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mallorys_cameraChapters 1 through 6 are here.
Part 2: Flavia
Chapter 7
If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.
I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.
Except they didn’t want it.
“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.
“I’ll live there,” Neal said.
And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.
Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.
But I understood.
And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.
Of course, he made other women come in that bed, too, and cooked them dinner. (I don't know if he pushed vegetables on them.) That had been part of the deal from the start. Almost the first thing I did whenever I came up to the place was strip the sheets off the bed and throw them in the machine, because maybe he had washed them, but maybe it had slipped his mind. I didn't make any fuss over it, but neither did I pretend they were just another item in a batch of laundry.
There were safeguards I insisted he take. I didn't want to come down with AIDS or some less lethal sexually transmitted disease in that rare instance he'd misread an amorous prospect. That meant condoms and STD testing every three to six months or whenever a fling threatened to become a thing.
Did I mind? I don't think so. I'd never wanted to live with Neal—I'd never wanted to live with anyone—and what Neal did while I was off doing the things I wanted to do was his business. Sex was his hobby. (My hobby was architecture.) He'd been honest about it from the start. "But you will never feel anything less than completely loved," he told me. And I never did.
Not minding was different than embracing the poly lifestyle. Or even integrating Neal's polyamory into my life. At the beginning, against my better judgment, I let myself be dragged to a few dinners for three at restaurants I picked specifically so I'd never have to visit them again. I was curious.
Amanda had Brillo Pad hair, a hawklike profile, and an impressive resume as a civil rights attorney. Of course, she didn't work for the City of Kingston; Neal was punctilious about observing church/state boundaries.
"Neal and I have a scenario where I'm one of the crooked cops in Monroe v. Pape, and he's one of the petitioners," she confided, giggling, over appetizers. She speared one of her artisanal mini‑meatballs with a toothpick as though it were a hostile witness and actually gave me a wink.
Over short ribs braised in stout and served on a bed of foraged farro and kale, she said, "They gave me an episiotomy with Jagger. I swear, if I'd known he was gonna be nine pounds, I would have taken up smoking as soon as that first pee stick turned blue. They cut so far into my clit that Neal actually had to re-teach me how to have vaginal orgasms."
Over dessert (crème brûlée with a shard of caramelized sugar): "So, you know, after you have vigorous anal sex? How you spend a couple of days plopping small poops every couple of hours? How do you deal with that?"
After that, I decided I was happy to let Neal's lovers stay hypothetical. But I was interested in the names that kept recurring. The ones he talked about. The ones who became friends.
I'd met Daria, Grazia, and Mimi a few times before Neal died.
###
A matter of record: Mimi found him, called 911, and then called me.
But I don't remember getting the call. And I don't remember a single one of the many things I must have done after I got the call— like calling Brant and Willie, the neighbors farther down Upper Cherrytown Road from Neal, to beg them to go over and deal with Mimi. (Just in case she was having a psychotic episode, and Neal was merely deeply asleep.) Like calling Neal's brother Mark. Like calling Daria, Grazia, and Angela —the woman Neal had driven eighty miles to spend Sunday night with after I’d left Sunday morning. Like calling Neal's primary care physician and the attorney who'd done our wills—
I was at the Jersey Shore. It would have taken me four hours to drive to the Catskills, except my hands were shaking so hard, I wouldn't have been able to handle a steering wheel. And anyway, what exactly could I have done in the Catskills that I couldn't do from here? I didn't want to see a body.
My cousin Tracy had fought the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, arriving in a record 45 minutes with a traveling war chest of valium, Xanax, Trazodone, Gabapentin, Percocet, Liz Phair CDs, and Jane's Ice Cream. I spent the afternoon on the couch of my Asbury Park condo in a narcoticized stupor, watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I thought I had problems? Sure, there was that dead boyfriend, but here I was on a comfy couch in a tasteful living room with a close-up view of the Atlantic Ocean, and I was on my second pint of unicorn cake ice cream. Erica Jayne, now she had problems! She was in Palm Springs, where the only thing that was tasteful was a Racquet Club vodka martini, facing a $25 million civil fraud trial. Plus, she was living proof of what happens when you let your glam squad watch too many drag tutorials.
"Goddam!" said Tracy. "Look how badly the bitch has blended that foundation into her hairline! She's gotta be doing her own makeup. No makeup artist would do something like that."
"Do you think I killed him?" I asked.
"What?" asked Tracy.
"Neal. I let him die."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Well, I mean—I didn't push him down the stairs. I didn't smother him with a pillow. But Saturday, he had one of those ocular migraines—"
Tracy frowned. "Ocular migraines?"
"They're not headaches, they're blood vessel spasms in the eye. You see colors and weird zigzags. They're connected to high blood pressure. I should have—"
Tracy snorted. "What? Wrestled him down, hog-tied him, and brought him to an ER?"
'Yes, goddamn it."
"Flavia, Flavia, Flavia. Neal was a grown-up. If he'd wanted to go to an ER, he would have gone to an ER. You're not his mother. And what the fuck has Erica done to her hair?"
Weren't his mother, I wanted to snap.
Anger. Second stage of grief, straight out of the Kübler‑Ross brochure.
But Tracy didn't deserve anger. When I'd called, she'd dropped everything. She'd never had much use for Neal. But she loved me.
###
I reconstructed our last weekend together in forensic detail. The Percocet sharpened my focus, or maybe it just enhanced my powers of free association.
When I arrived on the Trailway Bus in New Paltz Friday morning, Neal had been leaning against his Prius, and he made a little production of bowing as if I were a visiting dignitary. He'd seemed tired, hadn't he?
At the house, on the kitchen island, right next to the prep for chana masala, was a half-eaten jumbo bag of pork rinds.
"What? 7-Eleven was all sold out of deep-fried cholesterol?" I asked.
"Hey! Don't be dissing the working class's snack foods," Neal said. "I grew up eating these. I love 'em. Perfect for stress eating."
In the garden, he'd dug new trenches for pit composting. He'd expanded the vegetable beds another foot for the July planting of bush beans and collards. There was a new pile of rocks where he’d started a dry‑stack wall. A lot of heavy labor for a 90° heatwave.
We'd had lunch; we'd chatted. He was carrying 50 open cases; one of them seemed likely to go to trial. Neal was a stickler for attorney-client confidentiality, but he would vent about any case details that were on the docket. This one was a felony DV charge.
"He's delusional," Neal said. "We could plead him out for three years, but he's convinced she made him do it." He managed a smile, but his voice was thin.
In the early evening, when the temperatures began to creep down, we hiked out to Vernooy Falls. Neal's bonhomie masked a seam of fatalism, and places like this pulled it to the surface. Two hundred years ago, when farmers were still trying to eke out crops from the rocky, clay-dense Catskills soil, these falls had been the site of a grist mill, and a major crossroads had run through this spot. Now all that was left were scattered stone wall foundations and a forest dense with ash, maple, birch, and chestnuts.
"The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed," Neal said, kicking at one of the walls.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing. Doesn't really fit anyway."
"Is it a quote?"
"It's nothing. I'm showing off my Ivy League education," he said. "Four years driving a cab to put myself through Columbia, and all I can remember is a few lousy poems." He laughed.
The last morning, we'd had sex. Not one of our better encounters. The rattle of the AC window unit made an awkward metronome, and he seemed to lose interest. Oh, he was prepared to go down on me for an hour, but I could see the thought balloon: If that's what it takes... He'd always been more into doing than getting. I knew the sales pitch: I'd rather give pleasure than receive it, and, of course, that worked out well for me. I like having orgasms. Multiple orgasms. But I'm not an idiot; I knew perfectly well it was a control issue for him. He liked watching me while I bucked and writhed and moaned. "How much do you want this?" he would tease.
But that afternoon, he just wasn't into it. Until finally, I asked.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm having a lucy." That was his private code for those ocular migraines. "It's a little like trying to have sex on acid. So many distractions." He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers, let his hand drift down.
"Then let's not do this," I said.
"Okay," he said.
The quick way he swore off the delights of my naked body did something to the rest of my stay. As soon as I left, he was going to be driving to Albany so he could spend the night with Angela. Was the lucy a lie? Was he saving himself for Angela? He moved around me with forced cheer, a little too brisk in the kitchen, a little too quick to check his phone. When he drove me back down to the New Paltz Trailways Station, he did so in complete silence. We were fifteen minutes early and ducked into Shawangunk Roasters for a cup of coffee.
"Had a case last month," Neal said. "Felony DUI. Pleaded it out on Tuesday. Then, Thursday, boom! Guy gets hit by his own drunken driver, dies instantly. I spent all day Friday arguing with the DA over whether the conviction still counts for their stats. That’s what death is to the system. An accounting error.”
“That’s bleak,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s accurate. You die, your file goes into a different drawer. People still get paid to move it around.”
"Ironic, though," I said. "I mean, guy convicted of a DUI getting killed by a drunken driver."
"Yes, it's little touches like that that almost make me believe we're living in a sentient universe. Almost."
"So, where does death go on your flow chart?" I asked. "Cosmic joke? Teachable moment? Tragedy?"
"Gee, you mean I have to choose?" He laughed. "I suspect it's not that dramatic. Or interesting. Though dead people often do leave behind the most dramatic and interesting messes."
"What's the biggest mess you'll leave behind?"
"My love life," he said. "And my browser history."
When he walked me to the bus, he leaned over and kissed me on my forehead.
There'd been signs. But I hadn't picked them up. Did that make me a kind of accessory?
###
Death involves busy work. So much busy work! First up: the body. Neal's body was transported to one of the office buildings in the Ulster County Department of Health complex, where the medical examiner checked temperature, lividity, and rigor, and ascertained Neal had probably died 12 to 14 hours before Mimi found him.
"We can do an autopsy if you want," the ME told me over the phone, "though strictly speaking, I don't think we need one. I spoke with his primary. He had a history of high blood pressure, and the physical examination was consistent with a cerebrovascular event. Tox screen was negative."
I kind of wanted an autopsy, but I didn't think I had the legal authority to request one. I was Neal's primary polyamorous partner and the executor of his will, but not his wife.
Once the death was officially registered, I filled out the online forms to get the death certificates I would have to send to his employer, his bank, Social Security, the IRS, and the DMV. Most of the other stuff I could cancel online or by phone, but it would take days to work my way through all the credit cards, utilities, and subscriptions, and I'd need to get his computer, which was at the Catskills house. Neal had been helping support several dozen artists, musicians, and writers through monthly Patreon donations. I wondered whether I should email them or just leave them hanging when the cash spigot turned off.
I called the Neptune Society to arrange the cremation. The lady kept me on the phone for half an hour reviewing urn options. I kept telling her, I didn't care: "You can put him in the brown paper bag you brought your lunch in—"
"Oh, your loved one was into recycling?" she said. "Are you planning a sea burial by any chance? We have a nice biodegradable model made out of paper and eco-friendly, vegan glue that breaks down naturally over time when it's placed in water. It's not designed to hold the ashes of anyone who weighed over 200 pounds, though."
Neal had left all his money and all his possessions to Daria, the woman he texted twenty times a day because she was his best friend. I didn't need it, certainly. Daria had left the Hudson Valley five years ago for a failed marriage in California, and she struggled financially. She was due for her annual visit to the Hudson Valley at the end of July, which turned out to be ten days after Neal's death. Neal had already paid for her plane ticket.
I barely knew Daria.
"I could cancel," Daria said over the phone. "I was planning to stay in the house. I don't want to impose."
"No, no, you should come," I said. "You need to go through his stuff. Otherwise, I won't know what stuff I'll need to find a good home for."
I'd been planning a hiking trip to Zion National Park for the week of Daria's visit, but, of course, I'd canceled it. I picked Daria up in Newark and drove her to the house. Daria cried all the way to Kerhonkson. Daria had the gift of looking serene and beautiful when she cried, which was not a gift that I had. That was probably one of the reasons why I tried never to cry.
A surprise was waiting for us when we got to Neal's house.
Mimi.
Rocking furiously back and forth in the old rocking chair on Neal's front porch, forehead squinched, pink curls flying, a huge half-smoked doobie between her lips. Overhead, by the empty bird feeder, two blue jays objected loudly.
Mimi looked as startled to see us as we were to see her.
"Neal gave me his key!" she cried as though she was afraid I was about to accuse her of breaking and entering—which part of me certainly wanted to. "He told me I could come over whenever I wanted. And I miss him so much—"
She burst into tears.
After a couple of seconds, I approached and patted her clumsily on the shoulder. Daria was already beside her, enfolding her in her arms. Daria was very good at stuff like that.
"Have you been inside?" I asked.
Mimi sniffed. "To pee. And I've been running upstairs to lie down on his bed so I can smell him—"
Too much information.
I knew the bed would be unmade because Neal had been something of a slob. A clean slob, meaning periodically—generally on Friday mornings before I showed up for the weekend—he would make the bed, vacuum, spritz Mrs. Meyer's Lemon Verbena in the bathroom sinks and shower, and tackle the mound of dirty dishes piled up to leaning tower proportions in the kitchen. But he was messy. I think he saw it as a counterbalance to the courthouse universe, where every fact, feeling, and human tragedy had to be filed with a docket number.
Brant and Willie, brilliant neighbors that they were, had actually used their key to come into the house and clean up the kitchen just after the EMTs had carted the body away. I was very grateful. Neal had prepared a large batch of chana masala some short while before he died, and seeing those empty cans of chickpeas and stewed tomatoes on his kitchen island would have destroyed me, I'm sure. Brant and Willie had cleaned them up. And done the dishes. And dealt with the garbage and recyclables.
There was still all the deteriorating food in Neal's refrigerator to deal with, of course. The comestibles, spices, jars of lentils, bags of beans, obscure flours inside his cabinets. The specialty oils and vinegars in his cheerful, mismatched bottles along the counter. A ridiculous assortment of teas and restaurant condiment packets. All of it signifying a man with very specific and unusual culinary tastes who had cooked his way through this kitchen. I dug my nails into my palms. I would not cry. Instead, I opened the fridge.
I started with the easy stuff: the milk that had gone sour, the spinach liquifying in a plastic bag, a half‑used jar of harissa. In no time at all, I filled up a trash bag. I reached for another.
On the porch, I could hear the sounds of Mimi sobbing and Daria consoling.
When they got tired of that, they wandered inside and watched me throw away more food.
"Can I help?" asked Daria after I'd unscrewed the final half-empty jar of olives and poured its cloudy brine down the sink.
"I'm good," I said.
###
The one thing I did not want to do was organize any kind of memorial. It would be a lot of work, and Neal would not have cared one way or another.
I was shocked when Grazia volunteered to take that over.
“Totally irrelevant what Neal would have wanted,” Grazia said. “Memorials are for the survivors.”
She was right, of course. Grazia had a way of often being right, but she was so ornery and smug, I wished she didn't.
Grazia was not one of Neal's lovers. Their relationship was hard to describe. They didn't hang out together all that often, but he'd bookmarked her online diary, and he read it religiously every morning, following it the way other guys followed sports scores. When Neal and Grazia did meet up, they rendezvoused at Vinnie's, a low-ceilinged lawyer's cave with lights set to reasonable doubt, where she'd heckle him about his love life. She knew Vinnie and was prepared to cajole him into providing a venue and refreshments; she knew the courtroom buddies and the lovers I dreaded having to notify. She was prepared to do it all! When I inquired, "How much?" she waved me away.
"Just because you're rich doesn't mean you pay for everything," she said.
Which was a nice gesture, I suppose. Though the way she said it sounded like an insult.
Yes, it was true: I had money. How much? Enough to buy an apartment in Greenwich Village, a small mansion on Long Island, a condo at the Jersey Shore, this ramshackle house in the Catskills. Not enough to buy an island.
It bothered me that the only thing that made me stand out in a crowd was my bank account. I wasn't beautiful and charming like Daria or beautiful and bitchy like Grazia. I couldn't spin my particular wiring into lifetime of entitlements the way Mimi could. I couldn't play the piano like Kathy Pellegrini, I couldn't make smut sound peer-reviewed like Amanda. All I could do was pay the bills that kept the lights on. Neal had been my grounding rod. Without him, the world was just static.
###
Daria, Mimi, and I drove down from the house to the memorial together. Mimi had asked to stay with us there. Some complicated drama at the stoner spa outside Woodstock, where Mimi was crashing, blah, blah, blah. Who could keep up with the ongoing crises in Mimi's life? Mimi offered recaps, but I wasn't interested.
"And I miss Neal so much," she added. "I can feel his spirit here—"
Could she?
I couldn't.
Neal-Palooza, Grazia had dubbed the memorial. It went well enough, I suppose. The turnout was respectable. I didn't want to be there, but I said the things I was expected to say, kissed the cheeks I needed to kiss, and after I was done, drifted over to the giant TV Vinny usually kept tuned to Bills, Knicks, and Yankees games depending on season, which Grazia had somehow rigged into a rotating carousel of Neal photographs. Since the pictures had come out of her own collection, they were mostly photos of Grazia and Neal—sitting at Vinny's bar making stupid faces at each other, posing in front of various examples of deteriorating urban architecture, standing in front of various picturesque rural ruins.
After a while, Brant, our neighbor from across Upper Cherrytown Road, wandered over to join me. He squeezed my shoulder. "Any thoughts on what comes next? Or is it too soon to think?"
"Oh, I want to sell the place," I said. "As soon as I possibly can."
"Conservation people don't want the property?"
"They didn't want the property five years ago," I said. "I'll try again. But..."
"Hey! You gotta do what you gotta do. A developer would pay top dollar. We all know that."
"I don't want to sell it to a developer," I said. "It would break my heart."
"But you may have to."
"I may have to."
"The Lofts at Gentrified Pines!" Brant said and laughed. "Hey! Willie and I are probably getting too old for country life anyway."
"I'm sorry—"
"Don't be. You'll raise property values for all of us. Two-bedroom condos in the Stockade District don't come cheap."
###
Daria was flying back to California the next night. I’d drop her at Newark on my way down to the Shore, where I was counting on collapse, decompression, and a decent night’s sleep. I’d watched Daria and Grazia circling each other at the bar, ambassadors from rival courts who both knew a treaty was in their mutual interest, and Grazia had accepted an invitation to the house for the following afternoon. Object of negotiations? Friendship.
My cousin Tracy came to say goodbye, too. She hadn’t much liked Neal, but she’d shown up for the memorial anyway and managed to keep her eyebrows under control when the tributes veered from fond remembrance into full‑blown oversharing.
Tracy was out on the porch, accepting Mimi’s joints and nodding gravely through Mimi’s list of memorial grievances, a very stoned therapist on a house call, when Grazia arrived with the big black plastic bag Vinny had loaded with sandwiches. It turned out Grazia was a Housewives fan, too, and soon she and Tracy were rattling off lines like two Talmudic scholars trading tractate and folio.
The sandwiches seemed to make Grazia anxious. She kept eyeing them as though, at the memorial, some small miracle of transubstantiation had turned them into a physical manifestation of our love for Neal. She wanted us to eat them. We did not want to eat them. After she remarked plaintively, “They’re very good, aren’t they?” for the third time, I picked one up and took a bite. “Delicious,” I lied.
“Oh, good,” said Grazia, visibly relaxing. “I’ll leave them all with you. I’m gonna go and…” She nodded toward the house, where a thin ribbon of moody piano notes floated out from the living room. Daria.
“You have some salacious texts to read us, bitch!” Tracy announced from the other side of the porch, tapping Mimi's shin with a flip-flop.
Mimi flicked ash over the porch railing and flourished 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?"
Tracy laughed. "'Dear Kathy, remember that time the size of his balls gave you TMJ?'"
"Then the bitch texts, 'I hope it’s okay that I came today. I didn’t want to intrude, but I needed to be there to pay my respects—for him and for you.' Respect for me? That bitch can show her respect for me by livestreaming herself drinking bleach on Facebook."
Tracy clapped her hands with delight. "And the bleach better be Chlorox! Not that cheap ammonia shit they sell at the Dollar Store!"
"Oh, trust me! The bleach will be very high-end! Like if Tiffany's sold cleaning products instead of jewelry! 'Cause Kathy Pellegrini is one of the stinking useless rich—"
I froze.
Tracy shut her mouth in mid-howl and looked very pointedly at her watch. "Wow! Will you look at what time it is? Flavor Flav—" one of her nicknames for me "—I gotta roll. If I leave right this second, maybe I can avoid the I-87 crawl. Maybe."
"We gotta exchange contact info," Mimi told Tracy.
"We do!" Tracy agreed, but then she hugged me and got into her car. "I don't know why you spend so much time in Asbury Park," she called to me out her window. "There is nothing to do there. Nada. Niente. Zip. Call me when you see the error of your ways and come back to Manhattan."
"She's great!" Mimi said as we watched Tracy navigate the driveway.
"She's Tracy," I said. "Listen. Daria and I are probably gonna take off as soon as Grazia leaves. I'm gonna start locking up the house. What are you going to do?"
"I thought I'd stay," said Mimi. "I just—" She took off her green glasses, blinking furiously for a few seconds, rubbing her eyes. "I feel really lost without him. But I can feel him here." Her naked eyes were pleading. "You don't mind, do you?"
"No, of course not," I said.
But I did.
Part 2: Flavia
Chapter 7
If I had it to do over again (famous last words!), I would have torn the place down. It was one of the older dwellings on the Cherrytown loop—roads that had never seen a single cherry, but which, once upon a time, were overrun with feral crab apple trees. Hard little crab apples might pass for cherries if you weren’t paying attention. The tanners who settled this part of the Catskills probably used them for hard cider. By the 1930s, though, when the place went up, the tanners were long gone. They’d stripped the bark off the native hemlocks, polluted the streams, and moved on.
I bought it to save it: two hundred acres of mostly untouched woods plus a residential structure, more shack than house. The man who’d been living there since the Depression was one of those mountain hermit types, but he'd had distant relatives who'd waited out probate and were being courted by developers. You wouldn’t expect a developer to be interested in a parcel some hundred miles from New York City at the end of a twisting road, but you’d be wrong. There's always someone willing to bulldoze a hillside if the survey looks promising. So I decided I’d make the relatives rich instead and then donate the land to the Catskill Center for Conservation and Development.
Except they didn’t want it.
“What am I going to do with it?” I moaned.
“I’ll live there,” Neal said.
And within two months of the day I signed the deed, he'd moved in.
Hardly anyone who knew him understood why he would leave the small but bustling city of Kingston, where he had so many friends, where everyone knew his name, where he was one of the cocks of the walk, for the isolation of a mountainside.
But I understood.
And now he didn’t live here anymore. He didn’t live anywhere. He was dead. I’d been with him here most weekends for the past five years—and in plenty of other places besides, of course—but those other places weren’t imprinted with him the way this one was. Here was the kitchen where he cooked for me, the garden where he grew me kale and heirloom tomatoes, the bed where he brought me to sweet moan.
Of course, he made other women come in that bed, too, and cooked them dinner. (I don't know if he pushed vegetables on them.) That had been part of the deal from the start. Almost the first thing I did whenever I came up to the place was strip the sheets off the bed and throw them in the machine, because maybe he had washed them, but maybe it had slipped his mind. I didn't make any fuss over it, but neither did I pretend they were just another item in a batch of laundry.
There were safeguards I insisted he take. I didn't want to come down with AIDS or some less lethal sexually transmitted disease in that rare instance he'd misread an amorous prospect. That meant condoms and STD testing every three to six months or whenever a fling threatened to become a thing.
Did I mind? I don't think so. I'd never wanted to live with Neal—I'd never wanted to live with anyone—and what Neal did while I was off doing the things I wanted to do was his business. Sex was his hobby. (My hobby was architecture.) He'd been honest about it from the start. "But you will never feel anything less than completely loved," he told me. And I never did.
Not minding was different than embracing the poly lifestyle. Or even integrating Neal's polyamory into my life. At the beginning, against my better judgment, I let myself be dragged to a few dinners for three at restaurants I picked specifically so I'd never have to visit them again. I was curious.
Amanda had Brillo Pad hair, a hawklike profile, and an impressive resume as a civil rights attorney. Of course, she didn't work for the City of Kingston; Neal was punctilious about observing church/state boundaries.
"Neal and I have a scenario where I'm one of the crooked cops in Monroe v. Pape, and he's one of the petitioners," she confided, giggling, over appetizers. She speared one of her artisanal mini‑meatballs with a toothpick as though it were a hostile witness and actually gave me a wink.
Over short ribs braised in stout and served on a bed of foraged farro and kale, she said, "They gave me an episiotomy with Jagger. I swear, if I'd known he was gonna be nine pounds, I would have taken up smoking as soon as that first pee stick turned blue. They cut so far into my clit that Neal actually had to re-teach me how to have vaginal orgasms."
Over dessert (crème brûlée with a shard of caramelized sugar): "So, you know, after you have vigorous anal sex? How you spend a couple of days plopping small poops every couple of hours? How do you deal with that?"
After that, I decided I was happy to let Neal's lovers stay hypothetical. But I was interested in the names that kept recurring. The ones he talked about. The ones who became friends.
I'd met Daria, Grazia, and Mimi a few times before Neal died.
###
A matter of record: Mimi found him, called 911, and then called me.
But I don't remember getting the call. And I don't remember a single one of the many things I must have done after I got the call— like calling Brant and Willie, the neighbors farther down Upper Cherrytown Road from Neal, to beg them to go over and deal with Mimi. (Just in case she was having a psychotic episode, and Neal was merely deeply asleep.) Like calling Neal's brother Mark. Like calling Daria, Grazia, and Angela —the woman Neal had driven eighty miles to spend Sunday night with after I’d left Sunday morning. Like calling Neal's primary care physician and the attorney who'd done our wills—
I was at the Jersey Shore. It would have taken me four hours to drive to the Catskills, except my hands were shaking so hard, I wouldn't have been able to handle a steering wheel. And anyway, what exactly could I have done in the Catskills that I couldn't do from here? I didn't want to see a body.
My cousin Tracy had fought the traffic on the New Jersey Turnpike, arriving in a record 45 minutes with a traveling war chest of valium, Xanax, Trazodone, Gabapentin, Percocet, Liz Phair CDs, and Jane's Ice Cream. I spent the afternoon on the couch of my Asbury Park condo in a narcoticized stupor, watching The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I thought I had problems? Sure, there was that dead boyfriend, but here I was on a comfy couch in a tasteful living room with a close-up view of the Atlantic Ocean, and I was on my second pint of unicorn cake ice cream. Erica Jayne, now she had problems! She was in Palm Springs, where the only thing that was tasteful was a Racquet Club vodka martini, facing a $25 million civil fraud trial. Plus, she was living proof of what happens when you let your glam squad watch too many drag tutorials.
"Goddam!" said Tracy. "Look how badly the bitch has blended that foundation into her hairline! She's gotta be doing her own makeup. No makeup artist would do something like that."
"Do you think I killed him?" I asked.
"What?" asked Tracy.
"Neal. I let him die."
"What the fuck are you talking about?"
"Well, I mean—I didn't push him down the stairs. I didn't smother him with a pillow. But Saturday, he had one of those ocular migraines—"
Tracy frowned. "Ocular migraines?"
"They're not headaches, they're blood vessel spasms in the eye. You see colors and weird zigzags. They're connected to high blood pressure. I should have—"
Tracy snorted. "What? Wrestled him down, hog-tied him, and brought him to an ER?"
'Yes, goddamn it."
"Flavia, Flavia, Flavia. Neal was a grown-up. If he'd wanted to go to an ER, he would have gone to an ER. You're not his mother. And what the fuck has Erica done to her hair?"
Weren't his mother, I wanted to snap.
Anger. Second stage of grief, straight out of the Kübler‑Ross brochure.
But Tracy didn't deserve anger. When I'd called, she'd dropped everything. She'd never had much use for Neal. But she loved me.
###
I reconstructed our last weekend together in forensic detail. The Percocet sharpened my focus, or maybe it just enhanced my powers of free association.
When I arrived on the Trailway Bus in New Paltz Friday morning, Neal had been leaning against his Prius, and he made a little production of bowing as if I were a visiting dignitary. He'd seemed tired, hadn't he?
At the house, on the kitchen island, right next to the prep for chana masala, was a half-eaten jumbo bag of pork rinds.
"What? 7-Eleven was all sold out of deep-fried cholesterol?" I asked.
"Hey! Don't be dissing the working class's snack foods," Neal said. "I grew up eating these. I love 'em. Perfect for stress eating."
In the garden, he'd dug new trenches for pit composting. He'd expanded the vegetable beds another foot for the July planting of bush beans and collards. There was a new pile of rocks where he’d started a dry‑stack wall. A lot of heavy labor for a 90° heatwave.
We'd had lunch; we'd chatted. He was carrying 50 open cases; one of them seemed likely to go to trial. Neal was a stickler for attorney-client confidentiality, but he would vent about any case details that were on the docket. This one was a felony DV charge.
"He's delusional," Neal said. "We could plead him out for three years, but he's convinced she made him do it." He managed a smile, but his voice was thin.
In the early evening, when the temperatures began to creep down, we hiked out to Vernooy Falls. Neal's bonhomie masked a seam of fatalism, and places like this pulled it to the surface. Two hundred years ago, when farmers were still trying to eke out crops from the rocky, clay-dense Catskills soil, these falls had been the site of a grist mill, and a major crossroads had run through this spot. Now all that was left were scattered stone wall foundations and a forest dense with ash, maple, birch, and chestnuts.
"The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed," Neal said, kicking at one of the walls.
"What?" I asked.
"Nothing. Doesn't really fit anyway."
"Is it a quote?"
"It's nothing. I'm showing off my Ivy League education," he said. "Four years driving a cab to put myself through Columbia, and all I can remember is a few lousy poems." He laughed.
The last morning, we'd had sex. Not one of our better encounters. The rattle of the AC window unit made an awkward metronome, and he seemed to lose interest. Oh, he was prepared to go down on me for an hour, but I could see the thought balloon: If that's what it takes... He'd always been more into doing than getting. I knew the sales pitch: I'd rather give pleasure than receive it, and, of course, that worked out well for me. I like having orgasms. Multiple orgasms. But I'm not an idiot; I knew perfectly well it was a control issue for him. He liked watching me while I bucked and writhed and moaned. "How much do you want this?" he would tease.
But that afternoon, he just wasn't into it. Until finally, I asked.
"Sorry," he said. "I'm having a lucy." That was his private code for those ocular migraines. "It's a little like trying to have sex on acid. So many distractions." He held up his hand, wiggled his fingers, let his hand drift down.
"Then let's not do this," I said.
"Okay," he said.
The quick way he swore off the delights of my naked body did something to the rest of my stay. As soon as I left, he was going to be driving to Albany so he could spend the night with Angela. Was the lucy a lie? Was he saving himself for Angela? He moved around me with forced cheer, a little too brisk in the kitchen, a little too quick to check his phone. When he drove me back down to the New Paltz Trailways Station, he did so in complete silence. We were fifteen minutes early and ducked into Shawangunk Roasters for a cup of coffee.
"Had a case last month," Neal said. "Felony DUI. Pleaded it out on Tuesday. Then, Thursday, boom! Guy gets hit by his own drunken driver, dies instantly. I spent all day Friday arguing with the DA over whether the conviction still counts for their stats. That’s what death is to the system. An accounting error.”
“That’s bleak,” I said.
He shrugged. “It’s accurate. You die, your file goes into a different drawer. People still get paid to move it around.”
"Ironic, though," I said. "I mean, guy convicted of a DUI getting killed by a drunken driver."
"Yes, it's little touches like that that almost make me believe we're living in a sentient universe. Almost."
"So, where does death go on your flow chart?" I asked. "Cosmic joke? Teachable moment? Tragedy?"
"Gee, you mean I have to choose?" He laughed. "I suspect it's not that dramatic. Or interesting. Though dead people often do leave behind the most dramatic and interesting messes."
"What's the biggest mess you'll leave behind?"
"My love life," he said. "And my browser history."
When he walked me to the bus, he leaned over and kissed me on my forehead.
There'd been signs. But I hadn't picked them up. Did that make me a kind of accessory?
###
Death involves busy work. So much busy work! First up: the body. Neal's body was transported to one of the office buildings in the Ulster County Department of Health complex, where the medical examiner checked temperature, lividity, and rigor, and ascertained Neal had probably died 12 to 14 hours before Mimi found him.
"We can do an autopsy if you want," the ME told me over the phone, "though strictly speaking, I don't think we need one. I spoke with his primary. He had a history of high blood pressure, and the physical examination was consistent with a cerebrovascular event. Tox screen was negative."
I kind of wanted an autopsy, but I didn't think I had the legal authority to request one. I was Neal's primary polyamorous partner and the executor of his will, but not his wife.
Once the death was officially registered, I filled out the online forms to get the death certificates I would have to send to his employer, his bank, Social Security, the IRS, and the DMV. Most of the other stuff I could cancel online or by phone, but it would take days to work my way through all the credit cards, utilities, and subscriptions, and I'd need to get his computer, which was at the Catskills house. Neal had been helping support several dozen artists, musicians, and writers through monthly Patreon donations. I wondered whether I should email them or just leave them hanging when the cash spigot turned off.
I called the Neptune Society to arrange the cremation. The lady kept me on the phone for half an hour reviewing urn options. I kept telling her, I didn't care: "You can put him in the brown paper bag you brought your lunch in—"
"Oh, your loved one was into recycling?" she said. "Are you planning a sea burial by any chance? We have a nice biodegradable model made out of paper and eco-friendly, vegan glue that breaks down naturally over time when it's placed in water. It's not designed to hold the ashes of anyone who weighed over 200 pounds, though."
Neal had left all his money and all his possessions to Daria, the woman he texted twenty times a day because she was his best friend. I didn't need it, certainly. Daria had left the Hudson Valley five years ago for a failed marriage in California, and she struggled financially. She was due for her annual visit to the Hudson Valley at the end of July, which turned out to be ten days after Neal's death. Neal had already paid for her plane ticket.
I barely knew Daria.
"I could cancel," Daria said over the phone. "I was planning to stay in the house. I don't want to impose."
"No, no, you should come," I said. "You need to go through his stuff. Otherwise, I won't know what stuff I'll need to find a good home for."
I'd been planning a hiking trip to Zion National Park for the week of Daria's visit, but, of course, I'd canceled it. I picked Daria up in Newark and drove her to the house. Daria cried all the way to Kerhonkson. Daria had the gift of looking serene and beautiful when she cried, which was not a gift that I had. That was probably one of the reasons why I tried never to cry.
A surprise was waiting for us when we got to Neal's house.
Mimi.
Rocking furiously back and forth in the old rocking chair on Neal's front porch, forehead squinched, pink curls flying, a huge half-smoked doobie between her lips. Overhead, by the empty bird feeder, two blue jays objected loudly.
Mimi looked as startled to see us as we were to see her.
"Neal gave me his key!" she cried as though she was afraid I was about to accuse her of breaking and entering—which part of me certainly wanted to. "He told me I could come over whenever I wanted. And I miss him so much—"
She burst into tears.
After a couple of seconds, I approached and patted her clumsily on the shoulder. Daria was already beside her, enfolding her in her arms. Daria was very good at stuff like that.
"Have you been inside?" I asked.
Mimi sniffed. "To pee. And I've been running upstairs to lie down on his bed so I can smell him—"
Too much information.
I knew the bed would be unmade because Neal had been something of a slob. A clean slob, meaning periodically—generally on Friday mornings before I showed up for the weekend—he would make the bed, vacuum, spritz Mrs. Meyer's Lemon Verbena in the bathroom sinks and shower, and tackle the mound of dirty dishes piled up to leaning tower proportions in the kitchen. But he was messy. I think he saw it as a counterbalance to the courthouse universe, where every fact, feeling, and human tragedy had to be filed with a docket number.
Brant and Willie, brilliant neighbors that they were, had actually used their key to come into the house and clean up the kitchen just after the EMTs had carted the body away. I was very grateful. Neal had prepared a large batch of chana masala some short while before he died, and seeing those empty cans of chickpeas and stewed tomatoes on his kitchen island would have destroyed me, I'm sure. Brant and Willie had cleaned them up. And done the dishes. And dealt with the garbage and recyclables.
There was still all the deteriorating food in Neal's refrigerator to deal with, of course. The comestibles, spices, jars of lentils, bags of beans, obscure flours inside his cabinets. The specialty oils and vinegars in his cheerful, mismatched bottles along the counter. A ridiculous assortment of teas and restaurant condiment packets. All of it signifying a man with very specific and unusual culinary tastes who had cooked his way through this kitchen. I dug my nails into my palms. I would not cry. Instead, I opened the fridge.
I started with the easy stuff: the milk that had gone sour, the spinach liquifying in a plastic bag, a half‑used jar of harissa. In no time at all, I filled up a trash bag. I reached for another.
On the porch, I could hear the sounds of Mimi sobbing and Daria consoling.
When they got tired of that, they wandered inside and watched me throw away more food.
"Can I help?" asked Daria after I'd unscrewed the final half-empty jar of olives and poured its cloudy brine down the sink.
"I'm good," I said.
###
The one thing I did not want to do was organize any kind of memorial. It would be a lot of work, and Neal would not have cared one way or another.
I was shocked when Grazia volunteered to take that over.
“Totally irrelevant what Neal would have wanted,” Grazia said. “Memorials are for the survivors.”
She was right, of course. Grazia had a way of often being right, but she was so ornery and smug, I wished she didn't.
Grazia was not one of Neal's lovers. Their relationship was hard to describe. They didn't hang out together all that often, but he'd bookmarked her online diary, and he read it religiously every morning, following it the way other guys followed sports scores. When Neal and Grazia did meet up, they rendezvoused at Vinnie's, a low-ceilinged lawyer's cave with lights set to reasonable doubt, where she'd heckle him about his love life. She knew Vinnie and was prepared to cajole him into providing a venue and refreshments; she knew the courtroom buddies and the lovers I dreaded having to notify. She was prepared to do it all! When I inquired, "How much?" she waved me away.
"Just because you're rich doesn't mean you pay for everything," she said.
Which was a nice gesture, I suppose. Though the way she said it sounded like an insult.
Yes, it was true: I had money. How much? Enough to buy an apartment in Greenwich Village, a small mansion on Long Island, a condo at the Jersey Shore, this ramshackle house in the Catskills. Not enough to buy an island.
It bothered me that the only thing that made me stand out in a crowd was my bank account. I wasn't beautiful and charming like Daria or beautiful and bitchy like Grazia. I couldn't spin my particular wiring into lifetime of entitlements the way Mimi could. I couldn't play the piano like Kathy Pellegrini, I couldn't make smut sound peer-reviewed like Amanda. All I could do was pay the bills that kept the lights on. Neal had been my grounding rod. Without him, the world was just static.
###
Daria, Mimi, and I drove down from the house to the memorial together. Mimi had asked to stay with us there. Some complicated drama at the stoner spa outside Woodstock, where Mimi was crashing, blah, blah, blah. Who could keep up with the ongoing crises in Mimi's life? Mimi offered recaps, but I wasn't interested.
"And I miss Neal so much," she added. "I can feel his spirit here—"
Could she?
I couldn't.
Neal-Palooza, Grazia had dubbed the memorial. It went well enough, I suppose. The turnout was respectable. I didn't want to be there, but I said the things I was expected to say, kissed the cheeks I needed to kiss, and after I was done, drifted over to the giant TV Vinny usually kept tuned to Bills, Knicks, and Yankees games depending on season, which Grazia had somehow rigged into a rotating carousel of Neal photographs. Since the pictures had come out of her own collection, they were mostly photos of Grazia and Neal—sitting at Vinny's bar making stupid faces at each other, posing in front of various examples of deteriorating urban architecture, standing in front of various picturesque rural ruins.
After a while, Brant, our neighbor from across Upper Cherrytown Road, wandered over to join me. He squeezed my shoulder. "Any thoughts on what comes next? Or is it too soon to think?"
"Oh, I want to sell the place," I said. "As soon as I possibly can."
"Conservation people don't want the property?"
"They didn't want the property five years ago," I said. "I'll try again. But..."
"Hey! You gotta do what you gotta do. A developer would pay top dollar. We all know that."
"I don't want to sell it to a developer," I said. "It would break my heart."
"But you may have to."
"I may have to."
"The Lofts at Gentrified Pines!" Brant said and laughed. "Hey! Willie and I are probably getting too old for country life anyway."
"I'm sorry—"
"Don't be. You'll raise property values for all of us. Two-bedroom condos in the Stockade District don't come cheap."
###
Daria was flying back to California the next night. I’d drop her at Newark on my way down to the Shore, where I was counting on collapse, decompression, and a decent night’s sleep. I’d watched Daria and Grazia circling each other at the bar, ambassadors from rival courts who both knew a treaty was in their mutual interest, and Grazia had accepted an invitation to the house for the following afternoon. Object of negotiations? Friendship.
My cousin Tracy came to say goodbye, too. She hadn’t much liked Neal, but she’d shown up for the memorial anyway and managed to keep her eyebrows under control when the tributes veered from fond remembrance into full‑blown oversharing.
Tracy was out on the porch, accepting Mimi’s joints and nodding gravely through Mimi’s list of memorial grievances, a very stoned therapist on a house call, when Grazia arrived with the big black plastic bag Vinny had loaded with sandwiches. It turned out Grazia was a Housewives fan, too, and soon she and Tracy were rattling off lines like two Talmudic scholars trading tractate and folio.
The sandwiches seemed to make Grazia anxious. She kept eyeing them as though, at the memorial, some small miracle of transubstantiation had turned them into a physical manifestation of our love for Neal. She wanted us to eat them. We did not want to eat them. After she remarked plaintively, “They’re very good, aren’t they?” for the third time, I picked one up and took a bite. “Delicious,” I lied.
“Oh, good,” said Grazia, visibly relaxing. “I’ll leave them all with you. I’m gonna go and…” She nodded toward the house, where a thin ribbon of moody piano notes floated out from the living room. Daria.
“You have some salacious texts to read us, bitch!” Tracy announced from the other side of the porch, tapping Mimi's shin with a flip-flop.
Mimi flicked ash over the porch railing and flourished 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?"
Tracy laughed. "'Dear Kathy, remember that time the size of his balls gave you TMJ?'"
"Then the bitch texts, 'I hope it’s okay that I came today. I didn’t want to intrude, but I needed to be there to pay my respects—for him and for you.' Respect for me? That bitch can show her respect for me by livestreaming herself drinking bleach on Facebook."
Tracy clapped her hands with delight. "And the bleach better be Chlorox! Not that cheap ammonia shit they sell at the Dollar Store!"
"Oh, trust me! The bleach will be very high-end! Like if Tiffany's sold cleaning products instead of jewelry! 'Cause Kathy Pellegrini is one of the stinking useless rich—"
I froze.
Tracy shut her mouth in mid-howl and looked very pointedly at her watch. "Wow! Will you look at what time it is? Flavor Flav—" one of her nicknames for me "—I gotta roll. If I leave right this second, maybe I can avoid the I-87 crawl. Maybe."
"We gotta exchange contact info," Mimi told Tracy.
"We do!" Tracy agreed, but then she hugged me and got into her car. "I don't know why you spend so much time in Asbury Park," she called to me out her window. "There is nothing to do there. Nada. Niente. Zip. Call me when you see the error of your ways and come back to Manhattan."
"She's great!" Mimi said as we watched Tracy navigate the driveway.
"She's Tracy," I said. "Listen. Daria and I are probably gonna take off as soon as Grazia leaves. I'm gonna start locking up the house. What are you going to do?"
"I thought I'd stay," said Mimi. "I just—" She took off her green glasses, blinking furiously for a few seconds, rubbing her eyes. "I feel really lost without him. But I can feel him here." Her naked eyes were pleading. "You don't mind, do you?"
"No, of course not," I said.
But I did.
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