Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

“Ginsberg normal or Park Avenue normal?”

Claire lifted the sheet away and drew Mary in close.

As if on cue, Leo started crying in the next room. And in that moment, when Mary pulled away, Claire was grateful for the baby, and she hated him. Mary sighed and stood, but Claire stopped her. “I’ll get him,” she said, searching for her nightgown in the rubble.

In the blue-wallpapered nursery, it took a moment for the bundle of blankets in the crib to become a small human in her mind. She folded over the bars and lifted him up, his whole body one shape, irresistible and deeply frightening.

The warm body against her chest, the small breath. Tiny hands pulling her hair. And a face — a real face, chubby and red from crying — looking back at her. She could still feel last night’s red wine hiccup in her veins.

Bouncing Leo in circles around the nursery, she caught a glimpse of herself in the small mirror with a carved giraffe frame. Did she look younger, like she felt yesterday? She had always wondered why one could not be seen as one felt. Or could she? She was momentarily afraid that strangers on the street would be able to tell she had been with a woman. But no, she assured herself, her appearance had not changed overnight. She was Claire; it was a fact outside of fact. And yet, she hardly knew herself. She hadn’t even known who she loved until now. If you are the thing, how can you know the thing?

Along with night windows, her grandmother had avoided mirrors; she was afraid, perhaps, that it wouldn’t be her own reflection staring back at her.

She wanted to look in the mirror just long enough to un know herself, so she would know what it was like to know herself. Like tensing a muscle so you know what it is to relax. Or undoing a word by repeating it again and again until its meaning is lost. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry was the word she’d repeated as a fearful adolescent, until it was not-sorry, the word with which she realized all words were just a smash of sounds.

But all Claire could see was that her hair was a mess. She tried to believe it didn’t matter. She repeated the thought, it doesn’t matter , until it was a belief. Then she shifted Leo to one arm and used the other to pat down her hair. Leo, who had quieted down, was facing away from the mirror and it looked like she was holding a ball of white blanket, like she was merely playing at being a mother. There, staring back at her from the mirror, was a new woman.

From the nursery, she could hear Mary making coffee. The watery chuckle of the percolator. Silver spoon clinking porcelain. A woman waiting for her; it didn’t feel new at all. She had always been the woman she was in that moment, fast in love with Mary. It had never been otherwise. It would never be otherwise. Claire could not imagine not knowing Mary’s skin. Or her chapped lips, or the weight of Leo in her arms. The smell of black coffee being poured for her. That baby’s breath. That Mary air.

The subway was stalled and humming in the dark. They’d been stuck for nearly half an hour and Claire was running late, but at least she had a seat. It was the first day of her new temp job — shuffling papers for the Democratic Party Office. She’d been at Mary’s for nearly a year, but this was the first morning she’d left when Mary was still asleep, curled on the chair in Leo’s nursery.

The man’s voice was slurring a plea. Claire’s eyes rested on his red shoes across the aisle, which were stepping on the tail of his big red coat, which was in turn covered in a layer of grime. He had only one arm; a plastic cup for money was tucked between his stump and his chest. He was begging for change. Claire was undecided whether she should reach into her purse. And then he pulled out a gun and shot himself in the head.

The sound of it was the most interesting part. It was and was not connected to the movement of the train, which lurched forward again as if he shot it into motion. But there was another sound under it, which she heard with a different ear, a more fearless ear. The sound of skin.

There were distant screams, muted like they were underwater. An announcement came over the intercom, people started pushing into adjacent cars. She heard the screams, but didn’t see anyone with an open mouth. Blood garnished the windows and floor. She felt damp, but no blood had reached her. Her chest touched the back of the woman in front of her as they all pressed forward. Someone wept. A man was praying to Allah. A newspaper flapped up and down on a bench, but there was no breeze. It could be that easy.

Claire felt expanded. As if she herself had been shot and her arms and heart had spread out and splattered against the subway windows, touching every vein of the city — the witnesses on the train, Mary and Leo at home, her old apartment on Sullivan — spreading slowly, as a pool of blood, over her whole life.

Above ground. She was asked her name; she was processed. She was a witness. She was on Fourteenth Street. Where was it she’d been going? She turned south to Mary’s and then remembered her new job and turned north again on Seventh Avenue. It should have been a fifteen-block trek but then there she was, transported with no memory of walking, to the threshold of the new box-filled office, fluorescent light glaring off rows of filing cabinets that were hers to master.

“Did the agency teach you how to use our filing system? Do you have any questions?” a mousy woman was asking.

Claire shook her head no. Then she said, “Did someone kill himself on the subway?”

“What?” the woman asked.

The woman turned to a man in the corner, who Claire hadn’t noticed until then. “What did she say?”

The man said, “She means the guy who jumped in front of the train the other day. Is that what you mean?”

“No,” Claire said. Immediately, she knelt on the floor in front of a box and started working, organizing donors by date. She was to write thank-you cards to them in that order, and file them away forever. She heard the mousy woman attempt to whisper to the man, “Another weird one. Try a different agency next time?”

Watching the first pile of papers diminish and disappear into that gray metal grave was like watching a plant die. She pictured the man in the subway again, but this time filtered through the lens of a painting — a particular, fragmented style of painting: what the scene might have looked like if witnessed by Nicolette. What kind of grave would the man on the subway be buried in and would he have a funeral and who would attend? But then Claire was not sure whom she’d been thinking of. She worked efficiently and the mousy woman — whose name happened to be Claire as well — stood over her, humming her approval intermittently throughout the day. Claire found herself hoping that the other Claire would come by and tell her again how well she was doing, how much better she was than other temporary employees. When there was too long an interval between these interactions, Claire worried she was doing something wrong. The work, though not difficult, took enough of her concentration that she did not think of anything, really, except that the mouse’s skirt was frayed slightly at the hem and that there was something she wanted to tell Mary when she got home.

At Mary’s door, she struggled with the keys and dropped them twice. Mary must have heard, because when Claire rose from retrieving them, there was Mary’s face in the now open doorway. On it, she saw her own face reflected — a vague horror. Claire wished then that her first night with Mary had not yet happened, that she still had that to look forward to.

“What’s wrong?” Mary said looking past her, a silent “now” tagged to the end of the question.