The Suicide Club

by Toni Graham

  Holly slides the note back into the book and returns the Rumi to the drawer. At least she no longer writes letters to the dead. She even understands now why she composed the brainsick plea to the deceased Reed in the first place. During their grief support meetings, garrulous Dave sometimes quotes his Russian grandmother. Last week’s granny maxim was “Hope is a fool’s mother, but the only mother we have.”

  After she lies back down and pulls up the blankets, Holly mutes the television’s audio. The huckster selling stain removers has been replaced by a commercial for oatmeal. She has never seen this particular ad before, and in the dark of her bedroom the soundless image illuminating the screen arrests her attention. A man wearing a dress shirt and necktie stands poised for flight. On his back he wears a twin pack of cylindrical oatmeal boxes, which together look like a Jetpack, the mechanism that, when strapped to one’s back, allows one to actually fly. How many times, sleeping in this very room, has she had dreams of flying, rising up and away, above all the grit and hurly-burly of earth and soaring free?

  Once she saw a Jetpack demo on the Internet, a video clip of a man flying. His Jetpack emitted a loud, dissonant sound, more like Holly’s mother’s old Kirby vacuum cleaner than like an airplane. As the man flew, two attendants ran along, below and to the side of the flying man, ready to catch him if he fell.

  Now the oatmeal man is aloft, lifted into the air and gliding in a blue sky, briefcase bobbing in the wind, farther and farther above roads and buildings, his arms at his sides like gull wings. He ascends.

  BURGLAR

  It is easier for a father to have children than for children to have a father.

  POPE JOHN XXIII

  “No foul play is suspected,” the cable news guy says. Slater looks up from where he is sitting on the sofa with a stack of exams turned in by the students in his Theory of Architecture seminar. Funny how a phrase such as “no foul play suspected” can be clichéd and yet at the same time have the power to set off a Pavlovian response. He feels a spritz of cold sweat beneath his shirt as his father comes to mind. In the case of Poppy’s suicide last year, Slater knew foul play had in fact been suspected by the cops. His father had set up the Salvadoran housekeeper, telling her he was going out of town and asking her to come in and feed the dog while he was away. When she entered the house to feed Poppy’s elderly borzoi, the unfortunate woman found her employer in bed ashen and deceased, with a bottle of Captain Morgan and an empty prescription bottle on the nightstand. The cops then roped the porch with yellow crime-scene tape and questioned her for some time. He guesses he should feel grateful that Poppy arranged things so none of his children would find the corpse, but there is something unsavory about sticking a domestic worker with such a task. Another hackneyed expression comes to mind: “Not in my job description.”

  His attention drifts back to the TV, where the news guy elaborates on the no-foul-play story at hand. The item turns out to be one of those Ripley’s-type tales, freakishly unlikely. Some guy in South Carolina had received a heart transplant several years before and bizarrely enough ended up marrying the widow of his own heart donor. But the story had not ended there. Now, six years later, he has been found dead with what appears to be a self-inflicted shotgun wound, which as it happens is exactly the way the donor himself had died.

  It enters Slater’s mind that maybe the widow shot both men, but apparently the cops have ruled out that possibility. Could there really be something uncanny about the donor heart? Could an organ—other than the one below the waist—actually cause one man after another to fall in love with the very same woman and then to raise a gun to his head, too? The story momentarily rattles him. But probably the twice-widowed woman drove both husbands to suicide; probably the transplanted heart had nothing to do with the issue.

  Now the local news has replaced the national stuff, and on the screen is a haggard-looking woman being interviewed in the front yard of her home. Standing by the chain link fence is an interviewer from one of the Tulsa stations, a reporter wearing a flowered dress of the sort favored by Oklahoma women. The interviewee herself wears a pair of baggy trousers, topped by a maroon Sooners hoodie. She explains in what used to be termed a “whiskey voice,” but from the looks of her deeply furrowed face is more likely a voice ravaged by decades of tobacco use, that sometime during the night, someone had stolen her statue of Jesus from this very lawn. She points to a spot in the center of the yard and elaborates.

  “He was rot here,” she says, “rot in the middle of my yard, the sacred heart a Jesus.”

  The reporter in the country-cousin dress turns somberly to the camera and informs the audience, “The theft of the statue of Jesus occurred sometime last night. It’s hard to imagine who would do something like this.” She offers a dismayed little head shake.

  “Are we gonna let the Debil win?” the complainant says. “Cuz that’s what’s happenin’.”

  Beth comes out of the kitchen carrying two glasses of wine. “I think it’s the cocktail hour, Dave,” she says, eyeing the stack of student papers until Slater sets them aside. “What’s new on the news?” She hands him a glass.

  “The Devil stole Jesus,” he says, but keeps his tone nonjudgmental. He has never cared to be one of those like Woody Allen who mock other people’s religions. He has no ax to grind against Jesus, even if Jesus-culture is tacky, nor does he make Easter egg jokes, as Allen often did back in his high-visibility days before Soon Yi. Slater says nothing to Beth about the report of the telltale heart that caused men to shoot themselves. He takes a swig of what tastes like Merlot.

  Beth leans over to place coasters on the coffee table, and Slater has a close-up view of the backs of her thighs. He wishes he were a bigger person, a more loyal spouse, and that the sight of her cellulite did not impact him negatively. But Slater has begun to discover that he is not a big person, not the man he always intended to be. He has become a clenched-up semi-bitter guy who is often shocked to catch sight of his pinched, unhappy face as he passes a mirror or reflective surface. But Beth had never in their married life worn shorts when they still lived in New York. The women in Hope Springs, though, think nothing of wearing shorts everywhere they go, about seven months out of the year, and Beth has jumped onto that bandwagon. Of course, she’s an educated person, so she does not fall for the sucker-bait ads for creams or pills that are supposed to eradicate cellulite. She is aware that those dimples might as well be part of her DNA now, and that they’ll be with her in her casket someday.

  When he was a freshman at Columbia and still a virgin, he had found himself obsessed with the issue of virginity, wishing his own would disappear and imagining that he was the last male virgin over the age of twelve. He sat in many a seminar or studio session on campus paying little attention to the work at hand, staring at the other students in the room and trying to imagine whether they had sex or not. The preoccupation vexed him like a hair shirt until Homecoming Weekend when Cheryl Bernstein came through for him. Now he finds this sort of OCD thinking has returned, as he stares at every woman he meets, wondering if the backs of her legs are smooth or puckered. He has discovered himself in some unseemly moments trying to catch glimpses of Dr. Jane’s thighs when she crosses her legs in her short, flouncy skirts while she facilitates the suicide survivors group meetings on Wednesday evenings.

  Beth’s voice thrums along with the television; she is making a running commentary on the annoying number of commercials that clog the networks these days, but Slater cannot divorce himself from the story about the guy who shot himself, the guy with the donated heart. And what was it in Slater’s father’s heart that allowed him to take his life—who could ever know that? Slater remembers a weird factoid from a marine biology course he took long ago at Columbia. The hagfish, which is not exactly a fish but an elongated eel-like creature, has two brains and four hearts. The organism is so flexible it can tie itself in knots.

  “Did you ever notice,” Beth says, “that when the drug commercials are forced to list
the side effects, they do so in a cheery little upbeat singsong voice?”

  Slater shrugs.

  Beth mimics the commercial being aired: “May cause blindness!” she says in a buoyant tone, “paralysis or cancer!” She flashes an outlandish rictus of a smile, mocking the toothy grin of the actress enumerating the different ways a medication can maim the patient, and Slater has to laugh. Beth, a theater major in college, has always been a talented mimic.

  Slater does not recall anything further about the hagfish, though he finds himself wondering how many reproductive organs the critters might have. With all those hearts and brains, does it also need multiple sets of genitalia? How cool would it be to have two schlongs on hand, or maybe a penis and a vagina both, so you never had to worry about a partner. He had taken an undergrad lit seminar, too, as an elective, and there was a Hemingway story in which the young male protagonist looked longingly at women but made no attempt to meet them. The story said the youth dimly desired a girl but did not want to have to work to get her. What he wanted was a “life without consequences.”

  One day when he was five years old, Slater and two of his neighborhood pals had been playing inside his parents’ car. More accurately, the shiny black Plymouth with whitewall tires was his father’s car; few women had drivers’ licenses in the 1950s. Nearly every family owned only one car, and the man did the driving. Times were different then, as if in a different universe on another plane somewhere. In Flatbush in those days, little kids walked to school without escort, frolicked unchaperoned on playgrounds, rode bikes everywhere, alone or with their chums, played out in the street and inside cars. What they were not allowed to do was listen to the radio when sitting inside their fathers’ autos. “You’ll wear down the battery!” was the universal parental complaint in Slater’s neighborhood. On the day he is recalling, Jeffie Rabinowitz and Barbara Zuchelli had been his playmates, Barbara sitting in the backseat and Jeffie manning the radio as Slater sat in the driver’s seat twisting the steering wheel from side to side and making acceleration and braking sounds with his mouth. Jeffie left the radio tuned to a station playing Cliffie Stone’s “Silver Stars, Purple Sage.” Slater has no idea why cowboy songs were so popular in the 1950s, but there was a whole Western vibe going on then in both music and film. And when the family went out to Playland at the beach, there was a vending machine called Allstar Cowboys where one could slip coins into a slot and choose cowboy cards, just as the adults chose packs of cigarettes from nearly identical machines. Slater had purchased stacks of the cards, and before he went off to Columbia, he discovered in his childhood bureau cards including Bill Elliott as Red Ryder and Robert “Bobby” Blake as Little Beaver; that one is funny now.

  “Jeez Louise—your dad’s a crook!” Jeffie had opened the glove box and begun rummaging inside with an astonished look on his plump face.

  Slater had said, “No, he’s not,” even before he knew why Rabinowitz made such an accusation.

  Rabinowitz gingerly pulled a knife from the glove box and unsheathed it, clutching it in one hand and staring at it as if it were a Tommy gun. “Look at this thing!” he said. “It’s gigantic.”

  “Put it back,” Slater said, feeling a hot burning behind his eyes and even in his groin. When Rabinowitz did not re-sheath the knife, Slater repeated more loudly, “Put it back.” He added, “And turn off the radio, you’ll wear down the battery.” He heard Barbara gasp when she saw the knife, and knew she would go home and blab to her parents and her nine siblings. He had heard his father tell his mother that the Zuchellis had so many kids because they were papists, but when Slater asked what that meant, his parents would not say. Slater and his friends left the car, the mood spoiled, and Rabinowitz and Barbara both went home. Slater went inside the house, by then weeping like a wound.

  “What’s wrong, Davey?” his mother had asked. “Did you skin your knee?”

  At first Slater had not wanted to answer his mother, but when she prompted him, he blurted, “Daddy’s a burglar.”

  Mom had first laughed, then asked him why he would think such a thing. He explained he had discovered a knife in the glove box of the car, not mentioning Rabinowitz or the radio.

  “Oh, honey, that’s a hunting knife,” his mother said and put her arm around him. Slater can still feel the relief that surged through him that day, Poppy in an instant transformed from a potential knifer and robber back to his strong, worthy father, a former football player and a navy veteran, a longshoreman who marched proudly with his union brothers in parades.

  Just before Slater and Beth were married, lying in bed one long, lazy morning, he had told Beth the anecdote from his childhood about suspecting his father was a “burglar.”

  “It was just a hunting knife,” Slater told her, laughingly ruefully.

  Beth had squinted and pressed her lips together, saying nothing at first. Finally she said, “I never thought of your father as a hunter.”

  “He isn’t,” Slater said. “Never was. Poppy’s not the hunting type.”

  “Well, then,” she said, “he didn’t need a hunting knife. He must have had the knife in his car because he was a punk.”

  Slater had stifled a choky gulp from a sudden tightness in his throat. Poppy a punk? The association with his father was foreign and jarring. The word was still significantly insulting in those days, long before punk rock or punk culture. Until the seventies, “punk” was still defined as “a rebel or thug” and alternatively “a young man who is the sexual partner of an older man.” Slater did not know what he felt in that moment, exactly, other than the choking sensation and no slight embarrassment that it had taken an outside party to conclude what was glaringly obvious. Slater faked a laugh for Beth and said, “I suppose so,” but he was haunted for days by the exchange. In less than a nanosecond, the father he revered had been exposed as a punk, what Poppy himself might have referred to as a “no-goodnik.” Eventually he shrugged off the notion and restored his father to his former place in his mental outlook, but he had learned that morning in bed that even one’s own father was never what one thought he was, that the sands could rapidly shift, like when you stood at the edge of the sea and the waves rolled out, the slippage of the sand beneath your feet altering your perspective and leaving you for a moment dizzy.

  Slater arrives at the fellowship hall later than usual for the weekly suicide survivors meeting, but Dr. Jane is not there yet. Clay, the quiet guy who drives down from Ponca City, is not present either, so Slater sits next to SueAnn, though she usually chooses to sit near Clay. Slater has the feeling that both Clay and SueAnn are intimidated by the others in the group and even by Dr. Jane. SueAnn and Clay are the only natives of Oklahoma, the rest of the group just by chance consisting of coastal transplants. Slater is from New York; Jane is from San Francisco, here on an NIMH grant; Holly came from Los Angeles to open the only bookstore in Hope Springs, other than the one on campus. He greets SueAnn, and she laughs a bit nervously when she says hello, then resumes sipping coffee from a Styrofoam cup. She wears perfume he has never noticed before, though maybe he just has not been close enough to her. Rather than the floral scent he might have expected, SueAnn’s perfume smells like vanilla. He finds the fragrance more than a bit appetizing.

  Dr. Jane enters the room. Slater tries not to look her in the face. The last time he saw her, she was in Siesta Sancho’s restaurant flirting with a guy young enough to be her son. Yeah, well, so what if he’s a bit jealous of the young man. She seems to be surviving her own grief well enough, if she can take up with a handsome youth. Next to him, SueAnn gives off a lot of warmth for such a petite woman. Though she is slightly plump, he would not have thought of her as large enough to radiate so much body heat. Maybe she’s having hot flashes like Beth used to. He debates telling her she might consider knocking off the caffeine but thinks better of it and says nothing.

  “Would someone like to begin, this evening?” Jane says, all business now, her “therapeutic mask” in place. Slater wonders if she s
howed that expression to youngblood when they were in bed together.

  “I’ll start,” he says. The rest of them say in unison, “Thanks, Dave,” sounding like the folks in the A.A. meetings held down the hall, and all eyes pivot his way. He notices SueAnn has a little gold cross on a chain, or is it a crucifix? He can never remember the difference. The thing rests on her considerable cleavage, which is pinkish, also probably indicative of hot-flash activity.

  “I’m not saying this group hasn’t helped me,” Slater says, “but I feel like everything is backwards.” No one says anything, and Slater does not know what to say either. He had not planned to speak tonight and is not sure what he’s getting at. He goes with the flow, just lets the words edge themselves out.

  “Just before Beth and I were married, we lived in a sixth-floor walk-up a few blocks from NYU.” He looks around, sees that the three women seem actively attentive. “The fixtures in the bathroom were transposed,” he says.

  The women look at him quizzically.

  “The faucet with the H on it had cold water, and the one with the C on it had hot water,” he says.

  Holly laughs. “When you said the fixtures were transposed, I had this yucky image of the toilet flushing into the bathtub.”

  Slater tries not to look at her legs. “As my dad used to say,” he continues, “we’re all creatures of habit, so of course no matter how long we’d lived there, we often forgot that the faucets were backwards and we’d either step into an ice-cold shower or scald ourselves when we tried to throw cold water on our faces.”