Donny

Donny

"We're here to celebrate one fucked-up family.”

Donny held up his wine glass and looked across the table towards his brother Brian and Brian’s wife. The wine began to dribble down the sides of the glass as he brought it to his lips.

“Congratulations. Good job to each and every one of you.”
            Brian’s wife raised her glass slowly but did not drink. Brian kept his hands underneath the table in his lap. Donny reached over his plate towards the nearest dish and ladled the green beans onto it. The tip of his tie dangled into the gravy boat. He smacked as they slid down his gullet, each swallow punctuated by the slap of his lips.

“I’m being honest here.  You guys are really a piece of work. I’m so glad that we all invited ourselves here tonight.” He raised his glass once more and motioned for the others to follow.

Brian’s wife shuffled her feet in circles below the table but did not meet Donny’s toast. Donny and Brian’s half-brother Reggie, the final dinner guest, spoke.

“Thank you, Donny,” he said quietly, but growing louder with each sentiment, “for setting the bar high. For leading by example.”

Donny’s eyes began to roll up to the back of his head.

Brian’s wife tugs at Brian’s sleeves four or five hours earlier. The doors to the apartment’s side rooms are closed, and the kitchen of their shared apartment is clean for the first time in months. The mock marbled counters are scrubbed to a dull polish, the cabinets are closed, and the stove is free from melted cheese and sauce stains. A single fluorescent light buzzes underneath the microwave. Brian prefers it to the sound of buzzing flies.

“We don’t have to go if you really don’t want to,” she pleads. “I know this is always a tricky thing for you.” She stands behind him as he combs his hair. He peers into the window and tries to smooth out his cowlick, which is sticking straight out from the side of his head. She hugs him and rubs her hands on his stomach. The lick of hair won’t lie down properly.

“We’ve got to go,” he says to his reflection. Brian’s wife follows his eyes in the window, but Brian is still trying to flatten his head and does not look at her. “Donny is my brother, and at the very least, we’ve got to cut things off now that Dad is gone.” Brian finally turns around and faces her.

“This could be the last time that we ever have to listen to that bastard talk,” he says, and the couple leaves the apartment for their car on the street below.

The invitations had come by phone call a week earlier. That was the first surprise. Brian hadn’t realized that Donny had found his new phone number, or that he knew that his brother had moved back to the area.

“The estate goes to tying up Dad’s debts, as we all know by now, but I figured we might as well make use of the place before it goes up on the market.” Donny’s voice sounded strangely calm through the shroud of the telephone. “Reggie’s coming too, of course. Dad’s old business partner Oscar’s stopping by. Always thought he was a strange one. You notice he was the only one who cried at Dad’s funeral last month?”

The second surprise was the genuine promise of a cooked meal that greeted the couple as Donny opened the door. Donny bowed in the doorway of their parents’ former home and Brian could smell the wine on Donny’s breath as he kissed the side of Brian’s face. After releasing Brian’s cheeks from his palms, he held up Brian’s wife’s hand and modestly pressed his lips to it.

The third surprise was Donny’s apparent vigor. Each of his steps was practically a bound. The camel hair suit he wore didn’t quite fit, and it was too old for Brian’s magazine-fed taste, but Donny’s skinny body filled it with enough enthusiasm to compensate for this. His balding ring of hair was freshly cut.

“Glad to see the two of you still together,” he grinned, and led them into the dining room, where he pulled out a chair from the dining table for each of them.

“You make her seem like some sort of fling from back in college. We’ve been married for three years, Donny,” Brian said through clenched teeth as he sat down. “You were one of my groomsmen.” He rolled the stem of his water glass between his fingers as he spoke.

“Oh, I remember. It’s just that so often these things don’t work out,” Donny winked as he leapt back to the kitchen. “Remember dear old Dad and Mom. Or any of the other ones.”

Brian’s wife fidgeted in her chair and pulled the edge of her dress as far down her thighs as possible. She closed her hand over the tight bun on top of her head to check that everything was still in place. She was barely twenty-eight, and had met Brian at a bar near his apartment when she was a graduate student and he was still a junior partner at his law firm.

“I can talk my way out of anything,” he promised her that first night. She challenged him to talk himself out of a date the next weekend, and he accepted defeat.

“Honey, I don’t know if I like the way that tonight is going,” she whispered. She wanted to be back at the apartment watching television or writing up lesson plans for the new semester.

Brian didn’t look at her or speak. He was staring at the wall across from him. Several family portraits hung in a cascade, rows of faded faces smiling their eyes back at him.

The earliest portrait had only three people in it. It was a wedding picture with a diminutive Donny as ring bearer for Brian’s father and a dark woman who he knew to be his biological mother. Both parents squinted as if the photographer was unable to adjust the flash properly. The next portrait had four people in it. This was where Brian appeared, a chubby baby on his father’s lap. Young Donny leaned against the knee of their stepmother.

“This is the last time we ever have to come here,” Brian said, smiling for the first time, but without turning his head towards his wife. He hadn’t heard what she had said to him moments earlier. “I’m not going to say something about how this place is haunted by ghosts. That’s not true. But there’s no reason to ever come back.” He seemed satisfied with himself, as if he believed what he had said, and slumped back into his chair. She reached up and failed to flatten the hair that still stuck out from Brian’s head.

           

Oscar Szymanski was the next to arrive. He stepped from the taxi with just a suitcase in his hands and fidgeted on the porch while Brian opened the door for him.

“The most condolences. As many as possible, in fact, if you can imagine that all,” Oscar said as he shook Brian’s reluctant hand. Oscar’s head bobbed as he stepped over the threshold and he began to tour the house with Brian in tow.

 “I remember coming here not five years ago, no, it was eight, maybe the last time when I stopped by for a drink.”

Brian scratched the back of his head and mutely followed Oscar as he reminisced through each room. They stopped in the living room first. Brian noticed that the old television was gone, and that the curtains to the backyard weren’t just drawn, but permanently stapled to the drywall. Oscar took out a handkerchief to wipe dust off of one of the picture frames on the wall.

“Ah, the stories your father would tell me. The hours he would entertain me, in those early morning hours, here when all of your boys moved out. Oh! This painting, bought from a street vender when we slipped off to Morocco on a business trip.” He gingerly removed the frame from its hook and glanced at the door as if he intended to put the picture in his briefcase and run out of the house. Instead, he sheepishly offered the frame to Brian.

The picture was a fantastic scene from Venice which Brian was sure had never existed. The painter had not properly put in the shading or even bothered to paint most of the sky, leaving the impression of a lazy overcast day. Two men in suit coats waved to a woman being taken away in a boat. Their faces were turned away in an artistic avoidance of detail. The woman was too far off to need a face. Brian thought that it was just about the worst painting that he had ever seen.

“Yeah, that’s a good one,” he told Oscar. “To tell the truth, Mr. Szymanski, these things have been here so long I barely notice them.”

Oscar’s fingers twitched in rhythmic succession and he put the painting back on the wall as if he was laying his father in the ground. He shook his head, and the two of them walked upstairs. Oscar did not spend much time in any of the boys’ rooms, or the bathroom, but he let out a cry of anguish when he saw the state of the master bedroom.

“Thirty-odd years in such a beautiful slice of suburbia, and this is what it comes to,” Oscar moaned. There were clothes strewn all over the floor, and the bed could be barely seen beneath a mountain of books and dirty plates. “It’s as if your father is just in the bathroom. Like he’ll walk back in and greet us any moment.” Oscar gulped and went back downstairs. Brian said nothing, but realized where Donny had been living the last month, and where the camel hair suit had been salvaged from.

The four of them had begun to eat, finding it unbearable to wait on Reggie any longer, when the doorbell rang. Reggie walked through the entryway with his nose turned upwards. A twenty-something girl jangled on arm.

“What the hell you doing, showing up late like you don’t even want to be here?” Brian said, but he hugged Reggie and passed him the ham with a grim smile when they sat down at the table. Reggie’s girl reapplied her purple lipstick and her hand magnetically moved back to Reggie’s shoulder as she positioned herself on his lap.

“Donny has very graciously prepared this dinner for us,” Brian continued.

Reggie smirked back at Brian as if the two were sharing a cruel joke. Brian’s shoulders finally began to fall from where they had been clenched. Reggie touched the harsh lines of his long sideburns and flicked an imaginary piece of dirt from his between his thumb and forefinger. He started to work on Oscar as he moved the food onto his plate.

“Jesus Christ, you look as if you’ve never had someone you love die,” Reggie told the sweating man. “Something you gotta learn to deal with as you grow up, I guess.” If not for the girl, Reggie would have been the youngest person at the table.

“Why are you going on trying to make Mr. Szymanski uncomfortable, now?” Brian asked. He had his first glass of Donny’s wine inside of him, and was ready to start enjoying himself.

“It’s quite all right, you know,” Oscar stammered, “It’s not really my place to be here, and with all the, um, emotional feelings that can get quite high --”

“Let’s not let this get out of control,” Donny interrupted. “I invited several of Dad’s colleagues or friends, and Oscar was simply the only one still in the area.”

“And you’ve got such a great track record with planning things, Donny,” Reggie replied. “Just another one of your successes.” Oscar excused himself with a loud thump and stumbled to the bathroom.

Donny passed the bottle of wine to Brian’s wife, who refilled both her glass, and, after hesitation, Brian’s glass as well.

Oscar bumped back into the dining room and excused himself just after nine o’clock. Donny looked at the clock and could feel the beginnings of his approaching hangover. His leg bounced underneath the table. He cut off Reggie mid-sneer and raised his voice.

“Let’s not sit here and lie to ourselves,” he said, and then waited for his brothers to look at him.

"We're here to celebrate one fucked-up family.”

Donny held up his wine glass and looked across the table towards Brian and Brian’s wife. The wine began to dribble down the sides of the glass as he brought it to his lips.

“Congratulations. Good job to each and every one of you. Our noble and distinguished family is the master at getting what we want.” Donny barely took a sip.
            Brian’s wife raised her glass slowly but did not drink. Reggie’s girl had moved to a proper seat and was following Donny’s hands with a dull gaze. Brian kept his hands underneath the table in his lap. Donny reached over his plate towards the nearest dish and ladled the green beans onto it. The tip of his tie dangled into the gravy boat. He smacked as they slid down his gullet, each swallow punctuated by the slap of his lips.

“I’m being honest here. Anything you want, you name it – You get it. You guys are really a piece of work. Law school students, veterans of foreign wars, retail managers, professors – You named it – you got it. I’m so glad I can add ex-con to that list. I’m so glad I can look at a family of go-getters and heroes and say, ‘Gee, maybe not one of them has a heart, but aren’t we ambitious!’ I’m so glad that we all invited ourselves here tonight.” He raised his glass once more with a final jerk and twisted his free hand for the others to follow. His eyebrows were perilously high on his forehead, waiting for response.

Brian’s wife shuffled her feet in circles below the table but did not meet Donny’s toast. Reggie spoke a rejoinder.

“Thank you, Donny,” he said quietly, “for setting the bar high. For leading by example.” His voice began to fill the room. “For showing us that with a big heart, and a big mouth, and a big asshole, you get far in life. It’s treated you real well, hasn’t it?”

Donny’s eyes began to roll up to the back of his head.

“Reggie, you’re a real gentleman. An upstanding citizen, especially compared to me. And you shouldn’t have come back here if you didn’t want to see us again.”

“Christ, Donny, don’t you get it?” Brian shouted. “Are you really too thick to understand? We know this is screwed up. Why do you think we’ve spent as much time apart from each other as possible?” Brian grabbed his wife’s arm, but his motion was too rough and she stood up.

“Good night, Donny. Thank you for dinner.” She politely walked out of the dining room and waited for Brian to stumble from his chair to her waiting arm.

            Neither Donny nor Reggie spoke until after Brian had left. Donny twirled his wine glass, still mostly full, and looked over to the kitchen door. His previously red face was drained, and he slouched one arm over the next chair as he spoke.

            “Can you believe it? Gone for weeks, and the cleaning lady still shows up to make sure everything is ship-shape. You think he never even saw her, never talked to her? You think she even knows he’s dead?” Donny put the last of the cold food on his plate in his mouth.

            “I don’t even think he’s dead,” Reggie said. He lit a cigarette and watched it burn for a minute before he began to smoke. He tapped the ashes onto the floor. “At least, not any more dead than he was before.”

            Reggie leaned back and motioned towards the staircase. “You’re living in this shit hole now? You seem happy enough. That’s great. You know, Donny, thanks to you, I’m turning over a new leaf. Tonight, I really care about you.” He grinned towards his older brother. “I’m really glad that this is what makes you happy and that this is how you show us you care. ”

Donny frowned back and blinked.

            “No one wanted dinner,” he said, as if Reggie had already left. “Why would anyone come if they didn’t want to see each other?”

            “You’ve got it in your head that we’re some sort of family,” Reggie said in the same condescending tone he had used with Oscar. “But that’s the thing. We weren’t before. Why would we be now? Hell, we’re only half related anyways.”

            “But that’s what we have to work with, Reggie,” Donny said. “No mother, no father. Who knows how long it’ll even be before you don’t actually have a family?”

            Donny slowly walked upstairs to the master bedroom. Shifting a pile of dirty clothes, he uncovered the old television and turned it on. Curling up in a lumpy spot on the bed, Donny went to sleep while Reggie finished his cigarette downstairs.

            Brian was more drunk than he had realized.

            “Fuck. I’m more drunk than I realized.” He reached out for his wife’s arm to steady himself, but dragged his hand along her back.

            “Stop, please,” she says to him. They’re at the door to their apartment. The unemployment notices still hang on the refrigerator. She clears off a spot at the table and begins to move towards the cabinets, but Brian catches her in his hands with a simian swing and pulls her close.

            “What a fucking great night,” he says to her, looking into her eyes. “Let’s celebrate.”

            She opens to the door to their bed room. The trash has not been taken out. Dirty clothes lay on the floor and hang from the drawers of the dresser. The sheets are unmade. Brian begins to kiss even as he continues to talk about his family.

            “This is from Donny,” he smiles. “And this is for Reggie.” But as they begin to strip in the tepid darkness, he sweats and feels strange. Their clothes smell worse than he thought. He thinks of his Dad’s suit, hanging loosely from Donny’s shoulders. He stops moving.

            His wife wants to ask what’s wrong, but it is a concern of habit. She drops her arms and curls them across her body.

Without a word, he climbs out of the bed room and lies down on the floor of the freshly cleaned kitchen, where the linoleum smells of pine-scented cleaner. When he has stopped the world from spinning, he promises himself that the rest of the world is as harsh against his cheek. While waiting for the impulse to stand and return to the bedroom, he passes out on the floor.