The Grievers by Marc Schuster

even though it was true, even though a friend of mine had, in fact, killed himself, I felt sick to my stomach over saying it, over using Billy’s death to hang on to the dumbest job I’d ever had in my life.
    “Yeah,” I said. “I think that would be a good idea.”
    “Charley?” Sue said as I started toward my car. “We still need to talk, okay?”
    “Talk?” I said.
    “You’re up for a performance review. We need to talk about the work you’ve been doing.”
    “Right,” I said. “Work.”
    “But it can wait,” she said. “It can so totally wait.”
    “Thanks,” I said. “Totally.”

    I CAME home to walls of bare, jaundiced plaster and furniture draped in old bed sheets. On Thursday, Karen and I had tried to paint the walls of the dining room only to watch the paint bead up as soon as it came into contact with the plaster. Apparently this meant that there was still glue on the walls, and that we still had countless hours of scrubbing and scraping ahead of us before we could try once more to paint the walls and make the house our own.
    If I had any sense at all, I’d have started scrubbing long before Karen got home, but I opted instead for pulling away the lavender sheet that covered our television and catching the end of a soap opera, a vice I’d picked up in the early days of grad school. Initially, I’d attributed my fascination with the constant rise and fall of convoluted love affairs to a dutiful urge to immerse myself in the tropes and themes of lowbrow American culture; but in reality watching soap operas was oddly comforting. There was a certain logic to the genre that was hard to resist, a constant reassurance that as tangled and hopeless as circumstances were bound to become, things would always even out in the end.
    Plus the women were hot.
    Aside from that, what made me reach for the remote almost as soon as I’d walked in the door was the eternal prospect of characters returning from the dead. A year earlier, I’d seen a teenager die in a fire only to come back without any memory of his former life. Not long after that, an evil millionaire was found frozen alive in Antarctica after being presumed dead for over a decade. Then there was the supermodel who drove her car off a cliff only to be rescued, it was revealed three months later, by a megalomaniac arms dealer.
    Given the apparent propensity for the dead to return to life on all my favorite soaps, it wasn’t so crazy for me to lose myself, if only for a little while, in the fantasy that maybe there’d been a mistake, that maybe Billy wasn’t dead. Yes, there’d been a suicide, I allowed myself to think, but it wasn’t him. The old man who identified the body was wrong—he had to be. Someone else had jumped—some poor, tortured soul I’d never met. But Billy had just gone away for a while and forgotten to tell everyone. Someday soon, he’d come back healthy and strong and full of stories about his travels—how he’d fallen in and out of love with a Russian spy, how he’d foiled a hijacking plot off the coast of Belize, how he’d nearly lost an eye in a barroom brawl when a ninety-year-old woman with a hook for a hand took a swipe at his face. In fact, I thought wistfully, still lost in the soap opera logic of denial, it wasn’t inconceivable that Billy was already back in town and waiting for the right time to call.
    Then the telephone rang, and I sprang from the sofa, afraid I’d been caught dreaming impossible, childish dreams.
    “Charley Schwartz?” a gravelly voice asked when I picked up the phone.
    “Yes?” I said as if I weren’t sure.
    “Joe Viola,” the voice said. “Saint Leonard’s Academy. I’m calling about this Bobby Chang thing.”
    “Chin,” I said. “His name was Billy Chin.”
    “That’s the one. Were you thinking doughnuts or crudités?”
    “I’m not sure,” I said. “Doughnuts or—?”
    “Crudités. Your buddy Frank suggested egg rolls, but that runs into money.”
    “He’s