The Suicide Club

by Toni Graham

  Teddy’s back is to her as he stirs oatmeal. When he visited his father during the summer, Theo taught him how to cook breakfast.

  “Who is the man?” Teddy says.

  She tells him the guy is someone she met through a dating service. The sound of a spoon scraping a pan is for a few moments the only noise in the room. Then, Teddy says with clear annoyance, “Why doesn’t he have a wife? There must be something wrong with him.”

  Holly laughs. “I’m not married, either. Does that mean there’s something wrong with me, too?”

  “You can’t help it if Reed did what he did,” Teddy says as he ladles oatmeal into two bowls. “He did a bad thing—that’s why you’re not married.”

  She says nothing, glad he does not broach the subject of her going back to Theo, which might be what Teddy actually wants. Nor does she tell him Jeremiah’s wife died. Teddy does not need any further grisly information.

  “He could be a sereo killer,” Teddy says, placing a bowl before her.

  She says she is sure the guy’s not a serial killer, though maybe she is not as certain as she hopes she sounds.

  “Do you notice something?” Teddy says.

  She looks up from the screen, then follows Teddy’s glance downward to her cereal bowl. Teddy has fashioned a smiley face on her oatmeal. Raisins form eyes and a nose, and for the smiling mouth he has smeared some strawberry jam in an upward curving line. She swallows the catch in her throat and tells him he is the sweetest son, ever. She has not exactly believed in God for quite some time, but there is no doubt her child was sent Express Mail straight from the Big Kahuna.

  She closes the cover of the laptop and pushes the computer aside so she can eat breakfast. When she unfolds the newspaper, she discovers a peculiar story on the second page. It seems a young man, a skydiving student, was taking his maiden voyage, a piggyback jump with his instructor, a middle-aged man. A few seconds after they jumped from the plane, the instructor pulled the rip cord, then shouted over the wind into the novice’s ear, “Welcome to my world!” When the student called back a question, he was met with silence. Soon realizing the man on his back was unconscious, the student had the presence of mind to correctly position his body as they approached the drop zone, and he managed to make a safe landing. The older man was unstrapped from his back, stone dead, and taken away in a body bag.

  Teddy peruses the comics page while Holly sips her coffee. She closes her eyes, and shimmering there in the darkness behind her eyelids is the image: a man leaping from a plane, flying free, the blazes of noon enfolding him and wind hissing in his ears, a dead man strapped to his back.

  When she reopens the laptop, she discovers a new message from Jeremiah. “The jig’s up,” she says to herself.

  Teddy asks her what she means, and she tells him, “I mean I have to ‘fish or cut bait.’ I either meet this Jeremiah guy or let him go—my choice.”

  “My choice is no,” her son says. He does not look at her but continues examining the comics page of the Tulsa World.

  She says nothing, but she is fully aware that, more often than not, Teddy is correct about things, wise beyond his years—even wise beyond hers. He was crazy about Reed in a manner that was very similar to her own besottedness: dazzled, but not blind to Reed’s not-inconsequential shortcomings. Once, when Teddy was only six, he said to Holly, “Reed’s messed up—he doesn’t want to be happy.” She was astonished by the accuracy of her child’s observation. Reed was edgy when things were going well; he gravitated toward calamity, toward what Yeats called “fabulous, formless darkness.” She guesses that being a compulsive gambler served Reed’s crimped psyche very well. She has little doubt that plenty of his fellow devotees of online poker and smoky Indian-reservation casinos were there for the same reason Reed had actually been: to lose.

  Holly has just rung up still another copy of The Purpose Driven Life. Funny the way situations work out: if she had her druthers, such a book would not smell up her bookstore, but this very book has turned out to be the bread and butter of H. Hemenway, Booksellers. Cadon, her part-time clerk, is listlessly stocking the shelves. She can sense that before too long he will resign and she will have to train someone new. Maybe she can poach someone from the bookstore at the university, offering a higher salary than the school can pay. Not that she can afford to pay much, either. She knows it is just a matter of time—and not all that much time—before her shaky business goes completely belly-up. If she were at the top of her game, she would be aggressively devising a Plan B rather than playing the denial card. The fact is, even if she stripped the shop of real literature and turned the place into a Christian bookstore, she would still end up going broke before too long. Books themselves are sliding into society’s dumper. She will burn the place to the ground before she will have anything whatever to do with electronic reading devices like Kindle. Not only is she brick and mortar, she will forever be paper and ink.

  The bell over the door tinkles. She looks toward Cadon, but he pretends not to have heard, so she walks toward the front of the store herself, preparing to offer the default greeting.

  As the man steps across the threshold, he raises his chin and looks her full in the face. She momentarily teeters on a fulcrum between instant recognition and immediate rejection: It’s Reed / He’s not Reed / He’s Jeremiah / Oh crap. Within two seconds she has experienced shock, bliss, disappointment, and resignation, and now stands mute, waiting to see what Jeremiah will say.

  “Holly?”

  Jeremiah offers his hand and she reaches out to shake it and says, “How do you do,” with what she can tell is a stiff, formal tone. In the flesh, his resemblance to Reed is not pronounced, though he has the same unusual dark red hair and a similarly shaped jaw. “I’m Holly,” she says, then laughs nervously. Of course he already knows who she is; he just called her by name.

  “I’m Jeremiah,” he responds. “I hope y’all don’t mind my coming in.” He seems too genuine and even artlessly sweet for her to consider him a stalker.

  He is a handsome man, too. But then he smiles. This otherwise nice-looking online suitor not only has teeth that are worse than any Irishman’s, there is actually a gap where a tooth is missing. Trying not to betray her shock, she says something noncommittal and walks toward the coffee machine at the back of the shop, motioning him to follow. Her heart beats wildly, and she is hyper-aware of Cadon drawing a bead on them. The most absurd thing is that in this moment all she can think of is a rude joke she heard a disc jockey make on the radio: “The stadium in Oklahoma City was filled with fifty thousand people, which added up to a hundred thousand teeth.” She does not wish to be a snob, but until she came to Oklahoma, she had never before seen a person with missing teeth, except for carneys at the California State Fair.

  She offers Jeremiah coffee, and when he accepts, she pours mugs for them both. He is chattering a bit nervously, probably wondering if maybe he should not have come into the shop. She feels bad for him, poor guy. He says something about remembering she said she owned a bookstore, and when he googled the words “Holly” and “Hope Springs,” up had popped the website of H. Hemenway, Booksellers. Taking the mug of coffee from her, Jeremiah walks beside her to the small tables at the back of the store but stops and points to one of the top shelves on the store’s perimeter.

  “Oh, my favorite book,” he says, and for an instant she feels a frisson of hope, but he has indicated Rick Warren’s book. “The Purpose Driven Life,” he says, clearly proud of his erudition. Evidently he does not recall that he listed this book as his favorite within his e-Luv profile, but she does not say anything about this. At least he reads; cut the man a break. “I really like Michael Crichton, too,” he says.

  She nods. She knows that Crichton writes page-turners—and that he’s been married five times and is a vocal denier of climate change. But forget Jeremiah’s literary tastes and his teeth and for godsake try to be kind for a change. Who cares if Cadon is staring at them with what Holly has come to think of as
his little-grad-student smirk. He’s a lazy sod in any case and Jeremiah is, for all Cadon knows, a paying customer who should be treated as such. “Were you looking for a particular book today?”

  “Well, I was looking for something inspirational, but maybe something by Crichton, too.” She tells him he might be interested in Kubler-Ross, and asks if he has ever read Scott Turow. She will worry later about how to let him down gently as a suitor. As for Cadon, maybe she will fire him before he can quit. Just last week she saw him in a restaurant wearing a red beret; who is he to sneer at Jeremiah?

  When she and Jeremiah walk together to the Self-Help section, somehow she finds herself looking down at his shoes. The shoes. She recognizes them immediately, an uncommon style of Nike she has never seen anyone but Reed wear. She self-corrects: anyone but Reed buy, as the shoes were never worn after Reed purchased them. The shoes are a hybrid of bohemian and thug, black-on-black-on-black, even the swoosh black. The recollection of throwing the box of brand-new shoes into the Rubbermaid trash can behind her house is as vivid as if she had done it an hour ago. She could smell the new-shoe smell when she discarded the box, heaving it on top of some chicken bones and a Rice Dream carton. Air Monarch III was printed on the shoe box.

  This is the worst part: lying in bed without Reed next to her. After his death, she moved the bedroom furniture to what was formerly the study and vice versa, but decamping from their former bedroom has not helped. The new mattress has not helped, either, nor have the new bed linens, bedding that mercifully does not smell like Reed. No matter how many times she washed their old quilt and blanket, she swore she could still detect Reed’s heady scent, so finally she discarded them and bought new bedding from Bed Bath & Beyond. It’s the “beyond” that has her in its narcotic-like spell of remembrance.

  Her initial attraction to Reed had been based on his intelligence and wit and, admittedly, his good looks. But then sex entered the picture and everything careered out of bounds. She had fallen into a raptured state of eros, plummeting into the secret zone of just the two of them like Alice down the rabbit hole. And, yes, it had been transcendent—even Tantric. Dr. Jane has dismissed the heat between Reed and her as “erotic enmeshment.” They had not really come up for air until the week before Reed shot himself. That week, they had not even touched each other. She could count on the fingers of one hand how many times she and Reed had been in bed together without making love. But the week before he died, Reed sat in front of the television every evening with the sound off, smoking. Already envisioning himself on the other side, though she had not realized it.

  She is not at all certain that Reed actually intended buying shoes only as a ruse. Maybe he just was not sure, four days before he shot himself, that he was really going to take his own life; maybe he was vacillating. He had driven to Dillard’s and bought the expensive new pair of black Nikes, showing the shoes to her and Teddy before placing them back in the box and into the closet, where they remained until after he killed himself. Who buys pricey new shoes right before he kills himself? He had not even worn the footwear that awful day—it’s not as if he had wanted his body taken away with unsullied Nikes on his feet

  Fall Out of Love is not the first pop psychology self-help book Holly ever read. Once, she read a book about “self-love,” a book she bought accidentally. She had assumed the book was about self-esteem, of which she had been devoid at the time she purchased the book, just after she and Theo broke up. But it turned out the book was actually about onanism, that kind of self-love. At first she had slammed the cover shut, embarrassed. But she was too sheepish to return the book to the store where she bought it and so ended up reading the thing. The author claimed that women’s sexual fantasies differed from men’s in several ways, one of which was this: women fantasized only about acts in which they already engaged, whereas men’s fantasies roamed to uncharted territory. The claim offended Holly at the time. She still believed then that men and women were not only equal but the same, essentially interchangeable, save for their differing genitalia. She had bought Teddy both trucks and dolls when he was a baby, not wishing to imprint him with gender expectations. To her surprise, Teddy never once looked at the dolls, but he played with the trucks until the wheels fell off. And while neither she nor Theo ever allowed toy guns, she has been dismayed to see that Teddy fashions guns out of everything from pencils to empty cardboard toilet paper rollers.

  And wasn’t that pop psychology guy correct, after all? Has she ever had a sexual fantasy about anything other than being with a current or past lover? Trying to imagine making love even with Johnny Depp is a failed enterprise. Five seconds into the fantasy, Reed’s slender body and exotic angular face will superimpose themselves over those of Depp, and only then will she sink into that zone of mindless heat and of deliverance.

  Alone now in Reed’s and her bed, Teddy asleep down the hall in his own bed, she tries to avoid going to Reed in the dark of the room, tries not to touch herself, and when she touches herself anyway, she tries the bad-fantasy exercise suggested in Fall Out of Love.

  Instead of giving in to the images of alive-Reed, she replaces him with an unpleasant Reed avatar, one who is hairy where he should be smooth and bald where he should have hair. A Reed whose breath is not minty/ airy but fetid. A Reed who cannot make her writhe and cry out and weep and even nearly black out: la petite mort. An inept Reed. But the ploy does not work. Once again an image of the real Reed, deadly sexy and succulent and irreplaceable, overpowers the fabricated unsavory image, and again she is with Reed in the night.

  When she wakes, at first Holly thinks morning has arrived and she needs to get up and go to work in the store. But the room is dark, and from the partially opened bedroom window she hears women shouting, accompanied by the sounds of a scuffle. “Do you know what you’ve fucking done?” one of the women screams, and Holly hears a volley of slapping sounds, followed by cries and curses from two different female voices. The noise seems to originate from the vicinity of the next-door neighbors’ front porch. She sits up in bed, then remembers there had been a loud party going on next door, and that Teddy had wakened about midnight and called out to her from his bedroom down the hall. She had been propped up in bed watching a DVD of Blue Velvet—a bad idea in any case, as the song “In Dreams” brings back excruciating memories of the days following Reed’s death. A glass of chocolate milk and a few soothing words had put Teddy back to sleep, but she had been irritated when she turned out her own bedroom light and tried to fall asleep. The sounds of loud hip-hop music, drunken laughter, and the repeated slamming of car doors went on for some time before she managed to doze off.

  The illuminated numerals on the alarm clock indicate the time is now 3:00 a.m. Damn—the neighbors had seemed normal enough, until tonight.

  “You piece of shit! Fuck you!” a woman shouts, and Holly hears the sound of slaps and some screams. “Get out! Get the hell out!”

  She gets out of bed and peers through the shutters, but the side hedge blocks her view. One of the women is now sobbing as the scuffling sounds continue. Again and again someone shouts, “You fucking bitch! You fucking bitch! Do … you … realize … what … you’ve … done?”

  Holly shuts the window and turns on the television to mask the sound entirely. A shouting man with a beard hawks a spot-removal product, but she does not bother to change the channel. She switches on the air chime machine for its soothing effect.

  There is no valid reason to do what she does now. But she finds herself opening the bottom drawer of the bedside table and pulling out the old leather-bound volume of Rumi, the one in which Reed had written on the title page.

  When she opens the front cover, the sight of Reed’s haphazard handwriting jolts her to the core, and for an instant she reels backward, woozy as if she had just inhaled gasoline fumes. She knows in this instant that graphology is indeed an exact science: Reed’s handwriting is so manifestative of his personality, his essence, that it seems as if she has looked at a photo of him
or heard his voice. She has closed the cover without meaning to, so she opens the book again, more slowly to avoid a second profound shock to her senses.

  “You’re water. We’re the millstone

  You’re wind. We’re dust blown up into shapes.”

  I love you into eternity,*

  Yours, Reed

  At the bottom of the page, Reed referenced the asterisk by writing “Or at least until I’m 39.” Pure Reed—just like the “Goodbye, cruel world” in his suicide note. Always with Reed there was the one-two punch: fervor countered by sardonic humor. The irony is that she doubts very much that Reed realized when he scribbled the coda to Rumi’s verse that he in fact would not make it to thirty-nine.

  Holly turns to the page where she tucked the note she wrote to Reed just after his death but spares herself the added pain of unfolding the note and reading it. She raises the folded sheet of paper to her nose and breathes in the scent. The paper inexplicably carries the bouquet of cardamom and clove, summoning images of Reed, his face candlelit, across from her at their favorite Indian restaurant.

  When she was in her twenties, Holly had worked her way through reading the Russians. She started with Tolstoy, moved on to Turgenev and Gogol and Chekhov and Lermontov, segueing into the divine, incomparable Dostoyevsky. But the one thing that cropped up in the works of each author was what was termed “brain fever.” The designation covered everything from tuberculosis to puerperal fever to a mild nervous condition to a full psychotic break. Brain fever was cited as the cause or result of everything from depression to death. Often a jilted lover or a widowed woman would immediately fall into bed suffering from brain fever.

  If only we could have brain fever now, Holly wishes. Why couldn’t I have just signed out for a few months with brain fever after I discovered Reed with his face blown nearly off? Maybe the brain fever could have been timed well enough so that it struck me down before I found myself crawling down the hall, away from Reed’s body and to the telephone, as if the EMT people could arrive and put Reed’s skull back together. But two really necessary phenomena did not make it to the twenty-first century: brain fever and expedient syncope. Maybe if we still wore whalebone corsets and still took paregoric during menses, we might be able to faint dead away every time something terrible happened. But no, women are fit and healthy now, forced to be fully awake and aware, obliged to endure every unbearable moment.