The Suicide Club

by Toni Graham

  “I want to lose five pounds,” Holly continues, “so I picked up a box of Alli and started reading the label.”

  SueAnn is astonished. Holly appears to weigh no more than 110 pounds. Why would she go on a diet? She guesses it’s a California thing—they all seem so body conscious on the Coast. She nods at Holly, listening.

  “Do you know about the diarrhea issue?” Holly says.

  “No, I …” SueAnn is embarrassed and heat rises from her neck to her face. She feels the way she does when Gilbert’s bowling buddies make jokes about flatulence.

  Holly continues, “Well, the warning on the label says the stuff can cause what they call ‘anal seepage,’ and they suggest you wear dark clothing! Can you imagine?”

  While Holly laughs to beat the band, SueAnn thinks: What I never could have imagined has nothing to do with pooping my pants. I would never in a trillion and two years have imagined that I would be driving along the Arkansas River in a convertible with the top down, with a hip, educated woman like Holly, a bookstore owner who talks about Faulkner and Nietzsche and Proust as if they’re pals—a woman from California. Though SueAnn and Holly have become friendly, SueAnn feels like a rube around her and has even had to wonder why Holly wants to be friends. Maybe it’s as simple as that Holly often wants to talk about her dead boyfriend and SueAnn is always willing to listen.

  “God!” Holly says. “How great would it be if I’m wrong and the Belvedere really is hauled up in nearly all its former glory? Cars were so glamorous in the fifties, you know?” She laughs again, clearly euphoric, and SueAnn recalls Holly mentioned upping the dosage on her antidepressant. Holly is probably a bit intoxicated by the medication.

  “I’ve seen those cars in movies,” SueAnn says. “Like in Giant. And I’ve seen them on a 60 Minutes show about Cuba. They all drive 1950s cars down there.”

  Holly snaps on the car’s CD player and out blasts Ike Turner singing “Rocket 88.” She says, “To set the tone,” then adds, “Most people don’t know this, but Ike’s version came out years before Bill Haley and the Comets’.” Holly sings along, straying from Turner’s lyrics, “She has a V-8 engine, honey—it’s gold and it’s fine.”

  Holly, concerned about car thieves, parks her convertible in a pricey indoor parking structure, and SueAnn and she hoof it the several blocks to the excavation site at Denver and 7th. Before they catch sight of the dig, they see television vans and reporters with microphones. The public has been herded behind a chain link fence erected for the event, and SueAnn and Holly wormhole their way from the back of the crowd, inching as close to the fence as possible.

  “They’re lifting the lid already,” Holly says, grabbing SueAnn’s elbow and pulling her along, slithering their way to the second row of people thronging against the fence.

  A group of hard-hatted workers lifts the heavy lid of the vault, setting it aside. The mood of the crowd grows even more buoyant, and hoots of excitement speckle the air. After what seems like a long time, equipment-tethered ropes begin to elevate the car itself, though there may be help from a hydraulic device below. When she and Gilbert went to Las Vegas, they saw David Copperfield appear onstage by rising from the floor, slowly, as if ascending from the netherworld. When SueAnn stands on tiptoes, she can see the car rising slowly from the muck, a muddy shroud still clinging to the Belvedere, and her spine actually tingles as the whistling and shouting of the crowd grow louder and more fevered.

  “Oh, Christ—she’s a doner,” a man behind them says, and SueAnn cranes her neck to the side. The tarpaulin has begun to fall away from the car, and what is clear to everyone is that the Plymouth is no longer gold but is a rusted-out hull. In spots the vehicle is mottled the color of mustard, the shade of a jar of Gulden’s Spicy Brown.

  The Bible says if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will have the conviction to say to a mountain, “Move over there.” When she went to the Internet after Kyle’s death and looked up the parable of the mustard seed, she discovered the Buddhists possess more wisdom on the topic. The Buddha told the story of the grieving mother and the mustard seed. When a mother lost her only son, she took his corpse to the Buddha, seeking a cure. The Buddha asked her to bring a handful of mustard seeds from a family that had never lost a child, husband, parent, or friend. When the mother was unable to find such a house in her village, she realized that death is common to all, and she could not be selfish in her grief. But I can—I can be very selfish in my grief.

  At Kyle’s funeral, after the Twenty-Third Psalm and all the rest of what SueAnn now thinks of as standard bereavement clichés, Pastor Russ read from the book of John. She heard his theatrical voice, though she did not see him, her eyes too swollen to view anything clearly through the dark glasses Gil had begged her not to wear.

  “Everyone who believes that Jesus is the Messiah,” quoted Pastor Russ, “is born of God. And everyone who loves the father loves his child as well.” She was struck then and there, as if a bowling ball had dropped from the chapel ceiling and bashed her in the brainpan. At that moment in the chapel, she felt spite burn through her body like cascading lava, cauterizing her pain and transforming it into rage so potent she could actually smell it. The heavy sweetness of the floral tributes in the Hope Springs Cornerstone Baptist Church chapel in that instant were replaced in SueAnn’s nostrils by a malodorous foulness, a smell not unlike the eggish fumes she encountered when her parents took her to the hot sulphur springs in Montana one summer when she was a child.

  SueAnn stares at the Belvedere, blinking against the sun. She hears ragged weeping somewhere behind her among the onlookers. In the blinding glare of the Tulsa sun she stands riveted, the Plymouth, twisting beneath its rope tethers, shrouded and defunct. She fumbles in her sweater pocket for her dark glasses, the very same pair she wore at Kyle’s funeral, but what she feels instead is the Suicide Club membership card she printed the other evening. She fingers the paper in her pocket and seems able to read it without looking, as if some sort of sorcery has raised the letters like Braille: The bearer has agreed to enter into the world of chaos and cacophony and is a member in good standing of the Suicide Club.

  FUBAR

  Give … wine unto those that be of heavy hearts.

  Let him drink, and forget his poverty,

  and remember his misery no more.

  Proverbs 31:6–7

  At LAX on his way to the gate, Slater slips on something and nearly bumps into a young woman with an orange tan, wearing backless high-heeled shoes and accompanied by a Yorkie on a rhinestone leash. She stands talking into an iPhone, blocking the flow of foot traffic, stock still, right in front of one of those airport news shops. As she inexplicably holds the phone in front of her face, smiles, and snaps her own photo, Slater stops to examine the bottom of his shoe and determines he has stepped in dog crap.

  The woman does not notice or pretends not to notice her dog has defecated, so as Slater walks on he says, “Excuse me! Your dog pooped here!” For a moment she lifts her chin and meets Slater’s glance, but then looks away. By this time Slater has passed her, so he calls over his shoulder, “Don’t foul the footpath!”

  He’s on his way back to Oklahoma, having just spent the weekend in Santa Monica, most recently photographing Frank Gehry’s residence. Beth was unable to come along on the trip, needing to act as hostess for a long-planned baby shower for one of her friends’ daughters, which is the primary reason he chose this particular weekend—he does not want her or anyone else to find out about the real deal, the thing that actually brought him to Southern California. Well, the old saw is true, it only hurts when he laughs, so he made sure last night not to watch any comedies on the hotel-room television. He looks at his watch and realizes he has time to kill. Might as well grab an early lunch. He heads for the bar where he knows he can order a quick burger and a double Manhattan.

  When he takes a seat, the surge of pain stuns Slater. His entire torso thrums with a burning ache. Must be the elastic pressure belt the surg
eon has made him wear. How will he be able to hide the thing from Beth? It’s not as if coming to bed with a girdle on is something that heretofore has been within the realm of possibility. He stifles the groan he feels on the verge of emitting and orders a Rusty Nail. Where did that come from? He has not drunk a scotch and Drambuie since he was young and still teaching at Pratt, and he fully intended to order his usual Manhattan. The pain must have called up a weird unconscious association—there is something toxic sounding about a rusted nail, the taint of tetanus. Discomfort, my ass.

  The woman to his left turns her face ever so slightly away from Slater as she reads the Los Angeles Times and sips a glass of white wine. Don’t worry, I’m not going to land on you, Slater thinks. It occurs to him that maybe she smells dog do, so he leans down and wipes off his shoe, then rolls up the paper napkin and wings it over the bar and into a garbage receptacle. He thanks the bartender for the drink and takes a long pull on the Rusty Nail. The slow heat from his throat to his chest provides a winning contrast to the ugly burn tearing through his torso—his “core,” as the guys in the gym now say.

  What would his father say if he had lived to know that his only son had plunked down beaucoup bucks to have fat sucked and lasered from his midsection? The answer could not be clearer: Poppy would say his son had turned into a vain ponce, that no real man would spend money on womanly medical procedures. But his father also claimed that any man who would commit suicide had to be a “sister man”—that only a sissy would be too afraid to live. “When the going gets tough, the tough get going,” his father often said, and at times employed other 1950s clichés, such as “A quitter never wins and a winner never quits,” truisms that even then Slater viewed as tired pap and an offshoot of social Darwinism, not what one might expect from a hardcore labor union man like his dad. As for Poppy deliberately overdosing on sleeping pills, Slater might more easily have predicted him joining the Taliban, or having a sex change operation, or even becoming a Republican.

  But Poppy was always a complex guy, no doubt about that. He had been for the most part a kind and doting father when Slater was a kid, taking him to Dodgers games and fishing at Breezy Point jetty and even serving as Cubmaster to his Cub Scout pack. He called his son Davey-Man or Slugger and never missed one of Slater’s baseball games or soccer matches. He hired a metal band for Slater’s bar mitzvah party, a downer for the oldsters but bliss for Slater and the other thirteen-year-olds. But as a father he had a dark side, too, what Slater’s grief counselor called a “Jungian shadow.” He could become sadistic, without warning and for no apparent reason. When Slater was going through his cowboy phase in the first grade, his very favorite song was the country standard “Red River Valley”—ironic now that he has ended up living in Oklahoma. One day young Slater was sitting at the kitchen table in their flat when they still lived in Flatbush, drawing with crayons on butcher paper. Another of Poppy’s contradictions: he played piano beautifully and even composed his own music, not what you might think of as your standard-issue longshoreman. Slater had at times sat next to Poppy on the piano bench, watching him play. On the day of the coloring crayons, David had drawn wobbly lines across the page and was drawing crude replicas of what he thought looked like musical notes.

  “How ‘bout that!” Poppy had exclaimed. “Did you know you’ve written down the music for ‘Red River Valley’?”

  Slater can still remember the astonished pleasure resulting from his father’s revelation. At six years of age, not once had he considered that his father would tell him anything untrue—this possibility had never entered his mind. With the magical thinking of young children, accepting that he had accidentally duplicated his favorite piece was conceivable, in some giddy, unanticipated way.

  But Poppy had not been content to leave the joke there, inside their family flat. His father insisted that David take the piece to school with him the next day, tell the teacher that the crayoned page contained the song “Red River Valley,” and ask her to play the tune on the piano to the class during music time. Feeling shy, David had said he did not want to, but Poppy insisted. The inevitable had happened: Slater took the sheet to the young, freckled woman who was his first-grade teacher, explained that it contained “Red River Valley,” and earnestly requested that she play the song during music time. Slater does not remember everything about his life as a six-year-old, but this moment has a grotesque clarity. The teacher’s facial expression had gone from surprised to blank to contemplative, and then she told him sweetly that she had something else planned for today, but that she would try to play the piece some other time. That had been satisfactory to David, but when he arrived home that evening, his father immediately asked if the teacher played the cowboy song for the class. When Slater reported on the events, his father laughed long and hard, his wolfish teeth flashing. Not until many years later did Slater recall the incident and realize his father had punked him.

  Conversely, Poppy had brought up his kids to do the right thing, and in particular never to lie. And Slater never has been a liar, has always aimed to be a mensch. But ever since Poppy killed himself, Slater has found himself in uncharted waters. Though he cannot get it up with Beth, he lusts inappropriately after women in his circle; he skips his office hour sometimes and leaves students in the lurch; and last, but certainly not least, he skulks off to California and has liposuction. While it is true that plenty of straight guys have “procedures” these days, Slater never imagined that he would be one of those men.

  He does not really give a damn whether the woman next to him at the bar knows what he has done, so he removes from the inside pocket of his jacket the brochure the surgeon’s assistant gave him when he left the surgery suite Friday.

  After a surgery like liposuction, patients may be bloated and feel distended. Liposuction surgery is really a controlled injury—body fluid rushes to the site and the injured tissue becomes like a sponge. Your physician has gone under the carpet of skin and taken away the fat undercoating, so the raw surface oozes serum on the inside.

  Before he came to Santa Monica for the lipo, he studied up on the procedure and probably should have decided then and there not to go ahead with it. When he read the Internet info, all he could think of was the liquefaction that takes place after a serious earthquake. During the Loma Prieta earthquake in ‘89, because San Francisco’s Marina District had been built upon superficial sandy materials that were used to fill the old lagoon in 1915, liquefaction had caused water-saturated fine-grain sands and silts to behave as viscous fluids rather than solids. This liquidity caused entire buildings to sink into the muck. Slater’s flesh feels equally unstable, roiling and suppurating beneath the pressure belt.

  He chugs most of his drink and tries to catch the eye of the bartender, then pulls a notebook from his attaché case. Making lists has for Slater become like yoga for many others; the process calms his nerves and evens him out. He thinks for a moment, then writes:

  THINGS ABOUT L.A.:

  Surprisingly good buildings—Santa Monica Heritage Museum kind of cool

  Breast implants ubiquitous, even the hotel maids

  Very, very white teeth

  Bartenders and waitresses ready for their close-up

  Armpits on display—sleeves at a premium

  Hug each other constantly, just like on Leno

  What he should make is a list of ideas about how to hide the lipo from Beth. It’s not as if he could claim that he had undergone the procedure on a spur-of-the moment impulse just because he happened to be in Santa Monica—she would know that one has to schedule this sort of thing in advance, which he had. And maybe the worst part, the part that would be the coup de grâce, is the financial aspect of the caper. He paid more than $7,000 for so-called “smart lipo.” He borrowed from his 403B and had all the paperwork routed to his box on campus, but he is not so foolish as to expect that he will not be caught out by Beth someday. As for the bruising, well, he’ll just have to remove the pressure belt at night and sleep in a T-sh
irt. There isn’t much chance of them having sex, anyway.

  He slides the notebook back into his attaché case and pulls out a stack of mail that he grabbed from his box before he left Hope Springs. There’s this week’s Nation—he’ll have something to read on the plane on the way home. And there are the usual bills. But most of the mail he receives these days seems to come from only four sources: the AARP, though he refuses to join; hearing aid companies; burial insurance companies; and funeral directors. When he opens a brochure from one of the burial insurance companies, out falls a return postcard that the recipient is invited to return to the company, asking for more information. He scrawls at the bottom of the postcard: “Remove me from your mailing list. And while you’re at it, drop dead yourself.”

  “Oh! Do you go to Dr. Beauchamp, too?”

  The attractive woman on the stool next to him has tapped him on the arm and is smiling like a killer, displaying her lovely teeth, probably porcelain veneers from the looks of them.

  Slater is caught off guard. “How’d you …?”

  She points to the lipo brochure, which has Dr. Beauchamp’s name and address printed on it, and Slater nods, not knowing what to say.

  “Dr. Mike is my plastic surgeon, too!” she says. “I had my thighs done.”

  Slater exerts a tremendous effort not to look down at her thighs. “I guess that makes us homeys, then,” he says, raising his glass to her. She clinks her wine glass against his nearly empty Rusty Nail.

  “Did he give you anything for the pain?” she says. Her gaze morphs into a feral stare.