My parents' presence at a high school orchestra concert turned what should have been a routine event into something akin to the finals of the Olympic women's figure skating long program. Even from the blinding, floodlit stage I could practically see them in the audience, clucking at every error, grimacing at anything even slightly out of tune. Afterwards, when the other parents-musically illiterate chumps-were patting their kids on the head and loading the tuba into the station wagon, I would receive my critique. "You were hesitating in the second movement of the Haydn Variations." "You over-anticipated in the berceuse section of the Stravinsky." "Your tone was excellent in the first movement but then your chops ran out." My brother, who was forced for a number of years to play the French horn, was reduced to a screaming fight with our father in the school parking lot, the kind of fight only possible between fathers and sons. He'd bumbled too many notes, played out of tune, committed some treasonous infraction against the family reputation. My father gave him the business on the way out to the car, eliciting the alto curses of a fourteen-year-old, pages of music everywhere, an instrument case slammed on the pavement.
This sort of rebellion was not my style. I cried instead. I cried in the seventh grade when the letter telling me I'd been accepted to the North Jersey regional orchestra arrived three days late. I cried in the tenth grade, when I ended up in the All State Band instead of the orchestra. I cried when I thought I'd given a poor recital (never mind that the audience thought I was brilliant-all morons), cried before lessons (under-prepared), cried after lessons (sentenced to a week of reviewing the loathsome F-sharp etude). Mostly I cried during practice drills supervised by my father. These were torture sessions wherein some innocent tooting would send my father racing downstairs from his attic study, screaming "Count, count, you're not counting! Jesus Christ!" Out would come a pencil-if not an actual conductor's baton-hitting the music stand, forcing me to repeat the tricky fingerings again and again, speeding up the tempo so I'd be sure to hit each note when we took it back down to real time. These sessions would last for hours, my mouth muscles shaking from atrophy, tears welling up from fatigue and exasperation. If we had a copy of the piano part, my mother would play the accompaniment, and together my parents would bark commands. "Articulate the eighth notes more. More staccato on the tonguing. Don't tap your foot, tap your toe inside your shoe." The postman heard a lot of this. The neighbors heard all of it. After practicing we'd eat dinner, but not before that song-"There's a smile on our face, and it seems to say all the wonderful things..." "Good practice session today," my mother would say, dishing out the casserole, WQXR's Symphony Hall playing over the kitchen speakers. "Yup, sounding pretty good," my father would say. "How about one more go at it before bed?"
My mother called my oboe a "horn." This infuriated me. "Do you have your horn?" she'd ask every single morning. "Do you need your horn for school today?" She maintained that this terminology was technically correct, that among musicians, a "horn" was anything into which air was blown. My oboe was a $4,000 instrument, high-grade black grenadilla with sterling silver keys. It was no horn. But such semantics are a staple of Music Is My Bag, the overfamiliar stance that reveals a desperate need for subcultural affiliation, the musical equivalent of people in the magazine business who refer to publications like Glamour and Forbes as "books." As is indicated by the use of "horn," there's a subtly macho quality to Music Is My Bag. The persistent insecurity of musicians, especially classical musicians, fosters a kind of jargon that would be better confined to the military or major league baseball. Cellists talk about rock stops and rosin as though they were comparing canteen belts or brands of glove grease. They have their in-jokes and aphorisms, "The rock stops here," "Eliminate Violins In Our Schools."
I grew up surrounded by phrases like "rattle off that solo," "nail that lick," and "build up your chops." Like acid-washed jeans, "chops" is a word that should only be invoked by rock and roll guitarists but is more often uttered with the flailing, badly timed anti-authority of the high school clarinet player. Like the violinist who plays "Eleanor Rigby" before rehearsal, the clarinet player's relationship to rock and roll maintains its distance. Rock and roll is about sex. It is something unloved by parents and therefore unloved by Music Is My Bag people, who make a vocation of pleasing their parents, of studying trig and volunteering at the hospital and making a run for the student government even though they're well aware they have no chance of winning. Rock and roll is careless and unstudied. It might possibly involve drinking. It most certainly involves dancing. It flies in the face of the central identity of Music Is My Baggers, who chose as their role models those painfully introverted characters from young adult novels-"the klutz," "the bookworm," "the late bloomer." When given a classroom assignment to write about someone who inspires her, Music Is My Bag will write about her grandfather or perhaps Jean-Pierre Rampaul. If the bad-attitude kid in the back row writes about AC/DC's Angus Young, Music Is My Bag will believe in her heart that this student should receive a failing grade. Rock and roll is not, as her parents would say when the junior high drama club puts on a production of Grease, "appropriate for this age group." Even in the throes of adolescence, Music Is My Bag will deny adolescence. Even at age sixteen, she will hold her ears when the rock and roll gets loud, saying it ruins her sense of overtones, saying she has sensitive ears. Like a retiree, she will classify the whole genre as nothing but a bunch of noise, though it is likely she is a fan of Yes.
During the years that I was a member of the New Jersey All State Orchestra I would carpool to rehearsals with the four or so other kids from my town who made All State every year. This involved spending as much as two hours each way in station wagons driven by people's parents and, inevitably, the issue would arise of what music would be played in the car. Among the most talented musicians in school was a freshman who, in addition to being hired by the Boston Symphony Orchestra at age twenty-two, possessed, as a fifteen-year-old, a ripe enthusiasm for the singer Amy Grant. This was back in the mid-1980s when Amy Grant's hits were still relegated to the Christian charts. Our flute-plaing carpool-mate loved Amy Grant. Next to Prokofiev and the Hindemith Flute Sonata, Amy Grant occupied the number-one spot in this girl's studious, late-blooming heart. Since her mother, like many parents of Baggers, was devoted solely to her daughter's musical and academic career, she did most of the driving to these boony spots-Upper Chatham High School, Monmouth Regional, Long Branch Middle School. Mile after New Jersey Turnpike mile, we were serenaded by the wholesome synthesizers of songs like "Saved By Love" and "Wait for the Healing," only to spill out of the car and take no small relief in the sound of twenty-five of New Jersey's best student violinists playing "Eleanor Rigby" before the six-hour rehearsal.
To participate in a six-hour rehearsal of the New Jersey All State Band or Orchestra is to enter a world so permeated by Music Is My Bagdom that it becomes possible to confuse the subculture with an entire species, as if Baggers, like lobsters or ferns, require special conditions in order to thrive. Their ecosystem is the auditorium and the adjacent band room, any space that makes use of risers. To eat lunch and dinner in these venues is to see the accessories of Badgom tumble from purses, knapsacks, and totes; here more than anyplace are the real McCoys, actual Music Is My Bag bags, canvas satchels filled with stereo Walkmen and A.P. math homework and Trapper Keeper notebooks featuring the piano-playing Schroeder from the Peanuts comic strip. The dinner break is when I would embark on oboe maintenance, putting the reed in water, swabbing the instrument dry, removing the wads of wax that, during my orthodontic years, I placed over my front teeth to keep the inside of my mouth from bleeding. Just as I had hated the entropy of recess back in my grade-school years, I loathed the dinner breaks at All State rehearsals. To maximize rehearsal time, the wind section often ate separately from the strings, which left me alone with the band types. They'd wolf down their sandwiches and commence with their jam session, a cacophonous white noise of scales, finger exercises, and memorized excerpts from their hometown marching band numbers. During these dinner breaks I'd generally hang with the other oboist. For some reason, this was almost always a tall girl who wore sneakers with corduroy pants and a turtleneck with nothing over it. This is fairly typical Music Is My Bag garb, though oboists have a particular spin on it, a spin characterized more than anything by lack of spin. Given the absence in most classical musicians of a style gene, this is probably a good thing. Oboists don't accessorize. They don't wear buttons on their jackets that say "Oboe Power" or "Who Are You Going to Tune To?"
There's high-end Bagdom and low-end Bagdom, with a lot of room in between. Despite my parents' paramilitary practice regimes, I have to give them credit for being fairly high-end Baggers. There were no piano-key scarves in our house, no "World's Greatest Trombonist" figurines, no plastic tumblers left over from my father's days as director of the Stanford University Marching Band. Such accessories are the mandate of the lowest tier of Music Is My Bag, a stratum whose mascot is P.D.Q. Bach, whose theme song is "Piano Man," and whose regional representative is the kid in high school who plays not only the trumpet but the piano, saxophone, flute, string bass, accordion, and wood block. This kid, considered a wunderkind by his parents and the rest of the band community, plays none of these instruments well, but the fact that he knows so many different sets of fingerings, the fact that he has the potential to earn some college money by performing as a one-man band at the annual state teacher's conference, makes him a hometown hero. He may not be a football player. He may not even gain access to the Ivy League. But in the realm of Music Is My Bag, the kid who plays every instrument, particularly when he can play Billy Joel songs on every instrument, is the Alpha Male.
The flip side of the one-man-band kid are those Music Is My Baggers who are not musicians at all. These are the kids who twirl flags or rifles in the marching band, kids who blast music in their rooms and play not air guitar but air keyboards, their hands fluttering out in front of them, the hand positions not nearly as important as the attendant head motions. This is the essence of Bagdom. It is to take greater pleasure in the reverb than the melody, to love the lunch break more than the rehearsal, the rehearsal more than the performance, the clarinet case more than the clarinet. It is to think nothing of sending away for the deluxe packet of limited-edition memorabilia that is being sold for the low, low price of one's entire personality. It is to let the trinkets do the talking.
I was twenty-one when I stopped playing the oboe. I wish I could come up with a big, dramatic reason why. I wish I could say that I sustained some kind of injury that prevented me from playing (it's hard to imagine what kind of injury could sideline an oboist-a lip strain? Carpal tunnel?) or that I was forced to sell my oboe in order to help a family member in crisis or, better yet, that I suffered a violent attack in which my oboe was used as a weapon against me before being stolen and melted down for artillery. But the truth, I'm ashamed to say, has more to do with what in college I considered to be an exceptionally long walk from my dormitory to the music building, and the fact that I was wrapped up in a lot of stuff that, from my perspective at the time, precluded the nailing of Rachmaninoff licks. Without the prodding of my parents or the structure of a state-run music education program, my oboe career had to run on self-motivation alone-not an abundant resource-and when my senior year started I neither registered for private lessons nor signed up for the orchestra, dodging countless calls from the director imploring me to reassume my chair.
Since then, I haven't set foot in a rehearsal room, put together a folding music stand, fussed with a reed, marked up music, practiced scales, tuned an orchestra or performed any of the countless activities that had dominated my existence up until that point. There are moments every now and then when I'll hear the oboe-dominated tenth movement of the Bach Mass in B Minor or the berceuse section of Stravinsky's Firebird and long to find a workable reed and pick up the instrument again. But then I imagine how terrible I'll sound after eight dormant years and put the whole idea out of my mind before I start to feel sad about it. I can still smell the musty odor of the inside of my oboe case, the old-ladyish whiff of the velvet lining and the tubes of cork grease and the damp fabric of the key pads. Unlike the computer on which I now work, my oboe had the sense of being an ancient thing. Brittle and creaky, it was vulnerable when handled by strangers. It needed to be packed up tight, dried out in just the right places, kept away from the heat and the cold and from anyone stupid enough to confuse it with a clarinet.
What I really miss about the oboe is having my hands on it. I could come at that instrument from any direction or any angle and know every indentation on every key, every spot that leaked air, every nick on every square inch of wood. When enough years go by, the corporeal qualities of an instrument become as familiar to its player as, I imagine, those of a long-standing lover. Knowing precisely how the weight of the oboe was distributed between my right thumb and left wrist, knowing, above all, that the weight would feel the same way every time, every day, for every year that I played, was a feeling akin to having ten years of knowledge about the curve of someone's back. Since I stopped playing the oboe, I haven't had the privilege of that kind of familiarity. That's not an exaggeration, merely a moot point.
VARIATIONS ON GRIEF.
Several years ago, my oldest friend died, presenting me with an occasion not to be sad, not to cry, not to tell people and have them not know how to respond. Several years ago, I decided to create an ironic occurrence rather than a tragedy, a cautionary tale rather than the wretched injustice it really was. This is a neat trick, this business of utter detachment from everything less than great that goes on, this position of being perched on a cartoon drawing of a crescent moon, looking down at all the lonely people, all the stupid ones with their souls so foolishly close to the linings of their coats.
What my friend did was catch a virus from the air. This is true. This is, in fact, the only aspect of the event that remains unequivocal. I now suspect it was hantavirus-the strain that is passed along from even the most remote contact with rodents-but there was never any concrete evidence of this. Like a tuft of dandelion seed, this virus wafted into Brian Peterson's body as he walked down the street or sat by a window or perhaps even slept in the bed he'd purchased from Jensen-Lewis, the bed with the Ralph Lauren sheets for which he'd fastidiously shopped at Bloomingdales-"fabric for living." Except that he died. All but dropped dead. Unlike an encounter with a dandelion seed, contact with such a virus is a one-in-eight-million chance. Four to six people each year die of this. One stands in greater risk of being abducted by a celebrated criminal, or of being visited by the Publisher's Clearing House Prize Patrol, or of standing on the precise acre of land where a jetliner falls after the failure of a hydraulics system. This is the sort of chance that, upon impact, transcends itself and becomes something closer to fate.
Brian is someone who accomplished nothing in his life other than his death. This is an ugly admission, a brutal interpretation of facts I have not been able to process any other way. He died at twenty-two. Very few people came to his funeral. There were only a handful of friends to call, vague acquaintances who had faded into the murk of adulthood, who had disappeared down roads of maturity that always appeared to Brian as hazy and not worth the trip. His life had been a string of failures: an unremarkable education in suburban public schools, an abandoned college career, a less than half-hearted attempt to become a writer. He was an only child, spoiled by parents who had no friends and furnished him with an expensive car and expensive clothes that he drove and wore no particular place. His audience was himself, a reflexive relationship that resulted in unbearably empty spaces for both parties. This was a life bereft of even tragedy, until he finally fixed that. He let death come to him-although that, of course, is a matter of interpretation, as is every component of the existence and lack of existence of Brian Peterson.
I liked Brian because he liked me, because he laughed at my jokes, let me drive his car, and complimented my appearance even when I'd done something atrocious to my hair. I liked him because he didn't hold me in contempt for refusing to reciprocate the romantic aspects of his affection for me. He let me talk about other men. He let me watch whatever I wanted on his TV, even if it was National Geographic specials about the spotted leopard of Ghana. I liked Brian because he had nothing to do with the passage of time. He was immune to maturity, resistant to forward motion. He existed the way childhood homes are supposed to and never do, as a foundation that never shifts, a household that never gets new wallpaper, or turns your bedroom into a study, or is sold in exchange for a condo in Florida.
When he left this planet, he left me and very few others, and if those Christian alternatives to life really exist, then he must know by now that we will never be reunited. If those opposable H's are true, then he is in Heaven for never committing any crime, and I'll find myself in Hell one day for the spin that I have put on his death. My spin is this: I believe that he couldn't do anything other than die. None of us who grew up with him could imagine an alternative. And the fact that he didn't officially kill himself was enough to make all of us believe in the supernatural, or at least some kind of devilish warden hovering over our lives, whispering in our waxy ears, "Do something, or die."
Some specifics: Over the New Year's weekend of 1993, Brian came down with the flu. He called in some antibiotics and took a few. Then he left the cigarettes on the kitchen table, lay down in bed, and never got up. Also on the table was the December 22 edition of the New York Post, the January issue of Esquire, and a copy of TV Guide already cracked at the spine. He was a person who planned his television watching as if the programs were activities written in a Filofax, as if they were the contents of his life, which they, in fact, were. They were standing appointments, not even penciled in.
On January 4, Brian's mother called me. I was eating a bagel. I answered on the third ring; somehow I remember this. She told me he was in the hospital, that he had lain in bed in his apartment for six days until she and his father had come in from New Jersey to see what was wrong. She said something about shallow breathing. There were some words to the effect of calling a private ambulance service, of Brian being too weak to move from his bedroom to the elevator, then the intensive care unit, some diagnosis of atypical pneumonia, some negative HIV test, some reversal of the pneumonia diagnosis, some rapid deterioration of lung tissue, doctors "in a quandary," relatives flying up from Florida. Apparently there was a priest involved; things were that bad. Brian's mother spoke in simple, even words. I debated in my mind whether I should call her Mrs. Peterson or Jan, her first name. If I called her Mrs. Peterson, as I probably had in the past, would that mean that things were normal, that I was acting "normal" about it? She told me not to come to the hospital, that Brian didn't want people to see him as he looked very bad. I wrote a card and sent it by messenger from my office the next day. I had one of those jobs which allowed for such things. I worked at a magazine about beauty. I had an office and a computer and a phone with many lines. I had swank health insurance, a gym membership, all the things Brian never got around to acquiring because he never got off the frozen plateau I'd long considered to be nothing more than his pathetic ass.
This is about death. Although for Brian, death seemed to be there from the beginning. It seemed to have settled, seed-like, into his pores from the time he was small. For Brian, there was something about life that he just couldn't do. And what was amazing was the unusual way in which he chose not to do it. Nothing about him was morbid. His world was clean and high in quality. He took hour-long showers. He wore Armani jackets. He drove his very expensive car to New Orleans for the hell of it. He dropped out of two colleges because he wasn't enjoying them. He refused to get a job because he didn't want one. His parents paid his rent on a huge apartment in SoHo, which he decorated with the obvious accessories of one who sees life through fashion magazines and Williams-Sonoma catalogs. On the walls, he had the Ansel Adams photograph, the Van Gogh print. Brian was the owner of six separate remote controls. There was the television, the VCR, the cassette player, the compact disc player, the other cassette player, the cable box. As with his magazines, he often spread the remote controls out into a fan-like shape on the chrome coffee table. He dusted and vacuumed every day. He talked about his life as being "very good."
Brian was a firm believer in not spending time doing anything that wasn't enjoyable. The result is that he did very little; there was never much to enjoy. I say this as a person who only really knew him from the beginning of adolescence to the end of it, a time when pleasure comes in tiny spurts, when happiness presents itself in bursts at the ends of long, painful confusion. He had absolutely no concept of work, of the notion of reward following sacrifice, of dark preceding dawn and all of that. It seems unlikely that he really ever knew how to study, that he understood what it meant to make a phone call in order to find a job or make a professional connection or even arrange for anything other than Chinese food delivery or a haircut, the latter of which he obtained at Bergdorf Goodman's for eighty-five dollars. I have never in my life witnessed a person like Brian, a person who never witnessed life. I have never in my life allowed a person to cater to my whims the way he did, believing, as he did, that I had a life, albeit a cheap and filthy life, full of low-paying jobs, too much homework, and a college dorm room that smelled-as he declared the one time he visited-like "urine." Maybe this is what I liked about him, that he could so easily turn me into a working-class heroine, that even in my saddest moments of friendlessness and directionlessness, I had ten times the life that he had. And I never even had to feel guilty; he still thought his life was great, an empty space of leisure and blank pleasure that I too could obtain if I had fewer of what he termed "hang-ups."
This is about death and it is about blame. I blame Brian's parents for everything. The thing I say to no one is that they killed him. By paying his rent, by not making him study trigonometry or stay in college, by not saying no to the car or the apartment, or the gas money for solitary trips to nowhere, or the racks and racks of Paul Stewart shirts, Howard and Jan Peterson caused the death of their son.
The moment I declared this in my mind is the moment I became despicable. The emotions that surround my experience of Brian's death are by far the ugliest and most unforgiving sentiments I have bestowed on any event of my life. I chose, perhaps for my own sanity, more likely because I was too afraid to choose anything else, to feel as if his death at twenty-two had been imminent from the day he was born. Because Brian died of no defined cause, because the diagnosis was inconclusive, because his parents allowed no autopsy, because he simply died, I chose to believe it happened on purpose. I chose to feel as if death for him was an achievement, a blessing, a trophy honoring all that he never bothered to complete. I chose to take his death as a cautionary tale, a message that, if one did not do, one would die. So I did quite a bit. I worked long hours. I swam at 5:30 in the morning. I told myself that I was going places, that I was a "comer." Brian, of course, was a "goner." Like the unearned Armani jackets, death became him. The turns of phrase went on and on.
Brian's death took less than three weeks to complete. He was in the hospital for seventeen days. The day he went in was the day most of our mutual friends from childhood had flown back from Christmas vacation to the homes that were constituting the early part of their adulthoods. This meant California, Ohio, Massachusetts. I lived directly across the park from Mount Sinai Hospital, where Brian lay bloated from virus-fighting steroids and motionless from paralytic drugs. Any movement, the doctors said, would have stressed his lungs. When he lost consciousness, his parents asked me to start coming over; they believed he'd hear my voice and "wake up." I took the bus to the hospital every third night. This was what I had promised myself: That even though his father called me twice a day to give me a "report"-"They still don't know;" "Things are better;" "No, they're worse;" "The numbers on the machine are up today;" "I was thinking about that time on Nantucket, did Brian ever mention it?"-I would not wreck my life by living, as they did, in the visitors' lounge of the Intensive Care Unit on the fourth floor of the Guggenheim Pavilion.
This is also about lying.
The Peterson family unit was a tiny thing-mom, dad, kid. There were no other siblings, only a handful of relatives. No neighbors. No friends. I believe Howard Peterson received a visit at the hospital from his boss. After a few trips to the fourth-floor lounge, after a few times of seeing these parents who couldn't speak, who couldn't bathe, who had lost all sense of time, after a few times of seeing the faces of the nurses and medical students and even the relatives of patients who had been merely shot in the cranium or shattered on motorcycles, I realized that the only way to handle the situation was to tell lies. Though it was plain that death was something already occurring, that this hospital stay was no longer about healing but about the slow submergence of a doomed ocean liner, the game to play seemed to be a game of denial. Jan and Howard Peterson were interested in everything that was not reality. They were interested in all that their son was not. They wanted to know about his friends and what movies he liked and, as they put it, "his art." They wanted to know who had left the pack of Lucky Strikes on his kitchen table and should that person be called regarding "the situation."
I told them yes and yes and yes. I scrounged for morsels of truth and expanded them into benign, purposeful lies. I told them Brian liked Fellini-it was true, I believed, that he had once rented 8 1/2 from the video store. I told them he was devoted to his writing, that he planned to arrive at a masterpiece one day and buy them a house in Nantucket. To their delight, I spoke about him in the present tense. I pontificated about all that I planned to do with him when he, as they kept putting it, "got out." I surmised that Brian would someday write a lovely prose poem about his stay in the hospital. They ate this up, "more, more" they said without speaking, though Howard spoke a lot, "needed to keep talking," he said, whereas his wife lay on the plastic couch in the lounge and looked at the ceiling.
I came to know Howard Peterson better than I'd ever known a friend's parent. Though I hated him for the delusional, sugar-coated approach he had taken to parenting, and obsessed as I was at the time with what I defined as reality, with the cold, hard truths of the corporate working-world, and rent-paying, and late-night subway rides taken because a cab would cost too much, I wasn't outwardly cruel enough to express any inkling of opinion. I hated him for denying his son the postmodern rites of passage, for never arguing with Brian, for never hesitating to write the checks, for perpetually neglecting to crack the whip. Even now, it is a mystery to me who Jan and Howard Peterson are. For twenty years they lived in a small and badly decorated house in New Jersey. They drove a 1983 Oldsmobile Cutlass. Howard worked as a bond trader. Jan did nothing. They became rich in the 1980s and spent it all on Brian, invested it all in the enterprise that seemed an experiment in passivity, as if lack of movement was the ultimate freedom, as if people who say "I'm going to win the lottery and spend the rest of my life doing nothing" really know what they're talking about.
But my relationship to Howard during these days in the visitors' lounge presented me with an interesting set of rules, a subtle opportunity for mind manipulation. Since Jan wouldn't speak, and talking to Howard terrified me in that he broke down in tears after just a few sentences, my decision to "think positively" about the situation, to be optimistic and cheerful and phrase things in precisely the opposite way than I normally do, served the function of putting myself at a remove from the whole thing. As actors say, I made a choice. I made a decision to cross to upstage left, to tell them that Brian was working on a screenplay, to refrain from getting upset because, as I said, "There's nothing to be upset about because he's going to pull through." My best line was this: "Brian will not die because people our age can't conceive of death in relation to ourselves. It's not in his vocabulary, therefore it's impossible."
It was for this sort of language that Howard called me one night to come visit him in his hotel room. He and Jan were staying a few blocks from the hospital at a place called the Hotel Wales. Howard said he wanted to talk about Brian. He said he "wanted to gain greater insight" into his son. I was sitting in my room drinking wine from a plastic tumbler when he called. My bedroom window was open, and flecks of snow were floating in. A news report emitted from the clock radio, something about George Bush, who was technically still in office, although the inauguration was days away. I had been engrossed in the election, smitten by James Carville, newly invigorated by politics-the campaign buses and falling-down balloons of it all. Brian had taken little interest, though he'd appeared bemused by my chattering.
So this is what it was when Howard called: the wine in the tumbler, me still in my work clothes. I took a cab to the hotel and readied myself for more lies, for more of the acting I hadn't done since a high school performance of The Man Who Came to Dinner-a performance for which Brian had brought me flowers. I was terrified to meet Howard the way I had feared going onstage, the dread of the audience mixing with a longing for the whole thing to end in triumph, for some crowd to cheer, for a late-night cast party followed by peaceful sleep in my childhood bed.
This was a luxurious hotel, green and gold wallpaper, wood moldings polished until they were mirror-like. When Howard opened the door, he was wearing the same sweater he'd worn the past four times I'd seen him, only now there was a food stain on it. His hair stuck out on either side like a clown's. He wanted to hear the line again, the line about death not being in Brian's vocabulary. He wanted it repeated over and over, like a child hearing a bedtime story. I was afraid that if I flubbed the word order he'd correct me, that if I slipped into past tense he'd ask why. He said I was his favorite person to talk to these days, that the doctors were "paid to be pessimistic," that relatives were evasive, that his wife had given up and was simply praying.
The room was not a room but a suite-living room, bedroom, kitchen. Howard made himself a glass of water, took some pills out of his pocket, and swallowed them. He asked what books Brian read, what programs he watched on television. I said Dostoyevsky, Doctorow and Seinfeld. I said The Picture of Dorian Gray; that one, I believed, was true. I said that Brian was a lover of the good life, that unlike the rest of us, he lived for the day, that he'd quit school because he'd realized it wasn't right for him. I and the rest of Brian's friends, I explained, were just robots for doing our homework, for not trying to beat the system. Brian was a rebel. He was a lover, a fighter, and a hero all in one. He would never die. There was no way it could happen.
This went on for three hours, until Howard went into the bedroom, lay down, and fell asleep. I waited ten minutes and slinked out. He'd left cab money for me on the table, which I took, like a whore. This was four days before the end.
Brian died around 6:30 in the morning, the time when I usually returned from my swim at the health club, my participation in the society in which Brian refused to take part. I arrived home, saw the light blinking on my answering machine, and knew. For a few minutes I avoided replaying the tape because there seemed no reason. Outside it was still dark, still dead, cold January. My chlorinated hair was frozen on my scalp because I never wore a hat to walk the four blocks from the club. Howard's voice was steady on the machine; "Are you there? Are you screening your calls?... Brian didn't make it." He began to say something else but his voice cracked and he hung up. All I could think was that I wouldn't have to go to the hospital anymore. All I could wonder was whether I should go to work. I had no inclination to cry, although I believe I tried, conjuring up sad stories, again like the high school actress to which this event had partially restored me. I tried to do something appropriate. I made coffee. I took a shower. I turned on the television and watched the news. It was inauguration day. Bush's out, Clinton's in. The two families passed each other on the White House steps like baseball teams shaking hands after a game. Such somber, upright civility.
I had found my metaphor. I had found the moment upon which to seize, the symbol around which to fashion the circumstance of my friend's death. No longer a random occurrence, an inexplicable meeting with a bizarre virus no one else catches, Brian's death became for me a national mandate, an obligatory component of a cultural changing of the guard. Just as I had delighted in the fact that the Clinton campaign's theme song was Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop," a message that had prompted me to propel my thoughts vehemently into all that the future would bring-the information superhighway, congressional term limits, corporate-subsidized health clubs for hard-working, realistic people like me-I rationalized that Brian's refusal to ever think about tomorrow had lead to his demise. For the first time since he had become ill three weeks before, I allowed myself to spell the words out: Brian died because he refused to live. He refused to live because he refused to work. It was all out of some Ayn Rand manifesto: One must make profound sacrifices in order to live a life without compromise. Brian had attempted the latter without the former. He had seized the day so intensely that the day finally seized him. More turns of phrase. I reveled in them. I reclined back and watched my stylistic light show, curled up into my big, derisive comfy chair. In my mind, in the milieu that I had built around this event-the perfunctory hospital visits, the heading for the wine bottle the minute I returned home, the reluctance to tell other friends for fear that it would be awkward-I had set up an incident that had more to do with psychology than medicine. Brian was so drugged up, we were told, that he had no idea what was happening. He was a minor player. There was no dying involved, only the dealing with it. There was no body, only Hallmark cards. No last breaths of life, but instead cigarettes in the breezeway outside the Guggenheim Pavilion. As far as I was concerned at the time, there would be no grief, only irony.
And the sickest part about the whole thing is that I felt the irony while it was actually going on. There was nothing retrospective about this view, no longing for hindsight, as it seemed to have emerged precociously while events were still occurring. The monstrosity that Brian's parents were being asked to wrap their minds around was more, I knew, than I could ever conceive of. The singular event of their dying son carried more horror than the worst catastrophes in the combined lives of myself and everyone I knew. What could I possibly have compared it to? Being rejected by Yale? That my milk-fed existence was now being soured by a tragedy that was not my own but someone else's put me in the peculiar position of grieving vicariously, a condition so cynical that the only option was to shut up about it. So I faked it. I threw myself into their needs with a duplicity intense enough to distract me from whatever sadness it did not occur to me to feel for myself.
Gamesmanship is something this is also about. Verbal gamesmanship, sparring-though the feeling was more like hitting a tennis ball against a wall.
The words I said to Jan and Howard Peterson after their son was dead were even bigger lies than the ones I'd said when he wasn't. I continued with the present tense. "Brian's probably laughing at us now." And "Brian, though he is sad to leave you, is probably fascinated by whatever he is experiencing now." They loved this-especially Howard, who in the forty-eight hours between inauguration day and the funeral, had become obsessed with the afterlife, "the other side," as he called it. I spoke at the mass. I regarded this as an opportunity to do some writing, to "be creative," which was something my job was not allowing. I was a huge hit: People came up to me at the burial and congratulated me on my performance. My parents, though disconcerted at my use of the present tense in my speech, remarked that I was a skilled speaker. For me and the few friends who had returned home for the funeral, seeing our parents was almost worse than seeing Jan and Howard. They wore on their faces the look of having just avoided a fatal car crash. They were like people run off the road, shell-shocked drivers, breathing heavily and staring at the steering wheel while the tractor trailer ambled on ahead. "All I can think is thank God it's them and not us," my mother said to me out loud. I hadn't worn a coat-I didn't own a proper one to wear with a dress-and someone else's mother went home between the mass and the burial to fetch me one, which she angrily insisted I wear as we stood by the grave. My father expressed his fear that I would catch Brian's mysterious virus. Like me, he wanted to know the mechanics of the thing, how and where it gained its entry, what Brian had done to contract it, what error in judgment had been made to cause this.
After the burial, I returned to my apartment in the city, threw up, and continued on with my life. I came to see grief as something I would simply never have. I perceived it as a sentiment that dwelled in the hearts of others, tucked neatly underneath a rug I'd never even owned. I became obsessed with movement, with productivity. At the time, this meant doing a good job at work, being the best editorial assistant a slick beauty magazine ever had. I wrote killer photo captions, answered my phone perkily, filled out invoices until eight o'clock at night. I did all the things Brian never did. I didn't mention "the situation" to anyone. My parents called to check on me, thrilled when I didn't mention the event, relieved when I seemed not to have a cold.
After about three months, Howard called and asked if I wanted to have dinner. He left a message on my machine, leaving Brian's old number as the place to call back. When I did, Brian's voice came on, deep and reticent. "I'm not available, please leave a message." I hated Howard all over again. He picked up when I spoke. He and Jan wanted to have dinner with me "in order to talk about Brian." They wanted me to meet them at Brian's apartment where they were staying. They wanted only to eat in restaurants where Brian had eaten, so could I recommend one?
Brian had only eaten in stylish places with ceiling fans and aspiring models at the bar. I had always hated this about him. I had always been embarrassed to go to establishments I had no business patronizing-establishments Brian had even less business eating in, although he always paid for both of us and ordered many drinks and an expensive entree and usually dessert. Once, while I was in college, he'd taken me to a place he'd read about in a magazine, a small club that had recently opened in SoHo. There we saw a girl from my school, a very rich girl with a famous mother, both of whom had been profiled in Vanity Fair a year earlier. This girl, who had never spoken to me on campus, came to our table and kissed me on the cheek. Brian was ecstatic. I was furious. I felt I was dressed terribly-and even if I had been dressed well, I would have been merely posing as a poseur, which was worse than merely existing in a state of delusion, which is what Brian did adamantly, with stubborn, insistent braggadocio. Still, this encounter held him for several weeks. He mentioned it repeatedly, talking about "Meghan's friend Countess X" to whichever of our other friends managed to drag themselves back into town to see him.
Restricting my lies to the big ones-how bad would it have been, after all, to suggest to Brian's parents that we eat at Pizzeria Uno because Brian had loved the single deep dish?-I told Howard to make a reservation at Odeon because Brian loved it and often used it as a location in his writing, which was true. When I arrived at Brian's apartment, the Lucky Strikes were still on the kitchen table along with the December 22 edition of the New York Post, the January issue of Esquire, and the copy of TV Guide cracked at the spine. "We haven't touched these," said Howard. He was wearing corduroy pants and a polyester sweater. Jan wore wide wales and an L.L. Bean blouse. We went to Odeon. I scanned the room for fear of Countess X. Howard said he only wanted to order dishes that Brian had ordered. I had no recollection but told him the salmon.
It was during this meal that Jan and Howard first began to demonstrate their expertise in "the other side." Howard had read several books on the subject and had brought with him a list of the titles so that I, too, could learn more about "Brian's new life." Howard had had dreams, he explained, where Brian spoke to him and elaborated on the fun he was having. They had been to a psychic on Long Island who claimed to see Brian amid a field of roses and flanked by two other people, an older man-"probably his grandfather," said Jan-and a pretty, young girl whose name began with M. "I thought for a moment that might be you," she said. "But then you're not dead."
Then Jan declared loudly that she was considering killing herself. "I know just how I'd do it," she said. What got to me about this was not that she said it but that she said it so loudly. I looked over at the next table at three impeccably dressed men whose eyes seemed to momentarily shift over to us. It seems bizarre to me now that I didn't ask her how she planned to kill herself for fear that it was an inappropriate question. It seems bizarre that even after this meal, after I turned down their invitation to go to a late movie, after I again took cab fare from them, which I pocketed and instead rode the subway, I met Jan and Howard several more times. This went on for about a year. Howard would call every few months, and if I was in a guilty mood, which I almost always was, flagellating myself as I did about every inadequate job performance or overdue phone bill or call I screened for fear it would be them, I said yes. I said yes and continued to lie and say that I had read the afterlife books and that I, too, awaited the day of my death so I could see Brian again and that the world was hardly worth inhabiting when such a vibrant figure was removed from it.
The dynamic was this: The more I saw Jan and Howard, the more evil thoughts I harbored, which caused me guilt, which caused me to dig in my heels and see them again. This was my self-styled redemption, my faux little journey into good Samaritanism. If I saw the Petersons on a Saturday, I could be bad for the rest of the week. If I lied to Howard about the salmon, I could call a co-worker a bitch behind her back on Monday. What happened was that I began to hate the world. Just as I hated Jan and Howard for being so lax as parents that their son died of what I believed to be inertia, I hated everyone else for existing in a condition that I defined as "fake." Like Holden Caulfield, I became obsessed with "phoniness." I saw everyone as innate liars, as zombified self-deluders who were dangers to themselves as well as the rest of the world. I hated people who walked too slowly down the sidewalk, grocery store clerks who took too long to count the change, days when there was nothing but junk mail. I hated anything that impeded whatever I considered to be progress, whatever I had determined was my ticket to a socialized, productive life. Unlike Brian, I would pursue a career. Unlike him, I would shop at the grocery store efficiently. I would meet friends for lunch and drinks and have people over to my apartment to watch the Oscars. I would walk quickly down the street because I actually had someplace to go. I would do anything necessary to participate in what I considered to be life, which, to me, meant getting up extremely early and doing things like putting all the apartment's trash into a small plastic bag, which I would throw out on the way to the club to go swimming, after which I would go to work, and for lunch go to the gourmet deli on Forty-sixth Street, where I would tap my fingers on the counter if the people in front of me were taking too long to order, because I had somewhere to be, because I was impressively busy with this thing called life, because I was sternly committed to the pursuit of whatever was the opposite of death.
By the following Christmas, Jan and Howard had stopped calling me. I had expected to hear from them around the anniversary of Brian's death, the one-year mark of the Clinton administration. When they didn't call I imagined them dead in their poorly decorated house. I imagined empty sleeping pill bottles on the night table, or a hose hooked up to the back of the Oldsmobile with Howard's lifeless body five feet away. Since I'd never learned how they planned to kill themselves, it was difficult to put my finger on one particular scenario. Like "the situation" itself, there seemed so many variations on the truth, so many evil interpretations of events upon which to fixate. Through one of our mutual friends, I learned they hadn't killed themselves. Like a normal person, this friend, in town for Christmas, had called Jan and Howard himself and then driven over to the house. Like a good person, he sat in the living room and spoke honestly about this horrible thing that had happened. Unlike me, he saw no reason to lie. Unlike me, he wasn't hung up on some twisted symbolism, on some mean-spirited rationalization employed to keep fear at bay, to keep grief a thing depicted in movies rather than a loss felt in one's own flesh.
Here's another true scene from the movie. It's a flashback, a time I remember with Brian from when we were small, playing with other kids. We stood in a circle and called off our teams, the reds versus the blues, something like that. Then we needed an "it," a dreaded tagger who would tap us on the shoulder and freeze us. No one wanted the job, including myself, and I'd watched as Brian just stood there, silent amid the chants, bewildered as the shouting came over him. "Not it!" I yelled. "Not it!" someone else yelled. "Not it!" we all said until there was no one but Brian, a pale and clueless eight-year-old, suspended in those moments before realizing he'd lost the game. And so it was him. He was it.
Acknowledgments.
These essays arose from my good fortune of being in the wrong places at the right times just as often as I've stumbled into the right places at the right times. I am indebted to a number of wise people who have shown me the value of not always knowing wrong from right. Thanks to Michael Scammell, for noticing; Joshua Sessions, for reading (and reading and reading); Sarah Wolf, Emilie Dyer, Sara Eckel and Alison Schecter for talking and listening (and reading); and Sloan Harris, for waiting.
Thomas Beller was one of my earliest champions. He's one of the rare people whose taste fuels his energy rather than depletes it and I'm privileged to be a beneficiary of his chutzpah and goodwill. I am grateful to Robert Bingham, Daniel Pinchbeck, and all of the editors of Open City, especially to Joanna Yas, who doesn't let her ability to actually get things done detract from her imagination, foresight, and talent.
The ultimate thanks goes to my parents; Glen Daum, who taught me, through music, everything I know about writing a sentence; and Rachael Daum, who passed along the drive to get those sentences read.
MEGHAN DAUM is an op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times and the author of several books, including The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion (FSG, 2014). She is the editor of Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids (Picador, 2015). She has written for numerous publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and Vogue, and contributed to NPR's Morning Edition and This American Life. She lives in Los Angeles with her husband and two dogs.
Also by Meghan Daum.
The Unspeakable ... And Other Subjects of Discussion.
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in that House.
The Quality of Life Report.
As Editor.
Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids.