Half a Life: A Memoir (8 page)

“Wait,” I said, “
what
?” How does a case go from airtight to crapshoot? The lawyer said, Well, you know.

In front of twelve angry peers, a crying mother sometimes can turn opinion against any defendant. (I sometimes wondered if it was the gaucheness of the amount—why $20,000?—that had activated the Zilkes. I wish I could have asked them.)

It was only when they’d been offered this figure that the Zilkes—maybe wondering if they could get more—had hired a lawyer of their own. And, of course, their new lawyer had said: Yes, you’re looking at capital-M millions. (It had been Mrs. Zilke who’d hired the attorney to go after me for a fortune. At least, this is what I got from Mr. Zilke as we’d exchanged a few uptight words at one of the depositions. His offering me that information felt, in effect, like another glass of iced tea.)

And so they had arrived at their decision to sue. And according to my lawyer, to open the possibility that they could impoverish me forever by winning a larger sum than what my insurance policy would cover. I told myself that they had done it without my silly ambivalence. If they were successful, they would ruin the life of the kid they’d promised never to blame, never to target.

Almost exactly five years after the accident, I was visiting my parents when my insurance lawyer called. “Check into a hotel,” he told me. “Have your friend David check into a hotel, too. Did anyone brief you from my office why I’m calling?”

“No,” I said. “
Brief
me? Wait, is something big happening?” All the fears that were always whispering in the back of my mind rushed screaming to the front. Look right, Look left.

“Okay, I think in the next few hours you’re going to be served with a summons,” the lawyer said. “But this way, they can’t.”

I didn’t understand the legal maneuverings, the reason for a summons in a civil trial (and still don’t). But it didn’t really matter what I understood: We were going to court immediately.

Couldn’t they just call it off, though? My appearing on the stand, the mother crying and accusing and hating me to my face, all that?

“I hear you,” the lawyer said. “
But
. And hey, we’re paying for the hotel. No, I don’t think we can stop it. We
want
to go to trial. It’s a pretty definite win. Their attorney’s a
jerk, besides. We won’t even need to give them go-away money. Take a night. We have eyewitnesses, the cops. At trial, the evidence is with us. And when you have all
that
.”

I learned that even indoors, even on a cool night, one could sweat so much that a phone can go slick in one’s grip. It was hard not to imagine Mrs. Zilke on the stand, storms crossing her face. And then, on seeing me, her eyes would show the release, the godsend, that blame can be. I asked the lawyer to please not make me go through with it. I could feel the word
trial
echoing in my stomach.

“These things take on a momentum,” the lawyer was saying. “Look, how’s there any meeting anybody halfway with this? The family wants the millions they want, we’re not budging above twenty thousand, which leaves a lot of ground in between. Take a night. Have room service.”

I took that to mean I would be going on the stand.

I couldn’t stop picturing Mrs. Zilke: her face going cold at the sight of me, puzzled by the obstinate fact of my continuing existence. And every time she would lift her eyes to stare me down, she’d see the person who’d survived her daughter in the one contest that made possible any other.

“We’re flexible,” the lawyer said, “but we aren’t
that
flexible, where we won’t fight if we can save this much money. So.”

That, I was sure, settled it. The moment felt so decisive: stirring, certain, a thunderbolt. I laid out plans to go to a hotel.

The top, social level of who I was shrank from trial
possibilities. Still, there were deeper, muckier layers. These parts of me didn’t mind confrontation; these parts of me felt relief that it would at least now be over. My innocence (or my guilt) would have the official stamp of the U.S. court system. Again, I was mostly terrified. But something in me—the same tiny something that had longed for Melanie Urquhart’s anger—craved, finally, a decision from twelve people. They’d hear witnesses, cops, statistics, the journal entry. It would no longer be just my daily fluctuating opinion. The official world would have to listen, nod, and answer the question of that highway and that day. A government-sanctioned conclusion: you are culpable; you are blameless. This could bring ruin as easily as release. But the one sure thing it would bring was an end.

And yet.

With what seemed a shiver of disgust, the proceedings came to an immediate close.

Just hours before the trial was to begin, the Zilkes’ lawyer suddenly advised his clients to take the go-away money, the original $20,000. (Minus his thirty-percent cut.)
He
didn’t want to go to trial. And, like that, it was over. This is the missed beat at the heart of the story.

For years, as I continued to feel sorry for the Zilkes, I could measure time by calculating how much money they might have earned if they’d tucked away the original twenty grand with interest in some bank.

After everyone had dusted themselves off, had shaken hands and shut off the lights, after taxes, after
years
, the Zilkes by my calculations got something like $9,800 for what had happened to Celine and to me.

All because, as the Zilkes’ lawyer finally told them, there really was no case.

Some years ago, researchers at George Washington University studied the psychological effect of what police call “dart-out” deaths and what insurers call a “no-fault fatality”: car crashes, like Celine’s and mine, where someone hurries into an automobile. In the United States, some two thousand drivers a year survive “dart-outs.” And these drivers are more likely to get laid out by post-traumatic stress syndrome than are those who are
irrefutably to blame
in fatal accidents. No one knows why. Probably the brain prefers a sturdy error to fixate on. It’s hard to learn so viscerally that the questions of guilt and worth are managed with indifference, by nasty chance.

We’d had the accident at the age when your identity is pretty much up for grabs. Before it, I hadn’t been so introspective; I’d had nothing to introspect about. Nor had I hidden anything from the world.

For years, when I woke each morning, no matter where I was—home, my dorm, some friend’s couch, a woman’s bed—if I took an inventory of all that was good and bad in my life, the good would change (as it tends to do). But the bad remained a constant—Celine’s unresolved death, the sharp menace of a trial: that clock that ticked in my life. However, the world now meant to put Celine behind me. The New York Justice System’s gaze had moved to newer, bigger problems. No one would
ever
weigh in. I couldn’t call a trial for myself, say: “Please investigate me.” And so now, forever, I’d need to be satisfied with a personal answer, the one I’d never been prepared to give myself.

I thought my trial’s collapse would bring—to use a dicey, odious buzzword—“closure.” But there was no end to something like this, of course. For me the question, the black scribble in the margin, will always be Celine.

The biggest fact about me—the part that threw me into three dimensions—was her. My accident explained
frowns and, for better or worse, gave depth and chiaroscuro to smiles. It revealed everything about the personality I’d created for myself, starting from age eighteen. But it was not something you say to people. I was less fully developed than the chimps in that Amy Hempel story. I didn’t have access to a language of grief.

So: hiding. For example, on dates when I traveled the city as a single man. Every new person you date is a freshly arrived celebrity on your radar: you have to learn her backstory, how she ended up on the studio lot, what roles she can play, if she’s funny, charming, angry, sensitive. At the restaurant or wherever, I’d be talking, just getting-to-know-you stuff. But I’d have to also wonder: When do I tell her?
Can
I tell her? The answers were nearly always “Never” and “No.”

I did spill the story to a few women—often those who, judging by their own hesitations, seemed to have scraped through some trouble of their own. Women who’d faced something ambiguous or complex in their parents’ lives (we were that type of cohort). This came up a lot, small winces around the topic. Or maybe they’d had some wounding challenge (anorexia, depression, romances gone sadistic) during adolescence. I felt pulled by the lure of hard-won wisdom.

And so I would find myself confessing to women out of some dull and indefinable obligation, as someone else might feel about a schizophrenic family member or a stint at juvie. You think you know who I am? Well, here’s the guy very much behind the social Darin.

But then, I hated the reaction. They grew tender—they patted, deferred, nuzzled. They
forgave
. I saw them really begin to watch me. I felt the web of moments they cleared from certain interactions, that they wiped off the face of a conversation: Ah, he’s like this because of
that
. There was something gross about it. Even the truth had a lie’s sourness. This was the big problem of confessing, the problem of recognition. I had to do a mental squint just to see myself. And rather than turning life more difficult, as I thought it should, the declaration always got me to feel I’d used Celine’s death to obtain softer hours, gentler treatment.

There had been one young woman who’d come out of a long and life-threatening sickness. When I’d owned up to her (I thought: This woman’s life has been so difficult, but now she’s in the clear. She
must
have the right thing to say), she simply, cheerfully, and forthrightly stepped out of the momentum of our relationship. What she now wanted from her newly healthy life couldn’t be guaranteed by me: a lucky passage, an easy, bright course. I understood. Whenever I visualize this non-relationship, I see myself grounded at a restaurant table (I told her in a gloomy bistro) and then her naturally migrating to a better, more livable climate. Her manner was a combination of supportive and
adios
. This seemed just. It seemed self-protective and—considering the eighty-odd years we’re given to find our best accommodations on the planet—right.

Nevertheless, with others I acted it all out anyway, falling into my scripted role of assisted suppliant. And felt disgusted—with the unannounced caresses, with myself
for accepting them. For allowing myself to be pressed further into an artificial role. “Aw, everything’s okay,” said a huggy med student. Her name was Cindy, and her hands were ineffectual balms: poking bones, cold fingertips on my cheek. “Oh, sweetie honey,” said Felicia, a not-quite-love-match sitting on her studio apartment’s lumpy futon. A TV was glaring across the small dinner table. She reached for the remote, and whatever show had been on now lowered its voice, and I saw Mr. Zilke putting that coaster underneath my iced tea. (TV seemed, to Felicia, inappropriate background for the discussion.) No matter how stark the trauma, life—wet rings on wood, television’s surges and volume drops—kept on. “That’s got to be one of the saddest things I personally have ever heard,” Felicia said. “But you have
me
now.” She often listened to The Cure and was in thwarted, tragic love all the time. And here’s Stacey, who was acting like Juliette Binoche in
The English Patient
(the movie we’d just seen): “I’ll take care of you.”

“Um, I don’t know,” I said—and said. I kept waiting to become more who I thought I should be. Sometimes I would think, appallingly: “Good.” Or, if I was in an optimistic mood, I hoped the woman might actually tell me something that perched in the soul and sang the tune.

Instead, Stacey’s eyes got big and wifey. Felicia just scooted closer.

“It’s been easier than I thought,” I’d say drably, if I wanted to look brave. “I don’t know.”

“I’m sure it can seem easier, might be the way you feel sometimes,” Felicia said.
“But.”

“Thank you, though,” I’d hear someone with my voice say. “You’re very kind.”

(It was like this with everyone but the newly healthy girl at that gloomy bistro—Jacqueline. When I told Jacqueline, she slitted her eyes. She was making wind-resistance and weather calculations, anyone could see it. She already had the elsewhere stare of a break-up. I dropped a clumsy hand to the table and splashed my salad. Then, months later, I ran into Jacqueline again. I was now taking classes in an MFA program. At a party thrown by a student I knew, there was her trademark glossy dark hair and the flash of her teeth. Jacqueline really stood out amid the frayed ends and premature grays of grad school. I asked if she’d ended things because of what I’d told her. And she said—this was so diplomatic, it became one of those details I made a point of remembering, in case I’d ever need to reproduce it—“You just seemed like you had a lot to work out, Darin. And I thought maybe you could work it out easier without having to worry about how you sound to someone else.”

“I don’t,” I told her, “blame you”—and realized I was quoting the Zilkes. I wondered if that was why I’d asked her: to have their words in my own mouth. The words, however, were untrue. I identified with Jacqueline—I wanted an easy life, as well—and stood watching her sullenly with clipped, cloudy wings. But I did blame her. And the words tasted unclean in my mouth.)

It’s as if there’s some pheromone of tact and sanctity given off by people whose suffering embarrasses others. Most of these women understood how and why I was behaving
the way I did, before I had even behaved. And their sense of me, I realized, was dull and limited, but essentially accurate. (I’m not proud to admit that I found a way to shed the chafing habit of unwarranted sainthood: I broke up with these women.) Anyway, you see why I told so few people, and so rarely. It always ran conversation into the sand.

But I did have a somewhat normal and fun middle-twenties, or at least a multifaceted middle-twenties. And things had been happening in the world that anyone my age had to be at least faintly aware of: the United States had asked Iraq to step outside, then a Democrat came to occupy the White House for the first time since I was nine.