His voice sounds strange. Can he be my brother? “Is it really you, Harper?”
“Yes, Cage.” He hugs me tight. “I know it’s rough but you’ve got to hang in there.”
“The family’ll be sad for a while and then they’ll get over it. They’ll be better off not saddled with a nut.”
“Cage, everybody would be crushed. Mama. Dad. Nanny. Me. All your friends from Baton Rouge and Sewanee. We already lost Nick. Everybody would be sad for years.”
“Everybody dies.”
“Yeah, but the idea is to go in a nap in your eighties, not when you’re young and strong and so many people love you. We would carry that sadness around for years.”
“The rest might. You’d get over it. That’s why I asked you to come.” My voice is steady. “You’ve understood since you were eight. I want your permission to kill myself.”
Harper tries to hug me.
I push him away. “I don’t see why everyone doesn’t commit suicide. Life is like an all-night party with rivers of blow and naked playmates, but to get into the party you have to pass through a filthy hole, slathering yourself with excrement, and buy a ticket by prostituting yourself, and at the end of the night you have to squeeze back out through the fetid crack into nothingness.”
“That doesn’t sound like you, the theist of our generation. Maybe Papa
is
right.” Harper looks unconvinced. “Maybe there is some sort of afterlife beyond human imagination.”
“If there is, I’ll be in the seventh circle stewing in a vat of boiling blood. That’s what my dreams tell me.” I turn slowly and reach for my notebook on the pillow and hand it to Harper.
He looks at the cover. “This is from your last depression, when you were pulling out of it.”
“I was too scared to work, so Mom dropped me off at the library every day, made me spend the day there. Read the last page.”
“Whoever no longer wishes to live shall state his reasons to the Senate, and after having received permission shall abandon life. If your existence is hateful to you, die; if you are overwhelmed by fate, drink the hemlock. If you are bowed with grief, abandon life. Let the unhappy man recount his misfortune, let the magistrate supply the remedy, and his wretchedness will come to an end.” Harper stops and looks at me gravely. “Cage—”
“I know you don’t have any hemlock. I’m not asking for your help. I just want your permission.” Only death excites me now, gives me the energy to focus and speak. “The Romans thought it was an honorable way to die. A courageous choice. A way to redeem yourself.”
In the chair Harper crosses his legs, runs his hand through his hair.
“You want to leave? Leave. Just give me permission.”
“Let’s take a walk in the garden.”
“I’m too tired.” I flop back on the bed.
“Cage, you’re too depressed to see the light on the horizon. You have your best years in front of you. You have to be optimistic. You—”
“Stop bullshitting me, Harper. My past is a train wreck and my future’s a disaster waiting to happen. Everyone’d be better off if I were—”
“Alive, well, and happy.”
“Impossible. Inconceivable. Preposterous. Absurd. Go away, Harper. Go to your job, your girls, your money. Enjoy the party while it lasts.”
I
sabella Ballou is sipping something clear on ice at the bar, sitting up straight on a high stool. In blue jeans, low riding boots, and a sage turtleneck sweater, she looks like she came from the stables. This is a waste of time and energy. She knows what I’m holding and she’s not in the market. No chance for a trade.
But he loved women
should be my epitaph if I died tomorrow. I worship women. I wake up from the doldrums, forget the underground fountain of eternal despair in the presence of a beguiling face and soft eyes. I’ll touch my cheek to hers and kiss the air, both sides, a habit picked up in Europe that plays dramatically in the provinces. Sometimes it backfires, but it’s a good test of temperament and besides I have nothing to lose. This is practice. I try to amp up the lumens in my eyes and smile widely like Cage at the height of his charm on Nantucket ten years ago, my age now, radiate that spark, that warmth and kindness, the light in his eyes that promised high altitudes of excitement. I call out, “Hey, Isabella.”
She turns and checks me out like a cad, letting her eyes travel from mine down to my loafers and back up again. Her face hard as a hanging judge, she holds up five fingers with one hand and makes a fist with the other.
Ha, ha, I mouth, coming closer.
She seems plainer than I remember, then she smiles and it’s almost like looking at a different person, a take-your-breath-away beauty. “I’ll bet you held up cards in the yard of your frat house as defenseless, self-conscious girls walked to class.”
“Actually, no.” I laugh. It’s the truth. “I felt sorry for them.”
She sticks out her hand, which I grasp, bending forward for her cheek.
“What do you take me for?” she says, leaning away in her chair. “Euro-trash? You’re in Memphis now, sonny.” Isabella’s laugh sounds almost like a boy’s. Her spunky tomboyishness appeals to me. This is a girl who brooks no bullshit. I’ll bet she is a wildcat in the sack. “I got a bunch of girls to rate the boys. The guys were primitive. Hostile. Couldn’t handle it as well as the girls.” She takes a slug and swirls the drink around in her glass.
“Where’d you go to school?” I ask, trying to catch the bartender’s eye.
“UVA.” She sets down her drink.
“Must have gotten a lot of bad sunburns,” I say as she looks down the bar and raises her hand.
She sort of laughs and yells, “Tater!”
“No, I’m impressed. Virginia’s hard to get into, especially out of state.”
“Aren’t you beyond all that?” She holds my eyes for a second, then says to Tater, a shaggy-haired kid who looks thrilled to be talking to her, “The usual. And this homely specimen will have a . . .”
“Stoli on the rocks.” Normally I would order grapefruit juice, too, but it sounds weak in front of Isabella.
“So you’re wondering why I came?” she says.
“To humiliate me?” I ask, climbing into the stool beside her.
“You can take it.” She laughs dismissively.
“To fill me with impossible longing?”A festive mood radiates from her, and after three dry days I’m thirsty, and though I know this will end abruptly in a half hour, I’m able to exist completely in the moment as long as she’s next to me at this bar. Then I’ll drive back to Chickasaw Gardens, a forties fantasy of mixed-breed architectural styles under a canopy of old oaks and magnolias, to my parents’ white-brick colonial where I’ll try to sound upbeat through a quick, gloomy dinner before Dad and I go to bed early while Mom lingers late with a pile of magazines in front of the TV only to be up at five-thirty to share fifteen minutes over coffee, cornflakes, and bananas, before I catch the 7:05 Northwest flight three hours northeast to La Guardia to resume my pointless debauched lifestyle. I take the drink as soon as Tater sets it on the shiny redwood, knock back a mouthful, try to not let my lips twist at the first bite of the vodka.
“You’re the last man I want to lead on.” Isabella smiles conspiratorially, like both our private selves know that I really want to sleep with her but our public selves won’t mention it.
“You’re the prettiest girl I ever met on a plane.”
“You’re too smooth.” Isabella raises her glass. “To Peter Pans.”
“And to the girls who keep their dreams alive.” We knock glasses and she takes a tiny sip.
“How’s your brother?” she asks quietly.
I swallow about half my drink in one controlled gulp.
“I’m sorry.” She touches my sleeve, squeezes my forearm, and pulls her hand away quickly with less intimacy than we shared through the turbulent afternoon three days ago. “I mean, I know it’s a situation that no one else can appreciate. I don’t believe you can really put yourself in someone else’s shoes as much as you try, but I know it must have been horrible. And I hope Cage gets better.”
“Thanks. It’s tough seeing him, and if it’s tough just to see, imagine what it’s like to
be
him. Like you said, you can’t. He, like, set out a Socratic argument on why he should kill himself.” I finish off my drink, wave the empty glass at Tater. “It was hard to refute. At one point I wanted to say, Just go on and do it! Not really, but it’s so frustrating trying to break through, to get him to conceive that he could be happy again.”
“The world is scary.” Isabella runs her hand through her shock of red hair. “The world is so fucked up sometimes you think the correct response is psychosis.”
“Like the sane people are crazy and the crazy sane?”
“Yeah.” Isabella shifts in her chair and starts to sit like a cowboy, with her legs open and her boot heels chocked on the low rung of the chair. “It takes a certain amount of self-delusion to get up every day and smile.”
“Exactly,” I say. “And in the bottomless pit of depression, even with his mind reeling from antipsychotics and his own paranoia, Cage can be incredibly lucid.”
Tater delivers another drink, nods confidently at me, and grins at Isabella, who smiles at him for a second, then swings her gaze on me.
“So.” I take a sip. “If you can’t muster the mind-set that lets you ignore that one in three of us is going to get cancer, that most everyone you know is going to die painfully—that is, if we don’t all barbecue under the greenhouse or get nuked or—”
“Shot in high school by an angry fourteen-year-old,” Isabella throws in.
I roll a piece of ice around my mouth. “And if you can’t ignore the millions starving while you climb into your two-ton SUV to head off to work as a small cog of the big juggernaut, if you see the world clearly in all its horror—”
“And if your own life is a mess, then . . .” Isabella raises her eyebrows. “Well, what does he do now? How does he get his smile back, that self-delusion that lets you whistle while you work?”
“I don’t know how Cage gets his smile back. It just sort of happens. Eventually he goes back out in the world and one day he’s Mr. Happy.” The vodka is warming the back of my head. I feel good for the first time in days. Of course I feel bad about Cage but this has been going on for so long. “Then, a year later, if he doesn’t keep a close watch on the covert chemical war in his brain, if he doesn’t send in enough replacements at the right time for the lithium troops fighting the rising tide of manic barbarians, he’ll turn into Mr. Happy on a runaway freight train and eventually, in a futile attempt to keep the train from derailing, he’ll become Mr. Hyde.”
“I’ve been thinking about him.” Isabella rests her hand on my sleeve. “I remember seeing him and your mom singing in church. They both had good voices. Your mother can really belt out a hymn.” She laughs. “Your mother is so nice.”
“She’s sweet. She puts on that perfect southern belle graciousness at church or the flower festival, but at home . . . her stress level is linked to Cage’s well-being. When he’s manic, she’s jumpy and stressed-out; when he’s depressed, so is she.”
“But you wouldn’t know it if you ran into her on the street. That’s the perfect southern lady.”
I look down at her hand on my sleeve. “Why did you come?”
“Isn’t it obvious? You’re a nice guy. Your brother’s having a hard time.”
“Is that all?” I say, emboldened by the vodka.
“That’s not enough?” She crosses her legs.
“Plenty, but I . . . I don’t know.”
“Come on.” She shoves my shoulder with one hand.
“There’s something really special about you. A wild streak. And a very kind intelligence.” I pause, thinking how vodka makes it much easier to say these things. “And you’re beautiful.”
“
Pshaw!
” Isabella shoves my shoulder again. “The things you Peter Pans will say.”
“I’m serious.”
“Well, that’s sweet of you. But you know I’ve got a boyfriend.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes.” Her eyes register uncertainty or annoyance, something hard to read.
“Will you tell him that you had drinks with me?”
“Of course. Why would he care? Maybe you came here tonight with ulterior motives but I didn’t. Not everyone’s got a one-track mind. Most guys do, it’s true. And just because you’re secretive.” She mimics me, “‘Will you tell him?’ I told him about meeting you on the plane, about Cage.”
“You’re just a good Episcopalian.”
Isabella laughs. “And you’re a bad one.”
I nod. “Do you want another?”
“No thanks. I’ve got to meet some girlfriends.” She waves at Tater, then draws a check sign in the air.
“Well, thanks for coming. I had fun.” I drain the rest of the vodka from the ice. “I needed a drink.”
Isabella laughs. “Or three.”
I put a couple of twenties on the bar and stand up.
“You always a big tipper?” Isabella slides off her chair.
“Ever since I could afford it. I was a really bad waiter in a restaurant on Nantucket about ten years ago. It taught me respect for the foot soldiers of the food service industry.”
Isabella laughs.
“Thanks a lot,” Tater says to our backs as we start for the door.
I raise a fist over my head and walk on without turning around and realize I’m already drunk. Outside, we pause. “Where are you parked?”
She tilts her head over her right shoulder and says, “Behind Midtown Yoga. You?”
“Right there.” I nod at the Avis Firebird on the street. “Thanks for coming. Good luck. Maybe I’ll see you in Memphis the next time I’m in town.”
Laughing, Isabella raises her hand. “Yeah. We can go hear your father preach.”
Her grip is strong. I lean in and kiss her cheek on one side, American style.
“I’ll pray for Cage.”
“Thanks.”
“And that you’ll become an honest man.”
“I’m honest.”
Isabella smiles skeptically and nods. She pulls her hand free. “Bye.”
“Bye.”
A
t one end of the Virginia-walnut Georgian table that’s seen the last hundred Thanksgivings at Cage’s Bend, Frank blesses the dinner, then while we are still holding hands, at the opposite end Mother says, “Let’s go around the table and each of us name something that we are particularly thankful for this year.”