The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  Still, something had shifted since Freddie. Around these boys, she could see the change more clearly. She smiled more freely, laughed at their impressions of LBJ, and of Claire, too—Bird got her pout right, and the way she said, “Be careful, use a coaster,” though she’d given up on that after their third day.

  But it wasn’t enough. She was no good to anyone.

  Claire went back into the kitchen and found Bird still sitting there, deeply concentrating on his Coca-Cola. “My father isn’t doing so well these days either,” she said from the door.

  Bird turned to her and she sat down beside him. He played with the condensation on the bottle. “Does he need to have an operation, too?”

  “No,” Claire said. “I don’t know what that’s like.”

  Bird only nodded. Then he slid over his sticky, half-finished soda. An offering.

  Whenever Claire walked home from the library in the fresh air with a touch of spring, only to enter the muggy dungeon of stench the boys had built up around themselves, this thought entered her mind: where were the women?

  When she asked why they never invited girls around to help out, and that she couldn’t imagine none of them had girlfriends, Bird replied that girls were gossips and might spoil their covert missions. Lawrence flicked Bird’s ear and said that what Bird meant was they wouldn’t take risks if they cared about girls. “What if they got hurt because of us? Better to have just men,” he said. And Claire asked, “What does that make me?” Jill shrugged and said that if she wanted more women around, she should find that artist she’d mentioned.

  “I’ve looked,” Claire said. “I can’t find her anywhere. It’s like she doesn’t exist.”

  Claire had, in fact, cracked open one phonebook. Nicolette wasn’t listed.

  At the kitchen table, Jill’s toe touched the arch of her foot and stayed there and he gave no sign that he even noticed. Claire glared at the papers spread before her, smothered in legalese.

  “If you don’t get some coffin-dodger for a judge,” Jill was saying, “it’s possible just to get your separation converted. Still, might be easier to go down to Mexico to get divorced. If your husband—ex-husband—if he can afford it.”

  She moved her foot away, careful to make it seem as if she were not moving her foot away.

  “With the apartment, you have a chance,” he went on. “You’ve been living here alone the past however many years.”

  “Seven,” Claire said. The boys were playing the Fugs in the other room. Nothing, nothing, nothing, the lyrics rattled. She didn’t like this new song.

  “He owns it nominally, but he’s got a new apartment—”

  “Equipped with a new girl.”

  “You haven’t met anyone?”

  Claire stood and rummaged through the junk drawer, looking for a pack of cigarettes. “Can I borrow a smoke?”

  Jill took out his pack, beat it on his palm, and handed her one from the middle. He lit it for her as he spoke. “He should be paying your legal fees, do you know that? You have to ask him for ancillary relief. You shouldn’t be representing yourself.”

  Claire laughed softly.

  “What?” Jill asked, as if she’d laughed at him.

  “To represent yourself. You can only do it in a court of law.”

  “If you get a lawyer, this could all work out for you, Claire. The wife’s usually favored. Unless there’s some scandal you don’t want unearthed.” Jill chuckled awkwardly.

  “What about the painting?” Claire asked.

  “What am I supposed to say? You won’t even let me see it.”

  Claire walked around the table to close the blinds. It was getting dark.

  “It was a gift?” Jill asked. “Allan commissioned it?”

  “Who?”

  “Your ex-husband. Allan.”

  “Oh. He never went by Allan. That was his legal name. But, yes, he commissioned the portrait for my birthday.”

  “A gift is considered personal property, not marriage property. So you shouldn’t have a problem. Taking it from someone’s wall like you did, I mean, that might be used to prove some sort of prior unstable behavior, but it shouldn’t mean he gets to keep the damn thing.”

  Claire sat again, smoking quickly as if it would burn out. “I paid someone, a long time ago, right after it was painted. I paid someone to destroy it. Obviously he didn’t.”

  “If you’d just let me see it, Claire.”

  From the den, the lyrics drifted in, Nothing, nothing, nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

  “How can I help you if you don’t tell me anything?” Jill stood and started pacing. “Maybe they’ll argue the painting reverts back to him, then. If they can prove it’s a gift you tried to get rid of. And,” he looked down at her, “who knows, Mrs. Bishop, they might hold your silence against you, too, because, because you’re too silent. To me.”

  Jill stopped his pacing abruptly and headed out of the room. He paused in the doorway. “What did you call him? Your husband. Will you tell me that?”

  “Freddie,” she said, looking down at Freddie’s handwriting.

  Jill stood on a small stool under the arch of Washington Square Park. They’d managed a good turnout—three hundred people at least, Claire guessed. She stood on her tiptoes and saw Mary a few feet away and waved to her. They smiled and embraced, muscles rigid in the cold. Claire didn’t know how to hold her friend with that pregnant belly in the way. It was eight months large and it irked her. Claire pretended to listen to Jill with his megaphone, but she couldn’t force her eyes off Mary’s swollen profile, the loose white shirt that fell around her in a way that made Claire think: summer. Something about the scene made her want to flee.

  “Dear, he’s talking about you,” Mary said.

  “Don’t say that. He is not.”

  “‘Anonymous women who give their souls to the cause?’ You’re right, that can’t be you.” Mary rolled her eyes. “You do know those boys are madly in love with you.”

  “Oh please. I’m old enough to be their grandmother.”

  “You spend an awful lot of time with them. Don’t you think that’s strange?”

  Mary’s tone was arch, but she wasn’t smiling. Claire didn’t know what to say, except, “They live with me.”

  Mary studied her, forming some conclusion Claire was certain she would have been insulted by. “I should leave,” Mary said.

  Claire didn’t know why she had been avoiding Mary—ever since she’d started showing. Mary had only cared to share her pregnancy with Claire when she couldn’t hide it any longer. She’d waited so long to tell her. And that had hurt.

  But Claire didn’t have room for it now, or time. She didn’t have what it took to simply stand beside her friend. Claire struggled to say, “So soon?”

  “I thought it was going to be a small rally,” Mary said.

  “It’s good, don’t you think? They need the numbers.”

  “I don’t want the baby to get hurt at a peace rally. It would be too ironic to bear.”

  As if to prove her point, a man leaned out of his fifth-story window overlooking the park and yelled, “Commie criminals!”

  Claire grimaced. “Of course. They don’t need me here. I’ll leave with you.”

  They inched out of the crowd. “Walk me to my place a ways?” Mary said.

  “Oh, I would. I should go home. The hearing’s only a couple weeks away. I can’t tell you how much reading there is to do. Anyway, better if you take a cab.”

  “That’s right. The hearing. I should have known,” Mary said. “And here I am, worrying about my baby.” She stopped walking and turned to Claire, one hand on her belly. “You haven’t even asked how I am, Claire.”

  “I didn’t? I was going to,” Claire tried.

  “Forget it.”

  Mary turned north to hail a cab. Claire backed away, nodding stupidly, and walked into a group of pigeons—they flew up and toward her, too dumb to fly away.

  The house was empty. She needed a fe
w moments of quiet. But there was nothing quiet in her head, hunched over her divorce papers at the kitchen table. She was furious with Mary for her self-righteousness, for saying those things to her. None of it was true.

  The door—she heard it open and close and thought, just for a moment, that it was Freddie. That was the life tucked inside these files, all those nights in the kitchen alone, hearing the sound of coming and going that had nothing to do with her.

  She could feel him behind her but she couldn’t turn around. Jill stood for a while in the kitchen doorway before asking, “Are you okay?”

  When she didn’t answer, he walked up to her and put his hand on her shoulder. She imagined his hands moving up her neck, down again. She could imagine it all. How his skinny body would be clammy against her own, his freckled arms around her in her bed. He was so thin.

  “I wrote that speech for you,” Jill said.

  She opened another file. “I can’t understand this,” she said vaguely.

  “I’ll help.” He was still touching her shoulder. With his other hand, he reached around her to close the file.

  She turned to face Jill. “The man I asked to destroy the painting—he’s the superintendent here. We were involved.”

  “I can help,” Jill said again. He hadn’t seemed to hear her. Then he leaned in and kissed her.

  She did not move toward him or away from him. She stood perfectly still. His lips were sticky as he pulled away.

  “I’m too old for you,” she said. “I don’t want you talking about me at your rallies.”

  “That’s not true,” he said, taking a step back.

  4.

  Something was wrong. She could tell the minute she walked into the den. The room was too quiet. And it seemed cleaner. Claire had just returned from a reception at the Goethe Institute, her first since before the boys moved in. It had felt good to get out of the house, to have a reason to dress up and carry her good shoes in her Macy’s bag, to look too decent for the subway. To be surrounded by esteemed scholars and art critics who would never suspect her of housing an antiwar collective. But she hadn’t talked much and had left early after pocketing some cheese, wrapped in a cloth napkin, a gift for the boys.

  Jill was sitting cross-legged on the floor. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “What’s happened?” she said. “What is it? Tell me.”

  Carlos held out a piece of paper to her from the couch. He was hugging his knees, wearing pajama pants and socks and no shirt. His eyes were red. “Greetings from Uncle Sam. Bird’s draft letter.”

  She didn’t take the letter from him. Bird was standing silhouetted by the window, hard to see, holding his card. He was the smallest of all of them. “So he’ll burn it,” Claire said a little too casually, not addressing Bird directly. She threw her bags on the floor and gave an exaggerated shrug. “Or he’ll mail it back to the government and we’ll fight it in court.”

  “We’ll burn it together,” Lawrence said from the arm of the couch. “That’s always been the plan, right? If one of us…”

  “In the park. Tonight. For everyone to see,” said Jill. “Then tomorrow we’ll talk about our options. I’ve been doing it for everyone else. Just because it’s Bird, just because, it doesn’t make it any different. There must be something medically wrong with you. Maybe you’re a lunatic. Or depressed. Super depressed. Or homosexual. Hell, we’ve been living here together, all these boys in one room.”

  “You crack me up,” Lawrence said seriously.

  “Or maybe he’s just too dumb for the army,” Carlos said. “What’s your card say?”

  “He’s 1-A,” Jill said. “What’d you think?”

  “Let me see that.” Carlos moved swiftly from the couch to Bird and snatched the card from his hand. He pointed at it. “See, if we just erase this line here, and add a couple lines there, see, it says 4-F.”

  “Give that back,” Bird said loudly.

  Carlos jerked the card away, lifting it as high as he could above his head. Bird jumped but couldn’t reach. “You’re too short. Why would they want you? You’re too short, isn’t he?”

  “Give that back, Carlos,” Bird said, kicking him in the shin.

  Carlos hooted and laughed, but the others didn’t join in. Claire watched silently. Finally, he flicked the card down at Bird. It hit his forehead then fell to the carpet. Bird left it there. Watching it like it was a cockroach he wasn’t sure was dead.

  “If you want to make a show of it,” Carlos said, “we could find enough lighter fluid to cover you, easy. I got some matches if you want ’em.”

  “Not funny,” Lawrence said. “That’s not funny. Is it Claire? Why are you being such an asshole, Carlos?”

  Claire shook her head. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t cry. She tried to say, “No,” but nothing came out. Nothing, lots and lots of nothing.

  “Leave him alone,” Jill said half-heartedly. “We’ll do what we have to do. We’ll go to jail with him, if it comes to that. We’ve been there before.” He started quietly singing the Draft Dodger Rag, “I got eyes like a bat and my feet are flat.”

  Carlos sat back down on the couch and hugged his knees again. “We could get him off to Canada. Couldn’t we, Claire?”

  Claire was still standing. She didn’t know what to do with her hands.

  “He might never get to come home,” Lawrence said. “Or he’ll get canned. Five years.”

  “Same if we burn it and so what?” Carlos’s chin was on his knees, trapping his words. “Jill said it, we’ll do what we got to. We could go disappear to Mississippi, even. What’s keeping us here? There are other fights, important fights. Hide him down there where no one would think to look. We could go tonight.”

  “We could do nothing.”

  It was Bird. They all turned to him.

  “What do you mean, Bird?” Jill said slowly.

  “I mean I’m going.”

  Jill stood up from the floor. “What do you mean, Bird?”

  “I mean my family,” Bird mumbled.

  “What?” Lawrence said. “What are we?”

  “My mom. She’ll disown me if I dust off.” Bird looked at them, and then he looked like he swallowed himself. His body crunched in on him and it seemed like he knew it and was trying to stop it, holding his arms defensively, fists and face clenched. “I’m going,” he said.

  So they had mothers. It was something Claire had to continuously remind herself: that they weren’t lost boys. They were boys with mothers.

  “He is a lunatic. If he wants to go. You don’t need a shrink to prove that,” Carlos said.

  “I’m going,” Bird said again, and then, with the same intonation, “I’m sorry.”

  Then Jill was walking across the room toward him. They were only a few feet apart, but it seemed to take forever for Jill to get there. So much time and Bird was shrinking and saying, “I’m sorry. You got to understand. Maybe I can do more from the inside. I’ll send you coded letters. You need a man on the inside. You need me.” Shrinking while he was talking until Jill was over him, so much taller. Then Jill slapped him across the jaw.

  Claire saw the slap, but the sound was delayed. She thought of lighting and thunder.

  Bird began to cry. Jill leaned in and embraced him mightily and said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, man, I’m so sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and he might have started crying, too, their faces in each other’s shoulders. Until Jill leaned back and cupped the jaw he’d just hit, cradling it just long enough to show Bird how he felt. They loved each other. They all did.

  What was she supposed to say?

  Claire stood in the doorway, watching the scene like a home slide-show of someone else’s family. Was she supposed to act the part of the mother? She, who’d never been one?

  Claire had slapped her own mother, once.

  She would not let them see her cry. This handful of sadness was not mysterious. It was not God. It was overly human. It was a boy. It was lying on her couch. It was eating from her refrigerator a
nd gumming up her floors and needing her.

  Without a word, she walked out, locked herself in the hallway bathroom, and undressed. She let her skirt drop to the floor. She studied her figure, still under her control, though her hips had filled out. As if now, after all this time, they had something to say. Her bones groaned like an old house—small internal shifts that only she could hear.

  She ran her hand down her sternum, her breasts, her stomach. She found herself thinking of Mary’s pregnant belly, and what her own body might look and feel like if she were pregnant too. Did Mary worry her child would grow up to join the army and fight a faraway war? She imagined Mary must look beautiful naked at almost nine months. She thought of Nicolette and did not try to cover the image this time. Imagining her made Claire feel less lonely. As she slid her hands over her body, she let herself remember how Nicolette had touched her so many years ago, but now recalled that moment as a ghost touching her, the cold fingers of empty space. She’d pushed Mary away and who else could she talk to about this? About what? Losing a boy who wasn’t hers, who she barely knew and couldn’t help? She couldn’t help a soul and why should she care. She hated that she could feel sorry for herself at a time like this. But she was losing herself. And she had to flee.

  She touched herself, she couldn’t not. Thought she heard a knock at the door—had she locked it?—and continued to touch while she looked in the mirror as if it were the last time she’d ever see herself. As if she were saying goodbye, her reflection flying off to Vietnam to die. Goodbye, me. Say hello to the president.

  Bird would stay with his family—his other family—until he was deployed. The night before Bird went home, they got drunk. At first Claire stayed in her room, reading her used American History textbook that she hid from the boys. But she could hear their laughter and music, the linty edge of Miles Davis coming through the wall. She went to get a glass of water from the kitchen. An excuse, she wasn’t fooling anyone. But when she was at the sink, she decided to make herself a martini—with lesser gin than she used to drink. It had been a while since she’d had a cocktail.