“I’m not good at making speeches, Bob, and I’m even worse at expressing sentiment, so what I’ve got to say I’ll say only once, okay?
“I’m fifty-six years old. I am not one of the warm people. I drink more than I should, I like to smoke my cigarettes, I love to gripe, and if I were ever to crack a smile my whole system would more than likely go into cataleptic shock—which’d probably make several people happy. Despite all of this, I can stand here and tell you that I am not a callous grouch who doesn’t give a hang about others’ feelings. Especially your feelings, and especially right now.
“I buried my own wife seven years ago. Ovarian cancer. I thought for sure I’d die too, or at the very least go crazy. For a while I did—go crazy, that is. Which I suppose is a form of death.
“My point is that you’re going to go into that chapel in a few minutes and most of the people in there are going to try to comfort you. It’s included with the flowers and the coffin. They’ll give you a hug or shake your hand or some other type of giving-comfort gesture, and every last jack-one of them is going to say something like, ‘It’s all right,’ or ‘You’ll be fine’ or ‘At least she’s at rest’ or my personal favorite—‘The worst is over now.’ They don’t mean to be stupid, it’s just the only way they can think of to offer some scrap of comfort to someone who’s beyond it right now.
“Take my advice—smile at them if you can and hug them back or shake their hands and then just say thanks. But know this: the worst is not over. Not by a long shot. You haven’t even begun to experience the worst of this yet. You know, I still walk through the door some nights and expect to hear Jenny’s voice or smell her baking that godawful meatloaf she could never get the hang of. I still only sleep on the right side of the bed and I still keep her pillow on the left.
“I want you to know that I’ll do anything I can to help you through this. But don’t try to fight the grief, don’t tell yourself you can handle it because you can’t—it handles you until it decides it’s finished. And it’s never finished, not really. That hole in your heart, that empty space, that pain will be with you every moment of every day for the rest of your life. Sure, maybe it won’t be as strong as it is right now, but it’ll always be there. Always.
“I feel really bad for you, Bob. Because the worst is still coming.”
Robert finished his coffee, winced as it hit his stomach, and said, “I knew I could count on you to cheer me up.”
MacIntyre lifted his coat from the back of the sofa to reveal a thick brown envelope which he tossed onto Robert’s lap.
“What’s this?”
MacIntyre sneered. “The focus-group report.”
It was no secret that MacIntyre, a twenty-four-year veteran of television news, held the whole focus-group procedure in utter contempt. Channel 7's news department, thanks to the upcoming departure of anchorman Ken Jeffries, was now suffering the scrutiny of a consulting group, called in by management to reshape the look and substance of the news programs because it was feared Jeffries’ leaving would hurt ratings. So the consultants (“Smug little bastards rate just slightly under child molesters and faith healers in my esteem,” MacIntyre had once pontificated) had been given carte blanche by management to do whatever they deemed necessary, even if it meant firing on-air personalities and cantankerous news directors. Part of this small-scale Inquisition was to host focus groups—a theoretically average group of viewers who were asked to sit in a room and watch videotapes of certain on-air reporters and make comments.
Those comments, Robert knew—along with the consulting group’s review of the pertinent data gathered from those comments—were contained in the envelope MacIntyre had just unceremoniously dumped into his lap.
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“Don’t you find this just a little insensitive?”
“I’ll add it to my list of sins. You want me to haul out the sackcloth and ashes? We could sit in here and wring our hands and moan and groan, if you’d prefer.”
“I’m about to bury my wife, and you hand me an envelope that holds the future of my career inside. Bankers, housewives, tech-heads, pizza-delivery boys, and garbage truck drivers pass judgment on me, and that’s all she wrote.”
“Then I’ll kill the suspense. You were a huge hit with everyone. Nine different focus groups, and you were the only on-air talent to get damn-near straight tens from everyone. The only thing that even came close to a negative comment was some lady who said she thought your nose looked a tad too big for your face.”
“She ought to see me now.”
“All the information’s in there if you want to read what she and everyone else said. I gotta tell you, Bob, I usually put zero faith in focus group results, but...you were ‘the peoples’’ overwhelming choice to replace Jeffries. Even the lady who thought your nose was a little too big said you’d be the best choice for the job.” MacIntyre rubbed his eyes, then sighed. “I really hate to tell you this next part but...the consultants got a stiffy when we ran the story about Denise’s death and the theft of your daughter’s body. A popular reporter loses both his wife and daughter in one tragic sweep. Over two thousand calls have come into the station in the last three days. You should see the sympathy cards, the letters, the flowers,—Christ, one lady in Hebron even sent you a basket with fruit and homemade candy, with a little Bible tucked in between the pineapple and bananas.”
Robert said, almost absent-mindedly: “I’d like to have the fruit and candy. Denise used to make homemade candy.”
“Bob?”
He looked up. “H-huh?”
“Can you handle hearing the rest of this?”
“Does it make a difference?”
“The anchor position is yours. That’s solid all the way across the board. That part makes me happy because I know you’ll do a first-rate job and won’t turn into a prima donna like dear old Ken—he’s the network’s problem now. The part that does not make me happy—and I fought tooth-and-nail with the consultants and management both over this—is that while you’re on personal leave, the six and eleven p.m. broadcasts are going run short follow-up segments about you; twice a week for the first two weeks, once a week after that until you come back. ‘This-Is-How-Our-Beloved-Co-worker-Is-Doing’ pieces. Reasons are two-fold: one, the consultants don’t want the public to forget either what your face looks like or the tragedy you’ve suffered; and, two, these follow-up pieces are going to be designed to touch the hearts of our viewers and will probably guarantee that the ratings will go through the roof when you return to assume the main anchor position—they’ve even started planning the publicity campaign for the ten days prior to your return. You lose your wife and kid, and everyone in the news department benefits.”
“Vulture Culture,” said Robert, seeing the anger and disgust in MacIntyre’s eyes and liking the man all the more for it.
“I wouldn’t blame you if you told them to sit on a doorknob and spin.”
Robert shook his head. “I won’t. I’d like to, but I won’t. I want the job. Denise wanted it for me, too.” He tossed the envelope onto the sofa. “Man, this stinks! My drive, my obsession with getting this anchor position...I couldn’t spare a thought for anything else. Well, I could have, but I didn’t. And I brushed Denise aside because of it. She didn’t mind all that much, you know? She was used to being brushed aside by people who claimed to love her, to care about her. I figured it was no big deal. I mean, she understood how important the job was for me, for us. I just assumed that once it was all over, once I got the job, she’d still be there, waiting patiently just like she’d waited patiently for everything else throughout our entire marriage, I figured she’d still be around and I could make...make it...make it up to her. Ah, hell, Gene! Hell!” He leaned forward, elbows on knees, and pressed his face into his hands, swallowing hard to ease the throbbing behind his nose and eyes.
MacIntyre sat next to him and put a nervous hand on Robert’s shoulder. “Look, Bob, I really stink at this male-bonding crap but...I
hope you know how I feel about you, how I felt about Denise. I know my timing here left a lot to be desired, but I just wanted to...give you something to look forward to.”
Robert gave a short, sharp nod of his head.
“That’s what you have to do now, Bob. As soon as you toss that handful of dirt onto her coffin, you have to start giving yourself things to look forward to, little rest stops where can pull over and climb out of your grief long enough to—oh, hell, I stink at metaphors. Look, there’s no crime in still looking forward to things; good music, a tasty meal, a new movie, vacuuming the goddamned carpet, even—”
“—our house has hardwood floors—”
“—you’re missing the point. Remember when I said that you haven’t even begun to experience the worst of this? You want to know what the worst part is? Place-settings and pronouns, because those are the two things that will forever remind you that she’s gone for good. You’ll find yourself setting the table for two instead of one because you do that sort of thing on automatic pilot, anyway; and you’ll have to learn to replace all the ‘us,’‘ours’ and ‘wes’ with just ‘me’ and ‘mine’ and ‘my.’ You’ll be shocked at how often you still talk about yourself as if you were part of a couple—hell, I still do it, and it breaks my heart every time I catch myself because there is no ‘us’ anymore. Be on guard for them, Bob, place-setting and pronouns; they’ll undo you every time.”
Robert patted MacIntyre’s arm once, then picked up the envelope. “Your heart was in the right place, Gene. I’m glad you told me about this now and didn’t wait until a crew showed up to film my first ‘recovery’ segment.”
“I did what I could, but—”
“—it’s okay. Denise’d probably get a big kick out of it, once she finished being pissed.”
MacIntyre nodded, squeezed Robert’s shoulder, then rose to his feet. “We should probably head on out there.”
“I know. Can I keep this?”
“Yeah, just don’t let anyone else know about it yet. That report won’t be officially released until the end of next week.”
“You could get canned for leaking this to me, you know that, don’t you?”
MacIntyre shrugged. “There are worse things.”
“Don’t I know it.”
And so the two of them—
—what? You think it’s too sad, this picture. But so many of them are.
The mourners; don’t you want to see them? Don’t you want to know what they said to him, don’t you want to see the tears streaking their cheeks? Their pain is so exquisitely genuine. They all weep for the loss of love? What could be prettier or more romantic than that?
I see—the discovery of love. You want me to tell you about love’s discovery.
I don’t need to. Even now, as he is climbing into the funeral home limousine that will take him to the cemetery, he’s telling you about it himself as he remembers, his mind flipping back through its pages, disassembling the dolls to line them up side-by-side-by-side so they’ll reveal the truth that is the fruit at the center of the Mystery Flower.
He—the man I once was, who is still within me, and I within him—was still cutting his teeth as a television reporter on assignments of the dreaded “filler” variety—a birthday party for a lion at the zoo, the opening of a new health-food restaurant, other stories without even that much depth.
This assignment promised to be no different from dozens of others: an exposé on local corporate health programs. He was to go in with a camera operator and videotape several executives from an insurance company working out in the vast new exercise club recently added to the ground floor of their monolithic office building. He was all set to listen to a bunch of Vice-Presidents-in-Charge-of-Nothing-in-Particular-and-Doing-a-Damn-fine-Job-of-It fill the tape with a bunch of self-congratulatory hot air as they boasted of “maverick” employee health program, how they kept the well-being of their staff in mind at all times, hey, ain’t we great, cha-cha-cha.
The health club itself was impressive, filled not only with state-of-the-art exercise equipment but also more basic things like a pommel horse and parallel bars. From the equipment to the sleek chrome self-serve juice bar, someone had dropped a pretty penny. Robert couldn’t help but wonder how many premium increases were going to result from this but thought it best to keep that to himself.
He introduced himself to the three interviewees, worked out which of them would answer what questions (one of the stipulations being that he had to get all three of them—VPs, and all male, surprise, surprise—on camera), and who would be using which piece of equipment. Everything went off without a hitch, the VPs all laughed and sweated and smiled brightly for the camera, and all of them managed to get in some mention of a new coverage program the company had recently introduced.
Executroids on Parade. Film at eleven.
He checked with the camera operator, taped some reaction shots, and was getting ready to pack it up and go when a plain-faced woman wearing unfashionably thick-framed glasses and her hair in a tight bun walked by. He glanced at her and she smiled, but nothing more passed between them. She went to a far corner, removed her glasses and warm-up jacket, let down her hair and tied it back in a ponytail, then—after a series of painful-looking stretching routines—sprinted to the parallel bars.
She was perfection.
Swing up, legs straight out, swing in, kick back, spin around, legs corkscrewing, head down, grab the bars, flip-kick out, legs up-apart-over-and-back for a flawless free-floating somersault, pitch to the side and grab the bars, spin, then a fast roll onto a single bar, balancing on one hand, pushing back-and-out-then-off, slow mid-air pirouette, feet seeking firm purchase, standing erect on a single bar, then a double-flip to the floor.
Robert watched, breathless.
She hadn’t even broken a sweat, as far as he could see.
“You want me to get this?” asked the camera operator.
“Not yet.”
He wanted to share this with as few people as possible.
Several people in the club had stopped what they were doing to watch her; by the time she finished the next set of exercises, every set of eyes in the place would be focused on her.
She sprinted toward the pommel horse where she became, in his eyes, physical poetry.
Soaring through the air, hands down, landing squarely in the center of the thing, balance, legs apart, swinging back and forth, then around and around, each arm lifting just her legs swung underneath it fast as fan blades, one arm up, then down, legs fanning around, then she pushed up in the air, legs above her head, pirouetting with her hands this time, then facing the other direction, legs swinging back-then-front, then higher, always higher, spin, grab, balance, fan, pirouette, flip-kick, her movements growing faster and more precise, soar, spin, legs up, muscles rippling, defying gravity as her body became thought and just hovered in the air, then a blur of motion and she was back on Earth, sprinting toward the parallel bars once more....
Robert stood transfixed.
There should have been music; her grace demanded that the world be filled with something as rich to the ears as her movements were to the eyes.
When he’d first met her gaze as she walked past he felt kind of sorry for her, sorry for this plain-faced, ragamuffin woman who wore her hair in a bun and whose glasses made her face look too wide—God, how arrogant and stupid and condescendingly sexist could a man be?
She was power here, poetry and grace and light, up there above it all, stronger than anyone or -thing gawking at her from the prison of the ground below and—
—Good God, thought Robert: I’ve got a hard-on!
He looked down at the bulge in his pants and felt his face turn red. It had been quite a while since he’d felt stirrings like this; even before Amy had broken it off with him, so calculatedly and so coldly, his desire for physical passion had become more reflex action than genuine need, something he pulled out of cold storage long enough to make himself believe that what he felt fo
r her was True Love, forcing himself to be affectionate because that’s what True Lovers were supposed to do, they were supposed to become engulfed by desire at the merest glance, the subtlest touch, all of it right there on the surface; the blazing, overpowering, erotic intensity of a million sensations teeming at the fingertips, the need so immediate it actually ached, making them painfully aware of the invisible heat between them, savoring the scents of each other’s bodies, screaming inside for as long as it took to cross the distance between them and hold each other close—all of this he’d tried to summon with Amy toward the end, but the best he could manage was a half-hearted and never fully stiff erection that she once actually giggled at.
He stared at the woman as she dismounted and sat cross-legged on the floor by her warm-up jacket, her cheeks flushed and her face sheened with the thinnest layer of perspiration. Robert worked up that much sweat just getting out of bed in the morning.
Several people applauded. She looked up and tried to smile but was too embarrassed, too shocked that people had actually been paying attention to her.
Robert felt genuinely dizzy.
Without her glasses, her ponytail draped regally over one moist shoulder, there in her leotard and slightly frayed leg-warmers, her face glowing from the strength spent, she seemed ethereal to him. It was no magical movie-transformation, no Cindarellaesque cliché wherein the mousy girl suddenly blossomed into a stunning beauty, no way; at best, with her hair down and no glasses and clothes that clung to her curves instead of sagging around them, this woman would always be plain to those eyes that only saw beauty in three-dimensional terms; she would always be the “nice” girl at parties where everyone else came with a date, the good-natured girl who always arrived and left alone, who would always be touted for her “nice personality,” who would always be invited to join in with the beauties because her plainness like a microscope lens only magnified their loveliness, the girl who would always have everyone wondering why she couldn’t find a guy. She’s so sweet.
He knew that, under any other circumstances, he would not have given her a second glance.
In Silent Graves Page 12