The Grievers Page 4

  “He was in a bad place,” Neil said.

  “Yeah,” I said. “He was in a bad place.”

  Neil opened his door and slid behind the wheel of his car. I gave him a wave as he pulled out of the parking lot, but his eyes were on the road ahead of him. As the sound of his engine faded into the hum of traffic on Route 202, I tramped out to my post and finished my shift on the muddy wet grass that stretched between the bank and the highway.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  In the years following my graduation from the Academy, Phil Ennis gave up on watching his students mutilate dead cats in the name of science and migrated instead to the world of administration—first serving as Chair of Admissions, then as Vice President for Student Life, and finally as Director of Alumni Relations and Giving. It was in this final capacity that the man flourished. Unfettered from the constraints of dealing with pimply teens on a daily basis, he could spend the majority of his time composing longwinded pleas for cash, stock, real estate, and other gifts without ever having to worry about some misguided youth finding a cache of dead kittens in what he thought was a scrotal sack. What Ennis did have to worry about, however, was fielding calls from alums who expected him to remember their names despite the passage of time and the fact that they had yet to make a sizable donation to the school. Or, in my case, any donation whatsoever.

  “Schwartz,” Ennis said when I called from inside my dollar sign the day after my lunch with Neil. In the background, I could hear my former biology teacher tapping at a keyboard. After a brief pause, he pretended to retrieve my name from the soupy haze of his memory. “Class of ’ninety-one?”

  “Yes,” I said, playing along. “I’m flattered.”

  “We’re a family, Schwartz. You know that. But as I recall, we haven’t really heard from you lately.”

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’ve been meaning to get in touch.”

  “A small consideration is all we ask. Pecuniary or otherwise.”

  “I understand,” I said. “That’s sort of why I’m calling.”

  “Sort of?”

  “Do you remember Billy Chin?” I asked.

  “Chin,” Ennis said as if trying to put the name to a face.

  “He was my lab partner in your biology class.”

  “Of course,” Ennis said. “How could I forget?”

  “He—passed away—about a month ago.”

  “Jesus,” Ennis said. “How?”

  “He killed himself,” I said. “It was a suicide.”

  I told him everything I knew, including how to get in touch with Mrs. Chin in the event that he wanted to forward his condolences, and Ennis said that he’d include a death notice in the next issue of The Academic. Slick, shiny, and full of pictures, the Academy’s alumni journal arrived in the mail four times a year. Though Karen once figured out that Ennis’s face appeared, on average, once every three pages, the majority of the magazine was dedicated to spreading the good news that Saint Leonard’s was and always would be the region’s strongest bastion of Noblac ideals—namely courage, loyalty, faith, and intellect.

  “A few of us were thinking of making a donation in Billy’s name,” I said. “Maybe setting up a scholarship fund. Is there a protocol for that kind of thing?”

  “Absolutely,” Ennis said. “But it runs into money. To make it worthwhile, we’re talking two million up front.”

  “Dollars?” I said.

  “And that’s just to get the ball rolling. Which isn’t to say we can’t explore other avenues. A few years back we did a survey and found that fewer than thirteen percent of our students come from within city limits. Given our reputation as Philadelphia’s oldest prep school, that’s completely unacceptable, so we set up a scholarship to get more Philly boys in the door. You can always earmark whatever you pool together for that one, assuming Billy lived in Philadelphia. Or, if you prefer, you can assign your donation to an extracurricular activity like the drama society or the chess team. That’s how you two met, right? On the chess team?”

  “No,” I said. “I was never on the chess team.”

  “At any rate, we have plenty of options.”

  Sensing, perhaps, that there was no real money to speak of on my end of the conversation, Ennis repeated his condolences before cutting me loose. In the cramped, muggy darkness of the dollar sign, I snapped my cell phone shut and checked the time. Relieved that my shift was almost over, I crawled out the bottom of my costume and dragged it to the parking lot where my boss, the Associate Manager, was taking a cigarette break.

  “No balloons today?” she said as I shoved the dollar sign into the backseat of my car.

  “I had some earlier, but I let go of them when I fell.”

  “Didn’t Terry tell you to tie them to your wrist?”

  “Is Terry the guy who smells like sausage?”

  The woman nodded. Her name was Sue. She had a different blue suit for every day of the week and an apparent fetish for ruffled blouses. The effect, heightened by her brittle blonde hair and papery skin, was to make her look like she had a part-time gig playing in a gloomy version of the Partridge Family. When I looked at her, I couldn’t help wondering if this was what the future held for me as well—the daily, soul-sucking grind of a real job, the prospect of each year blending into the next until they all congealed into a pointless, washed-out blur. Was this what killed Billy, I wondered, as Sue exhaled a plume of smoke? Did he see where his life was headed—where all of our lives were headed—and opt instead to bag the game altogether?

  “The balloons are part of the image,” Sue said. She worked directly under the Academy alum who gave me the job, and she more or less understood the two most fundamental aspects of my position—namely that it was pointless, and my connections meant that firing me would be more trouble than it was worth. Nonetheless, she wanted me to at least play along. If Sue had to pretend that I was legitimately employed, then I had to at least make the occasional gesture toward doing the same. “We want people to associate banking with fun.”

  “Who doesn’t associate banking with fun?” I said.

  “Just tie the balloons to your wrist, okay?”

  I was tempted to ask where lying flat on my back on the side of the highway fit into Sue’s hierarchy of things people should associate with banking, but it was the kind of wise-ass remark that would make my wife cringe when she eventually found out about it, so I kept my mouth shut. If nothing else, being married made me think twice before saying anything that might otherwise get me into trouble.

  WHEN I got home, Karen had stripped the last of the wallpaper from our living room walls and was beginning to work her way up the stairs. The woman who lived in the house before us had been a heavy smoker, and her white wallpaper had, over the years, turned ugly shades of yellow and brown where the walls met the ceiling. So we burned lead paint away from the woodwork, scraped the wallpaper with a wire brush and razor blades, and soaked the walls with hot, soapy water until the pasty paper came away from the plaster in thin, sticky layers that reminded me of phyllo dough. In the can, the paint we had chosen looked like melted chocolate ice cream.

  “They want two million dollars,” I said, kneeling one step below my wife and scouring the wallpaper with a wire brush. “If we want to set up a fund in Billy’s name, that’s how much we’ll need.”

  “I guess we’ll be selling the vineyard, then.”

  Karen was wearing cutoff jeans and a lime-green tee shirt that her students had given her as a souvenir for chaperoning the senior prom. When she wasn’t teaching, she was grading papers, and the only break she ever took from grading was to vent her frustration on our walls and woodwork. Considering the amount of wallpaper lying in shreds on our living room floor, my guess was that her students still couldn’t quite articulate the difference between Realism and Romanticism.

  “I’m serious,” I said. “Two million.”

  “It’s the thought that counts, Charley. Make a donation in Billy’s name. Give what you can. It’s not like the A
cademy won’t take your money.”

  “Of course they’ll take my money,” I said. “That isn’t the point. The point is respect. I want them to know that I can do this, that I’m not a total—you know.”

  “A total what?” Karen said.

  “Fuck-up.”

  “Who said you were a total fuck-up?”

  “No one,” I said. “Besides, this isn’t about me. It’s about Billy.”

  “Okay,” Karen said, tugging at a strip of wallpaper. “As long as it doesn’t turn into another one of your crusades.”

  “Crusades?” I said. “What are you talking about?”

  “Your fixation with apostrophes, for example.”

  “That’s justified,” I said. “And I’d hardly call it a crusade. I just happen to have a deep and abiding respect for the English language.”

  “We can’t eat at Fernando’s anymore,” Karen said.

  “Are you kidding? I did them a favor.”

  “You pissed off Fernando.”

  “The sign said special’s—with an apostrophe S. Besides, there is no Fernando. That was the bartender.”

  “Whoever it was, you could have at least apologized when he told you to get away from his sign.”

  “Apologize for what? I saw a problem and I fixed it.”

  “I stand corrected,” Karen said. “You’re the Albert Schweitzer of punctuation.”

  “I’m not on a crusade,” I said.

  “Fine,” Karen said. “You’re not on a crusade.”

  For the next hour, we scraped, scoured, soaked, and scrubbed as the yellow wallpaper gradually gave way to gray, pockmarked plaster. At the bottom of the stairs, the radio was tuned to a classical music station. If either of us spoke, it was only to trade a scraper for a wire brush. Beyond that, we worked in silence.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Neil made a reservation for twelve at a restaurant that was mutually inconvenient for everyone. After driving nearly an hour north along the gray corridors of the Pennsylvania Turnpike, I spied an electric sign boasting eightyseven varieties of nachos and knew I was in the right place. That nachos was spelled with an apostrophe S didn’t make me cringe so much as it forced me to hold my tongue as the hostess seated me alone at a long table beneath a red bicycle that dangled precariously from the ceiling on superfine strands of fishing line.

  For the next ten minutes, I sipped iced tea and made a show of studying the menu while conversations buzzed all around me. When the waitress paused at my table to ask if I needed a refill, my sense was that the question had less to do with my drink than the hungry patrons-in-waiting eyeing the vast expanse of real estate in front of me with a mix of envy and outrage.

  “Hey, big boy,” I said when Neil arrived. “How about a drink?”

  “Sorry,” Neil said. “I never take a drink unless somebody’s buying.”

  “Duck Soup?” I asked.

  “Close,” Neil said. “Animal Crackers.”

  Everything I knew about the Marx Brothers I’d pieced together from sound bites, documentaries, Trivial Pursuit, and conversations with Neil, but I’d never actually seen one of their movies in its entirety. Like anyone even vaguely familiar with their work, I knew Groucho’s iconic mustache and glasses on sight, guessed that his cynical outlook on life had earned him his nickname, and understood that the animated stork in the Vlasic Pickle commercials was modeled after his trademark stoop, deadpan delivery, and incomparable cigar-play. I knew that Harpo didn’t talk, that he wore a curly wig, and that he honked a horn whenever he got excited. I knew that Chico spoke in a broken accent and once told a reporter that he’d been Italian until he saw what they did to Mussolini and subsequently decided to become Greek. I knew that Zeppo had starred in only a handful of films, always playing the straight man, and that Gummo had quit the act before they made it to the silver screen.

  I’d learned all of this through the kind of passive research that makes renaissance men of us all—a PBS special on a rainy Sunday here, a zero-context rant from my grandfather there. Fortunately or not, this was how I learned pretty much everything in my life. I never read the Beats, I only read about them. I never went to war, but I saw it on TV. I never played football, but I looked forward to every new version of Madden NFL to hit the shelves. And the closest I’ve come to a psychedelic experience is reading The Doors of Perception. Some people immerse themselves in the things they love, the things that excite them, the things that pique their curiosity. At best, I’m the kind of person who dips a toe in the water, but more often than not, I’ll settle for hearsay, opting always to remain a safe distance from whatever it is that holds my attention.

  “Nice place, by the way,” I said, glancing at the bicycle above us.

  “Sorry,” Neil said, apologizing before I could really start to complain—about the drive, about the wait, about the superfluous apostrophe. “Anthony had a coupon.”

  “So he’s coming?” I asked.

  “Actually, no,” Neil said. “He just called to bail on us. Something about a Dukes of Hazzard marathon.”

  Back at the Academy, Anthony Gambacorta was a pudgy kid with thick glasses who used to hang out in the light booth and share his extensive pornography collection with the stage crew while the Carrot and Stick Drama Society butchered the likes of Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neill in the theater down below. During our sophomore year, he made a name for himself when he replaced all the posters advertising an upcoming production of Bock and Harnick’s Fiorello! with counterfeits that read Fellatio! instead. The fact that nobody caught the mistake until a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer spotted it on the last night of the show didn’t do much for the school’s reputation; but an insatiable appetite for porn kept everyone in the know from ratting Anthony out even when the administration threatened to pull the plug on the drama program altogether.

  Anthony was also responsible for programming my cell phone to play the theme from The Jeffersons whenever it rang—a gift, he said after he’d done the deed, for my previous birthday, which he’d missed by two months. It was the last time I’d seen him in the flesh, and the only reason I was disappointed that he couldn’t make it to dinner with us was that I wanted him to change my ringtone back to whatever it was before. Not that I couldn’t figure it out for myself. I was simply standing on principle. Anthony was the one who put the damn ringtone on my phone in the first place, so he’d also be the one to take it off, come hell or high water.

  “The good news is that he’s working on a musical,” Neil said.

  “And the bad news?”

  “It’s an adaptation of Hogan’s Heroes. He’s calling it Down in the Stalag.”

  “Is he at least good for a donation?”

  Neil shrugged.

  Before he could say anything, Greg Packer arrived on the heels of our waitress, whom he instructed to return with a pitcher of margaritas and a plate of nachos. We were here to honor a fallen comrade, he added, so she should limit her intrusions to a bare minimum and keep an eye out for the remainder of our party. We were in mourning, he stressed—stricken with grief—so if she could please hurry up with the margaritas and nachos, he’d make it worth her while.

  “Gentlemen,” Greg said, acknowledging our presence only after the waitress hurried away. “Given the circumstances, it is, of course, with a heavy heart that I dine with you this evening, but I am also pleased to report that my personal fortunes have taken a turn for the better. To wit, I think I’m in love.”

  “Again?” Neil said. “Who’s the lucky lady?”

  “And please don’t say Karen,” I added.

  “Considering our larger purpose this evening, I’ll ignore that remark and say only that her name is Evangeline and that she lives in Chicago.”

  “Illinois?” I said.

  Greg looked at me as if I were something he’d stepped in. Yes, Illinois, he said in a tone that might have been justified if he’d ever come close to realizing the grandiose dreams of his childhood. As it stood, however,
he was just another unshaven slob in a rumpled blue blazer who lived with his mother and spent his days trolling the Internet for potential mates who might, in his words, extend the Packer line by agreeing to carry his seed. If he had any regrets that it wasn’t the future he’d imagined for himself back at the Academy, he never let on. Instead, he proceeded to behave as if the world had, in fact, made good on the unspoken promise it makes to all children—that we can be anything, that we can go anywhere, that we can do whatever we want as long as we want it badly enough.

  When our waitress returned with a pitcher of margaritas, she asked how many glasses we wanted. It was, I imagined, her subtle way of inquiring as to whether or not we needed such a large table, but Greg shot her down with a casual wave of his hand as if to say he couldn’t be bothered with petty details.

  “Is it me, or does our girl seem a little infatuated?”

  “I think it’s you,” Neil said as the waitress conferred with the hostess, the hostess conferred with the manager, and all three joined the hungry crowd at the front of the restaurant in eyeing our table with mounting suspicion. “And I’m also beginning to think that we need a smaller table.”

  “Nonsense,” Greg said. “You reserved a table for twelve, so we’ll dine at a table for twelve.”

  “That was probably a mistake,” Neil said. “I thought we’d get a bigger crowd.”

  “So it’s only us?” I said.

  “Irrelevant,” Greg said. “If the people out there had planned ahead, they’d already be seated. The fact of the matter is that they left too much to chance and now they’re paying for it. If we give up our table now, we’ll only be rewarding their indolence.”

  “Sean’s coming,” Neil said. “But only because I told him you were interested in buying a Volkswagen.”

  “Great. So now I have to suffer?”

  “Don’t talk to me about suffering,” Greg said. “I know suffering.”