She took him to the airport. She waited with him at the gate. She kissed him good-bye as they used to kiss good-bye when they were younger-slowly, with tongue. He didn’t seem to want to separate. She had to push him away; she remembered giving him a little shove. He handed the flight attendant his ticket; he disappeared into the mouth of the Jetway.
She remembered feeling free.
He waited until the final day. Quite possibly-India had to take this into account-it was the prospect of returning home that set him off. His trip, after all, had been a success: He had met the king of Thailand, he’d discussed his sketches with a team of the king’s landscape architects and his cultural attaché, he had been paid in full and given the royal treatment-a dinner cruise down the Chao Phraya River on the king’s yacht, a private tour of Wat Po, Wat Arun, and the palace that contained the Emerald Buddha. He had been given a suite at the Oriental Hotel, where so many distinguished men had stayed before him: Kipling, Maugham, Joseph Conrad. Bill had also found time to venture into the underbelly of the Patpong neighborhood, where he found a prostitute and bought a handgun. The prostitute may have been his for the whole week, but the gun he saved for the last day. He paid the girl, dismissed her, and then shot himself in the head.
The butlers stationed outside of his suite heard the noise and knocked for entrance. They knocked and knocked and knocked, then entered with their own key.
A secretary of the king’s called India at home. It was three o’clock in the morning. The catered dinner party for twelve women had ended only a couple of hours earlier. It had been a tremendous success, one of the most enjoyable evenings of India’s life: the food had been delicious, the table had looked beautiful bathed in candlelight and swathed in linen, there had been good music-Carole King, Paul Simon, old Beatles-and too much wine-champagne, Meursault, syrah. The women had departed reluctantly, with hugs, vowing it was the best dinner party they had ever attended. India had cleaned up alone with loud Van Morrison playing. She had finished the wine and smoked cigarettes.
When the phone rang, she knew it was tragedy. She thought maybe one of the boys-both of whom were at sleepovers-had drunk himself into a coma. Or one of the women from the party had lost control of her car and killed herself or someone else. India didn’t understand the heavily accented voice on the other line at first, but eventually she got it. She got it: Bill was dead. He’d shot himself.
It had been like falling into a well. Dark, cold, wet, scary, hopeless. Bill was dead. He’d killed himself. India remembered rising from bed, taking a handful of Advil, making a pot of coffee. Calling Birdie in Connecticut and sounding calm. Bill is dead. Birdie said she was on her way. She would stay and take care of the boys. India would go to Bangkok.
She didn’t remember the flight; she didn’t remember the cab from the airport to the hotel or what Bangkok had looked like out the window. She did, ridiculously, remember the outfits the bellmen at the Oriental Hotel wore-blue pantaloons with the crotches hanging down to their knees. Funny hats. Was it embarrassing for them to dress this way? she wondered. No sooner had India stepped from the taxi into the soupy heat than an official from the hotel-a Thai man in a pale beige linen suit-was upon her, bowing to her in the traditional wai, taking her hands. She looked at the man and could see that he expected her to cry or fall apart the way Americans did in the movies, and yet all India felt at that moment was contrition. Bill had, after all, killed himself in their fine hotel. It would have been a horrific mess and upsetting to the butlers who found him. (How had they gone home to their families and eaten their evening meal with the memory of Bill’s brains splattered all over the plush carpeting?) India was as mortified as she would have been if the boys had thrown a raucous party and broken furniture or put holes in the walls. And beyond these surface concerns was a deeper shame.
The administration of the hotel and the representatives sent to the hotel by the king were somber and sympathetic. They didn’t place blame; they didn’t wonder what went so horribly wrong. They exuded acceptance, as if somehow they’d expected this might happen. The Thai people hailed Bill as a genius along the lines of Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock, and geniuses were eccentric. Crazy. They cut off their ears; they overdosed; they blew their brains out.
India identified the body. She didn’t remember doing this, but she did remember Bill in the casket. He was her charge; she had to get him home. She thought of the body in the casket as “Bill,” though he was cargo now, he was luggage. And yet he was dearly familiar. She was a woman traveling home with her husband’s corpse. It was surreal, she couldn’t believe it was happening, and yet what choice did she have? She couldn’t leave him in Thailand.
The boys and Birdie were all at the Philadelphia airport when India and “Bill” landed. The boys looked years younger; they looked like mere children, and they cried easily. Billy was the strongest, ever the leader, and he gathered India up in a hug, and Teddy and Ethan followed suit, and in the middle of Concourse C, the four of them became one rocking, sobbing mass.
Everyone had something in her life that put her strength to the test, and for India, it was Bill’s suicide. For Chess, it was Michael Morgan’s accident. Birdie had said that Chess “felt responsible,” and India certainly knew what that was like. She held herself accountable for Bill’s death as surely as if she’d pulled the trigger herself.
He’d left no note. But if he had left a note, what would it have said? I asked you to come with me. I told you I couldn’t do this alone. You should have gotten me help. Wasn’t it clear I needed help? How could you forsake me? Why didn’t you care? You knew something like this would happen.
He could have written any one of those things and it would have been true.
India had eventually picked herself up and moved forward-and in rather spectacular fashion. She had, in some ways, made Bill’s suicide work for her. She built a career, a persona; she created a self. And goddamn it, she was proud of this.
But she hadn’t accounted for love. To love again was beyond her, right? She held Lula’s note in her hand. What do I have to do?
India responded to this second letter immediately. She was no longer afraid of being caught by the officials at PAFA. She had already been caught by life’s circumstances; she had nothing left to fear. It’s not what you have to do. It’s what I have to do.
Forgive herself.
Reconcile this and move on.
There was nothing harder.
CHESS
Day eighteen.
Nick stopped seeing Rhonda. I learned this, not from Nick, but from Rhonda, whom I saw on the elevator two weeks after the night I left Irving Plaza. She was coming home from Fairway, her arms laden with bags of groceries; I saw fennel fronds and artichokes. This was highly unusual for Rhonda: at home, she ate yogurt or Chinese take-out noodles.
I said, “Fennel?”
She said, “I’m cooking tonight for this new guy I’m seeing.”
I took a metered breath. “A new guy? You mean Nick?”
She looked at me as if she didn’t know who I was talking about. Nick? Then she said, “Oh! Nick was a flash in the pan. We were together at his show, and then I never heard from him again. He vanished.”
“Vanished?”