Untitled Chick Lit Novel

[mallorys_camera]

TITLE

Part 1: Grazia

Chapter 1

I drove up to Neal's house to say goodbye to Daria, who was red-eyeing it back to California.

GPS decided to take me on an exciting tour of the eastern Catskills. It was a lovely day, so not unpleasant.

Thing about GPS in the Catskills is that there is no cell coverage. Like nil, nada, niente. And the narrow roads have unexpected forks that GPS does not account for, and the unexpected forks always seem more attractive than the straight & narrow path—do we all see the metaphor here?—so it is very, very easy to get completely lost, especially for people like me who were born with no sense of direction.

When that happens, one must simply trust that GPS will make the necessary adjustments and that eventually, one will get where one wanted to go.

GPS, in other words, is a lot like the Judeo-Christian God.

###



At Neal's house, a Prius convention was going on. 'Cause the one unifying characteristic of Neal's sister wives—let's call it like it is!—seems to be that we all drive hybrids.

Daria, Flavia, & Mimi were there, of course. And Tracy, Flavia's cousin, had dropped by, too. Tracy wears killer sunglasses. She does not drive a Prius.

"I brought sandwiches!" I trilled, packing as much radiance as I could into a single smile.

Neal's memorial had taken place the day before. Neal-Palooza, I'd dubbed it. I could call it whatever I liked because I had organized it. Turnout had been respectable—we did in-house seating and Zoom—but one never knows how many people will turn up at a memorial, and I had way over-ordered the food.

At the end, after all the mourners had departed, Vinnie handed me an enormous bag. Chicken salad sandwiches! Roast beef sandwiches! The part of the sheet cake that still had the words, In Loving Memory...

But Mimi kept bitching about the memorial. "She had some gall!"

"Who is 'she'?" I asked.

"Kathy Pellegrini," Flavia said.

Kathy Pellegrini had been one of Neal's ex-lovers. She'd stopped wanting to have sex with him. Hey! that happens! Some random Ick Factor, I supposed. We've all experienced that random Ick Factor. One day, you wake up, and this person with whom you've been having the hottest sex imaginable just isn't doing it for you anymore. Who knows why? I mean, yeah, sure, there are proximal causes if you care to spend the time analyzing. But why bother? The salient thing is you don't want to fuck them ever again!

I myself had never wanted to have sex with Neal, so I never did. Brigham Young might have termed our relationship a spiritual marriage.

Neal was upset by Kathy's rejection.

Neal cried. The sister wives comforted and distracted.

Neal got over it.

At the time of his death, he was great friends with Kathy. They met up every couple of months to play Schubert's Fantasia in F minor for piano four hands, so why Mimi had decided to stalk around in a black cloud, making dramatic proclamations like, How dare that cunt show her face? was a great mystery to me.

"She tried to come up to me," Mimi continued. "She wanted to bond. "I just turned my back. Turned my back! And if she had kept it up, I would have turned around and screamed at her—"

No, you would not, I thought. Because had you, I would have picked you by the scruff of your neck and booted you out the door.

This was an event that I had organized. There's none of that at my events.

But no need to waste energy over things that never happened! So, I went right on smiling serenely, while shooting the sandwiches some nervous side-eye. Nobody was eating them. Surely, I wouldn't have to take the sandwiches home again? Or would I? How long before chicken salad turned into salmonella and roast beef into medium-rare E. Coli?

"Then she started texting me!" Mimi said.

"Wow, that is some serious Housewives shit!" said Tracy.

"Ohhhhh, a sister Housewives fan!" I said. "Which one is your favorite? It's The Real Housewives of Miami all the way for me, baby! I've been trying to get this one—"I glanced affectionately at a nervous-looking Flavia—"to watch it."

"Me, too!" said Tracy. "Me too! Who's your favorite?"

"OmyGAWD! Larsa and Lisa are everything this season—"

"She won't stop following my X-boyfriend on Instagram!!!" Tracy and I crowed in unison.

"I'm gonna medicate," Mimi announced. And pulled out her pipe.

###

Mimi was the one who'd found Neal.

He was seated at his kitchen table, but slumped awkwardly on top of his laptop computer.

That's because he was dead.

Mimi screamed for three full minutes.

Then she tried to call 911. That was difficult. Her hands were shaking. She got through on the third try.

"Do you know how to do CPR?" the woman dispatcher asked.

"I am not doing CPR," Mimi said.

The woman dispatcher tried again. "It would be really good if you'd attempt CPR—"

Mimi screamed some more.

"Ma'am? Ma'am! It's all right. We're sending a team over right now. What did you say the address was again? I can stay right here on the phone with you—"

Mimi threw the phone at the door.

Outside on Neal's front porch, everything was peaceful. No cars on the little winding road, no contrails in the sky. The wind chimes hung silent. The sun shone. Hawkweed and bee balm sprouted in the tall grass in front of the ramshackle house. The ballerina flowers of the late-blooming chestnut shimmied ever so slightly, though there was no wind. Little goldfinches were performing for the bird cam Neal had rigged up on the porch. A hummingbird hovered at the hummingbird feeder.

For the first two minutes after Flavia picked up on her end, Mimi couldn't speak. She wasn't crying. She was gasping, drowning on huge gulps of air.

Flavia's voice grew increasingly panicked: "Mimi? Mimi? Mimi?"

Then the paramedics appeared, sirens screaming.

And the gruesome game of telephone began.

I was the fourth one to be called.

###

I was sorry Mimi had to be the one to find Neal. I'd only met Mimi once before Neal died, but I knew a lot about her because Neal liked to talk about his friends, and his friends were mostly women he'd had sex with, was having sex with, hoped to have sex with. The technical term for that was "polyamory."

We'd all ended up connecting on social media, where you never had to know anybody, not really. All you had to do was look at the billboards they erected to advertise their lives.

Mimi was a widow. Her husband had died young of something gruesome—maybe brain cancer? She was plush and pretty, wore green glasses frames, had great rolling curls the same color as watermelon gumballs. She also had bipolar disorder, which she'd elected not to treat according to the American Psychiatric Association's latest guidelines. Instead, she smoked massive quantities of weed.

I tried not to be judgy about that though naturally I did not succeed because c'mon: When am I ever not judgy?

I did know the standard pharmaceutical cocktail for bipolar disease is very, very hard on the body.

But I kind of had to wonder whether Mimi's self-medicating was actually working.

For one thing, she made a lot of really bad executive decisions that had a negative impact on her life.

Like one morning, she was stalled in traffic on Route 9 on her way from her house in Peekskill (it was being foreclosed) to her job in White Plains (she was fired five months later). There was a kind of turnoff ahead that led to a frontage road on which sprawled the front lot of Eastchester Keys Preowned, an auto dealership.

And in the front lot of Eastchester Keys Preowned sat an adorable red Morris Mini Cooper.

The red Morris Mini Cooper had a white roof and cunning white circles around its headlights that made them look like cartoon eyes.

Three of the "check engine" lights in Mimi's elderly BMW were on perpetual blink.

Mimi didn't want to check the engine! The BMW still ran, right? How bad could it be?

She bet that red Morris Mini Cooper didn't have any blinking engine lights.

On impulse, she veered to the Route 9 shoulder and steered the BMW toward the turnoff for the Eastchester Keys Preowned front lot, navigating perilously close to several similarly stalled vehicles' sideview mirrors. Their drivers honked indignantly. She ignored them. She was on a mission.

One hour later, she was the proud new owner of a pre-owned red Morris Mini Cooper! The trade-in value of the BMW took care of the down payment. She wasn't quite sure how she would cover the monthly payments, which were not insubstantial, but she had a job—and oh yeah, she probably should call her boss to tell him she was going to be late—

Five months later, she was calling up Neal, weeping hysterically.

She'd only missed two payments, but a third was due in three days, and Eastchester Keys Preowned was leaving unfriendly messages on her voicemail, using terms like "repossess" and "loan default."

Neal took care of it.

When the dust had settled—and the red Morris Mini Cooper back to singing its siren song to the harried commuters of Westchester County—Mimi was the proud owner of a 2011 Prius hybrid.

Of course.

###

For another thing, Mimi was constantly erupting into torrents of the most vituperative rage against people whose transgressions seemed pretty minor to me.

Neal had multiple lovers, so Mimi was determined to have multiple lovers, too.

As far as I could tell, though, she didn't. If she had, I figured she'd have written novellas about them on Facebook, uploaded endless photo galleries to Instagram. Like she did with the dead husband.

Instead, she posted and uploaded long text screeds from the men she was rejecting. Often she embellished these texts with pix and autobiographical information snatched from their profiles on dating sites like OKStupid and Clutch-Dot-Com. I couldn't help feeling sorry for these men. True, they looked like schlumps, but there was no way of telling whether that was some sort of selection bias on Mimi's part or whether these poor benighted schlumps were trying for some sort of authenticity: Hey! This is what you'll get when we're six months into the relationship, and I've stopped blotting the pizza stains off my ironic t-shirt.

Guy: I'm new to the Hudson Valley. Can we explore and get lost in some bad directions together?
Mimi: Fuck off, serial killer dude.

Guy: You never play games? Not even Scrabble? What about Monopoly?
Mimi: Fuck off, disingenuous cunt.

Guy: So you're fascinating and tragic, huh? A unicorn that's also a dire wolf?
Mimi: Listen, if all you're going to do is keep copying and pasting words from my profile like you're conducting some advertising keyword optimization campaign, you're acting like a goddamn bot. Fuck off, bot.

####

"How many years ago did the husband die anyway?" I once asked Neal.

"Six," Neal said. "I think."

"Isn't six years a little long to be raging with grief?"

Neal widened his eyes and looked bemused. A characteristic look. "What? You think grief has a time stamp?"

"Maybe it should," I said.

Neal laughed at this. "You don't know her."

I shrugged. "I read her! She scares me. So angry!"

"She's bipolar. It's a rapidly cycling type of bipolar. She can go from hypomania to abject despair in the course of a single afternoon."

"How do you deal with that?"

"I wait it out," Neal said. "It's like the weather. It doesn't matter what you think about the weather. It's there, it changes. You watch it change. And you love the world the weather shapes."

###

But now Neal was dead, and I was on his front porch with the redoubtable Mimi and three other women, none of whom, if you got right down to it, I knew all that well.

Mimi was lighting up an enormous joint. "Skittlz," she told Tracy, tossing the baggie.

Tracy took an inquisitorial sniff, nodded appreciatively. Mimi passed her the joint.

Tracy inhaled deeply. I couldn't see her eyes behind the sunglasses, but I imagined them turning dreamy.

"Why are all weed strains named after candy?" I asked.

"Because they are candy. The very best kind of candy." Tracy's hand inched toward the sandwiches and then pulled away. "You don't happen to have any M&Ms on you, do you? No? Want a drag?"

I shook my head. "All dope does for me is make me feel like gravity is too heavy. Like I'm on Jupiter."

"The Real Housewives of Jupiter!" said Tracy. "Now that would be a franchise. Don't laugh, but my dream—my absolute Super Bowl—would be for Kim Kardashian to date Marcus Jordan. Just for a couple of weeks, you understand." She nudged Mimi with her foot. "You have some salacious texts to read us, bitch."

But I hadn't driven all the way to the Catskills to hear Mimi slice and dice random Neal ex-girlfriends.

"Where's Daria?" I asked.

"Inside," said Flavia. She looked like she'd rather be inside, too, but the obligations of hosthood had compelled her to stay where the voices were loudest. Neal's house was actually Flavia's house in the sense that Flavia's name was on the deed and she paid the property taxes. Flavia was rich, a fact that, as Flavia's friends, her sister wives tried their best not to remind her of and to ignore.

Mimi brandished her phone. "So the bitch texts me. Out of the blue! Like we're BFF forever: 'Please know I am here if you ever, ever wish to share Neal stories and remembrances—' What does she think we're gonna talk about? The size of his dick?"

###

I found Daria sitting on Neal's piano bench, paging through Neal's sheet music. She smiled when she saw me. "Sorry. I've heard that particular Mimi story three times already. Every time it gets a little longer."

"Packed with even more exciting details!" I said. "There's bound to be something you haven't heard before! Isn't the suspense killing you?"

We both laughed, but then we ducked our heads. Didn't look at each other. What do two women negotiating the terms of a friendship talk about anyway?

Neal's piano bench. Neal's piano. La belle maîtresse quatre-vingt-huit, or Missy Quat for short. Neal spent hours and hours playing the piano, a fact he liked to use to bolster his claim that he was really an introvert.

"I'm sorry," I'd tell him, "but if you're an introvert, Godzilla is the global head of Habitat for Humanity."

The truth was that Neal was downright extroverted, a personality trait amply reflected in his love life and his choice of profession—he'd been a public defender in Ulster County, New York. Just because he liked to tickle Missy Quat's ivories and cosplay occasionally with Meyer-Briggs dichotomies didn't make him an introvert.

"Do you play?" Daria asked.

"No. Do you?"

"I play a little. I might be ready for my first recital when I'm 104." Daria had a very distinctive way of speaking: She'd been born in Mexico City, had lived there till she was eleven. She didn't have an accent, exactly. She had a lilt.

"You know, I didn't believe it when Flavia called me to tell me," Daria said. "Oh, I didn't think she was lying. I just thought that she'd gotten it wrong somehow. That she had misinformation."

"Elisabeth Kübler-Ross 101!" I said. "Denial."

"That's the easiest stage when you live on the opposite coast, I suppose."

"And now that you're here?"

"Oh, I'm a fast learner. I was always very good at school. I moved straight on up to acceptance. That helps." She shot a wry glance at the tasteful celandon urn that contained all that was left of Neal's body after the cremation.

Though, of course, I didn't believe it contained all that was left of Neal.

"But everything speaks to his absence. Especially here—" Daria gestured at the room. Neal's books. Neal's vinyl record collection. Neal's comfy black leather chair; on its arm, a pair of Neal's reading glasses and a pad on which Neal had scribbled, Commercials are the best part of TV. For one thing, they have the biggest budgets.

"It's hard to be in this house," I agreed.

"We talked almost every day," Daria said. "The distance just seemed to be another phase in the connection, and the connection just seemed to grow closer and closer and closer."

"We argued," I said. "Constantly. We were always bickering."

"Yes, I know," Daria said. "He talked about how prickly you could be: 'It's time to take Grazia for her walk!'"

"Oh, he did, did he?" I said.

"He adored you—"

"Oh, I know he loved me. We were firmly in the Sibling Zone, bickered and made up regularly like brother and sister. And he liked fighting with me. It was a tough job, but somebody had to do it."

###

We fought about everything. The full octave range of the human voice, why The Real Housewives were (or were not) a deeply significant manifesto, budget airlines in Europe, the cellular exchange of mitochondria, whether the ladybugs infesting Neal's spare bedroom were the nymph form of the brown marmorated stink bug—

"You don't know what the fuck you're talking about," Neal would scoff.

"Oh, yeah? Know any good entomologists?"

What we fought about most, though, were the woo-woo aspects of my personality. Neal was not a fan of the woo-woo.

The last time we hung out—a week before he died—we'd talked almost exclusively about death, which, of course, me being me, I was now inclined to view as prophetic.

"Don't you think I'd rather be an atheist?" I'd asked him. "I'd much rather be an atheist! It would be a much better fit with my particular personality type! It is a total fucking drag every time I drop a quarter on the sidewalk to have to think, Now how does this teensy-tiny action fit into the Universal Plan? But I can't—"

"'Cause you buh-leeeve!" Neal sang.

"No, that's what's weird. I don't believe. I have faith. Belief and faith are qualitatively different. And there's nothing I can do to shake my faith. Believe me, I have tried."

"Well, I could try to arrange to have ICE kidnap you," Neal remarked cozily. "They're kidnapping a lot of my clients these days. Maybe a little waterboarding? Put you right!"

###

The woo-woo factor made a guest appearance at Neal-Palooza. Several of Neal's clients showed up—including a self-styled psychic who'd been accused of offering( for a mere five grand!) to remove the curse that had caused a hairdresser's alopecia and, in its place, build a golden pyramid that would forever protect the hairdresser and all her loved ones from death! (And presumably, bad hair days.)

The accusations were a matter of public record. Neal took attorney-client privilege extremely seriously.

But sentences were a matter of public record, too, so I knew Neal had gotten her off with a $1,000 fine and community service.

Flavia had been the first person to speak. Flavia was an introvert, not shy exactly, but moated, introversion's true bona fide. A graceful woman with a slender body, curvaceous butt, and a face reminiscent of Byzantine wall frescoes. She'd been Neal's primary partner. Neal had told me he only really slept well with Flavia in his bed.

"Thank you all for coming," Flavia said. She ducked her head down and seemed to forget for a moment why she was talking.

"It's, um, heartening to see you all here. Of course, Neal himself wouldn't have given a shit whether there was a memorial for him or not, but he was enormously loved and will be enormously missed, and memorials are for the survivors."

The golden pyramid psychic practically elbowed Flavia off Vinnie's impromptu stage.

"So, Neal didn't believe in the world beyond the veil," she told the crowd. "But on the very day he died, he came to me in his naked spirit body. His crown chakra was dazzling! 'You were right, Sylvia!' he told me, smiling radiantly. 'You were right. And I was wrong.'" She dabbed a napkin to a dry eye.

Neal's naked spirit body was a hard act to follow. Nobody seemed to want to speak after that.

The memorial was taking place at Vinnie's, a bar on Crown Street in Kingston that occupied an old stone building, which had once served as a lookout post and fortification for the original Dutch stockade back when Peter Stuyvesant was a real estate developer. Just around the corner from the courthouse, Vinnie's was popular with AGs and PDs. Though Neal himself hardly ever drank alcohol—he preferred weed—he liked kibbutzing with his fellow snipes (as he called them) and would sit at the bar for hours, hunched over a club soda, trading war stories, giving and receiving advice. Since I worked five minutes away as a nurse at the Wiltwyck Hospital emergency room, I would sometimes join him there. I drank straight bourbon shots.

The proprietor of Vinnie's was named—duh!—Vinnie. Neal actively discouraged me from trying to puzzle out just why it was Vinnie was so fond of him, but when Vinnie found out I was in charge of planning the memorial, he tracked me down. Told me, "You gotta have it here."

So I did. "But no open bar," I stipulated.

Vinnie compensated by producing plates and plates of chicken salad and roast beef sandwiches. His daughter baked a cake.

The essential challenge behind staging Neal-Palooza was one of compartmentalization: There'd been two categories in Neal's life, his work and his sex life, and if you got right down to it, client confidentiality extended to each.

For a couple of minutes, the silence threatened to derail the celebration.

The minutes grew longer.

Then a barrel-chested guy with a toothbrush mustache got up. "I'm Willie. My husband, Brant, and I lived across the road from Neal. In the Catskills. Long commute, but it's worth the drive. It's beautiful up there. Neal moved in four years ago, and Flavia came on weekends. We were a bit worried. I mean, we'd heard he was a lawyer. Did that mean he was an asshole?"

Willie paused for the laugh.

In a room filled with lawyers? Come on, Willie!

"Anyway, one afternoon, we were entertaining a trick—"

"He wasn't really a trick," Brant called out from the audience. "We just liked to call him that."

"—and we ran out of lube. So, I walk across the road, bang on Neal's door, and say, 'Hey, do you happen to have any lube I could borrow?' I didn't think he did, I just wanted to piss him off.

"And without missing a beat, he answers, 'Water or silicon-based? And don't worry about returning it.'"

This proved to be the icebreaker.

After that, you couldn't keep them off the stage.

A tiny woman dressed all in green told us, "I thought it would be messy loving a man who loved so many other women. But you know what? It wasn't. It wasn't at all. Neal told me at the onset, 'You will never feel not loved by me.' And I never did. That was Neal's great gift, you know: He saw the multiplicity of dimensions people exist on, and he focused them into something singular and beautiful."

A portly man in an ill-fitting suit, one of Neal's PD colleagues, gave us a not-so-brief history of the legal aid movement from the Magna Carta on, ending rousingly, "You know, for any defence attorney, guilt or innocence is way down the list. What we care about is holding prosecutors to their burden of proof, making sure cops are accountable for civil rights or evidence violations, mitigating the harm the criminal justice system wreaks on a defendant. And Neal was the best at that."

Kathy Pellegrini told us about how Neal had weaned her from masturbating with vibrators: "Isn't it about time you learned to play the acoustic pussy?"

An assistant AG remembered a time when a verdict hung on the claims of an unreliable witness. The witness maintained he'd been at the scene of a crime, only no one had recognized him. "I was going incognegro that day," the witness explained. The witness was white. Neal dropped to the floor of the courtroom and sat there for 90 seconds, howling with laughter. The judge had not intervened.

A lover he'd met on the Appalachian Trail drove all the way from Maine to tell us how much Neal loved the quiet of the forest, the sunsets on the summit, how when you travel with everything you could possibly need strapped to your back, you feel wiser.

Finally, I spoke. "So, I knew Neal on two different levels. There was the here and now, where we'd hang out together, maybe every couple of weeks. Sometimes we'd hang out in a café and talk. Sometimes, we'd go on adventures. Neal was the only person I knew who liked to go tramping through the seamy, unraveling parts of cities as much as I do. The science of Why Is This Here. 'Economic geography,' we called it.

"But also..." I swallowed hard. "I keep an online diary. I write in it every day, and Neal used to read it every day. And comment on it every day. He'd text me: 'Why are you doing this?' A lot of the time, I didn't know! So he became, in a sense, the other voice in my inner dialogue. He supplied the footnotes to my life."

Behind the bar, Vinnie had been standing, listening to the stories.

I'd been a little bit nervous about holding Neal-Palooza at Vinnie's. His life may have crossed Neal's tangentially, but Vinnie was basically a pretty conventional guy who'd lived a pretty conventional life. I was terrified Vinnie was going to recoil in horror.

But when I went back to sit at the bar after I spoke, he poured some bourbon into a shot glass and brought it over to me. "On the house. Thank you."

"For what?" I asked.

"For letting me be a part of this."

Were his eyes wet? No. That was just my overactive imagination.

The very last Neal-Palooza speaker was an ancient greybeard with multiple tattoos. Another one of Neal's former clients, I imagined.

"Life is short," the greybeard told us. "Death is sure."

Then he just stood there for five minutes.

While the room went silent.

###

Daria tapped out a few notes on the piano's ivory keys.

"Pretty!" I said.

"Opening to Chopin's # 4, Ballad in F minor," Daria said. "He was trying to teach it to me. Over Zoom."

We laughed.

"What's happening to Missy Quat?"

"Flavia's donating her to the Beethoven Foundation."

"Flavia's the executor... ?"

"Yes."

"And you're the heir."

"Yes." Her fingers crashed into an off-key chord. "Do you think he suffered?"

I said very carefully, "I have no idea."

The medical examiner had determined that Neal died of a cerebral aneurysm. Had it come on suddenly? I didn't know.

For years, Neal had been experiencing what he called "lucies" and what his primary care physician termed "ocular migraines." They were in the sky, shining! They were never accompanied by any headaches, seizures, dilated pupils, double vision, or any unpleasant symptoms that might have discouraged him from regarding them as something other than a light show his brain, ever the impresario, had mounted for his own private entertainment. Did the lucies bring him down in the end?

"We should keep in touch," said Daria.

"We should," I agreed.

From outside on the porch, we could hear Mimi's voice. "Fuck therapists," it was saying. "Therapists are like, 'You don't owe anyone anything. Except me. You owe me $245 for this session."

"Sounds like story time's over," I observed.

"We should go back outside," Daria said.

"Hey! There are sandwiches!" I said.

And reminded myself: Just because Neal loved Mimi doesn't mean you have to love Mimi.

But it was a hard sell.

Comments

[puddleshark]

❤❤❤

Thank you!

[mallorys_camera]

Thank you for reading! ❤️

[asakiyume]

I really like how you've woven some of the best lines and images from your journal entries into this--very nice.

[mallorys_camera]

Hmmmm. Well, actually only about 30% of it is cribbed from diary entries. 😀

You don't have to read it, you know! I'll still love you & you'll still be my friend! 😀 I get that our literary tastes are really different.

[asakiyume]

Our literary tastes are very different! But I love the way you write: I love your observations and your metaphors. And maybe it was only 30 percent, but I remembered them very clearly because they struck me at the time as sharp insights, beautifully expressed.

But yeah: clearly the dialogue is new ;-)

[halfmoon_mollie1]

what she said.

[mallorys_camera]

Thanks! 😊

[smokingboot]

I like this very much. Sharp paced, your own voice strong. His too.
But the thing that strikes me about this is how much love is in it. I enjoy the way its depth doesn't slow into any kind of mawkishness, it keeps enough spike to stay non-sentimental and engaging.

Looking forward to more whenever you feel like sharing!

[mallorys_camera]

Thank you! 😀