The Grievers (19 page)

As if I cared. As if I’d be the slightest bit impressed by the fact that Frank had an ottoman that cost roughly the same amount of money I made in a month or a china cabinet valued only slightly higher than my car. Please. Karen would talk about how comfortable their house was, how warm and inviting. She’d say she was just looking through the catalogues for decorating ideas, but I’d know what she was getting at even if she didn’t.

My paycheck was inadequate.

I wasn’t the man she needed me to be.

“I’m still trying to wrap my mind around this Billy Chin situation,” Frank said, serving himself salad from a large wooden bowl. “Do you remember how happy he used to be? How we all used to mess with each other?”

Be Neil
, I thought to myself.
Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil.

“Yeah,” I said. “Those were really good times.”

“Like the time you said that thing about his haircut?”

“What thing about his haircut?” I asked. “What are you talking about?”

“Something about how he must have cut his hair with a sharp rock?”

Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil.

“I’m not sure,” I said. “Is there any chance it was someone else?”

“I don’t think so,” Frank said. “I’m pretty sure it was you.”

“I’m pretty sure it wasn’t,” I said.

“Really?” Frank said. “You don’t remember? All of us taking shots at his haircut? And Billy was all, ‘What’s wrong with my haircut?’ And you were like, ‘Seriously, Billy? You look like you cut it with a sharp rock or something.’ Classic, man. The whole room was in stitches.”

“That never happened,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” Frank asked. “Of course it happened.”

“No,” I said, vaguely aware that Karen was squeezing my knee under the table. “It didn’t.”

Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil.

“I’m pretty sure it did,” Frank insisted.

Be Neil. Be Neil. Be Neil. Be—fuck it.

“I don’t care what you remember, Frank,” I said. “I’m telling you it didn’t happen. And if you don’t like it, then maybe you should go fuck yourself.”

I regretted the words as soon as they were out of my mouth—not so much because they insulted Frank but because they made me look like an asshole.

Maya cleared her throat and asked Frank to pass a pitcher of water.

Frank passed the water and asked Karen what she thought of the salad.

Karen said that the salad was delicious and told Maya that she loved her necklace.

A
LL THROUGH
the main course and then through dessert, Maya and Karen kept the conversation on an even keel with talk of their jobs, their favorite movies, and whatever else people talk about when they have nothing in common. When I wasn’t complimenting Maya’s prowess in the kitchen only to find out that Frank had done the lion’s share of cooking, I was making noises deep in my throat to suggest that I agreed with everything that everyone was saying—if only to prove that I knew how to behave in polite society. But when Frank offered to give us a tour of the house, I declined. It was a school night, I told him, and I’d already stayed up way past my bedtime. Though Karen agreed, she promised to give Maya a call so they could meet for lunch sometime. When Maya said it sounded like a great idea, all I could envision was an eternity of dinner parties at Frank’s house, the four of us growing older and older with each passing year, with nothing but idle chatter and halfremembered lies about our days at the Academy to fill the silence between us. And when Karen and Maya went so far as to hug each other before saying goodbye, I knew my fate was sealed.

“Lunch?” I said as the Dearborns waved to us from their front step. “What were you thinking?”

I looked in my rearview mirror and cursed Frank as I pulled out of his driveway.

“They’re not
that
bad,” Karen said.

“Maybe
she
isn’t,” I said. “But
he
sure as hell is. And to tell you the truth, I’m not all that sure about her either. I wouldn’t be surprised if she works for Dow Chemical or something—developing a new improved formula for napalm.”

“She teaches kindergarten,” Karen said. “You’d know that if you’d been paying attention.”

“Oh, and I’m sure she invites her entire class over to the house all the time.
Would you like the grand tour?
Please. As if we don’t already know their house is bigger than ours.”

“It’s what people do, Charley. They show other people their homes. It’s called being polite.”

“Right,” I said. “Polite. They were politely rubbing our noses in the fact that we’re poor.”

“We’re not poor, Charley.”

“We’re not rich either.”

“Since when has that mattered?”

“It doesn’t.” I snapped the radio on and off, and we drove for a while in silence—out of Frank’s neighborhood and through the narrow tunnel that led under the railroad tracks separating my world from his.
The wrong side of the tracks
, I though glumly. Even my failures were shot through with clichés. “I just wish I were doing something with my life.”

“You’ll hit your stride. Once you finish your dissertation—”

“Sure,” I said. “My dissertation. Like that’s going anywhere.”

“Give it some time,” Karen said.

“Time,” I said. “I’ve had all the time in the world, and where has it gotten me? Did I tell you I went down to the bridge where Billy killed himself?”

“No,” Karen said. “You didn’t. You don’t tell me much of anything lately.”

“Well, I did,” I said. “I looked right over the edge and saw everything he saw. And for a second there, I understood why he did it. Only for a second, though. But long enough.”

“Long enough for what?” Karen asked.

I turned onto our street and pretended not to hear my wife’s question as the gravel popped under our tires.

“Charley, please. Long enough for what?”

“Long enough to know I could never do it,” I said, cutting the engine. “Jump, I mean. I don’t have it in me.”

I opened my door, but Karen stayed still.

“Are you coming?” I asked.

“I don’t like when you get this way, Charley.”

“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry.”

“How can you just say that to me? How can you just tell me that you nearly killed yourself and decided at the last second that you couldn’t do it?”

“Nearly killed myself?” I said. “That’s not what I was saying at all.”

“Then what were you saying?”

“I was saying that I took a ride to the Henry Avenue Bridge. I was saying that I looked over the edge. I was saying that I knew how Billy felt. But I was also saying that I couldn’t do that—that I couldn’t jump. That was my whole point. I would never do something like that.”

“Okay,” Karen said quietly. “But I want you to talk with someone about this. It doesn’t have to be me, and it doesn’t have to be a professional. But you really need to talk to someone. Neil, maybe. Or Dwayne, or Sean. Hell, talk to Greg Packer if it helps, but talk to
someone
, Charley. I mean it. Something’s eating you up inside, and I hate seeing you so miserable.”

“I know,” I said again. And again, “I’m sorry.”

Karen leaned over the gearshift and kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were soft and warm in the cool night air. I was a good man, she said. That was why she married me.

All she wanted was for me to be happy.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN  

T
he minivan pulled into the parking lot at noon. It was a boxy Plymouth Voyager with wood trim and tinted windows. The driver wore tight jeans and a white tee shirt, and she gave me a wave as she stepped from the vehicle. Or not a wave so much as a quick glance over the frames of her sunglasses as she raised a finger to indicate that she’d be with me in a second. Then she turned back to the minivan, and I knew I was screwed. Inside, I could see five shadowy figures trying their best to strangle each other in the cargo hold; and though I tried to back away as the woman reached for the silver handle of the sliding door, my costume was too bulky and my range of motion far too restricted for me to make even a respectable attempt at retreat.

Tumbling from the vehicle in a chaotic tangle of bright yellow soccer jerseys, heavy cleats, and shin guards, the kids saw me immediately and made a beeline for my balloons. My guess as the earth shook beneath me was that I had approximately three seconds to live, and when the pushing started, I toppled right over.

My first instinct was to let go of the balloons, but I’d tied them to my wrist on the advice of Sue and the guy who smelled like sausage. In theory, it was good advice, but in the real world, it only gave my assailants something to fight for, so three of them started kicking me with their hard, heavy, hateful cleats, and the other two yanked so violently on the balloons that my hand turned five shades of purple.

So this was my life, I thought glumly, wondering where it had all gone wrong as the sprinklers came on and the kids skittered away. When I was four years old, my mother used to warn me against doing anything dangerous by telling me that if I got killed, she’d have to put me in a box and bury me underground. Now here I was, sinking into the muddy lawn in front of the bank inside my giant dollar sign, and it wasn’t because of anything I’d done. In fact, with the striking exception of asking Karen to marry me, I couldn’t think of a single thing that I’d actually
done
since graduating from the Academy. College, sure, but even graduating with honors was more a matter of figuring out which classes would require the least amount of work than of cracking open the occasional book and learning something. Even grad school was nothing more than an attempt at escaping the real world after two years of bouncing from job to job in quasi-corporate America. Temping, editing, proofreading. Before Billy, I used to joke that I’d rather hang myself than line edit another accounting textbook—by way of an explanation for quitting my last job, by way of justifying my choice to return to school, by way of insisting that I wasn’t a failure. I was moving up, I was trying to say. I was taking charge. I was plotting a course to a better future. But really I was only taking the path of least resistance. The only good thing—the only real thing—that came as a result of grad school was meeting Karen. Now I was floundering with my dissertation and, if I really wanted to be honest with myself, floundering in my marriage as well. All because of my aversion to work. All because I refused to
do
anything.

Because doing something meant change.

Because change meant growing up.

Because growing up meant leaving so much behind.

Phil Ennis was only half-right when he said that I thought my hands were clean because I was a cynic. The real truth was the reverse of that: I wore a cynical mask to keep myself from getting too attached to anything, to protect myself from getting too involved, to distance myself from the living because in the end I knew the only thing that separated them from the dead was time and that everyone I loved would one day be gone. So I learned to turn everything into a joke—my friends, my job, my house, my life—and when Billy died, the joke stopped being funny.

This was no way for an adult to live, I told myself as the sprinklers cut off and I heard a fresh set of footsteps squishing across the lawn. And it wasn’t enough to be Neil or the replacement Neil or whoever it was I’d been trying to be since Neil got pissed at me for sending the wrong letter to Ennis. What I needed to do was stand on my own two feet. What I needed to do was learn to be me.