The Best Friend

by Adam Mitzner

  “Promise me that you’ll never die, Clint.”

  “I promise,” I said with a smile. “Never. But only if you promise too.”

  “Yep. Never.”

  At midnight, we moved Nicky to our sofa. Once we were back in our bed, Anne quickly drifted off, but I knew sleep would be elusive for me. At the forefront of my restlessness on the night of Carolyn’s death was something that Anne had told me a few months earlier. At my urging, Nicky had allowed Anne to be the first reader of his manuscript. She appeared to be engrossed from the first page, and she read late into the night to finish the novel. When I heard her put the manuscript back in its paper bag, I asked for her review.

  “It’s great,” she said.

  “Nicky swore to me it wasn’t about him and me. Was he lying?”

  “No. Well, not entirely. It’s still about him, but you’re not in it, at least as far as I could tell. The main character is this guy who’s just like Nick, or his view of himself, at least: a wildly talented artist destined for greatness. Hence the title—Precipice—because he’s on the verge. But then he falls in love with a woman who threatens to ruin his life.”

  “What happens in the end?” I asked.

  “She dies,” Anne said. “So it all works out for our hero in the end, after all.”

  4.

  The St. Ignatius Church was spectacular in every way, from the enormous bronze doors providing the gateway from Park Avenue to the Palladian arched windows that captured the eye immediately upon entry. The main sanctuary was the epitome of Baroque architecture, with polished pink marble pillars supporting a seventy-foot arched ceiling, and a central aisle more than twice that long.

  It was the same church where Nicky and Carolyn had been married only five weeks earlier. Approximately a hundred guests had filled the chapel for their wedding, but five times as many came to pay their final respects to Carolyn. Martin Quinn lawyers were out in full force, as were the Zamoras’ neighbors from Astoria, many of whom I hadn’t seen since childhood. As I took in the mourners dressed in black, I couldn’t help but recall the contrast to Carolyn in her magnificent white wedding dress, and how the bridesmaids had looked like bursts of flame in red gowns.

  It had been four days since Carolyn’s death. Or three, depending on whether the count began on Sunday night or Monday morning, when Nicky discovered her body. It had snowed every day during that stretch, something the weatherman claimed hadn’t happened in more than fifty years.

  Two days earlier, on Tuesday, the Challenger shuttle had exploded on live television, killing all seven astronauts, including Christa McAuliffe, the elementary school teacher on board. Nicky and I had been watching from my living room. I’d thought that the diversion might be good for him. To be part of something uplifting, rather than continue wallowing in his grief. As the rocket disintegrated in front of us, leaving only twin smoke trails, Nicky looked at the screen without saying a word. It was almost as if he had expected the disaster, because in his new mind-set, everything ended with senseless death.

  Anne had tried to engage Nicky about the arrangements for Carolyn’s funeral, but he was unable to handle even the most routine tasks. As a result, Carolyn’s parents had planned the funeral as a full-on ecclesiastical affair, despite the fact that Carolyn had used the term “lapsed” whenever describing her Catholicism, and Nicky hadn’t set foot inside a Greek Orthodox Church in more than twenty years.

  The McDermotts were a large clan. They occupied the entire first row on the left side of the sanctuary. I immediately recognized Carolyn’s parents from the wedding. Carolyn’s father had reminded me of the butler in the movie Trading Places, and her mother must have commented at least three times about the beauty of the flowers. Like everyone else who had come to mourn after having attended the wedding, the McDermotts looked like pale imitations of the vibrant, joyous people they had been only last month.

  Carolyn’s siblings—her two brothers and one sister—sat beside their parents. Their significant others, along with aunts, uncles, and cousins, sat in the rows behind the immediate family.

  Nicky sat in a pew across the aisle from the McDermotts. Beside him were his parents. The seating required that only immediate family occupy the first row, which was why Anne and I sat directly behind the Zamoras.

  I had last seen the Zamoras at Nicky and Carolyn’s wedding. They’d been as happy as I could ever remember them being. They danced the Kalamatiano, the traditional Greek wedding dance, with gusto, and then Nicky’s father did the Hasapiko (which I always thought of as the Zorba the Greek dance) like a man half his age. But in the five weeks since then, they seemed to have aged a lifetime. For the first time, they appeared old and fragile.

  Carolyn’s older brother, John, gave the eulogy for the McDermott family. He spoke for about ten minutes, telling the mourners that his sister had sung in the church choir as a young girl, been a standout soccer midfielder in high school, been a member of the debate team in college, and graded on to the law review. He talked about her time at Martin Quinn, and how their entire family believed that only greater things lay ahead for their Carolyn.

  What John didn’t say, however, was word-one about Carolyn’s marriage to Nicky. Perhaps the omission was because he was yielding that part of Carolyn’s life to her husband, but it seemed more likely that the family held Nicky responsible for Carolyn’s death. It wasn’t hard to see it that way through the McDermotts’ eyes. During the twenty-seven years that they had been charged with safeguarding Carolyn’s well-being, she had thrived, racking up one accomplishment after another. Nicky had assumed that role for only a few months, and yet Carolyn had drowned in the bathtub on his watch.

  Nicky had always been a natural at public speaking, but he was in no condition to address anyone regarding his wife. The few times Anne and I had tried to engage him to discuss what he was feeling, he’d had difficulty putting together a coherent thought. I told him that it would be understandable if he declined to speak at the funeral, but he said he couldn’t live with himself if he didn’t.

  When it came time for him to speak, he looked like the same old Nicky: handsome, confident, totally in control. I could barely align the person delivering the eulogy with the shell of a man who had been living with Anne and me for the past four days. He spoke for nearly twenty minutes, without notes, and without faltering. It was a speech that struck all the right notes of melancholy and charm, joy and tragedy.

  After the mass, as the mourners made their way to the cemetery, Anne and I sidled up to Nicky. The snow had stopped falling, at least for now.

  “How are you holding up?” I asked.

  “It’s harder than I thought it would be, and I thought it was going to be fucking impossible.”

  At the gravesite, we stood beside Nicky like pillars keeping him upright, each of us holding one of his hands. After the priest had recited the appropriate psalms, two men in overalls lowered the casket into the grave. I honestly thought that Nicky was going to collapse, but instead he leaned more heavily on us until the service finally concluded.

  Nicky, Anne, and I walked back to his car together. As we approached the parking lot, I saw two familiar faces. At first, I thought I knew them because they were partners at Martin Quinn; then I assumed I recognized them from court. Instead, they were the two police detectives from Nicky’s house on the day Carolyn died.

  Detective Lynch nodded when we made eye contact, and then a thin smile came to his lips. I turned away, not acknowledging our brief connection. It was not the circumstances that kept my expression in check, but my sudden awareness that the police didn’t believe Carolyn’s death had been an accident.

  5.

  Nicky wanted to return to his own house that evening.

  “I’ve imposed on you and Anne enough,” he said.

  I told him it was too soon, but Anne pulled me aside and said that Nicky was right. Not that he’d imposed on us, of course, but that he had to get back to living his life at some point, and there would
never be a right time. At least if he did it tonight, she reasoned, I could go with him and help him settle in.

  “Make sure he’s got food in the refrigerator and throw out anything that smells. That type of thing. And, of course, make sure there are no reminders of Carolyn’s death. After he’s settled, you can take the train back into the city.”

  As soon as we arrived at Nicky’s place, he made a beeline to the kitchen. He returned with two tumblers and took them over to the credenza in the living room that he kept stocked with alcohol. He pulled out a bottle of Johnnie Walker.

  “Pour one for me and I’ll join you in a minute,” I said, trying not to make my agenda obvious.

  The master bedroom was on the first floor, at the back of the house. The bathroom was not en suite but located a few feet down the hall. It had been four days since Carolyn’s death, and in that period, scores of law enforcement personnel had traipsed through. If I’d hazarded a guess at what I would find, it would have included some blood, if Carolyn had indeed struck her head. Perhaps water that had collected on the floor but not yet evaporated. At a minimum, I assumed that towels would be strewn about. To my surprise, though, the room was pristine. Not so much as a Q-tip out of place.

  Carolyn’s presence was everywhere, however. Her toothbrush, contact lens case, glasses, hairbrush, makeup bag, and magnifying mirror were on the bathroom sink, and her towel and robe were on a hook beside Nicky’s. I was tempted to hide it all but feared that Nicky would find the absence of Carolyn’s things even more unsettling, so I left everything exactly as I’d found it.

  When I joined Nicky again in the living room, he was on the sofa, his glass now half-empty. A second glass, untouched, awaited my return. When I took my drink, I contemplated toasting Carolyn’s memory but thought better of it. Perhaps, I thought, Nicky wanted some time to reflect in silence. So I sat beside him, and we drank without saying a word.

  Finally Nicky said, “I know it’s what everyone says, but I really can’t believe she’s gone. She should be here with us right now. Not . . . six feet underground in a box.”

  “It’s a terrible, terrible tragedy,” was all I could think to say.

  “We were talking about having a baby,” he said. “In fact, the last discussion we had was about that. How wonderful it would be to have a child. I asked her if it was the right time for her, career-wise, and you know what she said?”

  I shook my head.

  “She said that any time is the right time to have a baby.” He shut his eyes and winced. “What day is it, anyway?”

  It took me a moment to recall. “Thursday.”

  “I don’t remember if I ever called the bar to tell them that I wouldn’t be coming in.”

  “You asked me to do it,” I said. “Remember, nearly the entire staff were at the funeral?”

  The reference to the funeral apparently required him to finish the rest of his drink. Then he walked back over to the credenza, grabbed the bottle, and brought it back to the sofa.

  “Slow down there, cowboy,” I said.

  As if I hadn’t spoken a word, Nicky poured himself another double, then topped off my glass. “If you can’t get stinking drunk with your best friend on the day of your wife’s funeral, alcohol should never have been invented in the first place.”

  Within the hour, the whisky began working its magic. Like everything else in Nicky’s life, he had mastered alcohol. It took much more than he’d imbibed to get him drunk, but it was enough for him to smile from time to time and allow his mind to range to matters other than his wife’s death. Of course, it was not nearly enough for us to move the subject away from Carolyn entirely.

  “I know that everyone thought we were crazy. That we’d gone from meeting each other, to getting engaged, to getting married, and then moving to the suburbs in . . . what, four months? And there were times when I heard this voice inside my head saying, Slow down. What’s the hurry? But I told it to shut the hell up. Wanna know why?”

  I nodded.

  “I thought, here’s finally a possibility for me to have what Clinton has. For once, maybe, do it like he does, just a little bit. And I didn’t want to let that chance slip through my fingers.”

  I’d spent most of my life wishing I were more like Nicky. In the competition of our boyhood, I’d never been the winner. Nicky was more handsome, a better athlete, and even a more promising student, his writing noteworthy among the English faculty as something to be encouraged, whereas my teachers always saw me as more of a grinder. When the movie Amadeus came out, my first reaction was that if Nicky and I had lived in late-eighteenth-century Vienna, we might have been Mozart and Salieri.

  “It’s something they never tell you when you’re in school,” he said, almost as if talking to himself. “Everyone—parents, teachers, coaches—they always say that the key to success is to follow your passion. But the real key is to find someone you love who loves you back. After that, nothing else really matters. I learned that from seeing you and Anne together, Clinton. I wanted that too.”

  Anne was waiting up for me. I don’t think she had expected for me to stay so long at Nicky’s, and the fact that I was still smelling of booze after the train ride back must have surprised her too. But Anne wasn’t the type to scold, especially when I was on a mission of mercy. She told me to take a shower and then come to bed.

  “How’d he seem when you left?” she asked when I returned to the bedroom, my hair still damp.

  “I’m not sure, to be honest.”

  “That’s not very comforting.”

  “I assumed you wanted me to tell you the truth,” I said with a smile. “For public consumption, I’d say that he’s devastated but very strong, and in time he’ll be okay.”

  “How long do you think it takes before you’re okay with your new bride drowning ten feet away from you?”

  “Which is why that’s what I’m saying for public consumption. Between us, he’ll obviously never be okay,” I said. “He told me that Carolyn wasn’t pregnant. He said that they were still talking about it.”

  The disclosure seemed to surprise Anne. She had more than once said that pregnancy was the only thing that would have made sense about the whirlwind nature of their romance, and now she was left without even that explanation.

  “He said something else too,” I offered, not sure whether sharing this bit of intelligence with Anne was wise. “He said that he moved so quickly to marry Carolyn because he wanted what you and I have.”

  She responded with a quiet laugh. “Do you think he was hoping that in a few years that he and Carolyn would hardly ever see each other?”

  The comment stung. Anne must have seen my displeasure, because her smile quickly vanished.

  “I’m sorry, Clint. No, what Nicky said was sweet. We’re lucky to have what we have. Call me greedy, but I just want more of it, that’s all. Do you know how many times in the past week I’ve heard someone tell me that this is proof you need to live every day like it’s your last? And the thing is, I’m not sure there’s any bigger lie. Can you imagine if people really lived every day like they were going to die tomorrow? Who would go to work? Who would exercise? Who would pay their bills? And don’t get me started on the fact that most people would immediately binge on drugs and hookers if they thought they’d be dead in twenty-four hours.”

  “Not me,” I said, looking into her eyes. “I’d spend it with you.”

  Her smile reappeared, but it didn’t reflect that she believed me. It was the look you give a child who’s telling you what Santa’s going to bring.

  “Maybe if you knew it was your last,” she said. “But since we’re not afforded that luxury, tomorrow life will go on as if we have all the time in the world, and whatever cautionary tale could be gleaned from Carolyn’s death will be forgotten. You’ll go to work and be there past ten. I won’t be home when you roll in, because I’ll be out chasing my dream. It’ll be the same as it’s always been.”

  “Maybe we should think about changing tha
t, then.”

  “Maybe. But what would that even look like? You want to go back to the FD? Should I give up on singing? Is that going to make either of us happier?”

  “Are you not happy now?”

  She exhaled deeply, which answered my question. I knew that this was not the best period of our relationship, but until that moment I hadn’t thought Anne was unhappy. Perhaps no one ever does until it’s too late.

  “No, it’s not that, Clint. I’m happy. I’m just not enamored by our circumstances at the moment. I’m sorry, I don’t know what I’m really trying to say. I’m just a little freaked out about all of this. I can’t get out of my head that no one dies in the bathtub unless . . .”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless they want to.”

  It was further testament to my failure to see the obvious at times, but I was so fixated on my immediate conclusion that Carolyn’s death had been a tragic accident that I hadn’t given any thought to the idea that she might have committed suicide. That would make much more sense than an accidental drowning, of course. She might have taken a handful of pills and then slipped away peacefully in the warm water. But despite the logic, I didn’t want to believe it.

  “Why would Carolyn kill herself? She was a newlywed, good career, new house. The world was her oyster.”

  “Yeah, I know,” was all Anne said in response.

  “You think she wasn’t happy with her life? Suicidally unhappy?”

  “How can you ever know?”

  “She didn’t leave a suicide note,” I said, even though I knew from my FD days that many suicides don’t leave notes. For some people, the act itself is the only communication necessary.

  Anne let my comment be the last word, but the thought that Carolyn had taken her own life had taken root. I had always imagined that Carolyn had been the one who put the whirlwind nature of Nicky’s transformation in motion, with him trying to apply the brakes but failing. But perhaps I had it all wrong. Maybe that transformation was exactly what Nicky craved, and in his rush to get there, he pushed Carolyn into a life she didn’t want, until she thought death was her only escape.