CHAPTER ELEVEN
Still Alive
The New Year’s Eve
after Chase and Iris started dating, the three of us went to Jim
Krieger’s house for a party. Jim went to high school with me, and
his brother was a classmate of Chase’s. About forty of our peers
were there as well. Jim’s parents were in the Caribbean until
January third and it was his intention to keep the party rolling in
some fashion or other until the evening of the second. The three of
us had committed to hanging on until New Year’s morning, but we
wouldn’t agree to anything more than that in advance. While Jim had
a great reputation for his taste in exotic beers and unusual
spirits, and while his parents’ huge home was an expensively
appointed playground, the notion of spending nearly three days in
this high-ticket frat house felt a great deal like
overkill.
I had expected to be
there with Thalia Merritt. We’d gone to high school together and
hooked up again at the beginning of the winter break. But by our
fourth date, we were straining for conversation and I was beginning
to lose interest. Which was just as well, because the day after
Christmas she told me that she was heading down to Florida with
some of her friends for the New Year and that she didn’t think it
was a good idea for us to get together again when she got
back.
I was surprised that
I didn’t mind being at this party without a date. Most of the other
people there were paired off (with a notable exception being Jim
himself, who “didn’t do the couples thing”) and when I’d been in
situations like this before I’d felt conspicuous. But with Chase
and Iris as companions, I was fine. I’d spent a great deal of time
with them since returning from Boston and, as we drove to the
party, I felt a little like I would be “sharing” Iris with Chase,
at least until the point when they went off to bed, if any of us
were going to get much sleep during this bacchanal.
When we arrived,
there were fewer than a dozen people there, though you wouldn’t
know from the volume. The house was a center hall Colonial and Jim
informed us that the living room was the “alternative rock room”
while the den was the “punk room.” Stone Temple Pilots was bursting
from the speakers in the former while the Sex Pistols blared from
the latter, and they converged in a three-chord train wreck in the
foyer. We chose the living room, where there was an enormous buffet
of alcohol along with a bowl of Doritos. As soon as he got into the
room and before he’d even poured himself a drink, Chase started
slam dancing with some guy he knew.
“I don’t suppose you
want to . . .” I said to Iris, nodding in their
direction.
“Hmm, maybe later,”
she said as we walked over to the bar.
“If he’s going to do
that, he really should be in the punk room, you know.”
“Oh, you know Chase,
always spitting in the face of convention.”
I watched my brother
in action. Even throwing his muscular body against the doughy shape
of his friend, there was a certain grace to his actions. I couldn’t
recall a single time when Chase looked clumsy to me, even when he
was at his most incautious. I found some pride in the fact that
when the two slammed together, the friend bounced backward even
though he had to be forty pounds heavier than Chase.
Within the hour,
partiers filled both the alt-rock room and the punk room and were
spreading to the kitchen, the sunroom, and the screened in porch.
Some were outside building an anatomically correct snowman while
others were wandering off to one of the bedrooms. I’d decided to
make ouzo my drink of choice, and by the third I felt like a bit of
slam-dancing myself, though I managed to resist the temptation. I
spent some time talking with a woman named Christine who told me
that she was “with Steve, but not with
Steve.” Since I didn’t know who Steve was, this hardly mattered to
me and it registered that there might be some advantages to coming
to this party unattached.
Chase had been
drinking with abandon and he was quite obviously feeling the
effects. He ping-ponged around the room, doing his Harpo Marx
imitation, singing – for reasons known only to him – a ludicrously
dramatic version of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina” during a break in
the music, and dropping into the conversations of others, only to
leave in midsentence. Iris watched this amusedly, making laughing
side-comments, inaudible to me, to a pair of female
friends.
Around 10:30, there
was a roar from the foyer and Chase broke away from what he was
doing to see what was happening. Intrigued to see what could cause
him to shift gears so quickly, I walked out after him. He was
performing an elaborate hand-shaking routine (complete with the
bellowing of nonsense syllables) with four guys I recognized as
lacrosse teammates. The five blasted into the living room and a
palpable shock wave accompanied them. They descended upon the bar
and, as they did, one of the group shouted yet another nonsense
syllable. This caused all five to reach for various bottles and
carry them to a corner of the room.
I watched Chase
curiously. In the past couple of years, he had become fond of
drinking whenever he found the opportunity, but I’d never before
seen him take to alcohol with this much fervor. With his four
teammates, he embarked on some elaborate drinking game, the rules
of which eluded me. It seemed to entail the performance of a
variety of stunts (saying things backward, balancing in awkward
positions, lifting things) and the seemingly random mixing of the
various forms of liquor in one glass. One of the contestants
regularly drained this glass, though it wasn’t clear to me whether
this person had won or lost the previous competition.
“Do you know what
this is?” I asked Iris, who had come to stand next to me to
watch.
“Pahzoo,” she
said.
I’d heard that word
exclaimed as the group approached the bar, though it meant nothing
to me at the time (which is not to say that it meant much to me
now).
“Pahzoo?”
“Don’t ask me to
explain the rules. I’m not sure there are any. The object seems to
be to get totally wasted in record time.”
“You’ve seen Chase
play this game before?”
“With those guys at
the end-of-season party. I drove home. He moaned.”
The boys were
babbling even more incoherently now, which suggested that they were
reaching their goal. After one last trick, which none of them could
perform, they collapsed on the floor laughing. Slowly, Chase got
up, searched aimlessly around the room, and then stumbled in our
direction. When I asked him if he had won, he looked at me as
though he didn’t understand the question. He then put his hands on
both my shoulder and Iris’ and, without another word, turned back
to lie down with his buddies. After a while, it became clear that
he wasn’t going to move.
I’d never seen Chase
quite like this before and was in fact a little disappointed that
he’d succumbed to drink like a mere mortal. I didn’t care whether
we left the other guys passed out on the floor, but I wasn’t going
to have people stepping around my brother for the rest of the
night. With Jim’s help, I carried him to one of the bedrooms and
threw a blanket over him.
“I don’t think we’ll
be seeing Chase for the rest of the year,” I said to Iris when I
returned to the living room.
“I’m sure he’ll be
okay,” she said.
“Yeah, he’ll wake up
in the morning wanting a dozen eggs for breakfast. Chase doesn’t
get hung over. He gets ravenous.”
I expected Iris to go
back to her friends, but she stayed by my side. I liked having her
there and the entire party took on a more human scale when she was
next to me. About a half hour after I put him to bed, Iris asked me
to check on Chase “just to make sure he’s breathing.” He hadn’t
moved, but he looked utterly comfortable.
Ultimately, Iris and
I left the living room for the relative quiet of the sunroom. When
it was nearly midnight, we counted down the final seconds together,
and then she hugged me and kissed me on the cheek, the first time
she had done either. It caught me by surprise and I’m sure I looked
as dumbfounded as I did at the end of ninth grade when Ellen Aspen
did a similar thing on the last day of school.
The party started to
thin out not long after this. Some people went home. Several others
found sleeping arrangements on the second floor. I never found out
if anyone shared a room with Chase. By 3:00, the music was off and
Iris and I sat on a couch talking with Jim, a girl he had his arm
around, and a couple of other people. Both of us had continued to
drink, though hardly with the avidity of the early evening. I was
definitely drunk, but it was the kind of six-inches-off-the-ground
drunk one gets from maintaining a steady high.
“The new year is off
to an interesting start,” Iris said to me as things quieted down
further. Jim and the girl said good night and two of the other
three people curled up on pillows on the floor. “Chase dropped
before the ball in Times Square did.”
“Not likely to happen
often,” I said.
“True. He’ll make it
his mission to outlast it next time.”
I nodded and Iris
leaned back farther, listing in my direction. A couple of minutes
later, she leaned a bit more and put her head on my shoulder. I
craned my neck to find that she was asleep. A short while after
this, I rested my head on hers and fell asleep as
well.
The vision of Iris in
a sleeveless top and shorts was as arresting as it was
transporting. I wondered if she remembered the first time I saw her
wearing clothes similar to these and even if she might have worn
them now in honor of that moment. It was difficult to stop thinking
that way, even as I warned myself against it.
I’d asked her to meet
me at the store because I had a few things to discuss with the
carpenters before I could disappear. As a result, I gave Tyler the
opportunity to whisper upon her arrival, “This is the friend you’re spending the day with?”
which also meant that I was going to have to deflect questions
about her from him later. I wasn’t sure how I was going to react to
that interrogation, as I hadn’t spoken with anyone about Iris
ever.
“Gee, love what
you’ve done with the place,” she said as she gestured toward the
back.
“If you like that,
wait till you see what I have planned if we don’t sell it in
another month.”
She walked over and
kissed me on the cheek. This had become such a casual gesture
between us, not at all like the first time on that New Year’s Eve
more than ten years ago. When I kissed her, I put my hand on her
shoulder as I always did, but this time that shoulder was bare and
I almost pulled back, not wanting her to think I was crossing a
line.
Iris looked around at
the slumbering store and asked, “Are you sure they can spare you
today?”
“The A-team is on
duty. They’ll persevere.”
We walked around the
block to my car. It was a radiant day. One of those ideal early
June days when you could enjoy the increasing warmth without the
oppressive humidity that usually accompanied it by the solstice.
I’d been feeling off my game since Aunt Rita’s party, but the
combination of the weather and the promise of a full day with Iris
encouraged me.
“What are we doing,
anyway?” I said when we settled into the car. We’d made no
plans.
“Let’s just go,” Iris
said.
“Just
go?”
“Just go. Something
will come to us.”
“Care to pick a
direction?”
“Northwest,” Iris
said without a moment’s hesitation. I was certain that if I’d asked
her four seconds later, she would have offered a different
answer.
We drove out of town
and onto Highway 9. As we did, Iris reached for the iPod. Hendrix
was in the middle of a seven-minute solo on “Red
House.”
“Wrong music,” she
said. “Okay if I change it?”
“Be my guest. There
are more than five thousand songs on there.”
Iris studiously
scanned as I drove. “You don’t really listen to Enrique Iglesias,
do you?” she asked.
“I was curious. My
curiosity lasted until the third cut.”
“Good thing. I almost
asked you to drop me off by the side of the road. Ooh, Fountains of
Wayne,” she said, switching from Hendrix. “Great summer drive
music.”
For most of the next
half hour, we did little talking. An update about the play. A
modified description of what I did on Memorial Day. Other than
that, some singing and a great deal of wind in our hair. As we
drove down the highway, Iris pointed to a sign for Asa’s Berry Farm
and shouted, “That’s it.”
I
shrugged.
“Berry picking at the
next exit,” she said.
“This is what you
want to do?”
“Of course, don’t
you?”
“Of
course.”
Asa’s was a mile or
so off the highway, a large shed set on dozens of acres. Asa
himself wasn’t available (Iris asked), but a middle-aged guy told
us that we could pick all the strawberries we wanted for a dollar a
pint. Iris seemed to find this exciting and grabbed two oversized
buckets for us to fill. The guy told us where the ripest berries
were located and we headed off in that direction.
The first thing Iris
did when we set our buckets down was pick a huge strawberry and eat
it.
“I just love
strawberries, don’t you?” she said.
“Are you planning to
tell Asa that you ate that berry? It’s stealing if you don’t, you
know.”
Iris laughed. “It’s
not stealing. It’s expected. They wouldn’t want anyone out here
picking their berries who didn’t just have to have a
few.”
I set to the task of
filling my bucket. It was a bit daunting to realize that a half
hour later the bottom of the bucket was barely full. Of course, I
still had more in mine than Iris had in hers, though it was likely
that she wouldn’t be needing lunch.
“Don’t they have
machines that normally pick these things?” I said.
“Yes, a special kind
of machine called a migrant worker.”
“They use those in
Connecticut?”
“Did you think they
hired college kids at twelve dollars an hour?”
“I can honestly say
I’ve never thought about it at all.”
Iris looked down into
my basket and said, “You’re way ahead of me. I’m going to have to
work faster.” She started pulling berries off the vines with
increased efficiency until she accidentally picked a rotten fruit,
which bled all over her hand. I looked over at her and laughed, and
she looked at her hand, confused for a moment over what to do –
until she decided to clean herself on my shirt.
For an instant, this
act stunned me. Iris had never done anything like this to me
before. She thought it was very funny and she probably thought it
was especially funny that I reacted the way I did. I remembered her
doing this kind of thing with Chase several times: electric blue
paint in his hair, snow melting inside the seat of his pants,
cotton candy suctioned to his five o’clock shadow. As much as I
always thought of her as the more serious and cerebral of the two,
my memories of her were dotted with these acts of complete
silliness and of Chase responding in kind.
I searched the bushes
for another overripe berry but couldn’t find one. I decided to do
the next best thing, crushing a fruit between my hands and then
moving to wipe them on her bare arms. She wriggled away from me and
ran off, but I caught her from behind and smudged the juice into
her shoulders.
“Not fair, I’m all
sticky,” she said.
“And I have a huge
red stain on my sleeve.”
“But you’re not
sticky – yet.” Seemingly from nowhere, she produced another
strawberry and drove it into my cheek. She ran away again and I ran
after her. But when I realized that I wasn’t sure what I would do
if I caught her, I slowed down, feigning exhaustion and calling,
“Truce.”
She turned back and
approached me tentatively. “Real truce?”
“Real
truce.”
“I can go back to
picking berries without fear of retaliation?”
“At least for the
rest of the day. I make no promises about the future.”
She leaned over and
kissed me on my spattered cheek.
“Mmm, delicious,” she
said, before returning to her bucket.
We stayed together
until late in the evening. The entire time, Iris retained a girlish
buoyancy that I hadn’t seen from her – and only then on occasion –
in a decade. Even when she fell asleep in the car on the way back,
she seemed younger. It was such a marked contrast to how she
appeared during her opening night and I wondered if in some ways it
wasn’t a response to it. Was she trying to show me that she could
be as loose and carefree as she had been intense and world-weary
after the show? Regardless, I was glad to have this Iris with me. I
was glad that this Iris was still alive.
I woke her when we
got back to her car. She sleepily apologized for leaving me alone
on the ride back. Then she hugged me and held me tightly while she
rested her head on my shoulder.
“This was fun,” she
said.
“It was. I’m glad you
came down.”
“When are you coming
back to Lenox?”
“When do you want
me?”
“Soon,
okay?”
“Definitely soon.
I’ll call you after you get back.” She kissed me on the shoulder
and got out of the car. “And clean up a little,” she said. “You’re
a mess.”
The next morning, I
awoke ahead of the alarm. While I showered, I decided I’d take
myself out to breakfast before going to the store. I thought about
calling Iris to see if she wanted to join me, but I didn’t want
this visit to end with a brief coda and I certainly didn’t want to
take the chance that things would be different in any way from the
day before.
When I got
downstairs, I saw that my mother had already left for the day’s
errands. She seemed to be getting to these earlier and earlier. I
drank a cup of coffee while I flipped through the Advisor, which of course took no more than a few
minutes. On my way toward the door, I went into the den to say
good-bye to my father. He was in his usual chair in front of the
television, the sofa bed unmade with the blankets heaped near the
bottom. I was accustomed to this morning scene at this point.
Except this time, the television wasn’t on. My father was staring
at a dark screen.
“Hey, Dad,” I said.
“I’m gonna be heading off in a minute.”
He lifted his arm to
wave, but didn’t turn his head.
“Everything okay in
here?”
“Everything is fine,”
he said vacantly.
It was entirely
possible that he was simply deep in thought or that he was
practicing some kind of meditation technique to improve his
condition. But this wasn’t the impression I was getting and I
didn’t like the idea of leaving him this way.
“Do you want me to
stay here until Mom gets back?”
He lifted his arm
again, though this time he didn’t wave. “I’m okay,
thanks.”
These were precisely
the kinds of “conversations” we’d been having since he returned
from the hospital and I could feel my concern shifting to
aggravation. He was much too young to allow himself to become an
invalid but he wouldn’t even consider the most rudimentary forms of
help. I shook my head and turned to go. If he didn’t want anything
from me, then it was ludicrous of me to offer
anything.
I’m not sure what
made me turn back toward the den. I’m even less sure of what made
me think of the chess set that was sitting in a box on a bookshelf.
But without saying anything more, I retrieved the box and set the
game up on the card table.
I wasn’t a chess
player. I knew how the pieces moved and I understood the basic
rules, but that was all I’d really learned. My father would play
regularly with Chase, though, with this set of ivory pieces on a
leather board, or with a plastic set at the store that they would
set up in the back room, alternating trips there from behind the
counter to make their moves. I knew my father took this game
seriously and could stay focused on it regardless of distractions.
He was also very good at it. I was in the room the first time a
fourteen-year-old Chase beat him and, as my brother pounced out of
the room in exultation, my father sat quietly at the table
regarding the final game board in admiration. Their matches became
more hotly contested after that, and while the results were
relatively evenly split, there was no mistaking Chase’s pride that
he could finally keep up with the old man or my father’s pleasure
in no longer needing to hold back.
I knew there was no
chance that I could beat my father. I would consider it a moral
victory, however, if I could even get him to make a
move.
“Let’s play,” I said,
sitting at the card table. If my father had been aware of my
setting up the board, he gave no indication of it. When I spoke, he
turned toward me, looked down at the table, and then looked back up
in confusion.
“Let’s play,” I said
again.
He looked at the
board and then back at the blank television. “Not right now. Maybe
later.”
“Later when, Dad? I’m
going to be very busy later and we’ll never get to
it.”
“I thought you didn’t
know how to play chess.”
“Which means you’ll
kick my ass. I would think that would be an offer too good to pass
up. And I do know a little.”
He turned back toward
the television and I thought for a moment that he was simply going
to ignore me. But then he pulled himself up out of his chair and
sat across from me, moving his pawn to King Four at the same
time.
We didn’t say much.
In fact, I don’t recall saying anything at all. But as my father
regarded the board or reached to move a piece, I could see that the
game engaged him. I played as conservatively as I possibly could
given the modicum of knowledge I had. I didn’t want to be too easy
an opponent for him and I didn’t want the game to end too soon,
knowing that when it did he would return to his chair. I took
extravagant amounts of time to consider my moves, though my
understanding of strategy was minimal. And I steadfastly refused to
resign, even when the outcome was inevitable. Still, after slightly
more than twenty moves, he checkmated me.
I shrugged when the
game was over, my acknowledgement to him that I’d tried my
best.
“You know a little,”
he said.
“I should work on
it.”
He reached toward the
board and put his rooks back in line. “You should,” he
said.
We got up at the same
time, me to head toward the door, him to settle back in his
chair.
“Have a good day,
Dad,” I said to him as I reached the door.
“Yeah,” he said,
offering a half wave.