October 8 - Losing Control

The headline was gruesome. Man commits suicide; jumps off thirty-two story building.

May shuddered, the newspaper trembling in her hand as she sat at her kitchen table sipping tea. The setting felt too serene for such a dreadful headline; the yellow painted walls, the floral curtains, the canary that John had gotten her as a birthday gift who let out a peep from his cage in the corner every once in a while, usually when she turned Coltrane music on the stereo, as though the canary liked to sing along. It was herbal tea that she drank, a blend of jasmine and eucalyptus that was said to calm the nerves (and perhaps boost the female libido), and she was glad now that it settled her stomach as her breakfast heaved in protest against the story.

Matt Dresden had been 33 years old, a father of two and twice divorced. Wall Street broker, recently involved with a merger that fell through. Suspicion that anguish over the case was behind his reckless last flight.

May ruminated on how, in the moment, falling and flying were the same thing. You’d never really know, until the moment you hit the ground.

Of course, by then it was too late.

“What a dramatic way to do such a thing,” she mused aloud. After all, if suicide was the rejection of life, why the need to end it with drama? He would never know the aftermath of his actions (this thought, of course, precluded the assumption of an afterlife or ghosts), so why the theatrics? If one was to commit suicide, didn’t it make more sense to do so subtly and obscurely; it felt like it was meant to be a dreadfully private thing, done by overdosing on aspirin, quickly swallowing three bottles-full so that the only evidence were plastic bins in a wicker trash can, or slitting ones wrist in a bathtub, so the blood washed down the drain. Then the clean up would be easier.

May shuddered again. These were not the thoughts she meant to be having over tea, yet somehow these kinds of stories always crept into her morning newspaper, overriding the tales of scholastic achievements or homegrown efforts for the World Wildlife Fund. Her friend, Anna, had just begun volunteering at the home for the aging – that was the new, politically correct term. Home for the aging, we say now, not nursing home, Anna stressed with a tsk tsk clicking of her tongue; surely Anna’s selfless efforts merited an article as much as a man who wouldn’t be awake the next morning to read of his antics. Could it be that the man had hungered for fame, even in death? In which case, he had still possessed at least this one appetite, and shouldn’t that have spurred his desire to live a little longer?

“There are better ways to find fame,” she chided Matt Dresden’s black-and-white photo. It was a picture of him dated three years ago, smiling into the camera on a fishing outing with what looked like a brother, a giant fish of some sort held between them. She wondered if he hadn’t smiled since then, which was why they had to dig three years into the archives to find something printable. When was the last decent picture taken of her and John?

She glanced at the fridge. The one of her and her husband at her cousin Sabine’s wedding; they looked smiley and happy that night, her in a red cocktail dress, him with a matching red bowtie. That was – gosh – from four years ago. May stood abruptly before she could think about photographs further, shoving aside the thought while she mashed her uneaten oatmeal down the disposal, and for awhile her hands were busy washing out the tea mug, and toweling dry John’s breakfast dishes. He always made himself toast with jelly on Mondays and Thursdays, an English muffin burnt to a crisp the other days of the week, but he never bothered to put his dish in the sink, a way, perhaps, to remind May of his presence when she found her way downstairs hours later – too many hours later, and sometimes the only evidence she had all day that her husband was still alive.

May giggled when Anna suggested perhaps she should wake earlier.

“There are so few points to my day, it’s easier when it’s shorter.”

Fewer hours until John came home.

Would the body have made a dent in the pavement when it landed?

“Stop!” May yelled at herself, mad that the article still crowded out the other thoughts in her brain. Soapy water and toweling dry with the new ivory handtowels she had bought. These were normal, comforting things. May and John lived a normal existence, and they were content to live a normal existence, right? She always announced to anyone who would listen – her eccentric sister who worked as a photographer in Madrid, John’s coworkers at the investment firm, friends living down the street who lived out the exact same ho-hum – she announced this fact to anyone and everyone who would listen.

Repeat something often enough…

It was a normal existence in a normal town where people did normal things and didn’t launch themselves like rockets off of thirty-two story buildings. They didn’t commit murders or rob banks, or stay awake past midnight. They watched the opening monologue of the Late Show before bed and tittered over the slightly naughty jokes. They certainly didn’t stray far from home except on organized vacation trips, and they never forgot to send field trip money into school with their children on the day of grand outings, or cupcakes on the occasion of a birthday. Or half-birthday. This was the kind of town that celebrated half-birthdays. Not the kind of town where people stumbled in late because they had gone out drinking for hours after work.

Surely not…

May set another pot to boil, hoping the ordinary act would drive Matt Dresden and his last great leap from her mind. The canary gave a peep, a car swished by down the street. She could hear children’s laughter, probably the Arkin family next door. They had just had a fourth, but Amanda Arkin still found time to play in the driveway with the other three – all under six years old. No day-time schooling yet to free up Amanda’s hands, not until Nate began kindergarten in the fall.

The tea kettle was hissing now, the water making that sizzling noise that presaged its imminent readiness. Or maybe it was the burner that made that noise, or perhaps the way the bubbles careened into the metal sides of the kettle. May’s skin began to itch. She had an image that she was a bubbling cauldron, that each of her thoughts was another popping bubble, bursting like a puss-filled wound to the surface, exploding open only to be replaced by dozens of others, shimmering up, swimming rapidly to the surface, crowding one another, pushing each other. What did it feel like, in there in the pot? She leaned in close so the steam caressed her cheeks, leaned further until it stung. She imagined herself submerged in boiling water, the bubbles scalding her flesh, turning soft white to angry pink. Maybe that was how Matt Dresden felt when he hit the pavement.

“Stop, stop!” she screamed. A lawn mower started up in the yard across the street.

It was eleven. She had eight hours until John got home.

Except John wasn’t home eight hours later. Not that she had expected it, not really. She heard the cars of the other working parents coming down the street, the headlights flitting across her window panes before leaving them dull and dark again. She heard the front doors open and close. She smelled the pot roasts, the veal cutlets, the stews. Caleb Arkin came home and swooped his children into a hug that managed to capture the three walking ones all in one go, before he turned to bestow a kiss on the forehead of the fourth, the gurgling newborn. And pinch Amanda’s ass. There might soon be a fifth.

Amanda grimaced, and May let the curtain fall so they wouldn’t see her watching through the window.

“You are not surprised,” she told herself. Because she wasn’t. John’s dishes – his toast on Mondays and Thursdays, his black English muffins on the other days of the week – this was the most she felt she knew of her husband in the past… four years? Four years, since Sabine’s wedding. They needed to take a new picture together.

May pulled out the wine bottle she had bought yesterday. She went in to the liquor store on Mondays, and bought seven bottles. Every Monday. She hoped the store keeper thought she entertained a good deal.

She would confront him when he got home, this time.

“You’ve been out drinking,” she would say, when he stumbled in at four in the morning.

No leg to stand on; she’d been drinking, too.

“You’re having an affair,” she would say. Ridiculous; she had no proof, and didn’t believe it anyway.

“I miss you,” she wanted to say. Not a chance she’d be so weak.

There were slower ways to kill oneself than with one jump.

May had her third glass of the night. The lights were winking out in the other houses, and the red wine made her warmer than she’d been all day.

Carefully, she stood up from the kitchen table and walked up the stairs to the second floor landing. The canary watched her go.

She pulled down the ladder to the attic, a process involving a few heavy grunts and a scratch along her left forearm.

She scrambled up the ladder, giggling, excited now, slowed only by the wine glass in one hand. She took another gulp before setting it on the wooden planking of the attic floor and unlatching the window that led to the roof.

The neighborhood looked so different from the rooftop! She could see the backyards, laid out like a patchwork quilt of green squares. She could see chimney s with birds nests tucked into the bricks, see the leaves cluttering the eaves of neighbors who didn’t bother with upkeep as diligently as she and John did. Had? She giggled again, and walked closer to the edge.

“Flying and falling are really the same thing,” she told the neighborhood. She inched closer, so the toes of her feet met the air on the other side of the roof. She dipped her toes like a teenager testing the water of a chlorinated swimming pool.

May frowned.

“I’m losing control,” she said. And began to weep.

The canary watched a twenty-something woman come back down the stairs, and pour herself a fourth glass, a fifth, watched her safely fall asleep with her arms crossed before her on the tabletop for a pillow.