Aunt Myra also reported that Grady had had an unusual stroke of luck in finding a buyer for Aunt Julia’s apartment, although, she added, he had been forced to accept less than he and Taylor had hoped for. It was the recession; real estate was so bad everywhere. But he said they were both relieved to have that responsibility off their minds. He was apparently still trying to get permission to finish building his deck, and was very upset about the situation. Olivia wished he would get a job so he would have something else to think about.
One day she walked past Aunt Julia’s apartment and looked up at the windows. The new owners had put up what looked like a mirrored wall and new window treatments. Did they ever wonder about who had lived there before, about that long and vivid and finally tragic life, or did they just feel pleased that they were starting a new chapter of their own? She supposed the latter. It had been only a year since Aunt Julia died, and already she was fading away with her blue grasscloth walls.
Her New Year’s resolution about more sex with Roger had not gotten her anywhere. He was as affectionate and cuddly as ever, but when it came to passion he treated her like an afterthought. She wondered if she should say something about it, and if so, what she should say. She was afraid that making an issue about it would only make things worse. He seemed so vulnerable. At night he had bad dreams, and tossed and turned and mumbled, but in the morning he claimed not to remember. It was the season, she thought. It was trying for everybody. Even the dogs, reluctant to play long outside in the cold, were restless, and twitched in their sleep with dreams of their own.
It was only she, apparently, who slept well, hiding, awakening from time to time to notice Roger’s distress and then hiding again—her way of escape, biding her time.
It was a Sunday afternoon. She was blow-drying her hair, getting ready to go to a movie with Roger, when the phone rang. It was Taylor’s husband, Tim, from California.
“I have bad news,” he said.
She froze.
Something’s happened to Taylor
. “What is it?”
“Grady killed himself.”
10
G
RADY KILLED HIMSELF
. Olivia felt numb. At the same time, the thought came into her mind that she wasn’t entirely surprised. He was the unhappiest person she knew—but she would never have thought that he would do something like this so soon, so young. His life was ahead of him; he was practically a child!
Not any more
.
How angry he must have been, and none of them had suspected.
“When?” she asked. “How?”
“This morning. He was supposed to be in a motorcycle race with some friends, but he called one of them and said he didn’t feel like going. He was very drunk. And then he said: ‘Goodbye.’ His friend got scared from the tone of his voice and drove over to Grady’s house, but Grady was gone. There was a suicide note. He took his motorcycle off the top of Mulholland Drive.”
The way Stan did, she thought.
“The police found him,” Tim said. His slow voice was grave and calm. Thank God for Tim, Olivia thought; he’s Taylor’s rock.
“How is Taylor?”
“She’s full of tranquilizers. She’s also in shock, but functioning. She’s sorry she couldn’t call any of the family herself.”
“I’m sorry I can’t talk to her. What did the note say?”
“Well, the police have it, but Taylor and I read it. He said he was going to kill himself because he couldn’t build his deck. He said his house meant everything to him, that it was his home and his peaceful refuge. Yes, those were the words he used:
peaceful refuge
.”
“I can’t believe he killed himself over a deck,” Olivia said.
“Well, there were a couple of pages of recriminations against the people who sold him the house, and he wanted them to be sued.”
“Even in our family, nobody’s crazy enough to kill themselves over a deck. It had to be the last straw.”
“Well,” Tim said, “the deck was what the whole note was about. Except at the end he added that if his mother wondered why he cut her out of his will she could ponder about it while she remembered how she had treated him as a child.”
“Oh, poor Grady,” Olivia said.
“The funeral is Wednesday morning, at the church. He’s going to be cremated, that’s what he and Taylor both wanted for themselves. She’s got to scatter his ashes in Mexico. Some little place, apparently very pretty, on the Sea of Cortez. He did a movie there once, and he liked to go back there by himself. But she’ll do that when she feels up to it, maybe in the spring. Are you coming to the funeral?”
“Of course,” Olivia said. “Please tell Taylor how terrible I feel for her.”
“I will.”
She had to ask him what she had on her mind, even though it was difficult for her. “Tell me, Tim . . . do you think he had AIDS?”
“We don’t know. It’s something we wondered, too. They’re doing an autopsy. I’ll see you at the funeral. I’ve got to call some more people now.”
He hung up and she tried to cry. But all she felt was a strange pain somewhere in the area of her heart, as if it had been scraped. She had cried at Aunt Julia’s funeral, and even at Jason’s bar mitzvah, she choked up when very sick, old animals had to be put to sleep, but not today, not now. She caught a glimpse in the mirror of her white and distorted face and looked away. She felt sad and in pain and horribly angry. What had Grady expected, if not this feeling of rage? Didn’t he know how angry everyone who had loved him would be that he had left without ever giving any of them a chance? He must have been so terribly lonely, but except for that one long drunken lunch with her, he had presented them only with the pleasant, rigid facade he wanted them to see.
Why hadn’t he let any of them know what he was really like? All those years he hadn’t even trusted them enough to let them know he was gay. He had denied it, and after that she hadn’t asked again, waiting for him to tell her. She and the cousins wouldn’t have cared. Aunt Julia wouldn’t have cared. On some level Aunt Julia probably knew. All her excuses, her friends-from-school myth—she had been an intelligent woman, not a fool. They had been Grady’s excuses to her, and she had gone along with them because that was what he wanted. Grady and Taylor were all Aunt Julia had.
The picture rose in her mind of Grady when he had been very young, just discovering the miracle of words. They had been at Mandelay, and he was being held up high in his father’s arms, trying to touch the leaves on a tree. His little face was stubbornly intense. “Dat?” he had asked, again and again, pointing at each new object, as Earlene and Julia and Olivia and Lila stood there admiringly.
“Dat?”
“A leaf,” Stan said.
“Dat?”
“A tree.”
“Dat?”
“The house.”
“Dat?”
“Daddy’s shirt. And who is that?”
Grady had grinned. “Olivia.”
He had been such a bright, eager little kid, doing what little kids did at that age, discovering the world. It had seemed at that moment he could become anything, anybody. But it was not even possible that he could be what should have been his most basic of rights: happy.
She went into the living room where Roger was watching some financial program on television. He took one look at her and was alarmed. “What happened?”
“Grady’s dead,” Olivia said. She sat close to him and he encircled her with his arms. After a while she told him all about it.
Uncle Seymour called then to tell her that his travel agency would order the plane tickets to California, and that they were all to go together on Tuesday afternoon and stay overnight. “It’s too late to get a Super Saver,” Olivia said, “but I want to go Coach.”
“We’re going First Class,” Uncle Seymour said. “Don’t be silly. This is no time for you to scrimp on money.” Thousands, she thought. Now she was angry at Grady again for killing himself, and annoyed about how much the plane tickets would cost for them to arrive with their solidarity and respect to his ashes that he had not let them give to his person.
Roger had decided not to go. She didn’t try to persuade him. She thought about Kenny in Santa Barbara, and suddenly felt the need to be closer to him, the way they used to be when they were young. She called him, and luckily he was in and already knew all about what had happened.
“Kenny, I don’t want to stay in a hotel at a time like this,” Olivia said. “I’m too depressed. Could I stay with you?”
“Sure,” he said. “You can sleep in Jason’s room. He’s away at school.”
Aunt Myra called. “I guess you heard about Grady?”
“Yes. Why do you think he did it?”
“He was upset about his deck.”
“You can’t believe that.”
“That’s what he said,” Aunt Myra said. “Now, how are you getting to the airport? Do you want to pick me up on the way, or should I go to Seymour and Iris’s and you pick us up there?”
“I’ll meet you at the airport.”
“How can we find you?” Aunt Myra said, sounding panicked.
“We’re on the same plane.”
“No, I think we should all take a cab there together. We’ll get a big one. I don’t suppose Roger’s coming. That’s all right; he’s busy. Maybe we’ll use Seymour’s car service. I’ll call you back.”
As it turned out, none of them even spoke to one another on the long plane trip. They read and ate and slept, and when they were awake they looked grim.
Good-natured Kenny picked them up at the airport and drove the others to their hotel; then he took Olivia home with him.
“Awful thing,” he said.
“Yes.”
After that they didn’t talk about Grady at all. When she got to Kenny’s he made her a sandwich and showed her his view of the ocean, all silver in the moonlight. The house was full of things he had collected on his various trips, but it was too neat and looked as if no one lived there. She supposed that was what a house started to look like when the children—or the child, in his case—had gone. Jason was in his first year of prep school, and then he would be off to college and after that would probably get an apartment of his own.
Kenny took her to look at the new home gym he’d had installed in what had been the guest room. He was very proud of each piece of equipment and insisted on showing her how it worked. His round face was beaming proudly.
“I use it every day,” he said.
“Good for you; it’s about time,” she said, not unkindly.
“I know.”
“Roger would love this,” she said.
“You could have one in your house.”
They sat in matching big chairs in front of the fireplace in his bedroom and talked. “I’ve met a woman,” Kenny said.
“You always do.”
“No, this one is different. The others always had something wrong with them. But this one is very spiritual. She’s not college-educated or intellectual, but she has such a strong sense of what’s real and what isn’t. She’s one of the most perceptive people I’ve ever known. She’s bright on a really
deep
level. I think she’s the one.”
“Where did you meet her?”
“At a singles party for Jewish professional people.”
“You went to a singles party?”
“Everybody was there. All the women were chasing me and I was chasing her.” He smiled. “Her husband died six months ago. He had Huntington’s chorea—a horrible disease. She nursed him for years. She was very devoted. They had no children. She’s a responsible, good person. I just had a sense she was the woman for me right away. And guess what? She’s my age.”
“That’s new.”
“Her name is Pam,” Kenny said. “I think I could marry her.”
“Really!”
“Yes.”
Olivia thought how strange it was that at this moment of grieving for a life lost, another one was about to renew.
“What does she look like?”
“She’s cute.”
Kenny had devoted himself to raising Jason, and Pam had taken care of her invalid husband. Now they were both free, or at least Kenny was freer than he had been. Pam would never desert him on top of the Himalayas as Gloria had done. He was her adventure. She would take care of him.
“I’m looking forward to meeting her,” Olivia said.
She slept that night in Jason’s room, on his water bed. Or rather she lay on it, rocking uncomfortably, muscles cramped and aching from the icy cold, shivering under blankets. She had never slept on one of those things before but she was sure they were highly overrated. She wondered if you could get hypothermia from a water bed. That would be a bizarre death to add to the family history. However, she was not afraid enough to sleep on the uninviting, uncarpeted floor. The room seemed singularly uninhabited and deserted.
“I nearly froze last night,” she told Kenny at breakfast.
“Oh, I forgot to turn the heat on in the water bed,” he said casually.
She was sure he never had guests.
The Church of the Spirit, where Grady and his family had worshipped, was in the Pacific Palisades, high on a bluff overlooking the ocean. It was a simple building, set among old trees, reached on foot by a gravel path. At first Olivia thought with a flicker of surprise that it was an Eastern hideaway for meditation, a compromise Stan and Earlene had reached when he decided to change his religion, but then she saw the cross on the roof.
The simple chapel where the funeral was to be held was very peaceful. It had pews and a stained-glass window, and a plain cross on the white painted wall above where an altar would be if there was one. Instead there was a small table on top of which was an urn. It was completely surreal to see what had so recently been a large and powerful man transformed into something that would fit into that little metal urn. Olivia almost expected to see Grady jump out like a genie. Beside it was a floral arrangement from Taylor, and that was all. Some soft classical music which she didn’t recognize was playing from the loudspeakers.
In the pews on one side of the room were Grady’s friends, ten or twelve of them, mostly couples, and on the other side was the family. You could certainly tell which was which. The men on his side looked like cowboys or ex-football players, with muscles and mustaches and outdoor skin. They wore suits, out of respect, with cowboy boots under them. Their wives were tough-looking and pretty, with none of that soft, polished Eastern look.
Grady must have met many people in his career, but the funeral was very small—whether he’d had only a few close friends, or whether Taylor hadn’t wanted to draw a lot of attention to his suicide by having a large funeral, Olivia couldn’t tell. Whoever these friends were, they were probably fellow stuntmen. None of them were “friends from school.”
Jenny and Paul were there, as were Melissa and Bill. Nick and his wife were not there, nor were Uncle Seymour’s middle-aged children. There were Olivia and Kenny, Uncle Seymour, Aunt Iris, Aunt Myra and Uncle David from Florida, looking sad and bewildered at this topsy-turvy event in the life cycle. Earlene was sitting in the front row, on the friend side, dabbing at her eyes with a damp handkerchief. Taylor was wandering around looking stoned, wearing a dark dress with tiny flowers on it, greeting Grady’s friends with the hand sign for “I love you” that Olivia had learned as a child.
Index finger and pinky up, two middle fingers down, thumb sticking out; remember to use the thumb, without the thumb it’s the sign for the Devil
. “I love you” was just a finger away from “You are the devil,” Olivia thought, taking liberties with the image, and wondered whether Taylor blamed these macho men and the world they lived in for Grady’s forced secrecy about his private life.
Tim came and got Taylor then, and brought her to her seat on the side with the friends. The music stopped. One of Grady’s friends got up and went to the front of the room to speak.
He spoke of a Grady she had hardly known, of pranks and fun and good times, of a Grady who was a leader, full of life. To hear Grady described this way he seemed such a happy, vital person it was hard for her to imagine him even thinking of killing hpinimself. Then who had been that miserable, vulnerable and beaten creature she had known? The same Grady, different view. The friend sat down and a young woman came to the front of the room.
“Miranda,” Aunt Myra whispered to Olivia. Grady’s ex-girlfriend.
She looked like an actress, ingenue-type. She had a pretty face, thick, sun-streaked hair and a body in great shape. Her eyelashes were so long Olivia could see them defined even from where she sat, and her large dark eyes were brimming with tears.