“I don’t think I’d make the cut.” Marty grinned at him, but quickly his expression changed, lacking anything even resembling amusement. He shifted his eyes away from Jack, just for an instant, then he looked at him again and asked, “Can you tell me what Danny was like during the days leading up to his suicide?”
“He seemed annoyed more than anything else. Or maybe he was feeling resentful.”
“Any idea what was annoying him and what he resented?”
“It was finals week and I was working long hours. I didn’t get to spend very much time with him. I think that had a lot to do with it. I thought so at the time.”
“Was this year worse than others?”
Jack shook his head. “It’s always crunch time, but somehow this year Danny took it harder. This was the last year we were going to spend the summer doing things together, he wanted to get a job next year. I don’t think he knew quite how to feel about it, or that’s what I thought. All I know is, I should have found the time to be with him.”
“And that was all? No eating problems or sleeping problems?”
Jack took a deep breath. “I don’t think he was sleeping much, the last couple of days before…His friends said he was eating with them, but he didn’t have much of an appetite when I was with him.”
“What do you mean, not much of an appetite?”
“When we had breakfast and when we met for supper, he wasn’t eating very much.”
“But that was something new.”
“Yeah. Danny was always a good eater.”
The look Marty gave Jack was not simply one of sympathy, it was the inside look again, and this time Jack found it reassuring.
“So, apart from the usual day-to-day problems, Danny doesn’t sound like the sort of boy who’d kill himself, does he?” Jack said. “And yet he did.”
“And yet he did,” Marty solemnly repeated. “My grandmother told me a story once that her mother told her about a woman who was illiterate. This was back in the 1880s, in Covington, Tennessee, where it wasn’t unusual for women to be illiterate. Her name was Irene Paige. She was the most beautiful woman in the county, and the gentlest. Young men used to come to her window and serenade her with that song ‘Good Night, Irene.’ She eventually married a man named Theodore, a carpenter, who made a good living and should have been a very contented man. But he had a mean streak in him. Maybe it would be called something else today, but in those days he was just called mean. At night, after supper, Theodore would read to Irene. She loved Charles Dickens the best, but it didn’t really matter, she liked whatever he chose to read. But when his dark mood came on, he’d go into his workshop, lock the door and not talk to his wife, sometimes for days. When he recovered and got back to reading to her, he’d pick up not where he left off reading to her but where he’d left off reading for himself, so great chunks of story would be missing, and he would never fill her in. Well, Irene went along with this for some time, and then Theodore stopped reading to her altogether. Not just for a few days but for an entire month, as a way of torturing the woman. Now, they lived out in the country and they had no children, so there was no one else around to read to her, besides, the few friends they had wouldn’t have interfered in a husband and wife’s affairs. Irene was just miserable. This dark mood grew more intense and Theodore refused to read to her, he took to beating her. Another month, and Theodore started feeling ill, a few more weeks and he was really sick. The doctor came out but he couldn’t figure out what the trouble was. Bed rest and Irene’s loving care was the best prescription, the doctor said. Irene administered to Theodore as thoroughly as a professional nurse, but Theodore got sicker and sicker, suffering agonizing stomach cramps and pains and high fevers. It took him nearly a year but he died a slow, agonizing death.” Marty had been leaning in closer and closer to Jack as he told the story, and now he leaned slowly back. “What no one suspected, not in a million years, was that Irene had poisoned her husband. Years later, I mean when Irene was old and getting ready to die, she told my great-grandmother what she’d done. She had to clear her conscience, for better or worse, and asked my grandmother to pray for God’s forgiveness, but she was sure she was going straight to the devil. My great-grandmother told that story to my grandmother to illustrate a point and my grandmother told it to me for the same reason: she said, ‘Everybody has a dark side, like the dark side of the moon, where nothing shines.’ Everybody has that one thing, that button that can set them off to doing things they’d normally never contemplate. The other boy who killed himself must have had it, and, I’m sorry to say, Danny must have, too.”
“You don’t have to tell me about dark sides. But your story’s about an abusive relationship, and Danny was anything but abused.”
“Only if you take the story literally.”
“Maybe I don’t want to take it at all. I don’t want to think about Danny like that. Anyway, you’re the expert, you tell me.”
“Tell you?”
“Why Danny killed himself. Why a perfectly normal fifteen-year-old boy would want to kill himself.”
Marty stared at the floor for a moment. “I don’t know, Dr. Owens.” He drawled the words easily. “But there’s always a reason. Maybe not just one reason. There might have been several things.” He managed to make this sound acceptable, but only for a moment.
“I’m not sure which is worse, knowing or not knowing.”
“I wonder that myself all the time.” Marty got up. “I’ve imposed on you enough for one day.” He thanked Jack for his time.
Jack didn’t want him to leave. He didn’t want to be alone. “What about the other boy?” he asked. “What patterns of behavior did he fit?”
“I can’t really say. I haven’t spoken to the family yet.”
“Why not?”
“They’ve left town for a while. They’re in Illinois somewhere. At a church retreat.” Marty started walking toward the steps and took a look around. “I remember when the Brennans sold this place. It’s a big old house, isn’t it. If it gets to feeling too big for you”—he took out his card and handed it to Jack—“and you ever feel like talking.” He opened the car door and before he got in said, “I’ll look forward to it.”
Jack watched the car drive away, kicking up dust and pebbles. Yeah, he thought, it’s a big old house…
It was early October of their senior year. The leaves were crimson and gold. When the wind blew there was a cold flutter—like waking from a nap in an unheated room—then the leaves floated to the ground and across the backyard and the field in effortless surrender to the season. Jack and Anne sat in the old VW. Anne with her chin resting on the handgrip above the glove box, the late-day sun reflecting off of her muscat eyes. Jack sitting low in the front seat. Across the road was the house. It was big with a deep wraparound porch. A man wearing a plaid shirt sat at the window smoking a pipe and reading a book. He raised his head when the engine stopped and looked outside, not expectantly but curiously. Then he went back to his reading.
“I like looking at that field behind the house,” Jack said.
“Yes,” Anne said softly. “It’s the light. Indiana light.”
“I like the way the house looks. I like that it’s out here and seems so isolated and yet you’re only ten minutes from town.”
Then Anne told him that she loved him because he loved an old house like this with its strong, wide porch and the field that stretched for two hundred acres or more. Because he liked to stop here in autumn and look at the falling leaves and the field and behind the field, where the old trees were bent and gnarled, and their roots bulged out of the soft earth along the creek, and in winter the snow was shiny and slick like liquid in the cold sunlight; and because he liked coming here to look at the green sprouts in spring and smell the tilled earth in the air.
Anne leaned across the small seat, pressed her chin against Jack’s chin, raised her eyes and said, “Can we always be like this? Loving each other and living our lives together?”
&nbs
p; He answered, “I don’t know why not.”
She whispered, “But you know how it is sometimes, people lose the thing that makes them love each other.” She said, “We’re a long way from settling into a house in the Midwest, aren’t we.”
“Yes, we are.”
“I’ve been thinking about us living in New Haven if you decide to take your master’s there. That’s at least a year.”
“We don’t have to live in New Haven.”
“Really? Because I’ve been thinking we should move to Manhattan after we get back from England. It’s the best place to find work in the graphic arts. Don’t you think? And, well, to play and everything. Unless you’re awfully married to your plan.”
“The only thing I want to be married to is you,” he told her. “Think you can put up with East Village squalor? That’s about all we can afford in Manhattan.”
She touched his cheek with her lips.
Jack knew that when they left Gilbert they would never come back, but he didn’t mind. Anne was the girl who’d made him stare in dumb amazement the first time he saw her. She was the girl who fit the image he had of himself. He didn’t mind if his plans for being Dr. Owens would have to be realized riding the commuter train. He didn’t mind.
The man in the window turned on a light and pulled down the shade.
Anne breathed softly into Jack’s ear, “You know that movie with Jane Fonda and Robert Redford when they move into that apartment in Greenwich Village?”
“Barefoot in the Park.”
“It could be like that.”
“I’m not quite the uptight WASP lawyer type.”
“No. I mean the squalid East Village apartment.”
“Unfortunately, New York always looks better in the movies.”
“So what?”
He looked over at her. Her chin was back on the handgrip.
“There are the thrift shops to sort through,” she said, “and Canal Street. I know it’s going to work out.” She sang, hoarsely and dry, “‘We’ll turn Manhattan into an isle of joy,’” turned to him and laughed her Carole Lombard laugh. “You know that story by J. D. Salinger, ‘For Esmé—with Love and Squalor’? We’ll call ours, ‘For Jack—with Love, Anne and Squalor.’” She looked at him now the way she’d looked at him last year when he saw her sitting at the bottom of the hill in Fairmont Park, where the ground was soft and the afternoon sunlight bent through the dark leaves, and the air was warm the way the air is warm in Gilbert in late April, like milk when it’s been on the stove just long enough to take the chill out. The day he finally spoke to her.
She was wearing tight blue jeans and a yellow shirt with the sleeves rolled up past her elbows and which fit her like a smock. She dug her toes into the earth, giving the impression that she would float away if not anchored securely to the spot. Her back was resting against a tree, her knees drawn close to her chest, her sketch pad supported on her thighs. Her brown hair, the color of dark molasses, had flecks of dried paint in it—she wore it long in those days and tied it back tightly over her ears. Her long, slender fingers worked the pencil across the paper. Her profile was a progression of diagonal lines, her forehead to the bridge of her nose, the tip of her nose forming something close to a right angle above her upper lip, which dipped gently, parting the way a spring bud would a few days before blossoming. Her chin curved just enough to soften her face.
This wasn’t the first time Jack had seen her. The first time was in the Fine Arts building—she had a studio on the top floor, he shared an editing room in the basement with another guy. She was standing in the rotunda with a group of art students, boys mostly, smoking cigarettes and talking the sort of talk art students talked at Gilbert College, the “Athens-on-the-Wabash,” back in 1975.
Some of the most accomplished theorists and practitioners of the visual and performing arts in America were on the faculty, and twelve hundred aspiring actors, writers, artists and young auteurs from around the world came to Gilbert, if not to sit at the feet of these learned men and women, at least to extract as much information and knowledge as they might during their four years there. One of those aspirants was an art student named Anne Charon from Dorset, England.
She wasn’t tall, five-five, but looked taller because of the way she held her back. Her face was intelligent and not pretty the way those all-American girls were pretty, or the unblemished blondes or the languid Europeans. Her face went deeper than pretty. More interesting than pretty. It was an elegant face. And she turned that face in Jack’s direction and only for an instant, like a flashbulb popping in the dark. Faster. And in that brief moment something happened inside of Jack, something anatomic, visceral. All he could do was stare at her in dumb astonishment until he recovered, in no more time than it took her face to freeze him.
It stayed with him when he went outside. When he met his friends at Paul’s and washed down his sandwich with an iced Dr Pepper. When he was alone in his editing room; and later that night, when he lay awake on the couch with the window open and that dangerous spring breeze filling the room with the hint of lilac and the strong ripe scent of honeysuckle. He lay there in the dark and felt the same thing he felt when Anne had looked at him that afternoon, something nameless and amorphous, a craving, except he didn’t know what it was that he craved. It wasn’t sexual. It didn’t come from his libido but from the place where the libido is no stranger: his self-image, or the self-styled self-image a twenty-year-old film student carries around with him, along with his textbooks and notes. What a film student cannot help having, needs to have, if he has any chance of surviving all the petty student pretensions, the self-absorptions. Jack’s image of himself, or better still, his image of the film student he thought himself to be, lacked completion, lacked the necessary component that he had been unaware of until that afternoon when he saw it wrapped in full bohemian regalia, with long brown hair, a delicious British accent, and the slightest chance that it was available to him. He couldn’t give a name to what he was feeling, so he decided to call it Love. It kept him awake the rest of the night.
Anne must have seen him looking at her that first time, although later she insisted that she was too involved with her friends to notice. Jack didn’t believe her. He told her she’d even smiled at him. That was the first time she did her Carole Lombard laugh, before she even knew who Carole Lombard was. When Jack saw her in Fairmont Park with her sketch pad on her knees and her long hair tied back over her ears, the sunlight squeezing through the space where her elbow rested on her thigh, the swell of her hip, full and thrilling, he didn’t walk over to her. Not right away. He’d been waiting a long time, at least a couple of months—which seemed like a long time then—to find her without her friends around. He didn’t want to rush the moment, more to the point, didn’t want to rush through the moment. As long as he did nothing, she would remain his creation, sprung full-blown, not from his rib but from the reflection in his eye. From the strange alchemy of hubris and self-doubt that would create the man he wanted to be from the woman he desired—this was where Anne Charon, his mythology of Anne Charon, was born. But once Jack moved from his spot, once he walked to her and heard her speak and do any of the things born of her own personality, she would no longer be of his making but a being in and of the world, fallen to earth from the heights of his imagination, and all bets were off.
He sat against the base of the ruins looking down from the top of the small hill and watched her a while longer. He studied her posture and the lines of her body, the way she dropped her hand to her side and then rushed it up to the paper, and he did not move for another minute. But nothing is possible in the absence of action; he walked slowly down the hill, because the passive observer leaves all things to chance.
Jack held Danny’s poem in the palm of his hand, he didn’t look at the words but at the handwriting, the paper itself—touched by Danny, folded by Danny, and which Danny had put in his pants pocket—then walked back to his study, placed the poem carefully inside his desk d
rawer, keeping the original creases aligned, and went back to work.
After he watched the final video and wrote his last critique, after all the envelopes were sealed and the grades were printed, he walked out to the car, took the ten-minute ride to the post office, where he mailed the critiques to his students, just as Dr. Owens always did, drove to campus, where he dropped off his grades, and began the ten-minute ride back to the house, along the quiet tree-lined streets where life seemed to progress undisturbed. He had finished his work and all he felt was that expanse of time growing larger, further into the future. He could always pack up, leave town and stay with his friends. Pack up and drive, like Danny and he used to do. Two for the road. Endless summer. Those lazy, hazy, crazy days. Days spread out like picnic blankets and baseball diamonds and the Atlantic Ocean at sunrise.
He thought: It’s still June and a lot can happen in a summer. A lot can go wrong in all that time; and he thought about the call that comes, not late at night or first thing in the morning but in the middle of the afternoon, on the cell phone when he would be anywhere but home. It would be Grace calling to say, “Your father’s gone into a coma.” “Your father’s had a stroke.” Calling to say, “Your father’s dead.”
So much can go wrong; and his heart started beating fast. He felt a sense of vertigo. He was having trouble breathing, as though a belt were tightening around his chest. He lost control of the car, it bounced over the curb and he hit the brakes hard. The tightness in his chest grew worse. He stared numbly out of the windshield and thought: So much can go wrong. The inside of his head pulsated. He imagined Grace calling him while he was out running errands, keeping busy, calling him if he went away, to tell him his father died. He thought of the cell phone ringing with the bad news. He thought: What next?
“The worst is over,” he said while his legs shook. “The worst is over,” while he felt nothing but panic, while he thought: What next?
He knew it was nonsense. “There isn’t going to be a What next? You’re just having a delayed reaction to Danny. The worst is over.” While his feet trembled, his hands began to sweat. While he thought: What next?
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