After he has talked about this plan with Elaine, then Bob will call Ave himself, and he is sure Ave will like the plan and will want to draw up the papers immediately. Bob is amazed that he didn’t think of this before, back when he and Ave first talked about going into business together. Bob has decided that he and Ave will also have to talk about Elaine, and he knows that during that particular discussion, which will concern Elaine’s confession to Bob and will therefore oblige Bob to confess to Ave his somewhat complicated and delayed reactions to it, he will reveal that, as one aspect of those complications, he made love to Ave’s girlfriend Honduras. This will clear the air, Bob believes, at last, and then they will stand on an equal footing once again, just like they did years ago, for Ave will own one boat, Bob will own the other, they will split the profits of the fishing business, and both of them will have slept with the other man’s woman once, a thing done in the past and completely forgiven now. Bob knows he’ll never make love to Honduras again, especially after the way she treated him the one time he did make love to her. He’ll be friendly with her, all right, but cool.
Then, finally, when he has finished talking with Ave, Bob will go through his brother’s papers and will try to put the poor man’s affairs in order as best he can. He’ll approach all the problems and tasks, meet everyone’s needs, in a perfectly rational way, be the man everyone can count on, Sarah, Jessica, the police, even Eddie’s creditors. He’ll leave the weeping to the others, let them be sad, frightened, angry, hurt or relieved; he will be calm, logical, competent. At times like this, he thinks, a man has to know how to take charge.
Of course, nothing works out as Bob planned. He finds himself weeping in front of the police, for the sight of his brother’s body as they lift it onto a wheeled stretcher suddenly fills him with a strange, overwhelming pity that he has never felt before. In a flash, he realizes that Eddie is totally powerless now; a glowing red bed of coals has become a bag of waters. A spirit that shouted at Bob, that beat on him and prodded and directed him, scolded and shamed him for thirty-one years, has been miraculously transformed into a typed note that claims only absence for itself.
It’s a terrible thing, Bob thinks. To go from being something to being nothing! A terrible thing for a man to endure — to be nothing after having been something. And for the first time, Bob pities his older brother, and his pity instantly releases him, so that when he weeps aloud for Eddie, in sorrow, of course, like any brother, but, more crucially, with pity as well, he weeps for himself, in joy. And as he weeps, he trembles, torn by the contending emotions that are called grief — pity and sudden potency, sorrow and joy, the horrified, abandoned child, bereft and frightened, and the exhilarated man, powerful and self-admiring.
He has trouble speaking to the police officer in charge, and as a result instantly forgets the name of the funeral home the officer recommends to him and to which Bob agrees they should send the body, so that, a few minutes later, when he is speaking on the telephone to Sarah, his brother’s widow, he is unable to tell her where they have taken Eddie’s body.
“You asshole,” she says, and she quickly apologizes but then begins to speak to him as if he were an adolescent boy. She tells him that she’ll fly down this afternoon and for him not to bother picking her up at Orlando, she can get out to the house on her own. “Just leave everything the way it is,” she instructs him. “And don’t let anybody inside the house. No lawyers, no bankers, no accountants, no nothing,” she says. “You stay there and watch TV or whatever you want, but don’t touch anything and don’t let anyone into the house. Jesus, what a fucking mess, excuse my French. Did he leave a letter or a note or anything around?”
Bob says yes, there was a note.
“What’s it say?”
He pulls out the envelope and reads the note to her, slowly, as if reading it for the first time.
Sarah laughs. “I guess the hell he was a failure. Took him long enough to admit it, though.”
“Sarah, for God’s sake! How can you say stuff like that? The man’s dead now. You’ve
