How to Kill a Rock Star

  “I just got here,” Loring said to Michael, and then he announced that Paul had been a recent visitor.

  “What?” Michael's head fell back. “He was here? Last night?”

  Michael touched Loring's shoulder as if to say, Let me, and the two of them traded places—Michael took the seat next to me while Loring lingered beside Vera. The way everyone was gawking at each other was giving me the creeps. I grabbed my brother by the arm and said, “What's going on?”

  “Eliza.” Michael's face was pallid. “Something happened this morning.”

  My body began to shake and my eyes welled up with tears. An accident, I thought. Paul's been in an accident. I imagined planes colliding in midair, a taxi being crushed by a semi, a mugging gone awry, terrorism.

  “Something bad?” I asked, my breath shallow, my heart pounding.

  Michael's lips were locked together. He seemed to be trying to keep the words in, as if the ones that wanted out didn't belong in the air.

  “Yeah,” he said, barely opening his mouth. “Very bad.”

  “Suicide.”

  Michael said the word, he knew what it meant, and yet all he could feel, at that moment, was anger—anger at Paul for throwing in the towel, and for putting Michael in the position of having to be the one to tell Eliza.

  She was shaking her head; tears were streaming down her cheeks.

  “No…” she kept saying. “No…”

  Michael couldn't look at her. He muttered the word a couple more times, trying to knock it into his head, trying to make himself believe it, too.

  Suicide. Suicide.

  That's what the cops were calling it. That's what the newspapers would eventually call it. Paul Hudson was no longer a person, he was “a jumper.”

  Apparently there was nothing too unusual about some crazy asshole vaulting off the Brooklyn Bridge. Even if that crazy asshole was three steps forward and two steps back from being a rock star, the world will still judge him and deem him a fool.

  They'll never understand. Not today, not ever.

  History can be as cruel as a bully on a playground.

  Michael had no clue what else to say, or the right way to say it. And so he just recited what he'd practiced the whole way home from the airport.

  Eliza had started crying even before he'd said the word. Eventually she stood up and began moving backward, all the way into the corner of the room, pressing herself so tightly into the ninety-degree angle where the walls met that her body made a triangle.

  She grabbed at her shirt—stretching it out, pulling on it, wrestling with it.

  “How?” she finally whispered, wide-eyed.

  Michael glanced at Vera, who glanced at Loring, who hadn't moved from his station near the door. Loring looked staunch and brave and Michael wished he would step in and take over.

  “Feldman called me early this morning,” Michael said. “Vera and I went straight to the airport.”

  As Michael continued to relay the details, he tried to make himself cry, believing it was necessary to join Eliza in a symmetry of pain, but he was too outside of himself to really feel anything, too disconnected to appropriately mourn his best friend.

  “I guess it happened around three o'clock this morning. Paul called Feldman sometime last night, said he was here in Brooklyn and needed a ride home. Feldman came and picked him up.”

  Eliza's hands were flat against her ears but Michael knew she could hear him.

  “Halfway across the bridge, Paul asked Feldman to pull over, said he felt sick.”

  She was shaking her head again.

  “There was an eyewitness. Besides Feldman, I mean. Some guy was driving across the bridge and saw the whole thing.”

  Eliza reached out to Loring. He went to her and she clung to him. “Tell him he's wrong, Loring. You're smart. Tell him.”

  Loring said he was sorry, he wished he could, and then Eliza buckled to the floor, whimpering.

  “Where is he?” she sobbed.

  Vera sighed heavily, and Michael regarded his sister with precaution. “They haven't found him yet. And Eliza, there's a good chance they won't.”

  She cried into her hands and asked if she could be alone. Michael wasn't sure it was a good idea, but Loring nodded and led Vera and Michael into the kitchen.

  “I didn't know whether to give her this or not,” Loring said, half-closing the door and pulling an envelope from his jacket. “It was in my mail this morning.”

  Michael caught a glimpse of Eliza's name on the front, and he recognized Paul's handwriting, but his nerves were shot and his head was so messed up he didn't know what to do with it.

  “Damn him,” Michael sighed. “Why couldn't he just let it go?”

  The stamp on the letter was a picture of the Statue of Liberty—a gloriously proud nighttime view, illuminated from below with light that bathed Lady Liberty in money-green radiance.

  “Give it to me.”

  Eliza's voice hit Michael like a snowball.

  “It's mine,” she said from the doorway. “I can see my name.”

  “Eliza, you don't need to read this right now.”

  But she walked over and reached for the letter, and against his better judgment, Michael let her lift it from his hand.

  There are things we never tell anyone. We want to but we can't. So we write them down. Or we paint them. Or we sing about them. Maybe we carve them into stone. Because that's what art is. It's our only option. To remember. To attempt to discover the truth. Sometimes we do it to stay alive. These things, they live inside of us. They are the secrets we stash in our pockets and the weapons we carry like guns across our backs. And in the end we have to decide for ourselves when these things are worth fighting for, and when it's time to throw in the towel. Sometimes a person has to die in order to live. Deep down, I know you know this. You just can't seem to do anything about it. I guess it's a sad fact of life that some of us move on and some of us inevitably stay behind. Only in this case I'm not sure which one of us is doing which. You were right about one thing though. It's not fate. It's a choice. And who knows, maybe we'll meet again someday, somewhere up above all the noise. Until then, when you think of me, try and remember the good stuff. Try and remember the love.

  “Bastard.”

  I let the letter drop to the counter, then went back to the couch and stretched out as if for sleep.

  I could hear Michael and Vera and Loring—their voices were traveling through the open kitchen door. I heard Loring ask Michael why Paul would do such a thing, as if Michael were the foremost authority on Paul's inexplicable behavior. Michael said he didn't know, but that Paul hadn't been in a positive frame of mind for a long time.

  The three of them came back into the room together, with Fender in tow, all of their eyes on me. Even the dog was staring.

  “Fuck Paul Hudson,” I said.

  Back in college, to fulfill my science requirements, I had elected to take a year of psychology. I'd studied the five stages of grief and immediately recognized my current position as somewhere between one and two. Stage one—denial and isolation—was obviously lingering, but stage two was anger and there was no doubt I was feeling overwhelmingly pissed off.

  “Bastard.”

  Loring was now standing above me. “Eliza, you don't mean that.”

  I wanted to kick Loring. His capacity for mercy was attenuating stage two, but I needed to hang on to stage two for as long as possible. And I was going to skip stage three altogether. Bargaining. An utterly useless stage. Neither God nor the Universe ever bargained with anyone.

  The plan was to segue from anger right into depression— a place I knew I could endure for a long time.

  Loring lifted my head, squeezed in behind it, and gently set it back down on his lap. He began petting my hair, I closed my eyes, and before I knew it I was watching the shadow of Paul's body hovering over the edge of a bridge. Only it wasn't the Brooklyn Bridge, it was the scene in Saturday Night Fever when John Travolta's drunk friend falls
off the Verrazano Narrows.

  In the dream, Paul was wearing brown sandals. Jesus shoes. His toes beetled over the ledge. His arms were in the air, straight and determined. His fingers were pointing to the sky. He was looking up, not down, and there was no fear on his face.

  He hesitated a moment before he jumped, like he'd had a change of heart but was a second too late.

  Still, no fear. Just that modicum of reconsideration.

  As his feet disengaged from the steel beam and he leaped into the air, I expected him to flap his arms and fly away.

  It was a dream. It could have happened.

  He dove instead. A dive full of dignity and grace. Olympic. Perfectly straight for the first ninety degrees, with three somersaults and a reverse twist.

  This is where I wanted the dream to end. Or else I wanted Paul to break the water in absolute kinetic awareness without so much as a splash, popping back up with a satisfied, gold-medal-winning, cocky-bastard smile on his face.

  I saw him hit the water. Then the water returned to stillness and I knew that below the surface of the river, Paul's body lay broken to bits.

  That's how it happened, right? Kind of like a plane crash.

  It's usually the impact that does you in.

  Mid-afternoon, I was still on Loring's lap. Michael, who was crumpled on the floor like a beanbag, looked up at me and said he was sorry, for what I didn't know.

  “I'm going to make some coffee,” Vera said. Her voice was small and hoarse. She'd been crying again.

  I wondered how Paul would have felt about people crying over him. Who was I kidding? He would've pretended to find it irrelevant and embarrassing, but deep down he would have deemed heartache and despair the only appropriate responses to his demise.

  “Loring,” Vera said, “can I get you some coffee?”

  If I would have been able to find the strength to move my tongue, I would have answered for Loring. No, thank you, is what I guessed he was going to say. Loring didn't like coffee. He thought it tasted like ashes. What Loring wanted, but was too polite to ask for, was some tea. A nice, sweet, full-bodied cup of Yinhzin Silver Needle, his afternoon favorite, would have made him happy.

  “No. Thanks, though.”

  The doorbell rang while Vera was still in the kitchen, and I felt Loring's body shift to see who was there, but the window that would have allowed Loring a view of the porch was behind him, and to turn all the way around would have meant disturbing my head on his lap.

  Vera answered the door, and I sat up when I heard Feldman's voice. He'd just come from the police station, he said. He'd been there since dawn and needed to speak to Michael.

  “This is a really hard time for all of us,” Feldman said to me. “I know you and Paul were close at one time, and I'm sorry.”

  I knew sorry. I was an expert on sorry and I'd never heard a sorry more ripe with innuendo. It was a finger pointing in my face. It was I warned you and I told you so and Why didn't you help me, you bitch?

  I probably would have gone for Feldman's jugular had he not been right. I had vowed to save Paul. And what had I done instead? I'd metaphorically handed him over to the Romans, stood idly by as the warriors raised their swords, thrown salt on his wounds, and loitered at the foot of the cross while he'd suffocated and died.

  “Michael,” Feldman said, “is there somewhere we can talk?”

  I shook my head. “Whatever you have to say, say it in front of all of us.”

  Feldman gave me a look and then shifted to address Michael. “Paul's body was recovered about two hours ago.”

  Much to my surprise, I took the news under the guise of control. Or else I was just too numb to move. Michael lost it.

  “No!” He lunged at Feldman. “You cocksucker! You no-good—”

  “Michael!” Vera cried. “Stop it!”

  Loring grabbed Michael and held him back until he calmed down.

  “It's okay,” Feldman said. “I understand. He's upset. We all are.” Feldman took Michael by the arm. “How about you and I take a walk, huh?”

  They were gone maybe five minutes. Upon their return, Michael said he was okay, that he didn't know what had come over him, but I thought he looked worse than when he'd left.

  Paul had no family to speak of, and Feldman announced that he and Michael would be handling all the necessary arrangements. The body was being cremated, and a service would be held later the following week, possibly at Rings of Saturn.

  ” We think it's what Paul would have wanted,” Feldman said.

  I didn't know whether I agreed or disagreed. Regardless, nobody asked for my opinion, and that hurt. But a crushing voice inside my head said I had no right to an opinion anyway.

  Michael walked Feldman to the door and then watched from the porch as he got in his car and drove away.

  The second Feldman was out of sight, Michael ran back into the house, grabbed his wallet off the counter, said he needed to get some air, and took off.

  He was crying.

  “Aside from O.J.,” Eliza said, “murderers don't normally attend their victim's memorials.”

  Loring thought she was making a mistake. If she had any intention of letting Paul go, that is, she needed to say goodbye.

  “He blamed me himself. In that song he sang at your dad's birthday. Besides, I'm sure the place is going to be swarming with every girl he had sex with in the tri-state area, and I really don't want to be a link in that chain of fools.”

  So while everyone else, including Doug and Lily, and even Amanda Strunk, were at Rings of Saturn lauding Paul's short and tragic life, Loring was in Brooklyn, where he had been every day for the last week, sitting on the floor next to Eliza, holding her hand while she watched bad movies and pretended she wasn't crying.

  “You look handsome.” She said it as if Loring had just walked in even though he'd been there for an hour. He'd worn a suit and tie in case he would have been able to change her mind about going to the service.

  For the last fifteen minutes they'd been watching a ridiculous comedy about a UFO landing somewhere in the Midwest. The spaceship had been carrying an alien prince looking for an earthling princess in, of all places, a mall. The alien's body was buff and human, but the creature had the universal extra terrestrial eyes—huge, bulging, almond-shaped, the color of a radioactive swamp; and his face was almost identical to that of a Sleestak from Land of the Lost.

  Loring watched in frustration as the buff alien browsed the food court. It exasperated him that none of the shoppers seemed to find it strange to see a guy from outer space standing in line at Burger King.

  “Lucy called me yesterday,” Eliza said, picking a piece of lint from Loring's sleeve. “She wanted to know when I was coming back. And she thought I'd be happy to know there was a surge in Bananafish's record sales this week. God, would that piss Paul off, people buying his record now that he's dead.”

  Loring put his hands on her shoulders and began kneading the little knots that felt like M&M's under her skin.

  “Lucy wants me to write an article on Paul,” she said. “He didn't give many interviews. And when he did he used to make stuff up. I once heard him tell a reporter he'd been born on an army base in Germany. Nobody really knew anything about him.”

  It was a terrible idea, and Loring deemed Lucy a terrible person for suggesting it. “You're not going to do it, are you?”

  “Of course I am,” she said with no trace of emotion. “And then I'm going to quit.”

  “Quit?”

  “I can't write about Paul and then go back to writing about heathens and pagans.” Loring wondered what Eliza would do if she didn't write. He remembered how, in Vermont, she'd gone out beyond the apple trees to gather flowers, which she'd arranged in an old pewter pitcher. She'd said then she thought she might like to work with flowers someday. Loring considered offering to buy her a flower shop.

  “Winkle paid for the memorial service,” she said during the next commercial. “He sent out invitations and everything,
like it was a New Year's Eve bash or one of his obnoxious Labor Day picnics.”

  Another few minutes went by. Eliza leaned on Loring's chest and said, “You know the worst part? Winkle told Michael he's going to release the album—the very same album that, two months ago, he deemed commercially unsatisfactory. I guess Paul's death was enough to convince Winkle it's a masterpiece. He's probably going to market the shit out of it and send it soaring to the top of the charts.”

  She disappeared into the kitchen, came back with a glass of water, and set it next to Loring as if he'd asked for it.

  “I bet Winkle's glad Paul's dead. I bet he clapped and did a flip when he heard.” At this point, Loring wasn't sure she was speaking to him, or just to hear herself talk. The way her shoulders were shaking, he knew she was trying not to cry again, but her voice could have been that of a local newscaster giving a traffic report.

  “Loring,” she said in the same, unaffected voice. “Why are you here?” On the screen, the female lead was trying to teach the alien how to eat with a knife and fork. “The night of your Dad's birthday you acted like you never wanted to see me again.”

  “I'm here because I'm your friend, regardless of what happened between us. I don't want you to have to go through this alone.”

  “Do you feel guilty?”

  Until she said it, it had never occurred to Loring that he might have had any bearing on Paul's decision to fling himself off that bridge. “He wasn't pushed. He jumped. You need to remember that.”

  The alien was shooting something at a cashier. His ray gun made the same sound as one of Sean and Walker's toys: Pfew, pfew, pfew.

  “I tried to talk to him that night but he wouldn't let me,” she murmured. “Then I fell asleep…And I thought I'd have another chance…I really thought…”

  Don't we all, Loring wanted to say.

  “How come you haven't asked me what happened that night?”

  “Asked you what?” Loring said. “If you slept with him? It's not something I want to think about. And anyway, what difference does it make now?”