I went to the bed and sat, holding the note. She’d never confront him. Nothing would come of it. I bowed and smelled the clothes on the bed, her T-shirt, bra, and underpants, taking my time with each, moved and overcome, engaged in the sensory knowledge, holding poignantly to the memories of her parts.
I had some raging, sicko crush on an emotionally stunted zillionaire, and she had a weakness for losers. It was silly and hopeless, and we’d never make it to Minorca. I found my shorts on the floor where I’d tossed them the night before, soaked from the late-night bike ride in the rain, with her key and earrings still in the pockets. I put the key on the kitchen table and placed the earrings in a teacup beside them.
There were some shopping bags from a store in town, and I picked up one and gave it a squeeze. I’d figured she might try to bribe me before she left, as a way to make light of last night’s suggestion that I prostitute myself to her wealthy friends. A gift, or cash or a check, a couple thousand, maybe more. And I’d laugh it off, so she’d pretend to shove it in my pants or something, more laughter, but then she’d get serious and plead, but I’d hold firm. No thanks, I’d say, I don’t need your pity, and shake my head with disdain. So she’d break down, she’d beg, and I’d cave.
I opened the bag to see what she’d bought me and found a gray polo shirt with a duck stitched on the breast and a three-pack of Fruit of the Loom boxers, price tag still on, $16.95. Rolled up at the bottom, like an afterthought, was a yellow necktie with brown loops on it. I examined it carefully, ashamed and confused. It looked like one I’d worn to my Aunt Doris’s wedding in 1979. She’d purchased this stuff at a creaky old store on Main Street that also sold smelly candles and beach toys. I couldn’t understand. Cheap, sensible clothing for the budget-minded male. Apparently I meant nothing to her, which I already knew, but now I knew how little nothing actually meant.
She blew $26,000 on her dog’s knee surgeries, destroyed a one-of-a-kind custom-made ball gown because she couldn’t find the zipper. Though she could also be thrifty and practical. She used old bread bags to carry her lunches, reheated leftovers, tossed in a sprig of rosemary to freshen her pot roast, wore shoes that hurt if they couldn’t be returned, hunted down mysterious charges on her credit card bill and hammered the people who’d tried to overcharge her.
She’d dragged herself out of the working class with the strength of a locomotive, and looked back now with something like contempt. We’d turned into a nation of moochers, she’d told me once, and the attitude of entitlement bothered her. She worried—not that all gains went to the top, that Romney promised to overturn Roe v. Wade, but that our pride was gone, that the moochers didn’t value things, like after-school programs, that were given to them for free. No matter how poor these people were, she’d gone on, it was better to make them pay. Then she’d explain the fee structure at some center she funded.
They lived in a monstrous stone-and-shingle masterpiece and also owned a $20 million duplex overlooking Central Park, and a “crappy” place in London, and a “nice” place in Chamonix. She employed a French-speaking Moroccan chef named Yasmine. I hated her life but thought I should have it. One hundred and twenty million dollars a year was the GDP of the Marshall Islands. If I worked for two thousand years, I’d earn the same as her husband did in one. Their net worth was a concept, like infinity. Easy to say, impossible to imagine.
We were an economic and planetary system at war, victims of a political farce. There’d been moments over the winter when I’d wanted to interrupt our epistolary love affair to unleash a searing rant of impeccable erudition—on the history of unstructured capitalism, twentieth-century U.S. imperialism, American workers forced to compete with Asian slave labor, private for-profit mass incarceration, Donald Rumsfeld, the Koch brothers, Citizens United, and the coming worldwide extinction—but I never got around to it.
I went through her purse and found some used Kleenex, hair ties, gum, a tube of Pantene Overnight Miracle. Eyeglasses, a kid’s toy pen that looked like a cucumber. An Air France deck of cards. In her wallet I found $367 in bills, some dimes and quarters, a discount punch card for a pet food and supply store, credit cards, random business cards—“Win Win, matching Wall Street executives with nonprofit causes.”
I’d been waiting for summer, for her. I’d wanted someone to save me. I wanted to lick her hand like a dying animal. I felt a horrible sadness twisting my face. From the start I’d been trying to function, to win her, to compete from a position of moral, material, psychic, and sexual subordination, underemployed, underfunded, improperly adorned. Loving someone is already so debilitating. To do it from this lowly place was so much worse. I saw an ordinary middle-aged man, unable to meet his responsibilities, jobless and abandoned, hurtling toward a last phase of doom.
I started to scream. It was the scream of a man who had no sense, who panicked and threw terrifying tantrums, smashed things, and sometimes smacked his own kids. I had vowed a long time ago that I would never become him, and I didn’t, tried not to, but I’d become him anyway. Overwhelmed, destructive, destroyed.
I shoved the kitchen table out of the way with surprising ease. The old wooden ladder was heavier than it looked. I dragged it out from behind the filthy plaid sofa and hefted it vertical, vaguely noting the name of the old shipyard burned into one end and the worn wooden dowels that served as steps. I opened it up beneath the cupola’s box of bright sunlight and climbed. At the top of the ladder I took in the view in all directions, the glinting water of the blue-black harbor, sailboats running spinnakers, feeling suddenly more alive, seeing colored spots, blinking and panting. Car traffic backed up all the way to the fish market. Across the highway, undulating dunes went out to the point. The dowels hurt as my flip-flops slipped against my sweaty feet. I swallowed back fear, still a little fuzzy on what I meant to do, as a feeling unimaginably corny and sad took hold.
Who hasn’t felt this way at least once in his life? Who hasn’t thought, at least once, Enough, stop the merry-go-round and let me off? Suicide is a selfish, pathetic, disgusting act. A weak, manipulative, evil thing that leaves behind nothing but the tortured souls of loved ones, twisting in limbo. I’ve lost everything, I’m a misfit, no one understands me, I want out. What a coward—I wanted a coward’s death. I undid my belt and tossed it over the rafter, then cinched it around my throat. Dare me to do it. Dare me to jump! I leaned into the belt to test its strength, felt it tighten, heard the silence of suffocation. I couldn’t catch my breath, but even breathing seemed like one more thing to worry about. My own death felt neat and simple. It felt portable, viable, and private. I started to fade, and panicked, and stepped up to undo the belt buckle, thinking I’d maybe taken this joke too far, as a flip-flop caught on the rung. I heard a loud bang and went flying.
OBSCURE CARTOONIST FOUND DEAD BY STINGY PHILANTHROPIST