The Brothers Bishop. Bart Yates
He smiles. “Nathan? What are you doing?”
My eyes are suddenly wet and my throat feels tight. “Nothing,” I mumble. “Just thinking.”
He’s dressed in khaki shorts and a white cotton shirt with the two top buttons open, but that’s all I have time to notice before he walks over and pulls me close to him, burying his face in my neck. His hands are cool and dry on my back. A lot of people have hang-ups about touching other people’s skin, but that’s never been a problem with Tommy.
He pushes me away for a second, holding my shoulders, and says, “You’re so dark you look like an Indian,” then he hugs me again before finally letting go. He smells like coffee.
I finish locking the armoire. “Where are your friends?”
“They’re outside admiring your rhododendrons. Come out and meet them.”
“Let me get some clothes on first.”
“Don’t you dare. I want them to see how beautiful my big brother is.”
He’s always saying shit like that, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t like it. Compared to him I look like Quasimodo, but he never seems to notice. I can’t help but smile at him and he takes me by the hand and pulls me after him into the kitchen.
I may be the older brother, but this is the way it’s always been with us. My earliest memories are of him leading me around by the hand as soon as he could walk. I thought I’d finally escaped the leash when he moved to New York, yet every time he comes home I dust off my old collar and let him reattach the chain. I’ve been told my whole life how lucky I am to be so close to my brother, but I can’t tell you how often I’ve dreamed of being an only child or a member of a family where the siblings can’t stand each other.
No matter what anyone tells you, love is not necessarily a good thing.
CHAPTER 2
Tommy is telling a story when I join everybody on the back porch
“…and he had this thing about snakes. If he saw one while he was mowing he’d freak out and run away. He’d leave the mower on and come get either Nathan or me to finish the lawn while he cowered inside, peeking through the curtains.”
He’s talking about Dad. Dad pretended to be a bad-ass, but he was the biggest wienie in the world when it came to snakes and rats and spiders.
Tommy puts his bare foot on his boyfriend Philip’s leg, and Philip (I don’t remember his last name—Ellington? Edgerton?) wraps a hand around it. Tommy smiles at him and resumes his monologue. “So anyway, one morning we all came walking into the kitchen and there’s this big fucking garden snake coiled up by the stove. It was at least two feet long, and it’s swinging its head around and doing the snake thing with its tongue. Dad ran upstairs, screaming like a bad actress in a slasher movie.”
I look around the table. We’re sitting in a circle on green plastic lawn chairs, drinking Chardonnay and eating pepper crackers smeared with Brie and hot mustard. Tommy is between Philip and me, and Camille and Kyle—their last name is Colman—are across from us. Philip’s a makeup “artist” for some fledgling theater company (which pays next to nothing, so he makes ends meet by working at Blockbuster Video), Camille’s a sales rep for Apple Computers, and Kyle’s a grunt in an advertising firm. Tommy gave me a brief biographical sketch of each of them when he introduced us, but not much of it besides their jobs stuck in my head—except that the first time Tommy and Kyle met, Tommy tried to get Kyle to go to bed with him.
What a surprise.
Tommy shifts his foot as conspicuously as possible right onto Philip’s crotch, and Philip giggles and blushes. I doubt he’d be quite as pleased if I told him how many times I’ve seen Tommy do the same thing with other guys. The poor bastards—all pretty, all brainless—last about two months.
I’m not impressed with Tommy’s latest plaything. Philip hasn’t said more than two complete sentences since he got here. (One of those was to complain about his cell phone not working anywhere on my property, and the other was to express his outrage about the absence of a television.) To be fair, it’s difficult to make conversation with someone else’s tongue in your mouth, but he could at least try.
He is handsome, though. I’ll give him that. He’s got long brown hair, pulled back in a ponytail, and his skin is flawless, and his smile is genuine and open. He’s got one of those faces that doesn’t look real, though, because there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. When you look at most people, you can say “so-and-so’s nose is his best feature,” or “look at those great eyes.” But Philip doesn’t have a best feature. Even his nostrils are attractive.
Camille is a striking redhead in her mid-twenties, with long legs and perfect, baseball-sized breasts, and Kyle is a skinny, hairy guy with vague green eyes and prominent cheekbones. Camille’s wearing the same thing she had on when they got here—a white cotton skirt and a red blouse tied up at the bottom to show off her flat, pale stomach—but Kyle’s replaced the pants and a button-down shirt he had on earlier with black soccer shorts and a plain white V-neck T-shirt. A tuft of dark chest hair sticks out at the bottom of the V.
Incidentally, if he’s heterosexual, I’m a dachshund.
Ordinarily, I don’t even try to figure out what somebody else’s sexual thing is, because I’ve been dead wrong so many times in the past it’s embarrassing. But Kyle is a classic closet queer. He’s not especially effeminate, but ever since he got here he’s been following Tommy and Philip around like a horny puppy, and whenever they touch he gets this hungry expression on his face that’s so transparent it’s hard to watch. I can’t believe Camille married him. She’s either the stupidest or the blindest woman in New York. She’s obviously in love with him, staring at him every few seconds and falling silent whenever he says something, but he basically ignores her in favor of whatever else is going on.
Tommy takes a swig of his wine and glances around at his audience, making sure he’s still got everyone’s attention. “The snake isn’t really the good part of the story, though, because Nathan and I just got a shovel and tossed the thing out of the house. What was funny is that Nathan wouldn’t let me tell Dad we’d gotten rid of it.”
All three of them are watching Tommy like he’s the most fascinating human being on the planet. Some things never change. Tommy doesn’t really have friends. He has groupies.
He reaches over and massages my shoulder while he’s talking. “Remember? You went over to the bottom of the staircase and yelled that it had gotten away and we had no idea where it was.” He bursts out laughing. “Dad kept calling down to ask if we’d found it yet, and you just sat on the couch saying things like ‘Not yet, Dad. Better stay in your room until it turns up.’”
“I’d forgotten all about that.” I pour myself another glass of wine. “He stayed upstairs for eleven hours. He wouldn’t even come down to use the bathroom.”
Tommy’s always done a killer imitation of Dad and he does it now. His voice drops about a fifth and he talks really fast and loud. “‘You boys better find that damn snake soon, or I’ll come down there and wring your scrawny little necks. I mean it. Nathan? Tommy? I’m not messing around.’”
All of a sudden I’m laughing, too. “He ended up peeing out a window, remember? We were cooking dinner in the kitchen when I looked up and saw this stream of water shooting out onto the lawn from the second story. It was sunset and the light caught it just right and I remember thinking, ‘Gee, that’s kind of pretty.’”
Tommy’s taking a drink when I say this and he has to spit it back in his glass because he’s laughing so hard. “Oh, God, that’s right. He heard us laughing then and finally figured out we were fucking with him. He came flying down the stairs and we took off before he could get to us. We left the stove on and everything.”
Everybody laughs but when Camille asks what happened next Tommy shrugs, smile quickly fading, and changes