Safe in her elevator, she remembered Freddie for the first time that night. He would be home by now. They hadn’t seen much of each other since the painting. And she missed him. Did she miss him? She avoided him at home now, running errands in the evening so she was gone when he came back from work. He said he was coming down with something, wasn’t feeling himself. She was afraid he’d be too sick to go to the office and would be home all day.
She pushed the button for the ninth floor, though she’d already pushed her own. The doors opened on the third, but she stayed where she was. The elevator moaned, as if it were some great annoyance to carry her up again.
On the roof she could see her breath, it led her to the edge. She stumbled over the big bubbles of tar roofing rising like waves. Claire bent low and leaned her hands on the cement ledge, noting the path she had just taken. A movement in the shadows. Dark shapes. There were men out there after all. Tipsy still, it was possible she could fall from the ledge and land on her cobblestone street, just like in the painting. Was there courage in falling? Was that what Nicolette had seen in her?
Claire pushed herself away from the ledge, as if pushing away the thought, and stood erect. It was a childish notion, selfish. Did she take pride in her own misery? She certainly did not want to die—if she felt otherwise, it was only pretending. She loved tromping around town with Mary. She loved her martinis, and her view, and her street. It was such a nice street, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t want to ruin it, and it would be terribly gauche to have people see her body splattered over the cobblestone. All those people who would stop to whisper and point, long after she was scraped away, saying proudly because they were in the know, “Remember how that simple woman jumped?” Claire hated those whispering, hissing women gaping over her remembered body. She hated them. She leaned again over the ledge and spit wide, spitting on those women. She could give a damn what they thought. It was her choice. If she wanted to fall, she would fall.
At any rate, she knew she would be the best at it. You could always be the best at something, even if it was at falling. Falling fastest, falling farthest.
Freddie was asleep by the time she entered the bedroom, the cold still on her. There was a brandy-induced sway to the darkness. She crept toward her side of the bed. He coughed in his sleep and she stopped.
With the smallest movements, she climbed into bed beside her husband, careful not to disturb him. She watched closely to see that his chest rose and fell—he was alive.
In the dark, looking to the ceiling, she made a face like she had just been told Freddie had died. She flattened out her expression, then molded it again—the devastating news rushing over her features, crinkling her brow, an open frown, but not too quickly or it would seem she’d been expecting it. Often, when Freddie left the house, Claire imagined a phone call from his sister or the hospital. Some horrible accident, carelessness on the verge of suicide. She would say it was her fault, for the sake of the family. She saw herself mourning in a tailored dress of black AlenÇon lace at the edge of his grave, wearing that face, and she tried to gauge what she was thinking based on that expression alone.
When she found herself imagining the details of Freddie’s death, it came as a headline reel at the cinema—Adulterous Husband Struck By Fluke Airplane Crash On Riverside. She was ashamed of these thoughts. But, she told herself, it was fear that compelled her to fantasize over his death—if she articulated a given scenario, it would not happen. It could not happen. She was protecting him. That was the magical thinking Nicolette had said she used with the notion of Claire’s suicide: she’d painted it out of being.
Claire remembered her own juvenile sense of power clearly—hiding in a closet, thinking up all the horrible things a boy she loved might do—spit at her, call her names, always blocking from her mind his kiss, the stolen words he’d whisper in her ear: You’re beautiful. To think them was to erase them. Though perhaps Claire had performed these rituals for the opposite result—thinking up misfortunes not to dispel but to conjure.
And if it were real, if Nicolette had saved her, without her permission—
A wave of gratitude shook Claire so fully she could have cried. A supreme gratitude like nothing she had felt before. It flattened her.
She covered her head with her pillow and closed her eyes. It wasn’t real. Nicolette was a fool, clinging to a weak childhood magic. It was pretend. Nicolette was nothing more than a schoolgirl hiding in a closet. She simply never grew up. Perhaps there was something admirable in that; it was somehow better than the mere hot air of an artist. In the cradle of her pillow, Claire rebreathed her own breath, damp and very much there.
Freddie’s shuffling and blanket-pulling and showering—it was morning already, but Claire kept her eyes closed and willed herself back to sleep. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.
Her head rioted against last night’s sweet punch. Lying in bed, she distracted herself from her headache by making up shapes from the paint and shadows on the ceiling—sailboats and rabbits and the Empire State Building. And then Claire saw how terribly the paint was chipped and she marveled that she’d never noticed before.
The spare paint was in the basement storage. She didn’t bother getting dressed, just threw on her robe, a short silky wrap, because who would be in the basement in the middle of the morning? And barefoot, why not? The stairwell was the color of an old bruise. She wrapped her body about the turns, almost enjoying herself, her speed. As if she couldn’t get there fast enough. Just before she reached the basement, something sharp pricked her foot. She yelled out, quick and birdlike. She looked at the arch of her foot, and at the stair, but there was nothing.
The basement cement was cool on her feet. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling—dull fists of light. The radiators whistled off-key—a wet, demanding cry, shushing her. Through the high, street-level windows at the end of the hall she could see the scuffed shoes of a man pause on the sidewalk. Both sides of the hall were lined with storage lockers, and every wall a gate. If she stood inside her own, she could see into her neighbor’s, and her neighbor’s neighbor’s—every forgotten possession.
She tucked the purple drape up and over the canvas in her locker. There she was again. Claire stared at her image under the shadow-swing of the bare bulb. She studied her own repeated and fragmented face, stroke by stroke, as if for a clue, and again found herself, to her great surprise, beautiful.
She could not hate it, not the way she wanted to. But she could destroy it.
There are moments when the skin is a circus. When the skin serves as warning. Tightening, loosening, grabbing hold of the muscles. She heard footsteps, a voice on the stairs, a song obscured. The clang of the metal gate.
Tomasz.
First his shadow and then him entering the dank hallway of storage units, stopping short when he saw Claire standing mutely in her cage.
“You look like a canary in there, Mrs. Bishop. A very cold canary.” He eyed her in her thin robe.
She did not drop the drape over the painting. She opened the gate as if ushering him into her home and Tomasz brought a warmth to the cramped space. She blushed. She kept her eyes on the painting. He stared at it and said nothing. Claire looked at him looking at her painting. This stranger staring at her painting, all that exposed flesh. It made her own, real flesh buzz and heat.
“Don’t,” she said.
It hurt her, physically, to be seen like this. It felt raw and true and laughable, the way she felt in the painting. She wanted desperately to make him stop looking.
She didn’t know Tomasz. She didn’t know if he had a family in Queens or Poland, an ex-wife or a wife waiting for him at home or what home meant. But she’d watched him sitting on the stoop during his lunch hour, fastening a piece of felt to the bottom of a chess piece he’d carved himself. She wondered if he spent his free time at the chess houses down the street, the all-night men battling one another with wooden queens and coffee mugs. He was just a stranger.
She touche
d his arm. “Please.”
He turned to her briefly, then back to the painting. His lips parted. He was trying to say something. “What is this?” Looking down at her hand on his arm. “The painting.”
Now she touched his shoulder. This is my storage and this is my hand. She looked at her hand. Was it hers? A surge inside her, something old, tapping. The ocean. Tapping inside her like water against the side of a glass. Her stomach ought to ache, but it didn’t. She reached and touched his face, his beard, and he flinched, looked at her confused, and she reached again. The bare bulb magnified his brooding face. He was full of shadows, his arm was strong. “Tell me what you want,” he said. His accent was thick on her face and his big hands were dirty. What she wanted? He touched her neck and rolled his fingers over her eyes to close them. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said as if she were crying but her eyes were so dry they stuck and burned. She forced them to remain open as she kissed his mouth. Her hands were ice against his chest. Her jaw was tight. He said no, and she said yes and he said yes. They did it all while standing and leaning against the stack of suitcases and boxes, and when that didn’t work he pushed her against the gate and she felt the metal shapes of it pressed into her back through the silk robe. Then beside them the painting racketed against the metal. She did not say a word. She flattened her palms on his back, felt his muscles slip along them. She did not want to move them. As he finished she pushed him out of her. She was angry and didn’t know why and then she calmed. Calm, she watched as he mopped up after himself with the rag that was always in his back pocket, but a dark spot remained on the cement. She laughed curtly at the thought that perhaps this had always been the purpose of the rag, the other married women in the building.
“I’m sorry,” he said—rising, buttoning.
He was about to leave when Claire called his name, almost a whisper.
“Yes?” There was—wasn’t there?—a hint of annoyance in his voice.
“I’ll pay you to destroy it.”
He raised his eyebrows, then nodded. He did not have to ask what she was referring to.
“I don’t want to know how you’ll do it, but you’ll do it,” Claire said, surprised by her businesslike tone. “Bring me proof? I have to know for sure.” It was crazy, he must think her crazy.
But Tomasz did not roll his eyes. He nodded dutifully, as if she’d asked him to replace a light bulb, then he left her standing there, staring at the wet mark on the cement.
5.
If Claire didn’t know better, she would have felt she was the source of Freddie’s illness—a cause-and-effect manifestation of her deception.
It was five in the morning and Freddie wanted water. He had woken them both with his coughing. She could hear his chainsaw breath cutting through his chest. It was probably a simple cold but he called it bronchitis or maybe, just maybe, tuberculosis. He wouldn’t be going into work.
She’d formed stories about Tomasz and the storage locker. Myths growing inside her head, stories that would explain all this. She told them to herself over and over again, as a child begs to hear the same story every night. Yes, there was a man, a fatherly type with an endearing brow and a speckled, trimmed beard, and he was the only one who heard the woman trapped in the basement. He rescued her. Also, the story of a man who’d tell all his friends that he’d fucked the married woman from 3B. I screwed the rich bitch. A notch on his belt. Rumors flying like ghosts through the old building.
“The sheets are too stiff,” Freddie said without opening his eyes.
And yet she couldn’t imagine lying beside any other man’s back but Freddie’s.
Claire rolled out of bed to get Freddie a glass from the kitchen.
When she’d come upstairs yesterday, after Tomasz, it was just before noon and she’d had nothing to do but wait stupidly for Freddie to return home. Her mind spun through the details on repeat. She listened to three radio shows and watched Young Dr. Malone on the set. She called Mary but hung up before she answered. She made herself a martini, then another. Finally, she took a bath, but not until she’d sat on all the chairs and lain on all the couches with a strange man’s smell still on her. Why had she done that?
She was tipsy when Freddie arrived, and he chuckled at her dozing on the sofa. But she hardly had time to say hello, and off he went to meet a college friend for drinks. Or someone. A woman. She later woke to Freddie’s raspy breathing—he’d been out all night, and must have returned around three a.m. She imagined the odor of Tomasz traveling through the house, sucked up through Freddie’s nose, swimming down to his intestines. He would know.
And then he woke feverish and full of phlegm. How could she not imagine her betrayal was the cause?
By the time Claire returned with water, Freddie was asleep again. She’d failed at her negligible task. She stood over him in the dark, the glass in her hands. He was so far away from her. She had the power to dump water over a sick, sleeping man, but what else?
He couldn’t even bother to feel jealous, while that was all Claire bothered to do. If he found out, he would build up stories around it, as Claire had, thick as a fortress, walls and walls of stories. What evidence did she have for her own life?
She couldn’t believe the thing she’d done to him, couldn’t believe it with such urgency that she didn’t believe it. It hadn’t happened, it was a daydream or someone else’s memory. Unfaithfulness did not belong to her. It had always belonged to him.
Still holding his water glass, Claire coughed loudly. She whispered, “I brought you some water.” Nothing. She nudged his shoulder, coughed again. “Are you thirsty?” Still nothing. “You look very, very thirsty.” Then she dumped the whole glass of water onto Freddie’s face.
He shot up in bed, looking around, blinking at her. “What did you? What’s wrong with you?” He wiped at his wet face with his hands.
“What woman was it this time?” Claire demanded. “Was it Nicolette?”
“What time is it? What are you talking about?”
“How many others have there been? Can you even count?”
“I’m sick, Claire. I have bronchitis.” Freddie threw his legs out of bed and pulled his wet shirt off, patted his face with it. He glared up at her with dim and tired hatred. “You’re a child. I don’t know who you are.”
She was too exhausted to meet his eyes. What little nonsense she’d said had sapped every reserve. He flipped his soaking pillow over, lay back down, and shut his eyes.
She could never beat his silence. So she jostled over him, to act like the child he said she was, then watched him as his feigned sleep became real. He looked younger than her, though he wasn’t. Freddie carried nothing with him that tugged his shoulders low.
Was that what had first drawn her to him? She studied the shadow shape of his body for an answer. When he resolved to have a dance after dinner, whether she would join him or not, was that it? Was it the way he fluttered about if she refused, batting his arms to make her laugh? The way he played characters at parties, the vapid aristocrat, the lovesick professor. He carried his voices around in his pocket and he always donned—needed—one mask or another. He was everywhere, a jittery reflection of a watch face on a wall. She could never quite catch up to him.
Claire used to fancy she was the only one who knew him through his guises. She thought he needed someone to know, to remind him which was the real Freddie, unmasked. But he didn’t want her to know him. He didn’t want her to know there was nothing to know. He didn’t need anyone.
She closed her eyes but couldn’t sleep. It would be a miracle if she didn’t catch what Freddie had. There was the ocean and there was the night. Her father’s jawline, then the back of his head. A big gray dog. She heard a noise, a crush in the darkness. She woke in a panic. Something was on her mouth, a vise—afraid, so intensely afraid she would die, and the dog and her father a mile down the beach. Freddie’s hand was cupping her jaw. He said she woke him with her grinding teeth. This had happened before but each time was
new. She was scared of waking in his grip.
Both of them only half awake, he pulled up her nightgown. He climbed on top of her, his head buried in her hair. But she saw, briefly, how tightly his eyes were closed. He smelled wrong. She didn’t want him in her, but how could she say no after what she’d done. She wanted desperately to overwrite it, to erase it with Freddie. Without even touching her, he tried to push inside, and she tried to let him.
“We can try again,” she said. But he rolled off, mumbling he was too tired and sick anyway.
In the dark shadows of pillows, she covered her ears and heard only the inside of her cupped palms and the inside of her head, a storm system of silence. Claire imagined what it would be like to go mad—her old inventions. The voices she would hear, like a light drizzle all around her.
They drove north in midday traffic, Claire resting her forehead on the cool glass of the passenger window. Freddie had said he needed fresh air and that he knew how badly Claire wanted to see the leaves turn. He wouldn’t want her to miss that confetti ground.
Central Park. Then the Bronx and the Bronx Zoo, the children standing on street corners in thin coats, their fists hidden inside sleeves, sleeves holding radios. She caught pieces of songs. At a stop sign she heard Ray Charles, his bent-branch moan. She nodded her head to it and they drove on. An hour upstate they reached a dirt road and a small patch of trampled grass. They’d been here once, long before. They congratulated one another on finding it again.
The lookout point was a mile from the car, a view of the Hudson waiting there. The short walk proved difficult for ill Freddie, and he stubbed his toe on a rock. Nevertheless, he said he felt invigorated. He wandered off to the edge on his own, and she watched his back. He’d worn his gray trench coat and struggled to take it off. It swashed and moved with his body; it seemed too big for him now. Ahead of her, in the light and shadows, he was nearly camouflaged. But a moment later she heard his voice calling to her. “Get over here. It’s beautiful.”
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 4