All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found

by Philip Connors

  Are you okay? she asked.

  Yes, I’m fine, he said. Just a little indigestion.

  They slept. In the morning, they showered, dressed, and checked out. He walked her to her car.

  Thank you, he said. You have no idea how great a gift you’ve given me.

  When my husband left, I was sure I’d never make love to anyone again, she said. What we’ve had—what we have—is so precious.

  They hugged, and she drove away, feeling both invigorated and a little apart from herself, as if she’d been watching herself in a movie.

  A few days later, he called.

  Listen, I have to tell you the truth now, he said.

  Here it comes, she thought. My whole life is about to unravel.

  In the hotel room, when you asked me if I was okay—well, I’m not okay. That first day I called you, I’d just been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. I was told I probably had less than a year to live.

  She tried to speak, but nothing came out of her mouth. She did the math in her head—it had been five months since that first call.

  He told her he was married. When he got the news about the cancer, he drove alone in his car for hours. He couldn’t bring himself to go home and tell his wife. He’d hidden his doctor visits from her, hoping it was nothing serious, not wanting to alarm her. Suddenly their days together were numbered. Her life was about to be torn apart, and she didn’t even know it. His was about to be over. He thought about ways of killing himself, speeding up the inevitable: driving his car into a tree, jumping off a bridge. That’s when he started dialing random numbers, unable to bear his solitude, and when he heard her voice he composed himself and made up a story, because she sounded kind, and he didn’t want to scare her, he wanted to talk to her—he wanted, somehow, to connect.

  Oh, Joseph, you should have told me.

  No. Then it wouldn’t have been the same. None of this would have happened. The whole thing would have been colored by sadness. I’m a married man. You would have pitied me, or been disgusted by me. You’ve allowed me to have something apart from all that, to create something new, one final thing. I couldn’t have lasted this long without you. But I want you to know I don’t have much time now. I might not be calling as often.

  Just call when you can, she said. Please. Call my cell phone if you don’t reach me at home. Please.

  She gave him her cell phone number.

  When he called, they no longer had phone sex. They talked about his illness, about his preparations for death, and when he got tired of talking about that, they talked about her work.

  One day he called, but she didn’t recognize his voice at first. He was very weak. It was just before Thanksgiving. He strained to tell her that he didn’t have the energy to speak very much, but could she please tell him what she was doing for Thanksgiving, whether she would see her family, anything at all about her plans. His life, he said, was over now. He was simply waiting to die. He envied people with plans other than dying.

  She broke down and cried, trembled uncontrollably with helplessness. Then, when the sobs had run their course, she got ahold of herself, for his sake. She blew her nose and wiped her eyes. She told him she would visit her parents in the little town where they lived. She would help them cook dinner for the whole family, all the children and grandchildren, the first great-grandchild of her still-living grandmother, and she told him everything they would make, all their favorite Thanksgiving food, turkey, gravy, mashed potatoes, creamed green beans, rolls and marmalade, pecan pie.

  I wish I could eat, he said. I miss having an appetite.

  Those were the last words she remembered him saying. He had whispered them. She’d barely been able to hear him.

  They never spoke again.

  A few weeks later, her phone rang. It was a woman. My name is Elan, she said. I don’t know you, but I’m Joseph’s sister. He asked me to call you and thank you for your friendship. He passed away quietly last week, in the company of family. He wanted you to know.

  When Rebecca finished her story, I was shattered. It was so improbable, so heartbreaking—a strange act of connection amid the horror of impending death. We talked for a while about the mysteries of chance, about the link between mortality and desire, and then I went to my room in the cottage. Without thinking, I picked up the phone. When I reached for the keypad, poised to dial with my index finger, I realized I had no idea whom I’d meant to call. I suppose it was a reflex, triggered by empathy for Joseph and Rebecca both. I couldn’t articulate it at the time, but I must have begun to understand that phone sex had kept alive a part of myself I feared losing, just as it had for Rebecca, and that the solace of strangers on a telephone was the only solace that seemed attainable, just as it had for Joseph. Their story, adjusting for the particulars, had a spooky resonance with my own.

  For a second I played one of those mental games that seem so absurd in retrospect. Do I replace the receiver in the cradle and admit I experienced a flickering instance of dementia, the body acting without direction or consent from the mind? Or do I recover myself, think of a number to dial, and trick myself into believing I’d had a purpose in picking up the phone all along? I opted for a harmless bit of self-deception and called my home number, thinking I ought to check for messages left in my absence. There was only one. It was, of all people, Molly.

  When I returned to New York, I called her. This time, I said, I want to take you out on an honest-to-god date. Let’s meet for a drink.

  I told her the address of a bar I liked.

  She was waiting at a table, sipping a beer, when I arrived. She told me her work was going well. She was part of a group show at a gallery, and people were impressed by her photos. She also had a new job assisting an artist, a well-known painter, and she enjoyed it. She answered his mail, ran his errands, traveled with him to Mexico City when a show of his work opened there. He had friends in the movie and the music industries, and she was meeting a lot of talented people. She’d even started dating someone—tentatively, but it was going well. No rush, nothing serious, just enjoying each other’s company. She and her husband were about to finalize their divorce.

  We had several drinks, moved into the same side of the booth, held hands. It felt very sweet, almost innocent, a strange turn given how we’d met, what we’d made of the meeting. At the sound of the bartender counting the change in his till, we looked around and discovered we were the last two people in the place.

  We hailed a taxi and took it to her apartment. I walked her to the door.

  I have to be to work pretty early, she said. I should get a good night’s rest.

  Me too, I said. I’m glad we did this.

  I gave her a hug. We kissed on the lips, briefly, lightly, and then she turned and was gone.

  I decided to walk home, across the width of Manhattan and over the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge, past the riverside projects and up through Long Island City to its border with Astoria. The night was beautiful, clear and crisp. It was a Sunday. The city was quiet. Partway across the bridge, I looked back at the skyline, that proud, almost disdainful skyline, still proud despite its diminishment. Standing there, suspended above the shining black surface of the East River, I had a hunch I’d never see her again, that she’d disappeared forever among that glittering immensity of glass and steel. We’d done everything backward, and now, still moving backward, it was as if we were entering the time before our first date, before I’d ever known her.

  Not long afterward, I gave up calling the talk line. At the time I suppose I’d have said I quit because I grew bored with the predictability of it, and because from a cost-benefit point of view it was nuts. But it may not have been entirely coincidental that around this time I finally realized there could be no substitute for the missed connection about which I fantasized most. All through my foray into phone sex I kept opening that envelope of photographs taken by the police when they’d discovered my brother’s body, and each and every time I imagined the call I should have placed to
him on the day he died, the consoling words I might have offered, the gesture of brotherly love he might have accepted as a reason to go on living another day. Equally likely, I belatedly realized, was the possibility that nothing could have dissuaded him, that my call would have been in vain, and whatever I said or did not say would have become the source of my regret, instead of my failure to call at all.

  Among the remnants of his life I’d tracked down, in addition to the official reports, was his final phone bill from US West Communications, a piece of paper I often studied for hints about his state of mind at the end. The time span of the phone bill made its meager data particularly stark, even if they only served to multiply the uncertainties.

  The bill claimed to cover activity through July 1, 1996, though it was dated June 12. It showed he was due a refund of $11.96. He paid for some services a month in advance, and the previous bill ran through June 1. This final bill, then, contained information, spookily enough, for just one day—the last day of his life, June 2, 1996. It listed three long-distance calls, all to Minnesota, one to our parents in Tracy, the others to our sister in Granite Falls. He placed the first at 11:04 a.m. The call lasted four minutes. Our mother and father had returned home from church and were in the midst of making lunch. It was 12:04 p.m. their time. They said they’d call him back when they finished eating and they did as promised.

  June 2, 11:04 a.m., Mountain Standard Time: the first of his three long-distance calls. Had he called to say goodbye without coming straight out with the word goodbye? My mother recalled telling him that perhaps if he gave Wendy some time to think things over, they might still work it out.

  Oh, I’m going to give her a lot of time to think, she remembered him saying.

  Was there a clue in those words? A note of warning?

  My sister received the other two long-distance calls he made that day, though she had no reason to suspect he called twice, since she wasn’t home for either call and he only left one message. He placed the first call shortly after he finished speaking with our parents, at 12:16 p.m. his time, the second at 1:52 p.m., each call lasting less than a minute. When Lisa arrived home to find his message she was surprised. In the two years since she’d left home and moved in with her boyfriend, Dan had not called her once. His voice mail was so out of character that it gave her cause to worry. For him to have called, she thought, something must be up. Something must be wrong. She immediately picked up the phone and dialed his number. He did not answer. She left him a message. He did not return the call.

  What changed for him between the time he left a message and the time she left one back? Why did he try not once but twice to call her—a thing, it bears repeating, he’d never done before that day—and then not a third time when he knew the call would be answered? In her message she’d made sure to say she’d be home the rest of the day. If he’d tried a third time he’d have reached her. Did he go from desperately seeking a lifeline to abandoning all hope for a lifeline in the span of a few hours? Was it the afternoon of drinking with friends that changed something? Was it the evening conversation with Wendy that crystallized his fate?

  The phone bill listed one further piece of pertinent data. It showed that at 9:15 p.m. he dialed *69 to activate last-call return, for which he was charged seventy-five cents. What could it mean? Someone had called him while he was otherwise occupied, and he hadn’t answered in time? Someone had called him and failed to leave a message, his answering machine recording nothing but the sound of the hang-up, and he wanted to know who it was? Or he’d been away from his apartment for a time, returned with a hope that someone had called, perhaps Wendy, and finding no message on his machine he checked for a missed call anyway?

  Ultimately, all this piece of paper told me, despite my hopes for more, was that he was still alive at 9:15 p.m. on the night he did himself in. That left a six-hour window between my mother telling me to call him and his last known effort to reach for something outside of himself, six hours the better part of which I’d spent in bed with Marie. In my most self-lacerating moods I imagined our bodies joined in pleasure as, two thousand miles away, he leaned into the barrel of the gun.

  Once the arts and editorial pages were settled again in Manhattan, in temporary quarters above the West Side Garment District, the men in the suites looked again for places to squeeze. Eventually a quarter of the company’s workforce would be cut, and Ray Sokolov was among those to leave. At the age of sixty, after twenty years of service to the company, he was enticed to take early retirement and replaced by a genial reactionary who’d cut his teeth at the Moonie-owned Washington Times. I was unsurprised when, shortly thereafter, word came down that the Leisure & Arts page would more fully integrate its coverage with the editorial page, whose mantra, “free markets and free people,” unwittingly tipped its hand by which of the two it placed first.

  Soon it came to pass that I was given a chance to work on pieces of greater world-political import. I was sitting with my feet on my desk, editing a story about a play in Chicago or the lovely wines of the Alsace, when Paul Gigot asked me to follow him into an empty conference room. He invited me to sit. He cut straight to the chase. He said that for the foreseeable future I would continue copyediting for the Leisure & Arts page, but beginning in a few weeks I would do the same for the editorial page of the Wall Street Journal’s European edition.

  I told him I didn’t want to do that.

  He seemed surprised.

  I told him I didn’t agree with the politics of the page—with its viewpoint on just about everything.

  He said he wasn’t asking me to write things I didn’t believe. He was asking me to edit copy for spelling, punctuation, and grammar.

  I told him I didn’t want my hands on the editorial page in any way, shape, or form.

  He said he would give me a small raise in compensation for my added responsibilities, and I would do whatever he told me to do.

  I thanked him for the raise.

  A college friend of mine, M.J., wrote that spring and told me she’d secured a gig as a fire lookout in southern New Mexico. She suggested I lift my flabby keister out of my cubicle and come have a look at the country, breathe some clean air, unplug for a moment from the rat race. In late May I booked another flight to Albuquerque, where I planned to rummage around for a couple days in my brother’s past before heading south for a rendezvous with M.J., a trip on which I would blow my yearly paid vacation and, with luck, find the answer to the question of what I should be next.

  Almost in spite of myself, in spite of my calculated evasion of the title in my so-called career, I was still for a little while longer a reporter, though one without pretense to worldly concerns, much less objectivity or evenhandedness. I made a date to visit the family who’d known Dan best at the end, thinking they of all people might know something I didn’t: his boss George, George’s wife Barbara, and their daughter Emily, all of whom I’d met on my first visit to New Mexico, when Emily and Dan were still engaged. I hadn’t talked to them since the last time I saw Dan alive. I’d met them only that once. For reasons of distance and logistics, I didn’t make it to Dan’s memorial service in Albuquerque, and they didn’t attend the funeral in Minnesota. It was hard to avoid the feeling that we were strangers communing over the memory of a ghost—a ghost who, seven and a half years earlier, had sat with us one evening after dinner and taken our phony money in a game of Monopoly, laughing as he filled the board with hotels, confident and happy and secure in the love of what he thought were his future in-laws.

  Emily and Barbara were at the kitchen table looking through boxes of pictures when I arrived. They wanted to give me some snapshots of Dan. Barbara offered me a beer. Emily talked of her family; less than a year after she’d ended things with Dan, and not long before his death, she’d married someone else and now had two little children. She’d also found God, and this had led her to the belief that everything had worked out according to plan, that the Lord Jesus had known Dan was in trouble, and had sent
her a signal to bail before she got caught up in trouble she couldn’t escape.

  Our conversation danced around the edge of the reason I’d come there. No one knew how to talk about him for more than a minute or two. I wasn’t surprised; I could count on one hand the number of times I’d found someone willing to talk about him for longer than a minute or two in the six years since his death.

  George said, Come here, I want to show you something.

  He led me to the dining room. Against one wall stood a china cabinet Dan had made for him, an elegant piece fashioned from oak, with natural stain and a lustrous wax finish. I’d seen similar pieces in other homes, always beautiful and perfectly functional, including in the home of my parents, but no matter how many times I looked at his work it always impressed me with its craftsmanship.

  The kid was good, George said. He took care. Not just with woodwork, but everything he did.

  Emily took us to the guest bedroom and pointed to another of his pieces, a chest of drawers.

  Dan made that for me when we first started dating, she said. I think he even signed it on the back of the bottom drawer.

  Sure enough, when we pulled it out we found the words, To Emily, From Dan, With Love. We all stood in awkward silence. I turned away from the sight of a tear tracing the curve of Emily’s cheek.

  George and I went together to the back yard, where more of Dan’s handiwork awaited: the swimming pool he’d helped George build, the shed they’d put up in which to store Dan’s hot air balloon. George spoke of summer afternoons they’d spent together grilling food, swimming in the pool, drinking beer, telling stories.

  Even after Dan and Emily broke up, George said, we remained friends. It wasn’t easy for Emily. It was pretty awkward, if you want to know the truth. She thought of it as taking sides, but I couldn’t cut him out of my life.

  George admitted—quietly, seemingly out of the side of his mouth—that he’d sought counseling after Dan’s death. He alone bore the horror of having discovered Dan’s body. I wouldn’t have known this if I hadn’t chased down the police report. But it was right there on the last page: