Doug laughed. “I’ll let Pete know you think he’s a dancing monkey. He doesn’t have much regard for private equity.”
Carver knew he was being baited, but couldn’t help taking it. “Not for moral reasons, I’m sure.”
“Oh, no. Well, he thinks you’re not so good for the economy.”
More bait. A great opportunity to prove he could control his urges. Carver said nothing and picked up the glass of wine that Lillian had set on the glass table in front of him. It was stupid to mix wine and Xanax, as it was very sedative, but it was like 9:30 already. No one would blame him if he went up to bed in half an hour.
Out in the hall, they could hear feet thudding down the main staircase — Chip’s footsteps. He strode into the room, the recipient of welcoming noise, and glanced around to take inventory. He nodded at Carver with his chin, then sat down on the couch opposite him, next to their mother.
“Did someone put the kids to bed?” Maggie said.
“Connie did,” Chip said, leaning back against the couch and looking at his phone.
“Hi Chip,” Lillian chirped.
Chip smiled at her. “Hi Lillian.”
Carver knew there was no sexual relationship between his wife and brother, but they did get an inappropriate kick out of each other. In some ways they were the same type of person.
“I hope Connie meets someone soon who’s worthy of starting a family with,” Nora said.
“She’s only twenty-nine,” Chip said. He always defended Conway. It was something Carver genuinely liked about him.
“I didn’t say anything about her age,” Nora said, getting up to pour herself some more wine. “She’s a beautiful young woman and the world is her oyster. I just want her to get what she wants in life, and she wants kids.”
“I don’t think that’s do-or-die, for her,” Chip said.
“Well, of course, everyone’s ambivalent before they have them. But she adoresyourkids.”
“She likes my kids because she can give them back at the end of the night,” Chip said. “Not everyone’s cut out for a permanent shift.”
“You’re not giving her enough credit,” Nora said.
“Freedom is better then credit.”
“Let’s not discuss people who aren’t in the room,” Doug said, with a glance at his wife.
Next to Carver, Maggie let out a soft snort. No one seemed to hear this except him and Chip, who shot a knowing and surprisingly flirtatious look at her. Maybe they were mending fences. Who really cared? Carver’s eyes were glazing over. He loved how he felt when he combined wine and Xanax — like a puppet with a very warm hand inside it.
Carver had been doing a good job keeping his eyes and attention off of Scott, but now they wandered over to him. He found himself drawing his bottom lip into his mouth and sucking on it, which was ridiculous, but in his somewhat addled state he didn’t care.
He stopped right before Scott returned his look. Carver flicked his eyes away, embarrassed, and shifted compulsively in his seat. He waited, but still felt Scott’s eyes on his face. Finally he turned his head again, and they stared at each other. Scott licked his own lips, then broke his gaze and effortlessly joined in on the living room’s conversation as if he’d been paying attention the whole time.
Carver’s face warmed and his gut churned. He forced himself to wait at least ten seconds, then got to his feet and said, “I’m gonna go get ready for bed. I had a long day.”
“Perfect, yeah, let’s break this up,” Chip said, immediately getting up too.
Lillian pulled herself out of a conversation with Nora and Doug and followed her husband upstairs to his childhood bedroom, which now contained two abandoned treadmills andseveral storage boxes. Since they had last stayed here, his mother had thrown some loose jackets over the treadmills; Carver began to clear these off so he and Lillian could more conveniently do their cardio the following morning. He did this methodically as he waited for his very slight erection to subside, staring at his old Third Eye Blind poster which was peeling away from the wall by all four corners.
It had been a while since he’d last thought about his final fight with Scott. It was a fight Carver hoped to avoid having; he fantasized that Scott would read his mind and accept what he found there. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to go with him, it was that he couldn’t. He would be giving up everything he understood to go all in on a hand of cards he was too young and stupid to even make sense of.
But Scott hadn’t read his mind, he’d made him say it. He asked Carver to come over while his parents were out, and they’d had it out right there in the McCaffrey’s big, dilapidated Victorian foyer. “You’ve been jerking me around,” he said, “you’ve been leading me on about this,” and Carver couldn’t deny the charge but thought it was bullshit anyway, because Scott always knew he couldn’t go. He couldn’t have gone any more than he could rip himself in two. He had begged Scott to understand this and repeatedly bounced off a wall of hard defiance, his frustration mounting until he was screaming in Scott’s face. Scott stayed adamant the entire time that they could make it work, that Carver could make it work, that this impossible and fevered fantasy could be a five-year plan.
The fight ended in a draw. Neither of them moved a philosophical inch. Carver’s parting shot was to tell Scott that he would fail, that he would not get what he wanted out of California, and Scott snapped, “We’ll see, huh?”
Lillian lounged on the bed while Carver worked, looking at her phone. When he had finished folding the jackets and layingthem in a pile atop one of the storage boxes, she said, “I’m gonna call Bernardo.”
Bernardo was one of the principals who worked immediately underneath them. “Why?” Carver said.
