By Barbara Fleck-Paladino
All would be as it had been, had I not said...
"Andy, who were the people who lived in our apartment before we did?"
Andy used to be a drinker. But of late he's been more sober than sober, owing to a triple bypass. I used to be a smoker. But when my mom died I embarked on a life-affirming course of quitting smoking. I dragged my husband along. He admits that he would not have quit if he hadn't had to contend with my shrill prodding.
Breathing is everything; without it, what have you got? Out of deference to people who choose not to give up smoking, I've tried to stop proselytizing about how they should quit...Hasn't everybody the natural born right to give up on oneself?
There's a cousin (over sixty) who recently—when I could not keep my mouth shut about the smoking—said, “I figure sixty is good enough.
Anything over that, well...” He puffed and he sighed...
To me, that is a depressed person. But who am I?
So I zippered my mouth. That didn't stop me from feeling for the man. Me, I'm busy trying to outwit death while that cousin is set to go at any time. Or so he says.
Isn't life scary enough without courting its end? Some of the most pungent anxieties concern my kids getting to their respective homes safely. Some of my fuzziest happinesses are knowing that, for the moment at least, they have accomplished that.
When Andy told me about the man hanging himself in our apartment, I suppose my jaw dropped. When he told me about it happening in my bedroom, I guess my eyes bulged. When he identified the man by name and told how the man's little boy had come running in from school and found his father, whose tongue...(you don't want to know about that tongue...), I don't suppose anything. I know my tongue wanted to gag in my throat.
The story fell out of Andy like a burden awaiting release. But don't tell your family, said Andy. Don't tell them that the man hung himself in the first closet to the right when you walk in the master bedroom. That the man was a writer. That he felt like a failure. That the child needed to be institutionalized...don't tell anybody.
I walked out to glorious Riverside Drive, shaken by what I’d heard; dazed.
That night, I knew I couldn’t keep such news to myself. I had to tell them—not about the tongue and the boy. But I did tell the general facts as I knew them from Andy, the formerly alcoholic elevator man.
After, I would look at my husband's closet as if I’d never really seen it before. To be fair, the closet looked as if to say, Who me? I peered in, to explore its depths and height, to see where a person could install the appropriate device to do the job.
I felt betrayed. Just when you think you know a living space, look what happens.
I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to sleep in that room. For the first time I seriously contemplated moving out. To find some place without a history, if not an odor, of death about it. I wondered over the fact that, in the twenty five years we’d lived there, none of the other workmen, or the other tenants, had happened to mention that, oh, somebody killed himself in your apartment...
Would I have said it?
No
.
I came to realize this was a kindness.
