All the Wrong Places: A Life Lost and Found (3 page)

We returned to being out of the loop with each other the moment I left on the long drive home. When I arrived back at school that January I briefly considered sending him a note of thanks, along with a photocopy of “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” but I figured he’d take it as a calculated insult, the high-minded snobbery of his college-boy brother, so I didn’t bother with the essay or the note. Emily called off their wedding not long afterward, a fact relayed to me by my mother, so our plan to gather as a family that summer dissolved.

The following autumn my telephone rang at home. It was Dan, calling to catch up. We hadn’t talked in most of a year. I was half drunk and in no mood for chitchat, so I lied and told him I was deeply invested in a
Monday Night Football
game. I told him I’d call him back at halftime and I hung up the phone. For reasons that remain obscure to me, although they surely had something to do with the words Martin Luther Coon Day, I never returned the call.

This would always remain the final exchange between us: his calling to connect, my turning away.

A few months later, on the day that turned out to be his last, I arrived in New York for a summer internship at the
Nation
magazine. I’d arranged the job in part so I could spend time with my girlfriend, who’d already graduated and left for New York ahead of me; it was also meant to be my springboard into an honest-to-god career, the last bit of polish on my résumé before I returned to Montana to finish my degree.

Marie and I had become involved after working on our college newspaper together. Amid late nights of intense work in a hothouse office, I’d fallen hard for her, in a way I hadn’t for anyone in my life to that point. She was a smart editor, a varsity tennis player with the legs that entailed, fluent in French, with a daring sense of fashion shaped by a semester in Paris. With her hair cut short and a cigarette in her hand, she looked like the brunette twin of the movie starlet Jean Seberg, another midwestern girl with an air of irrepressible sensuality. She called me
chéri
and undertook to expose me to the spiritual dimensions of gourmet coffee and good red wine, an education I can only think to call erotic in its devotion to sensory pleasures, to smells and tastes and textures, most of them a major revelation for a descendant of the first farmer of Canada. Some nights, early in our courtship, we’d sneak away from the paper for a couple of hours, fix dinner at her place, share a bottle of Bordeaux, then return to the office to meet our deadline. Our attraction, shy and halting at first, was the headiest thing I’d ever been a part of, the affections we’d hidden from our colleagues, the long hours engrossed in the creation of something real—an actual newspaper—and of course the moment long after midnight when our work was done and we were finally alone. We had dreamed of New York even then, walking across campus together in the quiet of snowy nights, and now the summer was ours, the city was ours, a possibility I’d been imagining for a very long time.

After Marie and I had reacquainted, I called my mother to let her know I was in New York safely. We talked for a bit about my travels—I’d come by car all the way from Montana—and then she told me, with an edge of concern in her voice, that she’d talked to Dan earlier in the day, around lunchtime. He’d told her that his new girlfriend had decided to break things off. Wendy was ten years older than him and hadn’t signed the papers on her divorce, and although her two kids liked Dan, they were confused by the sudden appearance of a man they couldn’t help viewing as their father’s replacement. Everything had happened too quickly between them, and she needed a break to put her life in order. My mother did her best to cheer him up, my father too, and when they hung up they figured he’d have a few bumpy weeks. Eventually he’d find someone else, someone more suitable, ideally unmarried and closer to his own age.

Still, my mother said, he sounded pretty down. It might cheer him up to hear from you.

I told her I’d call him.

I hung up the phone and thought,
Sure, I’ll call him—silly kid brother and his silly troubles with women. I’ll call him in a few days. Next week, maybe.
I’d been reunited with Marie for a couple of hours. We’d spent nine months apart, writing letters across the distance between us, and to find myself at last within reach of her touch made me want nothing else. Anything aside from that could wait.

The next morning I went to the offices of the magazine, thinking it was going to be my first day on the job, not having received the news that the interns’ start date had been moved back one day, unaware it would be more than a year before I’d return for my internship, by which time Marie would be gone for Paris again, our love but a memory. I spent an hour at the office, met some of the editors, grabbed a stack of back issues. In possession of a free afternoon I hadn’t expected to be free, I was at a loss for what to do with myself. The city seemed huge and half mad, a roiling carnival of commerce, an immense performance of human longing. I called Marie from a pay phone. We made a dinner plan, a celebration of our reunion. I walked all over Lower Manhattan, tuning in to the pace of street life, browsing amid the evocative, moldering-book smell of the Strand. I found an open bench in Union Square and unfolded a copy of the
Times
—my new hometown paper. Tears of happiness welled in my eyes as I sat there on that bench. Everything had come together, exactly as we’d planned it.

Late that afternoon, in the final minutes of my innocence, when he was already gone and I didn’t know it, I puttered around Marie’s apartment in Queens, listening to her Rickie Lee Jones albums, holding her clothes to my face, savoring the scent of her, delirious with longing. I was getting dressed for my first-ever dinner in Manhattan when the telephone rang.

I muted the Rickie Lee Jones. I picked up the phone. I knew from my father’s quavering voice that whatever he was about to tell me would change everything.

The known facts were these:

He’d spent the afternoon with friends, drinking.

He’d spoken to Wendy in the evening by phone.

He hadn’t shown up for work the next morning.

He’d died alone in his apartment.

He’d done the deed with a gun.

The week surrounding the burial was a maelstrom of tears and bewilderment and wild speculation about what had gone so wrong inside his head that he would choose to point a gun at it, and most of that time, mercifully, remains a fog in my memory. One moment stood out, though, a moment that would define my life in the years to come. It happened on the afternoon of the wake, when one of my uncles, in a moment of thoughtless candor, told me that if the family had been forced to choose ahead of time which of us was more likely to off himself, the odds would’ve favored me. At first I had no idea what to make of this extraordinary statement, except to wonder whether everyone’s sorrow might have been a little less intense, a little less violent, if the death had been mine. People said a lot of foolish things in the midst of their initial shock, but this one stayed with me: the idea that I’d bucked the odds and lived. In moments of self-pity, I allowed myself to wonder whether I’d failed the family by not performing to expectations. Viewed from a different angle, my uncle’s words offered up the rest of my life as an unexpected gift, an opportunity for the most radical improvisation. I could be whatever I wanted to be, as long as I didn’t end up another corpse in the casket with a hole in his head. Anything went. Anything was permissible, as long as I lived.

It soon became clear that the manner of his death had turned him into something of a cipher. People saw him one way or the other: sufferer or coward, victim or murderer. He either succumbed to outside forces or succumbed to the darkest impulse within. In the days after his death, when people’s explanations were forming and quickly hardening—little stories they thought they could live with—I often felt I was the only one who vacillated between the two extremes, pitying him one hour and hating him the next. Everyone else, it seemed, had chosen, or was clinging to a brave front of certainty. The gunshot was a mistaken impulse, the gunshot was a calculated rebuke. He slipped over the edge, he was pushed over the edge. He was broken by a battle with depression, he was broken by the sudden loss of love. He clung too tightly to other people, he didn’t know how to reach for help. The list of explanations was as long as the list of people who’d known him, and each seemed to me a simplification, perhaps even a lie.

I understood these accounts were attempts by those who loved him to soothe the pain of a sudden, inexplicable absence, but I took it as my duty to preserve some ambiguity, if for no other reason than to allow him an inner life of some complexity, resistant to easy answers and summary judgments. I hoped that time and patience would one day reward me with the truth but I was in no hurry to get there. The question for me was never,
Why did he kill himself?
He killed himself, I assumed, because his life became unbearable. The question, therefore, was why his life had become unbearable, and since I knew very little about his life at the end, and even less about his frame of mind, I couldn’t answer that question, and maybe never would. The proximate cause of his suicide—the breakup of an eight-month relationship—struck me as both too pat and maddeningly sketchy, a combination that led me to fixate on his final moments, improvising on the known facts, searching for a way into the mystery. I imagined his final hours again and again, long after a finer mind would have found peace or given up. I didn’t want to find peace. To have found peace, I thought, would have meant giving up my obsession with him, but that obsession had become the one thing that gave my life meaning.

The evening meals I shared with my parents that summer in Minnesota were funereal, as was only appropriate. To speak was to invite the possibility of invoking his name, and his name was just then unutterable, though he was always in our thoughts. In the beginning those thoughts focused on the last time we saw him, the last time we spoke to him; we hunted for clues we should have seen and didn’t, or we tried ourselves on the charge of failing to love him sufficiently, a trial that couldn’t help but end in a verdict of guilt. My sister, with whom I’d always been able to speak freely on any subject, was deep inside the drama that would result in a brief, failed marriage, and therefore unavailable for sibling heart-to-hearts. I knew better than to hope that my mother and father would look deep into each other’s souls, reaffirm their vows of fidelity in the face of tragedy, and draw me into the safe, warm bosom of their loving embrace. Never having been the kind of people who spoke freely—or even elliptically—about their innermost feelings, they weren’t about to start now, when the stakes were so much higher. My father soon devised a mantra—life was too short to dwell on a death he could not undo—that baffled me with what I took to be its refusal to feel a legitimate sadness; my mother’s devastation revealed itself wordlessly, with an expression of almost complete vacancy in her eyes, as if she’d gone somewhere in her mind from which she would never return. Their estrangement from each other’s experience of grief was too painful for me to contemplate it for more than a moment, so I turned away from them, turned inward—a strategy that became a habit, a habit that became a posture, a posture that solidified into an all-encompassing personality, that of a man shrouded in almost total self-regard.

The ambiguity I preserved in the story of his death was already on its way to becoming the story of my life. He was my silent partner, my all-purpose excuse, my left-hand man, and depending on my whim I was sometimes calculating, sometimes impulsive, one minute attentive and the next minute aloof, one day hungry for intimacy and the next day desperate for freedom. By remaining enigmatic—by refusing to be any one way or any one thing—I honored him. He would remain forever unfinished, and so would I.

PART TWO

Fax Boy

M
y address was the movie house, downtown Missoula, on the banks of the Clark Fork. The yellow marquee glowed outside my bedroom window, and night after night an early and a late show played through the wall of the balcony across the hall. I read novels till dawn, slept till noon, napped around seven each evening with plugs in my ears to keep the movies muted. I walked the river paths after dark. I lurked in AA meetings in order to hear people talk honestly about terrible things. I drank coffee in one of three coffee shops each afternoon, whiskey in one of five bars most nights. I went months without having a conversation lasting more than three minutes. I swam through time like it was motor oil. I made one promise to myself. I would not buy a gun.

I took a semester off and returned to New York on borrowed money, my first cash advance on my first credit card. I sublet an apartment in Queens whose occupant, an Italian man in his thirties, was laid up in the hospital with two broken legs. I didn’t ask why.

I completed my aborted internship at the
Nation
—a year and a half later than originally planned—for the sum of one hundred bucks a week, a willingly indentured servant at a magazine founded by abolitionists. I spent my days fact-checking articles on how to reinvigorate the labor movement, a staple of
Nation
reportage whose frequency and desperation of tone increased as union membership declined. During lulls between deadlines I gathered specious research for a contrarian columnist on what he called the hoax of global warming.

Back in Missoula, I worked on my pool game at Flipper’s, my drinking game at Al’s & Vic’s. One day I received a piece of paper in the mail saying that I’d earned a bachelor’s degree. I couldn’t have begun to tell you how.

Lacking immediate prospects after graduation, I stayed on in Montana. There was no urgency to make anything of my life, and Missoula was as fine a place as any to hide out from postgrad choices. Besides, the place was too beautiful to leave in summertime, and I couldn’t bear to give up an apartment that cost $180 a month and placed me within easy walking distance of so many quality bars. On summer days fishermen cast their flies upstream from the Higgins Avenue Bridge, a hundred yards from my room above the Wilma, while a bagpiper went through his mournful musical paces, using the bridge abutments as acoustic enhancement. I eked out a living baking bread in the early morning hours alongside a failed novelist who’d mastered the texture of the baguette, though not the art of fiction, during two years in Paris in the 1970s. Afternoons in my apartment, with the windows thrown open to the breeze off the black cottonwoods along the river, I worked halfheartedly on what I hoped would become my own first novel, a doomed imitation of Paul Auster’s
New York Trilogy
that stalled forever at page forty with the impossible scenario of a man tailing the ghost of himself after digging up his own grave and finding nothing in it. I felt authentically bohemian as I pounded on my manual typewriter, earplugs in place, while the muffled soundtrack of the week’s feature film pulsed and droned through the wall. One of the theater employees was a daytime drinker who liked to stop by my room in the late afternoons and slyly proposition me, vodka fumes on his breath. He probably did so with all the bachelor boys, but I was vain enough, and lonely enough, to take it as a compliment. The building’s manual elevator, one of the few of its kind still in operation west of the Mississippi, was staffed in part by a woman who’d never abandoned the apartment upstairs where her husband had shot himself a decade earlier, or so the rumor went. Riding the lift with her after a night out drinking, I fantasized about holding her hand in mine and telling her she was not alone. More than once I heard another rumor that David Lynch had spent some time around the place, long enough to use it as a model for the apartment building in
Blue Velvet
. Once you’d lived there awhile, the story had the ring of plausibility, though of course it turned out to be a fabrication.