May We Be Forgiven

Was there ever a time you thought — I am doing this on purpose, I am fucking up and I don’t know why?

The warning sign. Two years ago, Thanksgiving at their house. Twenty or thirty people at tables spreading from the dining room into the living room and stopping abruptly at the piano bench. He was at the head, picking turkey out of his teeth. I kept watching him as I went back and forth carrying plates into the kitchen — the edges of my fingers dipping into repulsive goo — cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, a cold pearl onion, gristle. With every trip back and forth from the dining room to the kitchen, I hated him more. Every sin of our childhood came back. He was born eleven months after me, he was at first sickly, not enough oxygen along the way, and got too much attention and then, despite what I tried to tell him about how horrible he was, always acted as though he believed he was a gift of the gods. They named him George. Geo he liked to be called, like that was something cool, something scientific, mathematical, analytical. Geode I called him — like a sedimentary rock. Despite the fact that he was perpetually oblivious to everyone but himself, his preternatural confidence, his divinely arrogant head dappled with blond threads of hair lifted high, drew the attention of others, gave the impression that he knew something. People solicited his opinions, his participation, while I never saw the charm. As much as he and I plotted against each other and blamed the other for our misdeeds, we were surprisingly similar under the surface, which was all the more annoying. By the time we were ten and eleven, he was taller than me, broader, stronger. ‘You sure he’s not the butcher’s boy?’ my father would ask jokingly. No one laughed.

I was bringing in plates and platters, casseroles caked with the debris of dinner, and no one, not George, not my wife, Claire, and all the kids, not his awful friends, seemed to notice that help was needed. His wife, Jane, had been at it all day: cooking, cleaning and serving, and now scraping bones and slop into a giant trash bin.

Jane scraped the plates, piling dirty dishes one atop the other and dropping the slimy silver into a sink of steamy soapy water. Glancing at me, she brushed her hair away with the back of her hand and smiled. I went back for more.

The turkey platter was in the centre of the table. I reached over my wife’s shoulder and lifted; despite the meat being down to the bone the tray was heavy and wobbled. I willed myself to stay strong, and was able to carry out the mission while balancing a casserole of Brussels sprouts and bacon in the crook of my other arm.

I stood in their kitchen picking at the carcass while Jane did the dishes, bright blue gloves on, up to her elbows in suds. My fingers were deep in the bird, the hollow body still warm, the best bits of stuffing packed in. I dug with my fingers and brought stuffing to my lips. She looked at me — my mouth moist, greasy, my fingers curled into what would have been the turkey’s g-spot if they had such things — lifted her hands out of the water and came towards me, planting one on me. Not friendly. The kiss was serious, wet, full of desire. It was terrifying and unexpected. She did it, then snapped off her gloves and walked out of the room. I was holding the counter, gripping it with greasy fingers. Hard.

From Thanksgiving through Christmas and on into the New Year, I thought of George fucking Jane. George on top of her, or, for a special occasion, George on the bottom, and once, fantastically, George having her from the back. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I was convinced that despite his charms George wasn’t very good, and that all he knew about sex he learned from the pages of a magazine read furtively while shitting. I thought of my brother fucking his wife — constantly. And whenever I saw her — the nephew’s birthday, Christmas Eve, New Year’s — I was hard. I wore baggy, pleated pants and double pairs of jockey shorts to contain my treasonous enthusiasm. The effort created bulk, and I worried that it gave me the appearance of having gained weight.

It is almost nine when Jane calls. Claire is still at her office — one or two nights a week she works late, ‘preparing, rehearsing, reviewing, strategizing’. Another man would think his wife was having an affair — I think Claire is just smart. ‘I need your help,’ Jane says.

‘Don’t worry,’ I say, before I even know what the worry is. I imagine her calling me from the kitchen phone. The long curly cord wrapping around her body.

‘He’s at the police station.’

‘Did he do something wrong?’ I ask.

‘Apparently. And now I’m supposed to go and get him.’

I glance at the New York skyline. From the outside our building is ugly, post-war white brick, dull. But we’re up high, the windows are broad and there’s a small terrace where we used to sit and have our morning toast. Now the table is rusting and we’ve got the cat’s litter box under it and a bin where we keep recyclables.

‘Can you pick him up?’ she asks.

Within minutes I’m on the street. When we bought the apartment, the idea of an extra $20,000 for a parking spot seemed outrageous, but over time it’s felt like the deal of the century. I call Claire from the car. ‘I’m in the car,’ I say, ‘on my way to George’s. There’s some kind of problem and I’ve got to pick him up. I had my dinner — there’s some for you in the fridge. Call later.’

A fight. On the way to the police station that’s what I’m thinking. George has it in him: a kind of atomic reactivity that stays under the surface until some small something triggers him and he erupts, throwing over a table, smashing his fist through a wall or into something. More than once I’ve been the recipient of his frustrations: a baseball hurled at my back, striking me at kidney level and dropping me to my knees; in my grandmother’s kitchen, a shove hurling me backwards, through a full-length pane of glass, as George blocks me from getting the last of the brownies. I imagined that he’d gone out or had a drink after work and gotten on the wrong side of something.