Carmiel Banasky - The Suicide of Claire Bishop

She touched his arm. “Please.”

He turned to her briefly, then back to the painting. His lips parted. He was trying to say something. “What is this?” Looking down at her hand on his arm. “The painting.”

Now she touched his shoulder. This is my storage and this is my hand. She looked at her hand. Was it hers? A surge inside her, something old, tapping. The ocean. Tapping inside her like water against the side of a glass. Her stomach ought to ache, but it didn’t. She reached and touched his face, his beard, and he flinched, looked at her confused, and she reached again. The bare bulb magnified his brooding face. He was full of shadows, his arm was strong. “Tell me what you want,” he said. His accent was thick on her face and his big hands were dirty. What she wanted? He touched her neck and rolled his fingers over her eyes to close them. “It’s okay. It’s okay,” he said as if she were crying but her eyes were so dry they stuck and burned. She forced them to remain open as she kissed his mouth. Her hands were ice against his chest. Her jaw was tight. He said no, and she said yes and he said yes. They did it all while standing and leaning against the stack of suitcases and boxes, and when that didn’t work he pushed her against the gate and she felt the metal shapes of it pressed into her back through the silk robe. Then beside them the painting racketed against the metal. She did not say a word. She flattened her palms on his back, felt his muscles slip along them. She did not want to move them. As he finished she pushed him out of her. She was angry and didn’t know why and then she calmed. Calm, she watched as he mopped up after himself with the rag that was always in his back pocket, but a dark spot remained on the cement. She laughed curtly at the thought that perhaps this had always been the purpose of the rag, the other married women in the building.

“I’m sorry,” he said — rising, buttoning.

He was about to leave when Claire called his name, almost a whisper.

“Yes?” There was — wasn’t there? — a hint of annoyance in his voice.

“I’ll pay you to destroy it.”

He raised his eyebrows, then nodded. He did not have to ask what she was referring to.

“I don’t want to know how you’ll do it, but you’ll do it,” Claire said, surprised by her businesslike tone. “Bring me proof? I have to know for sure.” It was crazy, he must think her crazy.

But Tomasz did not roll his eyes. He nodded dutifully, as if she’d asked him to replace a light bulb, then he left her standing there, staring at the wet mark on the cement.

If Claire didn’t know better, she would have felt she was the source of Freddie’s illness — a cause-and-effect manifestation of her deception.

It was five in the morning and Freddie wanted water. He had woken them both with his coughing. She could hear his chainsaw breath cutting through his chest. It was probably a simple cold but he called it bronchitis or maybe, just maybe, tuberculosis. He wouldn’t be going into work.

She’d formed stories about Tomasz and the storage locker. Myths growing inside her head, stories that would explain all this. She told them to herself over and over again, as a child begs to hear the same story every night. Yes, there was a man, a fatherly type with an endearing brow and a speckled, trimmed beard, and he was the only one who heard the woman trapped in the basement. He rescued her. Also, the story of a man who’d tell all his friends that he’d fucked the married woman from 3B. I screwed the rich bitch. A notch on his belt. Rumors flying like ghosts through the old building.

“The sheets are too stiff,” Freddie said without opening his eyes.

And yet she couldn’t imagine lying beside any other man’s back but Freddie’s.

Claire rolled out of bed to get Freddie a glass from the kitchen.

When she’d come upstairs yesterday, after Tomasz, it was just before noon and she’d had nothing to do but wait stupidly for Freddie to return home. Her mind spun through the details on repeat. She listened to three radio shows and watched Young Dr. Malone on the set. She called Mary but hung up before she answered. She made herself a martini, then another. Finally, she took a bath, but not until she’d sat on all the chairs and lain on all the couches with a strange man’s smell still on her. Why had she done that?

She was tipsy when Freddie arrived, and he chuckled at her dozing on the sofa. But she hardly had time to say hello, and off he went to meet a college friend for drinks. Or someone. A woman. She later woke to Freddie’s raspy breathing — he’d been out all night, and must have returned around three a.m. She imagined the odor of Tomasz traveling through the house, sucked up through Freddie’s nose, swimming down to his intestines. He would know.

And then he woke feverish and full of phlegm. How could she not imagine her betrayal was the cause?

By the time Claire returned with water, Freddie was asleep again. She’d failed at her negligible task. She stood over him in the dark, the glass in her hands. He was so far away from her. She had the power to dump water over a sick, sleeping man, but what else?

He couldn’t even bother to feel jealous, while that was all Claire bothered to do. If he found out, he would build up stories around it, as Claire had, thick as a fortress, walls and walls of stories. What evidence did she have for her own life?

She couldn’t believe the thing she’d done to him, couldn’t believe it with such urgency that she didn’t believe it. It hadn’t happened, it was a daydream or someone else’s memory. Unfaithfulness did not belong to her. It had always belonged to him.

Still holding his water glass, Claire coughed loudly. She whispered, “I brought you some water.” Nothing. She nudged his shoulder, coughed again. “Are you thirsty?” Still nothing. “You look very, very thirsty.” Then she dumped the whole glass of water onto Freddie’s face.

He shot up in bed, looking around, blinking at her. “What did you? What’s wrong with you?” He wiped at his wet face with his hands.

“What woman was it this time?” Claire demanded. “Was it Nicolette?”

“What time is it? What are you talking about?”

“How many others have there been? Can you even count?”

“I’m sick, Claire. I have bronchitis.” Freddie threw his legs out of bed and pulled his wet shirt off, patted his face with it. He glared up at her with dim and tired hatred. “You’re a child. I don’t know who you are.”

She was too exhausted to meet his eyes. What little nonsense she’d said had sapped every reserve. He flipped his soaking pillow over, lay back down, and shut his eyes.

She could never beat his silence. So she jostled over him, to act like the child he said she was, then watched him as his feigned sleep became real. He looked younger than her, though he wasn’t. Freddie carried nothing with him that tugged his shoulders low.

Was that what had first drawn her to him? She studied the shadow shape of his body for an answer. When he resolved to have a dance after dinner, whether she would join him or not, was that it? Was it the way he fluttered about if she refused, batting his arms to make her laugh? The way he played characters at parties, the vapid aristocrat, the lovesick professor. He carried his voices around in his pocket and he always donned — needed — one mask or another. He was everywhere, a jittery reflection of a watch face on a wall. She could never quite catch up to him.

Claire used to fancy she was the only one who knew him through his guises. She thought he needed someone to know, to remind him which was the real Freddie, unmasked. But he didn’t want her to know him. He didn’t want her to know there was nothing to know. He didn’t need anyone.