Luster(47)

* * *



The second leading cause of death for veterans is suicide, and this is what Rebecca says to me when the next body is young. I bring out my paints, and Rebecca leaves the radio off. After, we both take a shower and we sit in the car with wet hair. We share a cigarette, and two miles from home, we get stranded on the side of the road. While she is on the phone with AAA, she takes a gun out of the glove compartment and asks me to put it in her bag. I turn it over in my hands and try to seem like I haven’t seen it before, though because she has seen my paintings, I know she must be aware of the extent to which I have cataloged everything in the house. As it was when I first held it, the gun is crude and prototypical, the barrel thick and square. I unload the cartridge and slide it into her bag. When the tow truck comes, we stand on the shoulder and her hair keeps blowing into her face.

“The painting of your mother is your best one,” she says, and I think of the Polaroid camera, of my excitement to capture an unwilling subject while she slept. I think of the photo and its swift revision of a sleeping woman into a dead one. Because in the last days of her life, my mother didn’t sleep. There were only prayer circles and essential oils in Tupperware, Seventh-day Adventists with handbells in the living room playing “Power in the Blood” as my father, who wanted to be watching the Yankees game, dabbed myrrh on my mother’s skinny brown wrists. The night before my mother killed herself, a deaconess coerced me into taking the F-sharp handbell, and during the segue from “Amazing Grace” to “How Great Thou Art,” I looked at my mom and saw clearly her desire to die. As some tone-deaf person began to tell the story of Lazarus, the World Series was playing on a TV upstairs. A ball disappeared in the Bronx and a dead man came forth, and the story always ends there, optimistically, in the middle, with a miracle so high-profile it becomes the catalyst for the Crucifixion, which is technically a fair exchange, man for man, though three days before his death Jesus visited Lazarus again and you have to wonder what he said, if he looked at what Lazarus had done in the meantime and began to question what he was dying for.



* * *



When Rebecca and I get home, we start to take off our shoes and we both have kind of a hard time of it, which at first seems coincidental until I feel my own effort to extend this task, and I see that she is doing the same, the silence in the house such a sobering shift from the side of the road that I feel embarrassed just to look at her. Before it becomes ridiculous, she steps out of her shoes. She busies herself with the mail, and I go over and take it out of her hands, though when I look down at it and see that it is Con Ed I don’t know what to do. I look at her face and see her irritation, but underneath it something curious and more fixed, and I wrap my arms around her and regret it until she reciprocates, which she takes her time to do, her body shockingly hard as she pulls me in and runs her fingers through my hair, all her ingredients—the formalin and ash and under-eye cream—clarified at close range.



* * *



The next afternoon, Eric and I check into a Days Inn. We are both tired and there is something wrong with his back. When we get up to our room, a NARA associate calls him and he spends a while talking about the integrity of a Polynesian tapestry, which apparently has been beset by archival moths. Initially, these phone calls didn’t bother me, but as they increase in frequency, I feel these are conversations I am meant to hear, which make apparent his busy-ness and my fortune, to be worthy of this interruption to his day. When he ends the call, we share a four-ounce bottle of gin and I walk on his back for a while and consider the blueprint for the rest of our stay. It occurs to me that maybe he is not interesting and is just older than me, someone who has blown through his budget for failure and landed on the other side with a 401(k). When we have sex it lasts so long that in the middle of it, when it has become less about feeling and more about ETA, we look at each other and call it. I get dressed and tell him I’m going to get some ice, but instead I go to the gym center and lift the barbell as many times as I can. When I return to the room, he is unresponsive on the bathroom floor.



* * *



I call reception and an associate comes up and says that it happens all the time. When I climb into the ambulance, I see the EMTs trying to parse our asymmetry. They ask how we are acquainted, what we were doing, and if there were any drugs involved. When they ask for his birthday, I take a stab in the dark. At the hospital, he starts to regain consciousness. I have no choice but to call Rebecca, and when Rebecca arrives, she won’t look at me. She asks the nurse a handful of questions in a jargon I don’t understand. We stand outside the curtain while Eric provides a urine sample, and the doctor comes around and says syncope is very common, and that because of Eric’s low heart rate, he should be careful about rising up too abruptly, which he can do by counting to five before he gets to his feet. After we return to the house, there is no doting. Eric gets out of the car, and Rebecca looks at me in the rearview and tells me that she is going straight to work.

“I didn’t mean for this to happen,” I say.

“Is there anything that you do mean?”

“This isn’t my fault.”

“The slogan of your generation.”

“Why does it have to be my generation? Why can’t it be me, specifically?”

“Because you are not specific,” she says. “All of this, it has been done.” She looks at me through the mirror and taps a cigarette out of the carton and into her hand. “This isn’t serving me anymore.”