The Altruists Read online

  He thought he should intervene. But he didn’t want to stick up for his sister if it meant pissing off his father. On the flight over, tempted by the SkyMall in his seat-back pouch, Ethan had decided to ask his father for a loan. A bailout, until he was on his feet again. Their relationship wasn’t ideal, but he hoped that Arthur, like a government staffed with too many ex-bankers to be impartial, would rescue him with a stimulus package.

  “I hate to break it to you, Maggie,” Arthur was saying, leaning forward on his elbows, “but you are not your beliefs. Your positions. Your stances.”

  “Here we go.”

  “There’s no such thing as a feminist. Did you know that? No such thing as a Zionist either. No environmentalists. No Communists or anarchists. How about that? See, there are isms but not ists. People aren’t ideas, Maggie. People aren’t positions. People are people. Wants, urges, actions. That’s people. Flawed. Selfish. Ducking blows as they come.” He was having fun now. “All this identity crap, and I see it every day on campus, this assertion of preference and belief—it’s a teenage thing. An adolescent phase. ‘I am this but not that.’ ‘I like this but not that.’ The choose-your-own-toppings mentality. It’s all marketing. You realize that, don’t you? It’s a convenient way to get you to buy more CDs.”

  “CDs?! Do you hear yourself?”

  “I’m sorry”—he wasn’t—“but it’s true.”

  Maggie ignited with anger. There were countless reasons to dislike her father—he was an emotional cheapskate; he’d betrayed her mother; his cynicism had tainted her life like a drop of pee in a swimming pool—but the worst of it was how he’d managed, despite his low level of parental involvement, to shape her life. When she rebelled, she rebelled against him. She had made herself his opposite. He was the mold around which she formed. Or the form around which she molded? Her mother, who knew a thing or two about Gestalt psychology, would’ve had the answer.

  “So, hypothetically,” she said, “if one were to, I don’t know, philander, that wouldn’t make one a philanderer, would it? Because identity is bullshit, right? We’re all just urges, right? Hm. Yeah, I see your point. That all sounds very smart, and very convenient.”

  In the reflection in the window behind his daughter, Arthur saw the tension in his face. Sweat pooling at his hairline. A distended, porky vein down his forehead. Not an hour into the weekend and she’d already tripped him up.

  He opened his mouth, not knowing what might come out, when the waiter returned and slid a basket of dark, delicious, unkosher meat on the gingham tablecloth before him.

  TEN

  Drinking, Francine Alter once told her son, is not something that Jews do. She said this back in 1997 because Ethan was suddenly a teenager and just as suddenly there were parties where before there were none—parties in basements, parties in garages, parties stocked with skunked beer and sake (sake: it was the one libation midwestern academics always had but never drank), and directives always went down smoother in the guise of social commentary. But Ethan was thirty-one, his mother almost two years’ gone, and he was sweating in the dark before the hallway liquor cabinet.

  He snatched a dusty fifth of Polish potato vodka from the bottom shelf and took a swig. He’d survived Piggy’s the same way he’d survived his childhood: with his head down. Pretending to be somewhere else. His father and his sister hadn’t torn each other apart, not yet—that was a warm-up, the hors d’oeuvre, the teaser-trailer to their mutual antipathy—and both were now asleep upstairs. But he couldn’t avoid them all weekend, couldn’t ignore the present circumstances. The fact of being home.

  Shortly after receiving his father’s letter he’d dedicated himself to the mission of closure. If only he could speak with Charlie, if only they could see each other as they were—if only he could get an apology out of him, or at least an explanation—then surely, surely, Ethan would be able to move on. It was this lack of closure, he’d decided, that was keeping him from real relationships, real intimacy. After sophomore year he’d entered into a period of physical and emotional celibacy. He was nearly over Charlie before that night in the botanical gardens, before Charlie reached out and touched him. The touch had dragged him back into the fray. He still felt phantom fingers on his ear. He’d never let himself feel for anyone like he felt for Charlie. Shawn had always suspected Ethan of cheating. At the time Ethan chalked it up to Shawn’s flirtatiousness, projected back at him. But the well-groomed blond was right. Ethan’s heart was always somewhere else. And then, in 2012, a chance encounter had done it again. Charlie was always appearing when least convenient, pulling Ethan back to pain, to hurt, to love.

  Francine was diagnosed with breast cancer that December, and Ethan had flown home to see her. A vast, flocculent cloud darkened and devitalized the city, mimicking the family mood like weather does in memories. One night while his family slept, insomniac and lonely, Ethan commandeered the car and drove, somewhat aimlessly, to the Carnivora Club.

  The gay scene in St. Louis endured in the Grove, a business district in Forest Park Southeast at the far end of Manchester Avenue. There was something inescapably Missourian—unpretentious, sensible, blue-collar—about the clubs there, which operated in the Venn diagram overlap of Americana and kink. Which is to say that you could order a superb bacon double cheeseburger in the Grove, but a leather-clad waiter would serve it to you in a dog bowl.

  Carnivora, a lone gay bar by the botanical gardens, stood apart, drooping below the scene like the heavier testicle. It was a haven for stragglers too old or too tired to keep up with the Grove’s fickle crowds, the drag queen dramas, the spiteful rivalries between club owners. Carnivora was quiet. Low-key. It sat at a subtle corner where two one-way streets crossed in a highway-bounded residential neighborhood. A tin KING OF BEERS sign dangled over the entrance. Only a blinking neon fixture, four cursive words in the window, gave the place away: LA CAGE AUX CARNIVORES.

  Ethan pulled up to the bar. He was tired, physically and existentially kaput, burdened by visions of the months to come: the tense conversations, the medical jargon, the total impotent uncertainty. He needed a change of scenery. He needed a drink.

  He stepped inside to find the Carnivora Club empty. Two stools were missing seat cushions. Fried Green Tomatoes glowed on unsynchronized televisions mounted above the bar on either side of a poster hung in tribute to partying and Mayan eschatology both: THIS WAY, it read, TO THE APOCALYPSE.

  Ethan lowered himself onto a stool. The bartender was a talkative bear happy for the company. “I have two dogs,” he said, unprompted, in a voice at once gruff and elastic. “Total fucking assholes. Cute, though. You just want to eat them up. Don’t get me wrong, they’re great, but sometimes you feel like—” And he made a strangling gesture with his hands. Ethan mustered a nod. It was hell being home.

  There was no draft, only splashy drink specials and bottled beer. Carnivora’s signature cocktail was the Blue (Collar) Hawaii, a local take on the tiki-bar staple, which called for twice the rum and Blue Raspberry Kool-Aid in place of curaçao. Ethan ordered one. He raised the glass to his mouth, sweetness zipping down his throat. He downed it and ordered a second. The bartender hummed “Barbeque Bess.”

  “Men’s room?” Ethan asked.

  “Down that hallway,” the bear said and nodded. “Mind yourself back there.”

  Ethan slid off his seat. On the screens above him, Kathy Bates was losing her mind in a parking lot.

  He proceeded down the hall, sweeping his teeth with his tongue, tasting the sugar. The corridor was longer than it looked, growing darker toward the end. Ethan became aware of a muted groan, emanating (it seemed) from behind the door of the men’s room.

  Perhaps it was the alcohol, or maybe the insomnia, or else it was the news of Francine’s diagnosis, but Ethan—honestly, what possessed him?—opened the door.

  What he saw, in the restroom’s pale green light:

  A dribbling s
ink. A housefly looping through the air. And a wide-necked joe in a Blues jersey groaning on the toilet, one hand gripping the sink to his left, the other pressed flat against the wall. It took a moment for Ethan to register the other man, the second man, the man on his knees with his back to Ethan, kneeling with his head between the hockey fan’s legs. A pang of recognition stunned Ethan where he stood: printed on the back of the second man’s jacket, flying through the aperture of a giant letter A, was a cawing all-American bald eagle. The man turned, and at the first glimpse of those green eyes, Ethan fled the men’s room. He threw some wrinkled bills on the bar and drove home, blowing past a series of stop signs. The next morning, he called Teddy back in New York and dumped him.

  Five years after Charlie planted renewed hope in him with a touch to the ear, Ethan was making peace with the thought that it had been a drunken mistake, that he had read too far into it. Charlie was one of those straight guys who experimented, and Ethan had been his laboratory. That’s what he believed, until the scene at Carnivora. He wanted nothing more than to show up at Charlie’s house the next day and ask for—demand—an explanation. But he was needed at his mother’s side.

  Now, home again for the first time since the funeral and more than a little tipsy, Ethan felt prepared. This time would be different. This time he’d go through with it.

  Ethan swigged the vodka.

  And again.

  He steadied himself on the liquor cabinet and sunk to the floor. He sat with his back against it, facing his mother’s former office. DR. FRANCINE ALTER | COUPLES & FAMILY COUNSELING. This was the place where Ethan had first overheard the words dysthymic depression, panic disorder, and persistent anxiety as a boy and realized—with accumulating panic and anxiety—that they applied to him. He’d come of age in this hallway, eavesdropping on his mother’s patients. You could hear them despite the soundproofing, if you leaned in close. He learned about boundaries from the couple who could not spend one moment apart. He learned about betrayal from the woman who would not stop cheating on her husband, and he learned about forgiveness, then denial, from that same husband, who refused to give up on the marriage. He learned a great deal from one couple in particular, the Pfeffers, who had been seeing Francine for years. They’d taught Ethan inadvertent object lessons in compromise, as when they were divided on the matter of more children; in grief, when Gerry Pfeffer suffered a fatal stroke; and in the horrors of high-functioning depression, when Lauren was left to run her house by herself.

  Ethan stared at the nameplate. FRANCINE ALTER. The words weren’t really there, he thought, drowsily. They were absences, laser-cut into—or out of—the metal. Divots. Dimples. COUPLES & FAMILY. The letters were illusions, depressions defined by what had been removed.

  “Can I get some?”

  Ethan startled and looked up. Maggie stood above him, eyeing the vodka.

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s awful.”

  Maggie bent to accept the bottle and took a conservative sip. “Ew. Blech. Not good.”

  “I told you.”

  “‘Polish Potato Vodka’?”

  Ethan stared into the middle distance. “Why not? A tribute to our ancestors.”

  She sat beside him and sniffed the rim. “Are we Polish?”

  Ethan took the bottle back. “I don’t know. Probably.”

  “Thereabouts.”

  “Satellite states.”

  “Right.”

  “Wherever persecution complexes come from.”

  “Yeah, yeah.” She motioned for the bottle. “Weird to be here, right?”

  He nodded.

  Maggie sipped and winced. “It’s not like I remember somehow. You can tell Mom’s not around. It’s too clean, but . . . not in a good way, you know?”

  “Fake clean.”

  “The plants are dead and it smells like Windex.”

  “It’s uncanny. I think Dad moved some stuff around. I can’t place it . . .”

  “Oh, he definitely did.”

  “And it’s quiet.”

  “It is, isn’t it? Although I don’t think of Mom as the biggest talker.”

  “It wasn’t her,” said Ethan. “It was all her patients. All the people she brought into the house. There were always people around.”

  “Yeah. I miss that.”

  “The talk.”

  Maggie took another sip.

  “Maybe slow down,” Ethan said. “Empty stomach and all?”

  She hugged the bottle to her chest. “Don’t worry about my stomach. It’s not your concern. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Maggie arched her back. “Do you think Mom was good at her job?”

  “Hm.” Ethan exhaled loudly through his nose. “Does it matter?”

  “I guess not,” she said. “But I hope she was.”

  “She knew how to handle Dad. That’s not nothing.”

  “And she was smart. She was, wasn’t she?”

  “Yeah. But, again—does it matter?”

  “I want to remember her as someone who was good at what she did. As someone who was smart. Now that she’s gone I feel like she’s up for grabs or something. It’s on us to remember her correctly. Like, if we don’t, who will? I want to get her right. Because however we choose to remember, that’s how it’s going to be. That burden is ours. I don’t want to get it wrong or sell her short. Or have it be relational, like, ‘this was what Mom meant to me.’ I want to remember her as she was. But I’m also worried about, you know, deifying her. There are so many ways to be wrong about someone.”

  “You worry too much,” Ethan said.

  “Pot, kettle.”

  “Yeah, yeah, okay.”

  “You never told me why you quit,” she said.

  “Quit what?”

  “Your job.”

  “Right. That.” Ethan shook his head. “It wasn’t for me. I didn’t want that responsibility. Half the time they brought me on to justify a decision they’d already made. I was just the excuse.”

  “I always suspected you thought you were too good for it.”

  “That’s not it, Maggie. That’s not it at all.”

  She picked at the label on the bottle. “I think this is the first time we’ve done this.”

  “Done what?”

  “Hang out. As adults. You know.”

  “I guess that’s true.”

  “I think Dad had a way of making us . . . single-minded. I’d say ‘independent’ but that seems like giving too much credit. There was no effort to bring us together, as far as I can remember.”

  “We aren’t close in age.”

  “What I mean to say is that I don’t think we were taught how to deal with other people. Including each other.”

  “You can’t blame everything on him.”

  “But he is responsible.”

  “How?”

  “He just is,” she burped.

  Ethan laughed. “I’m cutting you off.”

  Maggie lowered the bottle, half-empty, to a coaster of moonlight on the floor between them. They sat awhile, the vodka tickling their stomachs. From upstairs, the scratchy sound of Arthur’s snoring could be heard, texturing the silence, while Ethan and Maggie stared at their mother’s name in brass.

  * * *

  • • •

  “I want to steal you for the day.”

  Saturday morning. Ethan sat at the kitchen island with his father. Between them, a plate of chocolate Donettes and a carton of grapefruit juice, impulse buys that Arthur had brought back from the Circle K on Delmar with the urgency and nutritional cognizance of a Paleolithic hunter-gatherer.

  Ethan, head pounding from the vodka, said, “Okay.” He would have to find Charlie tomorrow.

  He looked at his half-eaten Donette and cursed his chronic acquiescence. What was it about his father that prov
oked such slavish obedience? Why couldn’t he stand up for himself?

  He took a deep, restorative breath. Time alone with his father might be a good thing. It would give Ethan a chance to bring up the tricky matter of money. The loan. It was a sensitive subject, given his mother’s inheritance, but what would Arthur do, deny him? His eldest child? His only son?

  Ethan knew what he needed from his father. What his father wanted with him was another matter. But Ethan was okay, for the time being, with simply being wanted. He downed his glass of grapefruit juice, imagining it coursing through his body, a purifying drink to wash away the stress, the nausea, the mild hangover, and met his father in the car.

  The University of Missouri–St. Louis, or UMSL (UM-sull) and Danforth were locked in a sibling rivalry, in that one sibling was unaware of the existence of a rivalry at all. Danforth, like a flashy, ambitious older child—established more than a century earlier than its public counterpart—boasted a $7 billion endowment, a top-ten medical school, and a deliberate ignorance of regional competition. The med school, and the undergrad pre-med program, were the institution’s proudest achievements: the alumni magazine frequently bragged about the university’s medical facilities, the “dizzying array” of laparoscopic, endovascular, and remote-controlled technologies, the faculty’s achievements in the field of incisionless surgery, their ability to pull patients’ appendixes out through their mouths. This robotic upper hand was funded by the students, who, lacking Ethan and Maggie’s faculty-parent “discounts,” paid $60K per year and received little help from the university’s paltry aid program. (Though the lack of economic diversity among students was an acknowledged failure of Danforth’s, the university had at least solved the problem of racial diversity, increasingly admitting the wealthy children of Nigerian aristocrats in the place of African Americans more likely to apply for financial aid. “As long as they’re black,” whispered one trustee over a hot mic during an infamous State of the University address in 2013.)