Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

She pushed the button for the ninth floor, though she’d already pushed her own. The doors opened on the third, but she stayed where she was. The elevator moaned, as if it were some great annoyance to carry her up again.

On the roof she could see her breath, it led her to the edge. She stumbled over the big bubbles of tar roofing rising like waves. Claire bent low and leaned her hands on the cement ledge, noting the path she had just taken. A movement in the shadows. Dark shapes. There were men out there after all. Tipsy still, it was possible she could fall from the ledge and land on her cobblestone street, just like in the painting. Was there courage in falling? Was that what Nicolette had seen in her?

Claire pushed herself away from the ledge, as if pushing away the thought, and stood erect. It was a childish notion, selfish. Did she take pride in her own misery? She certainly did not want to die — if she felt otherwise, it was only pretending. She loved tromping around town with Mary. She loved her martinis, and her view, and her street. It was such a nice street, wasn’t it? She wouldn’t want to ruin it, and it would be terribly gauche to have people see her body splattered over the cobblestone. All those people who would stop to whisper and point, long after she was scraped away, saying proudly because they were in the know, “Remember how that simple woman jumped?” Claire hated those whispering, hissing women gaping over her remembered body. She hated them. She leaned again over the ledge and spit wide, spitting on those women. She could give a damn what they thought. It was her choice. If she wanted to fall, she would fall.

At any rate, she knew she would be the best at it. You could always be the best at something, even if it was at falling. Falling fastest, falling farthest.

Freddie was asleep by the time she entered the bedroom, the cold still on her. There was a brandy-induced sway to the darkness. She crept toward her side of the bed. He coughed in his sleep and she stopped.

With the smallest movements, she climbed into bed beside her husband, careful not to disturb him. She watched closely to see that his chest rose and fell — he was alive.

In the dark, looking to the ceiling, she made a face like she had just been told Freddie had died. She flattened out her expression, then molded it again — the devastating news rushing over her features, crinkling her brow, an open frown, but not too quickly or it would seem she’d been expecting it. Often, when Freddie left the house, Claire imagined a phone call from his sister or the hospital. Some horrible accident, carelessness on the verge of suicide. She would say it was her fault, for the sake of the family. She saw herself mourning in a tailored dress of black AlenÇon lace at the edge of his grave, wearing that face, and she tried to gauge what she was thinking based on that expression alone.

When she found herself imagining the details of Freddie’s death, it came as a headline reel at the cinema — Adulterous Husband Struck By Fluke Airplane Crash On Riverside. She was ashamed of these thoughts. But, she told herself, it was fear that compelled her to fantasize over his death — if she articulated a given scenario, it would not happen. It could not happen. She was protecting him. That was the magical thinking Nicolette had said she used with the notion of Claire’s suicide: she’d painted it out of being.

Claire remembered her own juvenile sense of power clearly — hiding in a closet, thinking up all the horrible things a boy she loved might do — spit at her, call her names, always blocking from her mind his kiss, the stolen words he’d whisper in her ear: You’re beautiful . To think them was to erase them. Though perhaps Claire had performed these rituals for the opposite result — thinking up misfortunes not to dispel but to conjure.

And if it were real, if Nicolette had saved her, without her permission—

A wave of gratitude shook Claire so fully she could have cried. A supreme gratitude like nothing she had felt before. It flattened her.

She covered her head with her pillow and closed her eyes. It wasn’t real. Nicolette was a fool, clinging to a weak childhood magic. It was pretend. Nicolette was nothing more than a schoolgirl hiding in a closet. She simply never grew up. Perhaps there was something admirable in that; it was somehow better than the mere hot air of an artist. In the cradle of her pillow, Claire rebreathed her own breath, damp and very much there.

Freddie’s shuffling and blanket-pulling and showering — it was morning already, but Claire kept her eyes closed and willed herself back to sleep. When she opened her eyes again, he was gone.

Her head rioted against last night’s sweet punch. Lying in bed, she distracted herself from her headache by making up shapes from the paint and shadows on the ceiling — sailboats and rabbits and the Empire State Building. And then Claire saw how terribly the paint was chipped and she marveled that she’d never noticed before.

The spare paint was in the basement storage. She didn’t bother getting dressed, just threw on her robe, a short silky wrap, because who would be in the basement in the middle of the morning? And barefoot, why not? The stairwell was the color of an old bruise. She wrapped her body about the turns, almost enjoying herself, her speed. As if she couldn’t get there fast enough. Just before she reached the basement, something sharp pricked her foot. She yelled out, quick and birdlike. She looked at the arch of her foot, and at the stair, but there was nothing.

The basement cement was cool on her feet. Bare bulbs hung from the ceiling — dull fists of light. The radiators whistled off-key — a wet, demanding cry, shushing her. Through the high, street-level windows at the end of the hall she could see the scuffed shoes of a man pause on the sidewalk. Both sides of the hall were lined with storage lockers, and every wall a gate. If she stood inside her own, she could see into her neighbor’s, and her neighbor’s neighbor’s — every forgotten possession.

She tucked the purple drape up and over the canvas in her locker. There she was again. Claire stared at her image under the shadow-swing of the bare bulb. She studied her own repeated and fragmented face, stroke by stroke, as if for a clue, and again found herself, to her great surprise, beautiful.

She could not hate it, not the way she wanted to. But she could destroy it.

There are moments when the skin is a circus. When the skin serves as warning. Tightening, loosening, grabbing hold of the muscles. She heard footsteps, a voice on the stairs, a song obscured. The clang of the metal gate.

Tomasz.

First his shadow and then him entering the dank hallway of storage units, stopping short when he saw Claire standing mutely in her cage.

“You look like a canary in there, Mrs. Bishop. A very cold canary.” He eyed her in her thin robe.

She did not drop the drape over the painting. She opened the gate as if ushering him into her home and Tomasz brought a warmth to the cramped space. She blushed. She kept her eyes on the painting. He stared at it and said nothing. Claire looked at him looking at her painting. This stranger staring at her painting, all that exposed flesh. It made her own, real flesh buzz and heat.

“Don’t,” she said.

It hurt her, physically, to be seen like this. It felt raw and true and laughable, the way she felt in the painting. She wanted desperately to make him stop looking.

She didn’t know Tomasz. She didn’t know if he had a family in Queens or Poland, an ex-wife or a wife waiting for him at home or what home meant. But she’d watched him sitting on the stoop during his lunch hour, fastening a piece of felt to the bottom of a chess piece he’d carved himself. She wondered if he spent his free time at the chess houses down the street, the all-night men battling one another with wooden queens and coffee mugs. He was just a stranger.