30 Pieces of a Novel

The Suicide

SOMEONE’S BANGING ON Gould’s door. Time, what, who could it be? “Hey, what’s going on?” he yells from his bed. Banging continues, harder thumps, and someone screams, then gags. He jumps out of bed — his shorts, where’d he put them? Fumbles for the light switch on the night table, turns it on, light blinding him, squeezes his eyes shut to adjust, opens them, can see now, and runs to the door. “Yes, who is it?” Nothing, and hasn’t been anything last half minute. “Who’s there? The banging and screaming. Who was it? Anybody still there?” “Help,” a voice says, man’s, weak, “help me, help.” “What’s wrong?” Nothing. “Just a second; I got to get my pants on.” The man bangs on the door. “I said I got to get my pants on; hold your horses.” “Help me, help me.” What am I doing? Gould thinks. Opening the door before I see who’s there? Looks through the peephole. No one. Door’s banged from below the hole. “Listen, I’m sorry, this is New York and not the best of neighborhoods. You’ll have to stand up, show yourself. I got to see who it is first before I open up.” Door’s banged from even lower than before. Guy must be sitting there, lying, crouching, something, maybe ready to pounce on him. And where are my neighbors? Certainly by now, even at 2 A.M., a few of them must be looking through their peepholes. “Who is it out there? Your name? Someone I know from this floor?” “Help, I’m dying.” “Excuse me, but dying how? From what? Literally?” “Please.” Sounded too real. “Just a second, I’m getting my pants on.” Banging, lighter, the guy saying, “Hurry, dying, help me.” Gets his pants on. No undershorts or shirt but doesn’t matter. With his hand on the door lock he thinks, Should I? But has to be someone hurt. Make sure not to lock yourself out — and takes his keys off the hook on the doorjamb and puts them in his pocket — am I ready to look if it’s something real bad? Suppose it’s from a knife, razor, in the face, neck, and the guy looks awful, bleeding everywhere, what do I do? Just shout for your neighbors if they’re not out, that’s all. Unlocks the door and man sort of falls over the threshold on his face. “Jesus, what happened?” Terrible smell, doesn’t know what it is, chemical, not shit or vomit or anything like it. “I said what’s happened to you?”—standing over him—“I can’t help if I don’t know.” “Poison,” the man mumbles into the floor, and Gould says, “What, poison? You took some? Stuff that can kill you?” “I’m dying. Wanted to when I took it. Get me help now.” Still nobody else around. “If anyone’s in their apartment looking,” he shouts, “please help me with this guy. He took poison, says he’s dying.” Gets on one knee, steels himself, and turns him over by his shoulder: Roland, fellow from down the hall and someone he went to college with. Eyes clenched in pain, mouth open, that terrible stink; black inside and his tongue, for a moment making motions to speak, also black, and some foamlike dark stuff coming up and making him choke. Gould quickly puts him on his side and holds him there so he can throw up. “What can I do for you, what can I do?” Gould says, holding his breath. “Help me,” Roland says, opening his eyes to slits. “I don’t want to die.” Couple of doors open; maybe they saw it was Roland and Gould on the floor beside him and thought it safe. Someone yells up the stairway, “Hello, you with the noise up there. This is Aaron Wallenstien from 6-H: what’s happening, need any help?” “Call the police,” Gould yells. “An ambulance, emergency! Guy here — Roland from seven something, end apartment — took poison and he’s in very bad shape.” Woman in a trench coat leaning over Gould at Roland says, “I’ll call them, I’m closer,” and runs into her apartment and slams the door. “Ask him what he took,” a man says from a few feet away; doesn’t recognize him but could be a tenant on the floor. “What’d you take, Roland, my friend?” the man says. “We should know that if we’re to help. Pills?” “Arsenic. In soda.” “A sweet soda?” Gould says. “Baking soda? What kind? Club soda?” and the man says, “Why you asking, what’s the difference what with?” and Roland says, “Coke.” “Then you got to throw it all up, my friend,” the man says, and Roland says, “I did, did, still. Help me. Doctor. Someone for the pain. Hospital on Amsterdam,” and Gould says, “Of course, that’s the one that lady should have called. Ring her bell, Mrs. D,” to a woman he’s spoken to from the eighth floor, “and tell her — that one, that one, 7-K — to get the emergency from St. Luke’s,” and Mrs. D rings the woman’s bell. “And you should drink water and throw up some more”—to Roland—“with salt in it or whatever you’re supposed to take to make you heave. Isn’t that what they say to do, salt?” to the man, and the man says, “Any fluid should do. Stick a finger down his throat would be faster,” and Gould says, “I couldn’t, could you?” “Roland, my friend,” the man says, still from a few feet away, “why would you want to kill yourself with arsenic? Of all poisons, the worst and most painful. Oh, my poor boy, what a mistake.” Lots of other people are at their doors, by the elevator and the stairs, hands over their mouths, in clothes they must have quickly put on, zippers unzipped, buttons and belts undone, one with a suspender hanging off his shoulder, most in coats and bathrobes, and one pretty young woman in leotards under a man’s boxer shorts. “Listen,” Gould says, letting Roland go when he starts screaming and shaking violently and makes throwing-up sounds but nothing comes out, “doesn’t anyone know what to do to help this guy? He took arsenic. And the woman who phoned. What’d she say?” to Mrs. D, and she says, “She said she knew herself to call St. Luke’s.” “Bread,” someone says. “Get him to swallow bread, doughier the better. Absorbs it and then it regurgitates out.” “Then get some soft bread and salt water,” he says to him. “Others of you. Hurry. Bread and glasses of water mixed with salt. And someone go downstairs and wait out front in case the hospital people and cops go to the wrong building.” Roland’s screaming, stands, bangs his fists against the wall, doubles up clutching his stomach, and yells, “My insides … on fire! Don’t let me. … Get me there yourself.” Woman comes out of her apartment. “They’re on the way. Ambulance from the one right up here, and police. The dispatchers for both said minutes, a few, and that was more than two minutes ago — I had something very important to do.” “Did they say what to do about the poison?” Gould says. “I didn’t ask; you didn’t say to.” “Call the hospital back and say we just found out it was arsenic and what should we do in the meantime?” She runs into her apartment and locks the door. A man’s standing beside Gould with a glass of water. “I mixed in plenty of salt and made it not too cold. I’m sorry but all my bread was grainy or stale.” Gould holds the glass out to Roland. “Drink this. You have to keep throwing up to get rid of that crap.” “No more,” Roland says, reaching for the glass, then falls back to the wall as if thrown there — people clear away from him — and flops to the floor and holds his stomach and screams. “Please, drink the water,” Gould says, holding it to his mouth. “I don’t want to force it down you.” Roland’s just screaming now, tongue out, eyes bulging, grabbing his stomach, then his throat, gags and coughs and spits but nothing comes up. “That’s why we want you to take the water. So there’ll be something to mix with the poison.” He gets the glass near Roland’s lips but his teeth are chomping at nothing, and Gould thinks he’ll bite the rim off and pulls it away. “What do we do?” he says, looking around. Nobody’s near them. The man who called Roland his friend is by the stairs, one foot starting down. “Come on, you, you got to help me think of something,” Gould says. The man throws up his hands. Then someone yells, “They’re here!” just as the woman comes out of her apartment and says, “Detergent and water, they said. Or bicarbonate and water, or soda water, but really any liquid and lots of it to wash it out of his system,” and two policemen rush out of the elevator and say, “Where is he? Which one is it?” because Roland’s lying on the floor, quiet except for some dry vomiting, and people standing around are blocking the police from seeing him. Several of them point, and the policemen get on the floor next to Roland and one says, “What happened, kid, some bad dope?” and a couple of people say, “Arsenic.” “Holy shit, by accident?” and one says, “On purpose, suicide.” “That’s hospital emergency business; I never had one that took arsenic. You, Mark?” and the other policeman says, “I guess we do like we do with all poison swallowings till Emergency comes — an emetic. God, I never smelled such a smell from anyone; it’s like paint remover. He’s gotta throw up bad,” and Gould says, “He’s been doing it all the time; there’s nothing in him to throw up anymore. I’ve been trying to get this salt water down.” “Good, that’s one of them,” Mark says, and takes the glass and holds it out to Roland and says, “Wake up, kid, drink. It’s good for you; it’ll save your life. Come on, do what I say; this drink’s all you need,” and Roland’s shaking his head with his eyes shut tight, trying to speak, it seems, but no sounds coming out, then grabs his stomach and screams, “Help me, the pain!” “Where is it, can you point to it?” Mark says, and Roland’s just screaming and beating his stomach, and Mark says to Gould, “You on this floor?” and Gould says yes and Mark says, “We can’t do anything but hold him down. Let me use your phone to get the ambulance guys here sooner,” and Gould says, “I don’t have one; she does — several of the others must,” when someone shouts, “The hospital people!” and the elevator door opens and the policemen clear a circle around Roland and the emergency team immediately gets busy on him, giving him something to swallow; when he won’t take it one forces his mouth open by pressing the back of his jaw, keeps it open with a rubber tool while the other pours some stuff into it. Roland vomits real liquid in a few seconds and keeps vomiting till nothing comes up, and then they stick needles into his arms and a tube down his throat and work on him for about fifteen minutes; more emergency people have come with machines they carry and wheel in, and then they strap him to a stretcher and stand him up in it in the elevator and take him downstairs.

“He looked dead just now,” Gould says, after the elevator door closes, and a man says, “Couldn’t be. I saw his heart going, pump-pump, pump-pump; he’ll pull through and will be back here in a week as if nothing happened,” and Gould says, “I hope so, but he looked dead to me, I swear: his body limp, head just hanging. I bet that’s why they took him out of here. There just wasn’t any sense working on him any longer,” and someone else says, “If he was dead they would have kept him here to write up a report because there wouldn’t have been any hurry to get him out. They must have thought they could do better on him in the ambulance to the hospital and of course even better than that in the hospital and that they got enough of the arsenic out of him now to get him to start surviving again. Believe me, though I didn’t get a look at him the last few minutes, no hospital’s about to waste the time and cost of one of its emergency units on a dead man,” and Gould says, “As I told this fellow, I certainly hope you’re right. “Where can you buy that stuff anyway? You’d think it’d be outlawed, it’s so lethal.” “Chemistry labs,” someone says, “and he was going for his Ph.D. in the area, wasn’t he?” and someone says, “By area do you mean Columbia?” and the woman says, “Columbia, I knew he was a student there, in chemistry.” “I thought it was history or political science,” Gould says, “since that’s all he seemed to talk about, politics and spheres of influence and such. And he knew everything about the subjects no matter what the era.” “And I thought ladykilling,” a man says, “because Jesus, if there ever was a guy in this building who scored well with the ladies, he was it. In fact, he had so many of them and at all hours that it’d be difficult to think he had time for anything else.” “So taking that into consideration,” another man says, “and his good looks, which is part of it, and the impressive way he spoke, and his intelligence and obvious charm, you have to think, Who had more to live for than Ronald?” and a woman says, “Roland. And always the last one to leave the elevator, always there to help you with your packages or say a nice word: things like that. A lovely person, an absolutely lovely person, with no sign of the slightest sadness or distress. That’s why it’s such a shock, what they say he did, and why I’d have to think he swallowed it accidentally.” “No, I’m sorry,” Gould says, “and really, shouldn’t we all pitch in, or at least the ones who live on this floor, and clean up the mess he and the hospital people left? Anyway, Roland happened to bang on my door for help when he was in the worst throes of it and told me he took the arsenic because he at first wanted to die but that he now didn’t want to, maybe because he found how painful it was or just getting so close to death he realized his mistake.” “He probably didn’t think it’d be that slow, either,” a woman says. “But you have to admit that if he was a chemistry doctoral student—” “He was,” a man says. “I know his dissertation adviser, and Roland and I talked about her.” “Then he knew what he was getting into and how long it’d take, and at the time, as this man here stated, he must have meant it but then had a sudden about-face. Now I guess all we can do is pray for his poor soul, for I’m sure he took enough to kill several men.”

A tenant on this floor tells the police that Roland’s door is still apartment and everything,” a policeman tells her, “and we’re about to attend to it, thanks. Just tell us if you know if he has any animals in there,” and she says, “No, I remember he once said he thought it unkind and a nuisance keeping pets.” A few police officers go into Roland’s apartment with the super and find the arsenic with the container capped, the super later tells some people, the empty can of soda he took it with, the glass he mixed the solution in, with a note pasted to it saying something like Don’t drink from this! It might contain poisonous residue! Throw out but break first, if I can’t because I’m suddenly incapacitated by the drink and a suicide note. It’s addressed to Apt 7J, a man whose name I once knew but I apologetically say I can’t recall now: his next-door neighbor and someone he vaguely said boo to, the man tells Gould a week later while they’re waiting for the elevator on the seventh floor. “He might have seemed friendly to others, from everything people here are saying of him since he died, but he acted to me like I cooked the worst-smelling fish in the cheapest corn oil every day and never dumped my garbage, cleaned my room, or took a bath.” The note, which the police held for a few days before giving him—“Let’s say that was stretching a bit their constitutional privilege of holding evidence,” the man tells Gould, “but since he meant relatively little to me and I was dumbfounded he chose me out of anyone to write the note to, I let it slide and didn’t make a legal case out of it, as I could have and conceivably got compensatory damages from the city and made it a test case against these kinds of questionable practices of the cops”—said he wants to die by his own hand because of a number of convincing articles and books he’s read the last year on how life’s not worth living in spite of the many little exciting if not fleetingly thrilling short-term things that can happen to adults. “You have to assume he meant orgasms, both of the masturbatory and copulative sort,” the neighbor says, “and good hash, a few brief poems and paintings over the centuries, several smashing sunsets and maybe a sunrise or two, and seeing the aurora borealis the first time.” Also because of a love he had for a certain woman who’ll go nameless because she’s blameless—“You wonder, at a time like that when he’s writing his death scrawl, and from such a bright and I suppose well-read guy, why he’d resort to such trite rhyming,” the neighbor says — but who didn’t return his love for her one iota, or perhaps, for half an afternoon at the most, just a trifle more than an iota—“You can imagine what happened during those few glorious hours,” the neighbor says, “since I’m sure he’s underestimating the iotaness of them.” The neighbor must have seen him with her once or twice, Roland wrote, but he tells Gould, “I saw him with, in my two months here, over a dozen different girls — I’m in and out of here ten times a day, so I miss practically nothing in this building — and of a wide variety of races, colors, shades, nationalities, and languages. And all lookers, and once three in a single day, so why’d he think, unless he described her for me, I could distinguish this one from the others because of maybe a particular glitter in his eye or bigger bulge in his pants that day?” Also because he’s going nowhere fast: he can’t stand historical research, writing bibliographies and papers, or other scholars and academics; the last thing he wants to spend two years on is a dull derivative dissertation, and the last thing he wants to become, he’s found, is a teacher or father, besides knowing he’ll never be even half fulfilled in any profession or capacity or with any woman over a long time or in any city or climate in the world. Life has been relatively to deeply depressing for most of his life, especially when he was a boy, so it seems the most sensible thing is just to end it. Could the neighbor personally tell his grandmother how much Roland appreciated her for bringing him up (here he gave her Bronx phone number, which turned out to be a disconnected one, the neighbor says, and with no listing of such a name in any of the city phone directories), when his parents died — both from cancer and just months apart, which had to influence his dark outlook and attraction to literature holding such a view — and how sorry he is for the sadness his death will cause her. He didn’t have the courage to write her directly and thought it best that what he would have said to her come secondhand in abbreviated form from a stranger. Please be patient with her; if she wants the neighbor to come to her apartment for tea to talk about it, please do, though he only has to go once. He also wishes he had a lot of dough to leave her so she could live comfortably in her last ailing years, but he dies, as she well knows and the bank- and checkbooks on his dresser will confirm, just about penniless. The young woman he loved, if anyone does discover her name, is not to be blamed one bit for his suicide, as he said, and the writers of those articles and books he read, some of which the neighbor will find in Roland’s bookcases and by his bedside (a few should go back to the library), are only to be commended — the ones still alive (most died natural deaths twenty to a few hundred years ago) — for having told the truth about what life is: endless tasks, meaningless efforts, illusions, repetitions, titillations, the occasional high, and tons of horseshit, this letter and statement about what life is included. “When I first read the last part,” the neighbor says, “I thought, Well, we’ve all heard that before and never thought much of it, but in the final line he sort of covers himself.” Gould says, “I’m surprised at that last part too, if you’re being accurate in your paraphrase of it, since I always thought of him as one of the deepest and most knowledgeable and clear-thinking guys I’ve known, and I’m not saying that now just because he’s dead.”

Roland started City College two years after Gould but they graduated together. He got out in three years while two of Gould’s five years were in night school, though they were around the same age, as Gould finished high school at sixteen. He was a tall handsome guy, lanky or wiry — you never saw him with his shirt off or in any garment that sort of stuck to his chest — sought after by lots of college girls, it seemed, praised and encouraged by his teachers to go on to graduate school but thought of by most guys Gould knew at City as a smart aleck, stuffed shirt, and pretentious bastard. He paraded his intelligence, was intolerant of anyone’s point of view if it differed with his, was bitingly witty and sarcastic, had no time for small talk, joking around, or even smiling, won every intellectual argument because he was such a good speaker, knew his subject so well, and never got emotional when he spoke, and also something about the attentive way he listened and focused on you without ever interrupting no matter how long you rambled on, and maybe the longer the better, for you to lose what you were thinking; cold-shouldered just about every male student unless he stopped you to ask your opinion about a particular topic that had been engaging or perplexing him lately, as he put it, waited till you were done or fed you some questions or lines to keep you stumbling and then decimated everything you said in the order you said it, often enumerating your points. He hadn’t changed much in any way a few years later when Gould moved into the apartment building. Jesus, not on the same floor too, he thought, since there were few people he liked less and no one he had felt more threatened by every time they had met. (Later he thought, What if I had lived next door to him? I doubt he would have written me the suicide note. But he would have knocked on my door sooner and I might have been able to save him by doing the same things I did. Then would he have moved back? How would he have reacted to me after that?) Usually Roland ignored Gould’s automatic greeting and smile, when they passed each other on the street or in a store or at the mailboxes downstairs, or would just grunt a morose, “Yeah, hi,” if they were waiting at the elevator, and then remain silent during the ride, lost in what seemed like a profound thought — eyes closed and head raised or head face down and hand covering his eyes — or reading a book he was obviously deep into and didn’t want to be taken from. Though occasionally Roland would ask a question in the elevator or the lobby — start it off with something like, “I was mulling over something and considered you the perfect person to discuss it with, if you have a minute”—about a subject (politics, religion, history, philosophy, literature, metaphysics) Gould knew nothing or little about, and if he knew more than that or even a lot and allowed himself to talk about it — usually he’d say, the five or six times this happened, “Really, I’d like to discuss it but I just can’t think straight now” or “I’m honestly in a rush”—Roland would still always end up ridiculing him, or not “ridiculing” so much as challenging Gould to prove what he said wasn’t shallow or softheaded, sentimental, commonplace, uninformed, “pilfered from a recent Times editorial,” just plain wrong, backing the challenge with quotes and facts and aphorisms and lines of poetry and Latin and French maxims, making Gould wonder about his own intelligence compared to Roland’s (not about himself personally compared to him, since he knew he was a nicer and more likable and maybe even more compassionate guy and would never treat someone’s opinions like that or inveigle anyone into a discussion simply to show off his mental prowess and range or to humiliate or discomfit that person), and how it’s unlikely he’ll ever think profoundly and speak that articulately and succinctly and formulate his thoughts so methodically or even be able to justify and defend well his simpler notions and arguments, and that as far as the so-called life of the mind’s concerned he’ll never be more than a half-baked intellectual with minimal perceptiveness, limited erudition, and few original ideas. All this was especially disturbing, since there was nothing he wanted more and worked harder at than to be a deep thinker.

What also annoyed him about Roland was that if he saw you with a pretty woman — riding up the elevator with her, for instance — he’d shoot her a look that said, Listen, drop that jerk and step out with me. In other words, Give me a signal you’re interested, and I’ll take it from there. So: a come-on — and once one of the women Gould was seeing and liked did drop him, saying it’s impossible for things to ever really work out between them since she knows she can never feel strongly toward him, and about a month later he saw her walking out of a neighborhood movie theater with Roland, his arm around her, her face close to his and looking as if she was going to close her eyes for a kiss. He didn’t want to interrupt her, wrong time to, but said, “Hello, Beca,” and she said, “Oh, Gould, hi, did you just see this picture too?” and took Roland’s arm off her waist. “I know you two live in the same building and I think you’re even on the same floor, but this is New York so I feel it necessary to ask, do you know Roland Meese?” and he said, “Do I know him? No, only since college,” and Roland said, “That’s right, we were in the same graduating class, or yours was the one before mine. How are you doing? Like a cigarette?” and Gould said no and Roland lit one and looked away, admiring the sky or something in it while he blew smoke straight up. “Well, nice to see you both,” Gould said, and walked ahead of them, not knowing how they first got together or when, but it was obvious she was stuck on Roland, though he couldn’t tell by Roland’s expression or anything how he felt about her. One day if he ever sees her again he’ll tell her, if she doesn’t know already, since they lasted only a few weeks or so together — once, when he saw Roland getting off the elevator, this popped out, “How’s Rebecca?” and Roland said, “Beca Kahn? Beats me; haven’t seen her for months. I didn’t know you knew her”—what happened to him: “Killed himself, I’m not kidding; arsenic, though soon after he took it he wanted to live, banged on my door for help; it was so strange: mine, which just shows how desperate he was, since the only thing I was good for before to him was dating girls, which means bringing them into the building, that he later went out with. But what a sight: his mouth foaming, gums and nostrils and tongue coated black. And a hellish stench coming out whenever he tried to speak and then suddenly no stench to my sensory apparatus when from about twenty feet away people on the floor were complaining about it,” and then say, “By the way, how did you two ever first get together? I’d just like to know. What’d he do, secretly get your number when my back was turned or you were leaving the building without me, or did you, without his even asking, slip it to him?” No, he won’t. Couldn’t hurt someone intentionally like that. He’d just say, “Did you hear about Roland?” and if she said no, he’d say, “Sorry I have to be the one to tell you. He committed suicide: poison, what a pity, guy so young and bright.”

The name of the woman who didn’t reciprocate Roland’s feelings for her is Naomi. He finds this out from a tenant on the ninth floor. “Learned anything new about our poor Roland?” she asks in front of the building, when they’re both going in. “Because I heard you were good friends,” and he says, “We knew each other, not well, paths crossed, that sort of thing, and no, nothing about him for a while other than what everybody else knows; the same things get repeated endlessly,” and she says, “What I heard the other day, and no one else seems to know it except the person who told me, so it must be new, was that the great love of his short life — you remember, there was something about this mysterious no-name woman in his suicide note to 7-J — and one of the main reasons he killed himself was Naomi somebody — last name starts with an S—that gorgeous tall dancer on the third floor … or she used to be there; someone said she moved a few days after to somewhere else around here, just too upset. But you couldn’t have missed her if you ever saw her, she was so striking. Actually, she probably escaped a lot of people’s notice because of her odd working hours and that she walked up rather than wait for the elevator that never comes. She could do that, only on the third floor. In fact, with her physical condition and youth she could probably run up fourteen flights twice a day without a sweat.” He says, “I’m trying to place her … the third floor?” and she says, “Don’t tell me. Long black shiny straight hair combed down to her waist when it wasn’t in a bun or braid, and maybe six feet, and legs about half that length? An absolute standout by anybody’s standards, and gifted too — in the corps de ballet of the New York City Center ballet company, if that’s what it’s called, and with a promising career going — this I knew before the recent chatter about her part in Roland’s death. Once — someone here said he saw her in it and she was terrific — a solo role or maybe only part of a pas de deux or trois: a Todd Bolender ballet, this person said, a protégé of Balanchine? He I know of, but this Todd choreographer I don’t, do you?” and Gould says, “Yeah, I’ve seen something he did with an American western or Shaker theme, I think. He’s very modern, very good, lots of crazy hand and leg and neck movements.” Gould had seen Naomi a few times. Her looks were ordinary — not gorgeous for sure, as this woman said; he even thought her a little homely — and she seemed private, always alone, gangly in a way and guarded and usually in a hurry to get into the building and up the stairs or to Broadway, and with that toes-bent-in walk he’s always associated with dance students rather than professionals, so he figured she was a dancer but only studying it, but a dancer also because of her hair and cheekbones and big forehead that was always showing and her posture and makeup and dance shoulder bag she carried. But she didn’t seem someone Roland would go nuts over — take his life, he means, or even fall in love with. Roland seemed to have his choice of women he went after, and most were a lot better-looking than her and some were true beauties and with more voluptuous — so to Gould more attractive — bodies, since she was small-chested and slim and much too bony, though of course she probably had the perfect body for dance and must have had beautiful legs — from what he saw of them below a skirt and could make out through her slacks, they were. “So what do you think?” the woman says, and he looks at her and she says, “Where’ve you been? I’m saying you think this Naomi Sugarman, I now remember the S was for, is the mysterious Miss No-name of Roland’s suicide note?” and he says, “I wouldn’t know. Based on your description of her, I never saw them together or her alone on my floor, though an image does come up that she lived in the building … I seem to see her”—closing his eyes—“going in or out. What’s the difference anyway?” and she says, “Oh, good time to tell me, after I spent the last few minutes telling you everything. I think you know more than you’re saying — what is it?” and he says, “Nothing, honestly. He came, he went — I’m talking about to and from the building and our few words to each other over more than a year, though we had gone to college together but I knew him there mostly from reputation and sight. He was a ladies’ man and considered one of the academic comers. But if you want to know, from what I could make of him he wasn’t a guy I ever especially admired for his character. He could be caustic and contemptuous, and his was a screw-you-I’m-for-me attitude—’you got a girl I’ve eyes for, I want her; you’re enjoying a book I didn’t like, pardon me while I dump on it’—though otherwise he was fine and admirable and with enviable brains. And outside of that one time, which was perfectly excusable — I’m not complaining, I’m saying, and I also probably never should have said the lousy things I just did about him, but you asked for honesty so that’s what I decided to give — he never caused any commotion or scene on our floor.” “Maybe that should have been in the New York Times obit of him if there had been one — you know, the ones with photos, not just put in by the close survivors,” and he said, “I no doubt said it wrong, excuse me. He’s gone and they’re right, what they say (or those Latin maxims do) about the dead — to forgive the deceased and no bad words about him and so on, if the guy didn’t do something really despicable like rape his little sister or murder someone other than himself.”

So there are a couple of things he doesn’t understand about Roland’s suicide. Oh, no doubt lots of them, but the one that stands above them all is why in hell did he do it? For here’s this guy, who except for his personality, which counts for a lot, okay, even if he couldn’t care less what other people who “didn’t matter” thought of him, though who knows? — but anyway, who had just about everything going for him in life. He didn’t have money, came from a poor background, but so what? — since having it easy and lots of money from the start can often be as much of a hindrance to you as good, and if anyone was going to make it in whatever field he finally decided to get serious about, it was him. He had looks, intelligence, erudition, gift of gab, was clever, et cetera, nicely built, tall, and dressed well even if he didn’t have many clothes at the time. He was very presentable, in other words, and had the brains to back it and could be charming if he wanted to — certainly with the people that mattered to him: professors, women he wanted to sleep with, maybe bosses — Gould doesn’t know who else but he’s sure Roland could be like that to anyone. Why? Because he also was smart enough to know what worked for him. It was probably people like Gould who he knew could do nothing for him, at least for the time being, that he showed his worst side to. So how could he make such a drastic decision, because of some things he read, and one woman he might have found gorgeous and alluring and immensely likable and so forth, and the tragedy of his parents some twenty years ago, and question marks about the future, and carry it out in so horrible and final a way? If he’d jumped off a building thirty stories up or into the Hudson from the George Washington Bridge, Gould would be asking the same thing — Why the hell do it? — but with arsenic he also had to know the pain it’d bring, though he might have thought it’d be quicker than it was. But wouldn’t he have read up on it? And had he tried killing himself before? If he had, that could explain the drasticness of taking arsenic — he wanted it to work this time — but not why he did it. Did he have an illness no one knew of, one that he’d been told would eventually kill him or permanently damage his mind or nervous system or something? Nothing like that came out from what the police found in his room — notebooks, checkbook stubs for medicine or drugs — and not in the suicide note, and he never mentioned it to anybody in the building, so far as anyone knows, and no doctor was located who’d been treating him for anything, and the grandmother the police finally turned up on Long Island and whom 7J and another tenant spoke to knew nothing about anything like that either — no disorders whatsoever; he was in terrific all-around health, she said, although she hadn’t seen him for almost a year. Was it chemical then, an imbalance of some sort, or whatever it’s called, that even Roland didn’t know about or just avoided dealing with and so hadn’t been treated? Again, no one knew of it and Roland never spoke to anyone about having any up-and-down feelings or mood swings or depression of any kind. He was as stable and confident as they come, was the general summation of him: never an inkling he was feeling blue and only his disillusionment with his academic studies and a couple of his professors and the future possibility of getting a junior-level appointment was the one thing along those lines that he talked even a little about with a few people in the building. Someone even called up Naomi and told her about Roland, and she was shocked as anyone and saddened and that but also said he hadn’t hinted to her anything was wrong with him other than his studies — he didn’t see how he’d be able to write the expected two-hundred-page dissertation, since his topic wasn’t worth more than a hundred-twenty and he doubted he could squeeze out more than that from what his research had given him — and how he felt about her breaking off with him. But even there, this person tells Gould when he bumps into her in the market up the block and says he heard she spoke to the dancer, Roland told her he was dejected but he understood why she thought they’d never be able to make a go of it and he’d soon get over the breakup. Gould says, “What did she say was the reason they split up? And how could it be she didn’t know about the suicide before?” and the woman says, “You think I’d ask either? What’s wrong with you? It’s enough that I called and had to give her the news, and now I’m not sure why I told you even this much. It’s her business, what went on between them. If she’d wanted to say, she would’ve volunteered. The point is she was surprised he alluded to the breakup in his suicide note. Or so prominently, since he seemed reconciled to it the last time they spoke — maybe a few days before he took the arsenic; though they both still lived in the building then, it was over the phone — and even a little relieved to be completely unattached and on the loose again. But I think you’re right about what I understand from others you felt about Roland — he didn’t have the sweetest or most politic disposition in the world — but whatever any of us thought of him in that regard should be dropped because of what he did to himself.”

His own brushes with suicide? They were nothing much — shortlived, not very serious, or maybe more romantic than serious and he was pretty young so maybe still immature — but it’s a subject he’s been thinking a lot about lately because of what happened to Roland, and it might help him understand better why Roland went through with it while so many others who think about doing it don’t, or not as thoroughly. The first time was when he was just eighteen. He’d finished a year of college, hadn’t liked what he’d studied, and was now taking two boring courses in summer school. He wanted to be doing anything but working eight hours a day at a tedious job in what seemed like the steamiest part of the city, midtown, and going to school four nights a week and then coming home to study for an hour or more. He also wanted to be living away from his folks and have a girlfriend or someone to date and a close friend or two, which he didn’t then. So a couple of times, maybe more, but while he was on a subway platform — going downtown to work or after work heading uptown to school, probably the latter, as that’d be the worst possible time for him and also the hottest in the subway station: between job and school when he was most tired and perhaps susceptible to thoughts of suicide — he thought about jumping in front of a train speeding into the station. He remembers thinking, Go on, end it now, what the hell’s life going to do for you anyway? In the long run it’s just going to go from bad to worse: studies, more loneliness, crappy jobs, girls who bust your balls, sickness, old age, death — and other things, maybe a little of it like what Roland was thinking at the end. He even got close to the platform’s edge once but backed away behind a pole when the train got to about twenty feet of him and was whistling. He was depressed most of the summer; his parents noticed it and wanted to know what was bothering him and if there was anything they could do to help—“You don’t want to continue summer school, quit it and concentrate on your job,” his father said, “and if that work’s too hard and you’d rather be a waiter in the Catskills or a counselor in camp, there still could be time to get something”—but he always said, “That’s not it. And the courses are important to finish if I’m to take a lighter night-school load next year so I can get a good full-time job. I’m just going through something; it’ll pass,” and it seemed to pass by the start of the fall term, when he got a better-paying day job and night school was easier and the weather was better and he had made a couple of close friends.

The other time, or only other time he remembers, was over a girl. They’d been sleeping together and he wanted to marry her: she had her own apartment and was studying to be a stage director; he was twenty-two and just out of college and didn’t know if he wanted to go to grad school for something — law, journalism, art history, international relations — or try to get into some profession; and she said yes but not to tell anyone yet, she doesn’t want people getting excited and making plans for a wedding before she’s had time to adjust to it, and then a few weeks later she said marriage was the worst idea imaginable for her, what could she have been thinking of? good thing they kept it to themselves, they’ll of course continue going out with each other, but she’ll se.’ about marriage with him in three to four years, if they last that long and no reason they shouldn’t; it’s not that they don’t love each other as much, is she right? and he said sure, what does she think? there’s no one else in the world but her — though for the time being she still doesn’t want him to move in with her, she has too many things to do first and wants to continue being totally on her own for at least another year, but since he spends almost every night at her place anyway and seems to buy most of the food and wine it’s just a formality that one half of the bedroom closet isn’t designated his and his name isn’t on the mailbox — but grew cool to him almost immediately after that and soon broke off with him, saying something’s happened the last two weeks, she can’t explain it but she doesn’t feel the same to him, it wasn’t anything he did and it isn’t another man, but she thinks it’d be best — no, she’s sure of it — that they stop seeing each other completely; is that going to make him very upset? And he said no, if that’s what she wants, it’s not what he wants at all but he knows from experience not to push somebody when he knows they don’t want it and he thinks he can get used to it, and they didn’t see each other for a month, then got back together; he called — well, he’d been calling every other day or so, just to see how she was, what she was up to, and so on, though really just to hear her voice and with the hope she’d say she wanted to see him — but this time asked her out to dinner, made up an anniversary: “It’s almost fifty weeks to the day we met and to me fifty weeks constitutes a year — I prefer round numbers — so what do you say?” and she said one dinner can’t hurt them unless they get food poisoning, and they saw each other almost every day for a month, then she broke it off again — it got too close, she said, when she thought they could keep it casual — though after this breakup they went out to dinner about once every three weeks and slept together that night — she said this was good for her and the way she wanted it, seeing him just as a friend and in addition getting rid of some of her pent-up sexual tensions and same for him, right? — and he said, “You won’t get me to disagree on that; it’s fine as is, and if it gets better, that’s okay too, though you’re telling me you haven’t slept with anyone else since our last big break?” and she said she can’t say that, and he said, “Well, that’s okay too; I wouldn’t expect you to only hold out for our once-a-monthlies. Do what you want; you’re a free bird,” and she said she doesn’t need him telling her that, and he said, “I know; I’m sorry,” till she said one morning, “Really, this is getting ridiculous and even a little humiliating and pathetic and painful and everything,” and he said, “What is?” and she said, “Don’t play the fool with me. Seeing each other and occasionally sleeping together when I don’t want to, especially the last part. I don’t want to sleep with anyone. Forget what I said about pent-up sexual energy and tension getting released. I have to be on my own completely — do you remember that old tune? I’ve school, I’ve assistant directing work to get after school, I’ve lots of things to do and no time for you. Besides, we’re not working out. We’ll never work out. We have to cut it off for good because it’s too obvious that continuing as just friends and sporadic bedmates isn’t working, and I don’t need or want it to,” and he said, “Okay, message coming in loud and clear. What’s that you said, darling? No, only kidding. So if that’s what you don’t want or need — all of what you said you didn’t — then it’s over once and for all and for good, forever, okay?” and she said yes and he said, “Fine,” and took home all his things for the third time in a few months, and when he called her after that she said, “I meant it, goodbye,” and then, “Stop calling, will you?” and then she wouldn’t talk to him: she’d hang up after she said hello and heard his voice or would only speak to him a few seconds—“Can’t talk now, busy”—and finally: “Listen, I said it’s over, so it’s over, so why are you still calling? Try to understand that I don’t want to hear from you again and I don’t want to try and make you understand that again. I no longer love you. You didn’t ask, but I said it. I in fact like you less each time you call. And because you have called so much when you knew I didn’t want you to, by now you’ve hit the lowest level yet with me and I have only the most unfortunate feelings for you. Whatever good feelings I once had for you have been entirely erased by your recent actions. It’s futile and hopeless to call me. It’s also downright stupid, do you hear? I’m not going to change my mind about seeing you or being in contact in any way with you, and the more you try to contact me to change my mind, the less chance there’ll be that I’ll ever even want to acknowledge your existence if we happen to bump into each other in a few years. Now, if that isn’t sufficiently unequivocal and unarguable and all those other adjectives that mean indisputable and nonappealable and unconditional, let me just say—” and he said, “No, it is, thank you”—though later thought, Thank you for what? — and hung up, and after the call, when he knew there was no chance at all of changing her feelings toward him and that she would never want to see him again or not for a long time — years, as she implied, and even then she wouldn’t assent to seeing him, they’d have to bump into each other accidentally as she said and at the most it’d be from her a “How do you do, you’re looking well and nice to see you, goodbye”—he thought of jumping off a bridge (interesting, he thought, always jumping off something: the Brooklyn or George Washington because you’re allowed to walk on them); and about a week later, after being miserable it seemed every single waking minute — pulling his hair, tearing at his face, banging his fists on tables and against walls, crying — he went downtown to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge (he didn’t know where to get onto the George Washington) just to see what he’d do on it and also to scout it out for a possible jump some other time, though if the impulse to jump suddenly came today or built up while he was walking across he just might do it, he just might, but when he came out of the subway station he thought closest to the bridge — he found out which one by looking at a subway map in the station he started out from but came up one stop short — he went into one of the many Chinese restaurants down there and at the counter had some dumplings and a beer, something he’d never done before alone, having wine or beer with food in a restaurant (at least not in the States, and he doesn’t mean free bar food with your drinks), and ended up ordering what amounted to almost a full meal: rice with it, bowl of sweet-and-sour soup before, and after it an appetizer dish he’d never had and which he ordered because it was cheap and he was still hungry and the counterman seemed to say in his broken English that it was filling — a scallion pancake with some strangetasting thick brown dipping sauce. The whole thing’s awful, he thought, and he’s tremendously depressed and doesn’t know how he can go on living without her but he’s got to do it, that’s all, just day after day not call or write or try to see her or spy on her apartment building from across the street or stare up at her side window from the alley it looks over or anything like that, as he’s been doing and thinking of doing more, and it should work out; in a month or two he should be over it and maybe even before.

Going over these two suicidal times in his life didn’t help him understand any better why Roland went through with it in the most painful way possible, but it did make him more sympathetic to him, that’s for sure. Perhaps, if you’re of a certain mind or in a certain frame of mind, he might mean, you can get so depressed you just lose it completely, while someone else in the same circumstances but of a different background and mindset and nature might have a built-in … he’s saying there might be an attitude or predisposition, let’s say, in some people that’s inherent or possibly even congenital and that prevents them and maybe everyone else with something approximating that gene pool, or at least holds it off more, from … oh, he doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about, or not much, so why try?

Roland’s grandmother and a cousin never come to his room to see what’s in it. It could be they’re too despondent or it’s difficult or inconvenient to travel to the city or they assume there’s nothing of any value or worth to them there, but anyway they tell the landlord to let the tenants on Roland’s floor, and especially the one who received the suicide note and then the ones who helped Roland that last day, to go in and take what they want. If anything’s left after that, to let anyone from the building in whom the landlord approves of, and then to dump or get a junkman to cart off the rest; they’ll pay for it. Gould gets a letter from the landlord on this: You and apt. 7-J, for a maximum of one hour, will be allowed inside Mr. Meese’s apartment. Help yourselves to whatever you wish, and please don’t make a mess. The super will accompany you, but he won’t be taking anything himself. He doesn’t want to go in Roland’s room. There are probably a few good books he’d like to have, but it’d be too ghoulish — Gould the Ghoul, which is what kids occasionally called him when he was a boy for no other reason than the words were so close — and he writes the landlord a note, thanking him for his offer but declining it and adding, Why not, to avoid what could end up being a greedy free-for-all over Roland’s things, give everything to a Christian mission house — I know of one on West 75th Street off Columbus Avenue near where I used to live, and there must be others in the city — or a poor people’s home, if such a place still exists, or the Salvation Army or an organization like that, but doesn’t get a response. About a week later 7J says he got some great books from Roland’s apartment, “One a first edition of an early Thomas Mann in the original German; how do you think he acquired such a thing? Also a decent night table that could be an antique — he probably picked that one up off the street — but there was nothing else there worth more than a nickel, unless I missed a few rare books that to me just looked mildewed and old.”

The apartment’s painted and a young woman moves in, an opera singer. She looks pleasant — a soprano, when he hears her through her door practicing — always dressed in beige or black or combo of the two, big hefty chest and thin legs and an intelligent face, is never with a man or really anyone, and Gould, the three to four times he sees her in different places the first few weeks, greets her and says things like “Enjoying the apartment? … Liking the building? … The neighborhood? It’s a quiet part of town and usually safe — though if I were you I wouldn’t walk alone after ten at night — and lots of good bookstores.” She says yes to all the enjoyment questions and to the last adds, “And thank you, I’ll take your safety advisory seriously. Everyone else here pretends ignorance or has been cagey about it.” He finally stops her on the street and says, “Hi, just a second, wait up, I want to talk to you,” because she’s nodding and walking past, and he says, “Maybe I should identify myself — your neighbor in Five-twenty, don’t you remember me? Not from right next door but on the same floor, 7-D,” and she says, “It’s my eyes; I left my corrective lenses home, sorry.” He says, “I know you’re a singer — I’ve even stopped to listen to you, but not right in front of your door. Lyric soprano?” and she says, “Mostly coloratura,” and he says, “Oh, so many of the great hard roles. How tough it must be to get up so high and stay there — in Lucia, for instance, and that mad scene,” and she says, “That one I’m still only familiarizing myself with; if you take it on too early it’ll kill your voice.” He says, “I hope I’m not offending you when I say that these days I prefer modern opera — Berg, Schoenberg, all the Bergs and Britten, and Ravel’s little whatever they’re called in French — those shorties — and even Bartók’s one shot at it, though my love for opera isn’t as strong as when I was a teen. Then I used to line up at the Met for standing room downstairs once a week, and, if I was close to broke or got on line too late, then the cheaper standing room in the uppermost ring where you can’t see and can barely hear. Now I find the singing in the older operas still glorious but most of the plots excessively melodramatic, even for opera, and sometimes unintentionally funny — I really expect Tosca to bounce back onto the top of Castello something-or-other when she makes her grand final leap … excuse me, and you could say here, ‘What do you know?’” and she says, “We all have our tastes, but take it from a budding pro that some of the characters’ subtleties may be eluding you,” and he says, “I agree a hundred percent,” and finally gets around to asking if she’d like to go to a movie with him one night this week: “I’d love to go to an opera with you also, if the seats were affordable and not in that top ring — my feet have done more than their share of theater standing and would now revolt by turning in under me. And I’d probably ruin it for you by asking for a running translation of everything being sung and said and, if it’s unclear to me, done onstage,” and she says, “Then spare me,” and they make a time to go to a movie, start dating. One night at her place she asks about the tenant who previously lived there: “This woman — the tenant on my line on the fifth floor — said he took his life in the building but she wasn’t sure if it was here or in the hallway or on the elevator or stairs, but she knows it wasn’t on her floor or in the lobby,” and he says, “Oh, Roland, a very brilliant fellow, handsome, everything. I didn’t get to know him well — he was kind of reserved and I guess I wasn’t too outgoing and forthcoming to him either,” and she says, “But as to what happened to him?” and he says, “He made it as far as our hallway but I think died during the ambulance trip or in the emergency room.” “What did he take, pills? And why’d he go into the hallway if he wanted to die?” and he says, “Maybe pills, and I don’t know the rest, I’m sorry. A change of mind? Who can say what anyone would do when the prospect of death — of not living anymore — suddenly hits you and then knowing you were the one who pulled the plug and now you don’t want it unplugged or something? The realization would be incredibly frightening, maybe even, for some, heart-stopping, especially if you felt it was too late to be saved,” and she says, “All that’s probably true.” A week later she says, “Why didn’t you tell me your part in it? and I don’t want you to give me any false modesty. You made me feel — I was talking about it to my next-door neighbor — like an awful fool,” and he says, “Why, because he knows we’ve been seeing each other? Okay: I didn’t want to scare you out of your apartment with what happened there before you, or even out of the building. Some people would get freaked knowing how horribly the previous occupant of the place died. And then I thought you’d ask for details, everyone does: ‘What were his last words?’ someone asked, and when I said I wasn’t near him then — he supposedly said them to the medical team working on him — she asked, ‘Then his last words to you,’ and so on. Anyway, that you’d get some of the details out of me and be horrified, because that’s what the whole thing was. I still shake when I think of it and I still see his burnt mouth and the rest of it and smell his smell and that’s all I want to go into it,” and she says, “Nothing like that fazes me, and I’m not superstitious in the least. I’d vacate the apartment if the rent was raised too high or it was overrun with rats and the landlord and the city couldn’t do anything about it, but not from something like what happened to him. And he supposedly only took the arsenic inside the apartment, never came back to it once he went looking for help, and the place had been thoroughly painted and cleaned of any sign of it. The landlord did a spectacular job; I’d never seen such an immaculate apartment for rent in New York. You forget I was raised on a poultry farm and one of my chores from the time I was eleven was to cut off the chickens’ heads,” and he says, “I’m surprised your parents made you do that,” and she says, “The birds weren’t about to kill themselves. Besides, I started getting paid a little for it once I was thirteen, dime a head. But even worse than chopping the heads off was beating them to death when some of them ran around headless,” and he says, “How’d you ever do that? I know I couldn’t have; I guess you grow used to it. But you’re right, I should’ve leveled with you long ago — maybe even told you of it the first time we spoke. The truth is I thought you already knew and I didn’t want to upset you even more. You’ll just have to forgive me for doing something I thought was best for you. I guess you never know what’s going to backfire on you: the intended good you do, even the bad, which can turn out good. It all depends on how the people it’s meant for take it, and of course, like I said, how it ends up,” and she says, “Now you’re feeling sorry for yourself. I hate that in a person, especially a grown man, and particularly one who cloaks it in a lot of philosophical and psychological jargon and gibberish,” and he says, “Boy, who even knew how tough you were … I’m learning something about you today,” and she says, “It’s not toughness. I think I’ve seen some of the worst in life and the hardest and so forth, but none of it has stopped me from doing anything I’ve wanted and getting to be who I am and achieving what I have so far, maybe not even for a minute,” and he says, “Where did all that come from?” and she says, “It came and it’s addressed to you.” “Oh, is it? Give me a day to think why. But it’s funny, too, because now I see something I didn’t, after all my explorations into Roland’s death before, and that’s that you’re the kind of person he needed and should’ve known, not some delicate creature like the one he flipped over and who probably dumped him, which I think set off his suicide, because she was so spooked by his pessimism and gloom. If he had, you would have shaken him up some and maybe out of his feeling so bad about himself and his future, and the poor guy might’ve lived,” and she says, “What do you think, I exist only to take care of weak men? If he had it in his mind to die and he asked my opinion I would have told him what I thought of doing yourself in before you’ve tried a thousand other things to fill your life, and then if he was still determined I would stop bothering with him because I don’t go for men who are that heavy or even want to be around them: they’d just depress me till I’d possibly start thinking about taking my own life. No, the last isn’t true. Besides all that, it’s a ridiculous thought, yours, even a bit ugly, hitching me up hypothetically with a crazy dead man, and, I’m certain, deep down, meant to be cutting and mean,” and he says, “Not so, and I apologize for whatever you think I ulteriorly said,” and she says, “I don’t believe a stitch of your apology, how about that?” and he says, “Then what can I say?” and leaves her apartment and they don’t speak to each other for a few days. About a month later — they’ve resumed seeing each other but only about once a week — she gets an opera singing job she auditioned for more than a year ago and she says it’s too good an opportunity to pass up and she moves to San Francisco. He calls her a few times — she never calls him — and says he’s still hoping to save enough money to fly out to see her, especially for her debut in a few months and also to see that part of California — maybe they can go camping together in a redwood forest — but a month after she gets there she says they should break off their relationship entirely. “Why? There’s still a strong possibility we can make it work, and I’d even think of eventually moving to San Francisco,” and she says, “Whatever you do, don’t come for me. It’s not only that I’ve met a man and am now pretty serious about him: one of the stagehands for our company, but he’s a master carpenter, no furniture mover. But also that the conversation we had awhile back — about the suicide guy whose apartment I took over? — turned me off you to the point where my skepticism about you just grew and grew. I didn’t like what I saw emerging from you, is how I’ll put it, to be real polite and not encourage you to flare up and try to malign me even more, and I thought it would only get worse. That’s why I became sort of cold to you after that, though it isn’t why I moved out here, of course,” and he says, “Cold? I didn’t notice it,” and she says, “Sure,” and while he’s asking her what she meant by that sure she cuts him off with “I beg of you, no more,” and he says, “Oh, my, how operatic; when do you impale yourself on your dagger?” but she’s already hung up.

The apartment’s rented to an elderly woman but isn’t repainted, as the landlord says the singer only had it a few months. The first time Gould meets the woman she tells him that her husband recently died, she was like a full-time nurse to him the last six years—“That’s how much he suffered, and we couldn’t afford real ones”—and since there was nothing left for her to do in their suburban community and her kids were scattered around the country in towns just as dull as hers and anyway didn’t really want her, she decided to move back to the city she was raised in, “and especially this Columbia area, which is like a quiet sanctuary in a noisy fast-paced city, just the place to start out in again.” She often has tenants on the floor in for dinners she cooks. She invites Gould a few times and he always begs off. After the singer and Roland, he doesn’t want to go inside the apartment. And it’s not that he’s afraid the woman will ask him about Roland’s suicide. She’s already said she knows and nothing he says concerning it could surprise or scare or repel her after what she went through with her husband. Mostly, though, he doesn’t find her interesting or intelligent, so he thinks the evening would be very boring. “Nothing personal, I want you to understand,” he tells her the last time she invites him. “It’s just that I don’t usually have dinner, and if I do it’s usually very light and with my own kind of special foods and preparations and eating it by myself while I work,” and she says, “Please, I learned long ago not to take personally the idiosyncratic things people do. So if eating alone or starving yourself to death is what you want, I’m certainly the last person to try and interfere with it.”