My Beautiful Failure (2 page)

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” I finally said.

“Why not?” he asked. A distinctive painting of a chicken, done by someone at Mom’s museum, hung on one wall. Anytime people came for dinner, they commented on the chicken. Dad’s gaze drifted to it, then back to me. A year ago he fit into my clothes. Now he had put weight on, even had a little belly forming.

“I would hate to see you get all excited and set yourself up . . .”

“Set myself up?” Dad pressed. Was he challenging me to say it?

“He’s fine now, Billy,” Mom said.

Dad spoke at the same time. “I painted thirty years ago.”

“I don’t want you to get too involved in it and then get upset. That’s all.”

“What would upset me? And even so, why can’t I get upset?”

Mom and Linda wouldn’t say it. But I didn’t want a repeat of last winter.

I
’ve brought a new friend home after school. It’s only two thirty, and I see Dad’s car in the driveway. He must have come home early. I walk into the living room with my friend, expecting to introduce him to Dad. Gordon is so superb that I really want to impress him. He’s new in town, and though some of the other new kids are snobby, Gordon isn’t. He plays French horn and has played on the White House lawn with the All-State band. He seems confident and relaxed in every situation, and his hair seems exactly the same length every time I see him.

I hear Dad moving at the other end of the house, and call his name. In the past he’s always had a story or joke for my friends. Sometimes he’s played an aria from his collection of opera CDs. But this time he doesn’t come.

“Just a minute,” I tell Gordon. Finally Dad walks into the hall, but he doesn’t look at Gordon or me. He goes past us, toward the den, rubbing his hands and whistling tunelessly. Now he’s coming back again.

“Dad, stop a minute. I want you to meet someone.”

“Are you looking for something, Mr. Morrison?” Gordon asks. “Can I help you find it?”

Gordon watches Dad with that game smile: relaxed, confident. But I begin to realize that Dad’s walking and his whistling are involuntary, that some kind of worry is driving Dad from one end of the house to the other.

After a few minutes Gordy also realizes something is very wrong, something I haven’t told him because I didn’t know and I wouldn’t know how to explain it if I did. He walks back to the bus stop with his instrument case and his backpack, and that is the last time I bring a friend home.

D
ad stopped sleeping, then eating, then working, then talking. I can tell you how long it lasted because I counted the days: 128. October to March.

W
hen Dad got better, Mom’s boss at the Brooksbie Museum resigned, and Mom practically moved in. Mom was director now, and she could ask the other workers, even the unpaid ones, to do more than they wanted, the way Pudge had asked her. She was all about the museum, dedicated to the history of the Massachusetts leather industry, with rarely a sentence about anything else. Her promotion became a shiny new scooter, her guilt about what happened to Dad the Mom-style sneakers that propel her forward. When I questioned her she said, “He’s fine now.” When I questioned her further she added, “Isn’t he?” and went back to reviewing slides for the museum.

In the summer the four of us went camping in two tents beside a New Hampshire lake, and Mom and Dad told Linda and me, while we sealed cheese sandwiches in foil and dropped them into the fire, that the trip was to thank us for our help over the winter. After that we didn’t say “depression” anymore. We mostly said “last winter.”

T
he day after Dad decided to paint again, I watched from the front door as his car pulled up. He unloaded twelve canvases from the trunk. That must have set him back two hundred dollars.

Linda and her friend Jodie burst impishly from the house. Jodie was pale and soft, with flimsy hair that was always shedding its ornaments. Jodie had the backbone of a ramen noodle. She did everything Linda did. I suppose if Linda ever died, Jodie wouldn’t be able to give the eulogy because she will have died too. Most of her time was spent doing crafts at our house: pounding brown leaves in the bathtub and calling them paper, or baking clay poops in the oven and calling them ceramics.

Dad had the girls carry the canvases into the utility room right off the driveway—a (strangely) underutilized room that housed our furnace and some sports equipment, cleaning supplies, and tools.

“What’s the plan?” Linda asked, stepping over some cross-country ski poles.

“This is going to be my studio,” Dad said. He pulled the chain on a light above his head. “I’m going to actualize every major idea I’ve had since leaving art school.”

“A studio,” Jodie said. She stacked the canvases against one wall. “I love the sound of that.”

“That seems ambitious, Dad.”

“Billy. I didn’t see you there.” I had followed them in. I was wearing socks without shoes, and my feet made no sound.

“‘Ambitious’ is no longer a dirty word in my life,” Dad said. “It was for a while. And I’m sorry if it is in yours. If so, that’s my fault, because I haven’t shown you what’s important.”

Dad’s ancient suitcase, full of miscellaneous small hardware pieces, sat on an old table that had belonged to Grandma Pearl. I loved running my hands through the pieces when I was little. The churning metal made the same sound as beach stones being rolled back and forth by a wave.

“I’m ambitious, Dad,” I said, rumpling the metal for old times’ sake. It wasn’t like Dad, the old Dad anyway, to be so serious and to speak in long paragraphs. I didn’t get why everything he said these days had to have such a
point
to it.

He motioned to me to move the suitcase to the floor. “How are your grades? Are they ambitious grades?” he asked.

Jodie made an O at Linda, as if they had caught me getting yelled at.

“I told you, they’ll be up. I have high hopes for this year. I just need to get focused.” I hadn’t told my parents, but school was for me like Dad’s job was for him: the thing I needed but hated.

Dad slid a stepstool from beneath the old table. He reached for a shelf set high into the wall and pulled out a heavy box. As the box came forward it tipped, but Dad caught it.

“God, look at all this,” he said, taking out old sketches, textbooks, and photographs. A few framed paintings were in the stack as well. He brought down more boxes, and Linda and Jodie piled them near the cleared-out space by the canvases.

“I want to see what’s in these,” Linda said.

“We want to see everything,” Jodie added.

“No.” Dad closed the boxes, and his voice got low. “I’ll go through these on my own. Lots of good memories here. You girls go back to what you were doing. Thank you.”

I pretended to help organize until the girls were gone.

——

“A studio,” I said, pressing my back against the door as Dad cleared out some beach toys that could go into the attic. “How about just doing one or two paintings to see whether you still like it? A few months ago you were just getting back into normal life. You couldn’t even . . .”

Dad froze. I didn’t know how to talk to him without being offensive. I hoped he’d see that I was trying to help, just like Linda and Jodie had been. I stuffed my hands into the cuffs of my sweater, as if they were the words I
needed to take back. How could I say it? There was a past him and a present him, and he didn’t agree with me on which him he was.

When he spoke again he didn’t look angry. He seemed understanding—tender almost, the kind of understanding that makes you feel small and stupid.

“You were a big help last year, Billy. We both know you and Mom and Linda nearly saved my life. But please don’t treat me like I’m still sick. Because if you treat me like I’m sick, I’ll start acting like I’m sick, and then the next thing you know I will be sick. And I don’t ever want to be sick again.”

“That’s exactly what I don’t want, Dad.”
I should touch him
, I thought.
Just go ahead and do it, the way Linda does
. I pulled my hand out and aimed it toward Dad’s shoulder.

He caught my hand in midair, like I was high-fiving him. He clasped my fingers and pressed them back to me.

“Here’s an idea, Billy,” Dad said, pulling out some rags to wipe the plaster dust from his old portfolio. The way he touched that old stuff. As if he could feel the years dried up inside it. As if he could add water and his college days would spring back to life. “You have a lot of talent. Why don’t you find a project of your own?”

C
hoose your poison,” Gordon said, leading me to the wicker papasan chairs on his deck overlooking a private beach. Gordy’s father was a lawyer and they were rich, but Gordy would never lord it over anyone. He held out two pints of ice cream: pistachio and peanut butter cup. Premium, of course. I liked both and would have preferred to share, but not knowing if rich people shared ice cream, I took pistachio. He transferred his to a bowl, so I did the same.

“He thinks I need a project,” I explained. We’d started this conversation on the phone, but I wanted some privacy and would use any excuse to visit.

“What did your mom say?”

“She agreed with him.”

“Ouch. I can see why you’re ticked off.”

I watched an airplane drop expertly over the Boston skyline and into Logan Airport.

“But you know, it’s kind of reasonable,” Gordy said.

“It is?”

“Well, maybe he means not that you’re in the way, which is how you’re taking it, but that you should have something you’re really excited about. Because he’s excited about something, and it’s cool to be excited. Do you want to try the peanut butter cup, too? I have a couple of extra spoons.”

We switched flavors, but I was too distracted to form an opinion on which I liked better.

“You must have good parents to want to put that kind of spin on what parents say. I mean, you must have had—” I felt awkward around Gordy every time I said “parents,” plural. His mother died of cystic fibrosis shortly after they came to town. The main thing people knew about Gordy, for months and months, was that his mom had coughed blood into a handkerchief in the administrative office when she registered him for school.

“Tell me this,” Gordy said after swallowing what was in his mouth and wiping his lips with a napkin. “What do you like to do?”

“You know. Ride my bike, listen to music.” I tick-tocked the spoon to show how monotonous I was.

“What about your songwriting? Are you still doing that?”

“Yeah, but it feels empty. Everything is flat. I mean, last year—last year felt so important. I saved somebody’s life, you know? What could be more important than that? I don’t know what to do other than take longer and longer bike rides.” I put down my ice cream and slouched in the chair, arms folded across my chest. “I’m only sixteen, and I feel like my life is over.

“I guess it’s different for you,” I continued. “You have
Brenda. Someone you can tell your hopes and dreams to. Someone who knows everything about you and thinks you’re amazing.”

“Whoa! Let’s not go overboard. She thinks I’m okay. I don’t remember her using the word ‘amazing.’”

“She’s a great catch,” I insisted.

Gordon chuckled. “Remember when Brenda and I went to the Roomful of Blues concert? Mitchell was in line waiting for their tickets. Andy was out on the sidewalk trying to chat up some girl, and every time he looked at Brenda and me he would say, ‘Nice work’ or ‘Major score’ or ‘You the man.’ I had to tell him to cut it out because he was making Brenda uncomfortable.”

“The other girl too, probably. What a jerk.”

Gordy wagged his spoon at me. “I know what your project should be,” he said.

“What?”

He looked into his ice cream to make his suggestion seem nonchalant. “Why don’t you join the Listeners?”

“The people with that big sign over the bridge?” I sat upright and Gordy laughed. I hadn’t expected this at all.

“The suicide hotline. According to the sign, they’re always looking for people. They even want people our age. Actually, I’ve thought of you every time I’ve seen that sign.”

I had seen the sign, of course, but never connected it to myself. Never connected it to any real person. But certainly there were people on the other end, taking the calls. Gordy was even more exceptional than I had given him
credit for. “That seems like it would be important. Talking somebody off a ledge.”

“You’d be great at it,” Gordy said, piling all that remained of both flavors into my bowl. “And you have the experience to back it up. If I ever got so low I wanted to off myself, you’d be the first person I’d call.”

B
ack in my room, I looked up the Listeners’ website. A video on their homepage showed cars driving over the Joseph E. Garland Bridge, under the Listeners sign. Someone got out of his car and walked to the railing. He saw the Listeners sign that said
FEELING DESPERATE
?
CALL US NOW
. Steady piano chords, ominous, like the tolling of a bell, played over the scene. Then the video switched to a youngish woman. She said she had lost her job and apartment and her kids were about to be taken from her, and she had been in so much pain that it hurt her to live each day. She’d put on a parka with big pockets and driven to the beach to fill those pockets with rocks. She’d been about to walk into the water and drown herself, but as she pulled into the beach parking lot she called the Listeners number and they talked her out of it.

“Without Listeners I wouldn’t be here,” she said, “and my kids wouldn’t have a mother.”

Another guy talked about how his sister had killed
herself and he had felt helpless to stop it. I was glad I had my earbuds on. I wouldn’t want Mom and Dad to hear.

A college student came on next. The caption beneath her picture said “Volunteer Coordinator.” “This is a life-saving service,” she said. “People call us who can’t talk to anyone else. When they call here, they can break out of their isolation and be themselves. Finally they have a connection to someone and something.” As the music got louder, she looked directly at the camera—at me, I felt—and said, “We save lives every day.”