Suicide Academy

by Daniel Braun Stern

  Barbara sat on the edge of the bed. She wore a slip. It struck me that I had never seen her half-dressed. Only clothed or naked. The unfinished look added to the despair described by her face and the forward arc of her body.

  “What is it, Barbara?” I sat down next to her.

  Blue eyes blinked. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  I studied her face for a clue. What I saw: the bland, American beauty; some Iowa innocence. Of both she was sublimely unaware.

  “Whatever it is—” I began.

  “A kid—” she said.

  Impossible, I thought. Issue from Barbara and myself, would be a Norman Rockwell painting of the Sabbath in Odessa. Huckleberry Finn with a yarmulke hiding in the woods because the Rabbi was looking for him to continue Bar Mitzvah instructions. (I quote Gilliatt the day he got wind that Barbara and I were having an office affair.)

  The silence around us was complete. Perhaps just the ticking of a clock could be heard.

  “Two days ago,” she said.

  “A guest?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who chose—?”

  “He’s dead!”

  “You know you can’t get involved.”

  “I know.”

  “He wasn’t—related to you, or anything, was he?” With so much traffic at the various Academies there have been some pretty wild coincidences.

  Barbara shook her head. “Children should be out of it,” she said. “We shouldn’t take them.”

  “If we didn’t somebody else would. We have to deal with what is. Not what should be.”

  “It’s too unreal.” The shaking movement continued, a moving cloud of yellow around her shut eyes. “How much real despair can a young kid feel? It’s a fake suicide. But it’s just as final. Oh, Christ—” She was weeping. She used more passion in her abstract grief than she did in making love. For some people the personal is a damper, while the death of a strange child can turn them on.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “Yes,” I called out.

  The door opened a crack. Gilliatt’s face peeked in. A cigarette was pasted to his lower lip. “Sorry to intrude,” he said. “But the cinema couple are here. Mr. and Mrs. Cardillo. You’re supposed to show them around the Academy.” He grinned.

  “Cardillo,” he repeated. “Jewel and Max Cardillo.” He was gone. The word in the dream had been reviens, after all. After all—after so much. Unable to think about it and unable not to think about it I turned back to Barbara. I looked at her, her back describing a defeated arc, her yellow hair splayed out in a hopeless heap on her shoulders. Gilliatt’s interruption had implanted in my mind the obvious solution to the problem. I don’t know whether it was hearing Jewel’s name or if Gilliatt’s half-leer had triggered the notion—but clearly the remedy for Barbara’s despair was to make love to her. It might only be a temporary aid, but it could put her back in action—long enough to give me the time I needed to get this most disturbing and problematical day properly under way. Without hesitation I released her from her slip, peeling it off like a shell from a shellfish. I held her breasts in my hands. The pink nipples were ringed with pastel aureoles. Their very weight in my hands called to mind the difference—Jewel’s breasts were lighter in weight, darker in color, softer in texture. I made love to Barbara quickly, as if to prove the principle of indifference. Jewel, Barbara … anyone. All breasts and thighs weighed the same on the inner scale.

  When I left Barbara she had repaired the damage weeping had done to her eyes and was starting to put on her uniform. I could not be sure how successful the experiment had been. Something mechanical in the movement of her arms as she raised them to slip on her blouse warned me against over-confidence.

  For myself—well, I had not been looking for a cure, only a temporary distraction. The urgency of an old question had been aroused and temporarily stilled. It was a question that had had an intermittent life in my thoughts since I had lost Jewel. Such a question was the texture against which the dream of the previous night had played itself out. I considered it a victory that the tormenting question had been successfully relegated to the dream world. Such questions as the faithfulness of non-existent or ex-loves belong to dreams. In daylight they’re too close to comedy for comfort.

  Now, I stepped outside into the snowy morning full of wonder at myself: that I could have ignored the name Cardillo on the application papers, on Gilliatt’s sardonic tongue. Perhaps he had known while I’d remained in a state of happy forgetfulness.

  I walked into the brilliant sun dazzled and disturbed. I thought of my father; of the sun-landscapes of the Florida Keys; of the two of us huddled over books as he tutored me—math, Maimonides, physics; of my strange, isolated childhood under a private blue sky. It had been a childhood ringed with a wild, Talmudic sort of aphorism for every eventuality. I’d recognized their reverse sound the day I met Gilliatt. Perhaps it was why I tolerated him.

  Why should memories unexpectedly accompany me on my walk to the Main House? Why not? If Jewel could arrive here, then I was prey to anything in the world of impossibility. I took in the sweep of the whitened hills behind me, the crusty trees that sparsed out as the hill became the approach to the formal gardens, and the pebbled path along which I walked. I was sharply conscious of the Academy as refuge at that moment. My continuing, silent monologue to the hills, the burning or frigid sky, the sea—how far could it be carried? This marvelous silence around me on which I relied so much—how long would it continue? I cherished the notion, of course, that I was sending people back, every day, with a sense of the massive silence within which we speak to each other and to ourselves. I was a bridge between the world and the people, our “guests.” Like any bridge, I could be crossed in either direction. But what if one day the monologue became a dialogue?

  A blackbird fluttered to the snow, pecked at something invisible or perhaps imaginary. It flew back to a bare bough. These hills, that stone covered with dead and living initials—surely something so silent must have a great deal, or something awful, to say.

  The wind was picking up velocity. Gusts were grabbing the corners of drifts and whipping them across the vanishing paths. The wind created a small, artificial blizzard between the Guide’s Quarters and the Main House where Jewel and Max were waiting for me. I didn’t know which I was finding it tougher to face: mad Max’s incoherent, tortured blustering against everything in creation—or Jewel’s impossible ambiguity. Jewel, helpless, incapable of truthfulness or change: perfect!

  9

  THERE THEY STOOD, THE one nightmare in a thousand nightmares that I had not had the imagination to dream. The two of them looking outrageously as if they belonged here. At first Max did not see me. He was fussing with some camera equipment. Jewel was dressed all in white, a snow-parody of a bride: white boots, white skirt, white thick-stitched sweater, all under a helmet of yellow hair.

  With a touch of the strange on-and-off wisdom she’d always had she read my state at once.

  “Take it easy, Wolf,” she said. “We’re here to do a film on the place. That’s all.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “You were always quick to think the worst. The mark of Capricorn.”

  Her ridiculous astrology! It had followed hypnotism, Marxism and God knows what else before I met her. I’d assumed it was simply the latest of her addictions, before she left me. The coffee table in the living room strewn with twenty-five-cent manuals. They were full of words like propitious …

  Do not engage in business dealings today. Stay near home and loved ones. Propitious time for artistic endeavor, as long as Aries is in the ascendancy.

  Had one of them sent her here? Today is propitious for final endings. Suicide is indicated for those in intolerable marriages with—

  “What sign is Max?” I asked Jewel.

  “Pisces.”

  —with husbands born under the sign of the fish.

  But I believed her. If she said she was here only to make one of Max’s ma
d films, then she was here for nothing more sinister than that. I had always believed her. It was from my darling Jewel that I’d learned the art of false naïvete. This time I could not even accuse her in the slightest degree. I’d known about the filming for weeks. I had just conveniently buried any memory of her new name: Cardillo.

  Naïvete—my God! Once I taught her how to make her own sleeping pills. She was up for a part in some off-Broadway disaster and had the all-night fidgets. I told her you took sugar, water and a little molasses for body—and they were called placebos. She made them, and each night swallowed one, made a beautifully wry face—the face a Ghirlandaio Madonna might have made while taking some equally phony Renaissance medicine—and peacefully slept the night through. Madonna of the Placebos, how was she faring these last few years, having left my subterranean life for one still further underground?

  10

  HOW WISE IT WAS of them to distract us immediately, to load us down with the trivial, essential details: filling out of forms, turning in of clothing, showing us our rooms. Though I shouldn’t, perhaps, call it wisdom on their part. I can’t be certain they care which way any one of us chooses. They seem indifferent to the final result. ‘They’ are, so far, the Director and his assistant. The assistant is a clown. A tall, bony Negro man, he is capable of mock seriousness, but that is all. He is a sort of fake stooge for the Director. Everyone is embarrassed and turns away from the sight of his antics. In a way, though, I find it reassuring. Mockery is, after all, closer to life than to death. I think …

  11

  “I WORK IN SUICIDE the way a sculptor works in metal,” I said. I had begun by forcing my exuberance and ended by feeling a real flow of joyful blood beneath my flushed skin. The preliminary tour of the Academy had started by showing Jewel and Max the administrative procedures. What I was actually doing was playing a secret duet. One melody I spun was the informational one. But there was another theme buzzing in my brain over and over again. It was the notion that they were here, this other duet, for a frightening purpose—what, I did not know. Given these two, there were too many possibilities, all full of dismay and potential disaster for me. The reason I did not protect myself by delegating the tour to Gilliatt or one of the guides on Rest Call was that I had the beginning of a plan. I would contrive to be alone with Max. Then subtly or directly, as the occasion turned out, I would get from him the real reason, using all the tact I had developed in my term of leadership. I chose Max instead of Jewel simply because I didn’t want to test my independence of her. It was too risky.

  So far my jovial and brisk persiflage was registering nil. Jewel did not smile, while Max merely grunted and manipulated a light meter. I observed Jewel’s face, a beautiful mask of blondeness. She would not smile, I realized. She had refused to smile when we were married. Smiling made wrinkles; smiling could damage your most important possession, the only thing you could ever really call your own: the face. Wrinkles came from laugh lines. Age came from wrinkles; death came from age. It was all quite simple. One could live without smiling. Undaunted, I continued.

  “What I like about the Academy, too,” I said, “is that there’s always something in question. There’s an obstacle everyone here has to hurdle before they can be whole again.” I paused. No response.

  “In one sense, that obstacle is themselves. In another sense, it is me.”

  Max looked at me with baleful eyes. He had not said a word since arriving. We were at the screening room. Gilliatt appeared from a side door and switched on the closed circuit television set. Jewel, Max, Gilliatt and I sat down. On the screen there appeared the Admissions Office. People were filing in, quiet and orderly. Several of them were already seated at desks filling out forms.

  “What are they doing?” Jewel whispered.

  “You don’t have to whisper,” I said. “They can’t hear you.

  “They’re filling out forms in which they leave money to the Academy if they choose not to go back.”

  “Money—” Max muttered.

  “Voluntary,” I replied. “Completely voluntary.”

  “Oh—?”

  Gilliatt stood before them. On his face was the usual expression of challenge. For the first time I tried to see him as others, Max and Jewel, for instance, might. He was something all his own. Not any Negro one might have met anywhere; not a parody of a middle-class American White Protestant either; a third choice, as it were. He had imagined himself, that was it. Faced with one ambiguous but totally unalterable fact, the blackness of his skin, he had created an imaginary being to surround this skin. The materials he had used to create his style were as divergent and unplaceable as his impressive but never phony-sounding accent. Not the “cultured” tones of the Anglophilic Negro (we’d had a number of those as guests) but a unique and personal sound that suggested education but defied placement. His entire manner was that of a man who had created himself so as not to be a great many things. The result was an oddment: a neuter, ironic, detached; impassioned only when speaking of his beloved Jew.

  “Voluntary,” Gilliatt repeated now. “What do these people have to lose?”

  “Then this is a profit-making organization?”

  “No.” Gilliatt was using his patient tone. “The Academy is non-profit. Admission is free. But how could the place run? It costs a fortune just to sustain. It’s like synagogues. Or colleges. The graduates leave money to the colleges in their wills. And most Jews go to Shule” (exquisite little Gilliatt nuance) “once a year—the High Holy Days. They don’t support it all year round. So once a year the Jews charge tickets to get in to pray. It seems barbaric at first. But you can see the logic—if you think about it.”

  In the Admissions Office a woman was crying. She was a big crag of a woman, about thirty years old. There was a Guide standing right near her. Two secretaries were just a few feet in front of the woman. But none of them made a move to help or comfort her. She laid her face on her hopeless arms and sobbed. It was an awful sound.

  Jewel murmured, “Look—”

  We looked until finally, unaided, the woman raised her head and blew her nose and finished filling out the forms before her.

  In the guise of continuing my prescribed lecture, but actually being possessed by a strong desire to speak directly to Jewel (O impossible desire: how often had I resorted to a desperate sexuality because speech had failed?), I said: “Our people aren’t unfeeling. Suicides are like children. You have to know when to ignore them. It’s no accident this place is an Academy.”

  Jewel turned toward me. Over her shoulder, past her wide, blue eyes, Max was taking shots of the TV screen with a small still camera. He shot them in quick, nervous clicks, like a spy recording some secret site on forbidden film. The simile is not unintended. Max was a likely suspect. I was going to have a job keeping my control with him and Jewel, whether they were innocent filmmakers or guilty film-takers. But my control was not the immediate issue. Jewel burst out crying as I gazed at her.

  I moved toward her, my ex-child-bride, without thinking. She pulled away, stood up clumsily, rocking on heels that were too high for our Academy countryside, and swaying, wept her unsteady way toward Max. He, however, was completely taken by his camera madness—focusing, clicking and winding. I nodded to Gilliatt, who gave Jewel his arm. She placed on it her right hand, white as rice paper inscribed with a calligraphy of blue veins, a pale counterpart to the bold statement of Gilliatt’s gleaming black arm. Weeping, Jewel let him lead her out of the room.

  Max and I were alone. Two aliens with undefined loyalties.

  12

  AS SOON AS WE were alone Max left off his camera activity and stared at me.

  “I remember you,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I remember you.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Nothing. Just what I said. I remember you.”

  “It’s been a while.”

  “Three years. Yes, I remember you.”

  “Will you stop
saying that, Max, will you please?” I was losing control of a situation I very much needed control of.

  “I remember you, too,” I said in idiot imitation. “Only you’ve shaved off your beard.”

  “Too many imitators,” Max said. “I shaved it off in the hospital, the last time around.” He slung his camera around his neck. It dangled like an enormous religious medal.

  “What’s it been like, Max?”

  “That’s not the question you want to ask,” he said.

  “You don’t know anything about what I want to ask. Just deal with what I do ask.”

  He smiled. Suddenly he seemed years younger, though he was probably about thirty. We had our ages in common as well as Jewel.

  “Okay,” Max said. “It’s been okay. No hospital trips for two years.”

  “And Jewel?”

  “You were always much too sensitive to how your wife feels. Unhappy, happy—what the hell’s the difference?”

  “And you—” I gestured toward the door through which Jewel had retreated from the tears of a strange woman, and her own.

  “I don’t give a damn. If she comes back through that door—great. If I never see her again—that’s okay, too. You can’t take it, Wolf. You never could.” He paused. “I remember you,” he said.

  It was true, I thought. Too vulnerable to Jewel’s misery. It was why the Academy was good for me. All this generalized suffering kept everything abstract—at arm’s length. But I was damned if I would tell this to Max.

  “Why did you come here, really?” I said, instead. “Is that the question you expected me to ask?”

  “No.”

  “Well, why?”

  “To make a film.”

  “Don’t give me that crap! I remember you.”