Aftermirth

by Hillary Jordan

  After Trainers wrapped I took my career off the oxygen and let it die. I got a few calls from old friends offering me a toe back in the water, but I turned them down, as much for their sakes as mine. The reek of my misery would only have stunk up their clubs and writers rooms, just like it did the apartments of my friends and family. I quit answering the phone, and after a while it stopped ringing much. The ones who were persistent I shoved away with sarcasm and, when that didn’t work, in-their-face rudeness. Their worry was a burden I couldn’t carry, because the only way to assuage it was to fake an alrightness I didn’t feel.

  About a year and a half after Jess died my old friend Annie, with whom I’d periodically shared benefits in my single days, called and invited me over for a home-cooked meal, and afterward (I realized afterward), for mercy sex. Her bedroom was dark—she’d turned the lamp off in what I later understood was another act of kindness—but she felt wrong, smelled wrong. The little cries she made were too breathy and high-pitched. I soldiered on, determined to please her and to feel pleasure, and I guess I succeeded; at least, our bodies said I had. But as I lay spent beside her all I wanted was to go home and shower and fall into the oblivion of sleep, and Annie was a good enough friend that she understood and let me, sending me off with a pan of leftover lasagna and a chaste kiss on the forehead.

  Izzy’s was the only company I could stand, because he let me be as morose as I liked and never asked, “So, how are you really, Michael?” Still, he had needs, and there were times I resented him so much for forcing me out of bed, out the door and into the Jessless world that I would yank him away from his pleasures, at which point he’d give me this look that said, What kind of jerk would deny his loyal, long-suffering—and you know how I’ve suffered—companion the simple joys of sniffing other dogs’ butts and rolling in squirrel shit? And I would be flooded with shame and let him walk me for a good hour and cook him bacon when we got home.

  Home was still the brownstone, despite the efforts of my family and every other person who was still speaking to me to get me to move. They thought it was morbid that I would want to stay so close to the place where Jess had been killed. What they didn’t understand was that it would have been even worse being somewhere she hadn’t hung pictures and made pumpkin bread, watched South Park and done the Sunday crossword, slept and dreamed and waked and laughed and breathed.

  Which is why, six weeks before the second anniversary of her death and a few days after my accountant called to inform me that I was nearly broke and would have to sell the brownstone if I didn’t start producing some income, I found myself opening a newspaper for the first time in nearly two years in search of some sort of gainful employment. I didn’t go straight to the job listings, though; I read the whole paper, feeling a lot like Rip Van Winkle. There’d been populist revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, apparently, and a second (and when was the first?) volcano eruption in Iceland on the same day that the world was supposed to end and hadn’t (and why the hell hadn’t it?).

  And then I saw the headline in the Metro section: WORKER KNEADED TO DEATH IN BREAD FACTORY MISHAP. Julio Santiago, forty-six, an employee at the Fulsome Grains factory in Elizabeth, New Jersey, had fallen into the giant dough vat unobserved by his co-workers. It wasn’t until the machine jammed that they’d discovered his body. This was the Times, so the article was straightforward, with no snickering. Still, at the end it said that the cause of death had been asphyxiation, not pummeling by dough blades. So why that misleading headline, KNEADED TO DEATH, with the cartoon visual it conjured? Was that not a sly attempt at humor? Feeling a growing anger, I went online to the Daily News website. Those pricks didn’t even try for subtlety. WORKER BATTERED IN DOUGH VAT ACCIDENT DOESN’T RISE, they quipped. I skipped the gory details and carefully scripted professions of regret by company officials and went to the end of the article. Mr. Santiago was survived by a wife, Pilar, and a daughter, Elena. The viewing was being held in two days at a funeral parlor in Passaic.

  I would go and pay my respects.

  As soon as I’d made the decision I was seized by restlessness. I straightened the house, throwing out months of unopened magazines and junk mail, long-expired food, plastic takeout containers and pizza boxes, desiccated flowers, ratty underwear and T-shirts. I hired a maid service to come and clean. I went shopping and bought some clothes that didn’t hang on me. I took Izzy to the groomers, got a haircut, had the car washed and the oil changed.

  The morning of the viewing, I shaved and dressed with more care than I had in two years. It was about forty-five minutes to Passaic—double that in traffic, but this was the middle of a Saturday—and as I crossed into Jersey I felt a queasy mixture of excitement and dread. I had absolutely no idea what I would say to these people once we were face to face. I only knew that I had to go and meet them.

  The funeral home was in a working-class neighborhood, and my BMW 650i convertible with its YUKYUK vanity plate was conspicuously out of place among the Kias, Hyundais and older-model American cars that filled the parking lot. I sat with the engine running for a long while, studying the black-clad people entering and exiting the building. Most went in pairs or groups, arms intertwined or locked around each other’s waists or shoulders. With few exceptions, the ones coming out looked less sad than the ones going in—which made no sense to me at all. Either Tuccelli & Sons was actually a massage parlor fronting as a mortuary, or some other mysterious force was at work.

  Finally I screwed up the courage to get out of the car and go inside. The foyer was dimly lit and smelled overwhelmingly of flowers. I sneezed, and someone said, “God bless you.”

  I turned and saw a kid in his late teens standing to one side of the doorway. He wore an ill-fitting black suit, a white carnation boutonniere and a lugubrious expression that looked incongruous on his pimply face. “Good afternoon, sir,” he said, giving me a solemn nod I would have bet a hundred bucks he’d practiced in the mirror. His voice was young and thready, trying desperately for gravitas. I figured him for one of the advertised Tuccelli sons, wearing one of his older brothers’ suits. No other kid his age would have taken that job.

  “Are you here for the white viewing?” he asked.

  I shook my head, confused. “No, he’s Hispanic.”

  I’ll hand it to the kid, his face didn’t change an iota. “You must be here for Mr. Santiago, then,” he said, gesturing to the left. “He’s just down the hall, in the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. Mrs. White is upstairs, in the Bower of Everlasting Peace.”

  In the old days that would have sparked enough material for a whole new act. Now I could only mumble embarrassed thanks and head in the direction he’d indicated.

  Vaguely celestial organ music issued from the open doorway of the Chamber of Boundless Serenity. In a frame beside the door was a printed paper sign that read SANTIAGO. It was a little askew, and the tip of one corner showed above the frame. I straightened it, feeling a sudden fury at how flimsy it was, how easily replaceable.

  The room was packed with people; that was all I registered before I was stopped by an extremely short, brown-skinned older man standing just inside the doorway. “Hello, señor?” he said, craning his neck to look up at me. “This is the Santiago viewing.”

  “Then I’m in the right place,” I said, with more confidence than I felt.

  His face showed surprise, along with something else I couldn’t identify, but it sure didn’t look like welcome. I felt other eyes coming to rest on me, heard a wave of whispers travel across the room and then drop into silence. I looked over the man’s shoulder into a sea of black and brown. Black clothes and hair, brown skin and eyes, all trained on tall, blond, blue-eyed, whey-faced me. I might as well have been standing there in a horned helmet and chain mail waving a battle axe. I’d never felt whiter in all my life.

  A guy about my age with a face like a clenched fist detached himself from a clump of people near the coffin and strode toward me. “Get out,” he said.

  “What?”
/>   “You heard me. You’re not welcome here.”

  “Look,” I said, bewildered by his hostility, “I just came to pay my respects.”

  He stepped closer, angling his head forward. His face was so close to mine I could smell his wintergreen breath mints. “You think by showing up here and proving how much you respect us, we’re gonna sue your gringo asses for any less, huh? Now get the fuck out.”

  He was almost a foot shorter than me, but he was coiled and wiry and full of enough rage to quail even my strapping, pillaging ancestors. I held my hands up and started to back away.

  “I’m not mugging you, asshole,” he said contemptuously. “Just turn around and walk out the door like a normal human being.”

  “Wait.” A woman wove through the crowd and came over to us, placing a hand on my antagonist’s arm. She was in her late twenties, petite and slender, with large, almond-shaped eyes that were swollen from crying and a prominent nose I recognized from the photo of the deceased. I guessed this was the daughter, Elena. Her expression was appraising but not unfriendly.

  “He’s not from the company, Esteban. Don’t you recognize him?”

  Esteban squinted at me, and his scowl got deeper and, if possible, even more menacing. “You a TV reporter?”

  “No, I, I’m a—” I fell silent, unable to think of a single word or phrase that would complete the sentence, and then it came to me: I was a nothing, a no one. And had been ever since the day Jess died.

  “He’s an actor,” Elena said. “He was in that show Trainers, remember?”

  “Yeah, I remember you,” Esteban said finally. “Funny guy who turned out not to be so funny. That why you came here today, huh? You looking for some laughs?”

  I felt like I was falling—into whiteness, nothingness, into a vat of dough. What had I hoped to find here, among these total strangers? Kinship? Some sort of communion of the damned that would make me feel less alone?

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I shouldn’t have come.”

  “You got that right,” said Esteban.

  I knew an exit cue when I heard one, but I couldn’t move, because Elena’s grave, considering gaze held me in place. Her brows were furrowed, like something was niggling at her. And then her expression changed, and her eyes widened and softened, and I saw Jess slide into place behind them.

  “She died,” Elena said. “Your wife.”

  “Yes,” I said. My own eyes were burning.

  “I remember, I saw it on the news. It was horrible.”

  “Yes.”

  “How did she die?” asked Esteban.

  I shook my head, unable to speak the words.

  “Tell him,” Elena said.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can,” she said.

  I started to say, You don’t understand, but of course she did. They all did.

  As if she were reading my thoughts, Elena gestured at the watching crowd. “Tell them. How you lost your wife.”

  I looked past her at the roomful of mourners, their faces now a swimming brown blur. “She was killed by a lightning strike because . . .” My voice cracked.

  “Say it,” Elena said.

  “Because she was wearing an underwire bra. It electrocuted her.”

  There were some murmurs, and then Esteban’s hand came down on my shoulder. “Shit, man,” he said. “That really sucks.”

  His eloquence undid me, and I started crying like I hadn’t cried since Jess’s funeral. Esteban raised his voice and translated (I didn’t speak Spanish, but I could make out the words esposa and electrocutada), and I heard more murmuring and felt a small, soft hand take hold of mine.

  “Come, Michael,” Elena said, tugging me forward. “Come and meet my mother.”

  As I moved through the room and felt the other hands touching my back and shoulders, I thought of the people I’d seen leaving the funeral home. Maybe, I thought, they’d looked better than the ones going in because they’d left a tiny bit of their sorrow here, behind them.

  I DIDN’T STOP mourning Jess, but what had been a howling pain settled into something between a moan and a whimper, still constant but endurable. I kept the mortgage paid and Izzy in gourmet kibble with voiceover work: a couple of Nissan spots, a radio campaign for Coors Lite. Nothing funny; I told my agent not to call me in for those jobs. Michael Larssen was out of the funny business.

  Elena and I had exchanged numbers and promises to stay in touch, which neither of us had kept. What did we have in common, really, besides bizarre misfortune? And attraction—there was that, but I couldn’t deal with that. We’d both felt it, and it had made our parting awkward. After we hugged she’d reached up and laid her hand against my cheek, and I’d felt a sudden urge to grab hold of it and press her palm to my mouth. I didn’t do that, of course, I just stammered hot-faced thanks and good-bye. Whenever I thought of Elena, and I tried not to, I felt squirmy. So when I got a voice mail from her some four months later, I was both pleased and rattled.

  “Hey Michael, it’s Elena Santiago. Can you meet me for coffee this week? I have something I want to ask you.” Coffee, not drinks, and she sounded serious and not the least bit flirtatious. I ignored the twinge of disappointment I felt and called her back. Her manner was the same on the phone, and when I tried to probe her about the reason for her call, she said she’d rather speak to me about it in person.

  We met at a coffee shop she suggested on 114th and Broadway. She was already seated when I got there, and I gave her a quick and only slightly clumsy peck on the cheek before sitting down across from her. She was as pretty as I remembered, and as sad.

  “How’ve you been?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “Not great. I’ve had to take a leave of absence from school. I just can’t seem to focus.”

  I nodded; I knew that feeling. “Where are you in school?”

  “Here,” she said, waving her hand in the direction of the campus across the street. “I’m in the law school.”

  “At Columbia?” It came out more incredulous than I’d intended.

  “Sí, at Columbia,” she said acerbically, in an exaggerated Spanish accent. “For every floor I scrub, they let me take a class.”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  Her mouth twisted in a rueful grimace. “No, I’m sorry,” she said. “That was rude. I’ve been rude a lot lately.”

  “Have your friends stopped calling you yet?” Elena gave me a puzzled look, and I said, “Master my proven techniques, and in just thirty days you can alienate your friends, co-workers and your entire family too, or your money back.”

  That earned me a half smile. “How are you doing, Michael?” she asked.

  “Better, actually. I think it helped, meeting you and your family.”

  Something flashed in her eyes. “That’s why I wanted to see you.” She rooted in her purse, pulled out a piece of paper and pushed it across the table. It was a printout of an Internet article called “The 10 Most Bizarre, Ludicrous Deaths of 2010.” They were listed in reverse order. The last paragraph was circled:

  #1: DEATH BY FEMININE HYGIENE???!!!!

  On September 27, chronic snorer Jim Harbuck stuffed tampons up his nostrils in an effort to quiet himself, not knowing that his condition was caused by sleep apnea, which closed up his throat and suffocated him. His wife, who might have saved him, was sleeping on the sofa downstairs, having been driven there by his thunderous snores.

  As I read I could feel Elena’s solemn gaze on me. I met it reluctantly. I knew where this was headed.

  “Her name is Roberta,” Elena said. “She lives in Durham, North Carolina.”

  “And you want to go meet her.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you want me to come with you.”

  She nodded. “Will you?”

  Her dark eyes entreated me. I looked away from them. “I don’t know, Elena. I’m trying to move on, you know?”

  “I am too,” she said, “but I’m stuck. I need to do this, Michael. And I c
an’t do it on my own.”

  “What about your cousin?”

  “Esteban thinks I’m loca. Maybe he’s right.” Her eyes were glistening suspiciously.

  Well what would you have done in my place, sat there and let her cry? Anyway, I owed her one—a fact I reminded myself of as I pulled onto her block of West 111th Street less than forty-eight hours later, grumpy and late. I’d had to get up at six, which has never been my finest hour, and in my befuddled, undercaffeinated state I’d forgotten Izzy’s food and had to double back and get it. He was riding shotgun with his head hanging out the window and his tongue flapping ecstatically in the wind, trailing a glistening rope of drool. As I drove up the block, looking for Elena’s building, it occurred to me to wonder whether she liked dogs. I hadn’t told her Izzy would be coming with us, and I decided right then that if she minded, the trip was off, because I wasn’t going without him. I’d been doubting the wisdom of this little expedition from the moment I’d agreed to it, and damned if I was going to spend eighteen-plus hours in a car with a person who didn’t have the sense to like—no, forget like—to love, to fawn slavishly all over my sweet, eminently lovable dog. I vowed that if she even so much as brushed his hair off the passenger seat, I was going to tell her to forget it. Anyone who was put off by a little dog hair on her clothes—or, for that matter, slobber or pee dribbles on the bedspread or stepping barefoot into the occasional pool of vomit on the rug—was not someone I wanted in my life, not for two days, not for two minutes. You see where I was going with this. By the time I reached Elena’s building I’d pretty much convinced myself she was a dog-hating bitch who could find her own way to Durham. If she hadn’t been standing on the curb waiting for me, I might have driven right past her building and back to Brooklyn.

  But there she was, looking lovely and a little anxious, and when she caught sight of Izzy she smiled, and when she saw that he was with me her smile got wider. I stopped the car, and she went to the window and let him whuffle her hand before bending down to say hello. “Nice to meet you too,” she said, when he licked her face. “And who would you be?”