Frederick and Ilana slipped behind our table, ducking torches, passing through the crowd as though they were invisible, or we were brain-dead, taking the path out to the beach. Waiters started clearing the other end of the table. The swimming pool was lit but empty. Conrad and some Scottish guy were naked in the hot tub, trying to work the Jacuzzi buttons. A fine rain had begun. Two women from the Theater Department climbed out, bodies steaming, and flicked their hair. Towels sat stacked in the rain. When I looked back again, Frederick and Ilana were gone.
Strong winds came up, spitting rain, then sand, blowing sparks and smoke from the outdoor fireplace, which led to last call and a crowd at the bar. Roberta waved her drink, talking about a kid named Skittles, who lived in his grandmother’s crack house and had sex in a McDonald’s men’s room. Happy Longworthy rubbed her necklace. I followed the footlights off the patio, toward my bicycle.
“Let me ask you a question,” Tom McLaughlin said, stumbling. “Will you have a drink with me?” The later it got, the more he drawled like a Texan. I kept walking, so he turned to the sleepy, tulip-shaped intern, one of the interns who’d stolen water from our dugout, and asked her.
“No thanks,” she said. “I’ve had enough.”
“These are both my drinks,” he said, banging into her. “But this one’s younger, so I’m treating it more gently.”
Winston Doyoyo sometimes snuck out at night without his wife or assistant and had to be dragged off women who’d agreed to dance with him, even though he was almost eighty. Carl liked to walk through the tent at mealtimes and pull on women’s ponytails. Toward the end of the conference, he sometimes threw his tongue down somebody’s throat without asking. Ilana and Frederick used the conference as some kind of bidet for them to wash their private parts in, before heading back to their loved ones. The staff was cleaning up.
“Hey, Clyde,” I said. Empty bottles, cigarette butts, an abandoned dress, and high-heeled shoes looked like the remnants of a Roman orgy. “How’s that ice machine?”
He grabbed the pool house doors and slid them closed. “Time to go home!”
Weaving in the dark in the rain through the west end of town, I saw the neon sign for the taffy store and passed bars blaring house music and a tea dance raging around the swimming pool of a one-story motel. A garbage bag of ice swung and bounced against my leg as I pedaled. I dodged pedestrians, the street jammed with sweaty dancers three deep in front of the pizza place. I reached campus and drank rainwater off my lips as grass came up under the tires and I fell over and lay there, gasping.
Amy’s dorm was locked. I banged on the door. I’d brought this ice for her. Someone opened a window and told me what to go do to myself. I responded with vicious threats and disgusting obscenities. This scene was playing out as yet another storied episode in an epic affair, big, with obstacles we fought through to be together. Someone came around the corner with a walkie-talkie and said he was calling the police, but it was just the kid who played ukulele at open mike. He asked if I knew where I lived.
Up the hill past the windmill I dumped the ice onto the grass. The old Barn sagged along its roofline, under the cupola and weather vane. I hefted my bike to the third-story landing, dropping it and tripping over it on my way in the door. Toilet and shower stall to the left, kitchen straight ahead, grease stains on the wall, dishes in the sink, dented pots, and a flimsy, unpainted partition wall that blocked off a place to hang clothes. It looked like the inside of the Unabomber’s shed. A metal table with my teaching notes and papers and four chairs that crouched like spiders beneath the windowed cupola, which even now shed grayish light. And in the light, some half-finished sketches of Chinese factory workers. When they couldn’t escape the system or work any harder inside it, they simply took themselves to the roof of the factory and threw themselves off.
I emptied my pockets, banging into furniture, hitting my head on the ceiling, and tried to take off my shoes without falling over. I’d given up everything for cartooning, and for that alone I deserved to die. Then I gave up on cartooning. I suffered psychic grief, low output, self-mockery, obscurity, isolation, depression, all of the deprivations of artistic sacrifice—without making any art. Marriage and parenthood provided a kind of second life, a new beginning, for some failed artists. Certain men thrived in it. If these past years had been any indication, I never would.
In the eaves of the apartment, the roof met the floor. Deep in the pinched area, behind the sofa, a wooden folding ladder had been pitched longways, tall enough to allow someone to change a lightbulb up in the peak. I squinted at the shape of it in the dark. I thought I could use it to reach the antique rafters in order to hang myself.
Did I want to hang myself because I was a lonely, drunken whore? Or because I couldn’t figure out how to make a comic about it, to find meaning in it? I didn’t know.
I went to my luggage for a belt, crying a little, sick of it all, of cowering, groveling, slaving away for pennies on scut work while dysfunctional tycoons complained about their man titties, or hoarded priceless antiquities, or told my art director what to do with me. Billionaires decided for me, told me where to go, what to think and draw, they underwrote the conference that brought me here to this hotbed of debauchery that fired my imagination and damaged my soul.
I was tired. Or it was the booze and narcotics, and the billion-dollar pay cut Amy would have to accept to be with me. I wanted to sleep. How would it feel to be gone? Had the world been missing me before I was born? Hasn’t everyone at one time or another imagined himself gone? How sad would my kids be? This body held and protected them, these arms lifted them in the night, this voice came to them even in the womb. A healthy man who played with them on the floor, he went away and never came home. The children weren’t told how he died, and his passing left an empty place, a smaller, meaner, sadder life. I wanted to believe I was worth more dead than alive, but it was about the same, which was nothing.