Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

“I suppose I wouldn’t move. You’ve been watching too much Star Trek .”

“Only because you hate it.”

“I could be convinced to sit through one tonight. Is it on?”

But Mary lowered her gaze, suddenly flustered. “I’m not feeling well. I think I’ll go to bed early.”

“Want me to fix some tea?”

“I’ll clean up,” Mary said.

“I won’t say no to that,” said Claire. Mary never cleaned.

While Mary cleared the table and began scrubbing the kitchen spotless, Claire turned on the set for Mary’s show and paused on the evening news. A woman was reporting about a rocket launch. In the middle of her report, she was handed an update on a small card. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot dead, she said.

Claire stood. “Mary,” she whispered. But Mary didn’t hear her over the running water.

“Can you put Leo down?” Mary called from the kitchen. “Bedtime.”

“Mary,” Claire said louder, still staring at the screen.

Mary turned the faucet off and came to stand beside Claire in the middle of the room. The reporter corrected herself. He was wounded, not dead. He was not shot in a car, but on the balcony of his hotel. He was being taken to the hospital. Then she introduced the weatherman.

Mary and Claire stood side by side, listening to the weather forecast. Mary’s hands dripped foamy water to the floor. From his high chair, Leo started crying over the prediction of icy sun all week. Mary held him and rocked him and cried with him.

Walter Cronkite, in color, reported there were already riots in Harlem. Mary and Claire looked out the window in the East Village. No one was on the street.

“I can’t believe it,” Claire said hoarsely. “I can’t. I can’t.”

Mary bounced Leo at the window, her back to Claire. “It’s not about you.”

“I know that,” Claire said faintly. “You have to make it fit in your mind.”

She edged closer to Mary, and Mary put her head on Claire’s shoulder, and Claire wiped tears from Mary’s cheek, and that was all.

Claire took Leo to his nursery. He wailed incessantly, which was not unusual but Claire thought perhaps it was because he felt the night’s sadness. She held him for a while and cried too, but when she’d finished he hadn’t yet. Then she left him to cry himself to sleep. She didn’t know it would be the last time she’d kiss his wet, red face goodnight.

Claire went to work the next day, answering calls, accepting donations for the Democratic Party in the wake of King’s death. She pretended to know the answers. She consoled a crying man on the phone, promised him they’d find justice in court and through legislation. She stayed on late in the office and took a cab home, afraid of the riots.

No one was home. Perhaps they’d gone on a walk. The bed was made, which was strange. No socks on the floor. Mary’s things were all put away. No — Mary’s things were gone.

Mary’s disappearance came at her straightforwardly, like a logic puzzle. Claire checked and rechecked the drawers and closets. The apartment was empty, the bureau empty. The Leo-sounds gone, along with all of his clothes and diapers. The stuffed lion Claire had bought him. Nothing was left but some old manuscript pages, the crib and the giraffe-framed mirror. The apartment was immaculate. Claire should have known when Mary started cleaning the night before. Wiping away all traces of herself.

Mary must have been upset about the news, wanted to get Leo away from the city and the riots. But no — Mary must have been planning this since the postcard arrived.

She sat in the middle of the couch, rigid, waiting for footsteps on the stairs, for the door to creak open. She thought about breathing — how easy it is to forget how to breathe if you think about how to breathe. New York pressed on her chest. She called out Mary’s name, once, when she heard a neighbor fumbling keys. She waited. She fell asleep for what felt like minutes, but when she woke, the morning sun was creeping through the blinds. For those few hours, she had escaped.

Still half asleep, she tiptoed around the apartment in a daze, then landed in the middle of the living room floor — where she and Mary had first been together. She got as low as she could, face to the floor, and sniffed.

Somehow, Claire managed to undress then dress herself, though she felt this task could easily escape her, too, if she thought about the mechanics. She hadn’t eaten since lunch yesterday, but she didn’t need food. Then she began to walk. East Tenth Street to the East River, then south and west, past the men in dirty frocks fishing in the slime. They smiled at her and she thought she smiled back but from the look on their faces she might have stuck out her tongue at them. She walked through the Financial District and Wall Street, veering around businessmen and tourists, through the narrow cobblestone streets, back again to the water. She looked for a communal reaction in people’s faces. She looked for huddled groups of mourners, but life went on as normal, unaltered; it did not pale in the face of tragedy. A train was down, and exasperated commuters waited for a bus near Battery Park. Men hailed taxis. Tough boys spit on the sidewalk, teetered on the curb, testing their distance from policemen on horseback.

A woman in a brightly colored pantsuit said to her friend, “And he said, ‘And that’s the way it is’ like he does for every news story. That’s not the way it is, people getting assassinated.”

“Yes it is,” the other said. “Good people die.”

Claire walked until her ankles throbbed, and then until they stopped. When she decided she ought to be hungry, she ate a slice of pizza on the corner, licking the orange grease off her fingers. She walked north along the Hudson, tucked behind factories where there was hardly a sidewalk. She was dusty all over. When the sun dropped and New Jersey lit up magenta then red, she was on West Tenth Street, looking south to where she’d been. Skyscrapers stacked one on top of the other, like a pile of toys swept to the side in a messy boy’s bedroom. They shot the sinking sun back east, all those hundreds of thousands of windows glinting a childish, sherbet orange.

After dark she found herself walking, quite by accident, to her old apartment. She pretended to pat her pockets for keys and did not have to wait long for someone to exit. The man hardly glanced at her, and she slipped inside easily — they’d gotten rid of any security, along with all other signs of dignity over the last years. The elevator was completely covered — floor, ceiling, and walls — in black tarp, apparently for renovation, but it was still functional. She rode to the top floor, then climbed the remaining steps to the roof.

Claire walked to the ledge and slipped out of her flats to flex her blistered feet. The clouds hung low, and every few moments a biting wind would reach her. The sky was starless. But there was her view: uptown, the buildings lit up the underside of the clouds. She’d forgotten to miss this.

She stepped unsteadily onto the low ledge, dizzy and terribly afraid. The wind blew her hair around her face. The air had a gelatinous quality, an underwater feel, so that she was seeing the seaweed-bound buildings through fish eyes, peering at drowned skyscrapers.

She would not be able to tell Mary about her day over dinner.

But she had said too much already. She should never have burdened Mary with all her anxieties, all those words. She was standing on the ledge not because of Mary, but because of Mary-leaving — its own proper noun. What else could she do but climb up to the roof where she had once smoked a cigarette with Nicolette? The artist who’d vanished with all the others to whom Claire had told her story.