Suicide's Girlfriend (17 page)

“Yeah. I didn't want to look like a jerk.”

While Bailey shaved, I stood by a window and listened to the flute thing, and then some old Wes Montgomery. People started straggling out of the union from breakfast, then a lot of them left in a rush, and the sun came out. Finally, I took a big breath, and asked, “So, what's with you guys leaving me at the Rat all night?”

Bailey couldn't have faked the surprise on his face. “I left while you were still talking to Elaine, man. Davis didn't help you get back?”

To show there were no hard feelings, I grinned while I shook my head, then I headed straight out the door for Davis and my dorm. It seemed like the most important thing in the world to me that I immediately convince Davis I hadn't been bothered by his leaving me at the Rat. I didn't want him walking around thinking otherwise for one more
minute
than was necessary, and it made me crazy that he might have already been awake for an hour or two, eaten breakfast with the idea that he'd had some effect on me.

I started walking faster than usual so I could finish with Davis quick, but I felt the way you do in a dream where you're not getting anywhere. The sun was out again, and the melt ran from beneath the sheets of ice that had built up over the winter. There was water crossing the sidewalks in skeins that left me dizzy, and everything was noisy—tires on the wet drives and down in the streets of town, and melt dripping over the tops of the dorm gutters.

I looked ahead to Davis and my dorm, trying to pick out our window, as if I could start avenging myself on Davis before I even arrived. Like I said, I didn't feel I was making much progress, but the window stopped me dead in my tracks.

Over Christmas, my mother had made me some curtains with green and blue stripes, and, that morning, the ends of those curtains were flapping out the window. I noticed because I'd never seen the curtains like that before. Davis and I never slept with our window open. And there was something else. It took me a moment to register the music coming out the window because it wasn't all that loud.
Pagliacci.

I was standing there in the parking lot, watching the curtains, no idea of what to do next, when Mrs. Bernard called to me.

Actually, I didn't recognize her at first; I was too nuts, I suppose, and she looked older than I remembered, as if her husband's death had settled in. She was smiling, though, picking her way across the parking lot, a big box in her arms. She set the box down on the ground when she reached me. It held three of the homemade lamps she'd shown us the night we'd gone to her house for dinner.

“Now don't think I'm a pest,” she said, “but I want to give each of you boys something to remember Robert by.” She handed me the bell lamp. “Because you admired it, Todd, and because of your efforts to help.”

I kept my eyes on the curtains while she talked about the bell, how I should remember its history, and all.

“I don't know if you can imagine, Todd,” she said finally. “I feel not quite right in the head when I think Robert's gone. How could he be dead, and I'll never see him again?”

I understood she was in pain, but I couldn't help myself. I stood up on my toes, dreaming somehow I'd see into that second story without going up the stairs.

“You're heading somewhere,” Mrs. Bernard said. “I just wanted to let you know—it was pleasant, having you boys in.”

I nodded. Somebody closed the window, gradually pulling the curtains in. For a moment, I felt as if I might black out, but there I stood, and there stood Mrs. Bernard, waiting, and so I went on about some jazz, how time would heal her wounds, and so on.

While I talked, Mrs. Bernard looked off in the direction of the president's house. Like I said, everything was dripping. A lot of birds
flapped from the trees over to the power lines strung from the dorm, and back again. I felt as if I had to raise my voice to be heard, and when I finished, Mrs. Bernard just looked tired. She asked if I'd mind taking Davis's lamp up to him myself.

I don't know. At that moment, it seemed to me Davis had
planned
for me to find him with Elaine—arranged things for my personal humiliation—and that Mrs. Bernard and her lamps had come just in time to reflect the garbage back onto Davis and Elaine, make me just a bystander. Which was what I thought I wanted.

“Listen, Mrs. Bernard,” I said, “I'm sure Ron would feel bad if he didn't get to thank you for the lamp in person.”

Afterward, on the way back to the parking lot, Mrs. Bernard walked fast, like she wanted to get away from me, but when we got to her car, she said, “I guess you knew they were there like that, didn't you, Todd?” She sounded mad, but she kept her voice low and people walked past without looking our way.

“That girl . . . you loved her once?”

I shrugged. We both stood there for a moment, not talking, then I gave her directions to Bailey's dorm.

That morning, when she drove past me, Mrs. Bernard lifted one hand in a salute, but she kept her eyes on the driveway. The front end and then the rear of her car dipped as she went over the speed bump. I was surprised that she drove the same car in which Mr. Bernard had died. For a moment, I disapproved of her for driving that car. Actually
disapproved
of her. But you can see how it was for me in those days: I was only just beginning to understand that a person couldn't go out and get a whole new life every time something bad happened to the old one, that the old life and the new life were one and the same.

T
HERE HAD BEEN
a suicide. This was in Tucson, Arizona. Early May. As if they knew that drama was in order, the city's ring of mountains brought on a series of outrageous, gut-bright sunsets for those people—not all of them friends of the dead man—who tramped out into the desert or sat on the traffic-blasted patios of that overgrown town's coffeehouses and bars to discuss the matter of his death.

“Wake up, I have something to show you.”

The suicide's last words. Spoken to the young woman with whom he lived. He had been young himself. Twenty-seven. A promising future ahead of him.

Everyone knew of adobe bungalows like the one rented by the pair. Built in the thirties. Enough charm that the tenants—many of them students at the university—forgave, or even took pride in, say, a kitchen wall with a crack so wide it allowed in a jagged glimpse of desert sky. Wood floors worn to something like suede. Beehive fireplace. The evaporative cooler that forever dripped over the lip of the roof.

Which made it hard for people
not
to picture the drama, the distraught
girlfriend, the mess. Of course, it was shameful to think that way—of gouts of blood, shattered bits of skull, flap of skin, brains.

No letter? No letter.

Someone suggested that the suicide's method might have been inspired by an article that had run in the local paper only days before the death: a human interest piece on a California woman who ran a cleaning service that took jobs no one else would handle. “The worst are shotgun suicides,” the cleaning service woman had said. In the accompanying photograph, she wore a white jumpsuit with a red heart stitched on its breast pocket. “We do our best to give the family back their home. It takes me and four trained staff six hours to do a room, and lots of times there's still things—books and special things—that just can't be saved.”

A large man in a midsize car. A young woman beneath a carport covered in cat's-claw vine. Post-World War II ranch-style house. Modest. Brick. From inside the house, a bird screeched out into the cracked heat of the desert morning. A cockatiel—small, white hybrid with clownish patches of orange on its cheeks. Angry? Heartbroken? Minute talons allowed the cockatiel to cling to the home's screen door while it cried for the young woman in the carport: Candace Cleeve, just then watching Professor Carson O'Connor back his car out the gravel drive.

“One minute, sweetie,” Candace Cleeve called to the bird. Impossible to tell that Candace felt ill, but Candace—had Candace been a cockatiel, she, too, would have screeched in despair. The day before, Candace and Carson had fought, and though they had made up, this morning Carson was off on a three-week car trip to the Midwest. In addition to meeting with fellow geologists, he would visit his college-age children, offspring of the marriage he had abandoned in favor of Candace. He would undoubtedly see the children's mother, and the big frame house they had shared on a shady Iowa street. He would, perhaps, feel some regret.

“Self-indulgent?” Carson had roared during yesterday's argument—an ugly thing concerning last week's suicide of one of his graduate students, and Candace's pain at the fact that Carson had spent the entire six days before his trip consoling grieving students over the telephone, meeting with groups of them at “mourning sessions,” helping them to set up a memorial picnic, and, finally, attending that picnic for the whole of yesterday afternoon.

“A memorial picnic for a guy who wakes up his girlfriend so she has to see him blow out his brains!” Candace protested during last night's argument. “That makes a hell of a lot of sense!”

Still, Carson was six foot seven inches tall, and every other part of him was equally large—lips, tongue, teeth. Like a tank when it noses over a rim, then begins its grinding descent, Carson suggested the possession of plenty of spooky power; and Candace—who had passed a fair share of her childhood being knocked around by a bored father, had just barely managed to maintain something like a sneer when Carson roared, “
You
are the one who's self-indulgent, Candy!”

Now, however, it was morning and, from behind the wheel of his beige Toyota, Carson smiled benignly at Candace. Candace smiled back, but when Carson and car briefly disappeared behind a hedge of tall and ill-kempt oleander, she gave the nod to those fraternal twins of emotion: fear and relief.

“For you guys to treat this . . . asshole like a hero! It's so self-indulgent!” More of Candace's words from the quarrel. Had it been the first or the second exclamation that triggered Carson's fury? Hard to know where anger began. Perhaps it had sprung up most fiercely when Candace included Carson among the “self-indulgent.” Candace knew that Carson was a good man. Candace believed that she herself was the worst thing Carson had ever done. Si.
Carson
, Candace sometimes called him, but only in her head, preferring not to provide him additional advantage.

But perhaps she had made Carson most furious when she referred to the student-suicide as an “asshole”? There was no denying that Candace felt a twinge of power and aversion—something physical,
almost reflexive—when she pronounced the word. She knew that “asshole” drew a picture—mauve flesh, bitter pucker, central seed of shit and darkness—and that though Carson considered himself a liberal, a “former hippie, for god's sake,” he did not like vulgarity. Still, “asshole” was an uncalculated risk on the part of Candace, who tended to be frantic in argument with Carson. Candace, after all, had been born two years
after
Carson graduated from high school. Candace had grown up on what may have been the most wretched of all the wretched little hog farms in all of Iowa, while Carson had his lawyer dad and bridge-club mother and sailboat summers. With “asshole,” frantic Candace had pitched a rusty manure fork at Carson and hoped . . . What all did she hope to do with that nasty implement? Well, she was ambitious. She meant to do damage and to enlighten and to pull Carson near.

And apparently she succeeded, something had worked, for now, at the end of the drive, ready to depart for places north and east, Carson called from his rolled-down window, “Hey, Candy! Security, Candy! And don't read the newspaper!” He laughed, then waved his slab of a hand—king-size? colossal?—and drove off down the street.

The first thing that Candace had noticed about Carson O'Connor when he and wife and son appeared beyond the muzzy glass porch that she used as her studio in those days—that is, the first thing she noticed after Carson's spooky height and breadth of bone—was his hair, stiff streaks of both pure black and pure white that stood up like the bristles of a much used housepaint brush. In a man, a bit of the monster could draw a woman on, convince her she was something of a connoisseur. Of course, it was no news that rarely did the converse occur. Candace understood that she had caught Carson's heart with her kiddy-bones, her small cat's face framed by a vaguely Parisian fringe of dark hair—which did not change the fact that she generally saw herself as Poor Iowa Farm Girl, and only occasionally caught a glimpse (as it were, through a crack in the hog-shed walls) of whatever Carson considered her charms.

“Keep the shades drawn.” “Don't walk around in your underwear.”
“Remember to eat.” “Don't tell people you're alone.” Things Carson had said while Candace helped him load the car. Candace took such warnings as proof that Carson both cared for her/didn't quite trust her; that he took what he saw as her lack of vigilance for something akin to promiscuity. And so, though she missed Carson already, Candace was also glad to see his big shadow recede from her patch of earth for a while. Gone, Carson could not show up in her studio to take away her paintbrush, remove her clothing; could not offer advice on how to deal with her gallery, or titles for her paintings, and even subjects for future work. Sometimes, the sheer effort of resisting Carson left Candace feeling dull, dull, dull, as if her brain had grown a crisp layer of chitin, some self-defeating means of self-defense.

Still, as she watched the beige Toyota—now waiting at the stop that led to the busy boulevard beyond—her eyes filled with tears, because, after all, she
was
self-indulgent, selfish, awful. Though she had not known the student-suicide, in the first days, she had wanted to talk endlessly about his death, hadn't she? In her sorrow for the girlfriend, Candace had
cried
into the telephone while sharing the story with Joe Raven, her gallery rep in New York, and Candace had met Joe Raven exactly once. Really, until she grew jealous of Carson's involvement in the suicide's aftermath, Candace had even considered telephoning the girlfriend to express sympathy! Snort, snort, snuffle, snuffle. A repellent scene that would have been, Candace felt sure, like something featuring her father, morose on Old Milwaukee.

And didn't she sound revoltingly like her father, now, as she called to the crying cockatiel, “Keep your shirt on”?

“Don't get your ass bent out of shape.” “Clean the shit out of your ears.”

Really, Candace had never meant to fall in love with a bird any more than she had meant to live in a house with a swimming pool or to ruin someone's marriage, but suppose a certain monumental man announced that he had left his wife for you, and then that man carried you off to Arizona, where every house that the realtor showed you had a swimming pool, and, then, later, while you were out skimming
leaves from what had become your very own body of water, a lovely white bird flew down and landed on your head, and that bird needed you? She nuzzled under your chin and cried for you when you went away and no one ever reported her lost in the newspaper: What could you do?

Disturbing, the way that—at the very moment that Carson turned onto the boulevard—his tan car became indistinguishable from all the other light-colored cars on the road.

In the desert, a light-colored car does not show the desert's constant dust so easily as a dark car. A light-colored car reflects heat and can be as much as twenty degrees cooler than one of a dark color.

Candace recited the above to herself as she headed toward the house, the bird. Like so many who make a vocation of seeking the ineffable, Candace had a crush on facts, saw them as surrounded by coronas of suggestion. “Charming!” Carson cried when he had recognized this quality of his love's mind. Carson, however, was a geologist. Carson believed that the real beauty in a thing resided precisely where all speculation regarding its nature could be contained.

“Okay, sweetie, I'm here,” Candace murmured to the bird, then paused inside the door in order that her eyes might adjust to the plunge from desert glare to brothy interior. Rose, turquoise: so her temporarily befuddled vision powdered the white feathers of the little cockatiel as it flew with a sweet flutter to her shoulder.

“Want to go paint?” With one hand, Candace smoothed the bird's feathers; with the other, as she passed Carson's desk, she took up the section of newspaper that Carson had snatched away from her that morning.

What had Carson not wanted her to see? While her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she told herself:
Complete dark adaptation—the rods taking over for the cones—requires approximately twenty minutes
. Or was it the other way around? Cones for rods? She could not make sense of the photo that dominated the front page. Gulf War vet addresses students, read the caption, and, yes, there was a figure in dress uniform, but the face was a strange darkness, a whirlwind, a
paper wasp's nest. The article explained: The pictured soldier had been trapped in a fire inside his tank. Seventy-five percent of his body had received third-degree burns. He lost his eyelids, his nose, his toes and fingers. Though blind, he now traveled the country, trying to carry a message of inspiration. He was proud he had served, the soldier said, though he did not deny his lot was hard. The last two sentences of the article read, “I'd give up my legs or arms—both—to have back my face. Without my face, it's hard to feel like myself.”

Candace clutched the newspaper against her chest. “Jesus. God help you, dear man,” she whispered, for though she was not at all sure about God, she supposed the soldier might be, and that she ought to speak on behalf of any possible belief he might possess.

Really, the photo left her feeling so dizzy that out of its ashes rose a happy thought: Maybe I feel this way because I'm pregnant? Carson had had a vasectomy prior to his meeting Candace some three years before, but Candace secretly held out for the possibility of a surgical failure. So perhaps she exaggerated her dizziness and the need to steady herself? To take a seat at Carson's desk?

With woozy care, she set the newspaper next to a sheaf of stapled papers, the top page of which bore a Xeroxed photo of a grinning young man.
Rick Haynes, 1969–1997
. Beneath the photo was information regarding the time and place of the picnic/softball game in Rick Haynes's memory.

A few of the ways that, in her time, Candace had considered killing herself: car crash into telephone poles and/or other inanimate objects; drowning; pills; leaps off surefire bridges or mountainsides. Never, however, had she dreamed of inflicting her suicide upon an audience or using a method whereby she would leave a terrible mess in somebody's home. Never.

“Bastard,” Candace murmured to the Rick Haynes photo.

Though she had heard Carson and his colleagues discuss Rick Haynes on several occasions—he came from a wealthy family; he was a mountain climber, brilliant, a drunk, often suicidal—Candace had met Haynes only once. Back in the autumn, very late at night, she had
gone to answer the front door and, opening it, found a drunken, bare-chested male ringing the bell and running the garden hose, full tilt, over his head of curly red hair.

“You're Candy?” the young man asked with a laugh. It was not unusual for Candace to feel self-conscious in front of people from Carson's department, all of whom seemed surprised to find that she was Carson's wife. This being the case, when Carson appeared behind her in the hall and led the dripping Haynes out through the living room's sliding doors to the back patio, Candace did not join the pair, but returned to her studio. There, too, sliding doors opened onto the patio and she could overhear the men as she painted.