51
A girl stops at the end of the aisle. It’s really hard when you’re a girl to imagine yourself to be the way other girls are. They can look so soft. Not soft like how they feel when you touch them, but soft like they look when they hurt. She has burgundy hair pulled back at her shoulders and large breasts like she would be warm in winter. Her eyes are bright and small and blue, and her mascara is smeared. She wears a straight cotton skirt with multicolored stripes and a camisole beneath a fringed orange jacket that is fastened with a vintage white plastic belt. She looks like Dusty Springfield, except for the red hair and the tattoos.
“Eveline?”
“Yes,” I say. “Hi.”
She offers her hand. “I’m Jewel. You know my cousin. Dan.”
“Oh sure. I’ve never met you, have I?”
She shakes her head. “I was abroad for high school, in London.”
“Oh, okay.”
“You used to live by the train.”
“Yes, that’s right, by the train.”
I wonder what she’s saying. She seems to be saying something. I take up my sweater from the seat alongside mine, inviting her to sit. I was saving the place for Denny, but he’s late, as usual. Jewel folds into the chair as if the string that had been holding her got clipped, and she begins to cry. It’s funny, I can hardly make out her sobs; they’re getting mixed among the sobs of all the other people. It’s one of those kinds of funerals, the communal sobbing kind, where it comes together and makes a kind of music.
Despite the sounds of grieving, the warm marine after-light of day coming through the tents in the Flemings’ backyard is beautiful. I feel as though I am in a swimming pool. People have begun to creep up politely on the outer side of each aisle, brushing against the white hydrangeas, which means there are no chairs left and almost two hundred guests have come. I know the exact count of chairs because I signed for them when they arrived this morning.
“One seventy-five, right?” the driver double-checked before letting his men unload. The driver was Billy Martinson from high school, from European history class. Nico Gerardi’s friend. Billy seemed happy to see me. He told me he’d dropped out of SUNY Oswego after one year, that he’d gotten out of the “party business,” so to speak, and into the party rental business, the delivery aspect of it. Billy had the dubious distinction of having clocked more deliveries than any other party trucker in the Hamptons, whatever that meant. Probably just that he was a menace on the local highways.
“The secret to success,” he informed me, “is the ability to be in two places at once.”
“One seventy-five, that’s right,” Mrs. Fleming confirmed, tying her robe tighter. She kept making her robe tighter and tighter all morning, though it wasn’t even slipping open.
One hundred seventy-five chairs sounded like a hell of a lot to Mr. Fleming, who appeared from the kitchen, Bloody Mary in hand, complete with celery stalk stirrer. When his wife reminded him that the service was scheduled for Friday afternoon and that colleges were out for summer, she sounded stretched and wilty, like she would not have been able to withstand an objection from him should he choose to make one. He ended up saying nothing, which had less to do with the fact that he agreed with her than that Billy and I were standing there, staring at him. As usual he seemed gigantic, though that was more in attitude than actuality. It was true that the service would most definitely be crowded, not only for the reasons Mrs. Fleming had mentioned. Though he may have had damaged relationships, Jack had had messages.
Mrs. Fleming shrugged and shook her head, quaking with her mouth agape as though she didn’t know what to say, or how to speak, or what it was that anyone even wanted. She drew a strand of white hair behind her right ear and tightened her robe again, trying to collect herself. It was the nearness of her husband that had thrown her. I did not surmise this; I knew it absolutely. Just Mr. Fleming standing there, with that Bloody Mary, looking, well, looking exactly like Mark.
Billy asked, “The chairs, Mrs. Fleming? Where do you want them?”
“This way,” I said, taking over, and the men followed me up the driveway around the west side of the house to the service area.
Billy examined the tautness of the tent ropes and the fixedness of stakes. “Who did these—Party Animals or Monumental Tental Rental?”
“Monumental, I think.”
He shook his head. “You should have called us.” He handed me a card. “Next time.”
I’d arrived at the Flemings’ at about nine-thirty that morning. I’d been thinking about going over all week, only I hadn’t. I just kept driving by the house, making sure things appeared normal, that lights came on at night and cars moved around in the day. When my mother found out what I was doing, she got mad and told me to knock on their damn door. She told me this was no time for bullshit city manners.
“I don’t want to impose,” I said.
“Kindness is not an imposition.”
“Maybe they need space.”
“They don’t need space,” my mother said. “They need someone to answer the f*cking phone.”
I was pretty sure the Flemings didn’t like anyone using their phone. Jack always said how his mother would bleach it every time someone touched it.
“There’s no one better equipped than you to make sure the family is holding up—especially that woman—and to see to it that Jack is properly represented. You are a diplomat,” she said, and liking the sound of that, she added, “A diplomat of the dead.”
“Your mother’s right,” said Powell, who had flown home from Anchorage for the funeral. “Imagine you had died first. Jack would be sitting right there where you are, telling us what and what not to do—what music to play, what clothes to wear, what stories to tell.”
My mother looked at Powell quizzically. “Do you really think he’d be sitting?” she asked. “I imagine he’d be lying. You know, sprawled out on the couch.”
Powell nodded as he considered that. “I suppose so. Lying and crying.”
“And being a tremendous pain in the ass,” Mom added.
“You’re right, Irene. He wouldn’t be worth shit.”
Though I could not exactly imagine the Flemings giving me a warm welcome, I trusted my mother’s opinion. She’d been to hundreds of funerals. She was always the first to volunteer in cases of crisis. If anyone tried to discourage her from attending yet another memorial service, she’d say, “There’s nothing worse than poor turnout at a funeral. I certainly hope you’re not alone on the day you bury one of your people.”
When the chairs were set—in curves rather than lines, no lines for Jack—I came in from the yard and found his mother sitting in the living room, dressed at last. She was wearing a taupe pant suit and on her lap lay a closed book, an album of some kind. Though she said nothing, there were two cups on the table and a plate of those triangular sandwiches without crusts. I figured I was supposed to join her.
She transferred the book to my lap as though passing a clipboard in a doctor’s office, without fanfare or emotion. It was a photo collection of Jack’s life that she had assembled from family events—weddings, graduation parties, birthdays. She intended to display it at the memorial. I didn’t have to look hard or long to see that Jack was miserable in every shot, despite the fact that he had successfully bastardized all his dress-up clothes. There were Boy Scout badges Superglued onto his wide-lapeled Brooks Brothers suit and flames painted onto his one silk tie, and Wacky Pack stickers varnished onto his good shoes. I could not see the shoes in the photos, but I knew they were there. The shoes were legendary. Denny had borrowed them for the senior banquet even though they were two sizes too small, and when we’d danced, he’d moved like magic, not missing a single step.
I was overwhelmed. I hadn’t seen pictures of him in so long. I wanted desperately to restore him. I couldn’t understand why it was not possible to do so. Me just thinking, his voice, his voice. His face, his eyes, his voice. I realized that I had not neared the bottom of my pain, that my sorrow was stronger than I could ever be, coupled as it was with the sickening knowledge that I’d wasted years with Mark that could have been spent instead with Jack—helping him, if that would have been possible. I held the book close to my face, squinting.
“Is something wrong?” Jack’s mother asked in her deflated sort of monotone, not looking up from the book.
“I forgot my glasses,” I said, lying.
“Glasses,” she said dismissively. “You’re awfully young for glasses.”
I stayed that way with her for the better part of an hour, going through photo by photo, squinting and sinking further into despair, because I couldn’t exactly leave her alone with the wretchedness of memories on the day of the funeral. After the funeral it was going to have to be every man for himself. And, besides, Rita the housekeeper had made a fresh pot of coffee, and though I’d often walked past the Fleming couch, I’d never sat on it. It was actually quite comfortable. Mrs. Fleming didn’t seem worried in the least about me holding a cup of coffee and eating sandwiches while flipping through the overstuffed album and blowing my nose, despite the very real potential for spills, which led me to wonder whether Jack had not made more of her cleanliness neurosis than she deserved. I kept looking up, half-expecting Jack to walk in, to join us. I thought it was something we could have gotten through well together—not the funeral, but coffee with his mother. I was sorry we’d never tried.
I heard myself say, “Do you mind if I open the drapes?”
She struggled with the suggestion as though having some cognitive lapse, as though a word or term I’d used were foreign to her. She moved her mouth, but nothing came out.
I stood and drew back the curtains on each window. “It’s pretty today,” I said. Rays of sunshine charged in at varying angles like they’d been waiting. “Isn’t it pretty?” Pretty as a word might not have been an appropriate choice for a funeral day; however, I used it with authority. The day was mine, I’d decided, and even if it wasn’t, I intended to take it. In old film noir movies, the detective takes on someone else’s problem, and in the process of solving it, solves his own. He works backward through the crime while moving forward in his mind to crack his own riddle. In such narratives the crime is a metaphor, and the riddle is a metaphor, and quite possibly, beginning at the end is also a metaphor, a prescriptive for successful living. The way it goes is this—The story starts when I enter it.
Mrs. Fleming flinched as though stunned by the flare of oncoming headlights. Then she settled back, looking wide-eyed and stony.
“Are you okay?” I asked, not sure if she knew who I was anymore. She didn’t seem flustered or disoriented; as a matter of fact, she appeared to have made her way back to safety. This was nothing new, I realized, and here lay the riddle of her chill—she was incalculably depressed. Of course Jack would have wanted to save her. Of course he would have tried. And, of course, his every effort would have been undermined. Yes, this is where he’d gotten lost. How sad. In his little-boy mind, he’d been her failure. Rourke had felt this way too, except that Jack had felt a companion disgust unknown to Rourke—Jack’s father was no hero as Rourke’s had been.
And the riddle of Jack was the riddle of us. Him not wanting to smother me as his father had his mother, but him not being able to stop. Him psychologically resorting to the tools and terms that had given his father power over others. Him holding me, teaching me, coming whole to my need with his need, and in the end, him leaving as he came, carrying away his pain as if in a suitcase, because I’d done nothing to relieve his burden.
“Look at this one,” Mrs. Fleming said, tapping a page we’d passed at least twice before. I opened my eyes wide.
It was a picture of the two of them, Jack as a baby. In it his hair was white and hers was white. They looked lovely, mother and son, and hopeful with the new bond between them. He was no more than twenty pounds with his symphony-shell ribs poking over his diaper and his ankles like twigs. And his eyes, searing blue as though the color had been branded onto his face, as though he’d been awakened already to the nonsense of inequity.
“Never side with your husband over your children,” she confided in a hiss. I turned to find her eyes. There was something eerie about the vacancy there, the hollow helplessness, the pathological refusal to invest in anything beyond the sphere of her own unhappiness. Looking at her, I felt the way others must have felt when they looked at me. She looked as if she were suffering from vertigo. “They’ll tell you to do that. Never do that. Men are disposable. Children are not.”
We were interrupted by a crash from the floor above. My hand jerked, and coffee spilled narrowly onto the saucer. The china shook unevenly, and I carefully lowered my cup to the table. The house had been so quiet, I’d presumed we were alone.
Mr. Fleming shouted, “Susan! Where did you put my cuff links?”
More unnerving than the sound he made was the fact that she had invoked him only seconds before the sound. She had detected him before he’d become detectable. Just as she’d been seducing me into doubting her connection to him, she demonstrated the strength of the bond.
“I didn’t put them anywhere,” she replied to the banister. “They’re on your dresser.”
She waited in case he was going to yell some more, then she returned to me with a joyless smile. “Jack loathed him. I loathe him too. I stayed married because I had no alternative. I had to consider their college, their future,” she said. “What would I have done? Aging, with two children. Who would have hired me? Who would have loved me?” She took back the book. “At least my son had the courage to die. His father will cling to life until the bitter end. Unless I kill him first. I’d like to kill him first.”
A procession of somber guests passes the row of Jack’s belongings that Elizabeth and I arranged on the garden wall before the service. There’s the stuffed mouse I made, the harmonica my mother had given him, his drawings, his skateboard, his surfboard, his books, his mother’s photo album.
Jewel is still next to me. “Did you love him, Jewel?” I get the feeling she did.
She hunts through her tapestry purse and nods.
“From when?”
“December 1980,” she whispers, withdrawing a tissue. “Dan and I ran into him at the John Lennon vigil. Jack was high. He hardly recognized us. He hadn’t seen me in years, but Dan, well—We took Jack back to my parents’ apartment on West End Avenue and we hid him in my room. He didn’t talk for two days. The third morning he was gone. I didn’t hear from him until he showed up at my apartment at Yale two months later. He was in bad shape again, so I cleaned him up and drove him back to school in Boston. That summer we got a room together in the East Village. In September, he dropped out of Berklee and came with me to New Haven.”
Yale. I remember Alicia saying she thought she had seen Jack.
“For a while it was okay. We’d go to concerts and movies, and I would borrow books for him from the library. I bought him a guitar,” she says. “I guess he got bored or restless, so he started to go down to the city. At first he would stay with this bass player on Fourteenth Street and Avenue A—they formed a new band—but soon he started disappearing for days at a time. His family tried an intervention, but it was excruciating for him. All of them in Elizabeth’s living room on First and Seventy-seventh with a therapist and these pickled kitchen cabinets. He couldn’t get over the cabinets, like why anyone would go to all that trouble.
“The family apologized; but he felt they’d just been coached to assume blame. He said they hadn’t genuinely changed, they’d just replaced their own authoritarian ideas with someone else’s authoritarian ideas. He said they were only motivated by AIDS and the homosexual connotations they’d have had to face if ever he’d contracted it.
“According to his family, Jack sabotaged the whole thing,” Jewel says. “If only they could have seen how upset he was. He just kept saying, They’re programmed, they’re programmed. His mother especially. I think he’d been wishing she’d been shocked into feeling some effect. I didn’t know what to do. I called. I wrote letters. I went to see Elizabeth.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
She shrugs. “They wanted him to go to this rehab place in Minnesota, but he refused, so they cut him off. They asked us to do the same. I objected because I knew it would drive him further into the hands of the wrong people.
“Last time I saw him was Christmas, six months ago. I had a sweater for him. He didn’t want the sweater; he wanted a hundred dollars. I said I couldn’t do that, and I didn’t have a hundred dollars. He was like, Fine, forget it. And that was it. A month ago, I got a call about the guitar. He’d sold it. My number in Connecticut was scratched onto the back, and the guy Jack sold it to had been arrested. The cops figured it had been stolen.”
I hand her a new tissue; she’s used her last. People keep coming by to kiss me and say hi, or just pat my shoulder.
“He never called you, did he?” she asks, her sad soul swimming. “No, I don’t suppose he would have.” She looks to her lap. “There was a book. He carried it everywhere. When he slept, I would read it. Songs, poems, pressed flowers. Letters to you, from you. Do you know the book?”
“Yes,” I say, “I do.”
There is a murmur of activity in front. “I’d better get back to my family,” Jewel says. “I just wanted to—to say, sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry to me. I betrayed him. You never betrayed him.”
“No, Eveline, you didn’t betray him. You treated him like he was a normal, healthy man. You didn’t let it descend to pity or need. When you couldn’t be honest, you walked away. He loved you all the more for it.”
Father Michael McQuail of Braintree, Massachusetts, begins the eulogy by admitting that he has never met Jack, that he has come as a favor to his friend Cecilia Hanover, Jack’s maternal grandmother, who is too infirm to have traveled from Boston to attend the service.
“Although I am a priest,” he says, gently bending the microphone out of range, then stepping away from the podium altogether, “I have not been invited to speak in a religious capacity.”
He stands before us in a sort of informal traveling priest outfit—black slacks and a short sleeved black shirt and a handsome stainless steel watch. His arms are tanned and healthy. I heard him talking earlier to Reverend Olcott about running—their other mutual interest. Father McQuail runs in the Boston Marathon every year.
“I understand that Jack was a plain-speaking boy, and I’m a plain-speaking man, so I won’t bother to carry on about a life unnecessarily lost or precious gifts wasted. I will just say that what this individual did to himself and to his family and friends was a transgression of the worst kind. First of all, drug trafficking and drug use are illegal, and the toxic damage caused to the body and mind by substance abuse represents a desecration of the natural to a perverse degree. Secondly, suicide is a crime. On some other occasion we might have a leisurely discussion as to whether suicide constitutes an ethical crime or a religious crime, but judging by the pain I see in the faces before me, I don’t think that anyone will disagree that it is a civic crime. His death cost all of you. You have been robbed of your ability to provide assistance, to tender compassion, to ask forgiveness.”
Father McQuail speaks quickly, in a kind of nasal bark. Before one sentence is complete, the next begins its tumble from his mouth. He gives the impression of being smart and sincere and in a bit of a fervor. One thing is for certain, he has everyone’s attention.
“But you know about your own pain. Let’s discuss instead what is a mystery. Let’s discuss feelings that are at risk of festering if left undiscussed. Let’s speak of the idea to which each of you is clinging, That those who fail were failed. You want to know, is it outside the realm of possibility that Jack was the victim of a crime of a magnitude equal to the one he committed? Not some gross solitary act, perhaps, but fine crimes, subtle crimes, crimes of omission.”
A new round of crying begins. It takes minutes for the crowd to settle down. “I didn’t travel seven hours to make anyone feel worse than they do already. I came because you are all assembled together just this once, and I embraced an opportunity. If anyone is too distraught to listen, you are welcome to take a walk around the block. It’s a beautiful day.” Father McQuail lifts the stem of a rose from the fence alongside him and inhales. He waits, but no one leaves.
“I don’t have to have known Jack to know that he was difficult. Mrs. Hanover, his grandmother, whom the boy is said to have resembled, is extremely difficult. Ours is a strenuous friendship. Some might ask, Why bother? Life is short, don’t work so hard. To me that is tantamount to saying, Life is short, don’t grow so much. If Mrs. Hanover is acerbic, she is brilliant. If she is self-righteous, she is uncompromising. If she is stubborn, she is trustworthy—if I am made irritable by the fixedness of her opinion, I depend upon the fixedness of her ethics. If she provokes me, she expects to be provoked in kind. If she questions my meaning, it is because, indeed, my meaning needs to be questioned.
“If my relationship with her were any less difficult—if she did not challenge me, did not test me, if she accepted me too easily, at face value, then she would not be a friend but an acquaintance. Certainly, at this level of intensity, one cannot have many friends. This is not a bad thing. Reduced circumstances are a consequence of truthfulness.
“I don’t have to have known Jack to see that he chose his friends carefully. Obviously he chose well. Surely he started out as all children do, giving what they hope to receive. An unfortunate misconception is that as we age, we need to move beyond the perfection of that childhood barter to something more abstruse. I am going to wager that Jack was terrified about making the transition into maturity that you all made with relative ease, that he claimed it was a compromise, and that he tested you—unfairly, no doubt. Some of you moved on, retreating to the safety of acquaintanceship. Terrified by your distance, your politeness—he removed himself in kind. He didn’t need narcotics to feel alien; he felt that way already. Narcotics confirmed his feelings and numbed them.”
Father McQuail paces absently in front of the Flemings. Elizabeth is shaking, trilling really, like a cold dog, and Mr. Fleming is slumped with his face in his hands. Jack’s mother’s head is like stone. She is a bust of herself.
“There are things that cannot be held to common external standards,” Father McQuail says, “because they possess an uncommon internal nature. To be kind, to be compassionate, to be a friend—if, in fact, it is a friend we want to be—we must struggle to look past outward manifestations in order to see the essence of what we admire.”
He rests an elbow on the lectern and looks out at us as if memorizing faces. “Being Jack’s friends, you’re probably resistant to simplistic analogies. However, I beg you to indulge me. If one is a gardener, one cannot treat a rose as one would any other flower. A rose wants coddling, and to be sure, few people have the patience for it—so much of the product, so much of the time, is a wall of thorns. Why does God give us the rose? To humble us, to better us, to encourage forgiveness and understanding. And for those who show forbearance, the reward is divine. Yet it occurs to me that the rose is not only the reward, but the acknowledgment of the success of our efforts—the sensitivity, the tenacity. It is the proof of the virtue of faith. The rose singles out the tender. God has strategically placed the pure in the midst of the perilous to separate out those who can and will strive to reach for an ideal. My suspicion is that once you have been called upon to love this way, once you have proved your capacity, you will be called upon again.
“I traveled down from Boston to let you know that your experience with Jack was not a failure; it was an experience. We can’t rewrite Jack’s life. But we can redouble our efforts the next time we meet someone like him. I ask you to be courageous of heart. I ask you to remember that if you were hurt in this instance, it was not because you deserved to get hurt, or were foolish to get hurt, it was because you risked getting hurt. I ask you not to forsake the willingness to risk.”
Elizabeth looks ravaged. Her eyes are swollen and pink and big for their sockets, like thyroid eyes. The pace of her speech is the opposite of Father McQuail’s. She speaks into the microphone as if she is sedated, though having spent the afternoon with her, I know she is not. She is simply determined to own up to her part.
She thanks Father Michael on behalf of her family, then she says, “I’m two years older than Jack, but Jack was ahead of me in everything. School, music, art, ideas, and now, suffering. He became a vegetarian when he was ten. That didn’t stop the rest of us from eating meat several times a week. I remember sitting at the table, tormenting him with steak. He would stare back with a blank stare, marveling at the spectacle of me being an animal eating an animal, and sure enough, I would start to feel like an animal eating an animal. After dinner I would make myself throw up. I never touched meat again after leaving for college. I can’t even stand the smell of it. I’ve moved from two apartments because of the odor of cooking flesh. I won’t let my parents cook it when I visit, or before I visit—and for my sake, they don’t,” she says, “though they didn’t offer Jack the same courtesy. I honestly don’t know how he coped.”
“At nine, he hung a sign he made from a torn sheet out of his bedroom window to protest the Vietnam War and the Kent State killings, and, at thirteen, he boycotted toothpaste containing nonessential additives. He used apples and dental floss for weeks until Dan found natural stuff at the health food store. My parents used to have him play piano like a trained pet at their cocktail parties until the time he said, ‘Here’s a little song I wrote just for you,’ and the lyrics were the ingredients of sliced white bread played along to this really bad piano bar tune. They never asked him to play again. In high school—I don’t even know why I’m telling you this—I used to hide my feminine hygiene products in a box in a dresser drawer. Once Jack walked in on me going through the box. I screamed for him to get out, but he only came farther into the room.
“‘Elizabeth,’ he said, ‘don’t be ashamed. Please. I’m saying this because they never will.’” She wipes her eyes. “‘Please,’ he said to me. ‘Please.’
“Jack loved the blues from the time he was a baby, which was uncanny considering that in our house we never listened to anything but Bobby Vinton and the Carpenters. Just to show you what kind of an a*shole I was, I used to tell him, ‘The blues suck.’ Last night I locked myself in his room. I don’t know how many of you have seen his room, but it’s the coolest space. I was on his bed crying when I saw his collection of albums on the floor. For the first time I thought to look at them, really look at them, and I did, and I, and I—couldn’t believe I, I never—there are milk crates full of—”
She bends over the lectern, supporting herself. I look away. Although she’s standing before a crowd, the moment is her own. I feel Jack in the tent—the leaden livingness, the way it used to be, with a premium on honesty. It comes like a minuscule change in humidity. Her father stands to help. She waves for him to sit.
“Full of rare recordings—seventy-eights, forty-fives, in perfect condition, alphabetized, labeled, exactly the way he left them, because he loved them.” She continues through her tears. “My first thought was to give them to Dan or Evie because I didn’t deserve them. Then I realized that Jack could have sold them when he needed money. But he refused to do that. He preferred to shoot himself. He must have known I would receive them. He must have.”
After helping Elizabeth to her chair, Dan takes her place. Minutes pass before people become quiet again. Dan waits patiently. The more patiently he waits, the more emotional everyone becomes.
“When I first found out,” he states simply, “I thought, I can’t say I lost anything. Whatever I lost, I gave up voluntarily, long ago. I actually felt lucky that I’d gotten out before getting hurt. I figured, nothing’s changed. His absence is his absence, and his presence—the things we did or the music we wrote, that’s still a presence, you know, meaningful and ongoing.
“But after listening to Father McQuail, I think it’s safe to say I fell seriously short.”
Dan tugs his shirt from his chest and adjusts his glasses. “I used to argue with Jack quite a bit. As we grew older, I stopped, because it was easier to not engage, and because I figured it’s what adults are supposed to do. I mean, who wants to be interfered with?
“The bizarre thing is that the more tolerant I became of his extremism, the more extreme he became. It was like he was begging me not to be mediocre, challenging me. Instead of recognizing his tests, I ignored them. The more outrageous his behavior, the more distance I put between us. As Father said, reactions like that terrified Jack. Especially in his frame of mind, especially with the company he’d been keeping.” Dan looks up at us. “I guess I could have worried less about the damage he might have caused me and more about the damage he was doing to himself.
“I’ve known Jack since we were two. Jack did not stumble unconsciously into adversity. Jack chose adversity because he believed himself to be a casualty of prosperity. Unfortunately, heroin use is not the kind of thing anyone can control, and loneliness, well, loneliness accrues. I asked my dad how it happened, how Jack went from using drugs sometimes to using them a lot to committing suicide. My father said it’s a matter of time in. Like becoming a musician. Spend more time in than time out and you become an expert.”
Dan reaches into his pocket and removes a small strip of paper, unfolding it carefully while he talks. “There’s a book of his that Elizabeth gave me yesterday, The Anatomy of Melancholy, by Robert Burton. Here’s a quote Jack had underlined. If adversity hath killed his thousand, prosperity hath killed his ten thousand.”
Dan plays with the paper on the lectern. “Jack could scale any building. He liked to walk as the crow flies, and if a house was in his way, sometimes he would go straight over it and meet me on the other side. He might come down scraped up, but he would tell me how beautiful the stars were from the rooftop. When I heard he killed himself, the first thing I thought was how he always did like to walk as the crow flies. Next I thought, I hope the stars look good from wherever he is.”
From the front, I can see most everyone, though it’s impossible to take them all in. Mr. and Mrs. Fleming are on my left, next to Elizabeth and Dan and Smokey Cologne, who is wearing a suit that’s briny green like a cartoon ocean. Smokey maintained the closest contact with Jack until the end, and there are things he has in his head that he will not share. When he arrived this afternoon, I ran down the Flemings’ driveway to meet him, and he held me. I never figured we were close, but that moment helped me more than all the others. Holding him, I thought of Jack but also of Rourke and Rob, of their friendship, and I hoped in my heart that everything had been done for Jack that could have been done, but nonetheless I knew otherwise—and I started to cry.
Alongside Dr. Lewis is his wife, Micah, with Jim Peterson, from their band, and our old music teacher, Toby Parker. Dan’s babysitter, Bitsy, is wearing turquoise beads the size of golf balls. Dad and Marilyn are also on the left, back by the screened porch with Denny and Jeff and Denny’s mother, Elaine. Behind them, all the people standing. Mom’s friends take up two and a half rows on the right—Lowie and David; her handicapped friend, Lewis; Nargis; and several people I don’t recognize. Powell is there too, but separate. He’s standing at the end of the aisle in case he has to catch me.
I see teachers—Mr. McGintee and Principal Laughlin and Mrs. Kennedy and tons of people from high school—Alice Lee, Min Kessler, Marty Koch. Ray Trent and Mike Reynolds are there, and so is Dave Meese, who once borrowed fifty dollars from Jack and probably still owes it to him. Rocky Santiago and his wife, Laurie, who swam with dolphins on their honeymoon, are next to LizBeth Bennett, who worked at the movie house, who is standing with Rick Ruddle, the Outward Bound counselor from Portland. I never met Rick, but I know him from hiking pictures. Funerals are bizarre—Dino, one of the brothers from the pizza place who was always antagonizing Jack, is sitting next to Jack’s cousin, Monroe Fortesque. Monroe attended Phillips Academy in Andover, then Princeton. Jack called him “the Preppy Hangman.” I am horrified on Jack’s behalf to see Monroe there, all muggy and serious. Though Monroe is Jack’s relative, he is one of those types of relatives you never imagine when you are conceiving your own funeral. If Jack had thought in advance about the Preppy Hangman being invited, he probably would have looked down the barrel of the gun and said, Jesus, it’s enough to make a guy want to think about living.
I didn’t tell Mark about the service, so he is absent. But Alicia is there, standing in back. I smile at her, then I adjust the microphone so I can be heard. I want my voice to go far.
“The Teton Mountains are in northwest Wyoming. The highest peak there is 13,766 feet. I’ve never been to the Tetons, but I know the average annual temperature at night and the average rainfall in May because Jack wrote it all down on the leg of my favorite jeans. Every time I washed the jeans, he would rewrite everything. I’ve never been to Yosemite either, but I know there are granite domes that look like hooded monks and sequoia groves that stand like clusters of elephant legs. There are boreal forests in Wrangell–Saint Elias National Park in Alaska, and carpets of wildflowers on the banks of Lake Clark in Anchorage, and petroglyphs of bighorn rams near the Arches National Park in Moab, Utah.
“Jack buried a picture of me in the ancient Blackfoot hunting grounds on the Continental Divide in West Glacier, Montana, and also a silver fork I had as a baby with my name etched on it. He said it would keep my spirit safe. He drew a map for me to find the spot, in case I’m ever out that way.
“Elvis Presley’s ‘One Night with You’ was originally recorded in 1956 as ‘One Night of Sin’ by Smiley Lewis, the best rhythm and blues man New Orleans has ever seen. Jack never forgave Elvis for not giving Lewis credit. If you dared to suggest that it wasn’t Elvis’s fault, that in general he helped to popularize black music, Jack would say, ‘Bullshit. He should have done all the originals as B-sides.’
“Besides Dave Brubeck’s ‘Take Five,’ Trois Gymnopedies, Number 2 was Jack’s favorite piece to play on piano. It was written by Eric Satie in 1888 as an accompaniment to athletes. Jack’s favorite year in music history was 1959. In 1959, Miles Davis recorded ‘Kind of Blue’ with Bill Evans, and Oscar Peterson did a version of Cole Porter’s ‘In the Still of the Night,’ which we would listen to whenever there was snow. If you happen to find a copy of that song, listen to it when there’s snow and you’ll know a place in Jack’s head that’s really nice. Was really nice.
“I can draw sixty-two species of wildflower from memory. Jack used to quiz me, and I would get points for speed. I’ve worked since I was sixteen, first in a restaurant and then in an art gallery, but the only money I’ve ever felt good about earning has come from flower drawings. I’ve sold sixteen so far, two last week, on Tuesday. They say Tuesday is the day he died. I thought of Jack that day, how proud he would have been, how the money was like our money. I keep wondering if I was thinking of him at the moment he was sitting with that gun, maybe thinking of me.
“I can name every snake and every cloud. Jack’s favorite cloud was cirrus because cirrus clouds are far, and he liked to look far. ‘Look, Evie,’ he would say, ‘they’re like horses’ tails!’ He wanted them to be my favorite too. I agreed with him as often as I could, only not in the case of clouds. I preferred stratus. Stratus are the brooding ones, low like anguish, like neglected boxcars in the rain, like crying in your favorite hiding place—like Jack.
“Turgenev wrote of nihilism in Fathers and Sons in 1862. Jack did not teach me that; my mother taught that to Jack, and I happened to be in the room. He was complaining about morality, how it’s a hollow construct, how the only possible reform is revolutionary reform. ‘Go read Turgenev,’ she told him. ‘Then talk to me.’ And he did. Possibly she meant to show Jack that he was thinking like the great thinkers. Possibly she meant to show him that his thoughts were not necessarily original. In either case she felt it was his duty to go further. She always spoke to him very fast, like it was a race, like she had to hurry, like Jack needed to get out of his head as quickly as possible.
“I should mention how hard this is for my mother. Like the rest of us, I’m sure she wishes Jack would have called when he was in trouble. Unlike the rest of us, she has to live with the knowledge that she actually would have done something about it. She would have thrown herself on him, like he was on fire.”
There is crying, ongoing like a faucet running. Under the tent the air is hot. I bend my knees and hold the lectern tight. “Those are the easy things. There are other things. Not so easy.
“Jack believed that society is hypocritical to place so much value on the sanctity of individual human life, while tolerating famine, war, extreme poverty, racial cleansing, environmental destruction, capital punishment, species extinction, and other crazy stuff, such as fattening calves in cages or force-feeding geese with tubes.
“‘It’s so stupid,’ he would say. ‘Suicide is intolerable but all too frequently, genocide is not. Why the double standards?’
“It’s hard to say whether Jack felt instinctively that suicide was the best possible solution to his problems or if he became intellectually convinced of a pro-suicide position because he found the anti-suicide position to be so condescending. He hated therapy, probably because he had been sent so much at such an early age. He rejected the theory that oversimplified rhetoric would inspire desperate people in desperate circumstances to discover the previously elusive joy of living. ‘Besides,’ he would say, ‘every therapist is on the family payroll. They have the incentive to find problems and side with their employers. We might as well ask the housekeeper her opinion.’
“His body was his alone, he said. He said that by the time he found himself in trouble, any feelings of entitlement others might have would not be real reflections of real relations. They would be false or residual. ‘If love isn’t getting through,’ he would say, ‘it’s not real. If we’re not sharing it, it’s not love. It’s fanaticism. It’s Pentecostal. The gift of tongues.’
“It all used to make sense. But now I see it was only Jack making sense. Because despite his having prepared me, I’m bereaved. Despite our separation, I’ve lost a piece of myself. Despite the fact that I tried to be fair, I wonder if I behaved irresponsibly. If I can’t say that my moving on with my life was right or wrong, or him ending his despair was right or wrong, I can say that today is worse than yesterday, and yesterday was worse than the day before. When Dan called to tell me Jack was dead, I was not surprised. Now I feel that the day should never have come, and I’m ashamed of myself for expecting it. I feel more guilty and more betrayed as time passes. Guilty because I should have done something, and betrayed because he promised I wouldn’t feel this way.
“If I have to give up my right to sorrow in order to respect his right to die, I’ll never recover. If I absolve him of this crime, he stays an invalid, a freak, a victim. If I don’t hold him accountable, I make a choice, as if I am godly. I’m not godly. He has to share his burden of the blame for not finding a solution. I mean, look around. We’re not talking about Jack’s one life, or my one life. We’re talking about at least as many lives as are here today. It’s inconceivable that we all failed.”
Powell is straight ahead, looking at me with concentration, staring evenly, attentively, as he stares perhaps at the sea.
“I wasn’t sure I was going to come up here. I kept trying to think of what he would have wanted, for me to talk or for me to not talk. If you had it all figured out that Jack wanted you to do one thing, it usually turned out that he wanted the other.”
People laugh, though I didn’t intend to be funny.
“I thought of trying to reach him. I used to be able to reach him. I don’t mean like calling up a spirit. I mean the difference between mindless thinking and really thinking—it’s like combining everything outwardly known and everything inwardly known and letting it shuffle together like cards. And then in a way, invisible things really do begin to appear.
“Elizabeth reached him. You probably noticed the change in the air when she was up here. When she spoke, she was very brave, and all we’d forgotten of Jack became clear—he became clear—and we reclaimed him from his own terrible version of himself. The way he was good, the way she’s always known that he loved her, the way she loved him too. The way he felt himself beyond repair but held out hope for her.
“I spent this morning with Mrs. Fleming, talking and looking at pictures, and Jack was clear then too. But his mom was also clear. I found myself wishing that I’d spoken to her sooner, that I hadn’t depended upon him to arbitrate, that I’d been as willing to question his ideas of things as he’d been mine. That I’d been a better friend. His view of her was not entirely accurate or fair. Jack could be so unforgiving; above anything else, that led to his isolation. It was after sitting with his mom that I decided to speak today, not worrying what he would have wanted, just making his job of forgiving her my job.
“Not everyone who kills themselves lives as Jack did at the end. Many violent suicides are committed by supposedly normal citizens—parents, teachers, scholars, doctors, bankers, movie stars. Some just kill themselves over time, through more acceptable means. Pills, alcohol, smoking, reckless driving, bad diet. You have to question the discrepancy between their public accomplishments and their anti-social behavior. What face did they show, what lies did they live, what passed for love that was not love at all? You have to wonder whether an extreme need to please or to succeed is not just a convenient, socially approved way of encrypting the darker corridors. And if that false face is accepted by others, it breaks the wearer doubly: the person isn’t known, and the attention they receive isn’t trustworthy. The wearer of the disguise proves what they believe deeply, that people around him are just stupid.
“Jack was different: he hid nothing. He was known, and so whatever love he received was real. Everyone acts like his honesty came easily, like he had it and we didn’t. But it was the product of an arduous labor. Look at the photo album on the back table. When he was forced to comply socially, he did so as a fully formed Jack, not as anyone who could ever be mistaken for the rest of us. His was a stylized resistance; he was an artist. And Mrs. Fleming admired Jack’s will. If she made an error by concealing in the secret support of his ideals her own secret need for freedom, it was only because she’d hoped he would live more freely than she did. Today I was thinking that every challenge he made to the established order came across to her more or less like a grasp for liberty. It’s obvious to me that she loved him very much, and for the same reasons we did.”
I stand a little straighter. “What she didn’t count on is that he would only become free if she would as well. I think he was making her a bargain. He had no intention of getting out alone.”