Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See (14 page)

My father wrapped his arms around her, and as soon as he did, she fell against him, crying into his chest.

“Sweetheart, come on, tell me what happened.”

My mother stood on her tiptoes and, trying to catch her breath, whispered into his ear.

“Oh God, Jesus Christ,” he said. His knees buckled slightly and for a moment my parents fell against one another, propping each other up with their grief.

Two days later, I heard pots and pans banging and loud voices coming from the kitchen. I wouldn’t have been surprised if it had been my father. There were times when he yelled a lot. But it was my mother, so I knew something was really wrong.

“It’s cruel and hypocritical. It’s disgusting.”

I’d grown out of sneaking around and listening behind doors a long time ago.

I walked into the kitchen and saw my mother in a dark-blue dress. There was a Bundt cake sitting on the counter. The plastic wrap had been peeled off. My father, wearing a suit, was leaning against the counter across from her, eating a slice.

“What is?” I asked, walking into the room.

My mother’s eyes were red. I could tell she’d been crying, but she looked much more angry than she did sad. Neither of my parents said anything.

“What is?” I asked again, this time looking at Pop.

He put the cake down on the counter and brushed the crumbs off his hands. Then he looked at my mother and nodded.

“I think he’s old enough.”

“Mrs. Bronfman’s family won’t be sitting shiva for her,” she said. There were tears leaking from her eyes, but I’d never heard her sound so angry.

“They’re not even giving her a real funeral. They’re just dumping her in the ground. In an unmarked grave in a public cemetery.”

“Why? I mean, I don’t understand. They’re her children. And her grandchildren. They were at her house all the time. I don’t—”

“She killed herself, Greyson,” my father told me quietly.

“I know. It’s terrible. They must be—”

“As far as Jews are concerned, suicide is just another form of murder. It’s a sin. You understand? She’s a sinner. So they’re punishing her.”

I think about Mrs. Bronfman a lot lately. I think I can safely say she didn’t give a shit where she was buried or whether anyone came over with casseroles or Bundt cakes. I think she probably just wanted something to push against. Something solid to end the fall.

Occasionally I am aware of the light changing at the edges of my peripheral vision. The wet, grey dawn is suddenly the bright midmorning, the orangey late afternoon, the purple-brown dusk, and then the yellow-black of late at night. I know it’s late when Ellen turns on all the lights. I know she is desperate to make the sun shine inside.

I always wondered how I would know when I had hit bottom. Somehow, the perpetual terror of dangling after the bottom had fallen out always seemed more obvious—a step beyond and more self-evident than hitting it in the first place. Especially the first time.

Because the first time, you always think it could be worse. You always think maybe you’re just tired. Or coming down with something. Or under a lot of stress. Or overthinking things. Or second-guessing yourself, doubting the choices you’ve made. You always think you just need a break from work and friends and the phone and your family. That you just need a rest.

You think you should have an answer to the question, “What’s wrong?” You wish you knew. No one can understand how much you wish you knew. You know you must be horrible to live with, to be around. Because you cannot stand to be you—to be in your own skin. You think you should be able to promise it will stop a month from last Friday. You can’t imagine it will ever stop. You would do anything to make it stop. Instead you say maybe you just need a day to lie in bed. And then you take another and another and another and twenty more. And think you’d rather not get up at all. Ever. Over. You want it over. You would do anything.

And before your wife goes grocery shopping she asks if it’s okay to leave you alone. And you look at her like you don’t know what she means but you do. And you laugh and say, “Of course, don’t be ridiculous.”

But that was yesterday. Now you’re standing in front of the medicine cabinet and you’re insulted that she didn’t believe you because she’s emptied it of everything but Q-tips and Tampax and cotton balls. You thought you meant it. But that was yesterday. And yesterday is a whole world away from this pain. Today, you’re tearing through the kitchen drawers with more energy than you’ve had in weeks. You wonder where the hell she could have hidden everything because spoons and butter knives and rubber spatulas are the only utensils left. And you catch yourself running your thumb over the impotent edge of a butter knife, wondering how much damage you could coax out of it. You imagine yourself, like an animal caught in a trap, gnawing away at your wrists with that little butter knife. How undignified. How pathetic. And then you think:
No, I am not my father
.

You are not your father. Because even old Mrs. Bronfman could get it right but he couldn’t. He couldn’t even do this right.

Because there was a hole in the bag. And he didn’t swallow enough pills. So when you found him, it was almost like he was napping, sucking the plastic bag in with each thick, drug-induced breath and blowing it out with each raspy, snoring exhale. You wanted to leave him there. For a minute you hated him so much you even thought about plugging the hole. It was what he wanted, wasn’t it? But you couldn’t leave him. Because then someone else would find him. Your mother or your sister or one of your brothers. And that would be worse. So you ripped the bag off his head and dragged him into bed and let him sleep it off. And then you washed his piss out of the rug. And you hated him. For failing.

You are not him.

And you throw the butter knife back in the defanged drawer and slam it shut.

You were just browsing. Just browsing. And that is not the same thing at all. So you cross that option off the list. For now. Because when the time comes, yours will not be some half-assed attempt, some pathetic bid for attention. You will mean it. But you are not quite there yet. Not quite.

So you go back to the old routine: panic and despair, panic and despair in endless succession—or worse, at the same time. Until it does become routine. Your routine. Her routine.

And as soon as she leaves for work, or even sometimes when she’s home and you’re in the shower—on the rare occasions when you have the energy to take one—you hear heaving, open-mouthed howls of breath-stealing grief. And realize when you gasp and choke on the saliva and snot running down the back of your throat that you are the source of the screaming. And then you stop.

You close your mouth and swallow it all and pull yourself together because you know that you’re just tired or coming down with something. You know there are people out there with real problems. You know it could be worse. You have a wife who loves you and a good job. You know you’re lucky.

So you stand up and you strap on your balls and you go out there. You smile. And pretend you can feel the bottom under your feet.

New York, 1994
. I wake to Cooper’s soft melodic voice floating across the hall. I have never seen Cooper unhappy. She is always smiling, often laughing at jokes only she can hear. At every meal she asks the attendant for five oranges, and every time, when the attendant shakes her head, Cooper laughs.

“Okay, then four! Three!” she yells giddily. Then the lunch lady rolls three oranges onto Cooper’s tray.

Cooper loves food. Tall and slim with narrow hips, broad shoulders, and a smooth, bald black head, she is always first in line when the food truck is wheeled in. I can only assume she tastes something the rest of us do not.

Tonight I listen as she describes a recipe. She is giving instructions.

“So good, such a nice dish. Couscous with raisins, braised leeks, and little onions, baby onions. Add chopped cilantro and little pieces of white sausage.”

At first I think she must be talking on the pay phone just down the hall. A request for homemade food from a family member. But then suddenly the conversation changes. Now she is onstage in front of an audience introducing her next number.

“It’s a four-minute song,” she says, “just about four minutes.” And she begins to sing. Soft and sweet. It is just the tonic I need to soothe my raging post-shock headache. I take my pillow and lie with my head at the foot of the bed, a little closer to Cooper’s room. I can make out what sounds like a Top 40 love song. I can’t hear the words but I can fill them in myself. I imagine her dancing in front of the aluminum mirror in her bathroom, like a teenager singing into a hairbrush. She is both audience and performer. Cooper’s voice can make it better, I think. Cool and soft, there is safety in its meaningless melody.

SEVENTH

“It’ll be over before you know it, son,” the tall, grey-haired anesthesiologist says, without much conviction. Not long ago I knew his name
.

But that line, I remember. It is the same line he used on me the last time—and probably the time before that. And on the patient before me
.

Over before you know it. For a split second I think about that. Does he mean quick and painless? Or that I will no longer possess the brain cells required to participate in the act of knowing, an activity I have taken for granted until recently. When I wake up—assuming I wake up—knowing itself will be different. Less painful? Or just less?

How will that feel? But now I can’t ask. Can’t move. So the panic and mounting claustrophobia I feel are silent, evidenced only by the increased frequency of the beeping on their machines
.

“BP’s going up,” the old guy says. The stern young doctor pauses, stops adjusting the dials and buttons on the dashboard in front of her
.

“Heart’s fine. Just anxiety,” the old guy says
.

“Shhhhh. Happy memories,” Florence whispers. I can smell the sour hospital coffee lingering on her breath. “Or just imagine you’re on a beautiful sunny beach somewhere.”

Typhoons, hurricanes, tropical storms, monsoons—the sunnier the beach, the bigger the storm
.

Thailand, 1989
. Bangkok looks a lot like Dallas. Or Atlanta. Or any other relatively charmless modern American city. Except in Bangkok there are four hundred Buddhist temples sandwiched in between the skyscrapers.

Tangles of intersecting highways. City of a thousand generic office buildings. And low to the ground, red roofs, gasping for air, praying.

I suppose if I were walking along the shore, looking out at the Chao Phraya River—its water taxis, ferries, and fishing boats churning through the rough mud-brown water—maybe I’d feel like I’d gone somewhere.

But I am standing on the deck of a converted rice barge, surrounded by a bunch of rich Western tourists like myself, staring across the river at a bunch of office buildings. I am nowhere. This is not what I expected. And I am all about expectations—dashing and disappointing and not living up to them. That’s me. On a good day. I am bored too. And I know that what lies between boredom and the self-indulgent navel-gazing, which quickly leads to wallowing in self-pity, is a very narrow and slippery slope.

I perk up when I see the waitress—young, thin, beautiful, dressed in something Asian-themed that stops just south of her crotch—coming around with a tray of drinks. I down the rest of my lychee martini just in time to swap my empty glass for a full one as she passes. She stops for a moment, looks back at me and winks.

“You naughty boy. I keep my eye on you.”

Then she tosses her ass-length, stick-straight hair over her shoulder and chortles as she walks away, swinging her tiny hips to the Thai disco beat.

All that attention because I stole a drink. On an all-inclusive dinner cruise. I am growing tired of the endless hard sell here. There is no seduction. No seducing. I think I’m beginning to feel cheap.

“Breathtaking, isn’t it?”

There is a slightly southern lilt to the voice. Southern American. Georgia? Virginia?

I feel the vacant air next to me change as she moves into it. She smells expensive. She rests her arms on the railing. Our elbows touch.

“Spectacular,” I say.

I turn to look at her, but the sun behind her is still too high and bright. She is a shadow. I shield my eyes with my hand and squint. And now I am able to make out certain essential details: crow’s feet around the eyes, lips notched by decades of smoking, slightly sunken cheeks—proof that she never eats more than half of what’s on her plate and attends step class religiously. I’m sure she has a lovely figure. For a woman her age.

“Excuse me,” I say, and walk away before she has time to introduce herself.

I am seriously considering swimming back to shore. Instead, I find the waitress and subject myself to another chortle in exchange for another drink. I’m beginning to like lychee.

By the time we return to the dock in Bangkok, I am so drunk that I have thrown up twice. Once over the side of the converted rice barge and once all over the chortling waitress.

“I guess I really am a naughty boy,” I say by way of apology.

She does not chortle.

I don’t remember anything after that. Somehow, though, I wake up in my bed in my hotel room in a Pan Pacific Bangkok robe.

The pounding in my head feels record-breaking. History-making. There is a bottle of aspirin and a glass of water on my night table. And a note:

Mr. Lee Majors:

Please take two of these white pills to feel better. You may also call the front desk for assistance at any time
.

—Ina

I love Ina. I have no idea who she is, but right now there is no one I love more than Ina. I pop the top off the aspirin and swallow four. I lie there for another twenty minutes and wait for the aspirin to kick in. Then I take a long shower just to be sure that when I get outside I’ll be able to tolerate the sunlight. I dry off, toss the towel on the bed, and draw the blackout curtain.