Osmosis

They were looking at it, two heads side by side, and Tony thinking it was shocking but unsurprising, too.

“Have you ever?” Clea says without taking her eyes off the image on the screen.

Tony knows the question is directed at him, that Clea wants an answer, but still takes it as a term of admonishment, a variation on something a Southerner might say in polite society, although Clea isn’t from the South.

“It’s certainly awkward,” Tony says. “For him, us.”

“No,” Clea says, “have you ever done that?”

“Didn’t we just not too long ago?”

She makes a face. “You know it’s been a while and you know that’s not what I’m asking.”

Tony pushes up from the kitchen island he’s been leaning on and pours himself some bourbon. Evan Williams. Borderline rotgut, but passable. What he used to drink before he got married.

“So have you?”

“That’s how you want to start this night,” Tony says. “With your brother arriving any minute?”

Clea closes the laptop. “You’re avoiding the question,” she says. “Does that mean you have then? If you have, just tell me, please.”

“My God,” Tony says and takes a drink.

She eyes him steadily, slow blinks a lack of satisfaction, but for the moment drops him from her sights.

“I haven’t seen him in a year,” she says. “Now I know why.”

Tony swallows some Evan Williams, speaks before the bourbon has slid completely down his throat so that his voice sounds gravelly. “You make it sound like he’s purposely avoiding you, as if he could know you saw that. It was seven years ago, if you’d looked closely. And you’d never have seen it if what’s her name hadn’t texted you. Today of all days? Right before he gets here? Man.”

“Her name is Emily. And man what?”

“Well, do they have a history or something? Your brother and Emily? She have it in for him or something?”

Clea avoids this last question entirely. “What difference does it make when this happened? Seeing my brother’s mugshot makes it seem like yesterday.”

“Yes,” Tony says, “but it’s not, and all I’m saying is that you not seeing him in a year has nothing to do with it.”

“I wonder if anyone else knows,” Clea says, obviously not listening.

“Like who?”

“My parents? Barb?”

“Oh,” Tony says, “right.” He sips from his glass.

“I bet not,” Clea says. “I’d have heard. Don’t you think I’d have heard? Something like this?”

“I really couldn’t say.”

“No,” Clea says, thinking, “I would have. Barb would have told me.”

“So now you have breaking news to share with family, is that it? On a seven-year-old incident.”

“I don’t know what to do with the information, can’t you understand? It’s one thing when it’s a celebrity or something. That doesn’t feel real. This does. Men in the 21st century don’t do this kind of thing. It’s creepy.”

“So’s the Internet. I’m sure your brother’s as embarrassed as anything. Have you thought of that?”

“He should have thought of that.”

“Okay, fine,” Tony says, “but we don’t know the whole story. If it were a bigger issue, he probably would have said something to someone.”

“Would you, given the nature of it?”

For a moment, they are both silent. Tony swallows more bourbon.

“Internet,” he says, but mainly to himself only. “For God’s sake. News like this isn’t meant to be found over and over again with such ease, is it? Go to a library and use one of those microfilm things. One time and you’ll never go back unless you’re doing a dissertation or something and resources are limited. But the Internet has made us all little investigators? Worse, judges. It’s too much. Seven years. Jeez-us. The past is meant to recede. At least somewhat. Maybe that’s the biggest problem today. The past never recedes as it should any longer. Things won’t let it. We won’t. Now something like this, because it’s right there and because no one can look at the fine print and read a date, it’s like it happened yesterday? We create a narrative for ourselves? How is that fair to the poor guy?”

“Poor guy?”

“You know what I mean.”

“It sounds like you’re defending him.”

“No,” Tony says, “I’m just not condemning him. I mean, no one does anything wrong anymore? We’re supposed to live in this society of perfect people? That’s robots, Clea. Human beings screw.”

Steady eyes. No satisfaction. Clea moves across the kitchen and begins arranging pillows on the couch, something she did ten minutes earlier.

“I don’t want to be nervous,” she says. “Feel this way.”

“Then don’t be and don’t.” Tony sits down in the chair with its back to the window and sips the bourbon. Evening has fallen over their property, their house, their suburb, the city of Fairfield. After a moment, Clea sits on the arm of the chair and looks at the top of Tony’s head. She thinks of touching it, where the hair swirls in such a way so that it shows his scalp, eye of a hurricane on Doppler radar, but doesn’t.

“What do you think she’s like?”

“Who,” Tony says.

“Jerry’s girlfriend. I saw a picture online somewhere.”

“Make sure you bring that up.”

With her left knee, which is kinked up under her right leg, Clea shoves his shoulder hard enough so that bourbon slops over the rim of his glass.

“Watch it,” Tony says.

“Does it make it better or worse that he’s bringing her?”

“Neither.”

“No,” Clea says, “something. It does make it something. I just can’t tell what. I mean, I feel so bad for her, don’t you?”

“Maybe she knows,” Tony says, staring straight ahead. “Ever thought of that? Maybe he told her. Maybe forgiveness.”

She shakes her head. “The idea. Awful.”

“I don’t know the woman,” Tony says. “Jesus. Let them get here.”

Eyes looking, but no satisfaction.

“You still haven’t answered me.”

“I most certainly did,” Tony says and gets to his feet. He goes to the sink where he drains his glass but holds onto it.

“Not once?” Clea says. She doesn’t turn around to face him.

“How long have you known me?” Tony says. “You ask this now?”

Clea untangles her legs but doesn’t look in his direction. “It’s new and unsettling information about someone I care about—love.” She adds this last word after a noticeable but undramatic pause, as if she’s surprised but unalarmed to find the word out of place stowed in a sock drawer. “Naturally seeing that makes me wonder.”

“This is about your brother,” Tony says.

“And your friend.”

“He’s your brother first.”

“The blood of friendship runs deep.” Clea wants Tony to look at her.

Without doing so, he says, “Yes, and?”

“He never said anything?”

“He did not.” He was certain not to add “I’d have told you,” for he was unsure if that would have been the case had Jerry discussed any of this with him.

“I can’t get over it in general,” Clea says. “My own brother? And doing that now? Today? With all that’s finally coming to light between men and women? Harassment, assault. MeToo. Why would Jerry want to be automatically linked to that?”

Now Tony looks up quickly from his glass, into which he’s been staring as if it were a porthole of a ship through which, if he positioned himself just so, he might shimmy and drop into a roily black sea.

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at,” he says.

She looks at him and her lips work momentarily, almost feebly, like a much older woman. “Not getting at anything. Just what I said. What aren’t you understanding? Doesn’t someone automatically co-join those two things now?”

“He was paying for sex and got caught,” Tony says, “not assaulting a woman.”

“How do you know that?”

He points at the silent clam of the laptop on the island.

“Wouldn’t it have said? Assault case? It was a sting operation.” He was about to add “stupid sap,” but instead tilts his empty glass at an absurd angle and waits to see how long the lone trace of Evan Williams clinging to the bottom will take to reach his lips. When it doesn’t, he turns and pours more.

“I don’t think it matters,” Clea is saying. “It’s all tied up in the same thing now. Same idea. God, so gross. So upsetting and disappointing.”

“That’s not entirely fair though,” Tony says, “is it?”

“Fair? I don’t think fairness comes into it. I think it’s all fair game now.”

“So your brother’s Harvey Weinstein?”

Clea appears to think about this for a moment and then nods. “In a sense, sure. Okay, well, no. I mean, I hope not. I hope it’s just this, but again, we’ve all been spun around by our shoulders haven’t we?”

“What?”

“Women, men. The age, the time. Pour me some of that.” She comes over to him and holds out a glass. Tony fills it halfway with the Evan Williams.

“Spun around to face the cold, enduring chill of that truth,” she continues. “And I’m sorry if my brother gets caught in the wake.”

Tony slumps down into the couch this time and looks out across the room into the encroaching darkness. Streetlights pick up cold, disjointed fingers of stripped bare oaks. Snow would arrive soon. He looks, wondering why he’d never gone to California when he’d wanted to. 20 years ago? Why not? He could have. He wasn’t married then, had no children. He thinks of his children now. Where were his son and daughter at five o’clock on a Wednesday in early winter? Tony looks across the room at a calendar on the wall but can’t make out the words from there. He guesses: his daughter would be at track practice, his son at band. He sips from his glass. Were decisions people made or not made simply a result of convenience, opportunity, or some larger fateful mechanism at work beyond human control, pushing and preventing, choosing and not choosing? His not choosing led him here, a good life, no doubt, but more often lately he’d been viewing it as the assembly of a huge moment made up of a number of smaller ones on the other side of which he had expected to witness an opposite but equally pleasing vista. But it seemed there was only the ascent and nothing after. No, he thinks to himself, sitting there. Immature. Can’t think that way. Can’t consider the other road. Only the immature and undeveloped do that. Or lament. Isn’t that the point of the Frost poem?

“Wasn’t he,” Clea is saying.

“Wasn’t he what?”

“Handsome? Jerry. Wasn’t he?”

“He’s not dead. He’s still handsome,” Tony says.

“So why then? Why does a handsome guy have to do something like that?”

Clea sits down next to him and Tony moves his position, sighs and grunts all at the same time. It was a muscle memory to some extent, a physicality he deployed whenever he wanted to send a message of annoyance, irritation. More than anything, though, it was failure of intimacy. And though words weren’t usually needed, now he says, “Ludicrous.”

“What is?”

“What you’re implying,” Tony says. “As if only the unattractive have those needs?”

“Don’t be crude.”

“Crude? I’m being honest.”

“It still doesn’t make sense.”

“To you, maybe,” Tony says.

“Yes,” Clea says and nods emphatically, almost angrily. “To me. So?”

“You don’t know?”

“Know what?”

“The reason.” He is speaking quickly now, his questions and responses nipping at the heels of hers.

“Reason?” she says. “You mean, cause? I don’t see where there would be any reason. I see wrong.”

“Fine, sure,” Tony says, “but handsome or not makes no difference.”

“It does now.”

He looks at her. Hands clasped behind his head, elbows winged out. A casual position betraying how he feels.

“I just don’t know how I can bear to see him again,” Clea says, “my handsome little brother.”

“Again, ludicrous. Do you realize how absurd you sound?”

“Do I?” She asks this genuinely. “I’m sorry, but I can’t.”

“No,” Tony says, “I mean more the thought process in general. That you’re having it one way or another. Having it at all.” Then, less audibly, “poor sap.”

“What?”

“Nothing. Just—your brother made a mistake, obviously.”

“No,” she says. “Not mistake. Deliberate action. And it is more horrible now, today. Makes it so much worse.”

“It does?”
“Yes.”

“So in another time it would have been more acceptable?”

“No, terrible then, too,” she says, “but definitely worse now.”

“So if you’d known about this, seen that on the screen a month ago, you wouldn’t have invited him here?”

She doesn’t say anything for a moment. “It’s not that.”

“No,” Tony says, struggling to control his tone and not allowing her to expand further, “it’s impossible is what it is. All of it. Seeing it, knowing it. Any which way. Like a goddamn billboard.”

“Why are you getting angry?”

“I’m not,” Tony says.

“It seems like you are.” Clea looks at him, eyes searching now, engaged. “Why shouldn’t we know? Anyone?”

“So it’s all a giant public square?”

“Sure,” she says, “why not?”

This was power. Tony knew it, had seen and understood it. There was no response for it but to think. To have thoughts and not show them. He gazes out the window knowing that soon headlights would pick up the tree branches and the shrubs and perhaps flakes of snow. Headlights of a car belonging to her not-unhandsome brother. Poor sap, Tony wanted to say, though he knew that was wrong. The point was that through it all, all of it, the high increasing volume of endless voices and sounds and cries and shouts and opinion that marked the 21st century, through terrorism and the changing American idea, the cons and the recessions, the elections, pandemics, social unrest, earthquakes, snowstorms and hurricanes, through it all, through all of it, what they were talking about in this moment but not really talking about in so many words was the only constant no one could actually talk about.

“So say something then,” Tony says loudly, almost interrupting his own thinking. The force surprises him. He draws his head back as if he’s been slapped in the face. His eyes find Clea’s. “Say something then,” he says again, this time more softly.

“I intend to. The minute he gets here.”

“Sure, that’ll go over well. In front of his girlfriend you’ve never met?”

“I’ll take him aside,” she says. She looks at her fingertips. “He’s my little brother. I know how to handle—”

“They’re all full,” Tony says, says this with his head back, his face pointed toward the ceiling. He is very still, looking upwards, but feels like he’s falling, stumbling. He lifts his head and, without looking at Clea, takes a long drink of the bourbon. He has lost track of how much he’s had.

“What are,” she says.

“From Los Angeles to Brooklyn. Men’s shoes lined up in entryways. Don’t kid yourself. They’re all full.”

He feels suddenly ill, but doesn’t move, only lifts his head, sees her sitting there, mouth partially open.

“How do you know?”

“Handsome and ugly alike. Little brothers, big brothers. Brothers and non-brothers.” He smiles, but wants to vomit.

“How?”

“Shoes lined up.”

Clea looks at him, blinking, calm but becoming angry. He looks back.

“Tell me how you know that, Tony. What are you really saying?”

She moves up on the sofa so that their faces are nearly touching. Tony’s eyes, however, are closed.

“Tell me, Tony. How do you know? Answer. Have you?”

He finds he wants to say with that same stumbling sensation, he thought he was about to speak but the silence continued, from another poem he couldn’t locate right then—why was he thinking about poetry so much?—but he stifles this. What comes out of his mouth is “poor sap, stupid idiot.”

“Tony,” Clea says loudly again. But his eyes are closed. She sips from her glass, eyes him carefully, then more softly says, “Tony? Tell me how you know.”

Tony doesn’t respond. His breathing indicates he’s fallen asleep, or at least is faking it. Clea sits and stares at her husband, then she too leans back, sinks into the couch, closes her eyes. Sometime later, she’s not entirely sure how long, she hears a car coming from the left. She opens her eyes enough to see the lights of the vehicle sweep and bounce across the yard as it turns swiftly into the driveway, illuminating bare tree branches, stiffening grass, and the falling shadows inside an unlit house.