The Good Die Young

It was twenty-three manicured acres of privileged seclusion until Brad saw the reporter perched in an oak tree. She was eyeing him from beyond the eight-foot stone wall that ran the perimeter of his parents’ Virginia estate. He kept walking, paralleling the fat limb she was sitting on, trying to recapture his Zen-like mood, his yogic breathing, his we are all one with the cosmos, unpracticed at the art though he was. His thoughts turned to a beanbag gun, like the ones that bounty hunters used, and he imagined two bags aimed right at her chest, pow-pow, her arms flailing out, her legs whipping back over her head, her shoes the last thing he saw. She could write a tell-all best seller, flash the twin welts on her chest at Morley Safer on 60 Minutes, win a Pulitzer for having four nipples.

Brad cut a meandering path away from her, clasping his hands behind his back, heading for the sculpture garden, coining a title in his head for her book: Cornered in the Home of his Childhood, which he had to admit pretty well described his current situation. Around front at the iron gates of his parents’ estate, reporters milled in numbers so large that private security men had been deployed to form a human colonnade, linked arm-in-arm, lining the way for liveried chauffeurs to deliver guests to the wake. Inside the house, despite its baronial expanse, the mourning had grown so claustrophobic, the jangling of the phones so incessant, that he had ventured out here every few hours to let off some steam unobserved. No way would he give up his strolling rights to one intrusive reporter; there were plenty of places where her eyes couldn’t go, the greenhouse the pool house the topiary where he’d played as a boy. “Media pukes,” he hissed to himself, his pet name for reporters, as he skulked through an arboretum of cherry trees, their last withered dregs of pink blossoms littering his way.

It wasn’t like he was ducking his responsibilities. He’d done his time in the reception line, the two-handed handshakes, the nodding pensively at well-intentioned remarks, even replying “how dear of you” when an aunt he hadn’t seen in years told him she thought that his brother Joey’s urn looked “at peace.” He was taking a break, that’s all, from the murmuring relatives and friends, from their humid sympathies. Out here on the grounds he could breathe, he could let his expression sour with his lifelong resentment of Joey, his half-brother Joey, the baggage from his mother’s first marriage, the black sheep, the cowardly suicide. The bourgeois cretin who wouldn’t have understood the privilege of aristocracy if it had slapped the smirk off his face. But in the sculpture garden now, as he ran his finger along the sinuous curve of a Henry Moore bronze, he heard a telltale click-whir-click, and looking up he saw them, an unholy shooting gallery of them, their elbows propped atop the stone wall, the sun glinting off their telephoto lenses. Like tourists at a wildlife preserve, where he was the cheetah. The bitch in the tree must have tipped them off. Christ! Betrayed by a woman who hadn’t even bothered to learn to dislike him.