Passion and Affect (14 page)

After he was gone, I thought about Charlie Hartz. It seemed that he was very bound up in my life, but apart from the summer and at my parents' dinner parties I rarely saw him. What kept people like me and Jeremy and my sister around him was that Charlie got the best out of what you were at the time you were it. Jeremy was a punk and I was a sloppy adolescent, and Charlie both savored our conditions and responded to what we were without any of the condescension adults usually fall back on. When he discovered that I could draw, he made me teach him and he spent several hours a day drawing pictures of Minna, which he would make me criticize. To pay me back, he became merciless about my backstroke, standing like a raja at the end of the pool, shouting insults until I got out of the water, blue in the face, and told him to go to hell. He arched an eyebrow. “If you were some sort of a spastic, I'd leave you alone. But if you tried you'd have a really poetic backstroke going for you.” He didn't mind laziness, as long as it was not laziness about doing something. He pried out of Jeremy that Jeremy took pictures, and the two of them spent an afternoon in the New Jersey swamps taking artistic photos of swamp grass. It gave both of them fantastic head colds. When he found out that my father knew how to install telephones, splicing into the Bell lines, and thereby cheating the telephone company, he and my father put an antique phone in every room of the Hartz house, and when Flossie complained that the ringing was driving her crazy they figured out a way to shut off the ringing and silenced ten of the phones. With my sister, he went diving and did the crosswords. He got all the obscurities, like brass money of India and water birds of the South Seas, and she got all the puns.

As winter started, Flossie and her set began their serious socializing with the usual round of dinner parties. At this time, Charlie and some local boy built a little car out of old parts, which Charlie used as a golf cart-
cum
-Land-Rover, and he appeared at parties slightly oil-stained. The gate to the pool was locked, and there was a flat wooden roof fitted over it, so that if Minna managed to get through the gate she couldn't fall in. After the first snowfall, he took Flossie and Minna to Barbados for two weeks.

Right before Christmas the weather became unnaturally warm. Snow melted into mud and car wheels skidded in it. The sky and the ground were mud-colored; it was like living between two roofs. I came home from school one afternoon on the warmest day, and in the living room I found my sister, who was not due home for another week. She and my mother were drinking and they were both red-eyed. It was another crisis. I wondered if she and Willis had broken off the engagement. I hung up my coat and my mother met me at the closet.

“What's going on?” I said.

She was very tense. “Something's happened,” she said.

“What?” I asked.

She said very quietly in a hysterical voice, “Charlie Hartz is dead.”

It was shocking, and I stepped backward, away from her voice. “Why?” I asked.

She said, “He shot himself this morning in his car,” and rubbed her knuckles against her teeth.

It was the first time anyone I knew had died. I tried to imagine what Charlie had thought of when he got into his car and when he put the gun up to his temple. I wondered what he felt when the bullet went through his head. I wondered what he felt now, dead, and where he was. Then I went to my room and cried. I wondered if it wasn't true at all and he was in his garage, working on his golf cart. When my father came home, he made me drink some brandy and then we went to Flossie's house. Minna had been sent to an aunt's, and Flossie was under sedation. Her mother was there, a keen-eyed, regal old woman, who had a foxlike intelligent face that prowed over an enormous bosom. She spoke to my parents off in a corner, and what I wasn't supposed to hear was that Charlie hadn't left a note, that his business was in order, and that, as far as they knew, his health was good. The rumors were that he was bankrupt or had cancer. But there was no note, no sign.

My parents stayed with Flossie's mother at Flossie's that night, and my sister and I went home. We were both dazed and kept mumbling “I don't believe it” at each other. She talked to Willis for an hour on the telephone. When we finally had dinner, it was as if the whole house was in the midst of a funeral. None of the lights seemed to work and we ate in dimness. We picked at our food. Willis came over and spent the night.

My parents came back the next morning and we sat at breakfast, all of us tired and strained. The telephone rang and my mother answered it. “It's for you,” she said to me, frosty in the voice. “It's Jeremy's mother.”

Mrs. Flower said how sorry she was to disturb me, that we all must be very upset. What she was calling about was that Mr. Flower had called Jeremy to tell him the news. He had taken it very badly and refused to come for the funeral. She wanted me to call and make him come home for it.

I called, and Jeremy said that he knew what he felt about Charlie and that his coming to the funeral wouldn't bring Charlie back and he refused to come down to hear someone who barely knew Charlie reciting insincerities over his body.

I asked him if he would come home for me, because
I
had to go to the funeral.

“I won't watch those vultures socializing around him,” he said. We were both very shaky. He said he would come down to see me, but not to go to the funeral. Then he said, “Did they tell you exactly what happened?”

“He shot himself,” I said.

There was an odd sort of glee in his voice, like someone championing a defeated, finished fighter. “He got up, had breakfast, and drove his car off and did it,” he said. “But that's not all. It's very corny.”

I was furious. “What are you talking about?”

“It's corny,” he said. His voice was ragged. He was very near tears. “Don't you know where he did it? He drove to Paradise Lane.
Paradise Lane
. That's very corny. He did it deliberately.” He went on and on, about how Paradise Lane was the suicide note he didn't leave, and how it was an existential gesture. He was babbling and I was crying.

After I hung up, I asked my father if the bit about Paradise Lane was true.

He said it was.

“What do you think it meant?” I asked him.

He put his pipe in his mouth and looked at me with the sort of worldliness that spans humor and outrage. “Not a damn thing,” he said. “Just a place to park his car.”

a road in indiana

R
AD MC CLOSKY
was born in 1938, Patricia Burr knew. His hair is dark blond, he is six feet tall, and he weighs in at one hundred and eighty-five pounds. At the age of twenty-three he married the former June Hulton and was divorced six years later. He has a son, Tyler, for whom he has written a number of songs, including “Tow-Headed Angel.” This information appears on the back of Rad McClosky's record album,
Closing Doors
, and it is from this source that Patricia Burr also knew that Rad McClosky had been a delivery man with the Tina Laundry in Nashville before he was discovered singing with Farron Leeds and the Neap Brothers, as one of the Neap Brothers. Patricia had never heard music like this until she got to Indiana, where the air waves were pulsating constantly with it. During the day, when Richard was teaching, she played the record over and over, learning the songs by heart. At night, and in the shower, she hummed the title song. When the record was playing, she sang with it:

“The lights went out when you walked out on me

Closing doors is all that I can see

Now my heart is dark and shuttered and

My windows painted shut

At night I cry for what can never be.”

The first day she had the record, Patricia played it for Richard, who sat smoking his pipe and listening intelligently, hunched in his chair with his elbows on his knees. When it was over, she looked at him hopefully. He thought for a minute and then asked her if she would mind not playing it when he was at home.

Rad McClosky was Patricia's only happy discovery in Indiana. She had been there a year, but she had been an Easterner all her life, and she was a stranger. One afternoon, driving home from the Great West Supermarket, she punched randomly at the buttons on the radio and stopped at the first few bars of what the announcer later said was a cut from the new Rad McClosky album. She pulled over to the side of the road and parked the car to listen to it. It was a song called “Long Ago Love,” backed by bass, piano, and slide guitar, sung in a husky, mournful voice. The guitar was so sharp that Patricia felt her heart was being sliced. Tears came into her eyes. Then she made an illegal U-turn and drove back to the shopping center. At Flame's discount record store she asked the clerk shyly for the new Rad McClosky album, as if it were a phrase in code. She was afraid that she had gotten the name wrong and the clerk would look blankly at her. It was slightly miraculous to her that the clerk nodded and put the record into her hands. On the cover was a picture of Rad McClosky, smiling and scowling—the expression that made him famous. A bright lock of hair fell onto his high forehead.

She drove home impatiently through the traffic, her heart beating with frustration at every red light. She was so eager with her keys that she dropped them at the door. Inside she put the record on and was relieved to find a note from Richard taped to the icebox informing her that he would be home late. It read:

P. Fac. meeting today. Home 6:30 or thereabouts. Fridge filthy, I might add. R.

She listened to both sides of the record twice, sitting on the floor with her ear pressed up against a speaker. She was dazzled and rapt, anxious to memorize all the songs at once. She turned the sound up and went back to the kitchen. The icebox was not filthy that she could see, but dry shreds of lettuce and breadcrumbs littered the bottom. There were faint finger smudges on the door. But if Richard said it was filthy, it probably was. Patricia believed that Richard possessed a higher wisdom, and that her own chief flaw was failure of vision. Richard was very solid: he took responsibility seriously. He took his classes, his marriage, the order of his rooms, and his newspaper in the morning seriously. Richard was the most thoroughly informed person Patricia had ever known. He believed that if you opted, out of conscious will, to do a thing, it should be done completely. In his presence, Patricia knew she was a child. The only thing she knew anything about was music, but this slight knowledge was discounted by Richard on the grounds that she was untrained and couldn't read it. His interest in music was perfunctory. He had a basic record library of the standard obscure classics, and he liked to hear Stravinsky during dinner.

Patricia wished the crumbs in the icebox bothered her; she wished the smudges on the door were offensive. These things ought to matter, she knew, like knowing how to read music if you loved it so. She picked up a rag, intending to clean, but instead she made herself a cup of coffee and listened to Rad McClosky. She realized that she was in the grip of what Richard called “emotional sloppiness,” and that it was getting worse. After all, she had
chosen
to stay home and keep house, chosen it over going back to school as Richard suggested. She was not keeping her end of the bargain up. She and Richard had been discussing this of late, and of late Patricia had stopped sleeping properly, stopped cleaning the house properly as she once had, and had stopped reading
Bleak House
two hundred pages in. The application for a modern dance class sat on her bureau, filled out but unsent. It had been there for two months. Sitting over her coffee, Patricia realized that what she
really
wanted to do was to listen to Rad McClosky singing “Closing Doors.”

For a month she played the record over and over during the day, and she was afraid that it was getting some what worn. There was a small scratch on “Closing Doors” and a larger one on “The Fire in My Heart That Burns for You.” She thought she might buy another copy as a contingency, in case the first gave out altogether. At night she suffered slightly that she couldn't listen to it since it disturbed Richard. He was finishing his novel, called
Pain in Its Simplicity
, and he needed quiet. She knew that if she were finishing a novel, she would be annoyed if Richard played Stravinsky all the time and she knew that if that were the case, Richard would be good about Stravinsky. Every night, Richard put in two hours on
Pain in Its Simplicity
and an hour preparing his lectures for the three English courses he taught.

Richard was very sensitive to noise: they had the top floor of an old frame house and Richard had chosen it so there would be no footfall above them. Richard's study faced the yard, but he kept the window closed although no one was ever out back at night. Three walls of solid book shelving kept out even the noise of the wind. While Richard worked on
Pain in Its Simplicity
, Patricia sat in the living room. Through the closed door of the study she could hear the muffled clacking of a typewriter. A copy of
Bleak House
was unopened on her lap: she was reading the back of the Rad McClosky album.

Richard had pursued her: Patricia had been a student in his survey of English Literature 12001. She was a junior in college, and Richard was getting his doctorate. On the first paper she handed in he had written: “This is beneath you. You could do so, so very much better.” She realized that special interest was being taken in her, but how did he know that she could do better? When he lectured, he paced, and when he paused to look at her, she was sure she was being seen into. One afternoon he asked her to stay after class: she was certain she was flunking, but he only asked her out to dinner. He began to take her out to dinner once a week, then twice. After a while she discovered that most of her time was spent with him. Her friends, bouncy undergraduates who got together on weekends to dance at the local bar, annoyed him, and gradually she fell away from them. He was interested in seriousness, he said. He was interested in potential.