Long Made Short (14 page)

He can’t pass schools once he knows where they are on his routes. Can’t even stand
hearing kids shouting from classroom windows. Almost every time he sees girls her
age laughing, he starts to cry, or stops whatever he’s doing—walking, reading—and
closes his eyes to give himself time to get over being choked up. He doesn’t know
what to do. “Maybe I can get a job somewhere else. You could do your translating anywhere—out
in the country, let’s say, and maybe even in a different country where I don’t understand
the language. Though kids’ laughing and giggling and stuff would be the same anywhere,
I think, and I probably couldn’t get the same kind of work anywhere but in a city
and in this country. But I could commute to the city. And we of course should start
making love again and have another child if it’s not too late.” “We can try,” she
says.

They try, and she can’t conceive. It may be something missing in him or her. They
take tests to find out what might be wrong, and nothing shows up. “Maybe it’s my disposition,”
he says, “or ours. I’ve never heard where that has anything to do with it, but it
does affect some illnesses, doctors have said, maybe even cause them, so it could
with this.” He’s always sad, or close to it. One night while they’re in bed he says
“You know, I don’t think I’ve smiled once since Lynn died. Oh my God,” and he cries,
and when he comes out of it he says “That was the first time I’ve said her name, or
even said the word ‘died’ when I was alluding to her, since that thing happened. That
thing, that thing,” and cries some more. “I cry as much as you,” she says. “I don’t
mean for this to be competitive grieving or anything, but I want you to know I still
think of her almost all the time and get very little sleep because of her, like you,”
and he says “I assumed that; I really did,” and kisses her and turns off the light
on his side.

A few months later he says “Maybe I should begin facing it, talk to people about it,
even bring it up out of the blue sometimes. Not to a professional but just people
who have wanted to express their sympathies to me for months but I’ve fought them
off. Yeah, I’ll try that. I think I can swing it.” She says “If you think it’s a good
idea, do it. But I still feel you should see a therapist, even mine if you want. He’s
wonderful—smart, sharp, caring—and he already knows from me how you feel and what
Lynn’s murder has done to you. And maybe he would even see us together about it, at
other times, which is also what I’ve been wanting. And you remember, I was never a
great believer in it before this, but he’s certainly helped me.” He says “Nah, what’s
good for you might not be for me. For now, just regular people.”

At work he says to his closest colleague “Sven, if you want I’m ready to talk about
my daughter now. You know, Lynn. There. You can’t believe how tough it is to even
say her name aloud; even in my head, if there’s a reason for it. But there, I’ve said
it and I’m not falling down, am I? What I’m actually saying is I have to talk about
her, have to, do you mind?” Sven says “You know how I felt about it and still do—heartbroken—and
you can come to me anytime. But probably the best guy to talk about this to is Boris
Lehman in Sales. He lost a son a few years back when some crazy kids started shooting
up a subway car. His son was going to school, though, not coming back.” And he says
“Maybe he would be a good person to speak with.”

He calls Boris, and they meet for lunch. “How’d you get over it,” he says, “or at
least where you could begin functioning like a semi-normal human being?” and Boris
says “For a while I didn’t think I ever would. But I came out of it a little when
I found out there were at least three other people in this organization who’d lost
their kids this way, or maybe one lost his wife, who got it in the grade school she
taught at. But anyway, to these deranged spontaneous shootouts or just individual
slaughters. One was the guy who still cleans my office—Hudson. His kid was out roller-skating
and got caught in the cross fire when two teenage drug dealers started popping off
at each other with automatics. Fortunately for Hudson, he had three kids and a wife
who was pregnant, not that it still didn’t nearly kill him at the time, he said. Like
you, I only had my one, and that little fellow took eight steady years of mating to
get. And then Clarence Fangel in Publicity downstairs, ten years ago his daughter
was stabbed to death. Something about some other girl in her high school who thought
she was trying to steal her boyfriend away…”

He speaks to Hudson and Fangel and learns there are a few more people in the building
and the ones around it who lost their kids or younger siblings this way: shot, stabbed,
pushed in front of a train, thrown off a roof after being gang-raped. There’s even
a lunchtime support group in this business district for such people, and he goes to
a few meetings, but the stories he hears, instead of helping him, make him feel even
worse. “You got to give it time,” the group leader tells him, when he says he’s thinking
of leaving it, and he says “I’m sure what everyone here’s going through is as inconsolable
to them as I am to what’s going on in me, but something chemical or whatever must
be in me where the feeling can’t be reversed. But I’ll give it its due.” Finally at
one meeting some new woman, a copywriter in his building, tells the group of her two-year-old
twins a few months ago when she was making a phone call on the street from a public
booth, and he rushes out with his hands over his ears, goes home, pulls down the shades
in his bedroom and later, when his wife comes home, tells her he doesn’t know if he’ll
ever leave. “Forget the country. Forget another country. From what I heard in the
group it’s not a lot better anyplace else, and there’s more and more of it every day.
Also forget about having another child, with or without my sperm, or even one we adopt.
The times just aren’t right for bringing kids up.”

He quits his job. His wife tells him he has to do something else besides stay in his
room, “For this way you’ll get even worse than crazy. Maybe you can work in some way
against the kind of violence that killed Lynn. Get a job teaching kids in school,
or after school, or with an organization that fights such violence, or just work at
your old job to have enough money to give to places and schools that fight or just
study such violence.” He says “Best I can do is just to be talked about as someone
whose grieving for his daughter totally disabled him for anything but staying in his
room. Maybe that piece of information will filter down to people who are violent and
prone to killing other young people…Nah, who am I my kidding? I had a daughter, loved
my daughter, lost her and now grieve every waking second for her. Maybe one day I’ll
come out of it, but right now I don’t think I will.”

They still sleep together, but he finds it very difficult to make love anymore. She
says “I want a child desperately. It’s the only way I’ll become relatively sane again
myself. I love you and don’t want to lose you, but would you consent to a divorce
so I can possibly meet someone else and try to have a child or adopt a child as a
single parent?” “I think that’s fair,” he says. “I know I could never have another
kid. I’d be so protective I’d squeeze the life out of it, send it to a shrink by the
time it was five and maybe, because of my terrible parenting, turn it into a violent
kid who hurts other children and maybe even kills them.”

They divorce, he moves out of the apartment so she can have it, moves in with his
sister in another part of the country. She looks after him, gets him his food, cleans
his room and clothes, doesn’t complain. “Who do I have but you?” she says, since her
husband divorced her soon after they lost their only child to disease. “Oh my God,
I forgot that,” he says. “It must be just as bad for you as it is for me. What am
I saying? It is; I know; I should have been taking care of you then in some way, but
I didn’t.” “You gave me lots of sympathy, and I was married at the time, so that was
enough. Now, what is it?—ten years later—I can take care of myself just fine.”

Eventually he gets out—it takes a couple of years—gets a job as a salesman in a department
store, still thinks of Lynn a number of times every day, and sometimes so much he
has to quit work for the day and go home, drinks too much lots of nights to blot her
out of his head, pays half the rent and upkeep of his sister’s place, learns that
his wife remarried and adopted two children, sends her kids gifts every year for their
birthdays and Christmas, never goes out with women, makes no friends, every now and
then does have lunch in the employee cafeteria with a few of the same coworkers, goes
through life like this, feels lucky he can get through every day without cracking
up and that he’s able to make even a marginal living. His sister does well at work,
has many interests, several boyfriends, sometimes stays out all night with them, goes
to parties, takes vacations, knows lots of women she calls buddies. He tells her “That’s
the way it ought to be, I guess.”

Way it happened. The chairperson of the committee is called up to the stage podium
by the head of the American Fiction Foundation. Rob is sitting at one of the many
tables, holding his wife’s hand. He leans closer to her and says in her ear “I know
I’m not going to win.” “Wait and see,” she whispers; “you never know. Though you’re
not expecting it, are you?” “Nah, I know who they’re going to give it to; at least
not to me. Because when it comes down to it at the end, the establishment, right?
Onwards and always. But why’d you say ‘you never know’?” “Shh, she’s talking.” A couple
of people at the table—his editor and publisher—are smiling at him; then the editor
starts grinning. He smiles back and looks at the opened program on his lap. They know
something? They smile because they know he’s won but were told not to say anything,
or because he’s lost and they don’t want to reveal it with a serious expression. But
why her almost ecstatic grin? Maybe she has a problem faking a smile around so many
people, or she’s the only one at the table who knows he’s won and she can’t keep her
exhilaration in. He looks around at several other tables. A few people are looking
at him, but no smiles, nothing serious, just with interest, as if “How does a person
appear at such a time in his life? And if he wins, I want to see his immediate reaction,
since he is the one sitting closest and facing me, and if he loses, well that too.”

The chairperson’s going on about the “distinguished history of this prestigious award,”
mentions several recent winners and the book titles, “all of which, I’m told, are
still in print, no doubt because of their high quality but I’m sure also because of
the recognition the prize gives,” the healthy state of American fiction today, based
on her judging experience the past half-year, “so if anyone tells you of the present
or possible demise of written fiction in this country, you send him or her to me,”
and finally “the long arduous job of the five judges, all working fiction writers
themselves, in choosing this year’s winner. We each read the more than three hundred
entries in book form or galleys. Or, to be vulnerably honest, only segments of some
of them—after all, we’re only humans and writers with just so much human and writing
time—to come up with the five finalists, and met today in this hotel to make our decision:
Lemuel Pond. The winner of the American Fiction Award is Lemuel Pond for his novel
Eyeball
, published by Sklosby Press, edited by—”

Lights go to Pond’s table; he slaps his head with both hands as if he can’t believe
it. Rob looks at his wife—she’s already looking sympathetically at him and squeezes
his hand—then at the editor and publisher. They’re smiling at him, or trying to, the
publisher sticking up his fist and jiggling it, whatever that’s supposed to mean;
the editor now wiping her eyes with a table napkin. “Fuck them,” Rob mouths to his
wife. She puts her finger over her lips. Pond gets up, most people in the ballroom
are applauding, a few whistling and shouting, and starts walking around the tables
to the stage, people patting him and grabbing his hand, and one man kissing it as
he goes. “That jerk didn’t deserve it,” Rob says to his wife over the noise, “that’s
all I’ll say. It’s a piece of shit, what he wrote, so of course you have to expect
they’ll reward it, the gutless judges, the toadying foundation, the scummy big stiffs
of the publishing world here, our little guys excluded.” She puts her mouth to his
ear. “Don’t say any more, really; someone will hear. And especially not to any reporters
if they ask, or anyone tonight. Give it a day. I’m sorry, darling. You should have
got it, and it’s what you’re saying, but it’s over, so go along with it or you’ll
regret it.” “Not so much me,” he says, moving his head away, “but really almost any
one of the other three. But he’s an amateur. Albeit, a first-class one, which accounts,
doesn’t it? for all the newspapers and highfalutin magazines that slavered over it
in reviews, the biggest hype job of them all by a writer from the same smelly Sklosby
stable. ‘Oh! Can’t he much! Can’t he perfectly! One of our precious traditional own.
Oh! Oh!’” “Enough. Really, enough. People have to be looking, and they eat up this
stuff.”

“Okay.” He reaches for his wine glass; it’s empty. “Fancy dinner, right? With white
for the ap and red for the main, and the waiters refilling your glass second you set
it down. But when you truly need a drink, they’re not around. Maybe it’s the first
sign of being the loser.” He grabs her glass, which is full. “Mind?” “No, drink away,
though don’t get loaded. This thing’s not going to do that to you, is it? We have
to drive back tomorrow.” “And if I’d won?” “Then you’d be entitled, I guess, to fall
on your face or to at least get high. But I’d probably still ask you to be moderate,
if only to get us a cab back to the hotel, and they’d probably want you to hang around
tomorrow for interviews.”