Sex and Death in the American Novel

by Martinez, Sarah

  People like to pretend we're not animals, but really we're more like dogs. Anyone who doesn't believe this should spend some time in a nightclub. Women at certain times already know what the urge feels like when everyone, whether short, tall, square shouldered or slight, looks like the tastiest piece of meat you've ever seen. Most men I've talked to will tell you that if left alone with a woman who is ready to go, they won't hesitate. Ever. The smart ones know how to keep themselves out of trouble.

  Eric and I first started going to Neighbours in college. Sometimes I would bring kids from my classes to dance the '80s theme nights or watch drag shows. Eric and I still liked to show off by reviving our competition routines to some club anthem like Insomnia or Sandstorm. I would spend all night dancing and hanging on Eric and then go home with some other guy I had just met. I was young—amusement came easily then.

  In my later twenties, Neighbours, with its colorful crowd, free atmosphere, and familiar vibe, was my favorite place to go to work off frustrations, check out the local scene, keep up on who was doing who, and get lost in hedonistic excess in a relatively safe environment. It didn't hurt my storytelling abilities either. There was nothing like watching two beautiful men first lock eyes, then cruise around each other, then finally sink into the shadows and slam each other up against one of the black painted walls of the club while the crowd danced on. While I danced on.

  I still loved to dance. I loved the attention, I loved getting lost in the thumping beat of the music and the flashing of the strobe lights—I felt like I could just take off spinning, catching the energies around me, twirling higher and higher with the music. I always expected to open my eyes and find myself floating near the smoky ceiling, lost to everyone. There was a thrill to get up on one of the stages around the dance floor and look down on the writhing bodies and occasionally lock eyes with an interesting guy or girl. On nights when the music was really good, and I was really feeling it, I felt like a goddess. I was powerful, above it all, untouchable, unless of course I wanted to be touched.

  This night I felt a need to put everything away: my brother, my father, the comparisons I constantly made between their work and my own. No matter how many times I tried to focus on my success, I always looped back around to the fact that I was still disappointing my father, even in death. Tristan's mood had me worried that I had done too well; maybe my success had more to do with his feelings of failure than I had imagined.

  I danced until my slinky clothes stuck to my skin. Eric came to take me home, and as I hopped down from the stage I felt like I had just woken from a long sleep, though my heart raced and my senses were on full alert.

  We met Vlad outside at the alley, and as we were saying our goodbyes, a man about Eric's height, wearing filthy clothes and hauling a canvas bag over his shoulder walked by, eying first Eric, then Vlad, and settling his sticky yellow eyes on me. His hair hung in grimy streaks around his face. His skin was oily and stubbled. “Sweet little cunt you are. How about I show you what a real man can do?”

  I had my hand around Eric's torso. I felt the muscles of his arms and back go rigid. “What did you say?” he demanded.

  “He called me a cunt. How very creative,” I said, fielding a mix of emotions: part outrage, part amusement at the lack of creativity, and part disgust. I stepped forward on shaky legs, afraid, but ready to take my shoes off and use them on the guy if necessary.

  “You heard me,” the guy said. “Faggot.”

  Before I knew what had happened, Eric was grabbing the guy's collar and hauling him up the side of the wall; a street light threw both of their faces into harsh relief.

  Vlad was beside me. “Wait,” he said, taking my arm and holding me back.

  “Say you're sorry,” Eric breathed.

  “Fuck you,” he said and spit in his face.

  Eric wiped away the spit with the hand that was not holding the man to the wall, then stepped sideways when the man kicked out at him. I had never seen Eric so angry. Once or twice when we'd been out together and we were harassed, a dark look was enough to get the offending drunk to walk away, or at least back off mumbling under his breath.

  My voice was shakier than it should have been. “I don't want him to get in trouble.”

  “He won't. Don't worry,” Vlad said, coming closer.

  Just then the guy struck out with one fist and Eric punched him and he slid to the ground. The events happened in less than twenty seconds, but felt like they took forever. I moved toward Eric, took his hand and pressed it to my cheek. Vlad looked from Eric to the guy before he hunched down and with barely contained disgust, reached out and moved the guy's face from one side to the other.

  “He'll be fine,” he said before turning back toward the door to the club.

  I was more worried about Eric. When I met his eyes I saw a complicated mix of confusion and fear. When he saw me watching him he smiled and said, “He disrespected my bitch. What was I supposed to do?”

  I took Eric's good hand and dragged him to the street. We looked back once to make sure the guy stayed down.

  Chapter 3

  We met in the spring for Tristan's birthday. I took a few days off work to stay out at the island and spend time with him. Looking through the notes he left me, I was reminded of how he had at least been distracted by teaching, when he did it—and he was good at it. I resolved to make my case when I saw him, citing all the lovingly placed notes containing advice that he left in my books. How could he waste this talent? He had to go out and encourage other writers as well. In that, he would recover his lost spark, I was sure of it. Mom took us to the pub in Coupeville that overlooked the water and the incoming sailboats.

  “So what's the big announcement? Have you finished, are you submitting, what?” my mother asked, fiddling with her wine glass.

  Tristan leveled a gaze at both of us and said, “I am done. I mean, I gave it up. What a relief too. I didn't know it was possible to feel this bad.”

  My mother and I stared at each other. Finally she said, “What do you mean you gave it up? Not your work…you don't give up your work.”

  “That's what I thought, but it turns out, it's easy. I boxed up everything I had and stuck it in the closet. I cleaned off my desk and there it is. I have started packing to move out. That should make you happy,” my brother said, frowning.

  “I don't get it,” I said.

  “I don't either,” my mother interjected, bumping her wine glass as she leaned toward him, sloshing some of the contents onto the table top. “I never said anything about you living in the basement. What will I do without you? Who will help me prune the trees, burn the trash, what about the rose bushes…”

  “Where will you go? Are you getting a job?” I asked.

  “I think the next step will be to figure out where I belong.”

  “So you are going to teach!” I clasped my hands. My mother looked confused. I plowed on; she could catch up. “Here or in Seattle? Or maybe you could look for a position in some cool location, oh, like how about some fancy European boarding school! You could call it a vacation! I would come visit you, even help you move.” I felt relief and excitement at the possibilities available for him.

  I turned to my mother whose expression was still skeptical, but she was going along. “Or what about The University of Montana? They would love to have you back.”

  Tristan's expression did not match my growing excitement. “I'm not going back to teaching. I'm going to have Uncle Curtis send me a chunk from the trust for a down payment. Probably get a small place in the city, maybe near you, Slug.”

  “That would be cool…you could crash on my couch while you look for a place…but why don't you want to go back to teaching, or is it because you're going back to music?” I said this last bit hopefully, but his face didn't change. It was sinking in that he meant giving up more than writing—he was giving up everything that made him creative or even useful. I flashed to an image of him sipping out of a paper-wrapped bottle under a grimy overpass,
his beard and hair tangled and clotted with bits of detritus. “How can you just quit? A break maybe…not giving it up.”

  “You're dipping into your trust again?” Mother was displeased.

  “Last week I felt really good, it was like I was channeling the universe and everything that worked was there. It was so easy, Slug, you wouldn't believe it, then I woke up this morning and was reading it all over again, twenty-five brand-new pages, and I saw it so clearly, it's all shit, nothing has changed. This is just like song writing. The problem is still me.”

  “Are you high?” I asked, joking but watching his eyes as he responded.

  He laughed and then grew serious. “There is no more color in the world. It's all fake, like the whole world went gray, or worse, it always was and someone came back and tried to put color on top of everything so it would look right but now I can see that it's just…” he moved his hands in front of his face like a magician would, opening and closing his fingers, “an illusion.”

  I turned to my mother. “He's high.” How could I deal with this level of disconnection? My vision of working him toward a reimagined teaching career seemed incredibly lame next to the way he looked now; disconnected, very wrong, too peaceful, too accepting, too easy.

  “I am not high…not yet.” He gave me small grin. “I'm thirty-six now. I am just finally seeing everything the way it really is and something has to change.”

  I woke up the next morning with a jolt, out of a vague dream about my college dorm and this crazy girl I'd met right before I graduated. I was in my mother's guest room, surrounded by objects from my childhood bedroom. My heart was beating as fast as that time I tried meth. I looked around and listened, but nothing seemed off.

  I moved out of bed afraid the room was going to come apart around me, and I knew I had to check on my brother. The house was silent as I padded down the hall, down the stairs. In the living room, the cards and cribbage board from the night before sat neatly in the middle of the table where I'd left them. Something was wrong but I didn't immediately see what it was.

  Tristan's bed was rumpled but he wasn't in there. It was definitely not like him to be up before 10:00 a.m. The red digital clock by his bed said the time was 6:30 a.m. I checked in his office, and there on his desk was a stack of five manuscript boxes. My stomach dropped and began to churn, my arms grew heavy as I approached them. A piece of notebook paper was folded and taped to the box on top.

  Slug,

  You are going to rock the world. Somewhere in all this shit is a ton of poetry that I wrote for you. It sucks but I hope it will help you know how much you mean to me and you won't ever forget it.

  I am leaving you my trilogy, maybe it will help you understand me and everything that's happened in the last few years. As it is, I've almost been happy with you and Mom cheering for me, only I see that this is not going to get better. Ever.

  The upside is that you get Uncle Curtis. You can do whatever you want now.

  You are the light of the world—you shine—don't ever stop doing that.

  I left Mom a note but don't you forget, or let her forget, that this was not your fault. Tell Mom I'm sorry.

  I love you.

  T.

  There was a sloppy smiley face next to the last line.

  I got very cold then, as if I'd turned into one of those statues from the perpetual winter in Narnia. I thought I knew what was wrong upstairs and I hurried up to stand in the living room again. Everything was as before, only above the mantle the shotgun was gone.

  I woke up my mother, and she rushed around checking the house and the basement as I had. We went outside, both of us holding our arms around our stomachs, sure at any second we would find something awful. We never did. After that we checked the garage. The space next to Mom's car was empty where Tristan's little red truck normally would have stood.

  After Mom called the sheriff, we went down and looked at the office and the note again.

  My mother held the note in her hand. “Uncle Curtis?”

  I shrugged. “Everything…Mom, I'm really scared now.”

  “Me too, sweetie.” She hadn't called me sweetie since I was ten. She wrapped her arms around me and after a while we went upstairs to wait.

  By evening the Coupeville sheriff came by and asked to talk to my mother. Outside, the sheriff's car spouted grimy smoke into the cool air. I backed into the living room and watched them talk. Phrases like, “coroner's office, personal effects, and apparent suicide” drifted over to me. When she closed the door, her voice was hard. As I watched her face go from blank to squinty and strained, I didn't want to hear what she would say, and I couldn't wait to get it over with. Once she spoke the words this would all be real. I wanted to jump out of my skin.

  She sat and lit a cigarette, then set it on the ashtray and watched the smoke drift toward the ceiling in a wispy blue stream.

  “What?” I said in a voice too loud for the heavy silence of the house.

  She looked up. “They found Tristan's car by Smuggler's Cove…he walked into the park. They found him—his…body—a half mile off a trail overlooking Admiralty Inlet.”

  I laughed, a hard braying laugh. I was sick and scared and horrified at the same time. All these feelings I felt in equal measure, thinking of him out there by himself. Did he wear his red flannel, the one my father left here that he wore whenever he went outdoors? He really did look like a lumberjack when he wore that, especially when his long hair went up under his dirty cap.

  I hugged myself with heavy arms. Every so often I would look at my mother who had lifted her cigarette several times but was unable to inhale. The quiet and silence were so heavy it filled my ears. All we'd had since he disappeared was silence, and whatever interrupted the silence, Mom on the phone with the police, calling her friends at different parts of the island to see if they had seen him, knowing they would answer in the negative. All that was over.

  After an incredibly long time sitting at opposite ends of the dining table, staring at each other, at the shiny wooden surface, smoking one cigarette after another, I rose and hugged my mother and went into the living room. I pulled down two of the oldest photo albums I could find and began flipping through. After a while my mother came in and sat next to me and placed a hand on my knee. Her hand was tiny, light and papery thin.

  A string of photos of Tristan and my father, the infernal shotgun in between them, both smiling, my father's arm around my brother, Tristan's brown eyes open and easy, my father's grey ones distant, as always.

  I flipped the pages.

  My mother's voice was a croak. “I hated when he would do that.” In one photo Tristan wore a denim jacket and had no shirt on underneath. His tongue stuck out and he held his hand up with both his pinkie finger and index finger sticking up.

  “He was so excited. He went camping and saw Metallica at The Gorge, remember?”

  There was a string of even earlier photos where he held his middle finger up in every picture, affecting a bored or hostile pose. But in every one his eyes were bright, laughing at his own posturing. The first time the tears came was through my laughter at this younger version of my brother, still a teenager, still full of hope, no failures yet.

  In the days that followed, I stayed on the island with my mother. We were busy planning the service, busy making each other crazy, busy rearranging his stuff, busy making phone calls, busy not sleeping. Busy was better than the alternative. We set the service for a week's time, had Tristan cremated, as was family tradition and his wish. The funeral home offered a service where you could get a little necklace with some of the ashes inside. Mother and I both ordered one of these, tiny infinity shapes in pewter.

  One morning we sat at one end of Mom's dining table with her laptop open in front of us. I wrote up the obituary and she dragged me through an entire day rewriting it. If that wasn't bad enough, we had to alter each version to fit the individual newspapers we sent it to.

  “It just has to be right Vivi, he was my boy…” S
he stared at me as if I could bring him back, as if I could take away the sense that everything we did on his behalf was not good enough, was not big enough, would not impress enough people.

  At one point late in the afternoon, when the deadline for sending one of the obituaries to make the paper was only a half hour away, I said, “Mom. If we don't ever send these, nobody is going to come to the funeral.”

  She balled her fists, spread her fingers out and balled them up again. I knew that feeling, the need to break every single thing in sight. Overwhelming frustration. Nothing was working. Nothing was right. What I was quickly coming to understand was that nothing would ever be right, so why bother? She wanted the obituaries posted in the Seattle Times and the Whidbey Examiner, plus the Missoulian, which she decided on at the last minute. “We want as many people to know as possible right? Doesn't…didn't he still have friends from college living there?”

  “He had friends everywhere, Mom.” I regretted the tired tone, but it was starting to look like we should just send the announcement to every paper within a five-hundred-mile radius. I wanted to curl up and sleep for a month. Instead I nodded and looked up the appropriate email address while she stalked around the kitchen smoking.

  “And don't forget the Spokesman Review…” she added.

  “You're kidding.”

  “What if someone is traveling…or…”

  I almost tossed the laptop across the room but the desperate look on her face stopped me. “Okay, Mom. I'll send one there too.”

  Mom located a church in Seattle, near where we used to live, where we could hold the service. I knew she was happy because the church was much more elaborate than anything she could have found on the island.

  The service was heavily attended by everyone from old girlfriends to acquaintances of both of my parents, and some of Tristan's old students and band mates.

  Leah, my brother's most serious girlfriend, showed up early as she promised she would. We met her at her car and we both hugged her. The last time I saw her she had long hair with purple streaks through it. Now she wore a short brown bob and a black dress over patterned black tights. Mom made small talk for a couple of minutes—which seemed completely inappropriate—until I thought I was going to jump out of my skin. I turned to Leah. “Did you bring it?”