economist – invited by leaders of industry and nations to enlighten them on matters economic – and ultimately direct the Center for Monetary and Financial Alternatives at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C.
* * *
STARTING WHEN YOU WERE CHILDREN AND CONTINUING on through your teens and beyond, you and George played a game together. In the game, one of you was a millionaire, the other a pauper. As a snowstorm raged outdoors the pauper scratched at the millionaire’s door. Meanwhile the millionaire, seated in his book-lined study, wearing a plush robe, sipped from a glass of port while smoking his pipe.
Though you took turns playing both roles somehow George’s version of this sadistic fantasy (in which he was the millionaire, and which, in recounting, he would score with appropriate hummed movements from von Suppé’s Poet and Peasant) was always more convincing.
In fact – and though he couldn’t have known it then – it wouldn’t be that far from the truth. There would come a day when, compared to you at least, your brother would be materially wealthy and successful; he would have a book-lined study in a sumptuously decked-out Victorian home. He would even puff on a pipe from time to time, though whether he did so in a plush robe you weren’t certain, and as far as you knew he wasn’t a port drinker.
Yet if there was envy between you and George it tended to flow from him to you. That George resented you was no secret; he told you as much on at least one occasion.
You were jogging together around the high school running track the morning after you’d both gone to a party thrown by a fellow high school student whose parents had both recently been killed in a car crash. You’d arrived late to find your brother talking to a pretty Asian girl, a foreign exchange student from China. You did your lone wolf Bohemian artiste act and ended up making out with her in the gone-to-seed garden.
You and George had rounded the track several times when he broke the silence:
You’re the kind of seductive charmer I envy, your brother said, panting. You’re also the sort of person that I never want to be like.
Your twin brother’s words filled you with self-reproach. You loved him, after all, in spite of everything. He was your mirror image. On the other hand you couldn’t help taking some pleasure in the fact that he envied you.
At times you wondered whether your brother’s decision to become an economist hadn’t at least to some extent been an equal and opposite reaction to your having elected to become an artist, if for him the appeal of economics lay less in anything positive than in its lack of obvious charm, a reaction to his disgust with superficially seductive ideas and people – people like you.
Had you not, after all, so far at least, charmed your way through so much of your existence, into the good graces not only of a certain English teacher but of others, too, including your father, who – according to George – always preferred you? Hence your twin brother’s distrust of and disgust for seduction in all of its forms. Thus for himself he chose the least seductive profession of all.
* * *
YOU (HOME FROM VISITING THE TEACHER AT HIS CARRIAGE house): Hey, George.
George (wearing headphones, listening to a record): Hey.
What’s up?
Nothing.
What album’s that?
Pet Sounds.
Oh. You just get it?
(George nods. You wait for him to ask where you’ve been. He doesn’t. You wait a bit longer before giving up and walking out of the bedroom.)
* * *
ONE DAY, DEAR PAST SELF, I’LL SHOW OUR BROTHER THE manuscript of this memoir. He won’t approve. He’ll point out some of its inaccuracies, how he began wearing glasses in first, not second, grade, that he didn’t throw up in Chinese restaurants at our father’s (or anyone else’s) urging. He’ll remind me that like me at first he wasn’t chosen for the teacher’s special class, he too had had to talk his way in. I won’t remember it like that, but he will be certain.
He’ll go on to say that he hasn’t read most of this memoir and he doesn’t intend to, that he disapproves of it on principle, that its mere existence pisses him off, as a matter of fact, so much that he doesn’t want to talk to me about it, doesn’t care to talk to me at all. For days he will avoid my phone calls and emails beseeching him to do so.
When he does finally consent to speak with me, what he will have to say won’t be pleasant. What he’ll have to say is this: that he’s fed up with being a minor character in what – as he sees me seeing it – is the epic of my existence, that though I may think I’m trying to do so, I can’t escape the inclination to make myself the center of my own drama. Newsflash: the world does not revolve around you, Peter, he’ll say.
He will go on to mention those periodic notices in local newspapers, in the Bethel Home News and the Danbury News Times, articles about your latest painting exhibitions and performances in plays, reports that, when they mentioned him at all, reduced him to a footnote. He’ll remind me of the time when, during a visit with our mutual friends in Vermont, we were discussing politics, how he, who had embraced Ayn Rand and her Objectivist philosophy, had been the lone defender of capitalism, how having excused himself to go to the bathroom (in fact he stalked off; I’ll remember that) he returned to find us all gone off to some bar.
You all just ditched me, he’ll say – noting that, all these years later, it still hurt.
Such things, combined with our socialist father’s contempt for his libertarian philosophy, further diminished your brother’s already imperiled sense of self.
But I’ve forgiven you, he’ll say.
As for my attempt at truth and reconciliation through composing “emotionally raw” memoirs, as far as our brother is concerned it’s pouring salt into old wounds.
I read ten pages, he’ll say. That was enough. A memoir written by someone trying to escape his own narcissism becomes itself an act of narcissism.
So our twin will say having refused to read the manuscript of this book.
OUR TWIN WILL be right and wrong: right to accuse us of trying to hog the lead, wrong to assume that role was ever ours. Whatever we did, dear Past Self, George always did it first. We’d marry, divorce, and have a child in that order; so would he, before us. We’d both move to Georgia and become professors in that state’s university system, but he’d get there twenty-five years sooner.
He’d be our closest confidant, this brother with whom we’d waken simultaneously from identical dreams, the person we turned to for solace and advice in times of distress or confusion, the person we looked up to more than we looked up to anyone else.
Including our father. Including the teacher.
Like them our twin played his role in inventing us. He helped engineer our fate. In opposition to your Bohemian dreams, he chose his path through life, sealing not just his fate, but ours, too. Since we were bound to follow him, our two hearts beating as one.
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