CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
Louder and Clearer All the
Time
“Bro, it is all a
pack of shit,” Chase said when he saw me walk into the
bar.
Shanahan’s was on the
other side of the bridge, frequented primarily by underage
drinkers. I drove past it during my first trip back to Amber, a
little more than a year after Chase died. By then, someone had
converted it into a day spa after the cops finally busted the bar’s
owners. But on this night, it was concussive music, unsmiling
patrons, and a young man sitting at a table by himself, wielding
his beer bottle like a gavel.
“What’s a pack of
shit?” I said as I approached.
“It all is,” Chase said, slamming his bottle down and
causing an eruption of beer to spatter the tabletop.
This was clearly not
his first drink. Perhaps not even his first bar. The only obvious
indication one ever had that Chase was drunk was the intensity in
his eyes. While the expressions of most people glazed over as they
became inebriated, Chase’s became fiercer, more laserlike. And his
gaze was burning hotter tonight than I’d ever seen it
before.
He’d called me an
hour before and told me to meet him here. Shanahan’s meant that
Iris wouldn’t be there and I assumed that at least a couple of his
lacrosse teammates would be around.
“Why are you sitting
here by yourself?” I said.
He pointed to a
redheaded woman sitting at the bar. “Because Ms. Proud Nipples
wouldn’t come to join me, if you can believe that.”
I looked over at the
woman talking to the bartender and then cast a sideways glance at
Chase. “Where are the Upchuck Brothers?”
“Last time I saw them
they were drooling on each other and learning to count to
three.”
“You’re done with
your lacrosse posse?”
“I’m done with my
posse. I’m done with lacrosse. Done.”
“It’ll be different
in college.”
“Whatever you say,
Bro. What are you drinking?”
I went to the bar to
get a beer for me and another one for Chase. When I turned back
toward our table, he was scanning the crowd and laughing, though I
couldn’t see what he was laughing at. He took a huge pull from the
bottle when I handed it to him.
“They’re infants,” he
said.
“Who
are?”
“The Upchuck
Brothers, as you so aptly named them.”
“I could have told
you that.”
“Mewling little
babies.”
“Coulda told you
that, too.”
He put his beer down
and leaned toward me. “I guess some of us take longer to catch up,
huh?” There was even more wattage in his stare tonight than usual
when he was wasted. I’d been noticing some changes since the late
winter, but tonight seemed to mark a quantum jump.
“Vance couldn’t make
it tonight.”
“Who’s
Vance?”
“A really good friend
of mine.”
“A really good friend
who I’ve never met?”
“Your specific
densities don’t match, Bro.”
“Am I heavier or
lighter?”
“Not the point.” He
looked off toward the crowd again and started bobbing his head to
the omnipresent Nirvana song. I took a drink from my beer and
watched the redhead hug and kiss a man who she’d obviously been
waiting for.
“Where’s Iris
tonight?” I asked.
His gaze snapped back
toward me and he finished his beer before speaking. “Playing with
her Barbie dolls, I think.”
“You mean she wasn’t
up for an evening of sophisticated entertainment such as
this?”
“Whatever. Get me
another beer.”
“Your legs aren’t
working?”
He threw both palms
on the table and stood up, walking away, saying, “Asshole.” He took
a few steps toward the bar and then turned back to me. “She isn’t
everything you think she is, you know,” he said, leaning down
toward me.
“What are you talking
about?”
“You fucking idolize
her. You think I don’t know that? She’s become the standard by
which all women must be measured in your eyes.”
This observation
stunned me and I tried to deflect it. “I think the woman you love
is great. I highly approve. Most brothers would see that as a good
thing.”
He sat back down
without getting his drink. “It would be a good thing if it were
anywhere near the truth.”
“Maybe we should talk
about this some other time.”
“This is a good time
to talk about it.”
“What are we talking
about? I’m a little lost on that point.”
“I want to shatter
your illusions, Bro. Illusions are always a bad thing. Iris is
about as far from perfection as a leper is from being a
supermodel.”
“That explains why
you’ve been dating her for nearly a year.”
“Was dating her for nearly a year.”
“You broke up with
her again?”
He pulled back from
his chair and moved quickly toward the bar. He came back with a
beer for both of us, though the one I’d been drinking was less than
half empty.
“She doesn’t know it
yet.”
“Are you trying it
out on me first?”
He laughed. “Yeah,
that’s what I’m doing.”
“Do you want my
advice?”
He took a long drink.
“I don’t think so.”
“Sleep it off, Chase.
Sleep it off for a couple of days if you have to. Sleep it off in a
rubber room if you have to. You don’t want to split up with
Iris.”
“Who are you, fucking
Cupid? Iris is no different from everyone and everything on this
planet, Bro. She’s weak, she’s deluded, and she’s seriously screwed
up. This is the way the machine works. When we’re young, we think
we’re going somewhere, but we’re really on a huge conveyor belt
being fed into the machine. It grinds us up and molds us into
McPeople – except for the ones who just get exiled to
Zombieville.”
“Do you hear anything
that you’re saying?”
“Loud and clear, Bro.
Louder and clearer all the time.”
He got up to go back
to the bar, even though his own bottle still had beer in it.
Something in his movements suggested to me for the first time that
there might be something other than beer running through his
system. I knew that Chase had played with drugs before. We’d even
smoked pot together a couple of times. Now I wondered if he was
experimenting with something new. I told myself to talk to him
about it in the morning (or the afternoon, assuming he was going to
need a little extra time to recover from this
evening).
“She cheats,” he said
behind me as he returned. I turned toward him quickly, but he
continued to his seat.
“She cheated on
you?”
“She cheats,” he said
definitively.
“Are you telling me
that she’s gotten involved with someone else?”
“I’m telling you that
she cheats at the game.”
“What
game?”
Chase leaned toward
me. I now knew definitively that there was something in his eyes
other than alcohol. “The game of life, Bro.”
“What did you do,
listen to too many Jim Morrison records today? Are you saying that
Iris has another boyfriend?”
“Who the fuck knows?
I’m done.”
“You’re just gonna
walk away from Iris.”
“I’ve already walked
away.”
“This makes sense to
you?”
“Welcome to the
machine, Bro.”
“What the hell is
with you lately? Slurred rants, paranoid speeches, irrational
accusations. Where have you gone?”
“I’m right here,
Bro.”
“I don’t think so.
Why’d you even call me to meet you here?”
“I thought we’d party
like it’s 1999.”
“Well, I’m having a
great time so far.”
“Then leave if you
don’t like it.” He finished the beer in one of his bottles and
slammed it on the table. “I don’t need you, either.”
I stood up to go. I
wanted to hit him. “I hope you’re gonna get over whatever this shit
is that you’re doing in the near future.”
He took a long drink
on the next bottle and said to me, “I’m working on
it.”
“Work faster,” I said
as I turned away.
“Knew I could count
on you, Bro,” he said, calling out into the thrashing guitars. I
nearly turned heel and grabbed him by the shoulders, reminding him
that he had always been able to count on me, that there had never
been a single day when I wouldn’t have given him everything I had,
and that I would never accept his trivializing this. But then I
reminded myself how wasted he was and how disturbed he’d made me,
and I knew nothing good would come of it.
On the drive home, I
replayed the conversation in my head a dozen times, trying to
figure out if there was substance in anything he’d said. It wasn’t
the first time he’d been this obtuse, but it was the first time I
hadn’t been able to smack him out of it. I rehearsed the talk I’d
have with him the next afternoon, when I’d let him know that he’d
gone too far.
That, too, had always
worked in the past.
It was something like
playing a game of telephone with myself. For two hours, I reran, in
sequence, my conversation with the reporter, my conversation with
the police officer, and the final one I had with Chase. Each time I
did so, the dialogue would change subtly, filling in a line that
I’d forgotten or chose now subconsciously to add to offer a better
explanation.
No music, no muffins,
and no coffee. Just two hours of insistent memory.
Why was I suddenly so
willing to consider the possibility that Chase had killed himself?
If it made any sense at all, why couldn’t I have at least conceived
the thought before today? Did this explain everything or simply
allow me to deflect some of my own sense of
culpability?
And if it was in any
way conceivable that Chase could have intended to kill himself that
night, how was it conceivable? How
could he possibly have been so close to a decision like that
without my having any notion? And why would he ever think that a
decision like that made sense when he could have gotten his
frustrations out in any number of ways with me?
It was late afternoon
when I arrived in Lenox. I drove directly to the Ensemble and
offered no more than an impolite wave to the guy at the front desk
and a half smile to Iris’ friend Melanie as I walked to Iris’
office. There were three people in there with her when I arrived.
She looked up and her expression offered a combination of surprise
and disappointment. I can only imagine what my own expression
suggested.
“I have to talk to
you,” I said.
“I’ll need a few
minutes,” she said, nodding toward the others in the
office.
“It would be really
good if we could do this now.”
Her brow furrowed
and, for a moment, I thought she was going to ask me to leave. But
then she rose up from her desk and excused herself, telling the
others to continue the meeting without her. She walked up to me and
then past me and we went outside.
“There was actually
some important stuff going on in there,” she said as we walked the
grounds toward the theater.
“Did you ever think
about the possibility that Chase might have killed himself?” I said
abruptly.
She stopped and
turned toward me, her face folding in on itself. “Tell me you’re
not doing this.”
“Somebody came into
the store today.”
“Tell me you’re not
revising history in an effort to turn me around.”
“Somebody came into the store today.”
“Who came into the
store today?”
“A reporter for the
Advisor. He was looking for my father.
He was doing a follow-up story on the tenth anniversary of Chase’s
suicide.”
“That’s just
ridiculous. Why would you take somebody like that seriously for
even a second?”
“I didn’t take him
seriously at all. Until he mentioned something about the police
report. I went down to the station myself and talked to a cop about
it. There are things in the report that are inconsistent with an
accident.”
“That’s bullshit,”
she said as she walked away from me and toward the
barn.
“It’s
speculation.”
“Which is just
another word for bullshit. Some guy comes by and whispers the word
‘suicide’ and you’re willing to completely change everything you
know about the most alive person I’ve ever met?”
“I screamed at the
guy. I threw him out of the store. I was borderline disrespectful
to the cop. But I couldn’t stop thinking back to that last night
and wondering if I was just too close to see the signs. They say
that kind of thing happens all the time.”
“There were no
signs,” Iris said as she threw open one of the barn doors and
walked backstage. She found a chair, swung it around, and straddled
it. “Is this really how you react when you’re backed into a corner,
Hugh?”
“What are you talking
about?” I said, finding another chair and facing her.
“You think you’re
losing me so you concoct some speculation to blacken my
memory.”
“You think I’m making
this up?”
“I think you’re using
it. Give me a break, Hugh. We would have known.”
“How would we have
known? You’re not willing to allow for one second that we might
have been so caught up in what we believed Chase to be that we
couldn’t see what he was becoming?”
“I considered it, I
rejected it. Instantaneously, because it is beneath serious
consideration. Why the hell can’t you do the same?”
Iris’ facial muscles
were taut and her body language was obscene. As it turned out, I
didn’t want to see every one of her expressions. I considered the
very real possibility that this could be our last
conversation.
“What do you remember
about Chase’s eyes?”
Iris’ shoulders
relaxed slightly. For the first time since we started speaking, she
didn’t respond immediately.
“His eyes were the
most beautiful part of him. The only vulnerable part.”
“Did they seem
different toward the end?”
“I have no idea what
you’re talking about.”
“You told me yourself
that you had a huge argument with him that day. What were his eyes
like?”
She closed her eyes
and shook her head. “Chase could always get angry. You know
that.”
“But did you see
something in his eyes that day? Maybe something you’d been seeing
more frequently over the preceding months?”
“I don’t think
so.”
I leaned forward in
my chair. “What kinds of drugs was Chase taking?”
Iris’ gaze flicked up
at me. “Other than alcohol, none that I know of.”
“Well even I know he
was doing more than that. I know he smoked some pot, but I’m
thinking there might have been something that would have made him
edgier. Coke?”
“Why?”
“Do you think it’s
possible?”
“Anything is
possible. But why?”
“If he tried it, he
would have liked it. You have to admit, it would be the kind of
drug that Chase could get excited about.”
Iris put her forehead
on the back of the chair. “He was snapping more and it was taking
him longer to recover from it.” She lifted her head up and, for the
first time that afternoon, she didn’t seem furious at me. “I was
afraid to tell him about the baby. I didn’t mention this to you
earlier, but it actually took me three days to get up the nerve to
break the news to him.”
I didn’t say anything
right away. When I did, my voice was weak. “What was the last thing
he said to you that afternoon?”
Iris put her head
back down on the chair for maybe a half a minute before she finally
looked up at me again. “Just before he got in the car, he said,
‘this isn’t the way this is gonna go.’ Then he just backed out of
the driveway. He shouted something else to me, but I couldn’t make
it out.”
Again, I didn’t say
anything. I wanted to give Iris time to process this conversation.
I needed some time myself.
“Did you know he
failed the lacrosse tryouts at Dartmouth?” she said.
“He didn’t tell me
that.”
“He found out a few
days before he died. I can’t believe he didn’t say anything to you.
It was probably the first time in his life he didn’t get what he
wanted.”
“It might have
been.”
She shook her head
sharply. “No one kills himself because he didn’t make the lacrosse
team, Hugh.”
“Or because his
girlfriend tells him that she’s pregnant and wants to keep the
baby. Or because his brother refuses to sympathize with his
suddenly paranoid worldview. Or because he started using way more
of a recreational drug than he should be using.”
“You don’t really
believe that Chase committed suicide, do you?”
I looked into Iris’
eyes. I saw her the way he must have seen her hundreds of times
over their year together. And in that moment, the vision of the
brother I’d always known reflected back to me.
“It wasn’t Chase,” I
said.
Iris reached out for
my hand, placed it on the back on the chair, and laid her forehead
down on it. We stayed that way for several minutes.
“I have no interest
in going back into that meeting,” she said.
“I’ll make you
dinner.”
“I’m not sure I have
any interest in eating, either.”
“Let’s go to the
farmers’ market. We’ll shop for dinner, even if we don’t eat
dinner. It’ll give us something to do.”
She leaned her cheek
against my hand. “I’m incredibly tired all of a sudden.” She half
smiled. “I was actually getting a lot done before you showed
up.”
We sleepwalked
through the farmers’ market, buying much too much to eat, even if
we had the appetite to eat at all. It was the first time in more
than a month that Iris and I made our way through this market
without her arm at some point looping around mine. It was hard to
know what this meant. Both of us had had Chase’s death foisted upon
us again today. And in some ways, it was like it was happening for
the first time. Regardless of what we believed happened that night,
we were forced to rethink it, to see Chase differently if only to
try on the possibility that he might have been someone other than
who we believed him to be.
In the end, we ate
little and talked less. We drank a bottle of wine and opened a
second all the while keeping the conversation to such a cursory
level that an observer might consider us casual companions or a
couple that had been together too long and had already said
everything they were going to say. This was the second time in a
row that Iris and I had been like this together and my first
thought was that the reasons for it were vastly different on the
two occasions. But then I realized that of course they weren’t at
all, that perhaps the only thing that could put silence between us
had done so in a definitive way. Though the wine had relaxed me,
for the first time all day, the sense of relaxation in itself made
me feel uncomfortable. At the point at which the only reasonable
thing to do was to move in some direction, the simple act of
staying still was upsetting.
We’d moved to the
couch. Iris had her feet tucked up under her legs and she leaned
against the arm opposite from me. We drank more wine and talked
idly. Finally, I decided that I needed to break away from
this.
“I should get going,”
I said, standing.
“You’re not staying?”
she said, her voice cracking slightly.
I was surprised that
she asked. “I hadn’t thought about it.”
“You’ve had a lot to
drink. It’s late for you to be driving back to Amber.
Stay.”
“Are you sure? I can
handle the drive back.”
“It’s okay.” She held
me with her eyes. She was the only person I’d ever known who could
do that. Not even Chase could do that. “I want you
to.”
I nodded. “I think
I’m going to go to bed, then. It’s been a full day.”
She pulled her feet
out from under her and stretched out on the couch. “I’m going to
stay up a little longer and finish this glass. I’ll see you in the
morning.”
“Good night,” I said
and turned toward the room I’d come to think of as mine but never
would again.
“Anything’s possible,
Hugh,” she said as I walked away. I turned back to her. “Anything’s
possible,” she said again.
“Is it?”
“I think it might
be.”
I wasn’t sure what
else to say. I wasn’t sure there was anything I could say.
Something told me that she wasn’t expecting a response. I turned
and went to bed.
I didn’t think I’d
fall asleep as easily as I did. And I have no idea how long I’d
been asleep when Iris slid into bed beside me. I turned to her and
she kissed my forehead.
“Just hold me, okay?”
she said.
I moved my arms
around her and she nuzzled her head under my chin.
“Is this all right
for you?” she asked.
“Of course it is.”
She moved her head a little further down my chest and stayed that
way until I fell asleep.
When I awoke, the
morning light had just begun to filter into the room. Iris was
facing away from me, but my arms were still around her. Her profile
in sleep was as soft and undisturbed as any I’d ever seen and I
wished for the power to will it that way for all time. No matter
what Iris had gone to sleep thinking, she had found something
during the night to give her spirit some rest.
I didn’t want to
awaken her, though I knew, regardless of the hour, that I wouldn’t
be getting back to sleep myself. I placed a delicate kiss on her
T-shirted shoulder and moved my arm out from under her. As I did,
she stirred and reached her arm out to touch my leg. I put my hand
over hers and she brought it back to her lips to kiss it and then
wrap it back around herself. I thought she wanted me to go back to
sleep with her and I settled my body next to hers. But when I did,
she turned to me, our faces no more than an inch apart. Her eyes
were wide open, but dreamy, and I wasn’t entirely sure she was
actually awake until she pulled my head toward her and kissed me
deeply. She pulled back ever so slightly and kissed me
again.
Nothing else mattered
at this point – not anything or anyone between us. I knew right at
that moment that it was impossible for me not to respond to her.
That there would never be a time in my life when I wouldn’t want
her instantly if she showed any sign of wanting me.
My head was swimming.
Desire on so many different levels filled me to the point where I
felt I could drown the entire room with my longing. And when Iris
propped herself up on one arm, caressed my face, and looked at me
as though she was seeing me for the very first time, I lost all
sense of control.
I had never before
abandoned myself so completely. My senses expanded into a
previously unmarked range as every touch, every sound, every sight
impressed itself upon me with a bracing newness. And with every
moment that passed – every moment in which this didn’t end – I
found myself surrendering more and more completely to the wonder of
it. I’d imagined making love to Iris on numerous occasions, but I
didn’t have the sensual vocabulary to envision it this way. In
every fantasy I’d ever had of us, she had gifted me with herself.
I’d never conceived of what it could be like if she was actually
giving herself to me, until now.
For a long time
afterward – it might have been hours – we lay in bed kissing,
stroking each other’s hair. I certainly wasn’t anxious to let her
go, to let this moment go, though for the very first time when I
was with her in any way, I didn’t worry that this was a temporary
thing. In the moments before we started making love, I saw that I
wasn’t going to have to think that way again.
“Can you stay?” she
asked.
“I can definitely
stay.”
“What about the
store?”
“There’s an excellent
chance it’ll be there when I get back. What about the
Ensemble?”
“They rely on me too
much. They’ll have to take care of themselves for the
day.”
She smiled and kissed
me on the nose, then pulled me closer and kissed me softly on the
neck.
“It doesn’t matter
how this started. Right, Hugh?”
“I think it might.
But the thing that really matters is that it started at
all.”
She lay her face down
on my chest. “I’m never going to forget him, you
know.”
“I wouldn’t let you.
I couldn’t let you.”
She pulled back to
look at my face, studying it, imprinting it. “It’s us now,” she
said.
“It’s
us.”