CHAPTER ONE #2
He’d turned out to be the most successful of all of his siblings, and no one expected him to.
He grew up as the black sheep for no real reason, despite sharing his parents’ values and drive for success.
They all wanted the same thing as a family, yet a pall fell when Carver reminded them of this.
Something set him apart from them — something so massive he felt it couldn’t possibly just be that he fucked men.
There had to be something else wrong with him just to account for the sheer weight of their confusion.
His parents were both lawyers, and they looked at him like he was the other side’s last-minute exculpatory evidence.
Rather, they had done so for most of his life.
They looked at him differently now that he was successful.
Now they were more proud of him than his siblings and so the inexplicable friction between them had eased.
When he hadn’t seen them in person for a while, Carver started to wonder if he imagined the friction to begin with, but then he’d come home for a holiday and in a moment of stress it would flare up like eczema.
His older brother was called Chip, because they were country club whites (his real name was Preston) and all the big hopes were originally pinned on him.
His sister, Conway, got lesser female hopes pinned on her and had largely evaded them.
Carver thought sometimes that he was the oddball because his parents had planned on one boy and one girl, a fact they were open about, and he had stepped into existence between them and Conway — abrupting their ideal family.
Chip had the sports career his parents wanted, in both high school and college, but never quite matched Carver for brains and drive.
Chip wasn’t as smart as he was cocky, with vices like girls and booze.
He made it through law school but got mediocre grades and had failed the bar five times.
Their dad had to secure him a pity job at a friend’s firm.
He had two kids and a rocky marriage. Carver vibrated with perverse satisfaction when he heard about Chip’s setbacks while on the phone with his parents or Conway.
“That’s a tough break,” he would say, forcing himself not to grin.
He did love Chip, and he wanted him to have a nice life. But first he wanted life to break Chip down until he felt bad enough about himself to understand what Carver had gone through all those years, and finally sympathize.
So it was not just Scott at issue. Even seeing Letty was an issue — she was a lesbian, and this was a gay marriage, and Carver didn’t need the reminder.
They went, of course. Lillian insisted, and no force in heaven was strong enough to untie his tongue so he could honestly explain to her why he didn’t want to.
She got a kick out of Carver’s family, and they liked her back, because she was like an atavistic throwback to the aristocrats they admired.
Carver found he often gave in to the demands of his life almost without realizing.
He was strong-willed but ultimately submissive, he’d been told.
He knew it was true, which was why he hated being told about it.
It was embarrassing enough to be this person at all.
It was downright untoward that other people could also see the way he longed to surrender himself.
Lillian let him drive them out of the city on Thursday night after work so she could use her laptop and phone for the hour-long drive, wrapping up final pieces of business so they could drink in peace all weekend.
They took the Maybach, which had an absurdly roomy and white cabin that made him feel like they were a pair of far-future astronauts.
Carver kept glancing in the city in his rearview mirror until it disappeared over the horizon.
There was a comet passing by this week which would, thanks to a lucky confluence of celestial factors, be very visible from Lower Manhattan on Saturday night.
Their friends loved an excuse to host or attend watch parties, and they sounded surprised that Carver and Lillian would miss drunken rooftop comet-watching for a hometown wedding.
“Just send them a nice gift,” multiple people said. “They’ll forget you weren’t there.”
“I got you some Xanax,” Lillian said as they sailed down 95.
“You did?” Carver said, barely paying attention, watching the dark road. “But I’m out of refills. You mean you got Xanax?”
“No,” Lillian said, sounding equally distracted as she reviewed a 10-K. “I called Dr. Rick and lied to him that you had air travel coming up and needed more but kept forgetting to call. He called in more for you.”
“That’s so unethical.”
“Yeah, he’s a terrible doctor. That’s why he’s on the payroll, baby.” Lillian extended a manicured hand. “Here.”
Carver stretched his palm out across the creamy expanse of the front seat. Lillian dropped a pill bottle into it. He tucked this into the jacket pocket of his suit and said “Thanks, honey,” not bothering to pretend he didn’t want it.
“I know you get antsy being around your parents,” she said. “Honestly, I think you just take them too seriously. They’re desperate strivers, but they’re alright people. They just worry about you making your way in the world, and it comes out as all this pressured and compulsive stuff.”
“But why do they worry about that? That’s kind of the point.”
“I don’t know,” Lillian said, licking her finger so she could turn a page in the 10-K. “Because you aren’t blonde? It doesn’t matter when you know you’re a success, Carver. You really are so smart. You know I don’t lie.” This was true.
“They know I’m smart,” Carver said. “Being smart doesn’t always help.”
“Sometimes it makes people nervous,” Lillian said. “It’s evolutionary. A smart person can figure out how to trick you and kill you. We look like predators to them.”
Carver was quiet after that. Lillian didn’t mind people seeing her that way — she knew what she was and was comfortable in it. Sometimes this made him seethe at her with hot, roiling jealousy.
He took a Xanax. It was just kicking in as they rolled into the circular driveway of his parents’ five-bedroom white colonial.
The house was worth around two million today, though they’d bought it for just under 200k.
When he was a kid, Carver thought it was a palace; today he could buy it off them in cash, many times over.
After he parked the car behind a line of four others, he took a minute to fix his hair in the rearview mirror.
Lillian watched him do this, clearly in no hurry. “Ready?” she said, producing the bottle of Screaming Eagle wine he’d picked out for this visit.
Carver nodded, got out and retrieved their luggage so he could roll it up the driveway’s fan-patterned pavement, which was slick at its edges from the sprinklers that watered the low hedges and flowering catalpa trees.
Lillian strode out ahead of him, not waiting.
He was happy to let her reach the door first. He could tell by curtain movement in the living room windows that their arrival had been observed.
Indeed, a second after Lillian’s knuckles struck the door, it opened to reveal his mother and her golden retriever, who she held by the collar as he barked. Lillian ignored the dog and hugged his mother. “Hi, Nora.”
“Hi, Lillian, great to see you.” Nora turned to Carver as Lillian walked past her into the house. The dog chased after Lillian. “Hi, Carver, honey.”
“Hey,” Carver said.
His mother swept her appraisive pale green eyes up and down him like a police flashlight. This, at least, he knew not to take personally. They had the same eyes and looked at people the same way. They looked largely alike, in fact, while his siblings took after their dad.
“You’re thin,” she said. Again, they were thin in the same way, it just wasn’t the way men his age were supposed to be thin.
In the Financial District his build was allowed, as everyone was addicted to cocaine and Equinox, but in the hamlets of Westchester County a thirty-six-year-old man was supposed to be thickening in the gut, arms and shoulders — putting together a golf body.
“Yeah.” Carver fidgeted before coming in for a hug. The hug was basically just them squeezing each other by the biceps. “How are you, Mom?”
“I’m good!” Nora said breezily. “I’m good. We’re all just sitting around catching up.”
“Who’s here?”
“Oh, a bunch of people.” She led him inside.
He could hear the bunch of people now — it was loud in the living room, with bursts of laughter every few moments.
He stowed their rolling suitcases in the corner of the foyer, in lieu of instructions.
“It’s no vacancy, we even have someone in the pool house. ”
“Who?”
Nora didn’t respond, instead pulling open the French doors that led from the hallway into the American Craftsman-style living room.
Carver followed her, and saw an array of mostly blonde heads looking up at him from sofas and chairs like meerkats.
He saw his sister Conway, his brother’s wife, Maggie, and their two children, his mother, his father, his wife, Letty’s younger sister Priscilla, and finally, Scott McCaffrey.
Scott was not blonde. His wavy hair was a rich, warm brown, like the ears of a springer spaniel, and long enough to reach his shoulders.
Unlike any of the Novack men he wore facial hair, a short scruffy beard.
He was dressed like he painted houses for a living — actually, he was dressed like he wanted you to think he painted houses for a living.
The clothes were slightly too nice and artfully disreputable.
This pretentious prick. Carver knew that continually, in the back of his minds’ eye, Scott was imagining himself giving a speech at the Grammys.
This was something everyone had recently managed to forget about artists: how fucking vain they were.
And Scott was not only vain, he was smiling. He was smiling at Carver like he knew exactly who he was and like eighteen years had not passed.