The Shore Magazine - "SIGNIFICANT OTHERS, CIRCA 1976" by Richard Grayson

There was a very long line at the bank, so Elspeth decided to go home and kill herself.

Elspeth worked the graveyard shift at the police precinct house. She had been having an affair with a married cop. “All cops are married,” Elspeth always says. He told her that once his wife had the baby and they moved to the suburbs, he wouldn’t be able to see Elspeth anymore. It was perhaps this that triggered the suicide attempt. Elspeth’s trip to California for two weeks postponed her nervous breakdown for a couple of months, but the benign effects of the trip were already beginning to wear off when Elspeth walked into the bank, saw the long line, and decided to go back to her apartment and swallow the bottle of pills the doctor had given her for her migraines.

She swallowed the whole bottle, one pill at a time, and soon she became pretty groggy. Curiously, she felt better, less depressed. She called up Elihu to say goodbye to him. When she told him what she did, Elihu became oddly upset; it was strange to her why Elihu started yelling like that into her phone. She did not want to hear it, even though Elihu wa s her best friend.

Then some time passed and there was a knock at the door. It was Elihu and some policemen. She stood at the doorway, pale, blinking, looking at them look at her, and she told them all to go away, that she wanted to be alone.

The next thing Elspeth remembered was lying in a bed at Coney Island Hospital with her mother at her side. Her stomach had been pumped.

“Ma,” she cried. “I want to move to a new apartment, not one so close to Elihu’s.”

I was giving my class their final, so I wanted to be there early. I drove up Flatbush Avenue in the snow, bought a cup of tea to take out, and was in my classroom at 8:45. Of course, no students were there. Except one. Billy DeMarco, the blond kid in the wheelchair, was sitting there in the dark before I got in. He hadn’t been in class since October. I remember him telling me back then that he was driving to his father’ s house in Pennsylvania and we discussed the roads in Jersey and I thought to myself that he must have hand controls on his car because otherwise how could he drive.

“I’ve been waiting twenty minutes for you,” Billy said. “I’ve been really scared to face you.”

I looked at him. “You know I can’t give you anything but a W after being absent all that time. It wouldn’t be fair to the other students who showed up regularly.”

“I guess I blew it,” Billy said. Hi s hands, folded in his lap, looked so pale. “It’s my first term, and I thought it would be a snap, like high school, and I could get away with things. But I blew it.”

I just nodded and helped wheel him out to the elevator. When the elevator came, I wished him good luck.

Stanley looked much the same as ever when I saw him at The West End. His complexion was pale and sallow, but he kept off all the weight he lost on the Weight Watchers diet. Yet somehow there seemed to be an invisible layer of fat surrounding his body. He still carried that green bookbag, although that one must have been the sixth or seventh bookbag he’ s had.

Stanley should have graduated in 1971, but there were so many F’s and Incompletes on his transcript, I figured he’d probably never graduate. Every term he took one course or another leave of absence. At that time only going to films every day sustained him. His friend worked for the Catholic Film Office, formerly the Legion of Decency, and so he got into all their screenings for free. Stanley said the priests and nuns especially love when the films made jokes about the Pope.

We always said that Stanley is the one person who never changes. But Stanley confided that he was doing something to change his status. He was finally in therapy – “to make sense of incoherence,” Stanley told me.

Stanley took a sip of beer and admitted that he was been on the verge of a nervous breakdown for years and had only been functioning marginally. Six months before, he started to have phobias about going places, and that’s when he decided to see this male psychiatrist in Manhattan.

During their first session, when he told the psychiatrist of his obsession with films, the doctor asked, “Didn’t you used to write movie reviews for The Columbia Spectator?”

“That endeared the man to me forever,” Stanley told me. “And besides, being in therapy gives me something to talk about other than films.”

On Tuesday night Ken’s dog’s ear started bleeding, so they rushed it to the vet, who said the dog had a tumor.

On Thursday, Ken’s mother was about to make the decision to put the dog to sleep when Ken burst into the vet’s office and said he didn’t want that to happen. The doctor said that he didn’t know if a dog Rascal’s age could survive and operation to remove the tumor. Despite the dog’ s heart condition and frailty, Ken insisted on the surgery. The dog was operated on, and Ken took her home to convalesce.

On Monday, the vet said the biopsy proved negative: the tumor was benign. Ken’s mother said he looked pale when he got off the phone with the vet, and that night Ken came down with another of his colds.

On Friday, Ken told me he was feeling better but wa s having a terrible time with his mother, whom he said had become “a real sickie.” She was so annoyed with the dog keeping her up nights that she wanted to put Rascal to sleep. Ken of course yelled and her and then she tried to induce guilt by crying or calling up Ken’s aunts and telling them how rotten Ken treat s her. That morning, when Ken left for grad school, his mother said, “Say goodbye to the dog because I’m calling the SPCA and she won’t be home when you return.” When Ken rushed home after his last class, the dog was still there.

Two weeks later Ken called me to say that he couldn’t function very well, that he felt depressed and guilty over the dog’s death, that he missed Rascal, that he felt such hostility toward his mother. He had decided to see the same psychiatrist he saw when he was breaking up with Aurora and hyperventilating. Ken said he was almost ashamed to confess this to me, but had begun to look up into the sky and talk to the dog during the day.

Exactly one week and one day later, Ken called me again with what he said was “very good news.” He and Sylvia have gotten engaged and will be married around Christmastime in a small ceremony in a rabbi’s study. He didn’t say a word about the dog.

After coming out of the Thalia after an afternoon double bill – Stanley was not there – I went across the street to a diner and sat down at the counter next to this pasty-faced middle-aged guy who wouldn’t stop talking.

A typical New York nutjob, he had a grudge against the very rich, knew how to solve the problems of the Middle East, and had traveled the world “from Casablanca to China, seeing everything in between.” I just kept nodding a s he went on and on, usually beginning his sentences with a “Whattayathink…,” as if I’d just contradicted him.

Finally he told me he had been captured in the Battle of the Bulge. He was taken to a Nazi POW camp, where he was tortured by a sadistic commandant: “Whattayathink, it was Hogan’s Heroes? An Australian RAF pilot couldn’t take it anymore and committed suicide by flinging himself on a live electric wire.”

I figured that witnessing that must have unhinged this man’s mind. He needed psychiatric help.

The man made me think of the Ancient Mariner. When I left the diner, he was telling a woman who had just walked in everything he had told me. What was the point of telling the same story over and over?

I had to meet Professor Wolfson for our tutorial at 3 p.m., and I was running a bit late. When I got to his office, he told me my novel was unpublishable because of the too-generous “slice-of-life” material and the many characters. He thought it was a very personal book, and felt that the parts about Shelli, Ronna, Avis and Helene were the best – though I constantly undercut myself by giving other people’s problems and intrigues equal weight to the protagonist’s.

He also said I try to write too much like real life, going back to characters the reader doesn’t remember from the first brief mention.

I told him, honestly, that I wasn’t discouraged, that I was certain I’d have a publishable novel in another incarnation of the material, and besides, I joked, I had great LSAT scores and could always go to law school if writing fiction didn’t pan out.

After leaving Professor Wolfson’s office, I went down to Boylan cafeteria for a drink and was joined by Elayne. We were talking when the 4 p.m. news came over the college radio station. I heard the story about “the suicide…nineteen-year-old boy…Walter Dreyfus…had gone to counseling but there was no help available…parents said he’d been depressed…killed instantly.”

Elayne later said that I got so pale she thought I was going to faint. A delayed reaction hit me – Walter Dreyfus – Wally! John’s brother! I felt sick to my stomach.

Not knowing where else to go, I wandered back to Professor Wolfson’s office and told him what had happened. “Incredible!” he said. “One of the characters in your novel!” He let me use his phone.

I called Ken and his mother was crying. “I hope you’re not going to tell me what Elihu did,” she was saying. “This will be a terrible blow to Ken.”

I called Stanley and he said that he’d read the story in The Daily News this morning and made the connection immediately. Stanley said he wouldn’t go to funerals, that he never goes to funerals, hates seeing those scarily pale dead bodies in their caskets. “But I think The Loved One is a great film,” he told me.

I called Elspeth and she said, “Why do people do such stupid things?” I reminded her about the migraine pills she swallowed. “That was different,” she said. “It was quiet. It wasn’t like jumping off the roof of the Student Center.”

Professor Wolfson was writing things down on a yellow pad as I talked – probably notes for a lecture to his undergrad lit class.

There were other calls to make, but I had to go home and mark my class’s finals. I read their papers over and over again before I gave most of them A’s. I kept repeating to myself, out loud: “Shit…shit…shit…”

Richard Grayson has been publishing his so-called fiction in literary magazines since 1975 and online since 1998. Recent work has appeared at The Quarterly Staple, Melange, Really Small Talk, McSweeney's, and Monkeybicycle. He lives in Florida, where he's an administrator at a fourth-tier law school and teaches adjunct undergraduate courses like one called Writing About Literature. He does not know how to swim.