Envy by Kathryn Harrison Page B

filler show called
People in the
News.
”
    â€œOh?” his father says.
    Will nods, watching his expression. “Same old, same old.” His father doesn’t answer, and Will frowns at him. “It still bugs me, you know it does, his turning his back on all of us. I can’t square it. Coming after . . . after he was . . . well, after that toast at the rehearsal dinner.”
    His father waves a hand through the air. “Let it go,” he says, as he does whenever Will drags Mitch into their conversations.
Let it go.
Let him go. Give it a rest. Do yourself a favor: let it go.
But how?
    Will doesn’t say anything, remembering his brother the summer they were at camp together in the Adirondacks, both of them thirteen, an age he associates primarily with the onslaught of wet dreams. He sees Mitch’s long body moving underwater, white, ghostly, aimed toward the dock where Will was standing, his face breaking through the surface. He came up out of the water and onto the dock in one motion, already more graceful and at ease in water than on land. It was an all-boys camp they attended that summer, and some of the campers teased Mitch about his birthmark, a port-wine stain that colored more than half of his face purple, but it had been Will whom this angered. Mitch was stung, he must have been, but whatever pain he felt in the moment seemed to fade. Or rather, Mitch faded, he became increasingly vague and distant—in Will’s memory it’s as if he is out of focus, an outline blurring into the background—while Will seethed with rage he couldn’t control. Like two people long married, he and Mitch had developed a tacit, if not unconscious, symbiosis, one in which Will bore their humiliation, both the shame of his twin’s disfigurement as well as the imperative to respond to insult. For his part, Mitch represented their capacity for patience and longsufferingness. Superficially, he did.
    That summer, Will got into fights on his brother’s behalf and, after bloodying a boy’s nose, was given formal warning by the camp director. A report of his misconduct was sent home to their parents, and in reparation for the nose, he’d been denied an afternoon of tubing on the river, instructed to spend those hours composing a letter of apology to the owner of the nose and another letter to the nose’s mother and father. As he remembers it, he had to write about a dozen drafts of each before he was able to purge the letters of recriminations against the boy he’d punched, and it required an extraordinary act of will to actually form the word
sorry.
Then, not an hour after he’d presented the letters to the director, he overheard a kid call Mitch an ugly douche bag and, before he knew what he was doing, had attacked him. The camp director called their parents to ask that they pick Will up; he was expelled.
    Mitch was encouraged to stay, but the twins left together, and though there was little discussion of what had happened, it was that summer, before eighth grade, that Will and Mitch and their parents became aware of what should have been apparent for some time: his and Mitch’s mutual, even symbiotic, maladjustment. Because Mitch had to bear the birthmark physically, Will had assigned himself its psychic burden.
    â€œHey,” his father says, “where’d you go?”
    â€œNowhere. Actually, I was thinking about that summer I got kicked out of camp.”
    â€œWhat about it?”
    â€œI don’t know. I guess it was the beginning of my being aware that things between Mitch and me were pretty seriously screwed up. That I didn’t respond to people on my own terms, or for my own sake, because I’d fallen into the habit of empathizing with Mitch. As if nothing were happening to me, not really, or not independently. I know, I know,” he says, seeing his father’s expression. “You’ve heard this before. And what’s the use in