The Fall Line

I was driving up the rock-salted highways of New England in a beat-up 1988 AMC Gremlin painted neon-green, which I had recently acquired as a bribe. I was headed toward some town in the White Mountains called Eustis Valley. My brother, Les, and his wife, Carolyn, had just finished a series of gratuitous renovations on a house located on the side of a ski mountain up there, and they had invited me to come stay with them for the weekend. I accepted the invitation, even though I knew that it was only a pretense for Les to rub it all in my face.

Things were complicated between us. We had almost nothing in common, had never really gotten along, and went through long stretches of not speaking to one another at all. Ever since Les was a teenager, he’d molded himself in the image of a young Bill Buckley. He dressed in braided belts and topsiders, subscribed to magazines with catamarans and luxury watches on the covers, and spent hours in front of the mirror perfecting the bland, aristocratic smile of the leisure class. Our parents were both public school teachers, but Les felt destined for more. In high school he landed a gig at a local country club, and in just three summers had worked his way up from juice-bar lackey to launch coordinator at the spring regatta. He parlayed his connections there into a scholarship at Middlebury, where he grabbed one brass ring after another. Eventually, he married Carolyn. Her family was loaded. Somewhere along the line, one of her ancestors had patented a kind of synthetic polymer used in medical catheters. The catheter money was obscene, an endless reservoir of intergenerational wealth. Carolyn’s father helped Les get a job at the same ad agency who’d done the Incredible Edible Egg, and now he was director of marketing there. They had a house on the Gold Coast of Connecticut, another in Hilton Head, and now, the hat trick: a hyperborean retreat in the mountains of New Hampshire.