Everything Changes

everything okay? With you, with us, with work. Everything.”
    I choose my words carefully. “Everything’s fine, Hope. Really. I’m just feeling exhausted, the kind of exhausted that movie stars get when they check into hospitals and their reps announce to everyone that they’re suffering from exhaustion. That kind of exhausted. Except I don’t have reps, so I’m just laying low for a day or two so that I can be well rested and happy at our engagement party. That’s all. Okay?”
    “Okay,” she says, mollified by my reference to the party. “I love you, babe. Call me later.”
    “I will.”
    Hanging up feels portentous, the powerful sense of an opportunity missed, although I have no idea what that might have been.

    The phone rings again a few minutes later, and, thinking it might be Hope, I pick it up.
    “Where the hell are you?” Bill shouts hysterically into the phone.
    Fuck. “I’m calling in sick,” I say.
    “You can’t disappear for a day and then call in sick!” Bill protests. “Hodges is on the warpath!”
    “Tell him I’m working on it,” I say. “As soon as I know something, I’ll call him.”
    “I’m not your goddamn secretary!” he screams at me. “You call him right now, Zack. I mean it. I don’t know what’s gotten into you, but if you blow this, you’re finished here. Do you read me?”
    “I’m already finished,” I say.
    “Excuse me?”
    “Okay,” I say, and hang up the phone. I’m thinking it might not be a bad idea to leave my cell phone home today.

Chapter 22
    It’s unseasonably warm for October and there I am, in the middle of the working day, cruising down Houston in a Lexus convertible, top town, blasting Elvis Costello through the Bose speakers, looking every inch like someone who has his shit together. I catch a glimpse of myself reflected in the window of an electronics shop and, for a moment there, I almost fool myself.
    Matt’s waiting for me on the stoop of his Lower East Side building, dressed in jeans and a torn roll-neck sweater, his version of presentable, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with his iPod. “Hey,” he says, ambling over to the car.
    “Where’s Elton?”
    “Fuck.”
    He runs back upstairs and returns a minute later carrying a small brown shopping bag. “Elton,” he says with a smirk, tossing the bag into the backseat.
    The first time our mother saw Matt’s shaved head, she cried for days, telling him that nothing in her life had ever made her sadder than seeing her baby’s head like that. “Your husband cheated on you,” he pointed out. “Your sister died of breast cancer.”
    “This is worse,” she insisted through her tears.
    Matt shaved his head as a concession to his receding hairline, unbecoming for the front man of a punk pop band, and he refused to grow it back. But every time Lela saw him, she’d cry inconsolably. Matt’s girlfriend at the time worked in the costume department of
Saturday Night Live,
and in a moment of inspiration she brought home a wig created for an Elton John sketch that was bumped at the last minute. It was a near-perfect fit, and from then on, Matt would wear the wig when he went to visit Lela. They never discussed it, but somehow the Elton John hair was an acceptable surrogate and the issue was thus wordlessly resolved.
    We hit the FDR at top speed and it feels good, two brothers on a midday road trip, the wind flowing over the windshield to kiss the tops of our heads, the sun-dappled surface of the East River shining like sequins, and it’s so easy to imagine us in another life, one in which we’re both successful and better adjusted, able to positively impact ourselves and each other, our ambitions and desires manifest, and not muted by the restive inner monologue of discontent that is our birthright.
    Matt names the bridges under his breath. The Brooklyn Bridge, the Queensboro, the Triboro, and, off in the distance, the Whitestone and the Throgs Neck. That was what Pete always did when we were kids in the back of Norm’s LeSabre, returning on Sunday evenings from visiting our grandmother in Brooklyn, heads on shoulders in the backseat, Norm and Lela singing along to Simon and Garfunkel and Frank Sinatra on WPAT-FM 93, the rhythmic bumping of the highway seams lulling us to sleep. It’s one of the only lingering memories I have of us as a family, of feeling insulated and complete.
    We’re driving along the service road in Riverdale when Matt suddenly sits up in his seat. “I