Suicide's Girlfriend (16 page)

A few days later, the college newspaper ran a story about the accident. Bailey had given an interview to some girl, and he'd made me out to be a hero. I didn't mind at first—I thought Elaine might hear the news and think well of me—but after a while the attention started to get to me, particularly if Davis were around. One day, this freshman and his girlfriend came up to talk to us at lunch. The girl stared at me like maybe I had chunks of the corpse on my lips, and Davis sat there, giving me these little winks. “Sure, Todd,” he said, “tell them what it was like.” I was eating a Reuben sandwich, and I said, “It was like this,” and I opened up my mouth. Can you believe that? I
opened
my mouth and showed them the chewed-up toast and corned beef and sauerkraut. I was shook, but I acted like it was pure disgust, and I threw down the sandwich and left.

Eventually, of course, I had to go back to the dorm, and there was Davis, sitting at his desk, grinning. “The dead guy's wife called Bailey, Toddy. She invited us for dinner, and he said yes.”

Bailey assumed he'd remember how to find the house; when we got there, though, it was a different time of day and, on our first try, we ended up at the house where Davis had called for the ambulance. I felt hopeful—maybe we could skip the whole thing—but Bailey got directions and we drove on.

Mrs. Bernard looked like one of those people you used to see advertising tonics for the elderly; not really so old, but wearing wire rims and gray hair and old lady's shoes with fat heels and laces. Weird. Maybe she was younger than Mr. Bernard and she'd tried to look his age. Anyway, our coming to see her made her happy. She acted like a kid giving a tea party, jumping up and down to get things, spilling her water glass. She wanted to know where we all came from and what we studied and so on. It wasn't until we
went to the living room that she actually said anything about her husband.

“That's Robert.” She pointed to a photograph on the coffee table: a young serviceman who didn't even look like he was related to the old man from the accident—a fact I found pretty depressing in itself.

“And you waited with him, Todd?”

While I nodded, and explained I'd tried to revive him, Davis stood behind Mrs. Bernard's chair, grinning at me like we were in cahoots, and I was getting away with murder.

“See here.” Mrs. Bernard got up and took out an atlas so she could show us the spot where Mr. Bernard had been born. “Before I knew Robert,” she said, “I always thought people put on British accents to sound high and mighty! Robert wasn't like that at all. I wish you could have known him, boys. A lovely man. He saw a great deal of suffering during the war. Many dear friends died. I think he drank to forget. I tried to help him to stop, of course. I hope . . . maybe there's a lesson for you. About the drinking . . .”

She looked each of us in the eye, as if she wanted to make sure she got a solemn nod out of each of us, and she did. Then she took us on a tour of his homemade lamps: one made of driftwood, another from a jar of marbles, that sort of thing. There was this brass one, too, and she lifted it up so we could see the base was actually a bell.

Bailey asked about it, and she explained the bell had come from the town where Mr. Bernard had grown up. As a small boy, he had heard that very bell sound the warning for air raids during World War I.

Bailey gave me a look like I should say something, too, and so I made some dumb remark, like, well, you'd never know there was a bell there, would you?

That made Davis roll his eyes, but Bailey and Mrs. Bernard nodded and looked as if I'd said just the right thing.

About a week later, Davis and I were in the dining hall, and he caught me looking at Elaine Sellen. I'd never talked to him about Elaine, but he knew I'd dated her, and he said to me, just like I'd asked him to help me scheme something, “I know that Patty she's with. How about if I convince them to play Ping-Pong? Then you show up and make it doubles?”

It surprised me he wanted to help me out, but I didn't object. From where I sat the conversation looked promising. Elaine even glanced my way a couple of times. But when Davis came back, he shook his head: “She's got other plans, Todd.”

He watched my face so hard I wondered if he'd done the whole thing just for my reaction. I shrugged as if I hadn't expected anything, but I'd gotten my hopes up, and it was hard to go back to where I'd been.

The next day, after class—just to get away from Davis and the school—I decided to go over to the car wash and clean off the salt I'd picked up over the winter. It was really warm out, the campus all sloppy with melting snow, and, first, I stopped by the dorm to change into my old shoes. The message bolt was down in the room so I checked Davis and my box.

I was so happy, I wanted to let out a big whoop and run right over to her dorm. I didn't do it, of course, but I did go straight down the hall to the phone.

An older woman answered. The house mother, I thought. I said who was calling, then asked for Elaine.

“You mean
Ellen
!” The woman laughed. “This is Ellen
Bernard
, Todd. Someone must have taken the message wrong!”

To make a long story short, Mrs. Bernard wanted us to come for dinner again. I was so screwed up about the mistake with the message, I hardly knew what I was saying for an excuse, some sort of TV version
of campus complications: big test, blah, blah, dorm meeting, blah, blah, blah.

“Yes, well, I understand, dear,” she said.

I forgot about washing off the car after that. I just drove to the Jack and Jill and got myself a case of beer, took it with me out to the palisades, drank through dinner.

When I got back to the room, Davis and some freshman were on my bed. That was another thing about him: he liked to make out with girls on
my
bed. Her shirt was unbuttoned, and I started backing out the door, but he goes, no, no, and tells the girl to leave, the two of us have to get down to studying.

Davis didn't ever drink much. “I prefer watching the rest of you fall on your faces,” he always said. That's what he did that night. At first, I just drank and he talked. Mrs. Bernard had called him, too. He said something crude about the call, like she probably wanted us to come jump her bones, did I think maybe that's what Bailey was doing, jumping her bones? Then he talked about the freshman and some other girls he'd had sex with from the college.

I was pretty smashed and for some insane reason I started talking about Elaine. I didn't say she was the only girl I'd ever had sex with, which was the truth. I just said how great she was in bed, that sort of thing. I wasn't real specific, or anything, but when I saw Bailey standing in our doorway, I guess I flinched.

“Todd.” Bailey came right in and pulled me to my feet, kind of giving me a shake in the process. “Let's go to the Rat, and get you something to eat.”

The Rat. That's what they called the snack bar at the union.

A lot of snow and ice had melted that day, but things cooled off at dark and it felt good to get inside after crossing campus. The Rat had a seating pit around a fireplace—the sort of thing people thought was cool when they toured a campus—and the three of us sat down there. Davis and Bailey talked about guitar players. I was too wrecked to join in. I just laughed. As if it made some difference who we liked best. Up at the jukebox, two girls kept putting on songs, sad ones that made my
drunkard's heart swell. I had a nutty idea in those days that if I just
felt
bad enough, Elaine and I would somehow start all over again, and so I hunkered down in my parka and worked on my sadness, all the while getting dreamier, dopier. I'd almost gone under completely when I felt something in the air, almost like a slap, and I opened my eyes.

There she stood. She had on a red ski jacket and a matching set of blue fur earmuffs and mittens that would have looked silly on anybody, but made her look like something out of a fairy tale.

She was talking to Bailey. “Ron told me about you guys finding that person,” she said. Ron was Davis's first name. It gave me the creeps to hear his name in her mouth.

Bailey said some stuff back: how he felt sorry for Mrs. Bernard, and how Mr. Bernard probably would have lived if he hadn't been drinking when he went in the ditch. Then he jerked his head in my direction, signaling I should slide down the seating pit, get closer to the conversation.

Elaine glanced over at me, then looked back at Bailey as if I were some stranger. I stayed put. “He probably wouldn't have
gone
in the ditch if he hadn't been drinking,” she said.

Then Bailey told her how I'd tried to revive Mr. Bernard, and so on. I waited for Davis to make a few wisecracks about that, but Davis just sat with the back of his head pressed against the wall of the pit: he looked like a movie star playing a political prisoner or a philosopher.

Every now and then, while Bailey talked, Elaine looked my way. He was still saying something to her when she walked over to me and sat down. Her face was pink, she looked almost as if she might cry. “I just want to tell you,” she murmured, “Ron told me the real story, and I think what you did that night—driving by that car—I think it stinks.”

Bailey didn't know what went on between us. He looked up from his bag of barbecued potato chips and smiled at Elaine and me like we were a pair of lovebirds.

My brain was straw, I was like the Scarecrow in
The Wizard of Oz
. “I thought Davis was
lying
about there being a car,” I said.

She shook her head. “Look at you!” She'd raised her voice loud
enough that people turned, and I did what plenty of people do when they feel awkward. I grinned.

I'd never seen her mad. We hadn't fought when we were together, but just then the tip of her nose was pure white. She brought her face so close that I could feel her breath when she whispered, “You aren't a serious person, Todd.”

It wasn't as if she meant I was goofy; it was more like she meant I wasn't quite
real
, and I hated her for that. I wanted to hit her, or hold her head under water, the same way I'd wanted to back in December, and, quick, to get hold of myself, I grabbed a log and threw it on the fire.

What'd I know about fires? I was drunk and crazy. My log crashed into a log that already burned. A few good-size embers flew right onto the pit's carpet. Across the way, a bunch of people jumped up, and a couple guys shouted at me: “Jesus!” “Be cool, man!”

Be cool. I stomped out the sparks. I sat down again. Elaine was gone, and I didn't so much as look around the room to see where she'd gone. Just sat and watched the fire, and the next thing I knew, someone was tapping me on the shoulder.

“You all right, dear?” A chubby-cheeked lady in a matted overcoat, fake corsage on the lapel, leaned over me. One of the snack bar ladies, framed by the gray morning light coming in the window.

My heart pounded: something about being left alone in that place all night, locked in at closing, no one—not even me—realizing I was there.

The snack bar lady brought me a carton of orange juice and—grateful to the point of tears, my head aching with beer—I drank it down while she watched.

Overnight, the snow and ice that had melted the day before had refrozen and walking to Bailey's dorm was like crossing a field of doorknobs. Still, you could tell the day would warm by noon. Everything felt damp, and a mist hung around the evergreens and the campus grounds, which dipped here and there, the way college grounds were supposed to.

Bailey didn't say a word about leaving me at the Rat. He played me flute music recorded in the Taj Mahal and, without my even asking, poured three aspirin into my palm.

“Anything transpire with Elaine?”

“Elaine thinks I'm scum. Davis told her how I drove by Mr. Bernard the first time.”

“Oh, well. You had your reasons.”