“Do you mind JoJo? The food’s good, and there’s nothing really close to the Met…”
“JoJo’s okay.”
“You, Peter Harris, are a mensch.”
“So true.”
“I’ll call. If they can’t take us at one, I’ll call you back.”
“Okay. Great.”
He clicks off, wipes a smudge from the face of his BlackBerry on the edge of the sheet.
“That was Bette,” he says.
Is it a betrayal, making a lunch date on a Sunday? It would help if he knew how serious Bette’s… situation is.
“Did she say what it is?” Rebecca asks.
“She wants to have lunch.”
“But she didn’t say.”
“No.”
They both hesitate. Of course, it can’t be good. Bette is in her midsixties. Her mother died of breast cancer, what, ten or so years ago.
Rebecca says, “You know, if we say, I hope it’s not cancer, that won’t affect anything one way or the other.”
“You’re right.”
At this moment, he adores her. The cloudy ambivalence burns away. Look at her: the strong-jawed, sensible, slightly archaic lines of her face (her profile could be on a coin)—behind it, how many generations of pale Irish beauties married to wealthy, stolid men?—the graying tumble of her dark hair.
He says, “I wonder why she called
“You’re her friend.”
“But we’re not
“Maybe she wants to practice. You know, try telling somebody she’s not that close to.”
“We don’t know it’s that. Maybe… she wants to confess her love for me.”
“Do you think she’d call you at home about that?”
“I’d say cell phones have made that a moot question.”
“Do you really think?”
“Of course not.”
“Elena’s in love with you.”
“Then I wish she’d fucking buy something.”
“Are you meeting Bette uptown?”
“Yeah. JoJo.”
“Mm.”
“We can go to the Met after, and see the Hirst. I keep wondering how it looks in there.”
“Bette. What is she, sixty-five?”
“Thereabouts. When did you get checked last?”
“I don’t have breast cancer.”
“Don’t
“It really and truly doesn’t make any difference if you say it or you don’t.”
“I know. But still.”
“If I die, I give you permission to remarry. After a suitable period of mourning.”
“Ditto.”
They both laugh.
He says, “Matthew left such elaborate instructions. We knew about the music, we knew about the flowers. We knew which suit to put him in.”
“He didn’t trust your parents and his nineteen-year-old straight brother. Can you blame him?”
“He didn’t even trust Dan.”
“Oh, I bet he trusted Dan. He just wanted to make the decisions himself. Why wouldn’t he?”
Peter nods. Dan Weissman. Twenty-one-year-old boy from Yonkers, working as a waiter, saving to go to Europe for a few months, thinking he’d finish up at NYU when he got back. He believed, he must have believed, at least briefly, that the world was showering bounty on him. He was making good money at the new cafe-of-the- moment. He and Matthew Harris, his improbably fabulous new boyfriend, would walk together through Berlin and Amsterdam. Madonna had left him fifty-seven dollars on a forty-three-dollar check.
Rebecca says, “I think I want Schubert.”
“Hm?”
“At the memorial. Cremation. Schubert. And please, everybody get drunk afterward. A little Schubert, a little sorrow, and then have drinks and tell funny stories about me.”
“Which Schubert?”
“I don’t know.”
“I think maybe Coltrane for me. Would that be pretentious?”
“No more than Schubert. Do you think Schubert is too pretentious?”
“It’s a funeral. We’re allowed.”
“Maybe Bette’s okay,” she says.
“Maybe. Who knows?”
“Shouldn’t you get in the shower?”
Is she eager for him to go?
He says, “You sure you don’t mind?”
“No, it’s fine. Bette wouldn’t call at the last minute like this if it wasn’t something important.”
Right. Of course. And yet. Sunday really is their day, their only day, shouldn’t she be a little more conflicted about releasing him, no matter how noble the cause?
He glances at the bedside clock, its beautiful aqua numerals. “Shower in twenty minutes,” he says.
And so. Twenty minutes in bed with your wife, reading the Sunday paper: this little cup of time. Black holes are expanding; a section of Arctic ice bigger than Connecticut has just melted away; someone in Darfur who wants desperately to live, who’d let himself believe he’d be one of the survivors, has just been cut open by a machete and for an instant sees his own viscera, the wet red of it darker than he’d imagined. Amid all that, Peter can probably rely on twenty minutes of simple domestic comfort.
Bette Rice has beamed something into the room, though. Call it mortal urgency.
Who ever expected heroism from little Dan Weissman, handsome in his avid-eyed, narrow-faced way, something of the antelope about him; no extravagant passions; Dan who was so clearly meant to be one of the boys Matthew
You could panic in the face of it all—your brother dead at twenty-two (he’d be forty-seven now), along with his erstwhile boyfriend and every other friend he’d had; slaughters in other countries that might give pause to Attila the Hun; children killing their teachers with guns their fathers left lying around; and by the way, do you think it’ll be another building next time, or will it be a subway or a bridge?
“Have you got the Metro?” he asks Rebecca.
She hands the section over to him, returns to the book review.
“The Martin Puryear is closing in three weeks,” she says. “Please kick me if I miss it.”
“Mm.”
He has twenty minutes. Nineteen, now. He is impossibly fortunate; frighteningly fortunate. Your troubles, little man? Think of them as an appetizer that didn’t turn out quite right. You should sing and frolic, you should make obeisance to any god you can think of, because no one has put a tire over your shoulders and set it on fire, at
