Stephen Dixon - 30 Pieces of a Novel

So there are a couple of things he doesn’t understand about Roland’s suicide. Oh, no doubt lots of them, but the one that stands above them all is why in hell did he do it? For here’s this guy, who except for his personality, which counts for a lot, okay, even if he couldn’t care less what other people who “didn’t matter” thought of him, though who knows? — but anyway, who had just about everything going for him in life. He didn’t have money, came from a poor background, but so what? — since having it easy and lots of money from the start can often be as much of a hindrance to you as good, and if anyone was going to make it in whatever field he finally decided to get serious about, it was him. He had looks, intelligence, erudition, gift of gab, was clever, et cetera, nicely built, tall, and dressed well even if he didn’t have many clothes at the time. He was very presentable, in other words, and had the brains to back it and could be charming if he wanted to — certainly with the people that mattered to him: professors, women he wanted to sleep with, maybe bosses — Gould doesn’t know who else but he’s sure Roland could be like that to anyone. Why? Because he also was smart enough to know what worked for him. It was probably people like Gould who he knew could do nothing for him, at least for the time being, that he showed his worst side to. So how could he make such a drastic decision, because of some things he read, and one woman he might have found gorgeous and alluring and immensely likable and so forth, and the tragedy of his parents some twenty years ago, and question marks about the future, and carry it out in so horrible and final a way? If he’d jumped off a building thirty stories up or into the Hudson from the George Washington Bridge, Gould would be asking the same thing — Why the hell do it? — but with arsenic he also had to know the pain it’d bring, though he might have thought it’d be quicker than it was. But wouldn’t he have read up on it? And had he tried killing himself before? If he had, that could explain the drasticness of taking arsenic — he wanted it to work this time — but not why he did it. Did he have an illness no one knew of, one that he’d been told would eventually kill him or permanently damage his mind or nervous system or something? Nothing like that came out from what the police found in his room — notebooks, checkbook stubs for medicine or drugs — and not in the suicide note, and he never mentioned it to anybody in the building, so far as anyone knows, and no doctor was located who’d been treating him for anything, and the grandmother the police finally turned up on Long Island and whom 7J and another tenant spoke to knew nothing about anything like that either — no disorders whatsoever; he was in terrific all-around health, she said, although she hadn’t seen him for almost a year. Was it chemical then, an imbalance of some sort, or whatever it’s called, that even Roland didn’t know about or just avoided dealing with and so hadn’t been treated? Again, no one knew of it and Roland never spoke to anyone about having any up-and-down feelings or mood swings or depression of any kind. He was as stable and confident as they come, was the general summation of him: never an inkling he was feeling blue and only his disillusionment with his academic studies and a couple of his professors and the future possibility of getting a junior-level appointment was the one thing along those lines that he talked even a little about with a few people in the building. Someone even called up Naomi and told her about Roland, and she was shocked as anyone and saddened and that but also said he hadn’t hinted to her anything was wrong with him other than his studies — he didn’t see how he’d be able to write the expected two-hundred-page dissertation, since his topic wasn’t worth more than a hundred-twenty and he doubted he could squeeze out more than that from what his research had given him — and how he felt about her breaking off with him. But even there, this person tells Gould when he bumps into her in the market up the block and says he heard she spoke to the dancer, Roland told her he was dejected but he understood why she thought they’d never be able to make a go of it and he’d soon get over the breakup. Gould says, “What did she say was the reason they split up? And how could it be she didn’t know about the suicide before?” and the woman says, “You think I’d ask either? What’s wrong with you? It’s enough that I called and had to give her the news, and now I’m not sure why I told you even this much. It’s her business, what went on between them. If she’d wanted to say, she would’ve volunteered. The point is she was surprised he alluded to the breakup in his suicide note. Or so prominently, since he seemed reconciled to it the last time they spoke — maybe a few days before he took the arsenic; though they both still lived in the building then, it was over the phone — and even a little relieved to be completely unattached and on the loose again. But I think you’re right about what I understand from others you felt about Roland — he didn’t have the sweetest or most politic disposition in the world — but whatever any of us thought of him in that regard should be dropped because of what he did to himself.”

His own brushes with suicide? They were nothing much — shortlived, not very serious, or maybe more romantic than serious and he was pretty young so maybe still immature — but it’s a subject he’s been thinking a lot about lately because of what happened to Roland, and it might help him understand better why Roland went through with it while so many others who think about doing it don’t, or not as thoroughly. The first time was when he was just eighteen. He’d finished a year of college, hadn’t liked what he’d studied, and was now taking two boring courses in summer school. He wanted to be doing anything but working eight hours a day at a tedious job in what seemed like the steamiest part of the city, midtown, and going to school four nights a week and then coming home to study for an hour or more. He also wanted to be living away from his folks and have a girlfriend or someone to date and a close friend or two, which he didn’t then. So a couple of times, maybe more, but while he was on a subway platform — going downtown to work or after work heading uptown to school, probably the latter, as that’d be the worst possible time for him and also the hottest in the subway station: between job and school when he was most tired and perhaps susceptible to thoughts of suicide — he thought about jumping in front of a train speeding into the station. He remembers thinking, Go on, end it now, what the hell’s life going to do for you anyway? In the long run it’s just going to go from bad to worse: studies, more loneliness, crappy jobs, girls who bust your balls, sickness, old age, death — and other things, maybe a little of it like what Roland was thinking at the end. He even got close to the platform’s edge once but backed away behind a pole when the train got to about twenty feet of him and was whistling. He was depressed most of the summer; his parents noticed it and wanted to know what was bothering him and if there was anything they could do to help—“You don’t want to continue summer school, quit it and concentrate on your job,” his father said, “and if that work’s too hard and you’d rather be a waiter in the Catskills or a counselor in camp, there still could be time to get something”—but he always said, “That’s not it. And the courses are important to finish if I’m to take a lighter night-school load next year so I can get a good full-time job. I’m just going through something; it’ll pass,” and it seemed to pass by the start of the fall term, when he got a better-paying day job and night school was easier and the weather was better and he had made a couple of close friends.