The Grievers

“And what is ‘this’ exactly?” Karen asked.

  I shrugged my shoulders and let out a sigh. When we got into bed and turned out the lights, I could feel the hard and soft contours of Karen’s body against mine. Shoulder blades and elbows. Skull, spine, and ribs. The warm curve of her bottom. The rise and fall of her chest as she breathed. Closing my eyes, I could still see the tops of trees and the river coursing through the valley below as the image of my falling friend fluttered through my mind. Billy’s mouth was moving as if he were trying to speak, as if he were trying to tell me something, and for a moment I felt like I was falling with him.

  Or not quite with him, I realized, still falling.

  But as him—headfirst, eyes wide, earth rising skyward.

  I was Billy Chin falling, and I was free.

  My body jerked. My heart was racing. My hands shook with phantom jitters.

  Just nerves, I told myself as Karen snored softly in the darkness, but when I closed my eyes, all I could see were the tops of trees.

  CHAPTER TEN

  By Saturday morning, the clouds had lifted and the sky was clear. Over breakfast, Karen dropped a prolonged hint about the long day of scrubbing we had ahead of us. What was the best way to remove the paste from our dining room walls, my wife wondered aloud as she pulled a box of cereal down from the cabinet over the stove? Soap and water hadn’t done the trick, so maybe it was just a matter of more elbow grease. If we put some serious muscle into it, she mused, pouring cereal for both of us, maybe that would do the trick. Unless I thought we should consider more drastic measures, she said. Chemicals, perhaps. Something caustic, something from the hardware store that would likely cause long-term health problems, but which would, in the short term, fix everything.

  I stood in front of the open refrigerator, pretending to look for the milk and then feigning ignorance about everything Karen had just said.

  “What was that?” I asked, making a show of finally discovering a half-gallon of milk right under my nose despite the fact that Karen was already seated at the kitchen table with her back to me. “I was looking for the milk.”

  “The walls,” Karen said. “I’m tired of living like this. I want to paint, I want to put all the furniture back in place, and I want to go back to living like normal people. I want my house back, Charley, but right now I feel like it’s never going to happen.”

  “It’ll happen,” I said. “Don’t worry. We’ll get it done.”

  I sat at the table and poured the milk over my cereal.

  “The only problem is that I need to work on that invitation today.”

  “Invitation?” Karen said.

  “To Billy’s memorial service.” I kept my eyes on my cereal. “I promised Phil Ennis that I’d have it done by Monday morning. I thought I told you about this.”

  “You told me about the crudités.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “There’s so much going on. The service is in three weeks, so I need to get this invitation done right away.”

  “Three weeks?”

  “It’s the only date they had open.”

  It wasn’t a lie, exactly. It was more of an extrapolation based on the information that Joe Viola had provided.

  “Is there anything else you forgot to tell me?” Karen asked.

  “No,” I said. “That should cover it.”

  Although I should probably mention that I took a trip to the bridge where Billy Chin killed himself, I thought as I brought a spoonful of bran flakes to my mouth. Oh, and no big deal here, really, but Dwayne Coleman had to wrestle me to the ground when I got too close to the edge. Other than that, no, I don’t think there’s anything else I need to tell you.

  After breakfast, I could hear Karen scrubbing away in the dining room as I drummed on a pad of paper with the tip of my pen. For the most part, the page in front of me was blank. Dear Fellow Alums, the invitation read in its entirety. Beyond that, I didn’t know what to say. For all of my disturbing dreams, my waking thoughts about Billy weren’t moving me in one way or the other. In some ways, I felt as if he were still alive, as if I could call him whenever I wanted, but didn’t because we were both so busy all the time. Which wasn’t much different from how our relationship worked while Billy was still alive.

  Crossing out my original salutation, I replaced it with Dear Friends, then stared at the blank page for what felt like an hour before locking onto my first line: Billy Chin is dead, and the Academy wants your money. Thinking this witty, I emailed the sentence to Neil, who wrote back immediately, saying that I forgot to mention the new cafeteria and the boathouse we were planning to build.

  Suddenly it was we, I noted. As if Neil and I were in on the planning, as if the cafeteria were ours, as if we’d be invited to the ceremony when Phil Ennis and company broke ground on the new boathouse. But that was the thing about Ennis. He had a real talent for roping people in and making them do his dirty work in a way that made them feel special, as if they were contributing to the greater glory of God by pestering fellow graduates with dinnertime phone calls, or calling in favors with local politicos to bend zoning laws so the Academy could continue its spiraling blitzkrieg through the crumbling neighborhoods of North Philadelphia.

  The messages bounced back and forth between the two of us for the next hour, and the invitation evolved with a curious mix of loathing and affection for the institution that had, for better or for worse, brought us all together and turned us into the men we had become. One version had Ennis promising to loan me and Neil out as housemaids to whoever made the biggest donation in Billy’s name—he’d provide the cleaning supplies if they provided the uniforms. Another version had him threatening to send Greg Packer to move in with anyone who didn’t come out to mourn Billy’s passing or at least send a few dead presidents to stand in their place.

  Sure, Neil had made me promise not to fuck around, but this wasn’t fucking around, exactly. At least, it wasn’t public fucking around. It was private—a bit of banter between the two of us as we warmed up to write the real thing. Tastefully vague about the cause of Billy’s death and the Academy’s desire to profit from it, the clean version of the invitation we produced probably wasn’t much different from anything that Frank Dearborn could have come up with; but the fact that it was ours, that Neil and I had written it together, sent a clear message to Ennis that we weren’t just a couple of names at the bottom of a letter.

  It said that Billy was our friend.

  It said that we could speak for ourselves.

  It said that Neil and I were adults, and we could each stand on our own two feet.

  Or at least it would have, if I had forwarded the right version to Ennis. Five minutes after I sent the final draft, Neil responded to the copy he received with a single sentence: I’d buy you a parachute if I knew it wouldn’t open.

  Animal Crackers? I wrote back.

  When the telephone rang, I knew I was in trouble. I’d made a mess of things before, but it was usually on a scale that Neil could contain. Like the time we drove sixty miles to see Elvis Costello in Atlantic City and I waited until he parked the car to mention that I’d left the tickets back in Philly. Or the time I picked a fight with a hairy Vietnam vet in a wheelchair and Neil said that I was off my medication to stop the guy from kicking my ass. Or the time I tried to pay a stripper by sliding a credit card between her breasts, and Neil kept her from having the bouncer beat the hell out of us by giving her all the cash left in his wallet. The fact that all three of these incidents occurred on the same night said a lot about how much slack Neil was willing to cut me. But the more I thought about it, the more I was beginning to realize that I was a bit of an asshole. Because it wasn’t just that night, and it wasn’t just the tickets, and it wasn’t just the Vietnam vet and the stripper and the money Neil fronted to keep me out of trouble. It was all those things multiplied by all the days and all the nights and all the opportunities I took to throw a monkey wrench into the finely tuned mess that was my life.

  “This is a joke
, right?” Neil said. “Tell me you didn’t just send that letter to Ennis.”

  I checked my outgoing email and clicked on the message in question. I didn’t need to open the attached document to know what I had done, but I clicked on it anyway. What I thought had been a scream a few minutes earlier was suddenly turning my stomach with dread. In the final version of the letter—the wrong letter—Neil and I were finally coming out of the closet as the pair of gay lovers the football team had always pegged us for, and we were claiming Frank Dearborn as our love child. Billy Chin was watching over us from heaven, and every reference to Phil Ennis read, predictably, Fill Anus.

  “Oh,” I said. “I think I might have made a mistake.”

  “Jesus, Charley. You’re the one who wanted Ennis to take us seriously for a change.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

  “How?” Neil asked.

  “I’ll call him,” I said. “And tell him not to read it.”

  “And when he asks why?”

  “It’s an early draft,” I said. “Full of typos.”

  “And if he’s already seen it?”

  “I’ll say it was all me—that you had nothing to do with it.”

  “That isn’t the point,” Neil said. “You said it yourself. Ennis looks at guys like us and sees a bunch of zeroes. Once a year, we send him a check, and once a year we get a blurb in the alumni magazine about our shitty little jobs and how we’ll never make anything of ourselves. This was our chance to actually do something—to show Ennis we could take something seriously for a change—and you went straight for the cheap laughs.”

  “It was an accident,” I said. “I meant to send the other one.”

  “I almost believe you,” Neil said.

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “Why would I send the wrong letter on purpose?”

  “I don’t know,” Neil said. “You have a tendency to do things that don’t make any sense sometimes.”

  “Like what?” I said.

  “Were you on the bridge with us yesterday?”

  “Oh,” I said. “That.”

  “And this ludicrous job of yours. What’s that all about?”

  “Okay,” I said. “You’re right. I’ve gotten myself into some weird shit lately. But don’t worry. I’ll take care of it.”

  “Whatever you’re planning, count me out,” Neil said. “Don’t even mention my name.”

  “Neil,” I said, but he’d already hung up.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I sat at my desk with my head in my hands, the incriminating invitation to Billy Chin’s memorial service glowing on the computer screen in front of me. Neil was right, I thought. I couldn’t do anything without screwing it up. My job was a joke, my house was a mess, and the dissertation I’d begun the previous September was languishing in some dark, lifeless corner of my hard drive, as scraps of paper bearing the late night scrawl of half-hearted inspiration curled in on themselves, yellowing and dusty, among the long-overdue library books stacked at my elbows. On top of it all, there was Billy. Even his death couldn’t keep me from failing him on a regular basis.

  “Are you okay?” Karen asked, poking her head into the spare bedroom we used as an office. “You look like you’re about to be sick.”

  “I think I screwed up,” I said.

  “What now?”

  “Everything,” I said. “My whole life.”

  “Is there any chance that you’re exaggerating?”

  “No,” I said. “Everything I’ve ever done is a joke.”

  “As the woman you married, you can see why I might take offense at that.”

  “You know what I mean,” I said. “I never take anything seriously.”

  “That’s not true,” Karen said. “What about Billy’s memorial service?”

  I shook my head.

  “Fucked it up,” I said. “The same way I fuck everything up. I turned it into a joke.”

  I looked up at Karen. She was dirty and sweaty from scrubbing the fine, filmy layer of wallpaper paste from our dining room walls. In less than a week, her students would take their final exams, and she’d be up to her ankles in red ink and bluebooks. Sure, she’d complain about it. And, sure, she was frustrated that our renovations weren’t exactly going as well as she’d expected. But at least she was doing something—something positive, something constructive, something meaningful. Meanwhile, my biggest effort to date had been to avoid putting any effort into anything at all, and the consequences were starting to show.

  “I need to act like an adult for a change,” I said. “I need to do something with my life.”

  “Okay,” Karen said. “Let’s start with the dining room.”

  “No,” I said. “I need to do something big.”

  “There’s always the living room,” she said. “And the upstairs hallway.”

  “Still too small,” I said. “I want to do something important. Something major. Something epic. Something big enough to make up for this slump I’m in.”

  “You could always finish your dissertation,” Karen said.

  “It’s a thought,” I said.

  “But I still think you should start with the dining room.”

  “You’re hinting at something,” I said.

  “The boy catches on fast.”

  “I haven’t been very helpful around here, have I?”

  “Not exactly,” Karen said. “No. In fact, helpful doesn’t even begin to cover it. Even when you’re here, you’re not exactly here, if you know what I mean.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “I know you’ve had a rough couple of weeks, Charley, but—”

  Before Karen could finish her thought, the telephone rang, and Greg Packer informed me that he had, in his words, the most auspicious of news. Evangeline, the woman he’d met online, had agreed to meet him for drinks. The only catch was that she still lived in Chicago and that Greg, caught up in the moment, had promised to meet her later that night.

  “So what are you going to do?” I asked, mouthing to Karen that it was Greg on the phone.

  “What else can I do? I’ve booked a flight to Chicago.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” I said as Karen rolled her eyes and left me alone to deal with my gentleman caller. “Where’d you get the money for that?”

  “Mother has a vested interest in my love life.”

  “That’s disturbing,” I said.

  “More specifically, she wants grandchildren.”

  “So she’s sending you to Chicago to meet a strange woman for drinks,” I said. “Makes perfect sense when you think about it.”

  “Your sarcasm notwithstanding, I’ve called to ask a favor. To wit, can you give me a ride to the airport?”

  “What about your mother?” I said. “Can’t she give you a ride?”

  “We had a bit of a falling out after she bought the plane ticket,” Greg said. “Mother wants us to raise the children here in Philadelphia, but I told her that Evangeline might well have a life and career in Chicago to consider.”

  “That was very big of you,” I said.

  “Indeed. And before you ask, I made the same request of our mutual friend regarding a ride to the airport, but he was in a particularly foul mood when I called.”

  “Neil?” I said.

  “Yes,” Greg said. “I won’t repeat what he said to me, but it wasn’t pretty.”

  This was perfect, I thought. If I got Greg out of his hair even for a day, Neil would have to forgive me. Or at least he’d have to admit that I wasn’t a complete screw-up. An incomplete screw-up, perhaps, but giving Greg a ride to the airport was an important first step in digging myself out of the hole I was in.

  “Okay,” I said. “I’ll give you a ride.”

  “Capital,” Greg said. “Of course, we’ll need to make a few stops along the way.”

  “Stops?” I said.

  “For odds and ends. And, needless to say, I’ll need to swing by the hospital for an epidural.”
>
  “I know your mom wants grandkids,” I said. “But isn’t that a little premature—not to mention the fact that you’re a guy?”

  “Your attempt at humor is duly noted, but I must point out, if only for your own edification, the subtle distinction between the anesthetic and steroid varieties of epidural. One, as you have accurately guessed, is closely associated with women in labor, but the other has myriad applications beyond the delivery room. For example, in my current condition, the prospect of sitting on an airplane for several hours is completely unfathomable without the aid of modern science. While pain medication is certainly an option, the enormity of the undertaking demands that I feel nothing from the neck down. That’s a slight overstatement, of course, but for the purposes of alleviating the kind of agony I will undoubtedly confront as I embark upon my quest, nothing compares to an epidural.”

  “I stand corrected,” I said.

  “The flight leaves at three and I’ve scheduled the procedure for noon, so you can understand my desire for you to attend to my needs posthaste.”

  “Right,” I said. “Posthaste.”

  The hard part was explaining the situation to Karen. Though I hadn’t exactly promised to help her, she was well on her way to winning me over when Greg called. A few more seconds, and I would have been hers.

  “What about our walls?” my wife asked as I stood in front of her, car keys in hand, my bungled attempt at explaining Greg’s need for an epidural still lingering between us. “What about doing something with your life?”

  “Don’t you see?” I said. “This is even better.”

  “How is unleashing Greg Packer on some unsuspecting girl in Chicago better than helping me with the house?”

  “Neil’s been dealing with Greg’s shit forever,” I said. “If I step up and take Greg off his hands, that’s one less thing for him to worry about. From there, who knows? I’ll come home, I’ll help with the walls, and then I’ll iron things out with Ennis.”

  “What happened with Ennis?”

  “Don’t worry about Ennis,” I said. “The point is, I’m taking control, and everything’s going to work out fine.”