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It is difficult enough for any of us to unsplice the strands of our separate identities as individuals; it is even more difficult to understand the nature of a relationship, which possesses its own identity and shapes the behavior of the people inside it through a complicated reverb of expectations, perceptions and emotional history. I think there is still something of the Cowboy City dynamic acting between Paul and me, though much has changed.

I’m also guessing that Paul and I together are not exactly the same people we are apart. Together, we behave in ways that tap into the demands and consequences of our history. I think this is probably not unusual. It seems to me unlikely that any person has one true self. We have an array of tightly packed contingencies of self, which may differ in small and not necessarily hypocritical ways, and we shuffle among them depending on the present moment and the force field of our relationships. Sometimes Paul and I need a break from each other’s company, to breathe the air outside of brotherhood, but I’m also guessing that we are, more often than not, our better selves when we are together, especially when we are working.

Paul comes in and out of my childhood memories like a cat in a quiet room. Sometimes he’s there; sometimes he’s not. I must have been watching out for myself most of the time as we were growing up and working out the confusion and trouble that was almost always going on around me—the shouting, the drinking, the insecurity. I also sensed from an early age that Paul’s only real vulnerability was his size and that if he ever grew big he would be able to handle the world better than I ever could. How did I understand this at age seven? I don’t know, but I did.

The good-boy epithet that my mother hung on me could not have been entirely true, even though she had me convinced of it. Paul was a stutterer as a child. (Occasionally, he still halts for the briefest moment at a word when he’s making an explanation. No one is aware of it except for me, I think.) His stuttering was getting worse when he was about eight, and somehow the school nurse got involved. There was a conference with my mother at Lee Street Elementary School in New Brunswick, where we lived for just over three years in the same apartment, a long stretch for us. There was a series of follow-ups with a woman who was (I’m guessing) a speech pathologist. I recall her wearing a white uniform and white stockings, and those meetings and examinations concluded with the speech pathologist suggesting that I—the good boy!—was part of the problem. She wanted me to stop correcting Paul when he spoke.

“You must try not to interrupt him, or tell him what he’s doing wrong,” she said.

So I guess I must have been a bit of a shit when I was eleven or twelve, already a little too perfect. I remember, too, that we used to fight a lot—real fights, wrestling on the ground, rubbing knuckles in the scalp, headlocks. I was bigger and always won the fights, though there may have been a few that ended in a deadlock because Paul was unwilling to admit defeat. The source of the fights was almost always my attempt to coerce him into helping me clean the house, or some small part of it. My mother worked at her hairdresser job six days a week and was content with a messy home, and I often felt compelled to straighten it out for her. My compulsion was not so strong that I was willing to do it by myself. Each of our housecleaning sessions thus was usually preceded by a half hour of tussling. I would get up from watching after-school television and tell Paul we had to clean up before Mom got home, and he would say no. To get his cooperation, sometimes it was enough to push Paul’s arm up behind his back in a chicken wing to the point of pain; other times stronger measures were required to get him to clear and wipe the kitchen table. Paul, by the way, disputes all of this, claiming it was he who wanted to clean the house and I who refused.