The Comedown Page 13
Now Lee was awake, which seemed to be frightening for him. He was looking up at her smoke trails, blinking tears out of his long-lashed eyes. She was at least 50 percent sure he’d turn out to be gay, just from the soft way he walked, the pitch of his voice, the pair of blue satin shorts he always insisted on wearing in the summer. And now here he was lying on his back crying as she imagined he would someday in the bed of a boyfriend, or possibly a girlfriend before realizing he wanted boyfriends, crying quietly as he remembered this very moment on the morning of his father’s funeral when his shitty mother was too stoned to comfort him.
“Baby,” she said, pulling him toward her. He stayed a lump. “Baby, how are you?”
He sniffed and shook his head.
“Oh, me too, baby. I feel the same way.” She hugged him and he stayed inert.
“How come nobody tried to stop him?”
They were making horrible eye contact now in the morning half-dark. The phone rang again, which made him jump.
“Ignore that,” she said. “I’ll call him back when we get up.”
“I bet a lot of people had the chance to stop him,” he said.
Did he mean Diedre? There was the fight they’d had the night before he left, when she said he’d have to quit the “medicine” because it was making him paranoid. He’d been bingeing that week, hadn’t been to work in days, and she figured it was another one of those if-you-don’t-come-in-today-don’t-bother-coming-in-tomorrow situations. Whenever he got like this she just hid his shit or did it all herself, tried to get him to spend a day or two getting clean. She’d never seen anyone consume yayo with the enthusiasm he did. Not even the Dohertys and Raymond had devoured enough crank to match Leland’s appetite. He breathed it, would bathe in it if he could. It was a lot, even for her. When she hid it, he’d storm into their room raging, then sobbing, then begging. It didn’t matter, though: he always knew where to get more. She hid it the day before he left and when the fight and his paranoia had escalated, she remembered thinking that all of her friends had known when to stop partying. She’d told him that and had stormed out of the room, put Lee to bed, and gone to bed herself. Those had been the last words she said to him.
“It’s hard to know when someone is suffering like that, what they need,” she said, hearing in her own voice how much she was bullshitting. “Daddy was suffering so much, and not even you or I knew how bad it was.”
Lee made fists and pressed them into his eyes. “I did!” he wailed.
Eventually she got up to take Kamzin’s call, which was about the logistics of the shiva and what should be said in the eulogy. No one would see the corpse because of the way he’d died—his horrible new form had been revealed to Diedre alone on a steel gurney at a morgue in Tampa. Aside from the kaddish they weren’t going to have much of a Jewish burial, because the corpse had to be transported (outrageously expensive) and then prepared for burial (also outrageously expensive; she didn’t know whether it was a part of grief to wish he could’ve at least died closer and less gruesomely), and then she had to pay for the funeral and for Kamzin to put together a eulogy. What was he going to say? Leland had hardly been a pillar of his community. The best he could do was manage to be hated and loved at the same time.
* * *
The nicest dress she owned was part pleather, so she had to wear the second-nicest, black suede she’d inherited from her mother. Lee had a suit, thankfully—Leland had purchased one for him for shul, arguing that he’d be able to wear it on his bar mitzvah, as if he wouldn’t grow at least five inches in the next four years. Then again Lee seemed to be the kind of kid who’d stay small his entire life, so there may have been some logic to Leland’s strategy. They combed their hair together in the mirror, Lee’s lips tight.
“How’re you feeling, baby?” she asked.
“I’m not feeling any type of way,” he said, his voice tired as Kamzin’s. “I just wanna get this over with.”
The synagogue was empty when they got there, Kamzin busy in his office. Diedre noticed the chipped paint on the domed ceiling, the droopy-faced angels rushing to the feet of the guy who’d built the synagogue; she couldn’t remember his name but he always looked so young in the painting. Then she looked twice: had the painting always been of him? She could be remembering it wrong, of course, but hadn’t it been of Jerusalem when they first started coming to services? Kamzin emerged from his back office in his comically tall kippah, dabbing at the corners of his mouth with what looked like a cloth napkin.
“I thought we’d have to throw together a service for you, too,” he said to Diedre. “The way you didn’t pick up your phone this morning.” He adjusted his tie, his cuff links, caught sight of Lee’s pale-with-grief face. “I’m sorry for your loss.”
People began to trickle in: Leland’s boss, a few of her friends from the bank, a woman whose son was friends with Lee at school, some older members of the congregation. One man told Diedre that Leland’s singing had been beautiful, and she didn’t bother reminding him that Leland never sang. Just before the service was about to start, a young man wandered into the chapel and started talking to Lee, who was greeting mourners at the front door. Diedre had never seen the man before in her life: he was tall, maybe ten years younger than she was, black, well dressed, squatting in front of Lee like a grade school teacher on a field trip, listening patiently while Lee explained something, then looking when he pointed back at her. She waved, and he made his way toward her.
“Diedre, Lee’s mom?” he said, extending his hand. “I’m Caleb Marshall. From Cleveland.”
“Nice to meet you,” she said.
His brows knit, unknit. Diedre was waiting. “I’m so sorry for your loss,” he said. “Did he not tell you about me?”
She searched her memory for stories of Cleveland. All she could think of was the nasty ex-wife, the disobedient son. “I’m sorry, I don’t think so.”
This appeared to be very disturbing to Caleb Marshall, who sighed and threaded his fingers together. “Okay then,” he said. “He, well, he paid for my college and law school. I’m very grateful to him.”
Diedre tried to suppress a laugh but couldn’t. “I’m sorry, is this a joke?”
“This absolutely isn’t a joke.” The small crew of mourners were beginning to look at them—his voice had changed—but Diedre didn’t care. “He paid me back in money he owed my father. He wanted to make up his family’s debt to ours.” He paused, raised his eyebrows. “Your family’s debt to ours.”
“My husband used to carry those cheap plastic wallets,” Diedre said. “At any given time he had less than a dollar in each of them.”
The young man looked angry. “I don’t see how that has anything to do with…”
Kamzin appeared in the main chamber, waving his hands like the building had caught fire, saying something about how they had to get things going before it got any hotter.
“I’m sorry, I don’t know about the debt,” Diedre said. “You’re welcome, of course, but it sounds like we knew two different men.” She left Caleb standing in the lobby and went to grab Lee’s hand.
The burial plot was smaller than she’d remembered it being. Maybe it was the shabby gaggle of mourners, the way Kamzin cleared what sounded like a fist-sized piece of phlegm from his throat before reading scripture Diedre didn’t recognize, but the whole affair felt pathetic. She remembered how the two of them used to watch Lee play in the sprinkler from the porch, Leland shirtless and drinking a tallboy while she wore the Pixies T-shirt she’d bought for him and smoked a blunt, her legs crossed over his, math rock blasting through the windows of the house. She remembered how he’d turned around during services to blow kisses at her behind the cheesecloth, how thrilled she was that they got away with being Jews by day and rock stars by night, how not a single member of that congregation suspected she went home and practiced air guitar on her bed and snorted yayo and made fun of Dateline with her husband, a man for whom she suspected she’d always had a place in her h
eart but hadn’t realized it until the day at the Shell when he was right in front of her. Now the memories came faster: Leland in a pair of workman’s gloves digging the palmetto bugs out of the gutter, Leland shaving Lee’s hair into a Mohawk and telling other congregants that Lee had done it himself, Leland wading into the swamp behind their house to wrestle the alligator Lee claimed he’d seen in there. She closed her eyes, dizzy from a cocktail of loneliness and guilt and self-pity, and when she opened them again she saw Caleb glaring at her over her husband’s coffin. He’d been joined by a tallish white man and his supermodel-looking wife. Diedre didn’t know these people. It wasn’t supposed to be an open funeral for the entertainment of anybody who just happened to be walking by. Her son was trembling at her hip, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. The supermodel was looking everywhere but at Diedre, and the man, her man—Diedre saw that he had the same high forehead as her late husband, the same thick eyebrows. A little “oh God” escaped her mouth, and Kamzin stumbled in his speech, went on.
She’d known practically as soon as she could think that she had been destined for a strange life, but she’d had no idea she’d been destined for the humiliations she felt later that day before her husband’s shiva began. How was she, a greasy-faced Florida teenager, supposed to know that at some point in the future her husband’s son from a previous marriage would come to her husband’s funeral and demand that he be able to “see” the house before the shiva started? All those nights spent waiting home alone for Trish to get back from her shows, those afternoons spent massaging her swollen ankles while pregnant with Lee, those mornings spent counting old men’s sleeves of change in her bank teller’s uniform—how could she have known that this would happen to her? Furthermore, how could she have known what to say? The son was stronger-looking than Leland had been, taller, clearly richer. His wife had gone back to the hotel while he followed Diedre home in his rental car. She agreed to it because he wore an expensive suit and threatened to sue her if she didn’t comply. What was she supposed to do? The minute he arrived, he spun around the room, his eyes bright with anger.
“He lied to you!” he yelled, sweating in his suit. “None of this belongs to you. My attorney has proof.”
“Who’s your attorney?” Diedre asked. It was all she could do to fight back.
But he didn’t answer, just rummaged. He took nothing that Diedre had purchased with her own money, nothing that belonged to Lee—just the odds and ends that Leland had arrived with from his previous marriage: a locked-up yellow suitcase she’d never asked him about, a few paintings from the wall, a wooden box of jewelry he claimed belonged to his mother, a box of old deeds that belonged to her as well. He told Diedre he’d already claimed possession of the car. Now that the old man was dead, he said, all these things would be restored to their rightful owner.
“Take what you need and do it fast,” she told him. “You’re traumatizing my son.”
Lee was sitting on the couch, pretending to watch TV, but he was really watching Leland Jr. wander self-righteously around the bungalow. This would surely be a moment he’d be stuck reliving, Diedre couldn’t help but think, one of the thoughts he’d have at her own funeral: My mother didn’t even give two shits about the lunatic who stole stuff from our house on the day of my dad’s funeral. After Leland Jr. had gone, she held her hand out to Lee but he ignored it. She asked him to come into the kitchen with her and eat potato chips, but he shook his head. She begged him to just help her cover the mirrors, but he said he was “busy.” She gave up. She had her limit, and she’d reached it.
She went into her bedroom and closed the door. Soon guests would be arriving with potato salad and candied carrots. She’d have to act natural, like nothing had happened. Lee would be catatonic on the sofa, bingeing on cartoons. She figured she had about fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to get a little stoned and change out of her dress, which was tight in the chest, and into “mourning clothes.” She packed a bowl and closed the blinds. On the shelf above her bed she kept all the cassettes she’d bought but had yet to listen to. Among them was Baby Bottle, the title designed to look like it had been spelled out in spilled milk. She put it in her Walkman, put on her headphones, and skipped through the tracks until she got to one whose bridge she partially recognized: “getting looked up and down / by the lizard-eyed girl.” She lay on her singed bedspread, crossed her ankles, and listened to Trish sing about her.
AARON MARSHALL
(1970–)
March 26, 1983
Cleveland
The light was pouring in through the window slats in the room he shared with his brother. They were looking less and less like each other, especially now that Aaron had three or four inches on him. He had to wake up but he didn’t want to. He had places to be. He had to put on his shirt and go through the motions of another day in the city of Cleveland in the neighborhood of Central and he didn’t want to. Everybody had their limit. He was tired.
He was almost thirteen and he already knew that the world had been built against him. What other proof did he need? His friends got frisked after school for no reason, teachers told him he had “potential” but was “acting delinquent,” his mother was sleeping with the ofay who’d probably murdered his father. His friend Andre had a country mom and whenever they had Aaron over for dinner she called everyone at the DMV where she worked an ofay. Aaron liked it because lots of people who heard him say it didn’t know what he was talking about, and he didn’t want his enemies knowing what he was talking about. And he had enemies, plenty of them.
It was a Saturday morning, their mom’s birthday, and Caleb was still asleep. Typical. Their mom was going to see the ofay today, probably: they’d been seeing each other for a while now and it made Aaron so angry and humiliated he didn’t even want to bring it up, the way it felt like a curse to think about a nightmare. That was about to change. He sat up in bed and grabbed his new shirt off the floor, the one he’d worn yesterday and the day before that and the day before that when he bought the new Run-D.M.C. tape. He sat up so his feet were shoulder-width apart on the floor and brought his hands together as if in prayer and then pulled them apart and brought them together again. He looked up at the ceiling. Water stains. A lot of people, elders, would tell him he was spoiled: he had a roof over his head, his momma fed him every day, he had clothes and shoes and went to school. Sometimes he saw his mom’s face in the morning, the grayish bags under her eyes, and he tried to think the way the old people thought. But then he’d think of the ofay’s stupid shiny little face and the rage would come.
Caleb liked school, in his expected dumbass fashion. He never missed a day. Even the time he got beaten so bad Aaron saw in his mouth that one of his molars was dangling from his gums, he just spent part of the day in the nurse’s office and tried to go back to science class with a wad of cotton shoved in the gap. Like that wasn’t going to get him beaten again. It was a cycle, Caleb saw it: you acted like a little bitch and then you got treated like a little bitch and then people saw how you got treated and kept on treating you that way until you did something. He could only keep rescuing Caleb for so long, until people started treating him like a little bitch, too. That day wasn’t far off, actually. He’d been walking with Andre and some kid had asked him if they were fucking. As if that were a perfectly logical question. Then he laughed—Aaron had never seen the kid before—and pointed at them, saying to his friend, “Too many faggots in this mafucken school.” The kid was the skinny, horse-faced kind who was all fronting and no substance: the only thing Aaron had to do to shut him up was stomp his left foot. But still. Two years ago, nobody would be saying anything like that about Aaron and Andre. A year ago, even.
He lit a cigarette he’d stolen from Andre. He spit the smoke into the center of the room, where it lingered in a hot cone before evaporating. Caleb coughed a little in his sleep but didn’t wake up, just rolled over on his other side and kept snoring. He slept too much and snored too much, that was his problem. What kind o
f person got told by the shittiest kids in school he was going to get “annihilated” the next day and then went home and did his homework and fell asleep like nothing was going to happen? That was how he got his tooth punched out, because he slept on that instead of telling Aaron, and then Aaron had to basically rush in there like the fucking paramedics. It was his sleepy, school-loving ass sitting in geometry class two months ago while Aaron cut and went back home to get some tapes and cigarettes for a girl he liked, her name was Mychelle but she wanted him to call her Meeches, and he’d seen the ofay’s car out front, gone upstairs to their apartment, and heard his voice behind the door. He couldn’t believe it since the car hadn’t been there for almost a year and he thought she was done with him. Aaron broke in through the fire escape and lay under the covers in his bed listening to his mom and the ofay talk about the day his father died, listening to the ofay describe a back room and a guy named Sunny and talk about what Aaron was surer and surer was a fake fondness for yayo. He had heard the ofay say, “And then he was lying on the floor and they took him away somewhere. I tried not to move,” and his mom telling him she’d heard enough. The ofay reminded her that she was the one who’d asked to hear it again. His mom just sucked her teeth. And while all this was happening, where was Caleb? The same place he’d been two years ago when Aaron had first caught their mom and the ofay: sitting in school.