One Last Thing Before I Go (9 page)

C
HAPTER 22

“I
s everything OK?” the girl asks him.

She’s pretty, topless, panting slightly, and right to ask, because she is holding, in the palm of her hand, his increasingly flaccid member.

They are lying on a twin bed in Jack’s guest room. Beyond the closed door are the not-so-muffled sounds of throbbing dance mixes, laughter, and drunken conversation. It’s been three days since Silver left Denise’s house and turned off his phone. A few hours ago Jack invited the college girls back from the pool for what he called a spontaneous suicide party. He gave a brief speech about Silver’s impending death, and then began pouring drinks. At some point Silver found himself pulled off the couch to dance. Everyone watched him for a while, until it became apparent that he wasn’t going to go into convulsions anytime soon. He would have felt like an idiot even if he weren’t wearing baggy Bermuda shorts and flip-flops. The girl dancing with him had long dark hair and wore a tank top and a pair of white short shorts under which her tanned legs shone in the phosphorous glow of the blue lightbulbs Jack had screwed into the fixtures.

Dancing with a pretty young thing can turn you on and make you feel like a potato at the same time. Silver surrendered to the moment. Someone handed out little red pills that looked like M&M’s. The dancing girl swallowed hers gleefully and then offered one to him.

“What is it?” Silver said.

“Trust me.”

She put it on her tongue and then opened her mouth, inviting. He trusted her. The waxy taste of lipstick and spearmint gum, a hint of sweat, the thrilling warmth of her tongue in his mouth.

“What’s your name?” he said when he reluctantly came up for air. She told him, and he forgot it instantly.

* * *

And now, through a sequence of events he can no longer recall, they are here, in this bed, her impossibly buoyant breasts hovering inches above his face, his wilting dick in her hand.

He’s never had erection problems before, but now seems as good a time as any to start. This girl whose name he can’t remember is young and beautiful, but he is old enough to be her father, is in fact the father of someone young and beautiful just like her.

“Wait here,” the girl says with a grin, and with no further ceremony, she goes down on him. It feels excruciatingly good for a minute, and then it doesn’t feel like anything at all, like he’s lost all sensation. He can hear the wet sounds of her working down there, but in the dark he feels utterly disconnected. After a moment she gives his dick one last, sorry kiss, like it’s a mischievous but ultimately well-intentioned nephew, then comes back up to where he is.

“What’s wrong?” she says.

Where does he begin?

* * *

After she’s gone back to the party, he waits an appropriate mourning period and then takes matters into his own hands. And maybe it’s all the practice he’s had at the clinic, but within three strokes his dick is standing tall and proud. He wishes what’s-her-name was still here to see it. It occurs to him that there might be something fantastically warped about being able to arouse himself better than the half-naked coed who just went down on him. There is, at least, a subtle metaphor to be divined in this unusual turn of events, but before he can wrap his scattered mind around it, the door opens up and Jack steps in with his arm around another pretty young thing. Jack is carrying two drinks, any one of which he manages not to drop as he and the girl come face to face with Silver, perched on the edge of the bed, clutching his manhood. The other glass shatters on the parquet floor.

And that’s when things get weird. Because Silver can feel himself spinning and rolling, yanking up his shorts as he goes, offering muttered apologies as he flees the room. But on another plane, he’s aware of the fact that he hasn’t actually moved at all, that he’s still sitting there, his fist wrapped around his member, staring up at them.

“What the fuck?” Jack says. The girl giggles, but not in a mean way. And then they’re gone, with only the light of the bathroom reflecting off the broken glass on the floor to confirm that any of this just happened. Then Jack comes back into the room, alone this time, still holding the remaining glass in his hand.

“Jesus, Silver,” Jack says. “Will you put that away?”

And this time, his body seems to get the message from his brain, and he releases his confused dick and pulls up his shorts. Jack sits down on the edge of the bed and hands Silver the glass. Silver throws it back, and shudders.

“I probably don’t have to tell you this, but generally speaking, the objective is to have your erection and the girl in the room at the same time.”

“That’s one way to do it.”

Jack grins and then laughs, and then they’re both laughing, hard, not because anything is funny, but because they’re drunk and drugged and getting older faster than they’d like and really, what else is there to do?

“I’ll miss you when you’re gone, buddy,” Jack says somberly.

“Thanks, man.”

He looks at Silver until Silver looks back, and then quickly looks away. That’s about as much intimacy as either of them can stand.

“You want to tell me what this is all about?”

“Not really.”

Another look, another look away. Jack slaps his leg and gets to his feet. “Fair enough. You coming back out?”

“I’ll be there in a minute.”

“OK. Watch your feet, there’s fucking glass everywhere.”

“I thought you were using plastic cups.”

Jack grins. “The glasses are for the grown-ups.”

* * *

Outside, the party has reached a fever pitch. The girls are all buzzed and sweaty, gyrating wildly to the music. Two of them, stripped down to their bras, dance on Jack’s coffee table. What few men Jack has invited are either dancing ridiculously with the girls or perched on the furniture that’s been moved to the perimeter, downing hard alcohol and watching. Jack is in the center of the dance floor, sweating profusely as he dances pelvis-to-pelvis with a girl Silver recognizes from the pool. What he lacks in grace he makes up for with shameless enthusiasm, and even though he’s an ass, Silver feels a warm rush of affection for him.

“Dead man walking!” Jack shouts, waving to Silver. He’s been calling him that all night.

Sad Todd sits weeping into his whiskey on the arm of a couch. The girls on the coffee table get wrapped up in a passionate kiss, and the room applauds their open-mindedness with shouts of encouragement.

The girl who had come with him into Jack’s guest room leaves the dance floor to embrace him with an enthusiastic hug, like a long-lost love. She is either trying to make him feel better about before, or else the little red pills are still pirouetting through her blood, painting the room pink for her. Either way, he can’t remember the last time someone hugged him like that, and he feels his eyes grow warm and wet.

“You feeling better?” she says, her lips brushing his ear.

“Yeah.”

She smiles. “Dance with me.”

She pulls him into the tangled mass of undulating bodies, wraps her arms around his neck, and shimmies against him. He falls into the basic white man’s two-step and tries not to get in her way. No one over the age of twenty-five should ever dance like this. As a drummer, he has an inherent sense of rhythm, but rhythm and grace are not the same thing. The girl purses her lips and presses her rocking pelvis against his. “You are feeling better,” she says with a sexy grin. She runs her fingertips over his pants, up the length of his erection. Then she leans forward and gives him a warm, openmouthed kiss. He closes his eyes, feeling the room spinning around him, the deafening music, this beautiful girl’s warm, willing lips pressed softly against his own, and he thinks, If I’m going to die, now would be a perfect time to do it. Of course, if he did, he would haunt every kiss this girl ever shared afterward, but we take our immortality where we can get it.

“Come with me,” she says, leading him off the dance floor, back toward the hallway to the guest room. Before he can decide whether or not he’s up for another attempt, another girl squares off in front of them with an angry scowl on her face.

“Jesus, Silver. Are you kidding me?”

The girl holding his hand drops it and, after a moment of uncertainty, touches his shoulder in farewell and heads back to the dance floor to begin the healing process. He looks at Casey, who is drilling him with unforgiving eyes, and he thinks, for the second time in as many minutes, that now would be as good a time as any to check out.

Casey is wearing a short skirt, a backpack, and an expression that causes his internal organs to clench with regret. She opens her mouth to speak, and he knows that whatever she says will further pierce his already perforated soul, but he is spared from hearing it because right then, Jack’s flimsy coffee table finally gives way, and a collective squeal rises up from the room as the dancing coeds come crashing to the ground in a tangle of limbs and underwear.

“Shazam!” Jack yells. Casey rolls her eyes and looks at Silver like it’s all his fault, then storms out of the apartment.

CH
APTER 23

“W
ere you really going to have sex with that girl?”

“It was a strong possibility. She gave me this pill.”

“So you were being date raped? Is that your story?”

“I don’t need a story. We were two adults.”

“It doesn’t go by cumulative age, you know.”

“She was legal.”

“How do you know? Do you ask for ID before you have sex?”

“No, but that’s probably not a bad idea.”

“You’re not charming, Silver. You’re a creep. How would you feel if I fucked Jack?”

“Shit, Casey.”

“No wonder you never remarried. You’re too busy chasing skanks who only do you to get back at their fathers.”

“Is that what you were doing? Getting back at me?”

“No. I actually had sex with an age-appropriate partner.”

“So you figured a condom was unnecessary.”

“You’re an asshole.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“OK. I’m moving in.”

“Where?”

“Here. This shithole. You got yourself a roommate.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I’m pregnant and you’re suicidal. We’ll have a blast.”

“I’m not suicidal.”

“Yeah, and I’m not pregnant.”

“Why are you here, Casey?”

“Isn’t this where you come when your life goes to shit?”

“Your life isn’t going to shit. I’ll take you back to Early Intervention tomorrow. We’ll get it taken care of.”

“Yeah, about that. I’ve changed my mind.”

“What? When?”

“Right around the time you decided not to have that operation. You inspired me.”

“Casey . . .”

“I’m going to ride it out, just like my old man.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“It runs in the family.”

* * *

He met a girl in a bar, or a club, or a movie theater, or a fraternity house. The point is, there was loud music playing in the background. As soon as he saw her face, he knew what it would look like when she ended it. But he went in anyway, because he was eighteen and horny and years away from knowing how much there was to truly fear. Maggie Seals. She was taller than him, a long, limber playground of a girl, and in the black light of her dorm room, the silken mileage of her skin went on forever. He followed her around like a puppy for his entire freshman year, and went broke calling her long-distance over summer break, but she still showed up the next fall with a prepared speech and a new boyfriend. For a long time afterward, every girl he slept with felt just a little too small.

CHAPTER
24

H
e wakes up and thinks,
I’m alive
. This simple fact fills him with a sense of accomplishment. He didn’t die in his sleep.

Last night he was filled with the electric certainty that he would. That at some point, mid-snore, that last bit of threadbare tissue holding his aorta together would finally snap, and he’d bleed out in his sleep and wake up dead. The thought made sleep impossible. That, and the knowledge that Casey was in bed a few feet away, in the second bedroom that, in spite of everything, he still thought of as hers. He was thrilled to have her there, but also terrified that she would be the one to find his cold lifeless body. He lay awake, picturing the scene: She comes in, calls his name a few times (he still cannot picture her calling him Dad), and then tentatively approaches the bed. Silver? she says. Then she prods him, his shoulder most likely, and in doing so feels how stiff and cold he is. Her eyes grow wide as she realizes what’s happened. But then what? That’s where he ran into trouble. It would have been nice to imagine that she is overcome with grief, but the truth is, Silver couldn’t see it. And also, hadn’t he put her through enough already? So maybe just a wry smile, as if to say “Good one, Silver,” and then a quick phone call to Denise. But maybe not even that. Maybe an indifferent shrug—
Oh well
—and then back to normal for all concerned. She grabs her phone and posts a Twitter update:
Found my dad dead in his bed. WTF? #howwasyourday?

But at some point, his racing mind must have run out of steam and allowed him to sleep, because here he is, waking up. And now he can hear voices coming from the living room, and he instantly recognizes his father’s deep baritone laugh. It can’t be Sunday already. He sits up in bed and falls back instantly as the room starts to spin. For a little while, he worries that he’s having another ministroke, but then remembers the little red pill on that girl’s tongue and realizes that he’s just drugged and hungover. He gets up again, slower this time, and performs a kind of shuffle/stagger into the living room.

His father is seated on the couch, in his customary all-purpose midnight-blue suit. Casey is curled up on the love seat, eating cereal from a bowl.

“He’s alive,” she declares dryly, raising an eyebrow at him. Her irony is unintentional, or else she’s so good at it that he’s just a bit slow on the uptake. He can’t begin to remember the last time he woke up to her voice. And the situation is not what you’d call optimal, but still, the happiness he feels at having her in his apartment is so powerful that for a moment he finds himself forgetting that she’s knocked up and he’s down for the count. He wonders why he didn’t fight for this years ago, which triggers a small but intensely powerful spasm of regret. She is wearing boxer shorts, one leg tucked under her, and he can remember watching her at four years old, in a pair of orange shorts, her thin, coltish legs climbing the stairs ahead of him, and wishing she could just stay that way forever. When kids outgrow who they are, you don’t mourn them, but you should. That four-year-old girl is as lost to him as if she’d died, and he’d give anything to have her back.

“Are you crying, Silver?” she says.

“A little.” He wipes his eyes and turns to his father, who is looking at him with unmasked concern.

“I’m sorry I disappointed you,” Silver says.

Ruben gives him a funny look. “When?”

“I don’t know. Always.”

“Silver.” There is a great warmth in his eyes. Silver wishes he knew how he did that. He would look at Casey like that, and then she’d just know.

“Know what?” Casey says.

“What?”

“You were saying ‘Then she’d know.’”

Shit. He has to get a handle on this.

“I’m sorry. Just thinking out loud.”

They’re both looking at him funny now.

“Are you having another stroke?”

“Hard to say.”

His father stands up, taking charge. “Do you own a suit?”

“No.”

He nods, as if his worst fears have been confirmed. What kind of life requires no suit?

“I have some band tuxes.”

“That will have to do, then.”

“Where are we going?”

“I’ll tell you on the way.”

“Can I come?” Casey says.

“No.”

“Come on, Pops,” she pleads.

Her grandfather looks at her fondly, and if there’s sadness in his gaze, he hides it well. “One train wreck at a time,” he says.

* * *

In the driver’s seat, Ruben looks over at the ruffles on Silver’s tuxedo shirt and grins.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Can you tell me where we’re going?”

“To a funeral.”

“Who died?”

“Eric Zeiring.”

“I didn’t know him.”

“Me neither.”

Outside, the sky is cloudless. It’s another scorching day. Silver turns up the Camry’s air-conditioning, and it starts to whine a little. Ruben absently turns it back down. Silver can’t remember the last time he was in a car with his father.

They pass Kennedy Park, where Silver watches a tall guy in gym shorts pushing his kid in a stroller and walking a large golden retriever. He looks totally cool with it. Silver pictures the guy’s wife back at their house, in paint-speckled shorts, her hair up in a bandanna as she paints a mural on their little girl’s bedroom wall. Her husband has gotten the baby and the dog out of the way so she can work. Later, he’ll drop them off so he can get to his regular basketball game, and on the way home he’ll pick up a nice bottle of wine, which they’ll drink in their claw-foot bathtub after putting their daughter down for the night. They’ve given up nothing in their marriage. His athletics, her art, it all merged effortlessly when they came together. Silver is happy for him, for the life he’s made, for the little girl who will grow up in that home.

“. . . position on suicide?” Ruben is saying.

“What?”

“I was wondering if you were aware of the Jewish position on suicide.”

“I’m guessing they don’t come down in favor of it?”

He nods. “No, they don’t. It’s a grave sin. The tradition is that for a person who kills himself intentionally, there should be no mourning rites, no eulogy. None of the honors of burial.”

“Is that supposed to be a disincentive?”

“Maybe. It’s hard to know. In the entire Bible, there are only two instances of suicide. The most famous one, which has greatly influenced Jewish law, is the suicide of King Saul on Mount Gilboa. You remember that story?”

“He fell on his sword. They were losing to the Philistines. He knew what would happen to him when he was captured.”

Ruben smiles, clearly happy that Silver has retained some element of Jewish knowledge. When they were little, every Friday night Silver and Chuck would walk home from temple, holding their father’s hands. And as they hopped and zigzagged to avoid any sidewalk cracks, he would tell them a story from the Bible, a different one each time. Silver favored the miracles—the splitting of seas, manna from heaven, water from rocks, the ten plagues. Chuck loved the battles. It was either a testament to Ruben’s storytelling skills or simply a function of the Bible’s aesthetic that he could usually incorporate both.

“That’s right,” he says, now in full rabbinic mode. “The sages used Saul’s suicide as a qualification, a separate status. If there were mitigating circumstances that distressed a person, then the rabbis could take a more lenient approach.”

“And you can apply that to pretty much every suicide.”

“That’s true. I think that was the point.”

“A loophole,” Silver says. “Nice.”

“Compassion,” Ruben says.

“You say tomato . . .”

His father shakes his head, frowning. This is why they don’t discuss religion. “The point I’m trying to make is that suicide is, both morally and spiritually, a very tricky area. Forget religion, forget God, for that matter.”

“Done.”

Ruben flashes him an annoyed glance. “This is serious.”

“Sorry. I know.”

“You have a family. You have a daughter. And regardless of how lousy things have been, Casey is still quite young. You have a lifetime to be the father you want to be to her. To be the person you meant to become before . . .” His voice trails off. This is the closest he has ever come to acknowledging his view of Silver’s life.

“Before what, Dad?”

“Before you got lost.”

Silver wants to get angry, but the anger won’t come. Instead, he finds himself fighting back tears. “I don’t know what happened,” he says weakly.

Ruben nods and pats his knee. Silver sees the age spots and wrinkles on his father’s hand. We’re all aging, he thinks, coming apart cell by cell at an alarming rate.

“Cheer up,” Ruben says brightly as they turn into the cemetery. “We’re here.”

“Yeah, about this. Why are we here? I didn’t know this guy.”

“How do you think I feel? I have to give the eulogy.”

“That is rough.”

Ruben shrugs. “Could be worse.” He looks over at me. “I could be wearing a tuxedo from the eighties.”

Silver laughs. They both do. They have the same laugh.

* * *

Eric Zeiring was twenty-eight years old and lived alone in some shithole in Brooklyn until he died of a drug overdose. No one tells Silver this, but he infers it from the things people are not saying, from the way everyone who speaks is carefully couching their words. His father makes reference to Eric’s struggles, to his parents’ unwavering love and numerous attempts to help him. To the elusive peace he has now finally found.

A single, enormous white cloud unfurls out across the sky with enough texture to see any shape you’d like: a woman’s boots, a weeping clown, Sigmund Freud in profile. It’s a small funeral, maybe thirty people gathered graveside, mostly friends of Eric’s mother. Eric’s father, balding and featureless, stands off to the side, looking impatient and out of place. Silver’s guess is they’ve been divorced long enough to be strangers. Eric’s mother, petite and pretty, weeps and nods emphatically at everything Ruben says. He talks about Eric’s mop of curly blond hair that made him look like a cherub when he was a boy, about how Eric loved to visit his nana in Key Biscayne, about what an athlete he was. He evokes the boy Eric was for his parents, to help them forget about the sorry man he became. No parent should ever bury a child, Ruben says.

It makes Silver wonder about his own funeral.

Because pretty soon, in a matter of days or weeks, his father will have to bury him. And maybe no parent should bury their child, but it’s really a question of value. His father has a wife, another son, grandchildren, and people like the Zeirings who count on him for comfort and perspective, to put a spiritual spin on things when the darkness invades their ordered lives. His funeral will be crowded, but not with his people. The entire community will come out to comfort his parents, which is what they deserve.

But who will be there for him?

Casey, of course. She’ll be there, maybe even shed a tear, he hopes, but the loss will be more theoretical than real, since she lost him years ago, really. Denise will be there, the self-conscious ex-wife, looking much sexier than she needs to. Definitely a low-cut dress and a push-up bra, stiletto heels that will punch small wormholes in the grass around his grave. Will she cry? For Casey, maybe. She’ll stand between Rich and Casey, and they will leave the graveyard a whole family, no longer complicated by the phantom limb that was him.

Who else? Some of the guys from the band? Maybe. Dana? Depends on how empty her life really is. Do you go to pay respects to the drummer you occasionally hook up with? It’s a judgment call. Jack and Oliver, certainly. Jack will be restless, scanning the crowd for sad, desperate women and saying inappropriate things too loudly while Oliver shushes him, also too loudly. Maybe a few other guys from the building, hoping for a similar courtesy if they too should die before getting their sad lives back on track.

Everybody dies alone. That’s a fact. Some more alone than others.

He looks at Mrs. Zeiring. Her eyes are swollen from crying. She loved this fucked-up junkie with her whole heart, breast-fed him, carried him, celebrated his first words, his first steps, overlooked his flaws, wiped his tears, and lived for his smiles. Then something in him broke, something she couldn’t see, and she watched her boy die slow and hard, and probably with a good deal of shouting and nastiness as he went. Her marriage is over, her boy is gone. There was a time when they all lived together, like Denise, Casey, and Silver, a time when she never could have seen this coming. He feels her pain.

Ruben finishes speaking and nods to the funeral director, who moves forward and flips a switch, and the coffin slowly begins to descend into the grave. The only sound is the small motor of the coffin-lowering device, and that shouldn’t be what Mrs. Zeiring hears as her son is taken away from her. Someone should sing, Silver thinks, and then someone does—a low, somewhat hoarse man’s voice singing “Amazing Grace” quietly but with great sincerity. Ruben’s eyes grow wide, and almost in the same instant that it occurs to Silver that “Amazing Grace” is not sung at Jewish funerals, he recognizes the singing voice as his own.

But Mrs. Zeiring is looking at him, not with anger or surprise, but a strange half-smile, and he decides that the only thing worse than spontaneously breaking into a Christian hymn at a Jewish funeral while dressed for a wedding would be to not finish it. So he does, slowly, and with feeling, while Mrs. Zeiring closes her eyes and thinks some secret truths to herself, and up at the lectern Silver’s poor father somehow achieves some measure of dignity as he quietly shits a hard square brick.

* * *

The sky turns threatening on the drive home. In this heat, quick, random thunderstorms are a daily occurrence.

“So,” his father says, “what did you think?”

“I don’t know. What was the desired result?”

“I’m not going to paint a bull’s-eye for you.”

“I thought maybe you wanted me to see what it looks like for a parent to bury a child.”

He scratches his beard thoughtfully. “That would have been petty and manipulative of me, but I won’t rule it out.”