In Memory of Angel Clare (26 page)

Jack glanced around, until he realized Michael meant the radio, which was left on and tuned to a classical station. A plaintive, familiar melody for flute was playing. “Oh, uh. Cocteau used it. Eighteenth century. Seminal opera.” Jack had to recite facts to himself before he could remember the name. “
Orpheus and Eurydice
.”

“Yes,” Michael said solemnly. “Clarence liked it.”

“Clarence liked almost everything.” Jack hadn’t meant to sound sarcastic. He usually turned the radio off the minute he came home, but he left it on for Michael while he took off his jacket and hung it on the coat rack. “Let me use the toilet quickly and the bathroom’ll be all yours.”

He hurried back to the bathroom, wanting to get this peculiar visit over with as quickly as possible. Standing over the toilet, he glanced around to see if he’d left out anything that was too revealing about himself. There was something disturbingly intimate about a visitor using your bathtub.

When he finished and opened the bathroom door, he saw Michael still standing in the middle of the kitchen, Jack’s cat still bonelessly draped in the crook of his arm, his fingers lightly stroking her fur. He had the trancelike look of somebody listening to music, only the music was over and a sophisticatedly emotionless announcer was now talking.

What a ham, thought Jack, but he had to say, “Michael? Are you okay?”

Michael didn’t respond, but Elisabeth Vogler did, suddenly squirming around and jumping out of Michael’s arms. Michael rubbed his arms and said, “I’m just tired and dirty. I need a bath.”

“Well, all yours.” Jack gestured toward the bathroom, where he’d left the light on. “The shower works fine if you’d rather take a shower. A shower’s quicker.”

“No. A bath,” Michael muttered, but he stood where he was, gazing through the dark bedroom at the white rectangle of light as if it were a mile away. “When Clarence was sick—,” he began, and stopped.

Had the music set Michael off on Clarence again? If they were going to have another argument about who felt what, Jack was prepared to keep his temper. “Yes?”

“When Clarence was sick, did he resent anyone for how they behaved? Hate or blame or resent anyone for how they acted?”

The little bastard, thought Jack. He spoke stiffly, impersonally. He hadn’t said “you,” but it was clear he meant Jack, hitting him where he was most vulnerable now. “He never said anything. Not to me anyway. I hope not. But I don’t really know.” Jack realized he didn’t want to know. This was worse than what Ben had said to him. To be judged by someone who had died was worse than being judged by the living; there was no way of knowing what the dead really thought of you, no way of arguing with them or yourself. Had Clarence felt Jack avoided or neglected him? “Did he ever say anything to you?”

Michael narrowed his eyes at Jack, a critical, skeptical look. “No,” he said.

“We did what we could,” Jack insisted. “All of us. Although I know some of us could’ve done more.”

Michael winced and turned away, as if he were ashamed of what he’d used against Jack. “I’ll try not to make a mess,” he said and headed toward the bathroom, taking his bag with him. When he closed the bathroom door, he had to close it again and again, until the bolt finally clicked.

The noisy closing of the door hurt Jack: it sounded like an accusation he was someone who might steal a peek at a boy taking a bath. Jack turned off the radio and sat down at the kitchen table. There was a rumble of water filling a bathtub. No, he hadn’t done all he could when Clarence was ill. But does anyone truly believe they did all they could for someone who was dead? Even Michael, beneath his self-important grief and overwrought drama, probably felt he hadn’t done enough. Ben was right; Michael had done plenty. Who was Jack to feel critical of the boy for behaving the way he had during Clare’s illness when Jack had done so little? But even Michael must feel he hadn’t done enough.

With a closed door between them, Jack worried about Michael again. It was neurotic. Irritated beyond words by Michael in the flesh, he again felt sympathy and even fear for him in the abstract. Something bothered Michael today, maybe just guilt for having gone out and had a good time last night. Jack wanted to talk to him, patiently, firmly. But he recognized the violence in his desire to get through to the boy; cracking open the false drama to get at any real drama inside was analogous to cracking open Michael’s skull. Were his good intentions genuinely good? Jack feared he could be moral only when he was alone.

It was the saddest hour of the day, still light outside the living room windows but dark in the living room, pitch-dark in the bedroom, the electric light of the kitchen feeble and lonesome. This was the hour when Jack felt most melancholy and immobile. He sat in his chair and sighed. Leaning forward, he could see the thin crack of light along the bottom of the bathroom door. He wanted to say something friendly to Michael, but he didn’t know what. He hoped to rise out of his stupor and find a kind word by the time Michael finished his bath.

After he got the door to shut, Michael turned the little paint-caked knob that locked it. He turned around and saw himself in the mirror above the sink, a gray pinched face in a bright room of white tile. The ceramic fixtures were black. The toilet seat was black. There was a pattern of black little squares in the ceramic tiles on the floor. Everything else was white, but a white that looked less clean the longer Michael looked at it. A gray film of dirt coated each horizontal surface: Jack was a pig. Michael felt dirty. There was a black rubber stopper for the tub. Michael plugged it in and turned the hot water on.

The bathtub was low and modern, an elongated roundness inside a rectangle. Michael had imagined a bigger tub, a deep boat with clawed feet. This would do, he insisted, and hung his coat on a hook on the door. He watched himself in the mirror while he unbuttoned his shirt, his blank face blurring into a mask as the glass fogged over, his wild hair hovering like smoke. With his shirt still on, he turned and stood over the toilet. He always needed to pee before he saw a movie, took a test, or had sex, anything that excited him. Water drilled water for a long time, the bubbles multiplying and crowding out. He remembered standing on his father’s shoes so he could get high enough to pee into the bowl, his father holding him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t fall in. He had been three years old.

A louder drilling of water thundered behind him. Would this be like drowning? Would his whole life flash in front of him?

Without flushing, he lowered the lid and sat down to untie his shoes. There was a gouge across the top of one shoe. When did that happen? His fingers felt too big for the knots and he finally pried the shoes off and tossed them in the corner. There was a magazine rack between the corner and the toilet, a wooden box stuffed with
The Nation, New York Review of Books,
and
Stallion.
Jack, he remembered. Jack the jerk. Jack the judge. “Some of us could’ve done more,” he had said. He judged Michael as someone so worthless he couldn’t even say “you” when he accused him. Jack was outside the door, already worming in a book or feeding his face straight from the refrigerator, already forgetting Michael was here, never imagining what Michael was about to do to him. Michael would show him. Michael would show all of them. He remembered to pull the note from his shirt pocket before he tossed the shirt into the corner.

He tossed all his clothes onto the floor in the corner, proving to himself he knew it didn’t matter now if they got wet. He hesitated before he pulled down his underpants, as if this were sex where complete nakedness was the point of no return. Then he pulled them off and felt nothing different, not even naked, only long and bony. His body looked sickly, a hollow chest, a pale stomach that bellied out from his skinniness, a penis like a vulnerable pipe of skin. He touched his testicles and ran his fingers through the coarse kink and curl of hair, wanting to remember how much his body had meant to him once, but everything was numb or ticklish.

He was ready, but the water was still too shallow. He turned on the cold water with the hot, sat on the edge of the tub, and waited. There was no window and the little room was steamy and warm, yet Michael felt cold, his skin tightening around him. He picked up the note he had left on the corner of the sink, opened it, and read it, sitting with his arms and legs bunched together. The note made no sense, as if somebody else had written it, then made perfect sense. “I cannot live… You never understood before.” It was like a note to himself, a reminder. He had to do this. He set the note on the lid of the toilet, flattening it out with both hands. He took up the paper bag and took out the little box. He broke open the box—it was like peeling back the shell of a shrimp. He set the plastic and metal dispenser on the edge of the tub—it looked delicate there, almost electronic.

He reached over and turned off both faucets at once. The silence was sudden and perfect. Yet he was still conscious in this small white room, still alive. He lifted one foot over the bathtub wall. The water burned. He brought his other foot in. The water lightly lapped against the tub. He slowly lowered himself, his body freezing, his teeth chattering until he sat on heat, then in heat, then sank until warm water rose up to his neck and he was warm all over. Heat flowed into every fold and corner. It was like the sex in his dream, sex without any genitals involved. Maybe his dream hadn’t been about sex at all but about this. The clear water gently swung back and forth, his body dissolving in warmth. It would be beautiful, like a slow drowning in self.

Michael sat up and took the dispenser from the edge of the tub. He drew back the tiny shuttle and pushed it forward to squeeze out a blade. The first blade popped out, flew from the tub, and landed on the ceramic tiles with a surprisingly loud ping.

The deep pounding of water suddenly stopped, getting Jack’s attention. He listened to the silence and thought about baths. He often took a bath himself when he was depressed or wanted a long, deliberate wank—usually one and the same thing. He heard the slosh of water as Michael stepped in and a subtle change of pitch as the water rose. Then there was calm, perfect silence, so quiet one could hear a pin drop. Yes, a bath did make you feel—

Jack
heard
a pin drop.

He actually heard something small and metal click on the tiles.

Like a razor blade?

As soon as Jack thought it, he wondered why he thought it. “If you feel so bad you should…” His imagination had been crying wolf all day, but the idea jumped back into his head, stronger and clearer than ever. He leaned forward on his chair and listened closely, as if one could actually hear a soft whisper of skin being cut with a razor.

What if it were a razor blade? Michael had said he needed to shave. The toiletries in his bag: he had dropped a new blade on the floor. And why suicide? Why did that idea keep coming back to Jack? It was almost as if he
wanted
Michael to kill himself.

He tried out that possibility, imagining he knew for certain Michael was in there slashing his wrists and Jack would sit out here and let him do it. It was like a ghost story you invent to scare yourself, Jack trying to frighten himself out of his neurotic worry with the sickest scenario he could imagine. “I must be insane,” he thought, sitting back and settling into himself again.

Michael reached out to pick the blade off the floor. He used his fingernail to lift the metal sliver up enough to get a finger beneath it. It was such a tiny thing. He held it tight between his thumb and index finger, an inch and a half of sharp edge. He knew a common mistake was to cut across, when the correct way was to cut across and down, in a J. How did he know that? He wondered who had told him.

Blue lines were buried beneath the pale white skin of his left wrist. The tendons went flat when he bent his hand back. His hand looked new and unfamiliar, purplish lines in the joints of his fingers, the tips covered with fingerprints like the lines for mountains and ridges on a topographical map.

He was frustrated he was still seeing and thinking. He had to stop thinking. He steadied his arms by pressing his elbows against his sides. The razor blade touched his wrist, then broke contact, without cutting. The razor blade wavered, like a pen hesitating over a signature. Where was his blinding pain and self-loathing when he needed them? Michael closed his eyes. Now. Or now. Or maybe now—

“Jack will be fine.” The crowded subway car trembled and swayed, Laurie swaying with the bodies pressed around her. “I should have said more but Jack can cope. Hope Carla’s home. Unload some of this crazy, jerky day on Carla.” She assumed Michael would be home too, his presence a nuisance that forced them to speak in whispers.

Carla sat in the gathering dark of the living room, enjoying the peace and quiet she had come home to. She briefly wondered again where everyone was, but it felt so nice to sit and think nothing after going against the bureaucratic mind at Bellevue all afternoon.

“We do not grieve for the living.” Or, “We do not grieve for the sick?” thought Ben, buttoning up the white shirt he had borrowed from the elderly volunteer—it would not do to speak at a rally in a sweatshirt. No, “We do not grieve for the living,” then words about grief being premature and the sick needing anger and care, and then his introduction of the speaker from Bailey House.

“My life is harder than yours,” Danny told the blue-eyed, angel-haired dog in Connecticut. “I get only twenty-three roubles a month, less what they take out for my pension, but I don’t wear mourning.” He was using his solitude to rehearse lines, but his heart wasn’t in it. An open-mouthed dog made a poor audience, and Danny was still miffed over Ben’s flight into town. He wondered if Ben’s political rah-rah was only an excuse for getting even with Danny for screwing up their threeway. He began again. “Why do you always wear black?” Chekhov could be so Hispanic.

“I wonder how they’re doing?” said Peter, watching the nightly news. “We should have everyone over for dinner soon, now that we’re all back.” Washing lettuce in the kitchen, Livy muttered, “I guess. Although we can’t have them without having Michael.”