taps the pack, violently, before extracting a cigarette. He’s not entirely sure why people do that (to concentrate the tobacco?), but he likes doing it, he likes that one sure and punishing whack as part of the lighting-up ritual.
Barrett says, “Dreams?”
Tyler lights his cigarette. He goes to the window, cracks it open, blows the smokestream out into the air shaft. His exhalation is answered by a tickle of frigid air, seeping in.
“Some windy joy,” he answers. “No specifics. Weather as happiness, but gritty, happiness blowing in unwanted, maybe in a town in Latin America. You?”
“A statue with a hard-on,” Barrett says. “A skulking dog. I’m afraid that’s it.”
They pause as if they were scientists, taking notes.
Barrett asks, “Have you listened to the news yet?”
“No. I’m a little bit afraid to.”
“He was still ahead in the polls at six.”
“He’s not going to win,” Tyler says. “I mean, there were no fucking weapons of mass destruction. Zero. Zip.”
Barrett’s attention is briefly diverted by a search, among the shampoo bottles, for one that still contains shampoo. Which is just as well. Tyler knows he can get crazy on the subject, monomaniacal; he can be tiresome about his conviction that if others only saw, if they only understood …
There were no weapons of mass destruction. And we bombed them anyway.
And, by the way, he’s destroyed the economy. He’s squandered something in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars.
It seems impossible to Tyler that that might not matter. It drives him insane. And now that he’s no longer looking out onto his private snow kingdom, now that he’s coked himself up from that languid, awake-too-early state, he’s not only alert as a rabbit, he’s also available, once again, to the forces of fretfulness and dread.
He blows another plume out into the inrushing cold, watches his furls of smoke evaporate in the falling snow.
Barrett says, “What I’m really worried about is Kerry’s haircut.”
Tyler shuts his eyes, wincingly, as he would at the onset of a headache. He does not want to be, will not be, the one who won’t tolerate a joke, the uncle who has to be invited at the holidays even though we all know how he’s going to carry on about … whatever injustice or betrayal or historical malfeasance he wears like a suit of iron, soldered to his body.
“What I’m worried about,” Tyler says, “is Ohio.”
“I think it’ll be all right,” Barrett answers. “I have a feeling. Or, well, I have hope.”
He has hope. Hope is an old jester’s cap by now. Faded motley, with that little tin bell at the tip. Who has the energy to wear it anymore? But who’s courageous enough to doff it, leave it crumpled in the lane? Not Tyler.
“I do too,” he says. “I have hope and belief and even a particle or two of actual faith.”
“How are you doing with Beth’s song?”
“I’m a little stuck,” Tyler says. “But I think I made some progress last night.”
“Good. That’s good.”
“Giving her a song seems kind of … small, don’t you think?”
“Of course not. I mean, what kind of wedding gift do you think would mean more to her? A BlackBerry?”
“It’s so impossible.”
“Writing songs is hard. Well, pretty much everything is hard, right?”
“I guess,” Tyler says.
Barrett nods. They pass through a moment of silence as old as either of them can remember, the quietude of growing up together, of sleeping in the same room; the shared quiet that has always been their true element, interrupted of course by talks and fights and farts and laughter over the farts but essential, the atmosphere to which they’ve always returned, a field of soundless oxygen made up of their combined molecules.
Tyler says, “Mom got struck by lightning on a golf course.”
“Uh, you know, I know that.”
“Betty Ferguson said at the memorial that she’d been three under par that day.”
“I know that, too.”
“Big Boy got hit by the same car, twice. Two years in a row. And it didn’t kill him either time. Then he choked to death on a Snickers bar at Halloween.”
“Tyler, really.”
“Then we got another beagle and named him Big Boy Two, and he got squashed by the son of the woman who’d hit Big Boy One, twice. It was the first time the woman’s son had driven by himself, it was his sixteenth birthday.”
“Why are you saying all this?”
“I’m just listing the impossibilities that happened anyway,” Tyler says.
“So, like, Bush won’t be reelected.”
Tyler doesn’t say, And Beth will live. He doesn’t say, The chemo is working.
He says, “I just want this fucking song to be good.”
“It will be.”
“You sound like Mom.”
Barrett says, “I am like Mom. And you know, really, it won’t matter if the song isn’t great. Not to Beth.”
“It’ll matter to me.”
Barrett’s sympathy blooms in his eyes, which darken for Tyler the way their father’s do. Although their father is not an especially gifted father, this is one of his talents. He has the ability, when needed, to perform this little eye-shift, a deepening and dilating that says to his sons, You don’t have to matter any more than you do right now.
They should call him, it’s been, what, more than a week now. Maybe two.
Why did he marry Marva so soon after Mom died? Why did they move to Atlanta, what do they do down there?
Who is this guy, where did the plaid come from, how can he love Marva—Marva’s okay, she’s fun in her crude, shock-the-boys way, you learn not to stare at the scar, but how can their dad cease to be Mom’s solicitous penitent? The deal was always so clear. She was the cherished and endangered one (lightning found her), it was right there on her face (the milk-blue Slavic fineness of it, her hand-carved quality, her porcelain glaze). Their father was the designated driver, the guy who enforced naps, the one who got panicky when she was half an hour late; the middle-aged boy who’d sit under her window in the rain until he caught his death.
And now, this person. This man who wears
