They were near enough now that their knuckles touched. Claire felt grateful she had gotten to see Mary change, that there was beauty and life in her that she could still discover. She almost said this out loud.
“What about Leo’s father?”
Mary straightened her shoulders, shifting only slightly from Claire. “What about him?”
Claire didn’t know what about him. She took a slug of wine, the bottle already half gone.
“I still haven’t told him,” Mary said.
“But he would help, wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“All right,” Claire said quietly.
“He’s married with two kids, for Christ’s sake. And the midterm election was just before Leo was born. I knew what he would have said and I didn’t want to hear it. Not again. The speech is always the same. That waiter years ago, or a congressman now, there’s no difference. They must all have subscriptions to some top-secret newsletter for chauvinists. I bet they rehearse it in the mirror.” Mary deepened her voice in her best impression of a man. “This is your decision and I support you, baby. Whatever you choose, baby. But it’s bad timing, there’s no money, it’s better for everyone including the baby, baby. Trust me, baby.”
Claire laughed, but stopped when she realized Mary wasn’t.
“The number of times I’ve heard that speech and had a hundred bucks shoved at me to get it over and done with.” She held up her fingers as if counting out the three men, then rested it on top of Claire’s.
“Did you love him?” Claire asked, her eyes on Mary’s unmoving hand.
“Love him? I don’t know. Yes? Maybe I still do.” Mary lifted the bottle halfway to her mouth then seemed to forget it and put it down. “I know him. I know him better than he knows himself. But I don’t want him to know. Leo’s father will never know he’s Leo’s father. I only have a few weeks to lose this pregnancy weight before the book party. A year and still I haven’t lost it all.”
Claire took the bottle from Mary and quickly downed another mouthful. “You’re going to see him there?”
“You’re supposed to say, ‘What weight?’” Mary shrugged. “It’ll probably be the last time I see him. Until Leo’s old enough to ask questions. He’ll probably get picked on in school and need an ego boost someday and I’ll tell him who his brilliant father is.”
So Mary thought he was brilliant. Claire hadn’t realized she’d been assuming, hoping, that Mary hated the man.
“The book was one of my best, though. Don’t you think?”
Claire nodded and drank again. She had the galley somewhere. She’d read most of Mary’s books, six in all, but she hadn’t wanted to pull this one off the shelf.
“I’m sorry I’m going on like this. I think I’m a little tipsy.” Mary took the bottle back and finished it off. “Remember when things were simpler?”
“No. When was that?” Claire smiled. “I do remember when your boyfriends were simpler.”
“Dumb as rocks is what they were.”
“What happened to the one who tried to make a film about the people in the sewers?”
“Him! He only lasted an hour down there and he ran out screaming that his camera was stolen!”
Mary cackled, her mouth wine-stained. Claire tried to ask about another, but only laughter escaped her. Then Mary hiccupped and they both doubled over. They fell back and their bellies burned. There were no words. Nothing was all that funny, but neither of them could stop. They laughed until they forgot they were people.
Then Mary kissed her on the mouth. Once. And they lay flat on their backs, beside each other in silence for a long time, no longer laughing but breathing hard and deeply serious in a way that was related to laughter, and their stomachs ached from the physical memory of it.
It was a first, but it wasn’t new. Claire’s heart raced in that familiar way. And not only because she had fantasized about Mary without realizing she was fantasizing about Mary—it was as if they had kissed before and were returning for more. She felt so grateful she could cry.
They moved closer to one another. Even after their bodies pressed, they did not stop moving closer. Here was the hollow above Mary’s collarbone. Here was Claire’s neck. Her elbow as it had never felt before, shimmying under Mary’s cheek. Kissing and pressing and kissing hard, until Claire closed her eyes, locking the moment inside her.
“What are we doing?” Claire whispered.
Mary answered silently. Her lips were chapped. Claire remembered that Mary’s lips always bled in winter. She felt the filaments of Mary’s lips on her own, the coarse parts of them. She felt Mary’s fingers moving down her body more than she felt her own body. Claire was rigid, nearly immobile for most of it, outside of herself looking down from above. She grazed Mary with her own hand. She had never touched another woman, Claire said again and again. Mary only laughed and took charge, undressing Claire as if she were undressing herself, fluid and natural. Claire was inadequate, prudish. But, in feigning knowledge, she felt more sexual than she ever had. She bit Mary’s lip hard. Their breasts pressed together. She kissed Mary’s arms all the way up and down, giggling. She sucked on her shoulder. Sucked on her knee, and upper thigh, and ribs, but nowhere too close. She moved so they were diagonal, so their smooth sides and hips could touch, so she could know what that felt like, too. She liked imagining the two of them from above, watching the film of their encounter. She felt as if she had never been touched by anyone.
In their excitement, they made such plans—Claire would move in not just for the month, and not only to help with Leo. Mary said she was afraid they would become a cliché, finding this in middle age—they’d be one of those couples that everyone envies, the kind whose happiness comes late and twice as big and here it is.
They both fell asleep on the floor, naked, wrapped only in each other. Claire dreamt that men broke in and shot them both clean in the forehead, and an older Leo found them dead. The neighbors came, and the coroners, and no one knew how the two women ended up there together, the tenderness between them. No one knew their story and it was as if their love hadn’t happened at all, and Claire woke with a dread that took the form of thick saliva. In a dream state, she rose to close the curtains. She stood above Mary, who lay unharmed and still curled around the empty space where Claire’s body had been.
Mary had had other women. But why me? Claire wondered. Why now? Perhaps she symbolized the stability Mary had never had. She was Mary’s oldest friend who was still alive. That meant something in this city, this neighborhood. Come to think of it, Mary didn’t have many friends—more often lovers whom she’d call friends in a pinch. Perhaps she made Mary feel sexy for the first time in a long while. Poor lonely, prudish Claire, Mary must be thinking. Claire was just there.
It was Sunday morning. Mary was long awake, working at the typewriter at the bedroom window. Claire watched her from the bed. The new spring sun made the paper gleam and Mary’s morning hair was caught up with light. She turned and smiled.
“It’s you,” Mary said tenderly, moving to the edge of the bed. She wiped the hair away from Claire’s forehead. “I know you.”
Claire pulled the sheets up to her shoulders, embarrassed.
“When did you get so modest?” Mary said, as if they’d woken up naked together on many occasions.
Claire gripped the hem of the sheet to her as she sat up. “I’m not.”
“You’re having second thoughts, aren’t you? I knew it. I made a mess of things again. Now you’re going act awkward around me. You’re going to want to leave.”
“I’m here,” Claire said. “I’m not going anywhere.”
“I know it’s new. And strange. But mostly—”
“Mostly it’s perfect,” Claire said. “The strange part is how normal it feels.”
“Ginsberg normal or Park Avenue normal?”
Claire lifted the sheet away and drew Mary in close.
As if on cue, Leo started crying in
the next room. And in that moment, when Mary pulled away, Claire was grateful for the baby, and she hated him. Mary sighed and stood, but Claire stopped her. “I’ll get him,” she said, searching for her nightgown in the rubble.
In the blue-wallpapered nursery, it took a moment for the bundle of blankets in the crib to become a small human in her mind. She folded over the bars and lifted him up, his whole body one shape, irresistible and deeply frightening.
The warm body against her chest, the small breath. Tiny hands pulling her hair. And a face—a real face, chubby and red from crying—looking back at her. She could still feel last night’s red wine hiccup in her veins.
Bouncing Leo in circles around the nursery, she caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror with a carved giraffe frame. Did she look younger, like she felt yesterday? She had always wondered why one could not be seen as one felt. Or could she? She was momentarily afraid that strangers on the street would be able to tell she had been with a woman. But no, she assured herself, her appearance had not changed overnight. She was Claire; it was a fact outside of fact. And yet, she hardly knew herself. She hadn’t even known who she loved until now. If you are the thing, how can you know the thing?
Along with night windows, her grandmother had avoided mirrors; she was afraid, perhaps, that it wouldn’t be her own reflection staring back at her.
She wanted to look in the mirror just long enough to unknow herself, so she would know what it was like to know herself. Like tensing a muscle so you know what it is to relax. Or undoing a word by repeating it again and again until its meaning is lost. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry was the word she’d repeated as a fearful adolescent, until it was not-sorry, the word with which she realized all words were just a smash of sounds.
But all Claire could see was that her hair was a mess. She tried to believe it didn’t matter. She repeated the thought, it doesn’t matter, until it was a belief. Then she shifted Leo to one arm and used the other to pat down her hair. Leo, who had quieted down, was facing away from the mirror and it looked like she was holding a ball of white blanket, like she was merely playing at being a mother. There, staring back at her from the mirror, was a new woman.
From the nursery, she could hear Mary making coffee. The watery chuckle of the percolator. Silver spoon clinking porcelain. A woman waiting for her; it didn’t feel new at all. She had always been the woman she was in that moment, fast in love with Mary. It had never been otherwise. It would never be otherwise. Claire could not imagine not knowing Mary’s skin. Or her chapped lips, or the weight of Leo in her arms. The smell of black coffee being poured for her. That baby’s breath. That Mary air.
1968
The subway was stalled and humming in the dark. They’d been stuck for nearly half an hour and Claire was running late, but at least she had a seat. It was the first day of her new temp job—shuffling papers for the Democratic Party Office. She’d been at Mary’s for nearly a year, but this was the first morning she’d left when Mary was still asleep, curled on the chair in Leo’s nursery.
The man’s voice was slurring a plea. Claire’s eyes rested on his red shoes across the aisle, which were stepping on the tail of his big red coat, which was in turn covered in a layer of grime. He had only one arm; a plastic cup for money was tucked between his stump and his chest. He was begging for change. Claire was undecided whether she should reach into her purse. And then he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.
The sound of it was the most interesting part. It was and was not connected to the movement of the train, which lurched forward again as if he shot it into motion. But there was another sound under it, which she heard with a different ear, a more fearless ear. The sound of skin.
There were distant screams, muted like they were underwater. An announcement came over the intercom, people started pushing into adjacent cars. She heard the screams, but didn’t see anyone with an open mouth. Blood garnished the windows and floor. She felt damp, but no blood had reached her. Her chest touched the back of the woman in front of her as they all pressed forward. Someone wept. A man was praying to Allah. A newspaper flapped up and down on a bench, but there was no breeze. It could be that easy.
Claire felt expanded. As if she herself had been shot and her arms and heart had spread out and splattered against the subway windows, touching every vein of the city—the witnesses on the train, Mary and Leo at home, her old apartment on Sullivan—spreading slowly, as a pool of blood, over her whole life.
Above ground. She was asked her name; she was processed. She was a witness. She was on Fourteenth Street. Where was it she’d been going? She turned south to Mary’s and then remembered her new job and turned north again on Seventh Avenue. It should have been a fifteen-block trek but then there she was, transported with no memory of walking, to the threshold of the new box-filled office, fluorescent light glaring off rows of filing cabinets that were hers to master.
“Did the agency teach you how to use our filing system? Do you have any questions?” a mousy woman was asking.
Claire shook her head no. Then she said, “Did someone kill himself on the subway?”
“What?” the woman asked.
The woman turned to a man in the corner, who Claire hadn’t noticed until then. “What did she say?”
The man said, “She means the guy who jumped in front of the train the other day. Is that what you mean?”
“No,” Claire said. Immediately, she knelt on the floor in front of a box and started working, organizing donors by date. She was to write thank-you cards to them in that order, and file them away forever. She heard the mousy woman attempt to whisper to the man, “Another weird one. Try a different agency next time?”
Watching the first pile of papers diminish and disappear into that gray metal grave was like watching a plant die. She pictured the man in the subway again, but this time filtered through the lens of a painting—a particular, fragmented style of painting: what the scene might have looked like if witnessed by Nicolette. What kind of grave would the man on the subway be buried in and would he have a funeral and who would attend? But then Claire was not sure whom she’d been thinking of. She worked efficiently and the mousy woman—whose name happened to be Claire as well—stood over her, humming her approval intermittently throughout the day. Claire found herself hoping that the other Claire would come by and tell her again how well she was doing, how much better she was than other temporary employees. When there was too long an interval between these interactions, Claire worried she was doing something wrong. The work, though not difficult, took enough of her concentration that she did not think of anything, really, except that the mouse’s skirt was frayed slightly at the hem and that there was something she wanted to tell Mary when she got home.
At Mary’s door, she struggled with the keys and dropped them twice. Mary must have heard, because when Claire rose from retrieving them, there was Mary’s face in the now open doorway. On it, she saw her own face reflected—a vague horror. Claire wished then that her first night with Mary had not yet happened, that she still had that to look forward to.
“What’s wrong?” Mary said looking past her, a silent “now” tagged to the end of the question.
Claire did not tell her what was wrong that day, or the next. She brushed her teeth, kissed Leo in his crib, crawled into bed like any other night. She went to work the next morning, and the morning after that, and almost enjoyed the monotonous task of thanking strangers and filing them away, garnering praise for a job well done. She was quieter than usual, but her coworkers didn’t know any different. And Mary didn’t seem to notice until Claire nearly dropped Leo while soaking him in the tub. Her mistake was apologizing too profusely.
“What is wrong with you lately?” Mary said, leaning into the bathroom. “You’re walking around like a zombie.”
“Yes,” Claire replied.
“Yes what? Did you even hear what I said?”
“Yes,” Claire said, finally making eye contact.
�
�What did I say?”
Claire looked up at her blankly. She searched Mary’s eyes for an answer, watched her face change strangely. It wasn’t until Mary kneeled down and touched Claire’s face that Claire realized she was crying.
“I’m crying,” Claire said matter-of-factly, as if she’d stated she were hungry.
“Why are you so private with me?” Mary pleaded. “You have to let me in. You have to.” It was so sincere and desperate, that plea—it reminded Claire of Nicolette attempting to explain the portrait.
But Claire shouldn’t have started at the beginning. She told Mary about the painting and about Nicolette, and about telling Nicolette about her grandmother locked in an asylum and slapping her mother, and the many interpretations of the word hereditary. She told her about Tomasz and the old man from the wine receptions and about Jill.
Mary listened and didn’t interject, not once. She was sitting cross-legged on the tile floor now, holding Leo in a towel, while Claire was perched rigidly on her knees. Finally, Claire got to the part about the man who shot himself in the subway.
Mary broke the silence before it settled. “Why didn’t you come home to me right away? You just went to work? What is wrong with you?”
Telling Mary did not make her feel better. It made her feel frail. It made her feel stupid and needy, stuck in her own story, validating it all by saying it out loud, breathing new life into it. With gnarled teeth the stories latched tighter to Claire’s ankle.
“Really, Claire. How could you have kept that to yourself? You need help.”
“Thank you,” Claire said, not as scornfully as she’d intended.
“Well, I don’t know what to say to fix it,” Mary said. “I can’t help you. You need someone who can.”
The Suicide of Claire Bishop Page 18