The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace (32 page)

Skeet kept a button in a small wooden keepsake box. The button was the size of the circle created by touching his thumb and index finger together, blue and white, with the Yale bulldog logo in the center. Jackie had sent it to him after Rob's acceptance. He kept the trinket tucked in the bottom of the box, beneath pictures of Rob, letters Rob had written, a postcard from Rio, and a mix tape Rob had recorded in junior high.

In the winter of 2005, halfway through Rob's second year of teaching at St. Benedict's, Skeet became conscious of a new shift in his son: Rob began asking him for advice. He had tenants on Greenwood now, and—as Jackie had warned him—extracting rent was a part-time job in
itself, tiresome with false threats on both sides, providing only enough to cover the ever-present costs of the property, no more. The teaching job was secure and mentally easy, but—as Wayne Ridley had warned him—emotionally taxing. Each day left him with little reserve energy, just enough to want to smoke up and go to sleep. He had girl problems. He had money problems. He had problems with Jackie. Skeet confided to his friends in the Christian discussion group that, as a father, all he wanted to do was help his kid. But as a prisoner, he did not have the capacity to offer advice regarding the world outside these brick walls and turrets. The only thing he could confidently tell his son was to prioritize Jackie above all else. His mother was a great woman, he would say.

Skeet had been feeling weak lately—nothing new, considering the D-grade food they ate, the lack of exercise and sunlight. A different kind of fatigue began overtaking him that winter, which felt terminal, trickling down through his body from his head. He didn't visit the prison doctor, though, because the medical ward was depressing and thick with others' diseases. And perhaps he didn't truly want to know what was happening to him.

T
HE
P
ENN
R
ELAYS
at Franklin Field in Philadelphia were like a national party, with races instead of a DJ at its center. Tens of thousands of people came to watch runners ranging from below-average high school athletes to Olympic medalists compete. The crowded corridors of the stadium resembled an industrial cattle ranch. I'd been coming to the relays since I was a kid, with my father. I'd run at them for eight years through high school and college. In April 2005, I brought my fiancée down from New York to meet up with old teammates and coaches.

I'd met Rebecca one year earlier, through a friend, in a bar on the Lower East Side. Six weeks later—six weeks of walking around the city in a state of intoxication together, talking until three and four in the morning each night, feeling so in love that we sometimes forgot to eat—we'd been sitting on a sidewalk bench drinking margaritas from paper
cups, and I'd blurted out, “So will you marry me?” (the concept having occurred to me only a half second earlier).

My parents and siblings had barely spoken to me since—because we'd known each other for less than two months, because I'd just turned twenty-four years old, because I was an aspiring (or “wannabe”) novelist who walked dogs to supplement nonprofit sector wages. I'd always been the quiet one, considerate in my actions and conservative in my decisions. That I could be ignorant and disrespectful enough to make the most important decision in my life spontaneously, without their wise and experience-based input, without a single thought as to the implications of that decision—this was beyond the comprehension of anyone who loved me, and it tore my allegiance between a woman I'd known for weeks and the family I'd known all my life. No one was wrong, necessarily, and my parents were acting purely out of love and an understanding of long-term life that I did not possess. But still, a year's worth of holidays were rendered tense and fraught. Exchanges with family members became strictly informational. Discussions on the matter with Rebecca often became fights, and more than one night had found her weeping facedown into the bed while I walked alone with my dog around the city in the early-morning hours, with no idea how to make things good again.

Such was our state when Rebecca and I trained down to the Penn Relays. I held tight to her hand as we navigated the maelstrom of human bodies toward the end zone bleachers where Ty Cantey and a few other former teammates were supposed to be. We found them, caught up, swapped a few college stories that seemed to bring forward just how young and stupid we all were—just how naïve I was to be engineering my life around whimsy.

Then Rob was sitting on the bleacher right above and behind us, with an arm locked around my and Ty's necks. “Whass
uuuuup
?” he said, imitating a popular Budweiser commercial at the time.

I hadn't seen Rob in two years, since that night in New Haven. He was slightly heavier than he'd been then, but his laugh was the same, his
rapid-fire knuckle cracks were the same, his grin was the same.

I introduced Rebecca, and Ty interjected, “Da Jeff is getting fucking married to this girl.”

Rob thought it was a joke. Then he leaned back, examined me as if in appraisal. He slapped his palm against my back hard enough that I had to grab the seat to keep from toppling forward. “Damn, son,” he said. “That's a strong move.”

The wind swirled around the stadium as the four of us sat and talked about where we were. Ty was two years into a seven-year MD-PhD program at Harvard, and he seemed worn out. The only way he knew how to study was very, very hard, all night, multiple times a week. He'd been studying this way for six years and racking up debt daily along the way. Between Yale and Harvard, he now carried more than $300,000 in student loans. On that day, he hinted at the reality that the research career he'd once aspired to would not go very far in repaying that amount, and he was considering cutting short the PhD component in order to specialize in a more profitable field of medicine, like orthopedics or dermatology.

I couldn't believe that word, “dermatology,” had exited my friend's mouth. That Ty Cantey—who had won the graduation award at Yale for overall achievement in the entire senior class, and who had seemed destined to add a Nobel someday—was considering a life spent treating zits and giving Botox injections felt sobering. Yet Ty seemed as slaphappy as ever, and we remembered a night when his girlfriend—“the Predator”—had gotten so angry with him that she'd clawed his arm, drawing blood, and he'd shut her out of the apartment. Throughout, Rob had been rolling around on the couch, gut laughing harder than I'd ever seen. “She made you her bitch!” he'd squealed over and over, through tears, and he said it again now while Ty blushed, unable to deny it.

In the context of old friends, Rebecca's presence made me feel more grown-up and presentable to them—certainly more so than the nonprofit job, or the unpublished novel that I spent most of my days and all of my nights editing and reediting. Rebecca and I had our own narrative
in the fast engagement, the family pressure that only strengthened our bond, the wide-open future in which we would surely succeed. This narrative was silly if not stupid, but we remained in that punch-drunk stage of love, oblivious of how annoying we might have been to others, and so we blithely rendered the romance to Ty and Rob. Not present in their reactions was the skepticism we'd been receiving from almost everyone else in our orbit regarding the choice we had made. Ty was already talking about the bachelor party. Rob nodded along quietly, not jumping up and down but very present, very
there
, the way he'd always been for us in college, emitting a kind of wisdom even when he wasn't speaking any words.

Later, Rebecca and Rob sat together, apart from Ty and me as we watched the races and marveled at split times.

“You picked a good one,” he told her, gesturing toward me.

“I know,” she said.

“No,” he said, looking directly into her eyes, face beyond serious, nearly grave. “For real. He's my boy. He's one of the good ones.”

Near the end of the afternoon, Rob and I made a food run to the vending area, and he said the same to me: “That's a good woman; you're a lucky man.” I asked if he recalled my college heartbreak sophomore year, and the night he'd spent trying to “get me right.” He grinned and shook his head, surely recalling my pathetic state. “Yeah, well, look at you now, brother. Things always come around.”

Rebecca, more than me or Ty, understood Rob's language. She'd grown up as one of the few white girls on her block in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, known during her youth in the late '70s as “Bang-bang-shoot-'em-up-Fort-Greene.” Her parents were both social workers and community activists who had never made more than $50,000 between them. They spent some evenings trying to shoo the johns from local bars. The thick wrought-iron cages set over the doors and windows of their home didn't always prevent burglaries, as intruders found a passage in through the roof. Rebecca had been mugged at gunpoint with her mother while walking the block between the C train and their front
door. Her father, who was legally blind, wore a bridge in his mouth, because half of his teeth had been knocked out by a mugger in Fort Greene Park in the middle of the day (though, due to the tide of gentrification that would never be possible in East Orange, her parents' home, purchased for $5,000 down in 1970, was now worth upward of $2 million). From Rob, she sensed the weight of similar experiences, and she knew that those experiences lent a grace to even the simplest of sentiments. When he told her that I was his boy, he meant it. In a way that was less fleeting than the day itself, his words solidified the decision she had made. If a guy like Rob Peace saw value in the man she was going to marry, then she knew it must be there. Because Rob wouldn't humor her about something as real as friendship.

W
E WERE
A
MERICANS
in our midtwenties, finding apartments and homes, meeting our future spouses, picking (or sometimes falling into) our future careers. We were creating our social circles and the hobbies around which those circles would revolve. We were becoming adults, or at least people who could present as such. This coming of age, in our particular generation, was warped, because of the accelerated pace at which the world seemed to be changing. We hadn't had cell phones or email in high school; our lives depended on them now. We began to manage relationships exclusively through text messages. In no moment of the day were we unavailable to anyone interested in our time. We shopped differently, read the news differently (or not at all), made plans differently. A cultish aspect had overtaken pop culture, with Apple products, the synthetic takeover of music,
Sex and the City
theme parties. Meanwhile, the country was in two wars that we—and by “we” I mean the people I knew in Manhattan, most of whom hadn't been present on 9/11—felt only abstractly connected to. With the world and its goings-on constantly blasting through our computer screens, relevance was the thing we craved, whether it was obtained in the media spotlight or with the accumulation of wealth or in being counter-everything or finding an
apartment in a cool neighborhood. For a socially phobic and culturally antiquated guy like me, I was content to watch from the outer edges.

Observing people I'd gone to college with, tracking the personality changes that had occurred between the blotto days preceding graduation and now, was both nourishing and unsettling. A girl who had been renowned on campus for her hard drinking and, shall we say, liberal attitude toward sexual relationships, was now a straitlaced lawyer for a prestigious firm, engaged to a successful banker a decade older than she. A charismatic and admired football star was now working 120-hour weeks at Lehman Brothers, with a growing paunch and personality dulled by all the numbing data he spent those hours analyzing. The senior class president, who had seemed built for a powerhouse political career, had become an Episcopal minister in a small rural town. As so many of us had done in college, we were still reinventing ourselves.

Everyone paused in the weeks after Lyric Benson died. She had been a classmate in Pierson College, beautiful, with an unbridled energy. She was the girl who, on one of the first nights of school, performed a belly dance over a very stoned Rob. An actress in college, she'd begun building a film career quickly afterward, with an Amex commercial and a guest appearance on
Law & Order.
In small, meaningful steps, she was heading toward her dream. However, as she did so, she dragged an anchor from college. During senior year, she'd begun dating an older man who lived in New Haven. He was in his midthirties, handsome in a worn-out way. He sported a long ponytail and fitted suits and became a staple at college parties. A rumor circulated that he worked for the CIA, or had been an Army Ranger, or both. To her female friends, he was mature and alluringly mysterious. To her male friends, he seemed like a pathetic predator of younger women and a liar (also, we were jealous). Either way, people were sure that the romance would run its course quickly, and Lyric would grow wiser. We were all growing wiser.

In the spring of 2003, he shot her in the face, fatally, at point-blank range. The murder occurred in the vestibule of her Chinatown walk-up building, in front of her mother, as recompense for ending their engage
ment after he'd begun exhibiting obsessive behavior. Then he'd killed himself. Her picture had been on the cover of the
New York Post
among other publications. The pure grisliness of the murder-suicide enthralled the whole city for half a day. Among those who knew her well, the tragedy was paired with a terrible set of emotions—loss, regret, and the guilt of knowing that if they'd been experienced enough to have foreseen such an ending back in college (though, granted, no one could have foreseen
this
ending), they could have guided her away from him sooner, and she would still be alive. The proximity to this kind of violence, this permanently engraved cause and effect, had been previously unknown to almost all of us—Rob Peace being one of the few who had knowledge of murder, premature death, the feeling that coursed through that particular brand of funeral. Lyric's death reminded us that having a Yale degree on our résumés could open many doors, but it couldn't protect us from life, which didn't much care about résumés.