“I’m not going to talk about it. Why are you talking to me? Why don’t you go sympathize with your brother?”
“He knows about this German?”
“His name is Hans.”
“That’s a German name,” Sam said, and he went outside to find Richard and sympathize with him.
Richard was crouching beside his daughter’s flower garden. His daughter was sitting on the grass across from him, talking to her flowers.
“You haven’t been bothering Alice, have you?” Richard said.
“Richard, she’s seeing a God-damned German,” Sam said.
“What does that have to do with anything?”
“What are you talking about?” the little girl asked.
That silenced both of them. They stared at the bright-orange flowers.
“Do you still love her?” Sam asked after his second drink.
They were in a bar, off a boardwalk. After their conversation about the German, Richard had asked Sam to go for a drive. They had driven thirty or forty miles to this bar, which neither of them had seen before and neither of them liked, although Sam was fascinated by a conversation now taking place between two blond transvestites on the bar stools to his right. He wondered if Richard knew that they weren’t really women, but he hadn’t been able to think of a way to work it into the conversation, and he started talking about Alice instead.
“I don’t know,” Richard said. “I think you were right. The Air Force, Mother, marriage—”
“They’re not real women,” Sam said.
“What?”
Sam thought that Richard had been staring at the two people he had been watching. A mistake on his part; Richard had just been glancing around the bar.
“Those two blondes on the bar stools. They’re men.”
Richard studied them. “Are you sure?” he said.
“Of course I’m sure. I live in N.Y.C., you know.”
“Maybe I’ll come live with you. Can I do that?”
“You always said you’d rather die than live in New York.”
“Well, are you telling me to kill myself, or is it O.K. if I move in with you?”
“If you want to,” Sam said. He shrugged. “There’s only one bedroom, you know.”
“I’ve been to your apartment, Sam.”
“I just wanted to remind you. You don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.”
“You’re right,” Richard said. “A God-damned German.”
The barmaid picked up their empty glasses and looked at them.
“This gentleman’s wife is in love with another man,” Sam said to her.
“I overheard,” she said.
“What do you think of that?” Sam asked her.
“Maybe German men aren’t as creepy as American men,” she said. “Do you want refills?”
After Richard moved in with Sam he began bringing animals into the apartment. He brought back a dog, a cat that stayed through the winter, and a blue parakeet that had been in a very small cage that Richard could not persuade the pet-store owner to replace. The bird flew around the apartment. The cat was wild for it, and Sam was relieved when the cat eventually disappeared. Once, Sam saw a mouse in the kitchen and assumed that it was another of Richard’s pets, until he realized that there was no cage for it in the apartment. When Richard came home he said that the mouse was not his. Sam called the exterminator, who refused to come in and spray the apartment because the dog had growled at him. Sam told this to his brother, to make him feel guilty for his irresponsibility. Instead, Richard brought another cat in. He said that it would get the mouse, but not for a while yet—it was only a kitten. Richard fed it cat food off the tip of a spoon.
Richard’s daughter came to visit. She loved all the animals—the big mutt that let her brush him, the cat that slept in her lap, the bird that she followed from room to room, talking to it, trying to get it to land on the back of her hand. For Christmas, she gave her father a rabbit. It was a fat white rabbit with one brown ear, and it was kept in a cage on the night table when neither Sam nor Richard was in the apartment to watch it and keep it away from the cat and the dog. Sam said that the only vicious thing Alice ever did was giving her daughter the rabbit to give Richard for Christmas. Eventually the rabbit died of a fever. It cost Sam one hundred and sixty dollars to treat the rabbit’s illness; Richard did not have a job, and could not pay anything. Sam kept a book of I.O.U.s. In it he wrote, “Death of rabbit—$160 to vet.” When Richard did get a job, he looked over the debt book. “Why couldn’t you just have written down the sum?” he asked Sam. “Why did you want to remind me about the rabbit?” He was so upset that he missed the second morning of his new job. “That was inhuman,” he said to Sam. “ ‘Death of rabbit—$160’—that was horrible. The poor rabbit. God damn you.” He couldn’t get control of himself.
