The men without women upset me more: There’s a lanky, dark-skinned man across from me, chewing cheese and crackers with his mouth open. The cheddar and the pumpernickel crisps are distinct. The old white man two seats away from me is digging into a bowl of gnocchi with tomato sauce. His tie and his whole face are freckled with sauce. I see a man on my other side, a few armchairs away. Very big, very black. Thanks to Brian, I now divide men into football/not football. This man is very wide and very tall. A running refrigerator, Brian would have said. He has a nice smile and I immediately think that I would be squirming out from under him after a pleasant evening and calling 911. Most men disgust me, and even the mildest feeling of attraction apparently leads directly to imagining them dead and cooling beside me.
I’ve internalized Great Wayne, so I hear him saying: You haven’t even metabolized Brian’s absence, let alone his death, yet.
I tell Wayne that right now I’m imagining a lovely, interested, interesting person across from me in a nice restaurant, and then I’m so nauseous in real life, I get out of my chair to run to the ladies’ room.
When I come back, Internalized Wayne is waiting for me. He shakes his head.
You can stop making an effort, he says.
I almost stop. I call everyone who must be called: my children, Brian’s mother, Brian’s two sisters. I text one of Brian’s brothers. His other brother barely uses a computer and doesn’t text. I ask the brother I do reach, M., to get hold of the other brother and tell him that Brian died peacefully and painlessly and I am now on the way home. I say the same thing to everyone. Brian’s sisters and their husbands （I don’t remember who’s in the group sitting with my mother-in-law, I remember only that there is a group sitting together, praying and waiting and, I hope, being of great comfort to one another） have been gathered together at Yvonne’s apartment. As I keep texting and dialing and scrolling, I think most of her, who has been such a rock and a support and a surprise through all of this. I play with Brian’s ring until our flight is called.
Thursday Evening, January 30, 2020, Leaving Zurich
My daughter Sarah waits for me at Newark Airport, my son, Alex, texts us along the way, and my daughter Caitlin waits up for Sarah and me at my house in Stony Creek. They help me upstairs, to my bedroom on the third floor, because I am moving like a blind, drunk stranger. Every light downstairs is ablaze, as I like it, as is my bad habit. When we get to my bedroom, Caitlin goes to turn on the overhead light. There is a snap and a fizz and then nothing. We flip the other switches. We try to turn on the bedside lamps. Light comes on in the bathroom and in the closet but none in the bedroom. Joe the Gentleman Electrician comes the next day. He changes every lightbulb and fools with the circuit breaker in the basement and comes back into the house and still nothing. He sighs. Suddenly, the lights come on. He’s as baffled as I am. It’s Brian being playful, we say. In the course of the next few days, every appliance in my house will break down and need to be repaired or replaced. I had thought, or hoped, that I would curl up in a despairing heap in the middle of my bed for two weeks and crawl out only for tea. Wayne asks me, Have you ever, at the worst time in your life, taken to your bed like that? I say that this is the worst time in my life and no. But I always wanted to, I say.
* * *
—
Instead of lying in bed wanly, I get up the next day and make coffee and am glad to be in my own house. I have put aside Brian’s cuff links and watches for my children, and the notes to them from Brian, and, in a small box, the notes he wrote to the granddaughters. The girls and I give a lot of Brian’s clothes to Goodwill, because his clothes are too big for anyone else in the family. I save everything I cannot bear to give away, including his Yale golf jacket, which is an awful thing, and his undershirts, which all the granddaughters wear as nightgowns. I put all the condolence notes in a big bowl and I put my thank-you stationery in another bowl and I put both bowls in the back of his side of the closet. I send Caitlin and Sarah back to their families.
I eat oddly but not badly. I think about getting drunk but don’t. I wake up at 5 A.M. and by now seeing the sunrise is a habit and 6:15 means I can legitimately get up and make more coffee. I watch television, and I will have seen every episode of Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I sit in my office and look at the pale-blue sky and the cold water. I listen to music all day, everything except Bill Evans and Billie Holiday, because I just can’t take it. I plan the memorial service. Right before we went to Zurich, Brian had finally stopped reading As I Lay Dying, after weeks of jotting down the names of all the characters, so he could keep track. （I don’t think you have to have Alzheimer’s to find this useful with Faulkner.） Mostly he liked saying to the people who knew of our plans, “Well, these days, I’m reading As I Lay Dying,” and watching their tongue-tied reaction.
A couple of mornings in a row, back in December, we had breakfast and discussed his memorial service. He said that the library was an okay setting and I knew that meant it wasn’t perfect and I didn’t try to do better. He said, Why don’t I record a few remarks, or even a few poems. I could read the Szymborska poem and then you could play it over the loudspeaker. That’d get ’em, wouldn’t it? I told him that that was a sadistic impulse and he shrugged amiably. So be it.
Except for stinginess or cowardice, there were no faults you could accuse him of that would hurt his feelings. On the other memorial-service details, we were in total agreement. Music: Bill Evans, of course. Poem: “Allegro Ma Non Troppo” by Wis?awa Szymborska. The sight of Brian, black fedora pulled down, crying in a small bookstore over a thick book of her collected poems, was one of the things that threw us into the massive disruption of our lives and our romance and our marriage and it does seem that there’s not a sentence I can write that doesn’t end with: and now he’s dead.
Saturday, February 8, 2020, Stony Creek
I have spent some time thinking about what to wear for this memorial service. What I wind up with is very Sophia Loren at eighty: thin black coat over black jumpsuit, with a gold-buckled belt, black heels, a chic chignon, and you-lookin’-at-me sunglasses at 9 A.M., which is not a bad way to go but not what I thought I’d be doing.
Early in the morning, I drive over to my friend’s house, who is also my hairdresser, and he puts my hair up. I could sit there, being loved and straightened and back-combed and sprayed, for hours. There is no place I’d rather be. Some of my dearest friends are coming, and some are not. I find that I have absolutely no bad feelings about those who don’t. They have loved me and supported me and done the same for Brian, or not, and it doesn’t matter anymore.
The memorial service is across the street from our house, at the library. I love the library. The librarians are the way librarians should be: devoted to the books, kind but firm with the public. It has been awkward to arrange the service, since I knew we wanted it and I knew when we wanted it but I could not imagine saying to Alice, our librarian: Brian plans to die on January 30; could we book the library for February 8, between art shows and the yoga class? I don’t remember how it comes to pass that the library is indeed booked for the service, but it is. My assistant and our friend, Jennifer, has probably arranged it, as she arranged the memorial cards. We are not having a Mass and we are not Catholic and we don’t have a parish, but nevertheless, the memorial cards are a big hit. The card has a picture on one side of Brian, looking summer-sharp in his sunglasses, and a soaring hawk and few lines of Rumi on the other （What is the body? Endurance. What is love? Gratitude. What is hidden in our chests? Laughter. What else? Compassion）。 Everyone takes a card or two and I am a convert to them.