Ladies and Gentlemen (12 page)

“You want some cereal?” he asked Danny.

Alyssa’s father stood with his hands in his pockets, looking at his son warmly, almost proudly. There was an element of self-consciousness to the whole display, and I observed it carefully, because I enjoy moments when people think they’re fooling me.

To his father’s question, Danny made a happy grunt like,
Gyah
.

“Let’s get you some cereal, kid.”

Mr. Richardson unlocked the top cabinet, where the cereal was kept, right in front of Danny, who obviously couldn’t remember the combination, and in front of me, of course, as if to demonstrate that no matter how brutally retarded his son was, the two of them could communicate man-to-man, as if asking him if he’d like a bowl of Crunchberries was like going to a bar together to knock back a few beers. I thought the whole performance was sad, and though I listened attentively while Mr. Richardson showed me where the combinations for the locks were kept—literally every cabinet was padlocked—perhaps I appeared intimidated by the whole thing, because Alyssa gently pressed her hand on my back and whispered for me not to worry, that she’d handle feeding her brother.

The next morning I went to the kitchen to get some orange juice, and when I closed the refrigerator door Danny was standing there looking down at me, as naked as the day he was born and scaring me silly. Danny gave an amazed laugh, and pointed at the juice—“Joos,” he said, “Joos”—and then went for it with both hands, wiggling his fingers delightedly. He took the carton out of my terrified grasp and proceeded to drink the whole gallon, the liquid running down the sides of his mouth. He was like a giant goldfish, I realized. The padlocked cabinets suddenly made sense; they were there to protect him from blowing himself up. He finished and looked at me and said, “Ahhhhh,” then burped wetly, handed the empty carton back, and peered over my shoulder into the lit shelves, but I’d managed to lock the door before he could
raid anything else. Needless to say, I got the hell out of there as fast as I could.

“That doesn’t count as a death,” I told Alyssa.

“We mean death in the pornographic sense,” said Casey.

“As in eyewitnessed,” Will said.

“I saw my grandfather get killed,” I offered.

“No,”
Alyssa said.

I nodded. “He was a big cigar smoker. Loved to smoke them while he golfed, read the paper, took a shit. I smell cigars and I think of him. It’s Pavlovian. Anyway, two years ago, he was eighty-four and healthy as a horse and then he went to light a cigar in his workshop—he made his own golf clubs—and the lighter blew up in his face.”

“What?” Will said.

“Blew up. Apparently he’d filled it with the wrong fluid and it was explosive. I came down to his workshop just by chance afterward and he was rolling on the floor trying to put himself out.”

“Shut
up
,” Casey said. She was thin in the face and flat-chested and liked to reach out and touch the people she was talking with—she had my forearm in her hands at that very moment. She was so confident in her sexuality, so sure of how she took hold of you or pulled you toward her, she was like a full-grown woman. We’d been fucking for a few weeks now, unbeknownst to Will or Alyssa. This all seemed dangerous and delightful to me at the time, and so far as I was concerned none of this sneaking around had any real moral weight.

“So what happened?” Alyssa said. She began rubbing my neck while Casey still had my arm in her hands and was giving me a
delicious Indian burn. I wanted Will to disappear, or fall unconscious.

“I put him out. But I made this terrible mistake, though I didn’t know it was at the time. I threw my shirt over his face to snuff out the flames, and his skin stuck to the fabric.”

Will winced. Both girls stopped cold.

I affected a faraway look. Not indifferent, more transfixed. “By then, my grandmother had come downstairs and had seen what was happening, and called 911. The medics came. It was totally insane. Anyway, he suffered third-degree burns on his neck and face and died of an infection a few days later.”

This elicited a stunned silence. Finally, Will said, “I don’t think I can top that.”

“Top it?”
Casey said. “Are you
sick
? This is his
grandfather.
”

“It’s all right. I’m okay with it. He lived a good life.”

“You were so brave,” Alyssa said.

I was lying through my teeth, of course. My grandfather loved golf but hated cigars, and he was still very much alive. I’d heard this story from a high school friend over the summer and thought it was remarkable, so I’d adopted it and given it wings—I added the bit about the shirt—and told it every chance I got. It conferred on me, I thought, a bizarre sort of glamour.

“My personal and only witnessed-death story,” Will jumped in, “was my uncle Nick’s, who, I should add, I didn’t like. He had lung cancer and it spread everywhere, though in spite of this he kept busy dying for what seemed like, I don’t know, a year. Toward the end, there was this big family gathering—he was my mother’s brother—out at his house in Seattle, which so far as I could figure
out as a kid was a wait-around-for-Uncle-Nick-to-die party. I mean this literally. That’s why I thought we were there. There were flowers everywhere and even a casket in the dining room, which at one point Uncle Nick went to lie in just to get the feel of it, and
that
was a strange thing to see. But I thought this was kind of the opposite of a birthday party and that at some point, just like the cake coming out, the guy was eventually going to sign off. I was seven years old and the concept of death only made sense to me as a very long trip you took, somewhere remote and possibly even fun, in spite of all the grief I’d been seeing, so I was actually pretty excited. For the party my uncle’s hospital bed had been moved into the living room and there were people everywhere, drinking, eating, talking. He’d been on the verge of croaking for so many months I guess nobody felt like it should interfere with a good time. Anyway, after what seems like so long I can barely contain myself, my mother comes up to me crying and says, ‘Will, it’s time to say good-bye to Uncle Nick.’ And because it was time for
me
to say good-bye, and because kids always think they’re the center of the universe, I thought he was going to die
right then
—and that I was somehow holding everything up. So I hurry over to his bedside. The guy had so many tubes coming out of him he looked like he was lying in a plastic hammock. I’m sitting there pumping my leg and he’s staring at the ceiling, and I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if I’m supposed to sing some song or say a magic word, so I wait as patiently as I can until he finally notices me and says, ‘Who are you?’ ‘I’m Will,’ I say. ‘That means nothing to me,’ he says. ‘Be more specific.’ ‘You’re my uncle,’ I say. ‘I’m your sister’s son.’ ‘Which sister?’ ‘Jenny.’ He says, ‘Oh.’ Then he looks up at
the ceiling again and says, ‘My death doesn’t belong to me. That’s the thing about dying slowly. You’re not dead yet, but people are already fitting your last rites into their schedule. You can see it in their eyes.
This might be the last time I see him
. There’s no dignity in that. Do you understand?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘No? Well, let’s make it simple. Try to die quick. Not soon, but quick. Get it?’ ‘Yes, sir.’ He doesn’t speak for a while and I start to get anxious again because I still don’t know what to do, but then he looks at me and goes, ‘Do you want to know what pains me most about my life? The thing I regret most?’ I’m like, ‘Sir?’ ‘The women I could’ve fucked,’ he says, ‘but didn’t. It’s all I think about. I lie here, start chronologically, and go back as far as sixth grade to some time as recent as last year, thinking about all the opportunities for pussy that I didn’t take, and it makes me want to cry. Do you like girls?’ ‘No,’ I say. ‘Well, I did. I
do
. And I should have fondled Milly Bear’s fat tits before I met your aunt Carol. I should’ve squeezed Liz Coleman’s ass and sucked Kathy Koch’s nipples. But I didn’t because I was afraid. Know why?’ ‘No.’ ‘Because I thought it
meant
something not to. That holding myself back registered somewhere. But it means
nothing
not to. It doesn’t register
anywhere
. I want you to remember that. Tell me you’ll remember.’ ‘I will.’ ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Someone is spared.’ Then he puts his hands over his eyes and lays there mumbling these women’s names, and I can’t stand it because I’m not only getting bored with the Q & A, but also tired of waiting for the main event. So I say, ‘Uncle, can I ask you something?’ And then he coughs really hard for a while and finally gasps, ‘Go ahead.’ And I say, ‘Are you going to die now?’ And he looks at the ceiling and says, ‘Yes, now I’m going to die.’ Then he made a sound
like a tire deflating, and boom, I swear to God, my aunt Carol keels over right behind us, dead of a massive aneurysm.”

For some reason, this story just killed me—I was sure Will meant it to be funny—and I laughed so hard I went fetal. The guy could string me out from the get-go and then pull me back in at his leisure, and this was the power I coveted above all his others.

“Will, I’m so sorry,” Alyssa said. She seemed taken aback by my reaction and reached out and touched Will’s shoulder, then ran her fingers over his neck, which surprised Casey as much as it did me, because we both looked at each other. In fact, it made Casey clearly and instantly jealous.

“Don’t be sorry,” he said. “Griffin’s right. It was funny.”

“You never told
me
that story,” Casey said. She took the last drag on the joint, squinting extraferociously as she inhaled. “How did
that
one escape me?”

“Yeah, well, nobody knows everything about anyone.” Will, who’d just rolled another bone and was holding it toward me, looked me right in the eye, which made me instantly paranoid. Did he know I was fucking Casey? Following this train of thought was very bad, so I recited the mental mantra I employed whenever I got stoned:
Grass makes you an ass
. It calmed me down, and Will had already shifted his attention to Alyssa. “I mean that,” he said to her. “You can develop a whole moral philosophy around that fact. I’ve been reading Levinas’s
Totality and Infinity
. His idea that the Other is an infinite …”

Will began explaining Levinas to Alyssa, who was as enthralled with him as he seemed to be with her. I thought he was trying to get into her pants, and while that might solve some logistical
problems, I couldn’t bear how jealous it was making Casey, so I got up and checked out his room, which never ceased to fascinate me. He had two four-foot-tall speakers pointed out his windows, because whenever he cranked up his stereo he wanted to share his musical taste with the whole quad. A big fan of Black Flag and The Replacements and the Butthole Surfers, he had their posters all over his walls, and though I appreciated these outward signs of allegiance, I found the stuff so impossible to listen to that I wondered if I was lacking in musical knowledge. I needed to add some genre to compliment my personality, to be deeply into
something
. I just hadn’t figured out what yet. Will was not only on the cutting edge musically but also technologically: the hutch above his desk was stuffed with green circuitry boards, floppy disks, wire clippers, a soldering iron. He’d programmed his Macintosh to do all sorts of things, like act as an alarm clock and answering machine; he used HyperCard to create outlines for classes and played strategy and role-playing games on it like MineHunter that to me seemed wildly complicated. He was one of the head techs at the college’s computer lab and had a campus radio show, “Rumor Will,” long musical sets interrupted by programs about the student body and faculty, which he did à la
Saturday Night Live
’s “Weekend Update.” He was head of a crew that had the coveted Thursday evening shift at the Rathskeller’s downstairs bar. He was so
whole
that you could tell he would make a bright new place for himself in the world. There was a black-and-white poster on his wall of his father sitting in one of those phallic race cars, wearing a helmet and goggles and waving as he crossed the finish line. When I’d asked Will about it, he told me his dad was in a club back home and
had built that car from the ground up. And it didn’t occur to me that a man who belonged to such a club was rich, or that at my age Will was probably trying to figure out how to get rich enough to belong to such a club.

“You know,” Will told Alyssa, “death’s right here in this building.”

Casey rolled her eyes at me. “Here we go.”

“You know what I’m talking about, don’t you?”

“No,” Alyssa said.

“I’m talking about room nine-E.”

“Jesus fucking Christ,” Casey said.

“What’s in nine-E?” Alyssa asked. She looked at Casey, then at me (and I’d heard all the stories). She was a double major in psychology and biology but lacked a single imaginative bone in her lovely body.

“It’s the room where Patricia Wilkes hung herself from the pipes our freshman year,” Will explained. “It’s been boarded up ever since. Seeing as Miss Alyssa has never been in the presence of death, I say we break in there and have a look.”

This was a nice play on Will’s part. If Casey was so pissed off at his flirting, for all he cared she could stay the hell put while he took Alyssa on a little adventure. From my end I thought it would give Casey and me some time alone, but she had that look on her face that she got when we had sex: the inwardness of someone testing a physical limit, like a dancer stretching a tender muscle. I’d watch her buck on top of me while this expression came over her and feel like I was almost incidental to her pleasure. All of which is to say I didn’t know what she was thinking.

“Why would we want to go there?” Alyssa asked.

“Because supposedly nothing in the room has been disturbed. All of Patricia’s family pictures are still inside. Her clothes are still in the drawers. Her Garfield posters are still up on the walls. Everything. It’s like a museum.”

“Really?”

“You’re pissing me off, Will.”

I didn’t need this from Casey. She had a temper and things could go south between them in a hurry, and if they did there’d be no us, at least not tonight. She’d spend the next few hours, maybe even days, fighting with him, and their fights were notorious. At the beginning of the semester, just before we’d started up, she became convinced Will was having an affair with a friend of hers. The story was that she came into his room and confronted him about it. He was sitting at his computer and turned to her, calmly denied everything, and then went back to the paper he was writing, at which point she grabbed a large flashlight and smashed it right across his skull. Dazed, he stumbled out of his room with his head gushing blood, truly afraid for his life and concussed so severely that his feet were crossing one over the other like he was drunk, while Casey ran after him, sobbing and wailing, “I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m so sorry, oh, Will, you fucking
asshole
, I’m so sorry.” I’d heard this story before I’d said a word to either of them. It preceded them, like the rumble you hear of a train when you put your ear to the rail. Their relationship had this sort of legendary dimension, and I was always impressed by their capacity to conflagrate or implode and inflict harm on each other.