Everyman

You wicked bastards! You sulky fuckers! You condemning little shits! Would everything be different, he asked himself, if I'd been different and done things differently? Would it all be less lonely than it is now? Of course it would! But this is what I did! I am seventy-one. This is the man I have made. This is what I did to get here, and there's nothing more to be said!

Over the years, luckily, he heard regularly from Howie. In his late fifties Howie, like almost all the partners who reached that age except for the top three or four, had retired from Goldman Sachs; by then he was worth easily fifty million dollars. He was soon sitting on numerous corporate boards, eventually being named chairman of Procter amp; Gamble, for whom he'd done arbitrage in his early days. In his seventies, still vigorous and eager to be working, he'd become a consultant to a Boston buyout firm specializing in financial institutions and traveled to look for potential acquisitions. Yet despite the continuing responsibilities and the demands on Howie's time, the two brothers exchanged phone calls a couple of times a month, calls that could sometimes go on for as long as half an hour, with one of them laughingly entertaining the other with recollections of their years growing up and of comical moments from their days at school and in the jewelry store.

Now, though, when they spoke, an unwarranted coldness came over him, and to his brother's joviality his response was silence. The reason was ridiculous. He hated Howie because of his robust good health. He hated Howie because he'd never in his life been a patient in a hospital, because disease was unknown to him, because nowhere was his body scarred from the surgical knife, nor were there six metal stents lodged in his arteries along with a cardiac alarm system tucked into the wall of his chest that was called a defibrillator, a word that when he first heard it pronounced by his cardiologist was unknown to him and sounded, i

He did not retain for long the spiteful desire for his brother to lose his health – that far he could not go as an envier, since his brother's losing his health would not result in his regaining his own. Nothing could restore his health, his youth, or invigorate his talent. He could, nonetheless, in a frenzied mood, almost reach a point where he could believe that Howie's good health was responsible for his own compromised health, even though he knew better, even though he was not without a civilized person's tolerant understanding of the puzzle of inequality and misfortune. Back when the psychoanalyst had glibly diagnosed the symptoms of severe appendicitis as a case of envy, he was still very much his parents' son and barely acquainted with the feelings that come with believing that the possessions of another might better belong to you. But now he knew; in his old age he had discovered the emotional state that robs the envier of his serenity and, worse, his realism – he hated Howie for that biological endowment that should have been his as well.

Suddenly he could not stand his brother in the primitive, instinctual way that his sons could not stand him.

He had been hoping there would be a woman in the painting classes in whom he might take an interest – that was half the reason for giving them. But pairing up with one of the widows his age toward whom he felt no attraction proved to be beyond him, though the robustly healthy young women he saw jogging along the boardwalk when he took his morning walk, still all curves and gleaming hair and, to his eyes, seemingly more beautiful than their counterparts of an earlier era had ever been, were not sufficiently lacking in common sense to exchange with him anything other than a professionally i

And he'd become bored with his painting. For many years he'd dreamed of the uninterrupted span of time that his retirement would afford him to paint – as had thousands and thousands of other art directors who'd also earned their livelihood working in ad agencies. But after painting almost every day since moving to the shore, he had run out of interest in what he was doing. The urgent demand to paint had lifted, the enterprise designed to fill the rest of his life fizzled out. He had no more ideas. Every picture he worked on came out looking like the last one. His brightly colored abstractions had always been prominently displayed in the Starfish Beach show of local artists, and of the three that were taken by a gallery in the nearby seaside tourist town, all had been sold to the gallery's best customers. But that was nearly two years ago. Now he had nothing to show. It had all come to nothing. As a painter he was and probably always had been no more than the "happy cobbler" he happened to know he'd been dubbed by the satirical son. It was as though painting had been an exorcism. But designed to expel what malignancy? The oldest of his self-delusions? Or had he run to painting to attempt to deliver himself from the knowledge that you are born to live and you die instead? Suddenly he was lost in nothing, in the sound of the two syllables "nothing" no less than in the nothingness, lost and drifting, and the dread began to seep in. Nothing comes without risk, he thought, nothing, nothing – there's nothing that doesn't backfire, not even painting stupid pictures!

He explained to Nancy, when she asked about his work, that he'd had "an irreversible aesthetic vasectomy."

"Something will start you again," she said, accepting the hyperbolic language with an absolving laugh. She had been permeated by the quality of her mother's kindness, by the inability to remain aloof from another's need, by the day-to-day earthborn soulfulness that he had disastrously undervalued and thrown away – thrown away without begi