In Memory of Angel Clare (20 page)

“You don’t hate me for being like this?” Clarence could say even that with matter-of-fact calm.

“No. Of course not. You don’t hate somebody just because he’s sick. Here.” He pulled back the covers. “Lie down and get some sleep.”

Clarence obeyed him, scooted up the bed and climbed beneath the clean sheets. He lay there like a child while Michael tucked him in. “But it gets boring doesn’t it? You must be bored out of your skull. I know I am.”

“Don’t talk nonsense. Get some sleep. You’ll feel better in the morning.” Michael bent down and kissed him on the lips, lightly. He gathered the dirty clothes from the chair and held them against his chest while he reached for the light switch. “Sweet dreams,” he called out, looking at Clarence looking at him as he pulled the switch. The room went black and Clarence disappeared.

Michael was relieved he was gone, but he stood in the door until his eyes adjusted to the darkness and he could see Clarence again.

Michael’s fear of Clarence subsided a little after that, although the handful of words and even the kiss felt so inconclusive they were easily forgotten. The fear itself and all memory of it were completely forgotten in what followed a month later. The weather changed and there was another attack of pneumonia; Clarence was rushed back to the hospital. It seemed almost routine now, and nobody spent the night in the hospital waiting room. Michael was expecting Jack the next morning so they could visit the hospital together, when the telephone rang. The news came in a commonplace telephone call. The shock of death temporarily obliterated all that preceded it. When memory returned, Michael’s past was rearranged around his grief: memory short-circuited around his time of fear and guilt. As more time passed, Michael sensed he had forgotten something, but assumed what he missed was Clarence. He returned from Europe afraid he was forgetting Clarence, and he read the letters, saw their friends, watched the movie one more time, hoping to find something to fix Clarence in his thoughts all over again. But what he missed, and what he found, was the memory of himself. When his forgotten piece crowded into him on the dance floor at The World, it seemed more terrible and unforgivable than it had been when Clarence was alive. It came back to him isolated and magnified by the year of forgetting.

Out on the street after fleeing the dance, Michael walked quickly with no sense of where he was going, wanting only to outwalk memory. Lifeless buildings like cold blocks of mud squatted in rows along a wide, deserted street. The endlessly overlapping streetlights illuminated a long waste of bone-gray pavement, fences blowing with newspapers, and glinting spirals of razor wire. He was still drunk, but so accustomed to being drunk he felt only the self-hatred binding his neck and blocking his thoughts. He remembered his fear, but little of what had preceded or accompanied it. He could not remember hugging Clarence the night Clarence asked to be hugged. As if in revenge for being forgotten, the memory came back to him with the final piece missing. He wanted to believe he had done what Clarence asked, but that seemed like only another lie now that Michael knew how selfish and cowardly he had been, a lie even if he had hugged Clarence.

He tried telling himself he hadn’t understood. He hadn’t really known Clarence would die. If he had known—but it was too late now to do anything with his knowledge.

Three men like clothes tied into knots stood in a broken doorway, eyes like broken glass hidden in the shadows of their hard swollen faces. Michael noticed them watching as he walked by. He hoped they would follow him, pull out knives, and demand his money; he could resist and be stabbed. They would cut out of him everything he was feeling. But Michael heard no footsteps or breathing at his back, nothing to take him out of himself for good.

He hated himself for forgetting how hateful he had been. How could he have forgotten that? His forgetting seemed as criminal as what he had forgotten. No wonder the others treated him as a phony who was only faking grief. His grief seemed just a lie now, an exaggerated monument used to cover his selfishness and cowardice. Love should be selfless and heroic. Michael had seized Clarence’s illness as his chance to be heroic, noble, and good. But he had failed Clarence; he had failed love.

Michael suddenly grabbed at the idea he hadn’t loved Clarence. Not really. It had only been sex and gratitude for sex and the absence of hassles that Michael had mistaken for love. He wanted desperately to use that idea to excuse himself for behaving the way he had. But thinking that thought pained Michael more than the memory did. If that too were a lie, then Michael was nobody, nothing. No, he could not let go of his belief he had loved Clarence, not even to save himself.

He heard the steady rumble and sigh of a highway up ahead and sensed water somewhere beyond it. He walked toward the water without thinking what he would do there, and found himself crossing on a fenced-in overpass, cars and trucks bowling through a concrete canyon as bright as daylight under his feet. He stopped and looked down, just as he had looked down from the balcony at the dance, and imagined himself falling. He gripped the diamonds of the chain-link fence and looked up to see how far he would have to climb. The wind was blowing hard. His jacket was flying out and dancing behind him like a tangled flag, and the air whistled and rattled in the hair around his ears; it was easy to imagine dropping from the sky like a dead spirit.

Teeth and jaw would break apart when they hit. He liked that, but the thought sobered him enough to think about the future as well as the past. Nobody would know why he did it. He wanted them to know. He felt his pockets for a pencil or pen. He found only money.

And he remembered the others: he was not alone. He could not throw himself from his life as if he were the only soul on earth. He had to do this, but he suddenly wanted to do it in a way that would prove to the others he loved Clarence, even as he proved it once and for all to himself.

A
LOPSIDED WING OF AFTERNOON
sunlight lay folded in the corner of the alcove. Jack gently placed the telephone receiver into its cradle one last time and stood up. He returned to the kitchen, where Laurie sat at the table with two neatly cut sandwiches on a pair of unmatched plates. Her arms were folded and her elbows on the table. “No,” he told her. “No emergency cases or bodies matching Michael’s description.”

Laurie unfolded her arms. “There. What did I tell you? Michael’s fine. He’ll come waltzing in just when we don’t want to see him. As usual.”

Jack nodded and sat down to his sandwich. “The police said I might check Central Booking downtown. I’d have to go there in person to get anything. But that’s only if Michael’s been arrested for something.”

“If Michael got arrested, we would’ve heard from him by now.”

Laurie was being sane and objective, which was exactly what Jack wanted from her. With her flannel shirtsleeves rolled loosely above her elbows and her pale eyes glancing up at him through her pale eyebrows, she looked competent and cool yet concerned. But she must have worried some, because she hadn’t touched her sandwich while Jack was on the phone. She ate now, but very slowly. Laurie was usually a slow eater because she was busy talking, but she was being quiet.

Although Jack thought he wasn’t hungry, his sandwich was gone almost as soon as he sat down. “Do you think I’m silly to be worried? You’re worried, too, aren’t you? A little?”

“Mostly because you’ve got me worried,” she said. “But okay. Yes. I was a little worried before you showed up. It’s probably just guilt over asking Michael to move. Just like your worry is probably guilt over losing your temper with him.”

“Maybe. Guilt
is
our element,” Jack admitted. Intelligently rational adults, they were fairly adept at explaining their worst thoughts to themselves and keeping them at bay. Jack’s anxiety had subsided while he heard himself sounding like an idiot on the telephone; it began to return to him now that he wasn’t doing anything with it. “I just wish the idea of Michael killing himself wasn’t so damn appealing. No, not appealing but—You know what I mean.” Jack realized he did find the idea
appealing,
as if some part of him actually wanted Michael to kill himself.

“Plausible,” Laurie said, the right word and proof she had seriously considered it too. “I wonder why? It’s not like Michael’s been giving us signals or acting more depressed than usual. He’s been strange since he got back, but more stuffy than unhappy.”

Jack couldn’t want Michael to commit suicide. “The thing is,” he said, “I don’t really believe in Michael’s unhappiness. Which I know is wrong of me. And his possessiveness about Clare annoys me, which is wrong too. So I’ve reacted against my doubt and annoyance by overcompensating and believing Michael to be so unhappy he really could kill himself. Yes?” he asked Laurie. “Does that make sense? Is that all my worry is?”

“But Michael has good reason to be unhappy,” Laurie insisted. “After what he’s been through. But being unhappy isn’t synonymous with feeling suicidal. And experiencing death firsthand like that should cure anyone of wanting death for themselves. Shouldn’t it?”

“I remember what I was like at his age.” Jack looked at his fingers and wrists on the table. “You’re not used to being utterly miserable, and death seems like such an appealing, easy way out. When you’re older, you realize every mood passes, even the bad ones. But I remember a couple of times when
I
came very close—” He was talking about himself at the wrong time and backed off with a nervous laugh. “If I’d been raised Protestant instead of Catholic, I might not be here today.”

Actually, he still thought about suicide now and then, whenever his attacks of loneliness became too much for him to bear. But it had become a kind of therapy for him, an alternative that put his despondency into perspective and made it tolerable again. Laurie accused him of enjoying his loneliness, but Jack felt this was a part of his life she couldn’t understand: she had a lover and he didn’t. Nevertheless, Jack realized he hadn’t once considered suicide since Clarence’s death, and had suffered none of his old attacks of bottomless melancholy over the past year. Then why did he imagine—or intuit—it for Michael?

Laurie looked very deep and thoughtful opposite him, following her own thoughts in silence. She suddenly shook her head and groaned. “I don’t know, Jack. Michael stayed out all night. Big deal. With anybody else it wouldn’t mean a damn thing. But he’s not in a morgue. There’s nothing for us to really do except be patient and wait for the inconsiderate dope to show up.”

“You’re right. I know you’re right,” Jack told her.

“You want another sandwich?”

“No thanks. Uh, you going to finish the rest of yours?” Half of her sandwich sat untouched on her plate.

“No. You go ahead.” She pushed the plate over to him.

“I hope I haven’t alarmed you,” he said while he ate. “I should be letting you get back to your capitalist duties.” He pictured himself leaving and going home and not giving Michael another thought for the rest of the day. And he realized he couldn’t do that. His anxiety for Michael, temporarily stilled while he chattered rationalizations, grew stronger than ever. He could not do nothing. “You wouldn’t happen to have any pictures or photographs of Michael around, would you?”

Laurie looked blank, then made a face. “Why? You want to put Michael’s face on a milk carton?”

“Yes, I know it’s stupid. But I’d rather be stupid than spend the rest of the day sitting on my hands. I thought maybe I’d drop by a couple of bars on the way home and ask if anybody’s seen him.”

“Oh Jack.” She gave him a pitying, condescending look, shook her head again, and stood up. “We sure the hell don’t keep any pictures of Michael. Let’s see if there’re any in his room.”

He followed her down the hall to Michael’s room, surprised she was doing this. Laurie promptly began to pull open drawers in the dresser. Jack watched over her shoulder a moment—it was all socks and underwear—then went over to the windowsill, which was used as a bookshelf, and looked through the row of textbooks and notebooks. There was no photo album, and nothing that could be read for pleasure; Michael was as illiterate as Clarence had been. The narrow room was starkly utilitarian, with no pictures or posters on the walls, nothing but a yellowed medication chart still taped to the closet door. Jack turned to the packed overnight bag left on the bed. Unzipping it seemed a weirdly intimate, almost sexual act, especially after Jack pulled out a boyishly small pair of white jockey shorts.

“
Now’s
when Michael will probably walk in through the door,” muttered Laurie, going through the bottom drawers.

Jack was feeling something similar. He did not so much believe in the efficacy of action as hold certain superstitions about it: whatever you want will come about at the worst possible moment. The phone call you’ve desperately waited for all day will come only when you’re on the toilet. The guy you’ve sighed over for months will show interest in you only when you’ve fallen in love with someone else. But Michael did not choose this moment to return.

“What’s this?” said Laurie. “Ugh. They look like poems.” She handed Jack a sheaf of looseleaf notebook paper.

“Oh yeah. Michael’s my-father-didn’t-love-me poems,” said Jack, looking through them and catching a line here and there.

“What if we called them? Maybe he’s gone out to see them or they know where he might be.”

“No. They don’t have anything to do with him and vice versa. And no wonder. ‘You toad of the church, you hypocrite,’” Jack read aloud. “‘I came and went from you like a fly on shit.’”

“I didn’t know Michael was another ex-Catholic.”

“Apparently.” Jack read more closely, looking for something that sounded suicidal, but all he found were strained rhymes and a few more scatological epithets. The poems might be insane or they might be just bad writing. He passed them back to Laurie, and she returned them to the drawer where she had found them.

“Well, no photographs at all,” she said. “Not even a picture of Clarence. Which is strange when you consider how fixated he is on him.”