My Misspent Youth (17 page)

So this is what it was when Howard called: the wine in the tumbler, me still in my work clothes. I took a cab to the hotel and readied myself for more lies, for more of the acting I hadn’t done since a high school performance of
The Man Who Came to Dinner
—a performance for which Brian had brought me flowers. I was terrified to meet Howard the way I had feared going onstage, the dread of the audience mixing with a longing for the whole thing to end in triumph, for some crowd to cheer, for a late-night cast party followed by peaceful sleep in my childhood bed.

This was a luxurious hotel, green and gold wallpaper, wood moldings polished until they were mirror-like. When Howard opened the door, he was wearing the same sweater he’d worn the past four times I’d seen him, only now there was a food stain on it. His hair stuck out on either side like a clown’s. He wanted to hear the line again, the line about death not being in Brian’s vocabulary. He wanted it repeated over and over, like a child hearing a bedtime story. I was afraid that if I flubbed the word order he’d correct me, that if I slipped into past tense he’d ask why. He said I was his favorite person to talk to these days, that the doctors were “paid to be pessimistic,” that relatives were evasive, that his wife had given up and was simply praying.

The room was not a room but a suite—living room, bedroom, kitchen. Howard made himself a glass of water, took some pills out of his pocket, and swallowed them. He asked what books Brian read, what programs he watched on television. I said Dostoyevsky, Doctorow and
Seinfeld.
I said
The Picture of Dorian Gray;
that one, I believed, was true. I said that Brian was a lover of the good life, that unlike the rest of us, he lived for the day, that he’d quit school because he’d realized it wasn’t right for him. I and the rest of Brian’s friends, I explained, were just robots for doing our homework, for not trying to beat the system. Brian was a rebel. He was a lover, a fighter, and a hero all in one. He would never die. There was no way it could happen.

This went on for three hours, until Howard went into the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep. I waited ten minutes and slinked out. He’d left cab money for me on the table, which I took, like a whore. This was four days before the end.

*   *   *

Brian died around 6:30 in the morning, the time when I usually returned from my swim at the health club, my participation in the society in which Brian refused to take part. I arrived home, saw the light blinking on my answering machine, and knew. For a few minutes I avoided replaying the tape because there seemed no reason. Outside it was still dark, still dead, cold January. My chlorinated hair was frozen on my scalp because I never wore a hat to walk the four blocks from the club. Howard’s voice was steady on the machine; “Are you there? Are you screening your calls?… Brian didn’t make it.” He began to say something else but his voice cracked and he hung up. All I could think was that I wouldn’t have to go to the hospital anymore. All I could wonder was whether I should go to work. I had no inclination to cry, although I believe I tried, conjuring up sad stories, again like the high school actress to which this event had partially restored me. I tried to do something appropriate. I made coffee. I took a shower. I turned on the television and watched the news. It was inauguration day. Bush’s out, Clinton’s in. The two families passed each other on the White House steps like baseball teams shaking hands after a game. Such somber, upright civility.

I had found my metaphor. I had found the moment upon which to seize, the symbol around which to fashion the circumstance of my friend’s death. No longer a random occurrence, an inexplicable meeting with a bizarre virus no one else catches, Brian’s death became for me a national mandate, an obligatory component of a cultural changing of the guard. Just as I had delighted in the fact that the Clinton campaign’s theme song was Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop,” a message that had prompted me to propel my thoughts vehemently into all that the future would bring—the information superhighway, congressional term limits, corporate-subsidized health clubs for hard-working,
realistic
people like me—I rationalized that Brian’s refusal to ever think about tomorrow had lead to his demise. For the first time since he had become ill three weeks before, I allowed myself to spell the words out: Brian died because he refused to live. He refused to live because he refused to work. It was all out of some Ayn Rand manifesto: One must make profound sacrifices in order to live a life without compromise. Brian had attempted the latter without the former. He had seized the day so intensely that the day finally seized him. More turns of phrase. I reveled in them. I reclined back and watched my stylistic light show, curled up into my big, derisive comfy chair. In my mind, in the milieu that I had built around this event—the perfunctory hospital visits, the heading for the wine bottle the minute I returned home, the reluctance to tell other friends for fear that it would be awkward—I had set up an incident that had more to do with psychology than medicine. Brian was so drugged up, we were told, that he had no idea what was happening. He was a minor player. There was no dying involved, only the dealing with it. There was no body, only Hallmark cards. No last breaths of life, but instead cigarettes in the breezeway outside the Guggenheim Pavilion. As far as I was concerned at the time, there would be no grief, only irony.

And the sickest part about the whole thing is that I felt the irony while it was actually going on. There was nothing retrospective about this view, no longing for hindsight, as it seemed to have emerged precociously while events were still occurring. The monstrosity that Brian’s parents were being asked to wrap their minds around was more, I knew, than I could ever conceive of. The singular event of their dying son carried more horror than the worst catastrophes in the combined lives of myself and everyone I knew. What could I possibly have compared it to? Being rejected by Yale? That my milk-fed existence was now being soured by a tragedy that was not my own but someone else’s put me in the peculiar position of grieving vicariously, a condition so cynical that the only option was to shut up about it. So I faked it. I threw myself into their needs with a duplicity intense enough to distract me from whatever sadness it did not occur to me to feel for myself.

Gamesmanship is something this is also about. Verbal gamesmanship,
sparring
—though the feeling was more like hitting a tennis ball against a wall.

The words I said to Jan and Howard Peterson after their son was dead were even bigger lies than the ones I’d said when he wasn’t. I continued with the present tense. “Brian’s probably laughing at us now.” And “Brian, though he is sad to leave you, is probably fascinated by whatever he is experiencing now.” They loved this—especially Howard, who in the forty-eight hours between inauguration day and the funeral, had become obsessed with the afterlife, “the other side,” as he called it. I spoke at the mass. I regarded this as an opportunity to do some writing, to “be creative,” which was something my job was not allowing. I was a huge hit: People came up to me at the burial and congratulated me on my performance. My parents, though disconcerted at my use of the present tense in my speech, remarked that I was a skilled speaker. For me and the few friends who had returned home for the funeral, seeing our parents was almost worse than seeing Jan and Howard. They wore on their faces the look of having just avoided a fatal car crash. They were like people run off the road, shell-shocked drivers, breathing heavily and staring at the steering wheel while the tractor trailer ambled on ahead. “All I can think is thank God it’s them and not us,” my mother said to me out loud. I hadn’t worn a coat—I didn’t own a proper one to wear with a dress—and someone else’s mother went home between the mass and the burial to fetch me one, which she angrily insisted I wear as we stood by the grave. My father expressed his fear that I would catch Brian’s mysterious virus. Like me, he wanted to know the mechanics of the thing, how and where it gained its entry, what Brian had done to contract it, what error in judgment had been made to cause this.

After the burial, I returned to my apartment in the city, threw up, and continued on with my life. I came to see grief as something I would simply never have. I perceived it as a sentiment that dwelled in the hearts of others, tucked neatly underneath a rug I’d never even owned. I became obsessed with movement, with productivity. At the time, this meant doing a good job at work, being the best editorial assistant a slick beauty magazine ever had. I wrote killer photo captions, answered my phone perkily, filled out invoices until eight o’clock at night. I did all the things Brian never did. I didn’t mention “the situation” to anyone. My parents called to check on me, thrilled when I didn’t mention the event, relieved when I seemed not to have a cold.

After about three months, Howard called and asked if I wanted to have dinner. He left a message on my machine, leaving Brian’s old number as the place to call back. When I did, Brian’s voice came on, deep and reticent. “I’m not available, please leave a message.” I hated Howard all over again. He picked up when I spoke. He and Jan wanted to have dinner with me “in order to talk about Brian.” They wanted me to meet them at Brian’s apartment where they were staying. They wanted only to eat in restaurants where Brian had eaten, so could I recommend one?

Brian had only eaten in stylish places with ceiling fans and aspiring models at the bar. I had always hated this about him. I had always been embarrassed to go to establishments I had no business patronizing—establishments Brian had even less business eating in, although he always paid for both of us and ordered many drinks and an expensive entree and usually dessert. Once, while I was in college, he’d taken me to a place he’d read about in a magazine, a small club that had recently opened in SoHo. There we saw a girl from my school, a very rich girl with a famous mother, both of whom had been profiled in
Vanity Fair
a year earlier. This girl, who had never spoken to me on campus, came to our table and kissed me on the cheek. Brian was ecstatic. I was furious. I felt I was dressed terribly—and even if I had been dressed well, I would have been merely posing as a poseur, which was worse than merely existing in a state of delusion, which is what Brian did adamantly, with stubborn, insistent braggadocio. Still, this encounter held him for several weeks. He mentioned it repeatedly, talking about “Meghan’s friend Countess X” to whichever of our other friends managed to drag themselves back into town to see him.

Restricting my lies to the big ones—how bad would it have been, after all, to suggest to Brian’s parents that we eat at Pizzeria Uno because Brian had loved the single deep dish?—I told Howard to make a reservation at Odeon because Brian loved it and often used it as a location in his writing, which was true. When I arrived at Brian’s apartment, the Lucky Strikes were still on the kitchen table along with the December 22 edition of the
New York Post,
the January issue of
Esquire,
and the copy of
TV Guide
cracked at the spine. “We haven’t touched these,” said Howard. He was wearing corduroy pants and a polyester sweater. Jan wore wide wales and an L.L. Bean blouse. We went to Odeon. I scanned the room for fear of Countess X. Howard said he only wanted to order dishes that Brian had ordered. I had no recollection but told him the salmon.

It was during this meal that Jan and Howard first began to demonstrate their expertise in “the other side.” Howard had read several books on the subject and had brought with him a list of the titles so that I, too, could learn more about “Brian’s new life.” Howard had had dreams, he explained, where Brian spoke to him and elaborated on the fun he was having. They had been to a psychic on Long Island who claimed to see Brian amid a field of roses and flanked by two other people, an older man—“probably his grandfather,” said Jan—and a pretty, young girl whose name began with M. “I thought for a moment that might be you,” she said. “But then you’re not dead.”

Then Jan declared loudly that she was considering killing herself. “I know just how I’d do it,” she said. What got to me about this was not that she said it but that she said it so loudly. I looked over at the next table at three impeccably dressed men whose eyes seemed to momentarily shift over to us. It seems bizarre to me now that I didn’t ask her how she planned to kill herself for fear that it was an inappropriate question. It seems bizarre that even after this meal, after I turned down their invitation to go to a late movie, after I again took cab fare from them, which I pocketed and instead rode the subway, I met Jan and Howard several more times. This went on for about a year. Howard would call every few months, and if I was in a guilty mood, which I almost always was, flagellating myself as I did about every inadequate job performance or overdue phone bill or call I screened for fear it would be them, I said yes. I said yes and continued to lie and say that I had read the afterlife books and that I, too, awaited the day of my death so I could see Brian again and that the world was hardly worth inhabiting when such a vibrant figure was removed from it.

The dynamic was this: The more I saw Jan and Howard, the more evil thoughts I harbored, which caused me guilt, which caused me to dig in my heels and see them again. This was my self-styled redemption, my faux little journey into good Samaritanism. If I saw the Petersons on a Saturday, I could be bad for the rest of the week. If I lied to Howard about the salmon, I could call a co-worker a bitch behind her back on Monday. What happened was that I began to hate the world. Just as I hated Jan and Howard for being so lax as parents that their son died of what I believed to be inertia, I hated everyone else for existing in a condition that I defined as “fake.” Like Holden Caulfield, I became obsessed with “phoniness.” I saw everyone as innate liars, as zombified self-deluders who were dangers to themselves as well as the rest of the world. I hated people who walked too slowly down the sidewalk, grocery store clerks who took too long to count the change, days when there was nothing but junk mail. I hated anything that impeded whatever I considered to be progress, whatever I had determined was my ticket to a socialized, productive life. Unlike Brian, I would pursue a career. Unlike him, I would shop at the grocery store efficiently. I would meet friends for lunch and drinks and have people over to my apartment to watch the Oscars. I would walk quickly down the street because I actually had someplace to go. I would do anything necessary to participate in what I considered to be life, which, to me, meant getting up extremely early and doing things like putting all the apartment’s trash into a small plastic bag, which I would throw out on the way to the club to go swimming, after which I would go to work, and for lunch go to the gourmet deli on Forty-sixth Street, where I would tap my fingers on the counter if the people in front of me were taking too long to order, because
I had somewhere to be,
because I was impressively busy with this thing called life, because I was sternly committed to the pursuit of whatever was the opposite of death.