Still in a nervous rush, Patsy called two high school teachers, the Krolls, Rosanne and Hank. She called Gary Krochock, their funny and embittered divorced single neighbor and insurance agent. They all said that they would drop by. Then, like someone who has been on a binge, she stopped herself.
By the time Saul came back down the stairs, five of their friends were already sitting in the living room, waiting for him, and Patsy knew, just from the look on his face, that he understood why she had invited them, and understood why they were there.
Saul went into the kitchen to bring in the beer, but several of the guests had brought their own and had already opened theirs. When he came back out, the death party, such as it was, had ground to a standstill; an expressive air pocket of dead silence greeted him.
Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was oddly muted, mumbling. It’s a desert in here, Patsy thought, as Saul handed out more beer to his friends. Gordy Himmelman had died storyless. Mad Dog and Karla and Saul had all taught him, but he had drifted invisibly, sullenly, into their classrooms and out again. Harold, the barber, had cut the boy’s hair and had known Gordy’s mother, once upon a time, but he had no stories about her son. No, he hadn’t been a good athlete; no, he didn’t have a good sense of humor; and, no, he wasn’t especially kind or considerate. The one really memorable action he had performed in his life, the one thing that everybody would remember about him and say about him as long as they remembered him or talked about him was that he had shot himself.
Saul and Patsy told the story of how they had stood before the window when it had happened. They told the story of the reporter from Channel Seven, Traci McMahoney.
Julie Dusenberg, the English instructor, hoisting her sleepy daughter, Kate, to her left breast, said it was like a case study. The whole event was like a case study.
“A case study of what?” Hank Kroll asked.
“I don’t know,” Julie Dusenberg said dispiritedly. “A case study of something. Of our time,” she said, finally, in desperation, “that you could deconstruct.”
“Well, it’s already deconstructed,” Gary Krochock said, from where he was stretched out on the floor. He was wearing a University of Oklahoma sweatshirt and was balancing his beer bottle on his stomach. “If it’s in the morgue, it’s completely deconstructed, if you want my opinion. It doesn’t get more deconstructed than that. By the way, did you know that ‘disarticulation’ is a medical term? It means taking the body apart, limb by limb.”
“Don’t tell me that this is going to turn into a discussion of American youth,” Mad Dog said, from his end of the sofa, peering with one eye into his empty beer bottle, “because if this turns into a discussion of American youth, I’m going home right now, no questions asked.” He gave off a slight air of pre-drunkenness. “I don’t want to hear about any of that.”
“But the boy’s dead,” Karla said to him. Karla, Saul noted, was the sexiest woman he had ever known who was not beautiful. She looked like a minor player in a porno movie. “Can’t anyone say anything good about him?”
“No,” Mad Dog said. “And I knew him.” He sat there. “Wait a minute. I thought of something. He made good paper airplanes.”
“But he’s a human soul,” Karla said, slapping him on the arm. “Where’s your charity?”
“Where it belongs,” Mad Dog said. “With you. With us.”
“Poor kid, anyway,” someone half-whispered. “Poor old kid, anyway.”
Susan Palmer all at once spoke up. “I don’t see why we have to feel bad. Patsy? You shouldn’t be feeling all guilty and everything. He wasn’t a charming orphan. He didn’t have asthma. He didn’t run away and then come home again, reformed like the prodigal whatever. He wrote semi-illiterate threatening notes, threatening our friends, and let’s face it, he was a big stinking mess. He destroyed Saul’s beehives, when you lived over there. It’s lucky he didn’t hurt Mary Esther. He came into their front yard and waved a gun around, and he sort of harassed them, and I agree, it’s a trauma, but I don’t see what obligation we have to be sentimental about some little shit.” She waited. “I’m sorry. I guess I got carried away.”
A long silence followed, interrupted by the sounds of beer pouring into mouths. Mad Dog suppressed a belch. Someone—Patsy thought maybe it was Rosanne, who almost never spoke—said, “So what you’re saying is, good riddance.”
“Did I say that?” Susan Palmer asked. “No. I don’t believe I said that.”
Another air pocket of silence opened up. Finally, the insurance agent, Gary Krochock, said, “I’ve got to tell you guys about this dream I had last night. Since we’re talking about the dead and everything. It was extremely weird. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”
“You did what?” Saul asked.
“I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat. We were in this big room, maybe it was a recording studio, which I don’t know much about because I’ve never been in one, but I know there were microphones, and Sinatra is out of the room, but he’s left his hat upside down on the floor. And because I had to take a pee, I pissed into it. I pissed into Frank Sinatra’s hat.”
“What did he say?”
“Frank? He didn’t say anything. He was out of the room. But I got scared, and I woke up,” Gary Krochock said. He was still stretched out on the floor. “I’m in big trouble now. I’m in a world of trouble.”
“Frank Sinatra is dead,” Patsy said. “You’re beyond harm.”
“No, but see, that’s the difference. The Chairman of the Board is powerful even in death. That’s why I’m telling you this. He has not lost his influence. He has friends here and there. He’s going to be very, very angry that I pissed into his hat. I don’t feel that I’m safe anymore. Frank Sinatra—well, there’s someone you don’t want to have for an enemy, especially in the afterlife.”
“Take out a policy on yourself,” Mad Dog suggested.
“Too late,” the insurance agent said. “Preexisting condition.”
“What time is it?” Julie Dusenberg asked. “I probably have to go.”
“Two minutes before eleven,” Patsy said without looking at her watch.
“Turn on the news,” Agatha, Harold’s wife, said. “Saul’ll be on.”
Harold reached down for the remote on the coffee table in front of him, pressed a button, and the TV sprang to appliance-life with a miscellany of hisses and crackles.
“Channel Seven,” Saul said.
They watched an ad for Bruckner Buick, some sort of midsummer clearance sale on sedans and SUVs. Then they waited through an ad for a local house-and-garden store until at last the news, preceded by a brass fanfare, came on, with the tease headline, “Local boy dies in schoolteacher’s front yard.” Dennis Peterson, the local anchor for Channel Seven, appeared behind the news desk, his toupee a fraction of an inch off-center, and he gazed solemnly at the lens, the way he always did when he had a major story to report. “A shocking event in Five Oaks today,” he began, in his baritone voice.
“He has a big ole head,” Gary Krochock said, of Dennis Peterson. “He looks like a goddamn pedophile.”
“Why can’t they use complete sentences?” Saul asked. “Not even Tom Brokaw uses complete sentences anymore.”
Everyone in Saul and Patsy’s living room was watching the screen, Patsy noticed. Dennis Peterson continued. “A seventeen-year-old Five Oaks boy, Gordon Himmelman, died by his own hand this morning with a single gunshot to the head. The handgun used in the suicide belonged to the victim’s aunt, and the young man had stolen it from her. The death occurred on Whitefeather Road, in the front yard of Five Oaks high school teacher Saul Bernstein. We do not yet know why the boy had bicycled to his teacher’s house to end his life, and there are still conflicting theories and many unanswered questions about this shocking event. We have a full report by Traci McMahoney.”
“I used to teach in the high school,” Saul said quickly. “I don’t know what I do now.”
“You should be making a tape of this
,” Harold muttered to Patsy. “You may need it.”
“You think so?” Patsy asked.
“That’s right, Denny,” Traci McMahoney said. She was also seated at the news desk in the studio. Patsy noticed that she was wearing a different outfit from the one she was wearing earlier this afternoon. “Tonight,” she said, “we have many more questions than answers about the tragic death of Five Oaks high schooler Gordon Himmelman.”
There was a cut to an establishing shot of Saul and Patsy’s brand-new house on Whitefeather Road, at The Uplands. Traci McMahoney’s commentary continued in a voice-over as the screen presented more shots of the house, the lawn, and finally the tree, viewed from a back-angle so that the bloodstains didn’t show. “The scene of the death was this quiet front yard in a residential area near the Wolverine Outlet Mall. The young man, Gordon Himmelman, lived with his aunt on Strewwelpeter Street. He was a troubled student, challenged academically in high school, currently a dropout, and a former member of the Cub Scouts. His mother had died several years ago in a house fire, and the boy, according to those who knew him, was known for his sense of humor and his pranks.”
“What? Cub Scouts?” Saul asked the TV. “Pranks?”
“The boy’s aunt, Brenda Bagley, filled us in on some details.”
“Where’s Saul?” Gary Krochock asked from the floor. “I want to see Saul.”
The screen cut to a close-up of Gordy’s aunt. She was smiling but the smile was stoic and unconvincing. “My nephew was a wonderful boy,” she said. “Just wonderful. He didn’t have a care in the world. He could get into scrapes, okay, but this is what he was, and what he wasn’t, well, I don’t know, because this thing doesn’t make any sense, this tragedy that he did, to himself, with the gun he found that I had hidden, there’s two and two. I can’t put it together, two and two that just don’t add up. It’s still just two and two.”
“Boy, is she ugly,” Gary Krochock said. “A poltroon. She looks like someone slid into her face at second base. With cleats on.”
“That’s an awful thing to say,” Julie Dusenberg said, turning around to look. “She’s just scared.”
“And what of Gordon Himmelman’s teacher?” Traci McMahoney asked, on a voice-over again, with a medium shot on the tape of Saul looking perplexed, standing next to Patsy. “Saul Bernsteen? When we asked him for some reaction, he seemed as baffled as the victim’s aunt.”
“Hey,” Saul said. “I wasn’t baffled.”
Suddenly there was a close-up of Saul. People in Saul and Patsy’s living room started to clap. The others shushed them. “I don’t think Gordy ever stopped to consider what he did,” Saul said onscreen into the microphone. “He just did things. He didn’t think about what he was doing. He just did them.”
The camera cut back to Traci McMahoney, and then to a shot of Garfield-Fraser Middle School, where the principal was being interviewed about school violence. “Where’s the rest of me?” Saul cried.
“The police have searched for a suicide note but have so far turned up nothing to give them any insight to this terrible event,” Traci McMahoney said. “So far, we have no clues as to why the armed boy bicycled over to his teacher’s house, and we have no clues, either, concerning the motivations for his tragic suicide. The only person who had the answers to these questions cannot give us one. In an age of violence in our schools, there may in fact be no easy explanations. Those who are left grieving must still wonder over the causes tonight. Perhaps the only blessing is that this happened during the summer, during school vacation, so that Gordon Himmelman’s school friends can have time before classes begin to mourn his loss. Reporting from Whitefeather Road, this is Traci McMahoney.”
“That was totally insane,” Harold said, shaking his head and looking away from the TV screen. “Jesus. That thing about summer vacation. What the fuck was that about?”
“Maybe it just slipped out,” Saul said. Dennis Peterson had segued to another story about Derby Days in downtown Five Oaks, and then the phone started to ring.
“I thought you looked pretty good, Saul,” Karla said. “You acquitted yourself very well.” She clapped her hands several times in his direction, a form of applause. A few other people in the room also applauded. “Hear, hear,” they said.
The party broke up half an hour later.
At two-fifteen, Saul was lying in bed with Patsy. “I can’t sleep,” he said.
“I know.” She opened and shut her mouth quickly, realized that the nighttime epigram she was about to utter was not particularly clever, and was in the wrong key, besides.
They lay there together. It was a warm night, and they touched each other lightly, back to back.
“Do you feel it?” Saul asked. “He hasn’t gone away.”
“What do you mean?”
Saul looked up toward the ceiling in exasperation. “He’s still here,” he said. “Can’t you tell?”
Yes, of course she could tell. Yes, indeed. He still was. It would take more than a bullet to put an end to him, but she would be careful not to say so.
Eleven
A day begins, sunny, the hint of a breeze, a relief from the stillness of the day before. The baby—really, her infancy is over, and the world is registering on her in complex patterns of light and sound—the baby is standing in her crib uttering greet-the-world noises, vocalizations. She practices her scat-singing. In the bedroom across the hall, her parents ponder the possibility of making love—the husband, who has not slept, staring at the ceiling, and the wife, who has slept very well indeed but who has a headache from a beer she drank just before she went to bed, studying the bedside clock, though she already knows the time. The encounter, if it happens, would be quick. This does not have to be said. No profound emotions would be exchanged, no virtuoso gestures; it would be like coughing: a relief for the moment, an analgesic against other urges and irritations. But after one or two tentative caresses on the arm, the back, the buttocks, they move away from each other. The spaces between them could be measured in millimeters, infinitesimal spaces expressing an inexpressible failure of desire. Neither one wants to hurt the other’s feelings, and they both take great care to be physically tactful. Arising out of the drudgery of sleep, the wife (Patsy) is preoccupied with her dreams, her daughter in the next room, and a slight and casual indifference to her husband’s body, an indifference that is new to her, and the husband (Saul) is preoccupied with death. He is, to use an antique word, heartsick. Morning sex will not cure it. Sex, today, would make it worse.
The measure of this particular marriage is that each one knows the other’s thoughts. Day after day, the possibility of a private language between them is established and maintained. No private language, the wife thinks, no marriage.
The wife tosses aside the sheet and marches into the bathroom. She splashes water on her face. Then she brushes her teeth, enjoying the taste, like candied goo, of the toothpaste, a sunrise taste. After rinsing her mouth out and watching the water swirl down the drain that is beginning to be clogged with her husband’s beard stubble, she searches in the medicine cabinet for the aspirin, pushing aside the antidepressants to get at it. She takes two caplets, then lowers her cupped hands to the running water. As she drinks the water, she notices that her toenails will soon need clipping. She looks at her face in the mirror and thinks of the word “haggard,” because that is what she expected to be but is not. She looks pretty great, all things considered. Her eyes glow with intelligence and clarity, the dream-life and the headache fading out of them now that she is standing up. Her beauty—and she can recognize this—originates from her eyes. It flows out from there. The rest of her body is secondary, a problem in geometry, a dancer’s problem.
Back in the bedroom, she stretches her clasped arms and twists her head back and forth to loosen the neck muscles. She lowers herself to the floor to perform her leg-raises, sit-ups, and more stretch exercises before she stands and walks over to the phone. She calls a special number at the bank to say she will no
t be coming in to work. Family emergency. Of course everyone at the bank will already know about Gordy Himmelman’s death. In fact, the secretary to whom she speaks passes on her sympathies. Patsy hardly needs to call. After hanging up, she pads into the nursery to greet Mary Esther, nuzzle her, change her, and take her down to the kitchen for breakfast. Her daughter screech-sings happily when she first sees her mother.
As Patsy’s mother used to say, following any event contaminated by sorrow, “Life goes on.”
The husband hears his wife’s light footsteps as she descends the stairs. Before he rises, he leans over to sniff her pillow to detect her mood. The smell on the pillow is businesslike, a female version of getting-on-with-things. How does he know this, how does he know he isn’t imagining, right there on the borders of psychopathology, his wife’s climates and thoughts? He shrugs to himself. He just does. He’s married to her. Slowly he pushes the sheet aside and stands up. He lumbers with effort—he feels like a circus bear—past the dresser, festooned with framed pictures of his daughter, past the rickety wooden chair on which he throws his clothes at night. He ambles in front of the window, pushes aside the curtains, and raises the windowshade. He lingers there, idly rearranging his penis inside his pajamas as he looks out at the linden tree and the lawn.
From the kitchen he hears his wife and daughter making noises. The wife is weaning the daughter, a difficult process for both of them. Food is being spooned into the daughter’s mouth, and this same food, projectile-spat, has appeared on the floor and the high chair. The husband at the window notices that his early-morning thoughts are in the passive voice. He is permitted to use the passive voice when he is sleepy.
The boy, Gordy Himmelman, is not there, outside, but he shoots himself anyway, randomly, airily, imaginatively, bringing himself back so that he can go away again. There he is, and isn’t, now, pointing the gun into himself and firing. Insubstantial bits of brains and skull fly up against the bark of the linden tree. How calm it is. How it goes on, destruction, into its own afterlife. Still, this life, his own, Saul’s, must be lived somehow. Saul shuffles into the bathroom for his shower, rubbing his eyes violently with the flat of his hand.
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