Thank You, Goodnight (30 page)

She paused for an exasperated breath.

“Look. Teddy, my little cheese blintz, I love you. I will always love you. I have a soft spot for you; it’s mostly pity, because you have no idea who you are or what you have or, frankly, what to make of anything in this life. But if you walk away from this now, after everything you’ve done, I’m probably going to skip your funeral.”

I stared at her, caressing the apple-sized wound just south of my clavicle.

“That didn’t hurt, you big baby,” Alaina said. “And pick that up for me, will you? I’m going to eat that.”

There was a knock on the door—soft, not convinced it wanted to be heard. It was Marin, Alaina’s assistant with the punky ’do.

“Yes, Marin?” Alaina was irritated. “We’re a little busy in here.”

“Dave Chenier is on the phone.”

“Jesus. How often does that guy call you?” I asked.

Alaina rolled her eyes. “You were Dave Chenier once, and I rolled my eyes plenty about you. What does Mr. Fuckface want now, Marin?”

“He’s not happy.”

“Of course, he’s not happy. Nobody’s happy! Transfer Mr. Fuckface to the conference room and I’ll take him in due course.”

“Actually, there’s one more thing,” the young woman interjected apologetically. “I’m not totally sure, but I think my ex-boyfriend might kill himself.”

Alaina glared irksomely. “Do you mean right now or in the general sense that all of us more or less consider suicide at some point?”

The girl gave a cumbrous swallow. “He called me ten minutes ago and said he was going to kill himself now. I guess he meant then.” She checked her watch.

“Holy fucking shit, Marin!” Alaina erupted. “Are you serious?”

“Yeah, so I was going to run out for a bit. I should probably check in on him. Do you mind?”

“Are you high? You can’t go to a potentially suicidal ex-boyfriend’s apartment by yourself.”

“Oh.”

Alaina was nearing the end of her wits from the many flavors of stupidity presenting themselves this afternoon. All of it finally gave way to a helpless shrug.

“I was fixing to give Teddy here the spanking of his life, but fuck it. Let’s go.”

*       *       *

Evidently, the
let’s
in
let’s go
included me, because before I could make my escape, I found myself sandwiched between Alaina and her underling in the back of a taxi, Dave Chenier presumably still on hold.

We zoomed uptown in various states of agitation. When Alaina wasn’t barking at the poor Pakistani cabbie for failing to make the traffic vanish, she was consumed with e-mails on her phone. Marin, for her part, seemed far more tense about monopolizing our time than about the health status of her ex-boyfriend. She spent the ride peppering us with apologies.

“By the way,” Alaina said without looking up, “do you know who we have the pleasure of riding with today?”

Marin shook her head.

“This is Teddy Tremble.” No reaction. “From Tremble. The band.”

She suddenly lit up. “Oh yeah. Sure. ‘It Feels like a Lie.’ Neato. It’s an honor, sir.”

I groaned and focused on the exotic synth pop dancing out of the dusty dashboard.

We zipped up Third Avenue to the Upper East Side, its endless palette of storefronts and apartment buildings blurring past. I was really hoping a dead body didn’t lie at the end of this ride. I was in no mood for grief counseling.

“How long were you with this lad?” Alaina wanted to know.

“Almost three weeks.”

“Three weeks and this guy is offing himself over you?” I hooted.

Alaina’s eyes glimmered. “You must be a beast in bed.”

“This guy’s got serious issues,” I told Marin. “If he happens not to be dead, I strongly recommend never seeing him again.”

“Oh God. I hope he’s not dead,” Marin panted. “I have a major fear of dead bodies.”

“You know what I have a fear of ?” Alaina raised her voice toward the driver. “Dying in a taxi with the radio stuck on the Bollywood station.”

The cabbie, muttering unintelligible invective, let us out in front of a decaying courtyard behind which a gray brick apartment building rose up about a dozen stories. It was the kind of place that housed the Marins of the world—young professionals rendered borderline insolvent by the city’s economic tourniquet.

Marin eyed the front door with palpable trepidation. There was no sign of the police, which meant either false alarm or already-bagged body.

Something drew my attention upward, a slight movement just above my field of vision, a color out of sync. I lifted my eyes three or four stories up, and there it was: a person on the ledge.

It was a jumper, but a jumper with apparent second thoughts, or at least mixed emotions about this whole killing yourself thing. He seemed to be leaning back against the wall as far away from the edge as possible, as if he’d realized that despite the sincerity of his tantrum and the purity of his outrage against life’s injustices, at the end of the day—shit—heaving yourself off a building was a far less vivid enterprise in theory than in practice.

I tapped Marin on the shoulder and pointed. “You know that fella?”

Alaina followed my finger and hissed. “Oh Jesus fucking Christ.”

I stifled a chuckle. A fall from that height probably wouldn’t have even done the trick. It was, in fact, entirely possible that he’d already jumped, dusted himself off, and climbed back up to give it another go.

Marin waved both hands up at the shaggy, yellow-headed figure like a desert island castaway halfheartedly flagging down a propeller plane but just as happy to stick it out on the beach for another couple of years. “Duncan? Duncan, down here!”

“Oh! Look who showed up!” echoed a voice from the ledge. Suicidal, he still had the presence of mind to be snot-nosed about it.

Marin tilted her head. “I thought you said you were going to kill yourself.”

“He waited for you to show up,” I said. “This isn’t suicide; it’s vaudeville. If he really wanted to die, he wouldn’t be dangling himself over the mezzanine. He jumps from there, at best he twists an ankle.”

“Come down from there, Duncan,” she implored. “Let’s talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about!”

“What a mopey little shit,” I said. “I’m calling the cops.”

I reached into my jacket pocket for my phone.

“Don’t even think about it!” the kid yelled down, his back still rigid against the wall. “Marin, tell your dad to put his phone away or I’m jumping! I swear!”

Alaina snorted, relishing the slight.

“I mean it! Same goes for your mom!”

Alaina’s hands went fast to her hips. “What did that little puke just say?” Then she eyed both Marin and me. “You clowns just got the compliment of your lives.”

Marin stepped forward and began to plead, her voice high-register but too shrill to be an outright squeak. “Okay, okay. Calm down. Nobody’s calling the police.” This tender young thing hadn’t yet learned
that when somebody says I mean it, the opposite is typically the case. I dropped my phone back inside my pocket.

“These aren’t my parents. These are people who are worried about you, just like I am. This is my boss, Alaina. And this—you’ll never believe it—is Freddy Tremble.”

“Who?”

“Freddy Tremble. From Tremble. The band.”

“I don’t know who that is.”

“Remember that song? ‘It Feels like a Lie?’ ”

He thought a moment. “No.”

“You never saw
Ballad of the Fallen
?”

“No. Why are we talking about this?”

Marin was muttering to herself in rising pique. Duncan had now managed to irritate each of the devoted souls who’d convened to save him. That was bad form.

“Can I come up there?” Marin called.

“No!”

“Come on, Duncan. Why are you doing this?”

“You don’t love me,” was the bruised response.

Marin turned to us. “He’s right. I don’t. I’ve known him for three weeks. Should I just be honest with him?”

Alaina was reading an e-mail.

At that moment, a second-floor window slid open and an old lady with a detonation of white hair poked her head out. “Hey! Why are you people making such a fuss?”

I pointed, and the woman’s head twisted upward to see. “Heavens to Betsy!” she screamed. “It’s a jumper!” She ducked back into her apartment like a whack-a-mole creature dodging a mallet.

Alaina was grinning at me. “ ‘Heavens to Betsy.’ That’s what we’re dealing with here.”

Meanwhile, a pair of older gentlemen was leisurely traversing the street to take in the goings-on. Both were circling seventy and shabbily dressed. One was nibbling at a vanilla cupcake.

The old woman on the second floor was back now, having thrust her head through the window again. “Police are on their way!” she announced. “Firemen too, probably!”

And just like that, Duncan’s expo expired. With the authorities on the march, there was now a limit to how long he could perpetrate this gratuitous torture of his ex-girlfriend. He had a problem. However genuine the emotional turmoil that had brought him out here, it was nothing compared to the misery he’d endure by abandoning it like a weenie. He may not have wanted to kill himself, but he certainly didn’t want to not die.

So he did the next best thing: he leaned back against the bricks and began to bawl.

Man, was it appalling. Distraught sobbing. Sputtering noises of a grown man’s whimper. “My star is fading, man. It’s like I’m swerving out of control and there’s, like, no chance of release.” He paused to sniffle. “I know no one said it’d be easy. But no one said it’d be this hard.”

“Pathetic,” Alaina jeered.

“It is pathetic,” I agreed. “That’s Coldplay.”

Alaina and Marin stared at me.

“All that lachrymose drivel—those are Coldplay lyrics.”

Alaina looked horrified. “Why do you know that?”

“I’m not proud of myself.”

Meanwhile, the two retirees, both clad in paint-spattered overalls, I realized, had made it to the sidewalk and now joined us in the courtyard. The one who hadn’t brought a cupcake looked at Alaina. “Do you speak English?” he asked loudly.

She gave him an ice pick stare. “Not a word.”

A sudden shriek sent all eyes darting up to Duncan. So absorbed was he in his mortally aggrieved wailing that the dumbass lost his balance. A chorus of gasps rose up from the courtyard as one of Duncan’s feet slid clear off the ledge and, with a guttural yelp, he stumbled over the side.

We all braced to follow the doomed beeline of his drop and the
inevitable sickening thud. But instead, there was a harsh jerk and the guy stopped falling. He’d somehow managed to slide his hand into the open window and grip the frame. Clutching a corner, he struggled to pull himself up, his legs swinging and kicking over the edge in a desperate and not altogether uncomic search for footing. By some miracle—some unnatural force inimical to the evolutionary process of natural selection—this yo-yo managed to wriggle himself back to safety, and after spasms of twitching and groping for dear life, he collapsed on the ledge. Panting and snorting, but alive.

It was all too much for Marin. She buried her head in her boss’s bosom and began to sob.

Alaina held her assistant close and pretended to console her. But I soon noticed that she’d fixed an urgent look on me. Her eyes burned into me with white thermonuclear fire. Alaina seemed to be transmitting some sort of message that I wasn’t receiving.

“What?” I finally barked.

“Go up there, Teddy.”

“What?”

“Go up there and talk to the mental patient.”

Me. The person who had the least business being there. “Fuck. You.”

She went stern. “Teddy.”

“Why would I go up there?”

“Because of that which swings in your boxers.”

“What?”

“That child needs to talk to a man, and laughable as it is, you’re the closest thing we have at the moment. He needs a heart-to-heart with someone who can relate to and bond over the cruelty of women. Are you familiar with the cruelty of women, Theodore, or do I have to introduce you?”

“Are you kidding me? If I go up there, it’ll be to lift eighty bucks from his wallet as compensation for the train ticket I wasted.”

“Go,” she insisted.

“You don’t want me to go up there. Trust me.”

Duncan did not want to be schooled on the harsh truths I was likely to unload on him. He was, to be sure, unprepared for my take on the human condition. Alaina kept on burning me with the death stare while Marin rocked and puffed in her employer’s armpit. I was unmoved by any of this, even the crumpled heap of humanity splayed out on the ledge. But we had arrived at an impasse, and impasses meant nothing if not more wasted time.

“I’ll go, Farber,” I said, wearily. “But only because you guys are all yelleeew.”

*       *       *

Naturally, the elevator was out of order, so I had to slog it up three flights in the equatorial swelter of the stairwell. At least the apartment was unlocked.

Inside, a panoramic scan of the room revealed little in the way of furniture, save for the obligatory flat-screen, a device that, with today’s programming, was a reliable vehicle for stories and images capable of sending even the sunniest among us into the tar pit of despondency, and ultimately, out onto the ledge.

I ambled through the open room. Upon poking my head out the window, I spied Duncan seated against the wall, the slack embodiment of defeat. He jolted to life at the sight of me, then evaluated through bleary eyes whether my presence foretold good things or bad.

“Why don’t you come inside?” I proposed unkindly, shooting for a swift and economical resolution.

“Of course I’m not coming inside. What do you think I’m doing out here?”

“Being ridiculous, for one. You’re also humiliating yourself—which is something I happen to know a little bit about.”

I suppose the last thing he’d expected was an antagonism. If somebody was going to be dispatched from the ground to try to talk him down, it would logically be the most compassionate of the lot, the one whose eyes would go all soggy when imploring him to choose to live!
Someone who’d say, You don’t want to do this, son. Really. I’ve been there. I, however, seemed to be taking a slightly different approach, that being the hurling of insults. Perhaps Duncan viewed my show of insensitivity as some sort of tough-love tactic. This was just my style. Harsh, but skillfully so. I’d done this a thousand times, never lost a jumper.