The Suicide Club

by Toni Graham

  “Poppy?” she said, not even bothering to hide her laughter. “Goo-goo Da-Da.”

  Slater explained that the name Poppy was not a diminutive of Papa but rather referred to the brilliant red flower. Like most men in his age demographic, Poppy had served in World War II. Every year on the eve of Memorial Day—in those days not yet celebrated on Mondays—he came home from the docks wearing a bright paper poppy on his lapel. Slater and his sisters found it hilarious, their father wearing what seemed to them to be a corsage. Mom shushed them, explaining that veterans sold the poppies to raise funds for disabled soldiers, and that Dad was being patriotic. Still, they had begun calling him Poppy after that, and the name stuck.

  He pulls his wallet from his back pocket and buys five poppies from the old veteran.

  Sorry I missed you.

  After waking, Slater lies in bed and halfheartedly considers masturbation, remembering a crudely humorous slogan he once heard: After fifty, never trust a fart or waste an erection. Well, he has not yet pooped his pants, but the few spontaneous erections he has now more often than not go to waste. Maybe he has been dreaming about that attractive shrink.

  He has not for a fairly long period of time felt himself seriously tempted by an extramarital affair. He and Beth put all that behind them long ago, after some calamitous dalliances in the seventies. In any case, the cheery Baptist women who populate the town are not to his taste. Even if he could stomach them, they wouldn’t consider a Jew—he might as well tattoo the mark-o’-the-beast on his forehead. There is no synagogue in the town; he and Beth have to drive an hour and a half to Tulsa during the High Holy Days.

  Slater kisses off the possibility of morning onanism and instead gets out of bed. Beth has kicked the blankets and sheet away from her in the night, and her nude body lies motionless on the white bottom sheet like a cadaver on a slab. He cannot help but stare at her thinned-out pubic hair. Where there was once a luxuriant thatch, now there is only the gauziest webbing, her sex revealed like a baby’s.

  In the bathroom, he decides to change the cartridge in his Quattro and to use some of Beth’s aloe moisturizer after he shaves; tonight is the weekly meeting of the grief support group.

  Slater observes his hairy chest in the medicine cabinet mirror as he shaves his chin. One cannot ignore the ratio of hair loss to hair growth that is seen on aging bodies. The more hair Slater loses from his head, the more grows on his chest and back, and as for the nose, fuhged-daboudit—he has had to order one of those trimming devices from the Sharper Image. They say bald men are more virile, so he can perhaps understand the growth of body hair, but what about his ED, as they call it in the pharmaceutical ads. In the three months since Poppy’s death, he has been unable to have an erection with Beth. He resorted to ordering Viagra from the Internet, and he and Beth had sex successfully one time about a month ago. The stuff worked great, but it gave him such a blinding headache that he never risked it again. Hell, he read somewhere that even Tommy Lee had tried Viagra, and that the drummer suffered the worst headache of his life.

  Beth’s sex drive is no longer what it used to be, either, and she too suffers from the inverse hair issue. Though she has barely any pubic hair, he has caught her in the bathroom ripping hair from her upper lip with wax strips, and shaving her toes in the tub. A velvety growth of hair coats her neck, and her formerly pristine thighs now sprout dark hairs. Whoever came up with the expression “aging gracefully” was entirely full of crap.

  “Metaphorically at least, he died in my arms,” a woman in their circle of metal folding chairs says. She is from Los Angeles. Slater has wondered fairly often why so many of the members of the grief support group are originally from outside Oklahoma. Well, if being devastated by a suicide is what it takes to introduce Slater to some other expats, so be it. He has come to cherish these Wednesday evenings, even though there is bound to be a lot of weeping every week, sometimes his own. The metaphor woman owns a bookstore in Hope Springs, and her fiancé blew his brains out in their bedroom. Slater’s chest burns with pain for the poor girl. Those who commit suicide are in fact murderers; Slater has long known this to be true.

  The woman herself now addresses this very issue. She tells the group that her little son from an earlier marriage, an eight-year-old boy who had been very fond of his future stepfather, said to his mom, “Reed thought he was killing himself, but really he was killing all his friends.” Much nose blowing ensues in the room, and Slater’s eyes sting.

  Dr. Jane volunteers commentary on the possibility of the woman’s son obtaining some counseling, but Slater cannot concentrate on what she is saying. Rather, he finds himself looking again at Jane’s bright toenails, pink this time, easily visible in her thong sandals. It’s not that he has a foot fetish; rather, he finds looking at her lovely feet quite a bit easier than looking at her uptilted nose or directly into her eyes. Now that he realizes he is hot for her, he feels self-conscious. Slater does not wish her to find his behavior “inappropriate,” nor to think of him as some sort of randy bastard, even if that’s what he is.

  But now Slater feels like a kid in grammar school, because while he has been inattentive, it seems Dr. Jane has steered the conversation elsewhere. “David, what about you?” she says.

  Slater feels his ears flame as if he were under a sun lamp. He is embarrassed that he missed the switch in topic. The fact that she called him David instead of Dave heats him up a bit; sometimes using one’s proper name instead of a customary nickname seems the more intimate choice. His groin burns hotter than his neck, and for a moment he thinks he feels dizzy.

  “Searching,” Jane prompts him. “Did you engage in those behaviors?”

  He cues right in—just last Wednesday they had been talking about “searching behaviors” in the bereaved. It seems that after one loses a loved one, particularly if the loss is unexpected and sudden, the aggrieved person begins searching for the lost one, walking about the house in a daze, looking under the blankets on the bed, opening closets, and even looking into the bathtub. Equally prevalent is the desire to wear clothing of the deceased. Newly bereaved people are often seen wandering their houses in a fugue state, wearing the lost one’s bathrobe or sweater. Sometimes they open the front door and peer out, as if the dead person is simply tardy and any minute will appear on the porch. This all takes place during what Dr. Jane terms the denial phase of grief.

  Slater reports that, no, his situation did not mirror the woman’s, as his dad was not living with him and Beth at the time of his death and thus Slater had no reason to look for him. Someone else picks up on the conversation and begins to share her experience. But what Slater has not told them is that there was an odd incident, one that frightened Beth. The night after his sister telephoned to tell them about Poppy, Slater walked in his sleep. Beth found him pacing up and down the hall naked at three o’clock in the morning. When she turned on the light, apparently he looked past her with unseeing eyes, and in a voice she later described as “unearthly” he said, “Poppy?” She had to touch his shoulder and tell him several times, “Dave, you’re sleepwalking, everything’s okay, come back to bed.”

  He engaged in sleepwalking one other time in his life, when he was four years old. His father went into the hospital for a ruptured appendix—whisked from the house by ambulance attendants and not coming back that evening. The toddler Slater was found by his mother in the middle of the night walking the house in his yellow jammies, making an eerie moaning sound that awakened her. In fact, he can still, more than half a century later, remember his mother picking him up in her arms and carrying him back to bed after he murmured “Daddy?” several times. In the morning, she told him he had been sleepwalking and reminded him that Daddy was in the hospital but would be home very soon. He does not share these recollections with the group; he keeps things to himself, his father’s spawn.

  What he encountered that night when his mother discovered his nocturnal roaming was a floor made of air, through which he was about to plummet; a
cataclysm; the imploding of the universe.

  When the university van brings them home from Bartlesville after nine, the students are still talking to one another sotto voce or listening to their iPods, but Slater is wiped out. Field trips are not as invigorating as they used to be when he was a young assistant professor at Pratt. He thinks of all the corny old jokes the borscht-belt comedians used to make about the legs going first. Too bad this turns out to be true—his calves began throbbing while he and the students were still walking Price Tower.

  “Did you know that the most common post-disaster injury is cut feet?” one of his students says to her seatmate. Slater is unable to hear the whispered response.

  Once the van has pulled into the lot outside the architecture building, Slater makes sure all the students are safely out of the van and into their cars, then climbs into his own car, his knees cracking like adolescent knuckles. God, he feels like he could use a nightcap, but this is a college town and he does not wish to run into any of his students in a bar. He opts to go up instead of down—caffeine rather than alcohol—and stops the car in front of Sancho’s.

  In his car in the darkened parking lot, Slater’s view through the restaurant’s enormous plate-glass window is unobstructed. Sancho’s blazes in front of his eyes like a brilliant outdoor movie screen, and he feels as if he is back in his childhood, sitting in the backseat of the family car at the Pageant drive-in theater. And it is not Liz Taylor or Pier Angeli who stars in this movie but a more current leading lady: Dr. Jane sits in profile, backlit like an ingénue, sipping from a cup. He recognizes her by her upturned shiksa nose, adorable.

  Fatigue renders him loopy. His mind swings from its hinges for a few moments, his thoughts careering into irregular space: I wish for just one day I were not married to Beth. I wish I had hair like Stone Phillips—if he’s not wearing a rug, the guy must have had a transplant. I wish I were named Stone instead of Dave. I wish I still lived in New York. I wish I had been a better son. Please, God, let me find a way to get Jane into bed with me and not get caught. God, send Poppy back, if only for a day, an hour.

  He watches Jane take a few more sips from the cup. One last thing slides into his mind as it reels along askew, something he once overheard one student say to another as the pair walked across the quad: You can’t pray for what you want. God is not a short-order cook.

  Slater knows he should go home to Beth rather than approach Jane in Sancho’s, but he resists the sensible part of his brain, the part that would have him wimp out. I’m going in, he decides—I’m not a eunuch yet. He first takes a whiff of his underarms, just in case the long day in Bartlesville has rendered him rank. He seems to pass muster, so he gets out of the car and approaches Sancho’s.

  He decides that rather than letting on that he has seen Jane through the window, he should make the encounter seem like a bit of serendipity—he does not want to come off as a stalker. He will casually order a cup of joe and then walk by her table, ostensibly on the way to a seat further in back. If she does not ask him to sit down, he will assert himself, say, Might I join you?

  But after he has the coffee in hand and turns away from the counter, something changes. Jane has seen him and is smiling, has even raised one hand slightly in greeting. He wonders how her face looks so young—he is fairly sure she is about his age. Beth posits that Jane has “had some work done” and points out that Jane’s hands look much older than her face.

  She seems glad to see him. Her teeth are so white, he thinks. He feels himself smile, too, and strides toward her table, but—oh god, this cannot be happening. It’s one of those cartoon moments, a scene enacted myriad times in Hollywood comedies, the smile-over-the-shoulder scene, a bit of cheesy slapstick. It seems she is in fact smiling at some guy behind Slater; the smile and the little hand raise are for the other man.

  He hears Poppy’s voice in his ear: Tough it out, boy. Never let ‘em see you sweat. He will not let Jane know what has just gone down. He pretends he has only now noticed her and nods in what he hopes is a businesslike manner as he passes her table. Once he is seated, his face engorged with heat, he takes the opportunity to scope out his competition, who is now seated at Jane’s table, facing Slater.

  It would have been too much to expect that Dr. Jane’s companion appear effeminate or perhaps homely or even mildly handicapped. No: the bastard could give Johnny Depp a run for his money. He has dark hair, enough for five men, and wears a tight red T-shirt and Levi’s, the red shirt inflaming Slater’s ire, the showy son-of-a-bitch. And not only does he appear to be far more handsome and fit than Slater, he also appears to be tremendously younger; the guy looks barely thirty. For one goofy moment, he thinks maybe the guy’s her son.

  But no, Jane and sonny-boy are doing what the entertainment programs on TV call “canoodling,” nothing flagrant, but a lot of looking into each other’s eyes and a bit of fingertip touching.

  What was I thinking? he wonders. I’m done, the guy with the Doberman had it right when he called me “old-timer.” My parents are dead and I’m flat-out next in line for the Slater family plot. And there will be no one behind me in that grim queue. Maybe we should have had kids; at least some of my DNA would remain in the universe. No wonder I can’t get it up: I’m kaput.

  In the car on the way home, Slater attempts to tamp down his distress by turning up the volume on the radio, the Oklahoma City NPR station. The first thing he hears is the interviewer asking someone described as a scientist/professor, “So, are you saying that the invisibility cloak may no longer be simply science fiction?”

  The man answers, “Yes, you could actually make someone invisible as long as he wears a cloak made of this material.” It seems the guy is in the process of creating a cloak made of what is termed metamaterials, which can be tuned to bend electromagnetic radiation and visible light in any direction. The scientist claims, “We think we can present a solid case for making invisibility an attainable goal.”

  When Slater was nine years old, one of his uncles gave him a radio-controlled whoopee cushion for his birthday. The thing looked like a typical accent pillow and could be strategically placed for the chosen mark to sit on. The young Slater could control the device from another location, causing deplorable honks of flatulence to issue from the unsuspecting sitter’s behind. The first time he tried out the device on his parents and sisters, everyone in the room laughed when he cried out, “It’s a dream come true!” But the real dream-come-true would be an invisibility cloak. Since early childhood he has had a persistent fantasy of walking the earth in a mantle of invisibility.

  The wind has picked up, and as Slater drives home he can see that it’s about to rain. A loud, sharp crack of thunder causes him to flinch. But the thunder booming above him also initiates kinesis of his mind. He finds himself transported back to the first time he can recall hearing thunder, before he even knew what it was. He was at the time about the same age he was when his father had the appendectomy and had felt not exactly frightened but surprised when he heard a peal of thunder above the family home, as if a convoy of trucks was driving across the roof. His father explained to him then about thunder and lightning and took him to the window to observe the lightning flashes. He told his son that soon rain would begin to fall.

  When Slater asked how his father knew this, Poppy told him that rain inevitably followed thunder and lightning. “When it starts to rain, can I go outside?” he asked Poppy.

  His father said as long as he cleared it with Mom, that would be fine. His mother dressed Slater in a slicker, red rubber boots, and a sou’wester rain hat, and he stood at the window until he saw the rain begin to fall. Poppy joined him then, wearing a Giants sweatshirt and a hard hat. He held young Slater’s hand in his callused paw and led him out into the garden. They sat on deck chairs near the lilacs and honeysuckle, faces upturned, Davey Slater opening his mouth to catch the raindrops.

  In the driveway in front of his house, Slater sits in the car in the rain, staring at the porch light th
at Beth has switched on, feeling immobile and heavy as if his body is a sack of meal. His heart breaks for a moment when he spots that poor wasp still circling on the porch, slow to get the point that he is now homeless.

  He sits at first inert in the car, but before he knows it, his notebook is out and he is making a list beneath the glare of the dome light:

  THINGS TO DO IN THE INVISIBILITY CLOAK:

  1. God forgive me, but: follow Dr. Jane home and get the goods on her—is red shirt her lover? Does she look as good naked as she does with her clothes on?

  2. Wear the cloak to the grief support group and listen to what they say about me when they think I’m not there.

  3. Follow Beth—see if she has an alternate life. Does she have some man with billows of hair, who never smells like garlic?

  4. For this one, need time machine as well as invisibility cloak: Let me be with Poppy when he dies. If I cannot change what happened, at least let me be there to prevent my father from dying alone.

  Slater stops writing, then rips the page from the notebook and crumples it. He does not wish anyone ever to learn of his base wishes and pitiful regrets—let him put an invisibility cloak around those.

  He thinks of Dracula. Dracula wore a cloak. And Superman, though his was more of a cape. If Slater wore a Superman cape, he could fly through the sky with his arms out in front of him like the young, unmaimed Chris Reeve, perhaps carrying a Lois Lane (or a Dr. Jane) in his arms, a hero. Or he could don a darker cape, the Dracula stealth cape, which he could wrap around his creamy prey before he sank his teeth into her lovely stem of a neck and took them both all the way, all the way to eternal life.

  Suddenly Beth appears in the driveway and raps her knuckles on the driver’s side window. When he rolls down the window, Slater sees his wife is weeping, her nose streaming and eyes red. He looks at her, at first uncomprehending. But then he realizes, my poor Beth, she knows the man she married might now as well be a thousand miles into the stratosphere.