“How can so many people be heading for the city at eight on a weeknight?” he muttered. “Where do they all come from, the bottom of Lake Ronkonkoma?”
He veered to the right and, finding the service road at a standstill too, eased the car onto the shoulder and sped up. Everyone honked as we passed, and I started to protest that this was making us conspicuous.
“If you don’t like being conspicuous,” he asked in an off-thecuff manner that distanced him from the question, “what are you doing with a car like this?”
I didn’t answer. The present held all the embarrassment I could contemplate. Our race down the shoulder of the road drew more honks and killing glances. I slunk lower in my seat and, withdrawing from conversation with my go-go neighbor, studied a cotton-ball cloud to the west.
I’d have liked to turn around the moment I dropped him off but thought I’d better take a few minutes to sober up. The walk from the parking lot might have been longer than the drive. I picked up a cup of coffee in the cafeteria and made my way to the emergency room.
It was hot. Nixon and Rockefeller stared down from the wall like hawks waiting for someone worth diving for. Two men wondered whether the air conditioning was out or off; the subject changed to annuities. I lit a cigarette. In less time than it took me to smoke it the Naugahyde seat was sticking to my bottom. I switched places and, waiting for the new seat to stick, leafed through a discarded afternoon paper that was hardly different from the morning edition. Volatility was in short supply.
Bud came in as I was getting up to leave.
“Lizzy’s fine,” he said, shaking my hand. “Stick around for a moment and you’ll meet my wife.”
“I’d better be on my way.” I thought I’d been imposed upon enough for one afternoon.
But on the way back I found myself ruing my departure. What had become of my spontaneity, my sense of event? I waved the feeling away—the driver beside me seemed to think I was making some sort of hand signal and slowed down. I went home to the ice tray I’d left out on the kitchen counter. The cubes had all melted in their boxes. Melting ice, that too was an event.
As he had when he’d come to borrow the car, he rapped on the doorjamb, pulled open the screen door, and shouted “Hello?” like a city kid calling from the street to a friend in an upstairs tenement. An open door meant an open house to him, and when no one answered, he let himself through the side gate and into the yard. From the window beside my desk, I saw him, a package in hand, going down the path in back to the swimming pool, where Mickey was fulfilling his daily quota of laps and lengths.
The weather had begun to turn, summer to retreat: every day the sunlight blanketing the water’s wobbly surface did less to warm its depths. Soon fallen leaves would clog the skimmers, stilling their flaps and blocking the light, and darkness would rise from the bottom as in a lake. It would be time to close the valves, shut the pump and filter down, and drain the pool. The approach of winter always weighed on Mickey, who’d be determined to get in as many workouts as he could before it got cold. Though not a fluid swimmer, he was dogged. Even from my window I could see that he was in his own world, a trance of hums and slaps, of hurried breaths and clumsy strokes and kicks. Bud put the package down beside a chaise and stood waiting to be noticed at the edge of the pool. Running out of patience, he grabbed Mickey’s wrist as he was coming to the end of a lap. It must have startled the hell out of my brother. I could almost hear the heart that had been throbbing from exertion knocking inside him from fright.
Bud’s nerve in grabbing a stranger surprised me, until I realized that he had mistaken Mickey for me. We weren’t much alike as brothers go, but from certain vantages we were alike enough. This was an uncomfortable realization, though not because I had a low opinion of Mickey’s looks. They were fine, certainly better than my own. But in other matters I was in the habit of thinking of myself in contrast to Mickey. Bud’s mistake made me wonder whether there weren’t other points of resemblance that my eagerness to note the differences had made me overlook—the set of our shoulders, perhaps, the shapes of our skulls, the proportions of our limbs.
Mickey unglued the goggles from his eye sockets. Bud recognized his mistake and began to retreat up the path. But instead of continuing his workout, Mickey leaned against the side, boosted himself out of the water, and toweled off. Bud remembered the package he had left behind and came back for it. He and Mickey exchanged more words, which led to Mickey’s offering him a seat or to his helping himself to one.
I couldn’t make out what they were saying. Their voices refracted off the water and scattered. I thought of Bud’s curiosity about me or my house or something that was out my way and grew uneasy. I thought next of Mickey’s pretense of interest in my well being and was uneasier still. I imagined Mickey blithering on about me and Joyce, asking my neighbor what he knew about it. Their looks and gestures were directed toward the house. They almost had to be talking about me. Who or what else did they have in common? But evidently I was in no hurry to break in on them. I stayed in my chair for a while before going downstairs.
I found them lounging on their chaises as though it was seventy-five degrees and not fifty-seven, sunlight falling through the bare spots in the branches onto Mickey, who in his goldcolored robe resembled a leopard after a good feed. Reclining in that bulky, half-open robe with his body hairs spilling between the lapels, he seemed too large for the chaise’s pallet. The broad chest and big gut merged to form a trapezoid in which it was hard to tell where the muscle ended and the gristle began. It took a leap of faith to believe that somewhere beneath that mass a skeleton was buried. Considering all that they had to support, his legs were scrawny and his skin pale for a regular swimmer’s.
“It’s out of my patch,” Mickey was saying, “but I do know a thing or two about it.”
“How are you, Neil,” Bud said.
Mickey’s right shoulder was twitching. In uneasy moments, his head was prone to twist and his shoulder to bob against it so hard occasionally that he had to clench his jaw to keep from biting his tongue. The anticonvulsive