The Comedown Read online

  “Then we’d be useless.”

  Allison smacked her forehead. “Yes. Exactly! Exactly! You get me! What’s your name?”

  “Melinda Provouchez.”

  “Melinda Provouchez.” She shook her head. “You’re Jeff’s friend?”

  “I—” Catch-22: to explain herself she’d have to mention Leland again, but she’d been told not to worry about him for now.

  “It doesn’t matter, sorry, why you’re here isn’t important. You’re on my frequency, I can feel it.” She grabbed Melinda’s wrist. “Have you ever thought about getting involved in politics?”

  Melinda pictured Howdy Doody asking her: Does politics mean lesbianism? She laughed. Allison nodded deeply, as though Melinda had just made a lengthy and cogent point. “No, no, I’m feeling that. It’s like, cheesy, right? It’s cheesy to believe in anything when you’re staring the pigs in the face and thinking: Well, if we produced this evil, then it must be a part of us. Which means we’re going to become like it eventually. So why fight the inevitable?”

  “I guess.”

  “But see, it’s not like that!” Allison jumped up from her seat, her voice echoing as if they were both standing at the bottom of a chasm. “Seriously, it’s not. You just have to be there with us. I’ll show you.”

  And then Melinda made Allison “the most solemn promise ever” to come to all her protests.

  * * *

  Not surprisingly, Allison was right about Nixon: on April 30, his bulldog face appeared on TV to announce the invasion of Cambodia. The protest was on the Commons the next day. Allison ran to hug Melinda as she saw her approaching. Jeff offered Melinda a sign that said BRING THE WAR HOME. They marched in a circle, screaming that war was murder and that it needed to be brought home. Bring murder home? Melinda had thought, but she didn’t say it out loud. The protest was angrier than anything she’d ever participated in, but she didn’t want to let on about that, so she screamed as loudly as she could. Allison pumped her fists in the air and told her she was a natural. Dr. Hoffmeier, whose entire American history class was marching on the Commons, stood in front of them, chubby arms crossed, smiling and shaking his head in a way Melinda could read as neither approving nor disapproving. Passing students paused to watch them, chant encouragement, take pictures. A small group broke off from their chanting circle, dug a hole, and buried a copy of the US Constitution, shouting that this was what Nixon had done to the real Constitution, he’d killed it last night on live television. Then Allison announced that there’d be another rally on Monday, same time, same place.

  As she walked around campus on the days that followed, people watched Melinda as if she were a celebrity on vacation. She slumped down in her seat, pretended to ignore the attention, but really she relished it. She ate dinner with Leland in the boardinghouse where the two of them lived with twelve other scruffy boarders and listened to the landlady, Mrs. Donnovan, complain, as she usually did, about her daughters not understanding the value of a dime—“Do you kids not know that you save a dime every time you use the same lunch bag you used yesterday?”—and then kissed her future husband on the cheek, telling him she’d promised Allison and Jeff she’d get drinks with them in town. Leland gave her a long blink of his red-rimmed eyes and said he’d try to come by later.

  “Melinda, qué linda!” Allison had shouted when Melinda walked in the bar. Jeff was next to her, leaning over a dark-looking beer and talking excitedly to a gaggle of guys on his right.

  Melinda sat down next to Allison and for some reason felt compelled to rest her head on her shoulder. Allison combed Melinda’s hair gently with her fingers and asked her how she’d liked the protest. Melinda said it’d been really great, it’d been far out, she couldn’t wait until Monday.

  “I’m so glad I found you,” Allison said. “There aren’t many people who’re on this frequency we’re on. Most people are down here.” She held her hand below the seat of her chair, close to the floor. “They think they can solve problems with bullets.”

  Jeff turned around, and the gaggle of guys shifted to follow his attention. “Bullets?” he asked, his voice high and goofy. “That’s no solution! What do you always say, Allison?”

  She seemed game to play his straight man. “What do I always say?” She looked to Melinda, who did her part by offering an exaggerated shrug. “Oh, that’s right!” Allison shouted. “Flowers are better than bullets!”

  “Flowers are better than bullets!” he echoed, and the gaggle of guys echoed him. Someone ordered another round.

  By the time Leland showed up, Melinda was sloshed. Her vision was accordioning and she was hugging Allison around the waist as they stood at the bar. Allison was trying to dance the Batusi, which everyone was telling her wasn’t that different from the Watusi, but she insisted it was and said it had something to do with the arms. The music was loud, with a bunch of brass, the kind of stuff parents listened to. There were people in the bar who didn’t belong to their group, older people who smelled like gasoline and leather. Everyone seemed to know the words to the song except for Melinda. Leland carefully peeled her off Allison and she put her arms around his neck. He smiled and told her she looked like she was having fun.

  “I’m changing the world!” she shouted, spitting a little in his face, and laughed. He kissed her on the cheek and asked if she wanted to sit down. She told him she wanted to dance, so he led her through a four-step waltz he claimed his mother had taught him. She was nearly limp in his arms, letting him do most of the work. Her thoughts came barely punctuated. Allison and Jeff had disappeared somewhere and the lights flickered like before a thunderstorm. Someone pitched a beer stein at the mirror behind the bar. The bartender ducked, the mirror shattered, and a hoarse-sounding woman shouted, “Flowers, not guns!”

  Melinda was forced up against Leland’s chest as the crowd pushed past them, chanting and yelling like mashed keys in an untuned piano. A bearded guy took a hammer to the bar’s front window. Melinda screamed “Allison!” but she was nowhere. Leland grinned at her. “Baby!” he said. She could barely hear him. She rubbed her temples, trying to cheat her vision into focus. He was mouthing the words Baby, it’s anarchy! He grabbed her hand and they ran out in the street. Motorbikes were parked everywhere and people were heaving stuff through shop windows all down the block. Leland said something about how this was the logical conclusion to everything, and she asked him over the ringing in her ears what “everything” was. Then she called Allison’s name again, a useless thing to do, and looked over to see that a cop had Leland pinned to the hood of his car, offering them a deal: they could either go peacefully with him and get off with a warning, or they could resist and get arrested.

  Melinda and Leland went peacefully and were sent home after an hour at the station. Leland was revved up, delirious. In the room they shared, he told Melinda that America was falling apart, capitalism and democracy were crumbling, therefore it would be an excellent time to get married. An excellent time to indulge in a capitalist institution? she wondered, but she said nothing. Had Allison snuck out back with Jeff? Was Allison in love with Jeff? Leland began kissing her and she kissed him back. He unzipped her jeans and they had sex on the floor.

  Governor Rhodes ordered the National Guard to Kent over the weekend. That familiar humming in Melinda’s stomach returned, the sensation that she was being gnawed at from the inside. Her blood was feeding the bugs. Living was causing her death. She wanted to call her parents but she had no idea how she’d explain herself to them. They called her—Mrs. Donnovan knocked three times on her door, broguing “Ms. Prooovoocheez! Telephone from Cleveland!”—but Melinda told her to tell them she had the flu. She needed time. She needed to find Allison.

  Allison called her on Sunday night. “Oh, Melly, can you believe what’s happening? The whole country’s taking notice!”

  “It’s pretty amazing.”

  “It’s bigger than any of us imagined. Did you ever imagine it getting this big?”

  “I did
n’t.”

  “Rhodes thinks we’re public enemy number one! And he’s right! Peace is the enemy of fascism!”

  Melinda knew from movies that every great revolution had its halfhearted sap who was always asking people if they really wanted to give up everything they loved for the cause—if maybe they could just rest easy knowing they’d come this far. Melinda was scared of Allison’s tone, but Allison would probably hate it if Melinda were that sap.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?” Allison said. “I’ve got to go. We’re planning.”

  “I’m sick,” Melinda said.

  “But this is history. You’ll be there, right?”

  “I’ll be there no matter what.”

  “I love you, Melly,” Allison said, and hung up.

  The words stayed longer between her ears than Melinda would’ve liked. Her stomach lurched and she realized she’d forgotten to take her birth control. She opened her plastic clamshell: she hadn’t taken any since Thursday. Her face slackened and she popped two pills at once. Then she sat cross-legged on her bed, paging through the copy of Antonio Gramsci’s prison notebooks Allison had lent her.

  She awoke the next morning with a raw throbbing below her navel. When she tried to shift her weight, her lower back protested. She checked for blood between her legs and found none. Leland was standing at the dresser, picking out a T-shirt. He told her he’d canceled his Dog ’n’ Suds shift to go to the protest. What looked like a few grams of grass sat on the dresser in front of him. He probably figured he’d make more money at the protest than at work. Guilty, sweaty—their fourth-floor room was a heat trap—Melinda flopped onto her stomach and said she’d told Allison she was sick. She went back to sleep and was awakened hours or minutes later—she couldn’t tell which. Leland was standing over her, pacing, explaining that the whole campus was swarming with militia and Jeff was dead, shot through the mouth. Allison was on her way to the hospital.

  Melinda sat up in bed, innards howling. “She’s dead, too?”

  “I dunno, I didn’t see it, I just heard it,” he said in one breath. He sat down in the middle of the room and grabbed his knees. “It’s gonna be slaughter.” He looked at her. “We all thought they had rubber bullets, but they didn’t.”

  She had the feeling that her entire life’s progress had been lost in an instant.

  She had to leave Kent. Her body was a bundle of raw nerve endings. There was only deadly quiet where her intuition had been. Her period never came.

  She got her degree, married Leland, and they moved to Cleveland. For months, every major newspaper and magazine ran the picture of Jeff limp on the ground with the runaway girl kneeling over him, screaming. She didn’t think about Allison: where she’d been standing, what she’d been wearing, how she’d felt when Jeff pitched the can of tear gas. Who’d shot her? Had she collapsed on impact? Melinda’s body registered the child’s kicks and little else. She grew larger without understanding that she was growing larger—her growth an extension of the child’s will. She got her license and sold real estate and didn’t think about Allison. And, for years to follow, the waves crashed over her until she could barely stand: the messy birth of her son, Leland in and out of NA, Leland Jr. cowering in terror of his father, the fight and the disappearance, her mother’s death of a heart attack, her father’s dementia, Tommy vanishing into a marriage with a woman who hated Melinda, her ensuing lonely period, her unpaid bills, her health, the briefcases.

  The yellow briefcases.

  He’d soldered one together and locked the other one shut, talking crazy about Reggie this and Reggie that and promising her that he would keep her safe. He’d taken both suitcases when he left. How could Leland Jr. have known about any of it? A new spasm of guilt shook her from the chest outward. She couldn’t even begin to keep track of the ways she’d failed as a mother.

  * * *

  She had come home from Rush and sat on her hotel bed, her feet throbbing as she undid her bra. Someone on TV was chattering about the Gaza Strip. Who had she been before he left her, she wondered. An automaton, a little aproned wife, the kind of woman Allison would’ve spit at. And when he finally lost his mind, she had spent her every day trying to keep him balanced—dusting the shelves twice, buying skim milk instead of 2 percent, unplugging the microwave in the middle of the night—all to keep from witnessing another outburst, to obtain another (usually empty) promise from him that he’d do something about his recidivism. If she was being perfectly honest with herself, she was frequently too stoned to notice how futile it all was. She should’ve known better than to think he couldn’t sense her hypocrisy, demanding through her own haze that he “get help.” And maybe he had been getting help, of a kind. She saw her son scowling from the driver’s seat of her van during his last visit to Cleveland: “Where do you think he got all that money to snort up his nose? Honest employment?”

  She bolted upright and called Alvin. One of few waves she’d crested in her adult life was Alvin Martinez, a fellow realtor. She’d met him the year Leland Jr. started work at Winn Maxwell. Fourteen years younger than her, Alvin had a seal-colored mustache and wire-brushed glasses, wasn’t a fetishist but was pleasantly nasty in bed and completely devoted. So devoted that he agreed when Melinda suggested he leave ReMax rather than go public with—and thereby define, a hated word and practice of Melinda’s—their relationship. And when she told him she’d never accept another proposal in her life, having wasted her youth playing house with a lunatic, he nodded gamely and said he hadn’t planned on tendering one. She’d ignored the note of disappointment in his voice, offering to cut him free whenever he grew tired of their arrangement. Over a decade later, he still hadn’t.

  He picked up on the second ring. “Hello, love.”

  He sounded exhausted. When she asked him if he was, he promised he wasn’t. She said she feared Leland Jr. may be psychic in addition to being schizophrenic. Alvin gallows-chuckled then apologized quickly.

  “But in all seriousness,” she said. Her tongue felt cottony: she took a Coke from the mini fridge and gulped it. “He knows about something he couldn’t possibly know about.”

  “What is that?”

  “Can you hear me?” she asked, but didn’t wait for a confirmation. “It’s a briefcase. Two of them.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Did I tell you about them?”

  He said she hadn’t. According to Leland, they’d contained “enough money to ruin all of us.”

  “Another one of his lies?” Alvin asked. “Or did they?”

  “Did they what?”

  “Contain enough money to ruin all of you? Jesus, how dramatic.”

  “I didn’t look—I couldn’t.”

  “Right.” He sighed.

  “I promised to keep it all a secret and he was so thankful. He stuck with the program for a while after that. Nothing happened so I figured it was all an act.”

  “What program?”

  “The group meetings. NA.”

  “So it worked to entertain his delusions.”

  “Well, you know, who knows what he was mixed up in? He was so paranoid. He always kept these decoy wallets with fake IDs in them like he was going to be robbed. He wanted to build a decoy car out of wood. He told me having fake copies of everything was essential because his every move was being traced.”

  “Delusional ideas, love, that’s what. They say schizophrenia can be hereditary.”

  “Leland isn’t at all like his father.”

  She could almost hear Alvin shrugging. “Maybe you’re right,” he said, which was what he always said when he wanted to avoid a fight.

  “The important thing is that—”

  “What?”

  She’d wanted to say “The important thing is that we weren’t hurt.” But that wasn’t completely true. So she said, “It’s just good that the police never had to get involved.”

  “A briefcase,” he said, obviously attempting to shepherd her away from her memories. “That’s symbolic. Li
ke something in a dream.”

  “The way he spoke it didn’t seem like a dream.”

  “Could be, but then you never know when someone’s had a nervous breakdown.”

  “He said he knew I knew about it.”

  “Maybe in his hallucinations you did.”

  “It’s just funny that there were actually briefcases.”

  “I know, love. But you can see how it’s probably a big coincidence?”

  She could. But then it would always be a big coincidence to Alvin, who’d lived his entire life in a world saner than hers. He came from a big family who sent detailed Christmas cards and loved Alvin from a respectable distance. Melinda promised to call him as soon as she had more information about Leland Jr.’s prognosis. She hung up. Alvin would want to worry with her, brainstorm recovery plans, help her vet doctors from afar. Play father to a son who could’ve been his brother.

  Alone again, she took the numb, double-wide box of her left foot in her hands and attempted to rub it awake. Her doctor had recently warned that hers was the type of diabetes that would take her feet and vision quickly if she wasn’t careful. She was supposed to keep her blood sugar balanced with a high-protein, low-carb diet, something she planned to do in two years when she retired. When she retired, she would special-order flattering dresses and go to the Shaker Heights farmers’ market and rotate the selection of fruit and vegetables in her crisper daily. She would lose weight, which everyone except Alvin was fairly vocal about wanting her to do. There had certainly been a time when she herself would have wanted this as well. But now, after everything that could possibly go wrong with her flesh had gone wrong with it, promising to change it didn’t make sense. She was living under a curse of bad waves—bad waves and bad news and bad luck—that much was obvious. Better to be a friend of fate than get on some desperate hamster wheel and sweat to death. A warm and uncomfortable current of electricity pulsed through her foot. She bit her lower lip in relief, closed her eyes, and started on the other one.