I walk down Eighth Avenue until the sky is the color of the street. Past the nearest subway stop, down on to the next. I want to walk. I want to feel the bones in my feet, because she’s here, she’s out here. I pause as a few notes drift out of a lit-up shopfront, trumpeting the sidewalk, looping in and out as if the night were at moments muting the music, at moments inviting it to move in and rise, like a fellow player at a jazz club, taking a solo, giving one. The repeated phrase takes a turn and it’s coming for me, violent for a moment, but the crescendo relaxes, sinks a bit in on itself. And there, in the display case of that shop window, is a large vase, and the design on that vase is exactly the visual representation of the song being played. It is blue and white with loops along the top, dots in the center, loops again below, a Dutch pattern but it’s all jazz. Art and intention all around—that craftsman knew I’d be looking at that vase at the end of dusk with jazz in my ears. How all things, all senses come together—when that happens I fill up and am so grateful for the pulse and life of the city.
I must lower my dosage. One pill per day instead of two and we’ll see how it goes. How else will I be able to find the truth? It all makes sense. But the sense of it is so heavy. I can barely hold it in my head. It makes so much sense I’m scared of it. But I will find the truth. I will find Nicolette. And you’ll help me, Loyal Voices.
I spread the magazine over my head. A light drizzle starts, and tonight will be wretched. All the summered people in the street, we all watch the city through a thin screen, gray and lit from afar like a movie, but the screen is also touching all of us, connecting us. Threading us through with water from the same cloud. This is what I’ve missed. Monday almost over. Tonight it will rain. Tomorrow the street will be different.
PART III: THE PROTEST MARCH 26, 1966
1.
The marchers came in small groups. Countable, until they were no longer countable. Police appeared on cue. And suddenly the street was blocked to traffic and Claire couldn’t cross Eightieth. In a matter of minutes she could hardly see the ground. Thousands swarming from the north, and Claire found herself—of all the places and days—in the heart of a protest.
She was making her way north on Fifth Avenue to a lunchtime lecture at the Goethe Institute, something about a German-American artist. She’d spent the morning poring over the legalese of her six-year-old divorce settlement. This was a much deserved lunch break; there would be a reception after the lecture—an hour or so until she could eat. She could hold off until then, but not much longer. Her staples: reception cheese, wine, crackers. Pinot Noir. Smoked Gouda. Over the sudden swell of heads, she could make out the wrought iron jutting from the windows of the Institute. She could see exactly where she needed to be and had no way of getting there. Her stomach growled.
Claire nearly slammed into a plywood coffin. Right here in Jackie Onassis’ neighborhood. The two men and two women carrying it had painted their faces white, as if they were dead. The dead carrying the dead. She didn’t know what to make of that. They were in her way.
“Excuse me,” she said, but they didn’t.
“Excuse me,” she said again, and the coffin was gone, buried in the wash of color that was now Fifth Avenue.
Excuse me.
Drums and feet. The grinning winter wind. So many faces they were faceless. Chants she couldn’t understand until she read their signs: don’t walk. bring the boys home now. make love not war. peace begins at home. And then a rusty voice above them all, a crazy man in their midst yelling, “Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas,” even though it was mid-March.
Claire threw her head back in frustration and caught sight of a city seagull circling above her. She glared at it suspiciously. Who would eat the cheese? Someone else would drink the wine.
Shifting from foot to foot, the hint of pain. She was already running late, and her only good shoes were in the Macy’s bag she was carrying. She would hardly have time to change into them. The soles of the green flats she wore now were so thin she could feel every shard and crack of pavement and old hard gum.
The smell of dust found her. Something about her father. She wanted a warm summer day in the country and the smell of dust. She felt like singing, or at least having a reason to sing. Her father, though he would never allow himself to articulate anything but kind and trusting thoughts toward his country and president, might be proud of her for being here, even if it was an accident. She missed him.
The peaceniks, the beatniks, the families with sons and daughters. Teenagers, the clean-shaven, the homeless. People shouting, people chanting together: Peace Now. Old men, children, everyone full of the same rage. Fists in the air. The sidewalks too were filled with onlookers—boys in brown uniforms and green berets jeering at the marchers, jeering, we’ll kill you, you fags. Two thousand down, one million to go. Frantic, waving signs: traitors should be shot. Fists in the air.
The protest was moving south. She would certainly be late if she tried to take another route. And she had errands to run later in the day. Replace the eyeglasses she’d broken last night, if she could convince the store they were still under warranty, buy a gift for Mary’s baby shower, maybe have her green flats resoled. But then she’d have to wear her good shoes outside and she couldn’t risk that—they were the only decent pair she’d kept after selling the rest. Errands like receipt paper scrolling in on itself. The wasted day, the wasted life. And all these people thinking they were better than her for supporting a cause, protesting the war. Looking at her standing there idly with her shopping bag.
What did the war have to do with her, or with any of them? She was hungry, that’s what mattered. She was always hungry. And it was embarrassing to have a whole train car of people overhear her stomach grumbling. Maintaining balance was hard enough without involving herself in foreign politics. The balance of riding the subway but looking too elegant to be there; the incredible energy it took to postpone divorce proceedings because she couldn’t afford representation; to put on appearances that a life alone was better than a life with him. There weren’t enough hours in the day to learn how to present her own case, plus the odd jobs she picked up. Sometimes her friend Lynn would hire her as a buyer for her decorating company. And sometimes Mary would have her do research for one of her books, though not lately. Mary hadn’t been returning her calls.
But Claire scraped by with the rent the artists paid her. She’d converted Freddie’s den into a studio and she’d need to find a new renter soon. Paintbrushes clogged her sink. Picking up after the artists was a full-time job—they were like children. Freddie’s lawyer had dropped in on her once and it wasn’t fun to make up excuses. To pretend that she—that she—was the artist.
A man named Avery had been the first. He’d moved his film equipment into the den to do a day shoot, and when they were done, he didn’t leave. He gave her a little money for the storage space and the few roles he had her play if he couldn’t find anyone else. But it wasn’t long before he tired of her. She didn’t have the range, he’d said. But he was just the first of many.
It was only when Mary teased her that all her renters were handsome, talented bachelors that Claire thought this arrangement at all strange. Was the room all they were paying for, Mary had baited? Mary guessed, but Claire did not admit that, if they stayed late working in the den, she would often let them into her bed. A night or two per week at most.
Claire would have to fight her way north on Fifth, against the onrush. Two blocks to the Goethe Institute, and she could make it. She would mingle at the reception. She would try not to stand too near the food table for too long; she was as proud as she was hungry. She often decided not to drink the free wine, but felt she deserved the cheese. Sometimes she thought there were others like her, though she could never be sure. Sometimes she met men.
Claire held her chin up like she was wading through high water. Salmoning up the street. No one gave her a second glance. She could get lost in here. She could disappear into it, unable to recognize her
self from the crowd, swallowed whole. The smell of sweat under tweed coats.
And then she was moving south, being moved, the Met and the Institute falling farther and farther away. She turned and walked with the crowd to keep from being trampled. Someone stepped on the heel of her shoe; she wasn’t walking in rhythm. She couldn’t do anything right. More policemen lined the streets like hedgerows, or barbed wire.
Next to her, a group of doctors wearing lab coats. Ahead of them, women with a banner strung between two poles; on it was a crude reproduction of one of Goya’s Black Paintings. A teenager tried to scamper up a telephone pole and a policeman raised one arm to pull him off by his collar. He went down, beneath the crowd, but Claire didn’t see him resurface.
It seemed theatrical. She was walking in the middle of a movie set, everyone an extra from a different film, only half-hearing the same direction, trusting the feet in front of them. Everyone with the same angry smile and wind-ripened cheeks. The end-of-winter streets dreaming of a better time. All the people, together and dreaming.
These people weren’t cowards like the newspapers said. The headlines, anyway, as Claire never read the full articles. Look at them, look at them saying what’s in their hearts. Look at them with tears in their eyes. Had she ever once cried over anything so outside of herself? She could take a cue from them, the way they stood strong against the slaughter, against the onslaught of words from the boys in berets. The very boys the marchers were trying to protect, singing out for their safety.
Now she walked beside a man carrying a little girl on his shoulders. The child smiled down at her. They looked to one another from time to time to make sure they were doing all right—an unspoken pact. And yes, yes, they were doing all right.
She was in the protest now whether she liked it or not, so she might as well like it. She should join the cause. She should better herself. She should stop biting her nails. Yes, she’d plan a course of resistance and break habit. It was all about breaking habit. Feeling new again. She would shout out with the people. She would volunteer. She would find a hobby.
At Seventy-Second Street, the shouldered child screamed and pointed straight up in fear or in jest of fear. Claire followed the girl’s finger to the interrupted sky. Above, the seagulls squawked and circled like scavengers, as if the protestors were their midday meal. The birds glared in the sun and Claire had to squint in order to see: one bird was attacking the other mid-flight. Directly above the antiwar demonstration, a battle was underway.
Claire looked back at the girl and thought a terrible thought—
Whose thought was that? It couldn’t be hers. It must, absolutely must, belong to someone else.
Abruptly, she stopped walking as if she’d left something behind. Thrust forward, chest out and neck whipped back, she was on the ground. She looked up into the face of a man some hundred pounds heavier than her. “Watch it,” he said, not helping her up.
The image was of the child, Claire’s companion, taller than she. And a knife, which appeared in Claire’s hand. With it, she cut the child in two from top to bottom. A clean cut, like cheese. There was no blood. It did not belong to her.
The asphalt printed her hands. Her leg throbbed. She said nothing. Her safety depended on her silence. She would not be trampled. She would not be trampled. Her Macy’s bag was still on her, twisted around her shoulder. But her purse lay on the ground and there were so many feet and shins in her way. A large pair of patent leathers walked right over it like it was nothing. Claire risked a shout. But she couldn’t hear herself, even down here. She looked up for help. The child, high above and further ahead, reached down as if to catch Claire, but the shoulders walked on.
Claire was not a bad person. She was good, thoughtful. Every time an ambulance passed by on any street, she would pause and think—not pray, but think—“I hope they are all right. I hope, I hope.” The thought could not belong to her.
By making herself small, Claire managed to edge her way to the sidewalk, half crawling, crouching low. Her leg was crying out for attention but she couldn’t tend to it yet. She yelled at anyone who would listen. “Stop. My bag. Please stop.” No one stopped. There was a break, a hiccup of space. She limped in front of a group of old men, veterans from another war. She grabbed the purse wrong side up, felt her possessions falling but what did it matter now, back to the sidewalk, inching between two cops to a small safe space close to the buildings.
Her chest was in knots; she was alive. She’d nearly forgotten about her leg, and it throbbed as a reminder. Her stockings were ripped in a wide oval and there was a long scrape down the middle, following the line of her bone. Blood sprang new to the flesh, as if her acknowledgment of the wound drew it out.
Claire began to lower herself to the ground against the building but a policeman caught sight of her, motioning with his hand, up, up. “No one allowed on the sidewalks.”
“But my leg.” She tried to smile at him, but he’d already turned around and she must look awful anyhow. She searched the numbers of the apartments around her. Jackie Onassis was supposed to live somewhere very near. If only she could knock on Jackie’s door.
But there was someone whose door she could knock on. Her sisterin-law. Ex. Her soon-to-be-ex-sister-in-law lived on this block or the next, or was it the next? Samantha and her near-penthouse. A little wobbly, Claire squeezed north behind the backs of policemen, past the first two apartment entrances, and stopped at the third to scan the names. She did her best to ignore the hard stare of the doorman who wouldn’t open the door and had her stand outside like a lout, an outsider, thick glass and mahogany wood between them. The doorman and his doorman’s cap.
She found the name: not Bishop, but Ebert, Samantha’s deceased husband, already an old man when she’d married him. Claire pressed the buzzer. It was as if she’d released a valve; her whole body begged to cry, but she refused it permission. She would not walk into Samantha’s apartment a bloody mess and weeping too. Not in front of Freddie’s sister, who had always been civil with her and gave her knowing glances concerning the separation.
There was the doorman’s desk, and there the stairs. “Ebert,” she said to him brashly. She didn’t want him to call the elevator for her—she couldn’t wait in the lobby and risk breaking down in front of this man. Despite her leg, she took the six flights up the narrow stairwell, each step mechanical, a service her body did for her. Her mind didn’t move until her nose was nearly touching the brass plated 6R and she had already knocked.
The door opened and Samantha stared blankly at the red-nosed, wind-beaten Claire. “Can I help you?”
Samantha didn’t know her.
She couldn’t stop it: right on Freddie’s sister’s doorstep, big tears fell as if of their own agency, as if they weren’t even hers.
“Oh Claire!” Samantha said. “It’s you, I hardly recognized—what on earth? Come in, oh dear, my poor dear, what happened to you?”
Claire indicated downstairs as her sobs shook her whole form.
“I should have known. How did you get caught up with all that? What did they do?”
Samantha led her by the wrist to her living room on the west side of the building. Four long windows faced Fifth Avenue, overlooking the people below and the park beyond. It was a large, clean room that Claire felt unbearable in. Filthy Claire against the beige carpeting, the textured eggshell walls.
“I must look frightful,” Claire said finally. “I am so embarrassed, barging in like this.”
“Don’t be silly.” Samantha sat her down on the crisp white sofa. Claire made sure not to let her battered leg touch it. Seeing this, Samantha hurried out of the room to get “the fixings.”
Claire patted her eyes with the heel of her wrist as if she was done crying, but she wasn’t. There was a glass bowl of chestnuts on the coffee table in front of her. She reached for them, stopped, her grimy hand midair. She listened for Samantha, reached again. She brought a handful to her mouth and chewed violently as she cried.
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br /> Then silence. She thought she could hear the marchers from the street, but it was so far away. Like a memory of voices. She couldn’t be farther from it had she been on the moon. It made her miss being down there. She scanned her new surroundings, this immaculate egg of an apartment.
Through wet lashes, she saw it. Directly across the room. Above the mantel. The only piece hanging on the expansive wall.
The painting hadn’t changed since she’d last seen it, save for the missing corner. The sky was still that laughing shade of blue. She was still falling in pieces from the bridge. She was still dead.
She leaned back on the couch, closed her eyes. She wasn’t asleep, couldn’t have fallen so quickly, yet she was consumed by the briefest nightmare: the little girl—the two halves of her in either of Claire’s arms. Claire tried to comfort her.
She clicked open her eyes. The light was different. But no time had passed, had it? Samantha rustled in with a wet rag and a bandage and a noose. No, she wasn’t carrying a noose.
The change in Claire must have been glaring and Samantha stopped short. “What’s wrong, dear? Does it hurt?”
Somehow Claire managed to say, “Where did you get it?” She pointed at the painting, arm extended, a rope pulling her taught, keeping everything in place.
“I don’t know?” Samantha answered before she registered what exactly it was Claire was referring to. With her eyes, she followed Claire’s finger. “Oh. That. Yes, in your basement. Yes, that’s right. It was in Freddie’s things when we moved him out. Hidden behind boxes like it was junk. I figured he wouldn’t mind, but I never asked him, exactly. Not directly. Was that bad of me? It was too strange and rare to keep locked away like that. It’s by that portrait artist, you know, she’s quite a name now—”
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 9