The Night Gwen Stacy Died (9 page)

Later—after they both were gone—it would seem sometimes as if his brother and the
dog had planned it this way, that while Peter sat at home alone with his mother and
dusted the piano keys with his fingers, Jake and the dog were in orbit somewhere,
Jake asking the dog to give him his paw, and then feeding him some cryogenically frozen
food scraps.

When Patch finally ran away, Jake had already been gone for four years. Peter was
ten years old when he started dreaming of Patch standing on the cusp of a field near
their house, looking both ways as if contemplating something. Within two weeks of
the first occurrence of this dream, the dog was gone. For those two weeks, Patch couldn’t
even go out into the yard to go to the bathroom without Peter following him out the
door and crouching beside him.

They had been playing fetch with a tennis ball. “Go, fetch,” Peter told Patch, and
Patch did. He was the sort of dog who was happy to fetch, content to bring any object
back to the place from which it was launched. Peter was working on his arm. He was
old enough to play baseball, but didn’t, and he wanted to know what it felt like to
throw.

“Patch, fetch,” he yelled, and the tennis ball shot into the air with the dog trailing
beneath it. Patch gathered the tennis ball between his teeth and lifted it, but then
rather than bounding back with it, he paused.

“Patch, come,” Peter called.

Patch sat down. As soon as he saw the dog sit, Peter knew that it had started to happen.
The dog looked at Peter and then he looked the other way, beyond their property, where
there was an expanse of farm land full of corn that was already half harvested, and
beyond that a forest of pine and fir. Peter didn’t call the dog again. He looked Patch
in the eye, and under his breath he said,
please
, but it was an entreaty to no one, least of all to Patch, who clearly was already
following a path he intended to keep. Patch dropped the tennis ball. He looked at
Peter for maybe another four seconds before running the other way.

He couldn’t save his brother. Even with warning, he couldn’t keep his dog. How many
nights had he watched Patch run from him? He had watched him take off at least fifteen
times in his dreams. You’d think that it would make the real moment, the moment in
which it truly happened, feel like just another enactment of the same scene. But it
was different. It was the moment in which the possibility arrived to change the course
of things. It was for this reason that he now wanted to save the man he’d seen swallowing
pills in the bathroom, to finally for once separate someone from these certain fates
he saw at night, and see if anyone was better off for his effort.

The house had taken on the particular state of disrepair endemic to grown men who
live alone with their mothers. It was not just that there were perpetually socks in
the dryer and dishes in the sink; their entire existence resembled the domestic unrest
of an elderly couple at the brink of not being able to care for themselves. Except—of
course—she was his mother, and he was not even thirty years old. His mother was sixty-two
and retired; Peter drove his taxi at night. For most of the day they shared the house.

Despite the long shifts she’d worked when he was a child, Peter’s mother had put in
every effort to raise him with a modicum of normalcy. When she returned from her shifts
at the hospital, she cooked dinners that represented each of the four major food groups.
There was a deficit of cereals with high sugar content in the pantry. Red M&M’s, containing
Red Dye 40, a substance suspected to cause cancer in laboratory animals, were separated
from the other colors in the pack and expelled upon opening. His mother had given
him piano lessons. From the age of eight, he had sat with his mother—who had pulled
a kitchen chair beside the piano bench, instructing his small hand in the preemptive
posture of stretching for an octave. She taught him the way his thumb must tuck neatly
beneath his middle finger to run through a handful of the major scales without impediment.
It was a kind of therapy for them both. Peter knew the lessons put his mother in mind
of her own childhood, in Davenport, when her marriage and children were just some
looming murky things in a future she still wanted to meet. For Peter, the exercise
taught him a peculiar sort of patience, to read this foreign language and begin, slowly,
to comprehend its cues—it took his mind off other things. But he was never any good
at it. He was sixteen when he told his mother he was through with the lessons. Though
he could tell that it disappointed her, this was a routine she let go without protest.

These days, the older woman his mother had become was a departure from the mother
he’d grown up with. She seemed somehow to need a mother herself. Peter would come
home from driving a night shift and round the corner of the kitchen to find it empty.

“Out here,” she called into the house. “I’m having breakfast on the patio.”

Peter followed the sound of her voice, and found his mother propped up in a lawn chair—the
first streaks of sunlight passing over the yard—staring into space with a piece of
string cheese clenched in her fist.

“Hi, honey,” she said.

“Where’s your breakfast?” Peter said. He looked around, hoping to see a bowl of cereal
stashed behind the mums, a bagel beside the birdfeeder.

His mother waived the string cheese above her head like a limp flag.

“Strings of cheese?” Peter said.

“And some almonds,” his mother said.

She freed another thread from the cheese and placed it in her mouth.

“Don’t you want eggs or something, Mom?” he said.

“No,” she said.

Peter was still working out whether he was going to let the conversation go at that
when his mother had theatrically lifted the rest of the log of string cheese and took
a big bite out of it and finished it off that way.

Then there was how he’d found the gun. His mother was getting ready for her water
aerobics class at the Y, and Peter was going to give her a ride. His mother was perfectly
fit to drive; it was her car, but if he wasn’t working himself, he drove her, and
waited in a bar near the Y for her class to end. He knocked on the door of his mother’s
bedroom when it was time to leave.

“Come in,” she said.

She was sitting on an armchair in the corner of her room, leaning over each foot to
tie her shoes. It wasn’t until he was halfway into the room that he noticed something
off in the opposite corner. Her top drawer was open, and its contents spilled from
the drawer onto the dresser—leggings, underwear, swimsuits, and some sharp, dark object
that immediately contrasted itself from the soft-hued stockings and undergarments.

“Mom?” he said. The question that was supposed to come next was so evident it wasn’t
readily available on his tongue. The gun looked so absurd in its disorderly pile,
Peter paused for a moment, as if there were a clear reason for its presence that he
only needed to summon.

“Just about ready,” his mother said.

Peter felt himself begin to back up, slowly. “I’ll pull around the car,” he said.

The bar where he drank while he waited for his mother was a local staple, the size
of a trailer, with animal heads and glossy eight-by-tens signed by minor celebrities
tacked to the walls at odd angles. Peter sat at the bar and began counting out singles
to pay for his drink. Everyone sitting at the bar had the old haggard look of extended
family, the uncles and cousins whose faces you recognize and nod amicably toward but
feel no need to converse with.

Peter ordered a beer, took the first sip. He had swiveled around on his stool to lean
his elbows on the bar when he saw the girl from the gas station. She sat with a small
group, and it was clear she’d noticed him but she was trying not to look his way.
It took him maybe thirty seconds to get her to look up. He fixed his eyes on her as
he drank his beer. The girl’s eyes were darting around like crazy, trying to find
somewhere else to rest. Her dark blond hair was pulled back in a lopsided ponytail,
slightly off center, and she was pretending to laugh at something someone said that
he couldn’t hear. He thought then that she was more interesting-looking than he’d
realized at the gas station. He thought if she would look up, he would walk over to
where she was sitting and buy her a drink.

But a moment later, when her eyes met his for an instant, Peter felt himself look
away, down at some stray cat from the neighborhood that had wandered into the bar
and was sitting on its tail by the pool table. “Evening, Edgar,” the bartender addressed
the cat, but the cat paid attention to no one. When Peter looked up again, the girl
was no longer sitting in the booth with her friends. He took this as a cue to finish
his pint in a single gulp and drive to the Y to wait for his mother.

When her class got out, his mother walked from the building alone, her gym bag firmly
under her shoulder, and got in the car. His eyes were fixed on the road and his mother
had just stopped fidgeting with the radio when he heard himself say, “So,” as if casually,
“there’s a gun in your underwear drawer.”

“Yeah,” his mother said. “What about it?”

“Isn’t there?” Peter said.

His mother exhaled quickly through her nose, half of someone else’s laugh. “It’s been
there for years,” his mother said. “It was your father’s.”

Peter felt all the muscles in his neck tense. “Have you ever used it?”

His mother laughed. “Lord no, what do you think?”

He wasn’t sure what he thought, but already, before he even drove the car home or
pulled it into the driveway, before he closed his bedroom door and pulled back the
covers of his bed, Peter had an uneasy feeling in the bottom of his chest that had
something to do with the gun in his mother’s underwear drawer, and something to do
with the girl. It was that evening that he first had the dream, and after that, the
dream came nightly.

He tried once more, that week, to go back to the station. He wanted to see the girl,
to see if she too could sense something strange between them, to see if she understood
that she was showing up on the floor of his bedroom every evening, as if on schedule.

“I saw you in the bar the other night,” the girl said when he walked in.

“Yes,” said Peter. “I saw you too.” He wanted to explain how at the bar he felt he
had to look away. He wanted to say, You keep coming in my room at night and kneeling
on the floor. He wanted to ask her who she was, to warn her that she was showing up
in his sleep every night, and what that might mean.

“Do you think I’m pretty?” the girl asked.

“How should I know?” he said. The conversation was already derailing itself into the
most vapid sort of flirtation, and Peter tried his best to set a better course for
the things he’d come to say. “I think you’re interesting,” he said.

“But not in a sexual way, right?”

It was impossible. She wanted him to kiss her. He could feel it, and though a few
weeks ago, it was exactly what he would have hoped for, he now felt annoyed.

“You’re a fake,” Peter heard himself say to the girl. He felt misdirected. Yes, the
girl was sweet and pretty, but that was it; there was nothing more to search for there.

Everything up until this point the girl seemed to take in stride. But then she looked
down at the counter, trained her eyes there. She was staring at the keys of the cash
register when she spoke again. “You think you can say what you want to me,” the girl
said.

Before she even lifted her hand, Peter had raised his own to catch her palm midair.
The reflex at first obscured the reality that she had been about to hit him. Initially,
Peter understood only that there was something too familiar about this action, something
enacted
, as if he already knew that the girl was going to try to strike him before she’d
even finished speaking. He was rattled by it. He walked out of the gas station in
a daze and began to drive, and it was only when he was at a stoplight two miles away
that he understood the reason he knew what the girl was going to do after speaking
that line was because he had read it somewhere already. He had read it in
The Amazing Spider-Man
# 37.

There are moments when such slippage occurs, between the regular, everyday world and
the interior worlds created, and these are the moments that fortify and support the
worst delusions. Peter knew this much. He knew there was absolutely no evidence to
support the conclusion that the girl in the gas station was Gwen Stacy. He knew—furthermore,
because after all, he wasn’t insane—that Gwen Stacy was a fictional character created
by Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, who did not exist outside of a hundred and some odd number
issues of comic books from the sixties and seventies. But how to reconcile the simultaneous
truths that clamored for attention in his chest, one asserting that this girl, this
gas station attendant, was the living incarnation of Spider-Man’s first love: she
had spoken a line straight out of the comic book.

In
ASM
# 37, the attempted slap is a kind of physical awakening, of mutual attraction, of
tension, of the hierarchy of human relationships in the world not necessarily being
quite what they’ve always seemed. Peter offers to walk Gwen to class, but feeling
snubbed by his aloofness the past few weeks, Gwen Stacy replies, “What are you doing,
Mr. Parker—slumming? Usually you’re too stuck up to say hello to anyone.” Peter suggests
that Gwen is a “temperamental female.” A few more words are exchanged before Gwen
accuses Peter of arrogance, and throws out her hand to slap Peter on the cheek, half-playfully,
but with anger behind it as well: “You think you can say what you want to me, and
then—Oww!” Peter catches her hand in his palm before it reaches his cheek. After this
moment, the world shifts slightly to accommodate the reality introduced by Gwen Stacy’s
action. Parker seems to feel himself capable of flirting, of asking for what he wants,
of calling out his adversaries at school. This quiet moment of Gwendolyn Stacy’s attempted
violence seems to alert to him that he is someone worth the effort of slapping, that
his actions matter—that independent of any heroic acts he may perform as his alter
ego—he matters. Gwen Stacy makes Peter Parker count for something besides the freakishness
that he uses to save the city from villains each night.