«Hoo–ha. So she'll be moving in?»
Sam didn't answer for a long time. We swung together in the dark–ness, with no sound but the slow creak of the chains. Finally he said, «I don't think so. I think maybe I lost my nerve with Marianne.» I started to say something, and then I didn't. Chains, owls, a few fireflies, the distant mumbling of the freeway. Sam said, «I couldn't go through that again. And it will happen again, Jake. Not for the same reasons, but it will.»
«You don't know that," I said. «It works out sometimes, living with somebody. Not for me—I mean, both my marriages were absolute train wrecks—but there were good times even so, and they really might have worked. If I'd been different, or Elly had, or Suzette had. Anyway, it was worth it, pretty much. I wouldn't have missed it, I don't think.»
«That," Sam said, pausing as precisely as our old hero Noel Coward would have done, «is the most inspirational tribute to the married state I've ever heard. You ought to crochet it into a sampler.» He dropped lightly off the swing, and we went on walking, angling back the way we had come. Neither of us spoke again until we were on the overpass, looking down at the lights plunging toward the East Bay hills. Sam said, «She's not moving in. Millamant doesn't like her that much. But I want you to meet her, next time you come to New York. This one I want you to meet.» I said I'd love to, and we walked on home.
At the airport, two nights later, we hugged each other, and I said, «Catch you next time, Jake.» I don't remember when we started doing that at goodbyes, trading names.
«Next time, Sam. I'll call when I get home.» He picked up his garment bag and started for the gate; then turned to flash me that fleeting grin out of childhood once more. «Keep a pedestal vacant in the Museum. You never know.» And he was gone.
Marianne had Millamant, as it turned out when I made my way from JFK to her East Side townhouse. The Abyssinian met me at the door and immediately sprang to my shoulder, as she had always done whenever I arrived. Arthritis had set its teeth in her right hind leg since we last met, and it took her three tries, equally painful for us both. I tried to remove her, but Millamant wasn't having any. She dug her claws in even deeper, making a curious shrill sound I'd never heard from her before, and con–stantly pushing her head against my face. Her eyes were wide and mad. «He's not with me," I said. «I'm sorry, cat. I don't know where he's gone.»
Marianne—still all flying red hair and opening night, down to her gilded toenails—informed me that Sam hadn't left a will, which sur–prised me. He was always far neater than I, not merely about the apart–ment or his dress, but about his life in general. Letters were answered as they came in; his filing cabinet held actual alphabetized files; he always knew where his book and magazine contracts were; and he had a regular doctor and a real lawyer as well, who doubled as his literary agent. But there was no will in the filing cabinet, no will to be found anywhere.
«We'd been talking about it," the lawyer said defensively. «He was going to come in. Anyway, I've spoken to the parents, and they want you to act as executor.»
I called Mike and Sarah from the lawyer's office. They were frail insect voices, clouded by age and distance and despair, static from deep space. Yes, they did wish me to be Sam's executor—yes, they would be grateful if I could clean out the apartment, sort his business affairs, and get the police to release his body, as soon as the coroner's report came in. Sarah asked after my mother and father.
The report said things like myocardial infarction and ventricular fibril–lation; death almost certainly instant. We buried Sam in an Astroturf cem–etery in Queens, within earshot of the Van Wyck Expressway. Mike and Sarah had managed to handle the funeral arrangements from Fort Lauderdale, which proved they remembered me well enough to know that I'd likely have wound up stashing their son in a Dumpster or a recy–cling tin. A limousine from the mortuary brought them to the funeraclass="underline" they stepped out blinking against the sharp autumn sunlight, looking pale and small, for all the years in Florida. I went over to embrace them, and we had a moment to murmur incoherently together before two men in dark suits took them away to the grave site. I followed with Marianne, because there was no one else I knew.
It didn't surprise me. I'd learned long since that Sam preferred to keep the several worlds in which he moved—music, theater, journalism, ballet classes—utterly separate from each other. I'd known the names of some of his friends and colleagues for years, without ever meeting one. By the same token, I knew myself to be the entire mysterious, vaguely glamor–ous West Coast world into which he vanished once in a great while. Until now, it had all suited and amused me.
An old Friday–night poker acquaintance drifted up on my left as I stood at the coffin behind Mike and Sarah and the dark suits. We shook hands, and he whispered, «Yes, I know, I got fat," while I was still trying to remember his name. I never did.
The rabbi looked like a basketball player, and he hadn't known Sam. It was a generic eulogy, no worse for the most part than many I've sat through, until he fixed his shiny blue gaze on Mike and Sarah and started in about the tragedy of living to bury an only son. I turned away, eyeing the exits. Damn, Sam, if you hadn't stuck us with these damn ringside seats, we could slide out of here right now, and be on the second beer before anyone noticed. But he had to stay, so I did too.
That was when I saw the small dark woman standing alone. Not that she was physically isolated—you couldn't be in that crowd, and still see grave and rabbi—but her solitude, her apartness, was as plain as if she had been a homeless lunatic, trundling a Safeway cart, all by herself with God. She was looking at the rabbi, but not seeing or hearing him. I patted Marianne's arm and eased away. It's okay, Sam. I see her.
Close to, she was thin, and looked paler because of her dark hair and eyes. She looked older, too—I'm bad at ages, and I'd been braced for a schoolgirl in a leather miniskirt, but this woman had to be twenty–eight or twenty–nine, surely. I said quietly, «You're Emilia. He never told me your last name.»
When she turned to face me, I saw that her nose must have been broken once, and not set quite right. The effect was oddly attractive, the bumpy bridge lending strength and age to a face whose adult bone struc–ture had not yet finished its work. Only her eyes were a full–grown wom–an's eyes, an old woman's eyes just now. An intelligent, ordinary face that grief had turned shockingly beautiful.
«It's Rossi," she said. «Emily Rossi.» Her voice was low, with the muf–fled evenness that comes with fighting not to cry. «Please, is there any chance at all that you could be Jacob Holtz?»
«Sam called me Jake," I answered. «We can go now.»
As we started to move away, she paused and looked back at the rabbi, who was still telling Mike and Sarah what they felt about their loss. We could smell the raw earth from where we stood. She said softly, «I imag–ined going up to them, talking with them, letting them know that I loved him, too, that he didn't die alone. But he did, he did, and I'd never have the courage anyway.» The back of her neck seemed as vulnerable as a small child's. She said, «He always called me Emilia.»
Being an executor means, finally, cleaning the place up. In a legal sense, there wasn't that much for me to do, once the police had finally unsealed the apartment and released Sam's body for burial. Bills paid off, bank account closed out, credit cards canceled, Mike and Sarah's names replac–ing his on God knows how many computers—how little it takes, after all, to delete us from the Great Database. A heavenly keystroke, no more.
But somebody has to clean up, and the landlord was anxious to have Sam's apartment empty, ready to be rented again for quadruple what Sam had been paying. I spent all day every day for more than three weeks at the apartment, sorting my friend's possessions into ever more meaning–less heaps, then starting over with a new system for determining what went or stayed. With electricity and telephone long since cut off, the place remained cold even when the sun was shining in the windows, and tumultuous Columbus Avenue outside looked so remote, so unattainable, that I felt like an astronaut marooned on the moon.