“Dr. Owens?” she said, as though she’d wandered up to the wrong house, or was speaking to the wrong Dr. Owens. She looked a little frightened, maybe it was Jack’s appearance, the three-day beard, the torn cutoffs, maybe it was just the look in his eyes. She took a step back and stayed on the other side of the door.
Jack smiled at her and said, “Working around the house. I’m starting to go to seed.”
Mary-Sue smiled back. “Mom thought you might like to taste someone else’s cooking for a change. It’s cold marinated steak. She said to be sure to tell you she would have made it for you sooner but we were down to Brown County until the day before yesterday.”
Jack said, “Tell her thanks. I appreciate it.” He got down from the stepladder and opened the door. Mary-Sue handed him the covered dish—he would have to remember to label and freeze it.
“Mom wanted to bring it over herself, but I told her I would.” Mary-Sue looked down at the floor and twisted her torso a little to the left, then the right, awkwardly, not like a teenager, but all shoulders and knees in her T-shirt and shorts, and just for that moment she wasn’t a fifteen-year-old but the little girl who used to come over with her mother and run around the house with Danny and get modeling clay in her hair.
“I suppose I should have called first and asked if it was okay…” She raised her eyes and looked at him sadly. “I guess…” and twisted her torso uncomfortably, again.
“I’m glad you came over,” he told her.
She stared at him silently, started to speak, stopped, lowered her eyes and just stood there.
“There’s something you want to talk about, isn’t there?” Jack said, in the voice he used when Danny had something to say and didn’t know how to get started.
Mary-Sue nodded her head. “Danny. I’m really sorry about—about what happened.”
“I know.”
“I miss him a lot.”
“I know you do.” He asked her to come in and sit for a minute. “Please.”
He went to the pantry, opened one of the tins, put a few cookies on a plate and poured her a glass of milk. It made him feel good to do this, to give cookies and milk to one of Danny’s friends.
Mary-Sue sat stiffly in the chair. She looked at the glass and the plate and then down at the floor. Her blond hair was long and straight, gold-streaked by the summer sun. She gave the few stray ends a tug and twirled them around her finger, but she said nothing.
“Can you tell me what’s on your mind?” Jack said to her.
“I don’t know…I mean…I don’t know…”
“There’s nothing to be afraid of.”
She shrugged her shoulders. “I was kind of worried about him, that’s all.”
Jack leaned forward, just a little bit. “What was he doing that worried you?”
She went back to twisting her hair. “I mean—I could just tell something was bothering him, about a week before…”
“Was he acting depressed? Something like that?”
“No. It wasn’t real obvious or anything anyone else at school would have noticed, but you know, Danny and I were like brother and sis—” She started to cry. Jack reached across the table and put his hand on hers.
“It’s all right,” he said softly. “It’s all right.” He told her, “It’s very sad, I know,” and that she didn’t have to talk about it if she didn’t want to.
She picked up a paper napkin and wiped her eyes. “I could just tell,” she sobbed. “I could just tell.”
“I’m sure you asked him about it.”
She shook her head. “No. I didn’t. I should have but I just thought he was angry at me or maybe he was just in a bad mood, you know because of the baseball game. But I’ve been thinking about it and—I don’t know.” She folded the napkin and placed it next to the glass. “It’s given me some bad thoughts.”
Jack wanted to ask her why she’d waited so long to come over, why she’d waited so long to tell him. He wanted to know what she saw in Danny that had upset her. He wanted her to know what Danny hadn’t been telling him. He felt a rush of anxiety beginning to overwhelm him, his legs started to shake and his hands, his neck felt cold and damp and he was sweating. He walked over to the window and kept his back to her so she wouldn’t see him trembling, so she wouldn’t be frightened.
He asked, “Didn’t he say anything to you about, well, didn’t he say anything at all?”
Mary-Sue answered, “No, but there was something—like when he thought no one was watching him. And like when I was teasing him one day on the bus about him and Jeanie Bauer.”
“What about Jeanie Bauer?”
“Oh, nothing. I saw him talking to her a few days before, that’s all. He got really weird about it.”
“Weird?” Jack turned around and braced himself against the wall.
“He was like, ‘Go bother someone who might care,’ and like that. Actually, he said, ‘someone who gives a shit.’ And then the next day—the next day he gave me a kitten.”
“A kitten?”
“A little orange and white kitten, with a broken leg. He came over to my house to say he was sorry about yelling at me, and he gave me a kitten. He said it was a stray that he found and he was worried about it and he couldn’t take it home because Mutt would hurt it. He said I should take it to the vet and then keep it. He made me promise to keep it.” She picked up one of the cookies, turned it over, looked at the underside and held it between her thumb and index finger. “He was real intense about it, about everything.” She put the cookie on top of the napkin.
“What do you mean, intense?”
“Like the kitten was the most important thing in the world to him. It wasn’t like Danny to be so, I don’t know how to describe it. Like he was all locked up inside. It was more like a feeling I had about him. I could just see something was bothering him but I thought it was just—that he’d snap out of it in a day or so. I should have made him tell me—I don’t know—like I should have taken it more seriously and done something about it. I shouldn’t’ve been—I thought he’d probably talk to you about it, anyway.”
“I asked Brian and the guys and they didn’t see anything out of the ordinary,” he told her, not as an argument.
“They wouldn’t notice the rain until their boots overflowed.”
That made Jack smile, and Mary-Sue smiled with him.
“In the cafeteria when they would just be talking and acting stupid,” she said, “I could see Danny wasn’t really into it.” She picked up the cookie and examined it again. “There was this one day when Brian was giving C.J. a hard time, they’d cut school a few days before, an end-of-term thing that no one was supposed to know about, but I overheard them planning it on the bus. I guess it’s okay to tell you now. A lot of kids do it, and Brian was talking to C.J. like he might have told his mom or something. Then Rick got on C.J., making him look real whipped, like he just wanted to run away. Usually Danny would take C.J.’s part, but this time he was just letting Rick get in his face. It was like Danny was in his own thoughts or something. But they just went on and didn’t notice a thing. Even when I talked to him, it was like he was way off somewhere.”
“Could he have been fooling around with drugs? Was that why Brian was giving C.J. such a hard time?” When she didn’t answer, Jack promised, “It won’t go any further than this room if they were.”
“I think I would have found out—honest, Dr. Owens. I don’t think any of them was doing drugs.” She took a deep breath. “I feel real bad about not making Danny talk to me. I could always get him to open up and say what was bothering him. But I guess I thought he’d snap out of it and be Danny again.” She looked down at the table. “You’re not mad at me, are you?”
“Mad at you?”
“For telling you about Danny and crying in front of you.”
“No, I’m not mad.”
“I felt like I had to tell you.”
“You did the right thing.”
“I keep thinking that Dan
ny must have talked to someone. I mean, when something’s really bothering you, you have to tell someone about it.”
“Any idea who that could be?”
“Usually me.”
“Maybe Jeanie Bauer?”
“No way.” She looked at him, Jack thought, with disappointment. Or maybe it was his own disappointment that he felt for having nothing better to offer.
Mary-Sue sat forward and rested her elbows on the table, raised her eyes and stared sorrowfully at the ceiling. She stayed like that for another minute, neither of them saying anything, then she pushed her chair back. “My mom made me promise not to make a pest of myself.”
“You haven’t,” Jack assured her. But she stood up, anyway. He asked her to wait a moment, and that’s when he told her about Lamar Coggin.
“His sister’s on my soccer team.”
“Did Danny know him?” Jack’s voice seemed to shrink inside his throat.
“No. I don’t think so.”
Jack squeezed her hand and they walked outside together. “I’m glad you came by. You were a good friend to Danny.”
Mary-Sue blushed. “I’m glad I came by, too,” and she started down the back steps. “Oh, my mom says for you to come over on the Fourth of July. If you feel like it.”
Jack stood on the porch while Mary-Sue slipped under the fence and hurried through the field, swinging her arms, her hair swaying back and forth like a mane.
“In the movies, the girl comes to the house of the grieving man and inspires him to rise above his sorrow. In reality, the girl tells the man his son had a sad, intense look on his face, that he was acting weird a week before he killed himself. She tells him his son wasn’t laughing with the other kids, and no one noticed. But she did. She doesn’t understand why—it is not understandable when you’re fifteen—that while the other kids were busy being the other kids and Danny was busy being Danny, she, being Mary-Sue Richards, saw something no one else saw in Danny’s face and thought Danny, being Danny, would snap out of it.” Jack went back inside. “But you can’t always rely on the constancy of personality, and even though Mary-Sue doesn’t know that she knows it, this awful fact of life gives her bad thoughts. But what makes you go bloodless is knowing that you were too busy being Dr. Owens to see what was inside your son’s sadness a week before he killed himself.”
Jack had worked his way through the house. He was in the attic now, where it was hot and he was stripped naked, dripping sweat on the bare wood floor while he sorted through the old photographs: Danny’s first birthday…Danny’s first Little League game…Filling up boxes and labeling them, talking to himself, worried that the telephone would ring at any moment with bad news, worried about What next?
He had not gone to Sally Richards’s for the Fourth. He had not even called her. Today was the seventh. “It’s too late now.”
He wasn’t going to look through the photo albums, or the loose pictures in their yellow envelopes, he was only going to organize them, by month and year, and box them, but there was always that one photo that he had to stop and look at: Danny playing, Anne smiling, mugging for the camera. Jack experienced a perverse pleasure from the pain he was inflicting on himself, the sensation of pain becoming familiar and acceptable. He took an almost clinical approach to it, stepping back, stepping out of himself, watching himself.
“This is what it feels like when your son kills himself. This is what it’s like to go mad.” He was surprised at how calm he was, as he arranged the next package of sorrow.
He used to tell Danny that memory is what makes people moral. But memory also makes people time machines of sorts, although it never brings satisfaction. The old letters found in the shoe boxes, the photographs—these manufactured ghosts—never metamorphose into life, never do more than locate the hurt, the soft spot, like the bruise on the fruit, that starts to throb and ache before the shoe box gets unwrapped or the photograph catches the first light, before you realize what you’re thinking about, the way it throbbed when Jack turned over the next picture and saw Danny’s face, when he opened the next box.
He wondered what Danny would think if he saw his father sweating naked in the attic, sorting through the old photographs, talking to himself and weeping. Was this what Danny had in mind when he committed suicide? Was this what he expected?
What are the rules of behavior now? Jack wondered. What do you want me to do?
Did Danny expect Jack to behave the way he always behaved? Did he expect Jack to have a plan of action, a way of coping? Did he expect Jack to behave like Dr. Owens? Did he expect him to live up to the deal?
“There is no deal.” Jack sat on the floor, drew his legs up to his chest. “The deal was with the living Danny.”
There was no deal because there was nothing left to lose. That was why Jack could go through the week without showering or shaving, why he could walk through the house talking to himself, sit on the kitchen floor spoon-feeding Mutt while he neglected to feed himself; why he could sit naked in the attic, in the heat and the dust and the dirt.
He laid a handful of baby pictures at his feet. “What’s left to lose? What’s left to lose?” While the soft spot pulsed like a heart.
They were lying side by side in their bed. The gray SoHo light seemed to drip, like a slow faucet, into the loft, inching across the bare floor and along the walls. Jack was wearing the bottoms of his drawstring pajamas and drinking beer out of the bottle. Anne lifted it out of his hand and took a sip.
“I suppose I’ll have to swear off this stuff,” she said, not sounding at all pleased. “It’s going to take some getting used to.”
“Not drinking beer or having a baby?”
She didn’t answer. She said, “So, what do you think?”
“I don’t know. We’re having a hell of a lot of fun and that’s going to end.”
“A hell of a lot of fun.”
“We should be excited, don’t you think?”
“I don’t know what to think. I don’t know what to feel. I’d like to think I’m scared to death, but I’m not sure that’s what it is, either.”
“We should be more enthusiastic.”
“I like our life the way it is.” She kissed his hand. “I’m not sure I want the honeymoon to end.”
“A six-year honeymoon isn’t nearly long enough.” He raised the bottle to his mouth.
“No,” she said, “it isn’t.”
“It’s pretty bourgeois, having a kid. Hunting around for a neighborhood with a park. Finding a good school. Buying a house…”
“I don’t know, Jack.”
“Man, it’s confusing.”
“I never thought of us as one of those couples who needed a baby to make their lives complete.”
“We’re not.”
“And you know it’s going to change our lives dramatically. How we sleep and the way we do our work. The way—Everything.”
“We should have been more careful.”
“Should have, but weren’t,” she said flatly. “I haven’t called my parents yet.”
“I haven’t told mine. In case we—” He didn’t have to finish.
“I suppose some sort of instinct will take over after a while and we’ll start nesting and designing little things for it to wear. But I’m not feeling any of that right now.”
“Neither am I.”
“I’m not sure that I’m even looking forward to feeling it,” she told Jack. “I don’t know.”
Jack put his arm around her shoulder and drew her closer to him. He started kissing the back of her neck and nuzzling his face in her hair. She said that’s another thing they’d even have to change after the baby was born, their sex life.
“Not right away. After a year.”
“Sooner,” Anne told him. “They’re aware of everything in six months. So, my rapacious Jack, we not only must pay the piper for our fun, we’ll have to take it on the sly as well.”
Later, with the tray of Italian bread and pâté next to them, Anne said, “W
e don’t have to know the answer, do we? Not right this minute.”
Two weeks later, sitting with his parents in their library, two glasses of whiskey on the coffee table, one for him, one for his father, a gin and tonic for his mother, Jack’s father said, “Bourgeois?” his voice strong and resonant. “What do you think you are, Jackie, a struggling artist? You’re a Ph.D. NYU professor with a published book under your belt.” There was nothing scolding in his voice. If anything, he sounded as though he were simply stating Jack’s credentials to the department chair, and trying hard not show any bias toward the candidate. Jack looked at his mother. She winked at him while his father went on, “And harboring the illusion of a bohemian life, if, by the way you ever had one, even when you were in college, is no reason not to have this baby.”
His mother told him, “If either of you has any claim to the title, it’s Anne. And even that’s a stretch.” She ran her hand along the arm of the chair, her fingers making small circles against the rose-colored fabric. Her long torso, like a Modigliani woman, like a young dancer, bent gracefully when she reached for her drink. She lifted her cigarette from the ashtray, leaving the subtle and pleasant scent of her perfume in her wake, the same perfume which insinuated itself throughout the apartment. She inhaled the smoke, almost as an afterthought, then raised her glass and said, “To your healthy new baby.”
“Enjoy the miracle of life that’s come to you,” his father said with a catch in his throat.
Jack raised his glass and sipped his whiskey. It went down smoothly, nothing second-rate about it, or anything else in the apartment. Not the crisp arrangements of sculpture, or the way a clock defined the space on a wall. Nor the elegant line of the neoclassic couch and the way it was placed symmetrically between two chairs; the lamplight, gauged just right to show off the oil paintings. The bookcase filling the west wall: Cather and Fitzgerald first editions, some early Hemingway, Twain. Limited editions of poetry: e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Kenneth Burke, Howard Nemerov, Wallace Stevens. The plays of George S. Kaufman—with and without Hart—Miller, Odets, Shaw, Pirandello, Noël Coward, Shakespeare, Molière; rare first editions by authors dead and forgotten, some forgotten even before they were dead; contemporary books from the bestseller list sandwiched in the corners.
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