The Grief of Others (11 page)

At the moment he was working on a portrait of his alter ego, gaunt and brooding. He wore a trench coat with the collar turned up. On his head, a porkpie hat, angled low. He leaned against a lamppost. Paul gave him dark shadows under his eyes. His own eyes burned with fatigue. He closed them a moment, the lids fairly creaking shut, like the metalwork door of a birdcage elevator. That was pretty good. If he were representing it in a strip, he’d draw it that way, two little metalwork elevator doors for eyes, and he would write in the word “CREEEA-KK.”

Sleep eluded him by and large. It had for years. When he was younger, he’d get up out of bed five, ten, as many as fifteen times a night, going to his parents with minor, revolving complaints (tangled blanket, stomachache, strange noise, itch), which sometimes progressed, as the night wore on, to tearful, wordless appeals. His parents would resolutely walk him back to his room, and he would submit to being tucked in again, over and over, until exhaustion finally overtook him and ended the cycle until the next night. Paul had been aware, even at the time, of his parents’ efforts to suppress their frustration at these dramas that dragged into the early hours of the next day, and in a way their success at this was harder to bear than their occasional failures. Twice his father had punched a wall; several times his mother had wept and once she’d hissed at him to stop being such a
baby
. In the course of their desperation they had offered him, variously, relaxation tapes, warm milk and Benadryl at bedtime, a system of star charts and rewards for staying in bed, a system of time-outs and loss of TV privileges for
not
staying in bed, a beautiful green suede–covered journal in which to vent the ungainly thoughts that were supposedly keeping sleep at bay, and karate classes three times a week in which to vent his physical energy—all to no avail.

Around the time he entered middle school, Paul had simply stopped going to them for help they’d never been able to provide. While the period that elapsed between hitting the sack and dropping off still often lasted several hours, it had become less fraught, if only because the guilt he’d felt over inflicting so much grief on his parents had been removed from the list of worries that continued routinely to visit him. Contrary to what his parents had so often assured him would happen, the worries, or state of worry, had not subsided with age. Some of the worries were concrete: he’d left his French book in the cafeteria, they were starting floor hockey in gym, he was confounded by cosine and sine, there was another birthday party he hadn’t been invited to. Worse were the nameless ones. When he’d been younger, they’d all been nameless. Paul could still remember hovering, pajama-clad, on his parents’ threshold, his throat and chest tight, his nose prickling with tears, and being utterly incapable of formulating a single word in response to his mother’s exasperated query, “What is it now?”

Sometimes he suspected that his gravest worries remained nameless, that the concrete, identifiable ones that amassed in his mind were illusions, diversions in the service of a malevolent force whose sole purpose was to prevent his ever resting easy. It seemed to him that as the nameless worries were supplanted, or obscured, by more tangible ones, he was actually moving further and further from the possibility of freeing himself from their root cause. He didn’t like to think about this, but sometimes couldn’t help it, in the way that he couldn’t help picking at his hangnails, even when they bled and scabbed over. Sometimes he wondered if this all meant he would one day likely become crazy.

All his worries, named and nameless alike, shamed him. Back when he used to go in distress almost every night to his parents, they had reminded him how lucky he was, how safe and privileged to live with his whole family, in a house, in a riverside village, in America—as though that would provide him with consolation instead of another burden, proof of his deficiencies. He was old enough to know his troubles were nothing compared with other people’s, to know the world was full of people with a reason, a right, to be unable to fall asleep. His own best friend, for starters. Baptiste spoke little of his life before moving to Nyack. The name of his village, Jacmel. That he’d worn an ironed shirt every day to school.That his mother still lived there, that she worked in a hotel, that she hoped eventually to come to the U.S. The very starkness of these details—and more, the stark way his friend delivered them, as if each fact were a single dry bean—convinced Paul that if anyone had cause for insomnia, it was Baptiste. Yet Baptiste exuded calm. Not calm: peace. As though everything yet to come had already happened. Sometimes, when Paul got worked up about some future event, Baptiste would try explaining that whatever was going to be would come about
si Bondye vle,
if God willed it. Paul was made uncomfortable by the submissiveness implied by his friend’s belief, but he couldn’t help envying Baptiste his faith.

Paul envied Biscuit, too. His sister seemed never to worry, not even when, in his opinion, a little worrying might be in order. Today, for instance. It wasn’t so much the playing hooky as it was the biking right in front of her school, for crying out loud, and the part about going to the Hook and falling in the river, even though she’d sworn she hadn’t fallen, or wasn’t at fault, or whatever. Who else but Biscuit would manage to get herself knocked into the Hudson River by a rescue dog? And then there was the question of bringing home the strange man.

Paul’s objection to this last was not on the grounds of danger. All you had to do was glance, briefly, at the guy—jockey-sized and watery-eyed, with his too-bright red hair and raw-looking mouth—to know he wasn’t dangerous. It was on the grounds of weirdness. Paul had pegged him as a misfit, an odd bird, and that was one thing this family didn’t need more of. Certainly it was one thing Biscuit didn’t need more of. Paul hated it that his sister had no real friends, no school friends, peers. His parents, inexplicably, did not seem to consider this a problem. But Paul knew what it could be like if you didn’t blend in, if you didn’t pass for being like everyone else—especially in middle school, where people were capable of calling you “Chub” to your face and your best friend, “Yo, Haitian”; of blowing milk through their straws into your tray of Fiesta Nachos or Teriyaki Chicken Dippers; worst, of ignoring you so comprehensively that it didn’t even seem intentional, until bit by bit the friends you’d had all through elementary school excluded you not out of malice but because you’d fallen off their radar screens—and you found yourself fair game for all the maggot-faced Stephen Boyds of the world.

He gave his alter ego a knife, and with a few short lines showed how it gleamed under the streetlamp.

This Gordie might be a nice guy, but encouraging a friendship between him and Biscuit—between him and anyone in this already too-weird family—was clearly a step in the wrong direction. Paul couldn’t help but blame his father, who’d not only invited the guy in but clothed and fed him, too. Not that he should be shocked; both his parents had already proven themselves legally blind several times over.They couldn’t seem to detect anything wrong with Biscuit, never mind that she had no friends her own age, cut school, and could frequently be heard whispering to herself in ridiculous accents. They couldn’t seem to detect anything wrong with him, never mind that he’d rapidly transformed from a happy-go-lucky kid who got invited to twenty birthday parties a year—everyone in his class—to a misfit loser with one measly friend—a friend who hardly ever even came over because of
his
misfitty Grann. They couldn’t even seem to detect anything wrong with each other, never mind that his mother had been silent for most of the past year, or that his father, for all his apparent optimism, was beginning to show fissures. But no, to hear his folks tell it, things were swell, everyone doing admirably, chins up, noses to grindstones, business as usual, soldiering on—like the very fact they’d all come through the past year made them heroes. Break out the purple fucking hearts.

And now into all this appeared Jess, magically, like someone stepping through a looking glass, like a character in a book made flesh, standing in their kitchen, smiling at him, holding of all mugs his alphabet mug, like a sign, an omen, but that was stupid, but maybe things were about to change, maybe they’d already begun. Paul was still unnerved by the confusion he’d felt upon walking into the kitchen and seeing her there. He’d had a feeling it was her straightaway, although of course he’d needed his father’s confirmation, so many years had passed. “Jess as in Jessica?” he’d asked, pretending to be unsure but in reality covering for his shock, the mix of happiness and anger that had flooded him. It was as if he’d popped a handful of joke-shop candy, a rush of sweetness followed by the vinegary tang of having been tricked.

But no one had tricked him. His parents had been in the dark themselves, as taken aback as he by her unannounced arrival. And if she seemed different than he remembered, that was hardly a betrayal. People changed. So she’d lopped off her spectacular hair—why shouldn’t she? Eight years had passed. Neither was Paul the towheaded, baby-toothed, loose-limbed boy he’d been. For all he knew Jess was as disappointed by the changes in him as he was by the changes in her. Except that was presumptuous. To imagine even for a moment that his inconstancy mattered to her.

He scratched out, viciously, the guy he’d been drawing. Started over on a fresh page, drew a girl this time, not some mud-flap ho but a badass chica with cargo pants and spiked hair.

If Paul had long nursed an infatuation for Jess, it had been more intense for its childish clarity, more tenacious for the innocence of its inception. Although he hardly thought about her anymore in a concrete way, he’d never really stopped expecting, anticipating her eventual return. As though the prospect of her resuming a role in his life had lent the future a necessary luster. But the joke was on him: it turned out the idea of her retained its power on the condition she not reappear.

That evening at supper Jess had shown him the same quality of attention she’d offered Biscuit, no more, no less. Paul had been unable to detect the slightest indication from her of their preexisting bond, and he took this absence as confirmation of something he’d begun to suspect: that he was in a kind of decline, growing more deeply unappealing every year. He thought of them down the hall now, Biscuit and Jess, side by side, sleeping, probably, but still he was jealous of them for having each other as company. He imagined he could hear their breathing through the wall, slow and inflated with sleep, rising and falling in tandem, lining the nest of Biscuit’s night-lighted room with its downy sound.

In fact he could hear nothing. Only, straining, the insect whine of electricity within the walls. The clock beside his bed read 12:58. An hour ago he’d been aware of low voices from his parents’ room. Odd that this still held some power to comfort. The house had since grown relentlessly quiet. He wished for the sound of rain.That was a thing that helped, some nights—the sound of rain on the eaves. But it had rained once today already, and the front had come through.

 

 

ON THE CRAMPED BALCONY of the second-story condo that he had until this past January shared with his dad, Gordie Joiner sat with a wool blanket wrapped around him, his feet propped against the railing, and regarded his own breath as it traveled in sparse veils from his mouth. It was not unusual, now, for him to sit out here quite late at night. The balcony had room for little more than the molded plastic chair in which he sat and a single milk crate, on which rested a clamshell that still held a few extremely weathered cigarette butts. Beneath the chair his dad’s old radio played, tuned to the same soft rock station that had been on when his dad had left for the hospital that final time. Plugged into the outdoor outlet, it had been playing continuously these past four months.

The condo complex was built into the crook of the thruway entrance ramp, and the whoosh of traffic, though diminished at night, never entirely stopped. Gordie’s dad had used to say it was like living by the sea, comparing the sound to that of the surf, not a nuisance but a lullaby. So Gordie tried to think of it now. Below, from the darkness, came the sound of bottles being tipped into a recycling bin. Someone in one of the other units yelled out a window: “Sheila! Get in here!” A car started up and pulled away slowly, out of the parking lot and into the elsewhere until Gordie could no longer follow the sound of its engine. He closed his eyes and inhaled deeply.The rain earlier in the day had stirred all manner of intricacies from the soil, and the air, though almost painfully cold in his nostrils, smelled plainly now of spring. It was, literally, no longer the season of his orphaning.

Will Joiner had entered the hospital on December twentythird with complications from lung cancer. It had metastasized to the liver, lymph nodes, and spine. He died just short of his fifty-fifth birthday. Gordie’s mother had died nine days after his birth. Postpartum toxemia. The loss made bitterer by the fact that nowadays, in a developed nation, such a death ought not to have occurred. Will Joiner put the blame squarely on their native stoicism, his and Bronwyn’s both, and throughout Gordie’s life his dad had always erred on the side of caution, medically speaking, in all ways but one: the cigarettes he could not, would not, give up. Red and white pack. Peeping out of his breast pocket or tossed on the kitchen table. The cellophane sleeves, run through with their strip of gold, always lying about. Even after the scan showed cancer, even after Gordie moved home, as much to police him as anything else, his dad persisted in sneaking smokes, out on the balcony or in the bathroom. Eventually he did not bother to sneak, but smoked again in broad daylight at the kitchen table, or in his leather chair before the TV, or brazenly, sitting up in bed, until Gordie had given up lecturing, given up hunting down the hidden packs and squirreled-away loose smokes he’d find rooting through his dad’s nightstand and sock drawer and the pockets of old sport jackets hanging neat and idle in the back of the hall closet.