The Grievers

A
LSO BY
M
ARC
S
CHUSTER

The Singular Exploits of Wonder Mom & Party Girl

Don DeLillo, Jean Baudrillard, and the Consumer Conundrum

The Grievers

MARC SCHUSTER

Copyright © 2012 by Marc Schuster

All rights reserved. No part of this publication, or parts thereof, may be reproduced in any form, except for the inclusion of brief quotes in a review, without the written permission of the publisher.

For information, address:

The Permanent Press

4170 Noyac Road

Sag Harbor, NY 11963

www.thepermanentpress.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Schuster, Marc—

The grievers / Marc Schuster.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-1-57962-263-3

eISBN 1-57962-308-5

1. Male friendship—Fiction. 2. Friends—Death—Fiction. 3. Funeral rites and ceremonies—Fiction. 4. Bereavement—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction I. Title.

PS3619.C48327G75 2012

813'.6—dc23

2012004249

Printed in the United States of America.

For Wei Han Chu
and Dan Barry

  CHAPTER ONE  

T
he telephone rang a second time, and Karen turned up her hands like a martyr revealing stigmata. The gesture was meant, I imagined, to imply that the pasty clumps of grayish glue and gooey shreds of wallpaper clinging to her rubber gloves rendered my wife incapable of dealing with the outside world—a silent argument that left me no choice but to counter her position with the irrefutable evidence of my own.

How am I supposed to answer the phone from all the way up here?
I all but demanded, waving my trowel and heat gun at the stepladder beneath me.
Besides, this is serious business. Can’t you see I’m using a power tool?

A heat gun is hardly a power tool
, Karen’s raised eyebrows seemed to imply.
Climb down from your ladder and pick up the phone.

Hardly a power tool? You plug it in, don’t you? It makes a noise, doesn’t it?

I conveyed these questions by scrunching my nose and curling my mouth into a sneer. Regardless of whether we were reading each other correctly, the conversation had, in the space of a heartbeat, gained enough momentum to erupt into a full-blown battle of frowns, shrugs, and eyepopping grimaces when the telephone rang a third time and reminded us why we were arguing in the first place.

Conceding defeat with an aggrieved sigh, Karen raced to the kitchen and answered the phone. When she returned a few seconds later with the gooey receiver pressed to her chest, I knew it was a call I didn’t want to take.

“It’s Mrs. Chin,” she whispered.

I lowered my trowel and laid my heat gun on the top step of the ladder. The last time I’d seen Billy Chin was on New Year’s Eve. We spoke for ten minutes before I noticed the line of stitches running from the heel of his hand to the dark recesses of his sleeve. Six months later, I received a note from his mother informing me that he had died. When I wrote back, I said she could call me anytime, night or day, if she wanted to talk. The offer looked great on paper, but as I climbed down from my ladder and reached for the phone, it dawned on me for the first time that the words might mean something.

“Charley Schwartz?” Mrs. Chin asked.

All I wanted was to hear that Billy’s death had been an accident—that he was driving home from work one night when a tire came loose from the back of a truck and crashed through his windshield, or that he’d been held up at gunpoint or died pushing a child from the path of a speeding car, or, worst case scenario, that he’d uncovered a scandal at the health clinic where he’d been working and was permanently silenced by hired assassins. Part of me was even hoping that cancer was the culprit and that Billy had faced the disease with grace and elegance. I didn’t need him to be a hero, exactly. A victim would have been fine, an unsuspecting pawn caught up in circumstances beyond his control. What I didn’t want to hear from Billy’s mother was what I already knew, so I clutched at my most elaborate fantasies even as she told me the particulars of her son’s suicide.

He walked three blocks from home and jumped from the Henry Avenue Bridge, she said. A friend of the family identified the body. Like both of Billy’s parents, the old man was a doctor, and his wife had taken care of Billy when he was a baby. When Billy’s mother told me this last detail, her breath caught. He was always a happy boy—kind and generous, she said, like I’d written in the note I barely remembered writing. When the old man who identified the body asked why Billy jumped, those were the exact words his mother had used: because he was kind and generous, because he was thoughtful and polite, and he didn’t want to burden his parents with the responsibility of coming home to an overdose.

Mrs. Chin spoke in a quiet, fragile voice.

I listened without saying a word.

There had been a girl in his life—a Japanese grad student who left Billy to take care of her mother in Osaka. Though Mrs. Chin said she could hardly blame the girl, the edge in her voice betrayed a hint of scorn. The same edge crept into her voice when she mentioned Billy’s funeral. Of course I couldn’t have gone, she said, because she wanted to keep the event small, keep it dignified and manageable, and therefore didn’t invite anyone but family. Now that it was over, she wished I could have been there—that any of his friends from the Academy could have been there.

“He always loved the Academy,” Mrs. Chin said.

I didn’t know how to respond.

Founded in 1851, Saint Leonard’s Academy was one of three schools in the greater Philadelphia area that could legitimately call itself the city’s oldest prep school. Though no one at the Academy ever spoke the names of the other two institutions aloud, the official line was that one of them had relocated just beyond city limits after a fire in 1964 and that the other closed its doors for three months during the influenza pandemic of 1918. These accidents of geography and history allowed Saint Leonard’s to use the phrase “under continuous operation in the city of Philadelphia” in ways that no other school could dream of. An informal poll of the young men who attended Saint Leonard’s, however, revealed an altogether different, if not entirely subtle, distinction between their institution and the others. To wit, the other schools were full of pussies.

“It was a wonderful place,” I said, omitting the fact that the unearned swagger of newly minted Academy grads had, over the years, led some to refer to the school as the Bastard Factory. “For all of us.”

There was a long silence that I wanted to fill with anything but the sound of my own breathing, but all I could think about were the black stitches running up the inside of Billy’s wrist and how I never said a word about them to anyone.

“You were a good friend,” Mrs. Chin said eventually.

Though I suspected the opposite was true, I let it go. After we said goodbye, I hung up the phone and went back to work. Was I okay, Karen wanted to know as I climbed my ladder and reached for my heat gun?

I nodded and felt a lump growing in my throat.

“He jumped off a bridge,” I said.

“Oh, Charley.”

Karen stripped off her gloves, and my finger twitched on the trigger of the heat gun. The couch was shrouded in dirty sheets and plastic drop cloths, but Karen sat down anyway and motioned for me to join her.

I hated to stop working.

I wanted to plough forward.

I needed to put my house in order, but I couldn’t get the image of Billy’s stitches out of my head, couldn’t stop thinking about his last desperate seconds, couldn’t stop wondering if there was something I could have said or done, so I climbed down from my ladder, curled up next to my wife, and cried.

  CHAPTER TWO  

S
aint Leonard de Noblac was a sixth-century monk whose prayers saw the queen of France through a difficult pregnancy. By way of compensation, King Clovis the Magnificent promised him all the land he could traverse via donkey within a nine-day period, and to sweeten the deal, the king also gave Saint Leonard the authority to free any prisoners he stumbled upon throughout the remainder of his life. At least, this is what I gathered from the slideshow I watched along with a hundred other awkward, pimply teenage boys on my first morning at the Academy.