The Grievers (6 page)

“He—passed away—about a month ago.”

“Jesus,” Ennis said. “How?”

“He killed himself,” I said. “It was a suicide.”

I told him everything I knew, including how to get in touch with Mrs. Chin in the event that he wanted to forward his condolences, and Ennis said that he’d include a death notice in the next issue of
The Academic
. Slick, shiny, and full of pictures, the Academy’s alumni journal arrived in the mail four times a year. Though Karen once figured out that Ennis’s face appeared, on average, once every three pages, the majority of the magazine was dedicated to spreading the good news that Saint Leonard’s was and always would be the region’s strongest bastion of Noblac ideals—namely courage, loyalty, faith, and intellect.

“A few of us were thinking of making a donation in Billy’s name,” I said. “Maybe setting up a scholarship fund. Is there a protocol for that kind of thing?”

“Absolutely,” Ennis said. “But it runs into money. To make it worthwhile, we’re talking two million up front.”

“Dollars?” I said.

“And that’s just to get the ball rolling. Which isn’t to say we can’t explore other avenues. A few years back we did a survey and found that fewer than thirteen percent of our students come from within city limits. Given our reputation as Philadelphia’s oldest prep school, that’s completely unacceptable, so we set up a scholarship to get more Philly boys in the door. You can always earmark whatever you pool together for that one, assuming Billy lived in Philadelphia. Or, if you prefer, you can assign your donation to an extracurricular activity like the drama society or the chess team. That’s how you two met, right? On the chess team?”

“No,” I said. “I was never on the chess team.”

“At any rate, we have plenty of options.”

Sensing, perhaps, that there was no real money to speak of on my end of the conversation, Ennis repeated his condolences before cutting me loose. In the cramped, muggy darkness of the dollar sign, I snapped my cell phone shut and checked the time. Relieved that my shift was almost over, I crawled out the bottom of my costume and dragged it to the parking lot where my boss, the Associate Manager, was taking a cigarette break.

“No balloons today?” she said as I shoved the dollar sign into the backseat of my car.

“I had some earlier, but I let go of them when I fell.”

“Didn’t Terry tell you to tie them to your wrist?”

“Is Terry the guy who smells like sausage?”

The woman nodded. Her name was Sue. She had a different blue suit for every day of the week and an apparent fetish for ruffled blouses. The effect, heightened by her brittle blonde hair and papery skin, was to make her look like she had a part-time gig playing in a gloomy version of the Partridge Family. When I looked at her, I couldn’t help wondering if this was what the future held for me as well—the daily, soul-sucking grind of a real job, the prospect of each year blending into the next until they all congealed into a pointless, washed-out blur. Was this what killed Billy, I wondered, as Sue exhaled a plume of smoke? Did he see where his life was headed—where all of our lives were headed—and opt instead to bag the game altogether?

“The balloons are part of the image,” Sue said. She worked directly under the Academy alum who gave me the job, and she more or less understood the two most fundamental aspects of my position—namely that it was pointless, and my connections meant that firing me would be more trouble than it was worth. Nonetheless, she wanted me to at least play along. If Sue had to pretend that I was legitimately employed, then I had to at least make the occasional gesture toward doing the same. “We want people to associate banking with fun.”

“Who doesn’t associate banking with fun?” I said.

“Just tie the balloons to your wrist, okay?”

I was tempted to ask where lying flat on my back on the side of the highway fit into Sue’s hierarchy of things people should associate with banking, but it was the kind of wise-ass remark that would make my wife cringe when she eventually found out about it, so I kept my mouth shut. If nothing else, being married made me think twice before saying anything that might otherwise get me into trouble.

W
HEN I
got home, Karen had stripped the last of the wallpaper from our living room walls and was beginning to work her way up the stairs. The woman who lived in the house before us had been a heavy smoker, and her white wallpaper had, over the years, turned ugly shades of yellow and brown where the walls met the ceiling. So we burned lead paint away from the woodwork, scraped the wallpaper with a wire brush and razor blades, and soaked the walls with hot, soapy water until the pasty paper came away from the plaster in thin, sticky layers that reminded me of phyllo dough. In the can, the paint we had chosen looked like melted chocolate ice cream.

“They want two million dollars,” I said, kneeling one step below my wife and scouring the wallpaper with a wire brush. “If we want to set up a fund in Billy’s name, that’s how much we’ll need.”

“I guess we’ll be selling the vineyard, then.”

Karen was wearing cutoff jeans and a lime-green tee shirt that her students had given her as a souvenir for chaperoning the senior prom. When she wasn’t teaching, she was grading papers, and the only break she ever took from grading was to vent her frustration on our walls and woodwork. Considering the amount of wallpaper lying in shreds on our living room floor, my guess was that her students still couldn’t quite articulate the difference between Realism and Romanticism.

“I’m serious,” I said. “Two million.”

“It’s the thought that counts, Charley. Make a donation in Billy’s name. Give what you can. It’s not like the Academy won’t take your money.”

“Of course they’ll take my money,” I said. “That isn’t the point. The point is respect. I want them to know that I can do this, that I’m not a total—you know.”

“A total what?” Karen said.

“Fuck-up.”

“Who said you were a total fuck-up?”

“No one,” I said. “Besides, this isn’t about me. It’s about Billy.”

“Okay,” Karen said, tugging at a strip of wallpaper. “As long as it doesn’t turn into another one of your crusades.”

“Crusades?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

“Your fixation with apostrophes, for example.”

“That’s justified,” I said. “And I’d hardly call it a crusade. I just happen to have a deep and abiding respect for the English language.”

“We can’t eat at Fernando’s anymore,” Karen said.

“Are you kidding? I did them a favor.”

“You pissed off Fernando.”

“The sign said
special’s
—with an apostrophe S. Besides, there
is
no Fernando. That was the bartender.”

“Whoever it was, you could have at least apologized when he told you to get away from his sign.”

“Apologize for what? I saw a problem and I fixed it.”

“I stand corrected,” Karen said. “You’re the Albert Schweitzer of punctuation.”

“I’m not on a crusade,” I said.

“Fine,” Karen said. “You’re not on a crusade.”

For the next hour, we scraped, scoured, soaked, and scrubbed as the yellow wallpaper gradually gave way to gray, pockmarked plaster. At the bottom of the stairs, the radio was tuned to a classical music station. If either of us spoke, it was only to trade a scraper for a wire brush. Beyond that, we worked in silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE  

N
eil made a reservation for twelve at a restaurant that was mutually inconvenient for everyone. After driving nearly an hour north along the gray corridors of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I spied an electric sign boasting eightyseven varieties of nachos and knew I was in the right place. That
nachos
was spelled with an apostrophe S didn’t make me cringe so much as it forced me to hold my tongue as the hostess seated me alone at a long table beneath a red bicycle that dangled precariously from the ceiling on superfine strands of fishing line.

For the next ten minutes, I sipped iced tea and made a show of studying the menu while conversations buzzed all around me. When the waitress paused at my table to ask if I needed a refill, my sense was that the question had less to do with my drink than the hungry patrons-in-waiting eyeing the vast expanse of real estate in front of me with a mix of envy and outrage.

“Hey, big boy,” I said when Neil arrived. “How about a drink?”

“Sorry,” Neil said. “I never take a drink unless somebody’s buying.”

“
Duck Soup
?” I asked.

“Close,” Neil said. “
Animal Crackers
.”

Everything I knew about the Marx Brothers I’d pieced together from sound bites, documentaries, Trivial Pursuit, and conversations with Neil, but I’d never actually seen one of their movies in its entirety. Like anyone even vaguely familiar with their work, I knew Groucho’s iconic mustache and glasses on sight, guessed that his cynical outlook on life had earned him his nickname, and understood that the animated stork in the Vlasic Pickle commercials was modeled after his trademark stoop, deadpan delivery, and incomparable cigar-play. I knew that Harpo didn’t talk, that he wore a curly wig, and that he honked a horn whenever he got excited. I knew that Chico spoke in a broken accent and once told a reporter that he’d been Italian until he saw what they did to Mussolini and subsequently decided to become Greek. I knew that Zeppo had starred in only a handful of films, always playing the straight man, and that Gummo had quit the act before they made it to the silver screen.

I’d learned all of this through the kind of passive research that makes renaissance men of us all—a PBS special on a rainy Sunday here, a zero-context rant from my grandfather there. Fortunately or not, this was how I learned pretty much everything in my life. I never read the Beats, I only read about them. I never went to war, but I saw it on TV. I never played football, but I looked forward to every new version of
Madden NFL
to hit the shelves. And the closest I’ve come to a psychedelic experience is reading
The Doors of Perception
. Some people immerse themselves in the things they love, the things that excite them, the things that pique their curiosity. At best, I’m the kind of person who dips a toe in the water, but more often than not, I’ll settle for hearsay, opting always to remain a safe distance from whatever it is that holds my attention.

“Nice place, by the way,” I said, glancing at the bicycle above us.

“Sorry,” Neil said, apologizing before I could really start to complain—about the drive, about the wait, about the superfluous apostrophe. “Anthony had a coupon.”

“So he’s coming?” I asked.

“Actually, no,” Neil said. “He just called to bail on us. Something about a
Dukes of Hazzard
marathon.”

Back at the Academy, Anthony Gambacorta was a pudgy kid with thick glasses who used to hang out in the light booth and share his extensive pornography collection with the stage crew while the Carrot and Stick Drama Society butchered the likes of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in the theater down below. During our sophomore year, he made a name for himself when he replaced all the posters advertising an upcoming production of Bock and Harnick’s
Fiorello!
with counterfeits that read
Fellatio!
instead. The fact that nobody caught the mistake until a reporter for the
Philadelphia Inquirer
spotted it on the last night of the show didn’t do much for the school’s reputation; but an insatiable appetite for porn kept everyone in the know from ratting Anthony out even when the administration threatened to pull the plug on the drama program altogether.