The Suicide of Claire Bishop

by Carmiel Banasky

  “You don’t have to fix anything. There’s nothing to fix. You sound like a man.”

  Mary banged her head on the porcelain ledge of the tub and growled in frustration. Leo cried out at being jostled so. But when Mary lifted her face, it was with a smile and drawing toward Claire. “I do not sound like a man,” she said, burying her head in Claire’s neck, Leo between them. “You’re the one who saw someone die, and I’m acting like I need comforting.”

  It would be nice to feel her own body again, particularly against Mary’s. To be in herself, not above herself. Claire let herself sink into Mary, let her skin feel Leo-skin and Mary-skin, the softly overwhelming smell of baby powder, the everything of Mary. She did need Mary. She needed Mary. She needed.

  It was nearing April and there was still no sign of spring. After putting Leo down, Mary sat in the nursery chair, making herself comfortable.

  “Aren’t you coming to bed?” Claire asked in the doorway.

  “He’s getting ill, I can tell. I want to stay with him a while.”

  “Come to bed with me. I need your body heat. It’s so cold.” Claire took Mary’s arms to lift her from the chair, but Mary didn’t rise.

  “I’ll be in later.”

  Claire dropped Mary’s hands and looked down at her. “I want you here with me,” she tried, which was more or less what she’d intended to say. Just as Mary could feel Leo’s sickness approaching, Claire could feel Mary drifting away. She’d seen Mary do this before, but she was never the one being strayed from.

  “I am here,” Mary whispered. “You’re being paranoid. And you’re going to wake Leo.”

  “But I want you.”

  “Right now?”

  She knew if she brought it up again, Mary would drift further, perhaps even say Claire was clingy—she knew that was how Mary saw her. But it would pass, and Mary would return. Claire was certain she would.

  She turned to go to bed alone, but remembered at the last moment—“The stove’s been finicky lately, have you noticed?”

  Mary didn’t respond.

  “The gas isn’t catching. Should we worry about affixiation? At night—can you imagine? Maybe that’s why Leo’s sick.”

  “Asphyxiation, not ‘affixiation,’” Mary said.

  “You think it’s possible?”

  “No. We don’t have to worry about that. Or anything. You’re always worrying about something.” Leo stirred, and though he didn’t cry, Mary stood and lifted him from his crib, his head on her shoulder. She bounced him up and down.

  “I’m sorry,” Claire said, “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know you didn’t mean.”

  Claire stood in front of Mary and caressed the back of Leo’s new hair. “We should call someone though. Get it fixed.”

  “Whatever you want. Call someone.” Mary turned her back to Claire so that Leo faced her. He let out a watery burp, then said something that sounded like, “No way.”

  “Who should I call?” Claire asked.

  “You’ve been here how long and you don’t know how to find a phone number? I can’t take care of everything. You’re exhausting!”

  Claire stepped away from them both. She was suddenly so tired her eyes began to droop. She said, “I’m just talking about the stove.”

  The day the postcard arrived, they brought the mail in together, and Claire did not have to make the decision of whether to read Mary’s private letter or not.

  Claire stared at the front—a watercolor of a cactus almost touching the moon, arizona scrawled in neon pink across the sky—while Mary held it up, reading the back. It was brief, apparently, because Mary looked up after just a moment, with a confused expression.

  “What does it say?” Claire asked.

  Mary stared at her as if she hadn’t heard, then disappeared with it into the bedroom.

  Claire imagined and reimagined that letter in so many different ways that she went to sleep with that man’s handwriting scrawling out her dreams. He wrote with a woman’s script, in her mind, and told Mary he loved her and would leave his family for her. That’s what Mary had always wanted, wasn’t it? Though she’d never said it out loud. Morning after morning, Claire woke up angry with Mary for something awful she had done to Claire in her dreams, though Claire could never remember the specifics. Only the feeling of dread remained.

  Two weeks passed without mention of the postcard. The easiest, most uneventful two weeks they had spent together in many months. Over dinner together (flavorless casserole—one of Mary’s recent attempts at cooking), with Leo in his high chair talking up a storm of mostly nonsense, Mary asked Claire if she ever overheard insider information about the upcoming election at work in the Democratic Office.

  “You know I only daydream,” Claire said. “Some spy I’d be.”

  “What do you daydream about?” Mary asked with food in her mouth, no manners at all.

  “You, silly. And getting a dog. Do you think we should someday? For Leo.”

  “You daydream about getting a dog?”

  “Maybe. If we ever move out of the city.”

  Mary took a large bite and chewed slowly and silently. When she’d swallowed, she said, without much humor in her voice, “You want to move out of the city. Who are you and what planet have you taken the real Claire Bishop to?”

  “I suppose I wouldn’t move. You’ve been watching too much Star Trek.”

  “Only because you hate it.”

  “I could be convinced to sit through one tonight. Is it on?”

  But Mary lowered her gaze, suddenly flustered. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll go to bed early.”

  “Want me to fix some tea?”

  “I’ll clean up,” Mary said.

  “I won’t say no to that,” said Claire. Mary never cleaned.

  While Mary cleared the table and began scrubbing the kitchen spotless, Claire turned on the set for Mary’s show and paused on the evening news. A woman was reporting about a rocket launch. In the middle of her report, she was handed an update on a small card. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead, she said.

  Claire stood. “Mary,” she whispered. But Mary didn’t hear her over the running water.

  “Can you put Leo down?” Mary called from the kitchen. “Bedtime.”

  “Mary,” Claire said louder, still staring at the screen.

  Mary turned the faucet off and came to stand beside Claire in the middle of the room. The reporter corrected herself. He was wounded, not dead. He was not shot in a car, but on the balcony of his hotel. He was being taken to the hospital. Then she introduced the weatherman.

  Mary and Claire stood side by side, listening to the weather forecast. Mary’s hands dripped foamy water to the floor. From his high chair, Leo started crying over the prediction of icy sun all week. Mary held him and rocked him and cried with him.

  Walter Cronkite, in color, reported there were already riots in Harlem. Mary and Claire looked out the window in the East Village. No one was on the street.

  “I can’t believe it,” Claire said hoarsely. “I can’t. I can’t.”

  Mary bounced Leo at the window, her back to Claire. “It’s not about you.”

  “I know that,” Claire said faintly. “You have to make it fit in your mind.”

  She edged closer to Mary, and Mary put her head on Claire’s shoulder, and Claire wiped tears from Mary’s cheek, and that was all.

  Claire took Leo to his nursery. He wailed incessantly, which was not unusual but Claire thought perhaps it was because he felt the night’s sadness. She held him for a while and cried too, but when she’d finished he hadn’t yet. Then she left him to cry himself to sleep. She didn’t know it would be the last time she’d kiss his wet, red face goodnight.

  Claire went to work the next day, answering calls, accepting donations for the Democratic Party in the wake of King’s death. She pretended to know the answers. She consoled a crying man on the phone, promised him they’d find justice in court and through legislati
on. She stayed on late in the office and took a cab home, afraid of the riots.

  No one was home. Perhaps they’d gone on a walk. The bed was made, which was strange. No socks on the floor. Mary’s things were all put away. No—Mary’s things were gone.

  Mary’s disappearance came at her straightforwardly, like a logic puzzle. Claire checked and rechecked the drawers and closets. The apartment was empty, the bureau empty. The Leo-sounds gone, along with all of his clothes and diapers. The stuffed lion Claire had bought him. Nothing was left but some old manuscript pages, the crib and the giraffe-framed mirror. The apartment was immaculate. Claire should have known when Mary started cleaning the night before. Wiping away all traces of herself.

  Mary must have been upset about the news, wanted to get Leo away from the city and the riots. But no—Mary must have been planning this since the postcard arrived.

  She sat in the middle of the couch, rigid, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, for the door to creak open. She thought about breathing—how easy it is to forget how to breathe if you think about how to breathe. New York pressed on her chest. She called out Mary’s name, once, when she heard a neighbor fumbling keys. She waited. She fell asleep for what felt like minutes, but when she woke, the morning sun was creeping through the blinds. For those few hours, she had escaped.

  Still half asleep, she tiptoed around the apartment in a daze, then landed in the middle of the living room floor—where she and Mary had first been together. She got as low as she could, face to the floor, and sniffed.

  Somehow, Claire managed to undress then dress herself, though she felt this task could easily escape her, too, if she thought about the mechanics. She hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, but she didn’t need food. Then she began to walk. East Tenth Street to the East River, then south and west, past the men in dirty frocks fishing in the slime. They smiled at her and she thought she smiled back but from the look on their faces she might have stuck out her tongue at them. She walked through the Financial District and Wall Street, veering around businessmen and tourists, through the narrow cobblestone streets, back again to the water. She looked for a communal reaction in people’s faces. She looked for huddled groups of mourners, but life went on as normal, unaltered; it did not pale in the face of tragedy. A train was down, and exasperated commuters waited for a bus near Battery Park. Men hailed taxis. Tough boys spit on the sidewalk, teetered on the curb, testing their distance from policemen on horseback.

  A woman in a brightly colored pantsuit said to her friend, “And he said, ‘And that’s the way it is’ like he does for every news story. That’s not the way it is, people getting assassinated.”

  “Yes it is,” the other said. “Good people die.”

  Claire walked until her ankles throbbed, and then until they stopped. When she decided she ought to be hungry, she ate a slice of pizza on the corner, licking the orange grease off her fingers. She walked north along the Hudson, tucked behind factories where there was hardly a sidewalk. She was dusty all over. When the sun dropped and New Jersey lit up magenta then red, she was on West Tenth Street, looking south to where she’d been. Skyscrapers stacked one on top of the other, like a pile of toys swept to the side in a messy boy’s bedroom. They shot the sinking sun back east, all those hundreds of thousands of windows glinting a childish, sherbet orange.

  After dark she found herself walking, quite by accident, to her old apartment. She pretended to pat her pockets for keys and did not have to wait long for someone to exit. The man hardly glanced at her, and she slipped inside easily—they’d gotten rid of any security, along with all other signs of dignity over the last years. The elevator was completely covered—floor, ceiling, and walls—in black tarp, apparently for renovation, but it was still functional. She rode to the top floor, then climbed the remaining steps to the roof.

  Claire walked to the ledge and slipped out of her flats to flex her blistered feet. The clouds hung low, and every few moments a biting wind would reach her. The sky was starless. But there was her view: uptown, the buildings lit up the underside of the clouds. She’d forgotten to miss this.

  She stepped unsteadily onto the low ledge, dizzy and terribly afraid. The wind blew her hair around her face. The air had a gelatinous quality, an underwater feel, so that she was seeing the seaweed-bound buildings through fish eyes, peering at drowned skyscrapers.

  She would not be able to tell Mary about her day over dinner.

  But she had said too much already. She should never have burdened Mary with all her anxieties, all those words. She was standing on the ledge not because of Mary, but because of Mary-leaving—its own proper noun. What else could she do but climb up to the roof where she had once smoked a cigarette with Nicolette? The artist who’d vanished with all the others to whom Claire had told her story.

  From the ten-story roof, the treetops were a galaxy of bare branches with barely a hint of new leaves. Claire could almost touch them, she wanted to touch them. A world like this, where kisses like Mary’s were possible, where lips were dry and ready, where there was war and people who devoted their lives to stopping it and did so from Claire’s very own den—this was a world too beautiful for her. She didn’t belong in it, not for a moment.

  To stand in love with the world, but to hate yourself in it to an equal degree—those two ends should not coexist. Yet they could, they did.

  She closed her eyes and saw the painting. It was beautiful. She believed more strongly in the self trapped in the painting than she did in the self trapped in the world on this roof. The self in the painting could not die. Yet that woman was forever waiting to jump, was jumping, had jumped. Every moment of her life.

  She lowered herself down and sat on the low wall, her back to the city but with most of her weight over the ledge. Her palms were sweaty. And if she let go—

  Did part of her think herself extraordinary because she felt doomed? She felt a kind of losing kinship with the dead man in the subway. But he’d had witnesses. Claire would not.

  Dr. King would have thought her silly and selfish, mourning herself instead of him, or others, not that he would have thought of her at all, an unextraordinary woman with a mortality problem. He knew neither death nor not-death were extraordinary. And he’d seemed to know death was coming. But Claire imagined even he must have been frightened, alone in that room. Both men—the anonymous man on the subway and the man whose name would never be forgotten—would have plaques on their gravestones of differing sizes, giving the dates of birth and death. Only a dash to sum up the in-between.

  She closed her eyes. She let go of the ledge. Her hands found air. They stung with anticipation.

  The door opened. And just as easily as she let go, she caught hold again.

  She heard the big metal door slam shut. Who could it be? She did not open her eyes. Was it Mary? Perhaps Mary had come to save her after all.

  A man cleared his throat. “Mrs. Bishop? Is that you?”

  Tomasz.

  Claire opened her eyes, gripping the ledge. He seemed not to notice or register the implication of her position. He said nothing about it. He didn’t run to her. He approached lazily and offered her a cigarette. They smoked urgently to fill the silence. He was always finding her in precarious situations. Or, perhaps, he simply came up to the roof for a smoke every evening of his life, and she was the one bumbling onto his stage.

  “How’s your wife?” Claire said, something to say.

  “Thank you for asking.”

  The fact of his ignorance or indifference made her doubt what she had been about to do. Maybe she never tried, never flirted with death. And who would know? No witnesses, no one to record it for her. She didn’t have a scrape or bruise, no scar on the wrist, no emergency room, not one scrap of evidence; it may as well have not happened at all. Only the painting, the stolen painting, contained any knowledge of it—and Nicolette, wherever she was.

  “Do you need help with—” Tomasz asked.

  “Yes. No. There’s still a few
things in storage. I don’t have much left.” She drew on her cigarette too hard and coughed. “Tomasz. Can I ask you, please. I’m not upset.” He looked at her suspiciously. She took a deep breath, tried not to seem intimidated. “Why didn’t you destroy the painting when I asked you? Years ago. I’m not upset.”

  He gave a small shrug. “It was too beautiful.” He nodded and looked past her to the city. “Colder this time of year than usual.”

  She leaned in closer to Tomasz, unsure if this was invited or not. “It is.”

  She hated him, but Mary would find him handsome. If she were to sleep with Tomasz, might it make her feel better to pretend that Mary would be jealous? She tried to picture what Mary was doing at that moment. If she was sitting down to supper with her congressman lover. If she set the table and cooked for him and poured his wine. And then it occurred to her—Mary had only recently made forays in the kitchen. Was it in preparation of becoming that man’s housewife? Before last month, Mary had cooked nothing but overdone noodles; she called it a kitchen phobia. Had she been testing recipes for him on Claire?

  She took another drag, shakily, then gagged, tried to reclaim control of her body. Her throat burned. She couldn’t swallow. Her stomach clamped. Then, holding her cigarette aloft, she vomited all over Tomasz’s shoes.

  1969

  Claire started with the phonebook but came up empty. The galleries were also a dead end. She went to the Black Kettle, the café where Nicolette and Freddie had first met, and asked around. She called upon other artists, people who might have considered Nicolette a colleague. She considered searching for Nicolette’s family but remembered she’d only had her father who’d died in the war. But which war, she didn’t know.

  An art collector with one gold tooth and a lolling Southern accent looked at her askance in the lobby of the Gershwin Hotel, where he’d suggested they meet; he obviously didn’t have an office. They sat close on a plush red divan. “Why do you want to know?” he asked, not wasting any time. “You writing a book?”

  “No,” Claire said, tilting her face away from his sour breath. “We used to be friends.”