I Regret Everything (29 page)

—You walked dogs for an animal shelter?

—I don't know why I stopped. It gets you out of your own head.

Jeremy shielded his eyes and watched the woman with the sheepdog cross the street. I put my hand on his back and just stood on the sidewalk next to him. He pounded his chest and made a guttural sound. A violent cough shook his body and his face contorted in pain. He composed himself and squeezed my arm. Then he took out a vial of pills, opened it, and popped one in his mouth.

—What's that?

—Oxycontin.

The temperature was cooler than it would have been at this time a week earlier. Jeremy looked drained. Another cough wracked his chest. He covered his mouth with his hand and when he drew it away his palm was spattered with blood. I ran back into the restaurant to get some paper napkins. When I returned he was seated on a bench in front of the hardware store. I sat next to him so our legs touched. He wiped himself off and apologized. I put my arm over his shoulder and he leaned into me.

—Are you okay?

—I'm terrific.

Jeremy started to laugh, which was not what I expected. He coughed again and a little more blood came up.

He opened the napkin. —How would you describe this? he said. A spray of blood?

—A sheen?

—A mist? Blood mists the napkin? Can something mist a solid surface? A window, I suppose, but a window is transparent.

—What about a spew or a spurt?

—Too literal.

—And gross.

—What's a fresh way to describe it?

—Blood splashed the napkin?

—Good, but that's a lot of blood if it's splashing.

—I can't believe we're doing this, I said.

—What else is there to do?

—Stipples, I offered.

Jeremy smiled. Blood stipples the napkin. —Excellent, he said.

—Does your doctor know about this?

—The treatment didn't work.

Time isn't supposed to stop but I swear it stopped then. The external world froze and a well of inarticulate emotion flooded my senses. Heart and lungs, nothing stirred. Even the wind seemed to hold its breath. Then sound and movement sputtered back, feeling returned, and life pushed relentlessly forward. I took Jeremy's hand and held it. There was nothing else to do. We looked at each other and he shook his head, the way a person would when a comedian tells a bad joke.

—What about alternative medicine? Did you even read the stuff I gave you?

—I thought the poem you included was good.

—Fuck that, Jeremy. What about never give in? There are experimental treatments, alternative medicine, diets, science fiction shit they're coming up with. How can you just sit there and let your life slip away?

—Spaulding, I blood you.

—What?

—Sorry, that came out wrong, and he laughed.

—I blood you, too, I said.

That's what happens when you love someone. You “blood” them, if blood as a verb in my personal dictionary can be taken to mean “understand, comprehend, get them in your marrow and with unbridled affection, the deepest way we can absorb another human being.”

Jeremy didn't want to go back to the motel room so the two of us ambled to the beach. The gulls in Montauk usually careered over the waves in dense flocks but that afternoon a single bird could be glimpsed, immobile, suspended like a grayish-white kite in the cool updraft. We huddled together on the sand. Jeremy put his arm around my shoulder. I thought about what led me here and a pattern began to emerge. It was the same impulse that found me in the audience for Marshall's play. There were people you cared about. Maybe not many, but there were a few and when you cared about them enough it hurt.

A fine mist started to fall. We huddled together and for another few minutes watched a surfer in the rough ocean, a guy around my brother Gully's age. As the swells undulated beneath him, he straddled his board, fearless and in complete control. The rain intensified and a wave rolled in and he looked over his shoulder and started to paddle. The wave lifted his board and he rose to his feet, thrusting his arms to steady himself. He shuffled forward then back as he rode the curl with supreme assurance until his foot slipped and the board shot out from under him and the wave crashed down and he disappeared beneath the churning water. When his head popped up, we walked back to the motel.

 

* * *

 

I found a furnished sublet in Williamsburg, two rooms on the third floor of a brownstone that belonged to a journalist. It was filled with books and had a big desk set against a window that overlooked the street. Three mornings a week I volunteered at an animal shelter where I took packs of dogs for walks. Like Jeremy said, it gets you out of your head.

The leather bag he purchased in Rome was filled with notebooks, the kind with marbled bindings that students use. I devoured them. He had been keeping a journal since high school. There were pages and pages of ideas for poems and novels, observations about friends and schoolmates, trips he'd taken, political opinions (progressive but with a conservative streak, he wrote pages about Winston Churchill), sketches about his clients, and lots of stories about women he'd been with. He'd even written about me and when I read those parts it was hard to not be able to thank him for getting so much of it right. We think words bring us close to people when they're gone but they're a comfort, not a substitute. Words can summon a memory but absence has no cure.

Gully checked in regularly. He invited me out to Seattle but leaving New York didn't seem like a good idea for me so I tried to convince him to come back here. He said maybe he'd visit next summer and in the meantime he was always willing to Skype.

I spent an afternoon recreating the Poets' Wall from my memory of the bedroom in Connecticut. I put Jeremy's picture in the American section. It was one I took in Rome. He was looking right at the camera, a great photo for a book jacket.

One day I met my mother for lunch at a restaurant in Chelsea and we patched things up as best we could. She and Dodd were getting married and I congratulated her. I meant it, too.

—How are you getting along, Spall?

—I'm all right. Jeremy left me enough money to live on for a while.

—I'm sorry I never met him. But maybe next time you'll find someone more appropriate.

—Sure, next time.

—How are you feeling?

—I was scratching granite so long my fingers were bleeding, I said. But not anymore.

She wasn't sure how to process that but to her credit didn't ask me if I needed some “rest.” So, progress. The two of us have more work to do, but you can't accomplish everything over the course of a Cobb salad and coffee. We said goodbye on the sidewalk and after she got in a cab I vowed to be more generous in our relationship, to consider my mother as more than the sum of her bad decisions.

 

* * *

 

New York Times
, November 3, 2014

Poet and Lawyer Jeremy Best

The poet and attorney Jeremy Best, who published under the pen name Jinx Bell, died in Montauk, NY. Although Best was little known in his lifetime, his work recently caused a stir in the London literary world when several publishers vied for his first collection,
Akbar Isn't Here
. Faber & Faber will publish it next year and American and French editions are planned.

Best was raised in Manhattan where he attended the Dalton School. He earned his undergraduate degree at Sarah Lawrence College and a law degree at Columbia. Best also briefly attended the Iowa Writers' Workshop. At the time of his death, he was an associate in the trusts and estates department of Thatcher, Sturgess & Simonson in Manhattan. Managing partner Edward P. Simonson said, “Jeremy Best was a superb trusts and estates attorney. He was honorable and circumspect. We mourn his loss.”

He assumed the pen name Jinx Bell after leaving graduate school for reasons that remain obscure. Although his output was small, his poems were published in
The Paris Review
,
Poetry Magazine
,
Wagon Wheel Quarterly
, and
Black Clock
. In the few times reviewers engaged with his work, he was classified as a formalist or neo-Classicist. Ian Tiburon, the chairman of the Creative Writing Program at Columbia, said, “It's a mystery why he wasn't better known. Bell's work fuses traditional metric forms with contemporary subject matter in a pleasing and provocative way.”

The industrialist Dirk Trevelyan, a client of Best's, has endowed the establishment of the Best Prize that will carry an award of one hundred thousand dollars and be granted annually to an American poet.

He had no survivors

 

Because Jeremy was indentified as a “formalist” or “neo-Classicist” I didn't think he would want to be remembered in blank verse.

 

“Elegy for Jeremy Best”

 

Jeremy Best gave up the ghost last night.

Known by the pen name of Jinx Bell,

He had reams of poetry still to write.

 

At trusts and estates he did excel,

Workdays filled with codicils and wills.

Less unswerving paths lead to a Nobel.

 

His unnerving verse gave London's critics thrills.

It's ironic all this posthumous acclaim.

Fate prematurely stilled his pointed quills,

But now discerning readers know his name.

 

For language J.B. held dominant affection,

He believed it must be what we most treasure.

The power, he said, to effect deepest connection

 

Is how we should ultimately take its measure.

In verse he sought solace from a lifetime of regret,

Elegant ordering of words his greatest pleasure.

 

Our interplay resembled a jiving jazz quartet.

Although the time we spent was too attenuated,

We soared to heights found mainly in Tibet.

In stars and planets our verbs forever conjugated.

 

* * *

 

In early December Edward P called and asked me out to dinner. He suggested the University Club, a place he used to take Gully and me when he lived there right after the divorce. I would have preferred something more casual but my father liked it and you have to make allowances for another person's quirks. When I arrived five minutes early he was at a corner table sipping a Scotch. He looked pleased to see me and the feeling was definitely mutual. I sat down and ordered a cranberry juice and soda. The conversation was a little awkward. We told each other what we'd each been doing and I asked about my brothers and Katrina. They were all fine. He wanted to talk about me.

—Spall, he said, You really do need a plan. I understand if you don't want to work at the firm, but I'd love to know, do you intend to go to school? Are you going to get a job?

—This is the plan.

—I don't understand.

—To live my own life.

—Spall, that's not a plan.

—My plan is don't rush me.

The best thing you could say about our conversation was that it didn't turn into an argument. I had resumed seeing Dr. Margaret, who told me she thought I was doing relatively well even though there was definitely room for improvement. We said goodbye on Fifth Avenue and agreed to do it again.

On a Tuesday around noon a few days before Christmas I was experimenting in tetrameter when there was a knock at my door. I peered through the peephole and was surprised to see Marshall standing there looking like a marshmallow in a puffy winter coat. It was an azure blue and he looked like a little piece of sky. I opened the door. Behind him was a small black suitcase on rollers.

—I ran away from home.

—No, you didn't.

—Can I stay here?

I told him to come in and we'd talk about it. We were seated in my living room drinking tea. Marshall still had his coat on. It was too big and made him seem younger than he was.

—You got here on the subway by yourself?

—I don't want to live with my parents anymore. They're freaks.

—You like your brother, don't you?

—He's four feet tall and thinks he's going to be a professional basketball player.

—The Connecticut Simonsons are as typical as families get. It would be great if you moved in with me but I've already caused enough problems for everyone.

—I think I'm depressed.

A year earlier I was lying on my side with a stomach full of pills waiting for an ambulance. But now my brother needed me, which was crazy.

—What do you love, Marshall?

—Stuff, you know. Movies, plays, music, reading . . . oh, and my garden, which is, like, dead now.

—Your garden's not dead. It's winter.

—It's dead.

—Listen, you're thirteen years old, you live in the suburbs with parents who don't really get you . . . you're totally normal.

—I don't feel normal.

—My therapist says that word has a pretty broad definition these days.

—Mine says that, too.

We finished our tea and an hour later the two of us were gliding across the skating rink in Prospect Park. What is it about skating? It's hard to be in a bad mood when you're sliding over a silvery surface of ice. The morning had been overcast but the skies shifted and sunlight poured through the clouds. All the local schools were on vacation so the rink was swarming with mothers and fathers and their bundled kids. Some swirled boldly like saucers while others stumbled around the ice. Reckless boys with red faces chased one another, long-legged girls in warm jackets and short dresses performed spins and arabesques. Enlivened by physical activity, Marshall zipped through the teeming scene while I just tried to not break an ankle.

He had a way of being joyful that I envied and desperately hoped he would never lose and you could see it on every inch of his graceful body that crisp December afternoon. From the way he pitched his head to the way he moved his gloved hands, my exuberant little brother was a shot of bliss. A feeling hits you, it comes out of nowhere—no idea it was even there—and there's nothing you can do. It made me so happy to watch him I thought I might start bawling.