When she stepped into the den, Jill stood up from the couch and made her take his seat. Beside her, Bird was so drunk he couldn’t sit without swaying. He looked at her, but his eyes kept shifting to her shoulders and sometimes, she noticed, to her chest. He grabbed her hand with his grimy one and talked about basic training. “I’m going to come back and kick all your asses.” His eyes drooped now to Claire’s lap. “But not yours,” he said. “You could kick my ass any day.”
“You’re not joking,” Claire said. “I’m all muscle.” And she flexed a bicep for them.
Lawrence laughed. “He almost failed his physical. Carlos told him to rub his own leg a lot. They almost thought he was a fairy.”
“Carlos tried to sabotage,” Bird slurred. “But I told them I drink lots of Kool-Aid.”
“‘Kool-Aid saves lives,’” Jill said deeply in his best ad-man voice.
“Will you write to us?” Claire said.
“If you write to me,” said Bird. “Will you write to me once a week?”
“Of course, if that’s what you want. Though I’m afraid I’ll run out of things to say. It will be terribly boring here without you.” She thought to herself that she was not lying, she would try to write every week.
“You can send me your picture,” Bird said.
“All right. I’ll send you a picture.”
“Don’t do anything nasty with it,” Carlos said to Bird.
“Shut up,” Bird said. “And maybe send some bubblegum.”
“Check. Bubblegum,” said Claire. “Is that what you’ll miss the most?”
“No. I don’t know why I said bubblegum. I don’t like it that much.” He lifted his beer. “To bubblegum!” Everyone cheered to bubblegum.
Claire sipped her martini and glanced at Jill, who was smiling at her.
Bird said, “You’ll be here when I get back. You’ll take care of us.”
“No,” Claire said. “I think you’ll have to take care of me.”
“You’ll keep ending the war while I’m over there and then I’ll come back and join”—Bird hiccupped—“and join you. I won’t be gone that long.”
“We’ll still be here when you get back,” she said. She looked to Jill and this time he stopped smiling.
Bird threw up in the bathroom, and when he was in there too long, Claire knocked quietly on the door to see if he needed help. He came out with a runny nose and tear-stained face, but he grinned at her.
She took him back to the den, laid out his sleeping bag and pillow, and helped him get into it without falling. He said, looking up at her from the floor, “There’s two of your nice face now.” He reached for her ankle and held it with his eyes closed, then opened them quickly. “It’s dizzy in there.”
“You’ll just have to sleep with your eyes open,” Claire said, reaching down to peel his fingers from her leg. She squeezed his hand until his eyes closed again.
After they’d gone to sleep, she packed Bird a turkey sandwich and an apple. She threw in a roll at the last minute. No, too much bread. She took it out. He would need vitamins. He’d need to stay healthy. She would tell him that. She put the wrapped food in the refrigerator.
They were running late, seven-something in the morning. Jill was taking Bird to the bus station. He held his bags by the door, tapping his foot. It was all too fast. She was so tired, too tired to think straight. In the hall, she watched Carlos and Lawrence and Bird slap shoulders. She watched them nod and say, “I’ll write you, man. Stay good.”
She hugged Bird lightly. It was like saying goodbye to an imaginary friend.
She let go and her childhood walked out the door—her childhood, riding an elevator to Vietnam—and she went back to her room and fell asleep.
She would wake up later in a panic, remembering the lunch she’d packed and thinking in her dream state that she could run and catch him.
Then there were three. And Claire. Carlos and Lawrence lay around, lethargic. Jill started organizing a new rally, making calls, writing letters, keeping himself busy, all with a scowl. Had he thought he could stop the war before it took his friends?
Jill tried to motivate them. He delegated small jobs. He said he understood. He said they couldn’t give up now, they had to act, they had to work harder on Bird’s behalf. He told them horror stories of soldiers who came back, but never soldiers that died. Still, they weren’t moved.
Claire was leaning in the doorway and the totality with which Jill refused to acknowledge her made her feel like she was eavesdropping.
“He needs us,” Jill was saying. “You don’t want him to come home all homicidal, do you? That’s what the Army does to you. They replace all of your emotions with one: anger.”
Lawrence shrugged. “That’s not special,” he said. “Haven’t you ever felt like killing someone? You know you’d never do it, but. You feel that rage.”
Jill stared at him a moment, hard-eyed. He’d lost them. “No,” he said, “I haven’t.”
Bird’s real name was Alexander Montrose. Claire only thought to ask after he left. He was Jewish and his parents lived in Rochester and he had a younger sister who sent him cards with flowers made of glue and glitter. When she later found one he’d forgotten to pack, it let loose its dust which sparkled on her floor.
———
They were using the painting against her. Freddie’s lawyer informed her of this at a meeting Freddie conveniently missed. The lawyer’s bald head gleamed in the overhead light. Claire had stolen it, he said. It was Freddie’s, and Freddie had gifted it to his sister. “What my client is offering should be considered very generous to an art thief.” It wasn’t legally hers, and the theft, he said, demonstrated she was unworthy of financial support.
Freddie met her on the front steps of the uptown office afterward. He was out of breath. Sweat sprung from his temples. He looked old. Is that what she looked like to him?
“Was that some kind of underhanded strategy?” Claire asked. “Not showing up for the meeting? I looked pathetic in there, fighting against no one.”
“I was held up at work. What do you want me to say?” He took a deep breath, paused and spoke calmly, as one does when dealing with a misbehaving child. “I don’t want any hard feelings. You’re upset about the painting, I know. We’ll talk about it. But maybe it’s best for you if you don’t keep it, don’t you think?”
“Such sudden interest. Do you have a collector looking at it? You must think I’m such a fool. You’re probably laughing with your friends at that dolt who doesn’t know the worth of art. Well, that dolt used to be your wife and knows you better than you think.”
Freddie shook his head ceremoniously. “Why do you think I’m out to hurt you? If you can’t trust the man you were with for eighteen years, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“What about the apartment?”
“We’ll talk about it with our lawyers present.”
“I deserve ancillary relief,” Claire said as confidently as she could.
Freddie smiled at her. “You look nice today. Is that new?”
He wasn’t asking about anything in particular, just saying words. She wanted terribly to hurt him. But she lowered her gaze. She felt defeated. “When will this be over?” There was nothing she could say or do to injure this man.
“You’ll be fine,” he said. “Trust me.”
———
Jill and Carlos and Lawrence were in the kitchen, mixing a strange dough of all the ingredients they could find in her cupboards, making a mess. The phone was ringing.
“I need to speak with Jill,” said Claire. They looked at each other and Carlos gave a low whistle. “I’m not kidding. Out.”
“Just joshing around.” Carlos lifted his hands in defense and he and Lawrence went to the den. Claire waited until she could hear them laughing and scrounging about for a misplaced joint. She looked at the phone and it stopped ringing.
“Bad meeting?” Jill asked. He reached for her shoulder but Claire moved away. If it
was impossible to hurt Freddie, it was sickeningly easy to hurt Jill.
“I need you to leave.”
“What? The kitchen?” She waited quietly until a look of understanding pulled down on his face. “Now? You can’t mean now.”
“I think it’s time. It’s been time. You’ll find another place.” Claire eyed the tile floor, scuffed and stained almost in a pattern.
Jill, nodding. “Hell, I dig it. After everything. After Bird and everything.”
“We always said two months, and it’s nearly been.” Jill said nothing. The phone began to ring again. “Freddie’s people are coming by the apartment tomorrow,” she lied. “I need to clean up by then. I only just found out.” Jill pursed his lips, still silent. “But we’ll still see each other. I’d still like to help out when I can. The cause, the boys. I mean it.” He roamed around her face until he caught her eyes and wouldn’t let go. Still he said nothing. She threw up her hands. “I don’t know why I’m arguing with you—it’s my home.” She let the phone ring. “Jill, please.”
He moved to the window. “Sure,” he said nonchalantly, fingering the blinds. “We have lots of other options. Other dens. Other women’s homes.” He turned to her. “Let me see the painting.”
The phone stopped ringing.
“That’s my father,” Claire said, gesturing toward the phone. “He calls to tell me about my mother losing the car keys.” He had called twice in as many days, always about Elsa, but Claire didn’t have time for that now.
“I know you, Claire. You don’t tell me a thing, and I know everything about you.”
“Then you’d know nothing if I started talking.”
Claire stood over the couch, watching Jill sleep. His forehead furrowed even then. But he breathed steadily, unburdened, and his lips, every now and again, would open and close as if he were giving a speech.
She didn’t want to lose him. She’d felt panicky as the boys had packed, her skin, her fingers buzzing like she were about to drop a vase from a great height.
His eyes opened softly. She gasped, couldn’t think of an excuse, and whispered, “I do need your help.”
He sat up raggedly. “What’s wrong?”
“They’re going to take the painting.”
She headed to her bedroom and he followed her down the hall. Her neck felt hot. In the dim light of her bedroom, they sat on the edge of her bed.
She did not tell him about her grandmother. Didn’t tell him about her mother or her father, who Jill reminded her of a little. Or that the painting appeared to have triggered all of it—even events that occurred before it was painted.
She did tell him about her time with Nicolette. How she had trusted and admired her, how beautiful she was. She told him how she and Freddie had hidden the painting in the basement and she tried to have it destroyed and somehow it ended up in the wrong hands. Jill listened to the silences—as if he knew what she was leaving out.
But she did not feel better afterward. She felt, in fact, cheapened by the telling.
“Show me,” he whispered, not purposefully, but as if she had taken his voice. He was so earnest. It made her dislike him.
She knelt down and felt for it under the bed, felt him watching her. She pulled the painting out and laid it on her mattress. Standing at the foot of the bed, Jill looked at her likeness lying there in the yellow light. She let him move a hand over the canvas, touching her face as an old woman, a child, the dead one on the street.
Then, without moving his eyes from the painting, he said, “I’m in love with you.”
“No, you’re not,” Claire said.
“I could be.”
He turned and took a step toward her, and then he cupped one breast in his hand. He looked straight in her eyes. They stood there.
She stepped around him, lifted the painting, and slid it back under the bed.
“You can’t let them take it,” Jill said.
She stood, straightening her nightgown. “It’s late.”
And he went back to the den, and she slept alone, which is how it had always been.
The hospital called the following morning to say Mary had gone in for an emergency C-section—a premature birth, but not to worry. Claire was, apparently, Mary’s emergency contact. On her way out the door, she wished the boys good luck and said they could let themselves out. They pretended they would see each other again in a few days, that this wasn’t goodbye. That they wouldn’t forget her. Claire kissed all three of them on the cheek, including Jill, no different than the others, then lowered her eyes and walked out.
When she saw the infant in his little ventilator, Claire cried and let Mary think she was crying with joy for the baby. Claire forgot she was angry with Mary for getting pregnant, for not telling her, for deciding to keep it. And Mary forgot to be angry with Claire.
When she got back, the lost boys were gone. She opened a window for the noise, the honking, the comfort of the city. To fill up the empty spaces. But the house wasn’t as odd without them as she thought it would be. Nothing else had changed.
Later, she would clean; for now she fell on her bed, spent. But it was she who was empty, not the apartment. She felt, instinctively, that looking at the painting would lend some comfort. Kneeling down, she reached her arm under the bed. She couldn’t feel it. She reached farther, her arms disappearing up to her shoulders in the dark. Nothing. She flailed her hand about, desperate now for the rough edge of the canvas, withdrew her arm, crouched low so she could see, flat on her stomach. Nothing.
She’d been robbed. The boys must have left the door unlocked and some vagrant had stumbled in off the street. She stood and ran through the apartment to see what else had been taken, ended back in her bedroom, breathless. But nothing else was missing, and she knew better. She didn’t want to know.
Jill had stolen it. But why—for money? He knew the artist’s name; he might have figured it could be worth something. But he had wanted to help her, to listen. That’s what he’d said. That’s what they’d all said.
She felt as if he’d taken her and she didn’t know where she was. Squatting with his friends somewhere, maybe Alphabet City. Alone and alone.
She felt she might vomit. She ran outside, down the street to the park, throwing her body ahead of herself. As if she were running after Jill in the early evening belly of Washington Square. “Nickel bag,” the men offered under the arch as she brushed by. Air was what she needed, but she felt instead that she was breathing in car horns. It was foggy, the last light barely shining through, which gave the sky a desolate look, like cement. A man, drunk perhaps, shouldered past her, though the park was nearly empty. It was no one she knew.
PART IV: THE TIMELESS HANDBAG OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS 2004
The day Nicolette left me, I’d been seeing the reflection men for a week or more. They look how your face looks warped on the side of a shiny mug. Bottle-necked, hourglass, fun-house. They visited my room and sat farting on my pillow, telling me secrets. They had vague red eyes with which they read my books. They had no noses.
But I don’t blame her.
Those weren’t you, Dear Voices, surely. You were still inside of me, muttering quietly about pancakes and the Pope, and they were outside. They could not have been you or you them.
My own danger level was on the fritz. I hadn’t been sleeping, afraid they’d tamper with me if I was out of my own sight for too long, but I hadn’t gotten out of bed for days, in case I might do the things they told me to do. That morning Nicolette coaxed me with pancakes. I touched her face to make sure she was real. She was, but her pancakes tasted like a trick.
“Why won’t you look at me?” she said.
I bulged my eyes at her in response.
“You’re a child,” she said.
She let me read while she mixed paints across the room. On her palette they sounded like spit in her mouth. She was wearing bright blue plastic gloves. The letters flitted on the page. She tried to nuzzle me and I pushed her away.
; She said I was cold to her. She asked, “What’s wrong with you?” Then she was quiet for a while. She scraped and cleaned her glass palette with a razor. “Maybe you should go back to the hospital.”
It was very dark even though it was day. She said, “There’s a man looking at you,” but she said she didn’t say that. She cleaned her special sable brushes with baby oil and set them to dry in empty chickpea cans. “You’re freaking me out,” she said matter-of-factly, and came to sit beside me on the couch. “I could try to paint you again.”
I rattled my head. She rubbed baby oil on my neck to make me laugh. The laugh was razors in my torso. The room smelled of turpentine. “You’re trying to kill me with that stuff,” I said. She started crying. To make her feel better, I said, “I’ll let you hit me in the head with a glass ball.”
She dried her eyes but then there was baby oil under them and it looked like movie tears. “What we both need is some fresh air,” she said, her cheery voice a mask.
And so we went to the theater. A Chekhov play and we got cheap seats the hour before.
All the people were fuzzy and I was seeing everything through a thick sheet of music. The usher showed us to our seats in the center of the mezzanine. The red plush tickled me through my shirt. I could hear my organs giggling like schoolgirls. I held her hand. Then in the second act, when Masha ran across the stage, I had to pee badly. But the reflection men wouldn’t let me go, wouldn’t let me miss the transition into Act Three, and the usher stared at me, choking me with that look, squeezing my bladder. Then the shuffling dark moments behind the curtain. I concentrated on those sounds because if I missed anything a crack would appear and Masha—no, the actress—she ran across the stage and looked straight at me to let me know I would fall through it, so don’t try anything funny. I thought I could hold it, I was determined to hold it—but then everyone in the audience began to whisper. They said, you are such an idiot. They said that I would lose it, that I deserved to lose it, and then the usher’s voice rose above the taunts and jeers. Pathetic, he said. Pathetic, ugly killer child—then she saw the warm wet patch on the front of my pants. Or maybe she smelled it first and she turned and found the source. She was so embarrassed she flapped her hands around, but low, no one saw those hands flapping, mimicking her disgusted heart, those hands that had touched me everywhere. She started crying. I saw a wet cheek gleaming in the dark, sun through fog, and then suddenly she stood up and left. She left. She left me there and ran in silence out of the theater, which caused a bigger scene than it would have otherwise, no one would have noticed if she’d only kept still, and there I was alone. I ran after her, a crack forming behind me, chasing me up the red aisle, and everyone stared—of course they stared. I ran wet and feet sinking. I ran and ran and ran right into the usher. He growled two words, those two words, in my ear, his teeth gnarled and jagged in the red glow of the door.
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 13