My Korean Deli_ Risking It All for a Convenience Store - Ben Ryder Howe [98]
SCARCELY A WEEK later, I get a phone call at Kay’s house from the Review at an oddly early hour. I know everyone claims to experience this at such moments, but something really does tell me not to pick up the receiver, that bad news awaits at the other end of the line, and that if I don’t answer the news will reverse itself or simply go away. But the phone rings and rings—someone seems to have turned off the Paks’ answering machine—and eventually I have no choice but to pick up.
It’s Brigid, who’d gone into the office early because she was fretting over some last-minute detail concerning the fall issue, which she and George had just sent to the printer. As she was coming down East Seventy-second Street she saw an ambulance pull to the curb and paramedics rush into George’s townhouse, and when she stepped inside George’s sister was already there, and she stoically reported that George had not woken up that morning. The rest of his family was upstairs. Soon afterward the paramedics came down and quietly went back to their vehicle, and people started going up to George’s bedroom to say good-bye.
On the express train to Fifty-ninth Street I sit numbly, waiting for the flood of emotion. It doesn’t come. I don’t feel like I’m in denial—not after watching George’s health decline over the last year and worrying about him as much as we all have. Yet it doesn’t seem possible that George, of all people, is gone, and part of me truly believes that when I get to the office it will turn out to be one of his stunts, an elaborate hoax for some magazine piece he’s writing.
Of course, the fantasy crumbles as soon as I walk into the office and see the faces of the staff, a moment that unleashes the flood I had been expecting. As I sit there at my desk, a basket case, I think of the last conversation I had with George, up in his kitchen, and wonder if he was in even worse shape than I realized. This fills me with regret for not doing a better job of helping him, and for probably making him worry about the Review a lot more than he needed to at the time. It’s hard to feel too much gloom and despair upon the death of someone as essentially lighthearted as George, yet there really was a melancholy tinge to his being, and it was something I now knew he wished he could have expressed more openly. Most of all I just feel an implacable sadness at the idea of not seeing him anymore.
That morning, without George, no one in the office has any clue what to do except cry. Eventually we decide to call all of George’s friends (a job that would literally take days were we to be even halfway successful) and tell them the news before it reaches them via some impersonal medium such as the Internet. They, in turn, of course want to know what the cause was (which in a day or so we’ll know to have been a heart attack) and whether anything had happened to George, a trauma of some kind. However, as far as we can tell, George had had a normal evening, wandering the city and drifting from party to party. It was the way he lived, alone but out in the world, totally private and public at the same time. He must have had fun (didn’t he always?) because he came home late, then died peacefully in his sleep, a fitting end for a life like his, except that I really think he would have preferred to fall into the polar bear’s cage.
Over the next few weeks the shock wears off and is replaced by a period of collective self-examination. As if George’s loss isn’t a big enough tragedy, the Review has to answer all sorts of fundamental questions about its own existence and whether to go on without him and, if so, how. What did George mean to the Review, and can he be replaced? Is it enough to have his genes embedded in the institution, or does it require his touch, his instincts? Maybe the magazine died with him; maybe it died a long time ago. Essentially these are academic questions suited