Half a Life: A Memoir (3 page)

“Hey, come on now, Darin—you only
guess
? How about if I told you we’re going to go in my Porsche?”

I swear this is what he said.

West Shore Road follows the turns of the Long Island Sound like a tag-along sister. This Tuesday a.m. it had the dispiriting vibe of all empty beachfronts in the rain.
Canadian geese bummed around the median where my own car, pretty much a few moments before, had slid to its stop. Where I’d stood and performed for those girls with their what-have-we-here faces.

“Let me show you,” the Shrink was saying about his Porsche, “what this baby can do zero-to-sixty, in
awesome
time.” (This really was his method, but I’m not sure what it says about the profession—whether this is psychotherapy or just Long Island psychotherapy, where all problems can be extenuated by making good time on the L.I.E.)

He stepped hard on the gas. The rain kept on as gentle drizzle, making an occasional plonk against the windshield. The Shrink ignored the street to focus his somewhat buggy eyes on me. He’d studied Judd Hirsch in
Ordinary People
, and was trying to be the hearty Jewish man to rescue me. West Shore Road offers two lanes in each direction. Maybe my
Ordinary People
foreboding was just that I’d seen the movie, and so was on guard for any resonances. In any case, it felt less like my moment than a pop culture remake I wanted to avoid. The drops on his windshield—the Porsche really was aerodynamic—had reversed field; they were traveling
up
, shivering in little broken dashes. But the Shrink didn’t flick on his wipers. He futzed with the tape player, still eyeing me. His hair had Bozo-grade kinks at the temples. Let’s just say he failed to come off doctorially. His car, I couldn’t help noticing—I am Long Island born and bred—wasn’t the splashy 911 model that the frequent automotive name-dropping had led me to expect. Rather,
it was a 944, what I knew to be the “Starter Porsche.” This model used Volkswagen parts. My hands were stuck in my jeans pockets, up to my thin sweaty wrists. Here I was, nipping along with a man who meant to save me in a souped-up Beetle. Cockeyed is maybe more accurate than buggy-eyed. But any man who tries to push into an emotional conversation—and to lead it to a very specific payoff—while entertaining the pleasures of driving really fast and dreamily on a wet road will of necessity seem bug-eyed. His stereo played “Let’s Hear It for the Boy,” from the
Footloose
soundtrack. It was obvious the Shrink felt a large and human pride in his purring German go-getter. He pronounced the brand properly, with the vocal pirouette of a
sha
at the end.

He decelerated—“Here?” he said. “Is this where?”—and even I noticed how smartly the eager little machine gunned down to lawful speeds.

I followed the pointer of his finger. “Um,” I said. “Not sure.”

If I’d tried to go beyond those short words, my voice would have guttered. I had already shared too much of what I felt and knew; I longed to feel and know
more
. “Maybe?” I said.

The sky had dropped a curtain on the sun. I remember the fast-passing median and its luscious grass. I can still see the boring road. The Shrink slowed us even more. Some geese poked along the median, each in its own way. I went nauseous. The day had become grim, irreparable.

“Okay, so?” he said, a wink of the profession in his voice. “How do you feel?”

What could I possibly have offered as an answer?

Then the sky bailed me out.

“Hey, look at
that
,” said the Shrink. A long leg of sunlight kicked down through the fog.

Miraculously, I could perform all the rites of conversation again.

“I feel pretty good?” Somehow I didn’t let the tears fall. “Not bad?” My voice wasn’t even really a sniveling whisper.

So I tried to give this a chance. I tried—after the Porsche edged onto the shoulder, stopping next to a sweep of West Shore Road. The
Footloose
soundtrack had forged ahead: first to “Almost Paradise (Love Theme from
Footloose
),” now Bonnie Tyler’s “Holding Out for a Hero.” After a moment of tiptoeing around the mood, the Shrink twisted the volume all the way down. We sat together in soft ticking silence. I tried to chuck my guilt into the landscape’s calm. I tried. And it
was
weird to be back here. Only days later, and it was already just a spot. A spot with geese and a spear of light.

Your muscles can tense with hope. I looked around for somewhere I could entrust with all this emotion: the khaki stripe of sand a little way off; the clean bend of street that (in a guess) I’d picked as the exact place where the accident had happened; all the vast and true stuff that seems to be nearly revealed, but isn’t, when you take the time to admire nature—that is in fact never revealed.

But a sickly paste of anxiety covered everything. I feared
that by giving my feeling over to someone
else’s
idea of what I should be feeling, I’d lose it. Years later, at college, I would read a Hemingway story about a young man home from a war, and the words would be so right I’d see that Porsche and that median strip and my stomach would turn heavy:

Krebs found that to be listened to at all he had to lie, and after he had done this twice he, too, had a reaction against the war and against talking about it …

His lies were quite unimportant lies and consisted in attributing to himself things other men had seen, done or heard of …

Krebs acquired the nausea in regard to experience that is the result of untruth or exaggeration, and when he occasionally met another man who had really been a soldier and they talked a few minutes in the dressing room at a dance he fell into the easy pose of the old soldier among other soldiers: that he had been badly, sickeningly frightened all the time. In this way he lost everything.

Over the Shrink’s Porsche clouds were tapping together, and the sky turned dismal again. The occasional car passed to slide its lights over the road. I had a fresh, healthy thought: It was too soon for me to gain anything meaningful from being here.

The Shrink turned a key, and his car snorted awake. “This,” he said, “was a help, right—this drive?”

I lied and I nodded: It sure had been.

His pink face (which for all I know wasn’t nearly as vulgar as I still need to see it) eased into the smile he’d wanted
to wear all along. And the Porsche skimmed back onto what you might call the traffic portion of the street.

“I
knew
it, Darin. It’s just a place. The accident’s just something that happened. This happened to both of you.”

Still, the Shrink needed to get back at me for having doubted him. He did this, however, with the gentlest touch. “Listen, you probably don’t understand this yet, but therapy,” he said, “is a process, okay?” He turned up the music again. “You have to listen to your therapist.”

It would be ten years before I’d try therapy again.

That Tuesday or Wednesday, there had been a school-wide memorial assembly: Celine’s teachers, friends, and coaches giving tributes to her, the “girl who has been so cruelly taken from us.” I hadn’t had the guts to be there that day, or back to school at all.

Friends told me that, before the end of the assembly, a teacher stood from the crowd. This was a guy I barely knew and didn’t very much like. He walked straight to the microphone. It was a surprise; the teacher hadn’t been designated to speak.

“Along with the sadness,” he said, taking the mic from the principal, “I know there’s a lot of anger here.” This teacher wasn’t a hippie, but he was given to wearing pullover baja shirts in his social studies class and I’d laughed behind his back many times. “Great emotion is justified in tragic events like these. But we should take a second to remember that Darin is a student in the North Shore community, too.” (Our school had about five hundred and twenty students total.) “The reports tell us he wasn’t at fault, and I am sure we can agree he’s a good person.”

It was years before I wrote to thank him, this guy
I didn’t really know, who was decent enough to perform a simple kindness, the kindness of remembering the young man whose well-being it would have been easy, at that moment, to forget. I didn’t say a word to him the rest of my high-school days.

As I waited to decipher the forming pattern of accusations and consequences, I returned to class. It was early June, about a week after the accident and a few days before the funeral.

I was met at North Shore High’s front door with a stormy look from Melanie Urquhart, one of Celine’s friends. I had prepared for this, or something like it. What high-schooler wouldn’t glare hard at the boy who killed her friend?

I had the hunch, as I contrited my way from class to cafeteria and back, that my day would be filled by these black glances. I was wrong. With frightened eyes, I looked everywhere, at everyone. And in the homerooms and corridors, there quickly grew around me a zone of silence and inviolability. Except when my friends would suddenly mount brief, haphazard campaigns of everything’s normal, quoting lines from
Fletch
and slapping my book bag or calling me a dick.

All the same, the inescapability of what had happened—what was happening now as I showed my face in the clogged thoroughfare between classes—threw who I really was into shadow, even to myself. It felt somehow like living at the last limits of objective reality. I seemed less real than the
plain, plump truth did. Because I’d driven a certain road, someone who had been alive was dead. I had killed someone. And yet, that wasn’t the end of it. Because now the daily me was back: the residue of that accident returned to school. The shambling or smiling or lurking person who’d run down the girl. I remember the first time after the accident my name was called in class, the feel of pause and hush in the room, like deer scenting something strange. Everyone’s ears and tails flicked. Speaking aloud here meant, all at once, that I was a student again. I’d have to work to be as present, as definable, as
real
as the accident was.

Before lunch, Jim—the guy who’d been such a jocular monster at the movie house—apologized and tried to explain himself. This was like that surprise tribute my social studies teacher had given at the assembly, a case of spot kindness. Jim was telling me that when we’d seen each other, he’d heard only that there’d been
some
kind of accident. And if he’d known that a person had actually been seriously
hurt
, let alone
died
, he of course wouldn’t have ever dared or even
dreamed
of, etc. Who cared what he said; his hands were on my shoulder. He asked three or four times how I was, and his grip on my arm felt good. When he saw I couldn’t answer, he’d interrupt my pauses. His nervous eyes watched me above his words, apologizing for the ways the excuses weren’t right even as he couldn’t stop presenting them.

Another buddy, Eric, assured me that he and others had started in on the high-school equivalent of push-polling, of
caucusing for votes.
Come on
, they’d say to anyone still on the fence, the undecideds.
Wasn’t it a little suspicious how she just
turned
into his car? You ever think of that?
To her friends they’d say quietly:
We have to be there for Darin, too. We have to support him, too
.

For all that, my inviolability zone wasn’t airtight. An AP English teacher, rancorous and grim, squinted my way: I’m almost positive he shook his head and grumbled as we passed each other. But more often what happened was vague. Students in hallways passed looks back and forth, telling one another: Hey, go on tiptoes around a griever like this. Or they just shunned me—quickened their pace, hid their heads in open lockers. I got a sense of which look signified what. Grievers become connoisseurs of the averted eye. My stomach was wincing the entire week. Except now and then, on the second and third days, when a few non-friends dared talking to me. At those moments, there would be that echoed
thump!
everywhere in the chest.

On the off chance I would need to chat, I’d prepared a whole, verbatim pitch. (“The entire thing happened in like an eye blink.”) When I delivered it, I’d see myself as poignantly sad, even a bit
aw-shucks
, with sundown lighting and uncertain piano tinkles right out of Hollywood, a scene trembling on the brink of discovery.

Again, most people steered clear, but a few—“Hey Darin, that morning did you have any, well, accidents happen, whatever—I’m sure you weren’t, I mean, who gets
drunk
during the day, but I’m just asking, did you …”—a
few kids did say things that demanded I address the accident. I’d chew off my monologue piece by piece, fussily clearing my throat, letting out a chunk at a time. It was the version I’d settled on, official and even true, but in a way that seemed to go against the spirit of truth: facts with edges sanded, corners rounded. (“Again, I didn’t really see her cut in front of me until pretty much, you know, impact.”)

The kids who did talk to me usually said:
Most of us understand it wasn’t your fault
, or some other soft response. And I even got awarded this: in front of my locker, the football team captain face-gestured my way. (With, I should admit, infinite disinterest.) He was the physical king of the class; his nod played up his good chin, the charisma of his nose … But so what seemed to be happening to me was a surprise. I don’t mean that North Shore High accepted my return with a gentle yawn. A fatal accident will remain a trusty motor of cafeteria scuttlebutt—I could intuit that as I humped around carrying my lunch tray. I felt like a paper cutout, poised there, being snipped into conversations at every table.

The school also had, of course, a few death fetishists. Kids who drew intricate pen-and-ink arabesques on their notebooks, who scratched
BLACK SABBATH
or
ANTHRAX
in their official fonts on the spine. These kids jostled over again and again, offering condolences but wanting accounts, details, details. I was a figure to them; to them, I may as well have been walking the halls with a black cowl and sickle. There was one girl in particular. She had mannish hair, cut
in a greasy style. It was obvious, as she interrogated me—the wide eyes, the thrilled cheeks—that by talking about this, she felt close to something decayed and vibrant.