The Reason You're Alive

by Matthew Quick

  I’m not going to go on and on about how fucking brilliant my wife was, nor will I describe all of her many wonderful paintings, and I mean that literally—they were full of wonder, even the frightening ones—because going into detail about her portfolio would take up ten thousand pages of this report. I’ll just tell you about the best one she did very early on, which she titled The Reason You’re Alive. It might have been the first painting she made in that studio of hers.

  You might think I’m vain when I tell you about my favorite of Jessica’s, because it’s a portrait of me. Baby Hank’s in there too. I’m in my full Vietnam combat gear, decked out in camouflage with a rifle strapped to my back, and I’m in the jungle with all sorts of bad shit around me—gooks in trees, tigers, unidentifiable snakes, because Jessica didn’t know all that much about the specific snakes they had in Vietnam, napalm fire, and part of the jungle is even melting from Agent Orange.

  But in the middle of everything, I’m not fighting; I’m holding little naked Hank, whose umbilical cord is still connected to his stomach. If you follow the cord with your eyes, you will see that it turns into a bubble that surrounds Hank and me and seems to be shielding us from all of that bad shit in Vietnam.

  It was heavily influenced by Henri Rousseau, to say the least. And you don’t have to go to art appreciation school to understand the symbolism in that or any of Jessica’s paintings, which is why my wife is so much better than artists like Eggplant X and other bozos who just want to make money and be mysterious asshole celebrities trying to make people guess what the fuck their paintings mean and then making everyone feel stupid when they get it wrong. Jessica never wanted to show her paintings to anyone, let alone sell them. I’m pretty sure they would have commanded millions on the open market. But she just wanted to paint. Period. Needed to paint. It kept her alive for ten years of motherhood. She never really wanted to be a mother.

  When she let me see The Reason You’re Alive, I didn’t cry but I got a big old lump in my throat. She had captured me perfectly—not just the way I looked, either, but how I felt damned, and yet I was still trying my hardest to atone. I was allowed to see the painting three or four more times before it went into Jessica’s archives, which meant that it was stacked up with all the other paintings, and no one was allowed to touch any of them. I had always dreamed that Jessica would one day get up the courage to show her art, maybe after Hank grew up and she was older and had matured as an artist or when she had finally beaten her depression, but that never happened.

  A few years later, things got really bad, only I didn’t catch it in time.

  I knew Jessica was having more difficulty pretending that she wanted to be a mother to Hank, but I was climbing up the corporate ladder at the bank I was working at in the city, which often meant after-work drinks and golf outings and dinners at expensive restaurants that Jessica never wanted to go to. And her reclusiveness was doing zilch for my career. The wife of a banker is supposed to schmooze, and all the other wives at the bank were fucking pros. So I was handicapped.

  I thought the art supplies and garage were enough, but one night in December of 1980 I took Hank to a 76ers game, and when we came home there were fire trucks and police cars everywhere. Our house was fine, but Jessica’s studio had burned to the ground, which meant all of her paintings had been destroyed. My heart sank. I knew this would send her over the edge, into an even deeper depression. But then I saw the haunted looks that the cops and firefighters were giving me.

  There are no words to describe how I felt, losing Jessica, so I’m not even going to try here.

  She seemed so happy when we left her that night. I’ve since heard that’s a classic sign for depressed people who are about to commit suicide: it means their suffering is about to end. Jessica kissed us both in the kitchen before we exited the house through the back door in the kitchen. Her last words to us were “Have a great time at the game!”

  Just as soon as he understood what had happened, standing there with all the fire trucks and hoses and sad-looking cops, Hank started to apologize. He kept saying he was sorry, like he had lit the fire, which he obviously hadn’t. At the time I was trying to process everything—the horrific fact that my wife burned herself to death, using her own art as a funeral pyre. But later I’d hear Hank apologizing for his mother’s death in my mind. I still hear it sometimes. It’s a whisper that’s ever-present, like my own heartbeat. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry.

  I probably should have talked more with Hank about his mother’s suicide. Today a kid like that would get therapy. But it was a long time ago, and you people trained me to keep my mouth shut and soldier on, which is exactly what I did, right or wrong. Young Hank followed my lead there, and time kept passing.

  Burning yourself alive is a hell of a way to go. I have spent all my time since blaming myself for what had happened, even though the VA shrink I currently see and four or five other headshrinkers have all told me it’s not my fault so many times over the decades that followed.

  But I know this is God paying me back for killing so many gook civilians and burning so many villages. No matter how much I might not like it, God likes humans, even Communist gooks, better than dogs, and that is the exact reason why God put the bad thoughts in Jessica’s brain. After all I had done during the war, I would never be allowed happiness, no matter how many good deeds I did for the rest of my life. Everyone who didn’t understand God’s math said I should remarry, but I never could go through all that again. Wouldn’t want to bring another woman down. And Jessica was the only one for me, anyway.

  The reason I went into all of this stuff here is that a few weeks after Jessica burned herself to death, I was emptying out her bureau, getting rid of her clothes, when I saw Clayton Fire Bear’s real name carved into the bottom of her underwear drawer. The letters were big white blocks, like he had cut to the bone of the stained wood. Since she had never even heard it, Jessica couldn’t have carved that name into the drawer bottom, although she would have surely seen it every time she put her laundry away. It was a mystery that I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve at first, especially since the firefighters had confirmed without a doubt, using their firefighter science, that my wife had intentionally started the blaze and made no attempt to escape it, but rather chose to go up in smoke with her art. Try living with that on your fucking conscience.

  I’ve asked all the VA shrinks—and I’ve seen more than a few over the years—why Jessica didn’t just leave Hank and me and start a new life if she hated ours so much. They all say leaving doesn’t kill what’s inside. And I know that’s true because I left the Vietnam jungle so many years ago.

  And I damn near went insane trying to figure out how Fire Bear’s name came to be carved into my wife’s underwear drawer, which is creepy enough, but downright disturbing when you factor in all of the other shit I have already told you about.

  But on the balcony, as I took the last few puffs of the Cohiba, Frank was telling me this monster Indian from my past was now a well-respected lawyer who would probably very much appreciate having his father’s knife back. And the truth I wasn’t telling Frank was that I wouldn’t mind knowing if Fire Bear had been in my house. And when. How. Why.

  Regardless, we could agree on one thing: I needed closure.

  13.

  After everything that happened, first my fucked-up brain and then Hank kicking me in the balls by falling back in love with that traitorous Dutch export of a woman—and after all the father-son progress we had made in Femke’s absence!—I didn’t feel much like hunting down a gigantic Indian lawyer who may or may not still have wanted to scalp me.

  I wasn’t afraid of Clayton Fire Bear. Never was. Never will be. But facing that past was fucking daunting, which is a common thing for most veterans, not just Vietnam vets.

  And so instead, Frank and I had a few days of living like bachelor kings, during which we smoked Cubans in this underground cigar room in the city that Frank knows the secret password for and ate s
teaks at the Union League, which tried to not let me in, on account of the fact that I was wearing camouflage and not a proper suit and tie. But Frank has so much money that he can basically do whatever he wants anywhere, and so—especially since I was a US veteran—they finally made an exception and even let me keep my camouflage bucket hat on while I devoured my filet mignon. We went to the shooting range and squeezed off a bunch of rounds, which is great for dealing with stress. They always hang up pictures of Muslim terrorists as targets, so it feels patriotic to kill those paper bastards too. We even took the limousine to Atlantic City, because Frank likes to play craps. He bets so much money, we always draw a crowd, and the hottest babes around fight to blow on Frank’s dice. The more money you have, the hotter the women you attract. Period. At night we’d watch the games until I’d pass out, and then Frank did who knows what.

  I was having a really good time with my best white non-homo friend, but after a few days, I think we both sort of got sick of each other. He asked if there was anyone else who could take a turn making sure I wasn’t a danger to myself or others, and that’s when I called Sue.

  When she answered, she said that I was just the person she needed to speak with because she had a favor to ask of me. Then she warned it was a big favor—the kind that had to be asked in person.

  I figured I’d say yes to her favor before I asked her if she could watch me for a few days, and we agreed to meet at a coffee shop not too far from the Liberty skyscrapers.

  When I walked into the coffee shop, I was blinded by the huge diamond on Sue’s left ring finger, and that confused me. I started to get my hopes up for Hank. Maybe he really did have the balls to stand up to Femke and woo Sue. As I strode over to the table, I began to imagine having a true American patriot for a daughter-in-law, and my heart filled up with pride to the point of bursting.

  Sue was beaming, and she couldn’t even stay seated. She popped up out of the booth, threw both hands around my neck, and kissed my cheek, which surprised me because she had never done anything like that before. I got a whiff of her, and there was that vanilla and lavender.

  Sue held up her ring finger and said, “Surprise!”

  The gigantic rock must have cost at least twenty grand. My immediate thought was this: I hope my dumbass son had insured it.

  I told Sue I couldn’t be happier for her as we sat down.

  She started acting like she had snorted a mountain of cocaine. She couldn’t sit still for a second and was waving her little arms all over the place. Finally she reached across the table and grabbed my hands, and then she said she wanted me to give her away at the altar, because her father was no longer with us, and Alan would have wanted a fellow Vietnam veteran to do the job.

  It took a lot of strength to keep the tears from escaping my eyes. I realized that I had not yet agreed to give her away on her big day when she said, “Will you?”

  I nodded once, and a great big tear fell from my cheek and splattered on the table, so I looked at my lap and tried to regain my composure.

  Then Sue said that there was one more part to all of this. Teddy had traditional values, and since Sue thought of me as a father figure, he wanted to take me out to dinner, tell me all about his ten-year plan, and outline exactly how he would provide a good life for Sue and their future children.

  This is when I looked up and said, “Did you say Teddy?”

  And she confirmed that she had said Teddy. She said she told me about this Teddy a million times before my brain surgery, only when I was waking up post-op, I had told her not to mention Teddy to me ever again, because he wasn’t good enough for her.

  I don’t remember saying that, nor did I even remember Sue being in the room with me during my recovery. I only remember her coming a few days after the surgery, but she said she was with me at the hospital the whole time. We’ll have to chalk the blanks in my memory up to your evil employer cutting out part of my brain and the people-cutter skier’s abominable incompetence.

  I kept asking questions, because it seemed like Sue was trying to trick me, but I could tell from the look on her face that she was deeply in love with this Teddy, whoever the fuck he was.

  So I went ahead and asked her directly if she had any feelings whatsoever for Hank, and she said she thought of me as a father, so Hank was like a brother to her. She wanted to get to know Hank and Ella better, and she knew that Teddy and Hank would be good friends too, so I had to think of it as positive growth in the family.

  “How come you’ve never introduced me to Teddy?” I said.

  There were two reasons.

  First, she knew I wanted her to fall in love with Hank, so she was afraid of disappointing me, especially while I was recovering. Apparently Sue and Hank had even talked about this when I fell asleep after the dinner parties. Hank was actually the one who talked her into introducing Teddy to me, which makes him a true moron, not fighting for the better of the two women available to him.

  The second reason she didn’t introduce me to Teddy was because I already knew him, and he was sort of nervous about asking someone he respected so much for Sue’s hand in marriage. Apparently, he had finally gotten up the courage to approach me right around the time I had that first seizure and totaled the BMW. But he didn’t want to bother me in the hospital or while I was recovering, especially since I was in such bad shape at first.

  I kept racking my damaged brain, trying to think of someone I knew named Teddy, but I couldn’t come up with a single face. I thought maybe I was losing even more of my memory, so I stayed quiet.

  Finally, Sue said that Teddy was waiting outside and was going to join us for coffee right then. That made my heart beat faster, because I didn’t want to see someone I had forgotten. That would have been fucking awkward, especially since this man was going to marry my unofficial daughter.

  But then “Teddy” walked into the coffee shop with that swagger of his, and I knew exactly who he was.

  Big T.

  I didn’t know him as Teddy, because none of his gym homeboys called him that, and he went by Theodore in the banking world.

  Teddy doesn’t really sound like a black dude’s name until you remember Teddy Pendergrass, who was one smooth brother. “Turn Off the Lights” is a track that can get you laid instantly with the right sort of woman.

  On the basketball court Sue’s Teddy was known as Big T, so I used that moniker as I stood up and did the secret brother handshake with him. At the end of this particular handshake you pull each other closer with your fists locked together between your chests, which keeps you at least four inches apart so it doesn’t become a homo handshake, and then you pound your other fist on your brother’s back three times before you let go. I performed it flawlessly. Big T gave me a huge grin.

  We all sat down, and Big T told me he loved Sue with all his heart even before he found out that she had an American hero for a father figure, and so I told him that Alan was the true hero, bringing Sue to America and raising her the right way, which was what you should always look for when shopping for a wife, and that bit made Sue a little mad, which is when I remembered that it wasn’t just me and Big T, but a woman was also present.

  Then Big T made a big deal about my putting a good word in for him at PNC Bank, where he currently works as an executive, making big-time coin, which is another reason why I approve of him for Sue. Big T was a true moneymaker, and he was also appreciative and, even better, loyal. He kept saying the phone call I had made changed his life, and I kept telling him it was living his life the right way—working hard and locking down many smart, opportunistic plays—that made making the phone call a pleasure. Long-term success usually comes from consistently hitting singles and doubles, not from hitting the occasional home run every so many games. Big T got that and therefore was a real man by anyone’s standards—always willing to do the little necessary things to help the team win rather than swinging selfishly for the fences.

  “Why exactly did you make that call?” asked Sue.

>   I told her all of the above and then added this: Big T was also the first brother at the health club who ever let me run ball. He vouched for me with his people, so I returned the favor.

  Big T—who was dressed in an expensive suit, by the way, looking pro and classy—went on to say that when he found out about my relationship with Sue, he was worried that I wouldn’t approve.

  I told him I wasn’t a fucking racist, which made both him and Sue laugh.

  “No, G.I. Joe,” he said, using his brother rhymes. “I thought maybe you’d think I put my hand in your cookie jar too many times. And so I wanted to prove myself worthy first.”

  This is when he told me about the huge promotion he had received at PNC Bank, letting me know that he was now one of the highest-ranking bankers in the building, thanking me for the help. I told him that my phone call was just a door opener. “They don’t promote idiots,” I said. “You did all the work yourself.”

  I had a thought right then that mixed-race babies are often the cutest babies, and a lot of beautiful people are mixed race. And so I knew that Sue and Big T were going to make gorgeous children, all of whom I hoped would call me Pop Pop. And I had a hard time holding the tears back for a second time.

  Sue spent the night at my home, making sure I wasn’t a danger to myself or others and admiring my large gun collection, and then I went out with Big T the next night.