`If there's a way for me to feel guilty about something, I'll find it', she said. `Some people show me all this sympathy, and it's as if I should be feeling even worse than I do, I should be fucked up enough to deserve that sympathy. But there were so many people who were closer to T. than I was.'
`It's not that unique a skill, you know.' I had some idea about providing an intelligent insight, from the perspective of someone who's seen a bit more of life, and all that. But really I was talking to G. the way I'd talk to anyone about this, awkwardly throwing out observations which I hoped might stick together into some meaningful structure. I was depending on G. as much as myself to discover that structure; we both knew that it's much easier to create than to narrate. `Most of my friends are remarkably adept at finding ways to feel guilty. You feel that you should do something unusual, that you can't simply go through the day as if nothing had changed. And you feel guilty about that and you decide to make some observance. But you don't know what to do, and any action you take seems contrived and insincere. And you feel guilty about that, too. You're being impaled on the horns of this dilemma and you think maybe this gives you some idea about what T. must have felt, the lack of any escape or salvage. But then you feel guilty for comparing your petty difficulties with the big mess that drove T. over the edge. You've been thrust into this role of the mourner, and you don't want to play at it, and you can't reject it.'
As I'm telling G. these bits and pieces, I'm thinking of all the deaths that I've had to react to. It'll take me another few hours, though, to realise that that's what's been in my mind.
The first was my mother's favourite priest, her confidante in the face of adversity. He died during what was, in other respects also, a difficult time for her. She was mourning, I think, partly for him and partly for the tiny channel into her isolation that he'd maintained and that had closed with his death. I was young and inexperienced enough not to be able to figure out what had been going on. I suppose I assumed that all families were like this. My father, thankfully, spent most of the day at his office. He would come back just before supper, doggedly maintaining the motions if not the spirit of what was still known as a `family man'. He kept a jar full of martini mix in the freezer, and once he'd cast off his coat and tie he'd plunk himself down in front of the evening news and have at it. Walter Cronkite's voiceover of death and misfortune out in the world seeped through my father's own numbness.
Supper was the most dangerous time. We had to converse. We had to look each other in the eye. Silence or aloofness might have been taken as spite. But when we talked we often ended up misspeaking. A chance phrase or a momentary glance would be misinterpreted. Once his fuse was lit there was no stopping it, no explaining or clarifying. I can't remember the details or even the topics of most of the arguments. Perhaps the reason for my forgetfulness is the pain of these experiences, or perhaps it's simply that all of it was so petty.
My father would rail against us, or rather he would rail against the universe in general and against us in particular since we were the parts of it closest to him. He wished he could live at the office and never come home. He wished someone would shove a firecracker up his ass and shoot him off to the moon. In the end, mercifully, he'd announce that he was going for a cup of coffee or a movie. He'd gun the car down the street, and in the silence that followed, my mother's sobs would become audible. I never knew what to do about this, and I felt inadequate. I envied my older sister's mobility, the freedom with which she could escape this torture.
My mother had some straightforward ambitions. She was traditional, a product of her upbringing in England of the 1940s. She wanted very much to fulfill the role of a mother. She wanted to play with her children, to mend our clothes, to feed us good meals.
One evening in 1977, after another supper had been ruined and my father had left the house, my mother and I trudged up the staircase. I don't know where we were going but I remember being on this staircase with its white railing and deep, red carpet. She turned to me and said that people change. My father, she said, wasn't the man she'd married. I already knew that much; I'd seen the photographs from years before, my mother pushing off adventurously on some new exploit and my father carrying on with her and enjoying it, caught up in her enthusiasm. I had some classmates whose parents were divorced. I didn't know the details but on television, at least, this was always how it started. I suppose I assumed that this meant that I'd soon be moving away from my father, or that my father would be moving away from me. This was an attractive prospect for me not even so much because it meant the removal of my father but because when the news got out it would bring me sympathy, and sympathy was what I lived on. But that's the last I heard of it. We stayed, and so did he.
Seventeen years later, when I'd come back on a visit from California where I was in graduate school, my mother decided to fill me in. She'd had an apartment picked out for us and had been ready to escape into it. She'd discussed it with my sister, who'd been in high school at the time, but she'd decided to shield me. I had thought all those years that my mother had been hiding things from me, that our outward relationship was overshadowed by ongoing and covert gathering of intelligence. Because of this I'd had trouble trusting her. She'd never told my father how close she'd come. With all that water under the bridge, still, when I found out I made her tell him. I wanted to see him admit, to us and to himself, what a prick he'd been. I was angry at having lost my father for all those years.
That same year that my mother almost moved out with us, the father of a classmate of mine was shot dead. He managed an apartment building in a shitty part of Maryland, and he'd been trying to collect the rent. Our teacher must have told us about it. I can't remember the specifics, because it didn't affect me. But I thought that I should respond in some way, and I had to figure out what was expected of me. I felt guilty not doing anything at all. So when I walked home that afternoon I made an effort to cry. I managed a fair job of this. I was like a little Richard Nixon, tears at the ready. To my mother, who was in the front garden as I walked up the drive, it must have seemed genuine. Only I knew the level of my insincerity. I was manipulating her.
This was the way I dealt with life. There were rules to the game, social scripts that my peers seemed able to intuit effortlessly. It seemed they had some faculty of induction that I lacked. Even when I managed at least partially to figure out the rules, I was conscious of playing by them. I longed to be able to incorporate them into my being, so that I could act sincerely without this feeling of pretense, so that I could be a person instead of only acting like one.
About four years later, my father's brother Tom died. I was visiting at the time in Herkimer, the small, upstate town in which my father had grown up and which he thought would work some hocus-pocus on me, cure me of my aloofness and bookishness, if I were deposited there for long enough. (As soon as the relatives began to work on me, to pester me to drop my books, to hang around with the neighbourhood children, to go to the swimming pool, I saw through their plot. I telephoned my mother and begged her to call it off, telling her what a terrible time I was having. But it had been my father's vision and she wouldn't speak against it.) One day while I was out being cured of my antisocial personality, Uncle Tom fell down dead from a heart attack.
The automatic response of an Italian to a death in the community is to descend on the home of the bereaved with as much prepared food as can be transported. My response was to do nothing. I sat at the table in Uncle Tom's house, absentmindedly shovelling potato crisps into my mouth from a large bowl that someone had brought over. My cousin, who was much older than I and in her twenties at the time, squeezed past me and asked on her way, `Could you situate yourself somewhere else?' Immediately I felt terrible guilt at having been insensitive enough to have used the death of my uncle, her father, as nothing more than an occasion for chowing down.
When my father showed up I hugged him, because this, I thought, was the convention in instances in which such events have occurred. He in turn assumed that I was approaching him for solace, and dutifully played the part of the comforting father. I remember standing in his arms feeling suffocated, and wondering when he was going to release me.
It wasn't that I hadn't liked Uncle Tom. On the contrary, I'd enjoyed the times I'd had with him, the stories of his childhood in Herkimer and of the war, the jokes about sex and flatulence that had made me feel that I was becoming a man and being accepted into the social circle of men. It was my anger at my father that kept me from grieving so much. And it wasn't until I was safely hidden in back seat of the limousine on the way to the cemetery that I found myself bawling uncontrollably.
At the funeral, the relatives were called one by one to kneel before the open coffin and pray. I was an atheist by this time, and this procedure reminded me of when the relatives dragged me to church with them and I felt all conspicuous sitting in the pew while everyone else walked forward to crunch their meaningless wafer and to sip their meaningless wine. When my mother knelt I stayed standing by her side. She pulled on my hand for support, but I assumed that her touch was an attempt at guidance so I pulled my hand away. Later I felt guilty about that.
I've taught summer courses ever since I was in college. I suppose it's because I enjoy living vicariously. I like to see my students discover the subject for the first time. They renew in me that thrill that properly stems from facts and relationships whose beauty I've begun to take for granted. I enjoy seeing them hooking up at the dances, sneaking out of dorms for rendez-vous, experiencing life and love as I never permitted myself to do when I was that age.
Surrounded by children who ridiculed my interests and sensitivities, who built themselves up by tearing me down, I'd learnt to erect barriers, to resist being touched, both physically and emotionally. Even after I'd managed to remove myself from such company, these habits were difficult to break. Even now, with those troubles of adolescence far behind me and with the beginning of my fourth decade creeping up, I wonder about the rules of the game. I want to connect with people but I don't know how to go about it. With these people it's easier because they know what the game is meant to hide and their not afraid of saying it. They're not ashamed of intimacy or of public compassion. The word `compassion' is especially appropriate in this context, meaning as it does `suffering together'. Suffering together with someone involves accepting one's own vulnerability, admitting that bad things happen, that we're very often powerless to prevent or to change these bad things, and that they might happen to onself just as easily as to one's friends.
K. was a brilliant student. She internalised mathematics, thought in it, appreciated its beauty. I was fortunate enough to have her in my class during my second summer of teaching. I started off teaching her how to program and by the end of the three-week course she'd built an interpreter for a small programming language. We did a few formal proofs and she flew through all the proofs in the assignment, seldom needing to stop to revise any of the steps. She loved automata theory, a difficult topic loathed by many university-level computer science majors. I knew that she was special and I worried that the courses that the high school offered would be too elementary or too slowly paced for her. She and her friend M. liked to pretend that they could beam thoughts at me; whenever they felt that it was time to go out for a break, they subtlely each put their index fingers to their temples in an image of telepathy. I seldom noticed this, and then when I would call a break a few minutes later K. and M. would burst out in laughter.
K. was at Princeton when she killed herself. I don't know how she did it. I was curious but I didn't ask. It shouldn't matter, I thought, the end was the same. K. was the sort of person who would have done it with pills. Looking over the class picture and the evaluation that I'd written for her was eery. I hadn't been in touch with her for a few years and I wondered what could have gone so terribly wrong.
T. was a lot like K. I never did have a chance to teach T.--she took the course while I was teaching on a different campus. But that didn't matter so much, because she and I liked to hang around with the same group of people. T. didn't just hang around, though, she drove the group. Her mouth was often struggling to keep up with the speed of her thoughts. In retrospect, I can wonder: were there times when her thoughts were unable to keep up with themselves? We survivors, lucky or unlucky, have been left with a difficult task, to piece together events and motivations, to form an image that coheres. This is the job of a storyteller, someone who leaves off living for a while in order to stand outside of life and to contemplate it. We agree on several points:
(0) T. was the person for whom the word `grin' was invented. When she conceived an idea, the grin appeared. And by the time the grin disappeared, the idea would have become reality, or it would have at least been well on its way to implementation, with a hundred consequences mapped out and considered.
(1) T. was exuberant. The most visible outward mark of this was that damn orange shirt. People she hardly knew would come up to her and ask her to turn the volume down. The shirt defies words. To be in the same room with it for any length of time one needed sunglasses.
(2) Despite all this, T. was inexplicably sad, though she usually did a good job of masking it, an effort up to her usual, exacting standards. On those occasions when she couldn't hide it, she remained impenetrable. Whatever was bothering her wasn't permitted to become a subject of discussion. On the last night of the summer session this past year, with everyone about to leave the next day, I found her in a darkened corner of a walkway, huddled against one of the college's brick walls, sobbing. What would you have done? What can you do, when you see a human being in pain, other than to ask what's wrong? Perhaps if I'd been more persistent, if I'd taken the time to become closer to her and to obtain passage into her world, I might have got an answer. But this was T., and knew that it'd almost be easier to tear down that brick wall she was leaning on than to penetrate her defenses.
(3) T. was gentle with everyone except herself.
My own brush with suicide came in the autumn of 1990. It seems almost trite to say now, but I'd finished university and didn't know what to do with myself. I'd been so eager to demonstrate my capabilities that I'd rushed all my projects to their conclusions. Now I was out of projects.
My computer science research had been the first casualty. I had become a special case in Cornell's computer science department. When I first arrived there I'd been one of only two undergraduates doing research. I accumulated privileges--an office, my own computer, a mailbox, access to the department lounge--and I didn't understand how to use these privileges properly. It wasn't that I was trying to flaunt them or to abuse them. Instead, yet again, I was unable to make sense of the unwritten and unspoken rules and restrictions. I was told that I could work in a certain place, and I covered the wall there with comics and clippings, and instead of asking me to take them down people gave me dirty looks that I didn't associate with anything. I was given an office, and lived in it until I was told explicitly that I couldn't sleep there. Once when I was in between apartments I used a corner of the lounge for storage. All these transgressions were interpreted as effrontery, but in fact they represented only cluelessness. All of it was made worse by the fact that I rarely asked for these accoutrements; they simply were thrust upon me with the tacit assumption that I knew all about the petty but rigid social conventions that governed them. I was like an ignorant dog being poisoned by chocolate.
On top of the guilt that I felt at this inability to get along with people lay the shame that I felt at being such a dunce. It wasn't that I was particularly slow at abstract mathematics so much as it was that all the people around me were particularly quick. Over a casual lunch, they could solve problems that I could hardly even discuss. I knew that I was an impostor and that it was only a matter of time before I'd be shown up. So I got out of it before anyone had a chance to unmask me. I quit computer science and got a job in a kitchen.
Literature was the second casualty. I wrote a couple books in college. Neither of them ended up being expressed as well as it might have been. The first addressed the unity of science and literature, the ways in which modernity in each reflected a corresponding zeitgeist in the other. It was a true idea but presented a bit facilely and supported somewhat arbitrarily. This book made the rounds of publishers until at last the director of the summer school where I teach wropte a letter of introduction for me to the editor at a small press upstate. The editor accepted the book, sat on it for two and a half years, and then screwed up all the marketing.
Meanwhile, I proceeded with my novel. I hadn't understood at the outset that this thing that I was writing was a novel. But all the stories and sketches that I'd been producing contained the same characters, albeit with different names and circumstances, and I came to understand that all I'd been doing was introducing the same story over and over again, altering only the nonessentials. I was still finishing this when university dropped out from under me.
I had this idea that I'd escape definition, escape being a product or property of a government or a social system. I thought because of my English mother and because of the common language that I'd be at least as home there as I'd been all along in the United States--which was, I felt, not much. I could hardly have been more naïve.
My first goal had been to get a job. I'd had enough trouble with unspoken social scripts in American culture. And if I'd been an alien in America, then, like James Baldwin in Paris, I was doubly an alien in London. American society dispenses rewards for dogged persistence, but the English see no reason to encourage a person who's bashing themselves against an unyielding wall. On the contrary, English society dispenses rewards for knowing one's place. When an American wants you to go away, he'll tell you very directly to push off. This happens all the time in New York. You find it in much the same manner even in Los Angeles, although in that latter, Western city New York's simple `Go away!' might be euphemised into `Sorry; have a nice day!' But when an Englishman wants you to go away, he says he'll take your particulars and ring you back later. And so I waited by the telephone, with this hollow promise ringing in my ears, failing to understand that I'd been given the brush-off. With the passage of time, the fact of my inefficacy began to sink in, and I began to understand how my mother must have felt, operating as an alien in what seemed superficially, linguistically, her own culture, but which was actually a terribly foreign and unforgiving place. When I understood this I began to long for my mother, whom earlier I'd tried so hard to deny.
When at last I did manage to land a job, it was as a part-time clerk in the Imperial College Computer Shop. The place was horrid. The people were nice enough but they were as trapped by circumstance as I. The boss had been in this for untold years and was nearing retirement. The salesmen had been at university, had come to London to find work that matched their station, and were still getting over the astonishment at not being carried along in niches as they'd been all through school. The office girls had come from Ireland and had gravitated toward each other in this foreign city.
European students smoke like chimneys, and all the years of nicotine had seeped into the wooden panelling that lined the corridors. The stench of it hit as soon as I walked in the door. The front desk was attended by an old man who directed visitors to offices and departments and accepted deliveries. I walked by him every morning, out of the dankness of the subway from the South Kensington tube station with its stale urine and abject buskers. I took the lift up one floor, and plodded down the corridor. Light, what light there was in this cloudy English autumn, had to fight its way into this place through windows tainted by London's sooty air. (It was so bad that when I'd blow my nose after being out in the streets, the tissue would come away blackened.) At a bend in the hallway, a photo composite hung on a nail that someone had pounded into the nicotinic panelling. Most of the people who worked in this place were in it, the same, modulo the dark hair, the wide collars, and a few medallions. The photographs were faded black and white. At work, I sold disks to one-track engineering students and thought of how I'd ended up here.
What had it all been for? In the tube I'd stand at the edge of the platform as the train approached. Sometimes the driver would blow the horn at me, nervously, or so I imagined, and I'd feel a temporary thrill of power. After the front of the train passed, I'd lean into its path, so that the wall of each approaching car slammed against me, brusing me. The pain was but a fraction of the punishment that I imagined was due me. Only two factors held me back: the fear of screwing it up (like I'd screwed up everything else) and suffering, and the guilt at causing my family to suffer. I had never understood their unconditional devotion to me. From my point of view, it seemed as if they must have been desperate to believe that I was worth something, when in fact, as only I seemed to know, I wasn't. When I was in kindergarten one of the mandatory activities was painting. I never knew what to paint, because I knew that whatever the object I chose, my representation of it couldn't come close to the original. So, for lack of anything else, I painted colour charts. My mother praised me for these plodding constructions, and put them up on the refrigerator door.
Not long after I threw in the towel and returned from England, I lost the teaching job that I'd had every summer for the past several years. This is how it happened. I was determined not to see the whole European escapade reduced to a total failure. So with my friend H., who was at Sussex in an exchange programme, I took a railway trip through the Continent. I've written about this before so I won't belabour it, but suffice it to say that we learnt that all cities are the same and that although one may be carried across great geographical distances, public conveyances cannot remove their passengers from angst, depression, guilt, or any others of those suicidal clichés.
We passed through centuries-old cathedrals and churches, and the words `Honour thy father and thy mother' kept echoing in my brain. My father had always talked about visiting the old country with me. I called him up, after H. left for the spring term in Sussex, and he met me in Rome. I stood with my father in the small olive plantation that my grandfather had owned briefly. It had since become an orange plantation. My grandfather had risked it, and lost it, as collateral on a friend's loan. He'd understood something that I'd refused to understand. All these people plied me with food and conversation, simply because I was a relative. It was my mother all over again, her placing my dismal artwork on the refrigerator door simply because it was mine. I couldn't connect with these people, couldn't accept their openness, and I left as empty as I'd arrived. Then, with the book still languishing in the offices of my unresponsive publisher and my life in a shambles, I got into an argument with my employer. So the job was gone, too. Three empty years passed before I managed to get it back.
After reading G.'s email about T., I go home and phone G., and it's at this juncture that all of this begins. We make plans to attend the memorial service. The next day, I get invited to a party. `Write your own suicide note!' says the invitation. `We'll pick one to read and guess whose it is.' I'm busy reading Janet Hobhouse, who writes herself out of death but dies before she can finish. I think of Sartre's father, dead and undead, and my father, who was dead to me for so long.
I'm starting to understand this idea of sacrifice, how one person can die to atone for the mistakes or the shortcomings of another, to give that flawed survivor a kick in the rear end and to say look, this is how it is, this is what we can't avoid and this is how we deal with it. If I could trade myself for T., I would, not because I'm selfless, but because dying for something worthwhile is so much easier than figuring out how to live. I hate to see beautiful things destroyed, and at least if I were the one slated for destruction I wouldn't have to see it.
Have you ever found a photograph, torn and windblown in the anonymity of a gutter somewhere? It's a picture of a family, or a lover. Someone's lost it. It's been sucked out a window on a muggy summer day, or dropped from numb, gloved fingers on a winter morning. That photograph, stained and languishing, that's death, winking at you. I used to think the proper response would be `Fuck you.' Now I'm trying to reach out and touch death's hand, and to say to death, `Not today.'