Companion to an Untold Story

COMPANION TO AN untold story

ASSOCIATION OF WRITERS AND

WRITING PROGRAMS AWARD

FOR CREATIVE NONFICTION

COMPANION TO AN Untold Story

MARCIA ALDRICH

Published by the University of Georgia Press

Athens, Georgia 30602

www.ugapress.org

© 2012 by Marcia Aldrich

All rights reserved

Designed and typeset in 10/14 Quaadrat

by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus

Manufactured by Sheridan Books

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources.

Printed in the United States of America

16 15 14 13 12 C 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aldrich, Marcia.

Companion to an untold story / Marcia Aldrich.

p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-8203-4337-2 (hardocver : alk. paper) —

ISBN 0-8203-4337-4 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Suicide—Case studies. 2. Friendship. I. Title.

HV6545.H53 2012

362.28’3—dc23

2012006938

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

ISBN for this digital edition: 978-0-8203-4470-6

COMPANION TO AN Untold Story

Age at death. In obituaries, a proxy for the worth and fullness of the life. Joel was born May 23, 1949, and died, according to the official determination, on November 20, 1995, at age forty-six.

Aldrich, Marcia. I myself, friend, spouse, and secretary, reader, sorter, scrivener of my past, mortographer and augur, maker of lists, reciter of lines, inspector-reluctant of things the dead leave behind.

By the luck of letters I’ve been drawn here to the fore of the story. I have been pulled to this place with some resistance, the resistance I’ve felt ever since I was a child rider of the alphabet. In an essay called The Reading, told in the third person, I portrayed my young reluctance to come to the front:

The writers were to read in alphabetical order, just like grade school and a whole lot of other martyr-making events where because of her last name the reader had to go first. Always first in school to present her report on bread mold or Harriet Beecher Stowe, the little girl reader mumbled below hearing (Speak up! Miss Joy would say). Not first because of importance or merit, but first by the precision of letters’ law to give the report, break the trail, take the test, hit the ball, offer herself up to the tribunal.

If only the little girl reader had a name later in the alphabet. She didn’t want a name like Stoppit or Testerone; they came too late and besides belonged in the pages of the grotesque, but she’d be happy to have a name ending in the letter H. Let the ABCDEFG’s exert themselves to warm up the crowd, and then turn it over to the H’s for a while. But no, she was an early alphabet, a figure who for the daring required of her should be equipped with flying cape and steed. Alas no such flare and vertical capacity sprang from her spine.¹

The second paragraph in this passage tries to catch the naive hope of a young girl who imagines a world of another order where she would escape her imposing place. And yet the little girl, for all her childish whims, intuits everything the grown woman can express, feels that her place in the alphabet comprehends all that fate has called her to, compacted to a name.

The woman knows there is no other place from which she can begin. Hit the ball, blaze the trail, saddle up to ride the alphabet, I say. (Speak up! Miss Joy would say.) If I have been chosen, let me choose. If I have been called to speak, let me speak with unreluctance about an unknown man, as he appears before me, looking on with inhuman eyes, as he was in the last visit, and before and after, the pivot between the friendship and the aftermath, now freed from his torn and tired life, and feel that the words are his by right, with the strength and order of letters’ law.

Alpha. In this book, the destination of a cross-reference—like the target of a goto statement in a programming language, or the sign to which the musician ascends in a D.S. al fine²—whence again down the page flows the river of words.

Ambition. His death was not the practice of resignation: Here is the difficulty about suicide: it is an act of ambition that can be committed only when one has passed beyond ambition.³

Answering machine. I have concluded that in delivering the last package the post office was too efficient (see Last words to me) and that Joel expected me to receive his last things when he was already dead. The box arrived like a gust of wind that through an open window ruffles papers on a desk and dies away, so that the woman who left them there, coming back to complete her task, does not notice her work has been disturbed.

The odd contents of the box, added to the evidence of Joel’s prior gifts, allowed no doubt that his behavior was not in keeping with the ordinary run of things. I laid the items on the bed and showed the note to Richard, saying, He isn’t going to kill himself, is he?

Richard responded as he had responded before: Joel would never give us his things and then kill himself. He wouldn’t do that to me. It would be too cruel, Richard thought, for Joel to deliver his gifts in a last visit while concealing a detailed plan of suicide. His ethics and values would not permit it.

But this time there was less conviction than anguish in Richard’s voice, and he seemed to be arguing with himself, not with me. We felt, I think, the same dread anxiety.

You should call him, I urged.

Richard phoned Joel’s apartment and was relieved to hear his voice on the answering machine. Its usual message about leaving a message, delivered as it had always been, with a machine’s perfect reproduction, was comforting. The words said that Joel was still alive, and not just because that is what the sound of a voice implies. It would not be Joel’s way to leave this trace of himself behind.

Richard left a greeting, his voice brisk and compressed: No need to call me back—I’ll call you. When he tried again that evening, the phone rang and rang, unanswered. Joel had turned off the machine—proof that we were right, that he was still alive when the last package arrived. The package did not deliver the message it seemed to deliver, for he would not have permitted us to see unmistakable evidence of his intent before it was too late to stop him. We could have warned the police of his impending act, and they would have rushed to the apartment with sirens wailing, breaking down the door to rescue him. The very clarity of the message in the box was evidence that the message was not what it seemed.

And so by the balm of this logic anxiety was soothed, and we entered in the next days one of the periods of the story that I can least explain: the weekend and early weekdays that followed the arrival of the last things. I must have showered and dressed for work, and worked, and there were meals, and children gotten off to school and to other ordinary activities, and dogs walked, and more sleeping and bathing and dressing and working. Thanksgiving was coming up, with friends arriving from Ohio, a meal to plan, a house to prepare. We returned to normalcy, so much so that I can remember nothing about those days. I am invisible to myself, like a spoon dropped into a pan of dirty dishwater.

Of course we had reached the wrong conclusion about the package and the answering machine. I later asked myself, when my emotions had quieted: Where did we miscalculate? Had we misjudged Joel’s wish to vanish without a trace? Did he believe his last words to me were too obscure to interpret? Only much later did I understand: The post office was too efficient, and Joel expected me to receive his last things when he was already dead.

Was Joel in the apartment at the time of Richard’s call? Or did he return from a final errand and see that he had left a message? In his hollowed rooms, Joel listened to the reverberation of Richard’s voice—there was no furniture to absorb the sound—saying, No need to call me back—I’ll call you. He must have shaken his head in disbelief, astounded that we still didn’t get the truth, that nothing could penetrate our self-absorption and indifference. Or perhaps he thought well of such blind loyalty. He looked about his empty rooms late in the afternoon and thought, Yes, this is my time. He pulled the plug from the machine and got rid of it. The void was complete. His vision of a purified life had become real, and on that day he died.

Apartment. Joel’s residence at 638 Athens, San Francisco, where he lived alone from 1983 until his death, the longest period of time he lived anywhere.

At the end the apartment was empty except for a gun, a phone, and a corpse. His efforts to make it a home when he had moved in twelve years earlier—rolling out carpets, hanging posters, shelving books, cutting and displaying roses—were long abandoned. Even a poor man accumulates, and the final scene was constructed by divestiture. In the months leading up to his death, he eradicated all traces of his life. He turned the pages of his best-loved books, listened one last time to the songs his mother had sung, then disposed of them for good. One last time he read his papers, letters, and notes before he stuffed them into big black bags and hauled them to the curb or burned them in a trash can out back, a bonfire of purifying destruction. He added thirty years’ worth of sheet music to the common heap and set it on fire too, notes and lyrics in perfect harmony. He destroyed, sold, or gave away his lesson plans, the poetry he had written as a young man, plates and cups, coffeepot and mugs, instruction manuals and dictionaries, photographs, address book, computer, stereo, and television, clothing and toiletries, harpsichord, and car. He removed a little more of himself with each bestowal of his things, severing another connection, however fragile, to the world of the living, to his past, to us. At the end he sat cross-legged on the bare floor, the chairs and futon gone, and surveyed the emptiness around him. The room was filled by light, unabsorbed by furniture, drapes, or the objects of the living. Rid of the clutter of connection, was the final stage a fitting image of his life?

He prepared with precision and care, leaving the minimum to be faced by survivors. He wanted no one sifting through his last things. The months of planning allowed him a long, leisurely good-bye.

Arborvitae. In early October I walked home from work at the end of the day, as I always did, wondering if he had arrived and how changed we might appear to one another. In memory he was compact and taut in build, not taller than I am, with a bit of a barrel chest and a strong abdomen, moving briskly with quick, springy strides, as if the tendons in his legs were too short, and then the loose plop of his feet at the end of each step.

Our neighbor’s arborvitae, twenty-five feet tall and closely planted for privacy, divided our respective properties, and each evening as I strolled homeward along the sidewalk, its plates tilted and tossed by roots of trees, my view of our front yard was blocked by the tall barrier until I was practically home. It was not until I had crossed the property line that I saw Joel, who was hoisting a Henry Weinhard beer box from his banged-up, busted dull thing of a car. For a moment he did not see me. His features were as I remembered, angular, lips thin, nose strong, eyes alive—the face of a scholar who might pore over ancient maps in a dusky archive. His black beard and coarse hair had been swept by gray and still bristled with electricity in the late strong sun. The old silver maple between the sidewalk and the street was spreading its yellow leaves on his shoulder, which was draped in a thin, shabby flannel shirt.

Then he saw me, put down his box, smiled his self-conscious smile, and walked across the grass to me. I remember that because it looked unspeakably green. It was the turning time, that summit