A Life in the Rearview

David Bellingham nodded to the usher as he passed by and he took a seat in a pew by the open window. It was in the last row on the righthand side as you faced the front of the sanctuary. The back of the pew pressed hard against his spine. He was prone to slouching and straight-backed seats like this one were uncomfortable for him.

He wondered, did people choose seats on one side or another at a funeral as you did at a wedding. More likely as not, one did, he thought. Families and friends being what they were. They were no different at funerals than they were at weddings were they. Maybe, he thought, there was an even greater cause for internecine animus at a funeral.

Nonetheless, he sat where he sat and that was that. Besides, would where he sat make any difference? Make him feel any less like an interloper of sorts? Any more than he was already feeling?

He knew next to no one there, and, of course, that was to be expected. The people he knew or who knew him were dwindling, were they not?

Outside the window, the tops of trees down the hill, across the lake, rustled in the breeze. The sound they might have been making didn’t reach him, though the breeze through the window brushed across his skin. His mind wandered. Drifted.

When they called his name, he touched his hand to his jacket pocket. His notes. An Ativan. A Clif Bar. His water bottle. He got up and walked up the side aisle and negotiated the short flight of stairs to the microphone. He tapped it. God, he thought, must everyone in the world do that?

Hear cleared his throat. “We met,” he began, “in September of ‘57. The year the Dodgers left New York for LA. He was new. It was junior high and everyone that year was new. We all came from different parts of town. But he was from a different town.

“I remember that he looked lost. Maybe not lost, but he had this solitary look about him. The way he looked around. The concavity of his expression. He looked, I think, like I was feeling.

“You have bike?” I asked him. He shook his head. You play basketball? ‘Yeah,’ he said.

“In Phys Ed, we shot baskets at one of the nets on the side of the gym by the bleachers. He would shoot these jump shots from the corner. He’d say, ‘Fall back, baby!’ when he hit one. Those were not high percentage shots but that’s what he liked. We’d go to the outdoor courts after school and shoot around and then we’d play one-on-one.

“And there was this one day. I remember it was cloudy. I don’t know why I remember that but, we were playing, and I thought he was going to take one of those corner jumpers, but he didn’t. He drove straight at me, and I had my hands up, my arms up, my hip into his, and he went to the hoop for a layup. He didn’t stop. Just banged into me and, and I can feel him coming into me at this moment as I stand here, and his shoulder slammed into me, right under my arm, and it snapped his shoulder. He just crumpled. He fell down, and some old guy came over and he yanked on his arm, and I could hear the bone pop back into the socket. I was shaking. Felt sick. He was sweating like crazy, and I thought he was going to faint, but he looked up at me and said, ‘I’m okay, I’m okay. I’ll take the foul.’

“His mother made us good sandwiches and he had a nice sister. One day after school he told me that Miss Bergman, the English teacher, who he thought had a crush on him, told him he was an iconoclast. I didn’t know what that meant.”

“One year, this was the year before we graduated, we went to see a Chiffons concert in the city together, and after the show he said to me that one of them, the one on the left, the really cute one, was looking at him the whole entire show. I told him I thought she was looking at me. ‘You believe what you want to believe,’ he said.’

“Then the next year, after we graduated, it was May or June, he called me on a pay phone from upstate. He said, ‘Can you pick me up at the AmTrak station?’

“Why?”

“I flunked out,” he said.

“Sure.”

“I was sorry, I told him, but I was really glad to have him home. I didn’t say so. So, we went straight to Roberta’s in the Bronx for pizza and a beer.

“We went to Knicks games. Bradley, Frazier, Monroe and Willis Reed. He was my best man, and I was his. We were both crazy young. Too young and too crazy to know we were too young and too crazy.”

“One year, it was ’69, he called me, ‘Come over and we’ll watch the moon landing together. The four of us did. We sat on the floor in his living room and ate tacos. And afterwards he said, ‘You think that whole thing was for real?’

“Yeah, why?”

“’No reason. Just saying, I guess.’” That was exactly the kind of thing he would say.”

“We used to talk about the kids. Vacations. Work. Where the country was heading. Where the world was heading. We still do. Talk about kids and vacations and the country. Not still, I mean, but you know what I mean. It was always grounded in the here and now. The present. Covid shots. Hearing aids. Knee replacements. Shingles.

“A few years ago, he started talking about how old we were getting. It was like, aches and pains and surgeries. And he’d always say how he could see us one day sitting on a bench on the boardwalk in Atlantic City, wearing hats and overcoats and looking out at the water. Sort of like the Simon and Garfunkel song. And he’d always say that we’d be mumbling things indistinctly in one another’s direction and we’d be nodding our heads like we heard and understood.

“But, you know, we never really talked about the rest of it. The ‘what happens after the mumbling stops’ kind of thing. Other than joking about being euphemistically ‘gone.’ I don’t know what he believed. I mean really. I think we had different ideas, but I’m not so sure about that. I never really asked him, in just those same words.”

He paused speaking.

“Oh, yes, and one last thing that he would say to me, ‘You know, David, I’ve been down so long, it is beginning to look like up to me.” I always thought he made that one up. I was sure of it. Anyway, I liked thinking that. Besides maybe Richard Farina was the one who stole it from him. That’s possible.”

He looked out at all the faces of all. There were mostly smiles all around. People he didn’t know or didn’t recognize. You could see he figured that that was as good a time as any to stop.

So, he walked back down the steps. Back to the pew at the end of the aisle, near the open window and he watched the trees across the lake rustling without saying anything and he could feel the breeze brush against his skin.