The Unprofessionals (16 page)

I
KNEW THAT
I had to stop thinking about him as an eleven-year-old boy, the way he was when I first met him on a hot day in New England. His father had introduced us in his super-speedy way. He was in a rush to a meeting of thirty reproductive surgeons in his living room. I was there to photograph the thirty, and the surgeon dashed upstairs to his room-size closet to change out of his suit jacket. The boy was hanging about idly, having done his easy homework hours before. He stared at me, appearing to take in my whole life story in an instant.

“You two are going to get along great!” his father had said in a shouting style intended to convey something uncomplimentary. The under-meaning was, You're both weird in the same way.

After that, the boy put a leash on his dog and we walked around outside the house discussing which state had the higher rate of Lyme disease, Connecticut or Massachusetts. The boy was dressed as if his mother had chosen his clothing, in khaki Bermuda shorts and a polo shirt—luckily for all of us, it was minus the polo player—and he wore Top-Sider moccasins. This was before he cared much about how he looked. His shorts were wrinkled and his polo shirt hung out at a lopsided angle. His thick, wavy Jeff Chandler hair was messed up and standing out in a few directions. I noticed during the evening that his little legs were child-thin and shaped like his mother's legs, although a slight chubbiness was threatening his midsection and making his polo shirt hang in the crooked way.

When I waved good-bye to him outside in the dark driveway where he'd stood nonstop lecturing on the history of the kinds of cars his parents owned then, and all the years before, I noticed his little knobby knees below the bottom of his shorts. The messed-up hair, the slightly buck teeth, the deadpan expression, the shirt askew over the baggy shorts, and the thin, delicate legs with the round knees—seeing this was the beginning of my attachment to him and his sad and lonely place in his family and the world.

 

NEXT, I'D
seen him at a most awkward event in his life, a religious celebration he'd been forced to have for his thirteenth birthday. This embarrassed him, since his plan was to join the conservative Christian Republican world. When he told me this plan at a later age—sixteen—I said, “The religious ceremony of your birthday celebration was videotaped.”

“No one has it but us,” he said.

“The FBI could have a copy,” I said.

“How? How could they?” he asked. “No agents were present,” he said. But he sounded worried.

He wore a little white tuxedo, again conjured up by his mother, and he was sitting at a table with a bunch of thirteen-year-old kids, all staring straight ahead without smiling or speaking.

At the end of the night's toned-down festivities, the boy was pressed into several family-picture-taking episodes by a professional photographer. During this part of the event, my husband and I were taking our leave. I looked back at the boy, who had on his pre-existential expression of good-natured cooperation mixed with the beginnings of the disdain to come, and I waved and smiled in a moment of empathy. To my surprise he smiled back. The smile had a second of happiness in it, meaning, “Isn't this ridiculous?” or, “It's almost over.” He did look a little like Alfred E. Neuman, and he didn't mind.

 

I HAD
to learn to see him as a college boy/heroin addict. I had missed this whole stage of his development.

“I saw him decline,” his cousin told me. “It was like a serious, fatal illness. It wasn't a surprise. I watched it for four years. He looked like a Holocaust victim. He never ate food. He had black circles under his eyes. The drug therapist told us afterwards that he'd used drugs every single day the last year of his life.”

 

I KNEW
no spiritual counselors. Or any counselors. I knew no one to talk to at all, now that the boy was gone from the world.

I looked at the valerian tincture and I looked at the Xanax, both in a basket of vitamins on the kitchen table. I'd never taken a pill for daytime problems, but this would be a good time to start.

I thought of asking someone for an opinion, but whoever I asked would probably say, “There's no pill for this.”

 

I CALLED
a medical professor who was a friend of the boy's father and whole family. He sounded glad when he answered the phone, because the last time we'd met was at a fun-filled event.

The surgeon's friend hadn't an inkling of what he was about to hear.

I practiced the technique I'd been preparing.

“Did you know he was a heroin addict?” I said.

“No,” he said.

Then I told the story, and as I did, I heard his voice getting ready for the end. The silence, the pause, the yes. By the time I got there, he already knew.

When he called back later, he said, “They're cloistered at home. They don't want to see or talk to anyone.”

 

MEDICATION AND
work were all I had for the day—maybe the rest of my life. I might end up like Jacqueline Kennedy's cousin, the younger Edie Beale—if I was lucky. I'd visited her abandoned garden many times, before and after its restoration. In both conditions it was twenty times the size of ours, and filled with flowers, trees, shrubs, old walls, fences, and vines. I would end up even worse without this kind of a garden for solace and peace.

 

ON THAT
afternoon, the day after the boy ended his life, the hardware-store manager called to inform me that there were no two-line cordless phones in the whole town. They love to give this kind of information. Because if there were such a phone, they might be asked to go to the stockroom and find one.

In the midst of this situation, the UPS man arrived with a box from J&R Music World. I didn't remember having ordered anything. I tore open the box with pruning shears. Inside was a two-line cordless phone, a silver phone the boy had advised me to order the week before. “Get the GigaRing,” he said. “It's the best one if you can't spend six hundred dollars on a really good one.”

There it was. I opened the box and looked at the phone. I touched it. You little jerk, I thought about my friend the boy, now we can't even criticize the phone together—I was alone with the grotesque object. I wanted to know how he could have talked me into buying this phone at the same time he was planning his suicide.

I threw it, box and all, onto the washing machine in the laundry room. Then I turned around and leaned on the dryer and cried in a new way I didn't want anyone to hear. It would be too much of a burden to anyone, even the birds I heard chirping outside. The sound of opening a window or turning a doorknob could scare them away.

The expensive high-tech silver stand-up receiver—I'd never knowingly order such a thing. It was one of his delusions of grandeur to recommend the phone. And on top of that, it wasn't all silver, it was part black and he knew that I wanted nothing black in my sight, but he tried to train me out of the phobia for the purposes of technology. The phone had the special name, and phones with names were things he knew about.

I hoped I wouldn't be getting any mail from him when I saw he could still reach me with a phone. The purpose of this phone was to enable me to do many things out of normal phone range while talking to him as long as he wanted.

I looked around. I didn't even have a cat, I remembered. A cat could be there annoying us and getting in the way. A dog would be more understanding. That's what Andrew Weil had written about dogs, and I believed everything he said, except the part about garlic—that if you eat it all the time it doesn't cause a garlic odor.

 

THE WEEKEND
was a time of hot, humid nothingness.

“What's wrong?” my husband asked a few times. I'd already told him the news, which he was able to forget right away.

I reminded him: “My close friend committed suicide. I'm thinking about him.”

I had to learn that men were a kind of nonhuman species; they were like beings from outer space who needed a form of simple communication. I'd seen this in science fiction movies—earthlings trying to talk to robots and beings from other planets. When I tried it out, it worked and kept down the expectations. Men weren't like actual human beings, and I'd proceed accordingly. I hadn't read the
Men Are from Mars
book, but I understood the principle behind it.

Anyone who called got the story. Soon I was tired of it—“heroin,” “rehab,” the last phone calls. People didn't like the story and soon I stopped bothering them with it. I could tell that some people thought it was bad manners for me to tell them.

The narcissist was a special case. I left a message for her the first night. “Something really bad has happened with the boy.”

She called back right away. On other occasions she might take a week or a month to return a call—calling only when she was in the mood to talk about recipes or shampoo. I had a two-minute tolerance in my brain for these subjects.

She owned an art gallery near San Francisco where she showed paintings depicting accidents and disasters. She'd guessed the ending from my message and wanted to talk about it all night. Like most of my friends, she took antianxiety medication, and the talking had to take place before the medicine kicked in. The time-zone difference made it even more difficult for us.

All of my friends had this in common—we'd never taken any psychomedication until we were forty-four or-five. We did it as a last resort, pressured by doctors. The whole psychiatric profession was probably sick and tired of hearing problems and just wanted everyone to take pills and shut up. My more well mannered friends would say, “The Klonopin,” “Ambien,” “Xanax,” or even two of the three, “kicked in. I can't think straight,” or, “I have to go to sleep before it wears off.”

A psychiatrist had warned me about this a couple of years before. “If you keep doing one more thing, you'll miss the opportune moment for sleep,” he'd said. He knew I had that compulsion to do more and more things at night, things like laundry and recycling, and he said that he had the same compulsion.

“I guess your analysis was a failure,” I said.

“A partial failure,” he'd agreed. “One continues to struggle,” he said, one of his favorite ways of excusing his faults.

I disregarded his advice and always kept doing the one more thing. I hadn't really slept since 1983.

He'd told me the advice specifically about Ambien, but the one time I tried that drug the sleep it produced wasn't real sleep.

I'd read a description of the topic in an early story by Marcel Proust:

“The feebleness one experiences several minutes before sleep induced by a bromide. Suddenly perceiving nothing, no dream, no sensation, between his last thought and this one…‘What? I haven't slept yet?' But then seeing it was broad daylight, he realized that for over six hours he had been possessed by bromidic sleep.”

The boy and I had once agreed about this, both saying into the phone at the same time, “I hate Ambien!” His father used to yell, “I hate Harold Pinter!” the same way whenever I recommended
The Birthday Party.

The boy said Ambien didn't help him sleep at all, and when he'd told his doctor, the doctor said, “Take two more. Take six.”

All of us in the anxiety club knew about seizing the moment for sleep, but some would keep talking; they'd make no sense and fall asleep talking.

I'd say, “Let's talk tomorrow,” or, “Let's go to sleep,” or, “Your medicine has taken effect.” And they'd say, “No, let's talk now,” as they fell asleep.

These are my friends, I'd think. This is where I am.

The day after the boy ended his life, I realized that I might have been on the phone talking about him when he was committing this act.

I should have kept calling him, not talking to my friends about why he wasn't calling back. This is the flaw of many women, I was learning—talking instead of acting. I should have told him again the answer to his request “Tell me two things that make life worthwhile.” I should have told him right then instead of postponing the talk. I should have quickly made up a list of more things.

But maybe he'd turned the phone off once he'd made up his mind. But maybe in haste he'd left it on and he would have seen the vibration feature of the phone in his jacket pocket.

Just the thought of his jacket was unbearable—his jackets, which were so important to him in high school. He'd shown me how he'd organized his closet in his room at home when he was fifteen. All the jackets hung neatly with big spaces between them. He explained which jacket was for which purpose: one for school, one for lectures, one for dinners out, one for dinner parties. He tried on one or two and walked around. Some of the jackets were hand-me-downs—one from his father, a navy pea coat from college. One was black faux fur, from a cousin.