Suicide's Girlfriend (18 page)

From their conversation, Candace had gathered that Haynes had just learned that someone had written him a less than glowing grant recommendation. In view of this, Haynes declared he wanted to kill himself. “I'm a piece of shit, Carson! Pure, unadulterated shit!” Not long after this, however, Candace heard Haynes express a desire to go mountain climbing. “Come on, Carson! Or else watch reruns of
Harry O! Harry O
's great! Or go to Frank's for sausage gravy and biscuits! D'you think Frank's would be open yet? No, Jesus, what am I talking about? I want to fucking kill myself.”

While Haynes had paced the brick patio or rattled around in one of the moldering director's chairs left behind by the home's last owners, Carson stretched himself out on the bricks, hands folded behind his head. Candace could not make out much of what Carson said, but now and then she did hear him laugh. Did she make Carson laugh, Candace wondered. She was slightly relieved, a short while later, when Carson brought Haynes to the door of the studio and, grinning, asked if Candace would
please, please recalibrate Rick by singing “I'm a Villain.”
“I'm a Villain” was a cheerfully perverse little tune that Candace had learned from a cousin some twenty years before and, paintbrush in hand—eyes fixed upon the studio's pressed-board ceiling with its pockmarks from the past owner's games of darts—Candace sang a hurried:

When she finished, she looked out the door and said, “I think there's more, but that's all I know.” Rick Haynes laughed and clapped and Carson said, “Thanks, Candy. I think that'll help Rick regain a sense of proportion.” Then Carson put his arm over Rick Haynes's shoulder and began to walk him back across the patio, saying as they went, “I've seen you with your students, Rick. You know how to teach, and that's rare!” He went on, then—using words that felt uncomfortably familiar to Candace—to tell Haynes that Haynes had everything to live for. Hadn't Candace received similar words of encouragement from Carson, once upon a time? Hadn't she felt her agreeing to everything he said was a condition she must satisfy before he felt it was safe to love her?

When Haynes finally left the house that morning, it was four o'clock or later. Carson came into the studio. “An interesting guy,” Carson said. He pulled up his shirt and began to rub his broad stomach. An assertive, self-pleased gesture. On some occasions, it would have filled Candace with desire. Just then, however, while Candace went through the motions of scraping the table on which she had laid out her paints, her brain erected a swath of distant landscape, a thicket of trees that crinkled, and slumped, and folded in upon itself like a cellophane construction brought too close to flame. She turned from her work and asked—the words tiny things, insect wings, desiccated with her sense of how she disgraced herself—“So, would you think I was more interesting if I were still, you know, suicidal?”

For a time, Carson continued to rub his stomach. Perhaps he had not heard? No. He had heard, and he said, finally, in a voice full of chill disgust, “If being suicidal is just something you can choose to be, then
you're not really suicidal, are you, Candy?” He paused. “But if our being married hasn't stopped you from thinking about suicide, maybe we should get divorced.”

Robbed. That was how Candace had felt in the dawn of that autumn morning. The possibility of suicide had been the lens through which she saw that her life was all her fortune. If Carson took away the possibility of her even
thinking
about the act . . . why, then, there was no way to see that fortune without losing Carson in the process.

Perhaps the cockatiel was distressed by the flapping of the hall window shade that Candace let fly—or perhaps it was the ringing of the telephone—at any rate, the bird sunk her fine nails into the flesh of Candace's shoulder and kept them there while Candace hurried back to the telephone on Carson's desk.

The caller identified herself as one of Carson's students. Had she provided her name, Joyce Burton, Candace almost certainly would have recognized it and realized that the caller was the suicide's girlfriend. In that case, Candace would have had to employ one of her tricks—bite a finger, hard; twist a pinch of skin between her fingernails—in order not to cry,
Oh, I'm so sorry about your loss!
But the caller did not identify herself, and Candace felt merely annoyed at the way that the woman persisted in referring to Carson as “Carson,” especially after Candace referred to him as “Dr. O'Connor.”

“I wondered if anybody'd be around if I dropped off some books of his.”

The caller's voice—that stylized, throaty business favored by certain female disc jockeys—it put Candace off; still, while the woman continued,
Oh, yes, she knew that Carson was off to Iowa
, Candace tried to reason with herself: maybe it was better to have a perfectly fatuous voice as opposed to some dull thing you kept from fear of sounding counterfeit.

“But I may . . . be out this afternoon.”

“Would you be back by five, though?”

Squawk, went the cockatiel, as if voicing Candace's reluctance to see the caller. In appreciation, Candace drew a finger down the bird's back; a wonderful thing how, there, the feathers always felt simultaneously warm, cool.

“Was that your bird?” the caller asked. “Yesterday—at the picnic?—Carson told us all about you and your bird.”

“Excuse me a moment.” Candace placed the receiver on Carson's desk.

A cockatiel is a branch climber. A tame cockatiel will automatically step onto a human finger if that finger is set close to the bird's breast.

In the hall leading from Carson's study to the kitchen stood a little gateleg table and Candace set the bird there, where, for a while at least, the creature would keep company with her bright reflection in the hall mirror. Carson always said that the bird liked mirrors because it was in love with itself, an assertion that caused a cloudy burning in Candace's gut. Candace knew the bird to be finer than that: Candace's bird believed another bird existed in the mirror. It was that other bird that Candace's bird loved.

“Sorry,” Candace said to the caller as she took up the receiver again.

“So, does the bird have a name?”

“Oh”—Candace squeezed her eyes shut at the pretension of her own and Carson's choice—“Phoulish Phlame, spelled with Ph's instead of F's. Carson wanted to call her Fool with an F, but I didn't think that was nice, so we came up with this other thing. Actually, Carson says
she's
a
he
, but I heard it hurts to have them sexed, so we just . . . agree to disagree.” She took a breath, aware that she rambled: her attempt to prove to the student that she, Carson's wife, did, indeed, exist. “Anyway, she's got a little yellow cockade, like a flame, and I thought Phoulish Phlame sounded like an old love song. Did you ever hear the Ink Spots? One of my professors used to play these old Ink Spot records during studio. ‘My Echo, My Shadow and Me.' ‘Whispering Grass, Don't Tell the Trees for the Trees Don't Need to Know.'”

The caller gave a little laugh. Did she find Candace entertaining?
Nuts? Candace felt exhausted by the time that she got off the telephone. She laid her cheek on Carson's desk blotter. Indulged in a credible imitation of the caller's throaty voice—“Of course, I know Carson's in Iowa”—before reminding herself that being bitter and envious was surely no better than being aggressive and attention-seeking.

So maybe there was no way to be, at all?

Cheek on the blotter, she lifted the sheet of paper that held the photo of curly-haired Rick Haynes. Maybe he had asked himself the same question.

She sighed, and closed her eyes, then felt a stab of guilt and snapped them open. Because she had not accompanied Carson on his trip, she knew Carson expected her to spend every minute they were apart working on her July show. That very morning, hadn't he plunged his big head into her studio in order to say—very lively—“Hey, Candy, looks like you've got enough food in the cupboards, you won't even have to leave the house while I'm gone”?

Scary but necessary to ask, “Are you trying to tell me I shouldn't go anywhere, Carson?” To which question the big, homely-handsome face expressed grave disappointment. Also, Candace had spied the tanned, leonine face of Carson's ex-wife looking out from Carson's face; the ex would never have accused Carson of scheming. Of course, Candace understood that face was not really the face of Dana O'Connor; maybe not even something rigged up by Carson. Perhaps rigged up by Candace herself? Who knew? Who knew? The notion that you alone invented each of your thoughts and feelings was hot property these days:
What's that you say? I hurt you? No, no, my friend, you hurt yourself
Without lifting her head, Candace eyed the little digital clock on Carson's desk. 10:47. Had she agreed to the student's coming at five? Six? And should Candace call her parents to tell them that, during his trip, Carson meant to drive his son and daughter over to visit the farm? “Oh, yes,” Carson had stoutly declared, “every Iowan ought to know what a genuine pig farm looked like.” Candace, however, suspected that Carson actually hoped a tour of the Cleeve farm—all mud and stink and splintered outbuildings—would implant the idea in his children's
heads that poor Candace needed their dad far more than their tall, tennis-playing mom ever did. A chancy business, Candace thought. The children, after all, were almost adults and had no particular reason to
need
to like Candace. Suppose the only effect of their visit was to mingle their idea of Candace with a memory of pig shit and stupidity. After all, Carson had been in
love
with Candace on his own first visit to the pig farm. He had been all set to beat up Morley Cleeve for ancient history. Yet Carson came away from his tour as round-eyed as the only kid that Candace had ever dared bring home after school, and, these days, there was even a flush toilet.

“What if that teacher hadn't helped you get a scholarship?” Carson had cried. “My god!” His astonishment both pleased and irritated Candace. She had liked the idea that Carson could not fathom Morley and Georgine as her parents, but also recognized that Carson's failure of imagination was not entirely flattering; fluke, she might be, but Georgine and Morley were her parents, flesh of her flesh. Her whole, half of each.

This was the second of the stapled Xeroxed pages concerning Rick Haynes. Candace read it without lifting her cheek from Carson's blotter,
which had the pleasant effect of making the white spaces between the lines of type into stripes.

Just after the suicide, Carson had reminded Candace—unnecessarily—that she had once met Joyce Burton at an Earth Science party. Candace remembered Joyce Burton quite well. Big. Lumpish. Wearing a collection of rings that looked like pipe fittings, and an outlandishly tight and plunging pink knit that indicated either enormous self-confidence in her appearance or a complete disregard of it. Joyce Burton had sat upon the department chair's kitchen counter and chortled at her own bawdy tale of an encounter with a Nogales street vendor. Standing by herself, pretending interest in the spectacular city views available from the department chair's kitchen windows, Candace had watched Joyce Burton's reflection, and wondered: Did Joyce Burton's confidence come from her hair—which was a truly lovely sheet of icy blonde—or from a sense of being smart or loved, or from money, or what? The showy way in which Joyce Burton seized fellow students and faculty in greeting struck Candace as intriguing, paradoxical: Joyce Burton might have been hoisting onto a cart the great bags of a grain that she required to keep up the strength to hoist great bags of grain onto a cart.