“Thanks, no thanks,” I yelled back when I was done. The chassis of the old Mercedes was almost rubbing against the tires. There wasn’t room for another page. In a sweaty and exhausted mess, I went upstairs for the last time and asked through gasps, “You wouldn’t know where Helmsley is now, would you?”
“You mean his body?”
“Right.”
She gave me instructions to a funeral home. “Tonight’s the last night of the wake, though, and if you see his cousin Elsa there, tell her I want the china teacups.”
“China teacups, fine,” I replied and was about to run out, but stopped short when 1 saw her poking on the couch. I had slept on that hard old couch endless nights. Mercifully 1 grabbed a steak knife in the kitchen, elbowed the old lady to one side, and slit open the upholstery, liberating those overwound springs.
“Hell’s bells, what’d you do that for!” she screamed.
“Believe me I was doing both you and the couch a favor.” I just couldn’t bear to think of my old couch in one of their tacky Queens basement-living rooms with stucco walls and aluminum siding.
The Malio Family Funeral Home was handling the interment. As I pulled the car to the curb, I was amazed to see such a large group of mourners. They were all dressed loudly in black and they loudly crowded outside together. I parked in front of a hydrant and went in. There were three galleries for bereavement, and only when I entered Helmsley’s display room did I realize that those strangers were only strangers.
In an adjacent room was laid out the dead body of some matriarchal grandmother; the wailing group hovering around were both direct and derivative members of her lecherous hatch. A closed coffin in an empty room was Helmsley’s final salute. People avoided me. I heard someone mumble, “You don’t go to a wake dressed like that!”
I went into his vacant room and pulled the door shut behind me. Helmsley wouldn’t have cared about the filthy clothes, or the streaks of peroxide in my hair. I sat in the front chair that was closest to his box. As I listened to the rumble outside, I grew increasingly angry that no one else had come. They had mentioned his death on TV His academic pals could have found out where he was. The crowd outside should’ve been Helmsley’s crowd. No one had come to see him off, not even that slut Angela, who probably compelled his suicide. What had happened? I would’ve given anything to know. I didn’t just want an account of the events leading up to him jumping off the bridge, but what he saw in her; why did he allow himself to be degraded by her? He was as handsome and intelligent and amusing and considerate as anyone I ever met. How could a lifetime of study and creation have come to such a forlorn end? I rose and paced back and forth in front of the closed lid.
All he asked me to do that early morning was to leave the house, just for a couple of hours, and I acted no better than his beast-lover, making it an issue of pride. After all the patience that I had demanded of him over the years, I suffered that I hadn’t returned any.
Perhaps out of a compulsion to punish myself, but I think out of a macabre need for forgiveness, I opened Helmsley’s casket. He was badly mangled, the bone of his right forearm was ledging out of the side, just below the skin.
Autopsy sutures that crisscrossed his face and body were thick and unconcealed. I ran my hand through his flaxen, still alive hair and I stared into his bluish face. Until there was a knock at the door, I didn’t realize that time was passing. I quickly shut Helmsley’s lid and threw open the door. A tall lanky man in a cheap dark suit, curly hair, and silly porkchop sideburns entered. He looked like a portrait Helmsley had of the poet Pushkin.
“You knew Helmsley?” I asked slowly, assuming, based upon his appearance, that he spoke a foreign language.
“No, I’m sorry, but the home is closing.”
I thanked him and left. The mob of a family outside was gone. The Mercedes had a ticket on the windshield. Slowly I drove back to Glenn’s house and carefully parked the Mercedes in her garage. After locking the garage door, I went back upstairs into the living room. I had forgotten to turn off the TV, so I used one of the two remotes to lower the volume. Then I quickly downed a double bourbon. About two minutes later, Glenn entered wearing a nightgown, and stretching her arms out, she declared, “I’ve had a refreshing nap.”
“A refreshing nap?” I murmured, still picturing Helmsley drained of life, and locked in sleep. Her remark seemed to be a freakish contradiction. I started laughing, uncontrollably laughing at what she said. All that had occurred in the short period of her nap. She stood there and looked at me as if I were crazy. If I tried to explain all that had just happened she would have no doubt about my insanity. Instead, I pointed to the TV “I’m sorry. I just watched ‘The Odd Couple.’ Boy, is that Felix unpredictable.”
She had a drink and felt refreshed and talked about her boyfriend and how she was adjusting to the break up. So I filled my glass and kept up a polite expression.
“…as if my wings were clipped…you know, so what now? Well I’m not sure myself, just all the little things that I’ve always wanted to do, but he prevented me from doing. All I really know is I have this sudden sense of being free!”
She rambled on itemizing all the grievances and why she felt good about the break up. I just drank more and smiled more and nodded more. While she talked, I envisioned Helmsley in that closed book of a coffin in a dark room. As I got drunker, I thought more about the meaning of death. In this instance, most poignantly, it meant a potential unrealized. Reams of blank pages, unfilled. He truly intended to dedicate his life to writing. All the plays, the novels, the essays, the short stories, all those philosophical tracts that he would pretentiously talk about or those he actually had written: now, only I would know. He would have found life unbearable if he had known that he was going to die with virtually none of his plans achieved. It retroactively drained the meaning from his life; so why would he kill himself?
Suddenly I heard Glenn again. “The thing about my relationship with him was that I was in constant admiration of him. I used his language, I looked at things with his values, but I realize now it’s because I was essentially intimidated by him deep down. That’s why I really thank God that I’ve broken up with him, because now for the first time I can see what it is being myself…”
“But he gave you so much,” I replied, applying her statement to my relationship with Helmsley, “can you really just forget about him like that?”
“He took so much more,” she replied. “He was utterly demanding and selfish.” I couldn’t follow her here, because Helmsley asked for so little. It was as if we were passing on crisscrossing escalators, hers ascending and mine descending.
Soon we watched some TV and played a board game. Eventually after some persuasion on my part, and reluctance on hers, she told me a little about her first marriage: they were both too young. There seemed to be something more she kept restraining herself from saying, and I was too stretched out of shape to induce her any further. After a late night snack, we went to bed.
I lay next to her and quietly she slid under the sheet and tried to start up the engine. The combination of booze and dead Helmsley was too much. I just couldn’t solidify. But she only reacted with greater determination. I wanted to tell her, but, like her, I too was restraining myself from getting emotionally entangled. Finally I tugged her off and told her that I just wasn’t up to it, too much bourbon. She felt the chill, rolled over, and went to sleep.
I awoke the next morning in a sweat. I had dreamt that Helmsley had died, and so he had. Glenn wasn’t lying next to me. I found a note on the night table, it read: