by Mark Salzman
“No.”
“We have to get you one. It’s about time you had at least one decent jacket, now that you’re starting to go to parties like that.”
That weekend Dad picked me up and took me home and we went shopping at a good used-clothes store my mother had heard about. They had only one jacket in my size, in dark gray corduroy, but it looked good on me and it was practically as good as new, so Dad got it for me. When we climbed back into the bus he looked at me and nodded, but he had a look on his face that demanded explanation.
“What?” I asked.
“Oh, I was just thinking.”
“What?”
He paused, then finally said, “Nothing but the second-best for my son.”
Wearing my new coat I attended the party, and after dinner we all moved to the living room, where we drank red wine and chatted by candlelight. As always at large social events with my peers, I felt nervous and was unable to initiate conversation with anyone. I was always fine once someone started talking to me, but I never did learn how to introduce myself to strangers. I found myself backing farther and farther away from the group, pretending to be interested in my cocktail napkin and wondering if it would be rude to leave early, not really watching where I was going. Suddenly I felt a hot stab in my back, right near my shoulder blade, and realized I had backed into someone’s cigarette.
I was mortified, but my first thought was that if I moved suddenly, the person would realize that his or her cigarette had burned me. I didn’t want to put anyone through that, so I slowly moved away from the source of the pain.
Instead of going away, though, the pain got worse. Much worse—and very fast. It was excruciating! Jesus, I thought, this guy must be following me on purpose with a cigar pressed into my coat. I was in agony. Then I noticed a woman pointing frantically at my shoulder. I glanced backward and saw that I was on fire. I had backed up against the piano where a candelabrum had been placed and had stood there like an ass until my beautiful brand-new secondhand jacket ignited. I tore off the flaming coat, threw it on the floor and kicked the fire out.
It was an embarrassing way to become the center of attention, and of course it was not the solution to my shyness that I was hoping for. I broke the tension by laughing it off, then excused myself and went home. There I told Holden what had happened and he asked me to turn around.
“Holy shit!” he said, trying not to laugh. “It didn’t just burn through your coat! It burned through your sweater, your shirt and part of your skin! I think I can see your trapezius muscle. Or maybe that’s the scapula? Wait—no, I think I see your spinal cord!”
“Shut up, Holden. Help me get these clothes off.”
Holden gave me some iodine for the wound, and I turned in for the night. All I could think of was Why did it have to be my new jacket? Why did I have to back into a flame? Why didn’t I jump away from the fire as soon as I felt it? Why was I such a wuss?
On a February afternoon I was reading an article about how it was taboo in Chinese villages for men or boys to walk under the drying laundry of women who were menstruating when the phone rang. It was my brother.
“Hey, Erich, what’s up?”
“I have bad news. Michael Dempsey died this morning.”
“Michael died?”
“Yeah, a car accident. He fell asleep at the wheel driving real late last night. Right near Ethan Allen Inn. You know that rocky slope? His car went off it. Lenny was in the car too but he’s OK. The funeral’s this weekend. You think you ought to come down for it?”
“Yeah, I better. I’ll take the train to Westport. Can you pick me up?”
“I’ll be at school, but Mom can pick you up. She figured you’d want to come back. Sorry to have to tell you such bad news.”
As I rode the train home I didn’t have much of an emotional reaction to the news. Part of me was taken by surprise; part of me thought it shouldn’t have surprised anyone.
Still not feeling anything, I went to the wake the next day and had to face the awful sight of his mother, surrounded by her four other sons, weeping over his coffin. They had to keep it closed; it had been a bad accident. I said something to her about how sorry I was, then moved to the waiting room. Bill was there. “Hey,” he said. He looked much smaller in a suit and tie.
“I heard it on the radio coming home from work,” he said. “I couldn’t believe it. At least he got his black belt, though. That was the one thing he wanted.”
Michael’s brother Frank came out to join us.
“Sorry, Frank,” I said.
“Yeah, sorry about Mike, Frank.”
Frank was in shock. “We buried him in his good uniform,” he said slowly. “He would have wanted that.”
When Mrs. Dempsey came out into the waiting room she looked a little better. She hugged me and I asked if there was anything I could do.
“Would you say something at the funeral tomorrow?” she asked. “Michael was always so proud of you, I know he’d like that.”
“Sure.”
I spent the rest of that day and night writing a eulogy. The next day, back at the funeral home before moving to the church, a commotion of whispers broke the silence. I turned to see the door open, and a man, barefoot and wearing a snow-white Oriental robe with his hair in a samurai-style topknot, walked slowly past all of us in our black, middle-class funeral outfits. He didn’t look at anyone, he just walked steadily toward the coffin. What was shocking was that he wasn’t Chinese or Japanese; it was Sensei O’Keefe.
All my young life I’d been told to tuck in my shirt and avoid wearing pants with holes in the knees at formal occasions because it wasn’t “appropriate” to mess with the dress code. I had always thought that was just meaningless conformity until I saw Sensei in that white bedsheet at Michael’s funeral. That was really inappropriate. He obviously meant it to be an expression of deep respect. I’m sure he’d made that robe himself, and the thought of that angry, tormented man spending hours hunched over it with a thread and needle, and then daring to wear it in that funeral parlor, was touching, but the effect was like a kick in the balls. He looked as if he had stopped by on his way to a Halloween party.
Sensei kneeled in front of the coffin Japanese style and meditated, then punched the coffin lightly, got up, returned to the back of the room and stood at attention. No one knew what to do or say.
The funeral director announced quietly that it was “time.” Mrs. Dempsey moved toward the coffin, then fell backward in a faint. Sensei rushed forward and caught her in time, then bent over her, fanning her face and telling her to breathe deeply. When she recovered, Michael’s brothers, the funeral director and I carried the coffin out to the hearse.
The service was in a Catholic church. Given that the priest wore a white robe, Sensei’s outfit blended in slightly better than it had in the funeral home, but it was still all wrong. When the priest had nearly finished with the service, he walked over to me and said, “As you know, the family has asked that you say something. Are you going to be all right, son?”
I got the impression from the way he asked me that he was not keen on one of Michael’s buddies giving a speech. I imagine he was worried I might get up and tell rock ‘n’ roll stories. “I’ll be OK. It’s short.”
I got up and delivered my eulogy; then we moved to the cemetery and the coffin was lowered into the ground. It was freezing cold out, and wet snow covered the ground, but Sensei stood the whole time in bare feet and that flimsy sheet, not shivering once. After the ceremony was over, everyone left except for Sensei O’Keefe, who kneeled in the snow beside the grave. As I drove out of the cemetery with my parents, I could see him still kneeling there.
“A lot of nerve that guy has,” my mother said, her eyes red from crying, “to show up for a boy’s funeral dressed like that. I wonder how that made poor Mrs. Dempsey feel.”
“She has too much class to let it bother her, I’m sure,” my dad said.
That night I went over to Michael’s house, where
dozens of relatives were hovering around Mrs. Dempsey, making sure there was plenty to eat and drink and that she didn’t have to worry about anything.
One of the relatives, an aunt of Michael’s, seemed especially stricken with grief. “Why does God take the best ones?” she kept asking. After dinner she took me aside and pointed to a boom box on the living-room table. “That was such a beautiful speech you gave,” she said, sobbing quietly. “Would you please read it one more time for Michael’s mother? I’d like to tape it for her. I know she’ll treasure it.”
She set up the box right there in the living room and hushed everyone up. I couldn’t refuse, of course, but it was an awful thing to have to do. I read the speech again, and Mrs. Dempsey started crying with renewed vigor.
“Thank you,” the aunt said, hugging me for a long time. Then she picked up the tape player. “Oh, sweet Mother of Jesus!” she said angrily. “How could I be so dumb? I pressed ‘play’ instead of ‘record.’ We’ll have to do it once more.”
18
The funeral was all about Michael, but once the ceremony was over, in my mind his death became all about me. I began examining my reactions to the event with dark fascination; I felt ashamed, though I wasn’t sure why, that my strongest emotion that weekend had not been a sense of loss, but instead a sense of helplessness at not being able to comfort Michael’s mother. I also felt vaguely guilty for having quit lessons and abandoning Michael when he probably most needed a close friend. But most disturbing of all was a growing sense that something was missing from my reaction to the event. I was sad, of course, but—and I felt extremely guilty for thinking this—wasn’t there a larger component to this? Wasn’t a person supposed to be shaken to the core by this sort of milestone, and forced to reevaluate his life?
This was, after all, someone exactly my age who, in one instant, and without having willed it, had gone from having his whole adult life in front of him to ceasing to exist forever. It was a momentous event, certainly the most serious one of my life, yet I felt unchanged. Awful as it is to admit, I felt almost disappointed. I was convinced that I had to make an effort to keep my mind on the experience until I had properly digested it; there had to be a message in this somewhere, one that was vital for me to understand if I was to move forward in my own life, but I couldn’t decipher it. But if I didn’t decipher it, it seemed to me, it would be from a lack of commitment to the ideal of leading an informed, examined life—and we all know what the unexamined life is worth. If I didn’t decipher this message, I feared, I would regret it for the rest of my life.
Uncharacteristically for me, I did not discuss this with my father. I knew that he almost certainly would have his own interpretation, and would have been happy to pass it on to me. This sort of thing—the unexpected, the undeserved, the unbearable—was right up his alley. But I didn’t want his interpretation, and I was sure he would understand why. I felt that the time had come for me to start answering these questions on my own.
When I returned to New Haven my friends and teachers offered me plenty of thoughtful attention, but rather than consoling me as it was supposed to, it only encouraged my sense of personal drama. Soon I felt I owed it to them as well as to Michael to draw some meaning out of the tragedy, so that his death, along with my friends’ sincere concern, would not be for nothing.
It became difficult for me to concentrate on my schoolwork because any time that I spent reading Chinese or Victorian novels or articles about archaeological discoveries in Peru was time spent avoiding the far more relevant question: How do we move on? Why aren’t we all paralyzed by the knowledge of our mortality? Ironically, the awareness of my own mortality had never slowed me down before, but now the question of why it didn’t slow me down was bringing me to a complete halt. I couldn’t keep my mind on a book or a writing assignment for longer than fifteen minutes.
As the weeks passed my concentration got worse, and for the first time I had to ask my dean to grant me late-paper extensions. The night before the final exam in second-year Chinese, which was by far my strongest subject, I panicked. I’m unprepared, I thought, and my teachers, who have been so good to me, will be disappointed. I’ll get a bad grade and it will be the end of the world! I took a couple of No Doz pills and stayed up all night cramming, something I had never done before. Halfway through the exam my hands started shaking so badly that I couldn’t form the characters. I sat in the chair staring at my hands without being able to control them, until the professor saw this and asked me outside.
“Are you all right?” he asked. I told him what was happening, and a pained look crossed his face. “How much of the exam did you complete?” he asked.
“Most of it, I think.”
“Mark, everyone knows how much you’ve put into this class this year, and everyone knows you’ve had a bad shock recently. Go home and rest, for heaven’s sake. There’s really no need for you to be so worried about the exam.”
I was grateful for this act of mercy, but by the time I got back to my room I began to feel stupid for having been so worried in the first place. What a grade-grubber I was! No wonder I was such a confused kid if my priorities were that out of whack. I mean, if you’re going to face the great question of what your life means once you know it might end at any time with no regard for your aspirations, you ought to at least have the courage to get a B on a language exam.
That summer I decided not to go home. Charles McBirney, the professor who had rescued me from the exam, needed a part-time research assistant over the summer, and he introduced me to the owner of a Chinese restaurant in town who offered me a night job as a waiter. I rented an apartment in an unsavory but affordable neighborhood right next to the downtown YMCA, and only a few blocks away from the restaurant where I worked.
With school out for the summer I could wake up later and later. On a typical night I would come home from work at ten-thirty and fall right asleep. At one o’clock in the morning I would jerk awake from a nightmare and then toss and turn until three, when I would fall asleep and then start all over again. I usually crawled out of bed at noon. During the afternoons, if I wasn’t working over at the Asian languages building, I usually drove out to one of the deserted beaches an hour or so east of New Haven and sat there until it was time to drive back and start work at the restaurant again.
What was the message? How do we go on? Wasn’t this the very problem that had made my father the way he was? That was it; that was why I had to deal with this once and for all. This might be my last chance to do what I had set out to do so long ago: to bring order to the chaos, to make sense out of my life, to become happy the way my father hadn’t. If I planned on keeping the sacred promise that we all make to ourselves at the threshold of adulthood—never to surrender to hypocrisy, complacency or mediocrity—I had to resolve this issue now. I owed it to my dad to go through with this to the bitter end and not give up this time. I felt I owed it to Michael, too. Poor kid, he wouldn’t have the chance to do it himself.
I asked the big questions all day long, but instead of answers, there was only static in my head. It was almost like being stoned all the time, only it wasn’t nearly as entertaining. Everything seemed drained of its color, flavor and interest. It was like waking up and finding myself in a black-and-white B movie, the kind you might see at two in the morning and watch without getting involved in the action or dialogue. You watch the flickering images because they attract your attention, but without much comprehension.
It was not a satisfying or pleasant sort of introspection, but I didn’t resist it. On the contrary, I welcomed it; didn’t all the historical figures I respected come to do what they did as a result of having answered these questions for themselves? Didn’t my father once say he was glad that I asked questions like these, and didn’t he say that I shouldn’t expect the answers to come easily? Or something like that?
Although I never would have admitted it at the time, for some time I had cherished a whole body of romantic ideas about the nature of geni
us and inspiration, one of them being that you couldn’t be a real artist if you hadn’t had a nervous breakdown when you were young. The younger the better. However, my impression was that you couldn’t just lower yourself into the depths whenever you felt like it; there had to be a plausible catalyst for the breakdown, a real or symbolic event that set off the psychological avalanche, and I could hardly ask for a more plausible one than the death of a childhood friend. I wasn’t so monstrously selfish as to be glad that Michael had died, but I was selfish enough to convince myself that it was my duty, now that it had happened, to turn it into something positive.
By the time the fall semester began I was way too busy reading books about nihilism and Zen and staring out my window at the naked city to study Chinese at all. The semester was a disaster, to the point where I felt I had no choice but to drop out.
“Oh, no! Not this again!” my father said when I told him the news.
“At least he’s got his high school diploma,” my mother said, trying to cheer herself up.
“I’m not sure he does. Mark, you didn’t actually graduate from there—did they ever send you a diploma?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
My mother’s eyes froze in abject terror. “You never got your high school diploma? Oh, my God!” When my mother had nightmares, they usually came in one of three scenarios: having to walk across a field of dead birds; giving a concert without having prepared at all and with a strong wind blowing the music off her stand; and finding out that her kids never got their high school diplomas.
