The Weekend: A Novel by Peter Cameron Page B

inattentively and recklessly until some moment late in the game when he would discard the drink or smoke and bring the game to a swift, and for him victorious, conclusion.
    Poison! he would call out. Now I am poison!
    John’s mother had divorced his father and moved to Italy when he was five. John had stayed with his father in New York. Tony was born a year later. He had an Italian father who was, as his mother herself used to say, “never really in the picture.” In the beginning John had spent several summers in Europe with his mother and Tony, but Tony had been just a baby then, so John had played alone at the Mediterranean resorts his mother frequented. After a summer or two of that, though, John’s father had suggested he might like to go to camp and John had agreed. Camp Phoenicia was very different from Club Azul but John had liked the difference. He was aware of the difference, even then. Sometimes in the hot pine American woods he would catch a whiff of the cypressy smell of Italy and think: Tony and Mother are on the beach. I am not like that, he had told himself. And then he would think of his dad in New York with Florence (stepmother) and Susannah (half sister) and think: I am not like that, either. I am here, alone, in New Hampshire, at Camp Phoenicia. In a way he had never lost that feeling of himself, for that had been the first moment he was aware of having a sense of himself,
of having figured out who he was. And John felt he had not changed in any substantial way since then. The intervening years were a clear pool of water, and he could always look back through them and see, and recognize, that boy, alone, in the woods.
    One summer Tony had been sent to Camp Phoenicia. By then John was a junior counselor. Tony hated camp. He hated everything about it: the bunks and the sports and the cold lake and the food and all the other boys. He shivered all the time, and said he couldn’t get warm. He was sent home, all the way to Italy, after only two weeks. John felt as if he had failed: he was supposed to have looked out for his brother.
    The experience was a sort of sundering, but it proved, in the long run, to be mutually beneficial. Tony went on to cultivate his personality, which was very different from John’s, and John stopped trying to make Tony American, and masculine. For a while, as teenagers, they assumed they were opposites, not just different, and they had very little to do with each other. But as they got older and more complicated, the polar extremes they had so easily assumed grew uncomfortable and hard to maintain, and began to melt. As adults they found they were rather fond of, and fascinated by, each other.
    John had whacked the ball down near the river when he heard Marian calling him from up near the house. She was holding Roland, and Lyle and a young man in shorts were standing next to her. They were all looking down the lawn toward him. Marian waved for him to come. He hit the ball as hard as he could and then chased it up the hill, passing it on the way.
    “You’ve been practicing,” said Lyle. “That isn’t fair.”
    “Hey,” said John, between pants. “It’s good to see you.” They embraced sincerely yet a little awkwardly, for they had never worked out the physical component of their friendship.
    “This is Robert,” said Lyle. “And Robert, this is John.”
    John and Robert shook hands. “Did you have a good trip?” John asked.
    “Yes,” said Robert.
    “Look,” said Lyle suddenly, pointing to the river. “There’s the river.”
    “Yes,” said Robert. “I see it.” And then he realized that Lyle hadn’t really been pointing out the river so much as eliciting a comment about it, so he said, “It’s beautiful.”
    “Yes,” said Lyle, looking around. “How’s the garden?” he asked John.
    “I think I’ve outdone myself this year,” said John. “And I have to show you my wall.”
    “Well, let’s see,” said Lyle.
    “Don’t you want to come inside