Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
My eulogy was well received; Billy's sisters, Margie and Laurie, thanked me for it, and
Andy, Billy's son, told me it was the most awesome speech he'd ever heard—the most
welcome review I'll ever get. I was a pallbearer, an agonizing duty, and at the burial after
the service, I was among the first to shovel dirt into the grave. I've had that experience
once or twice before; the sound of the clods landing on the coffin is enough to make you
wail—or want to, at least.
Happily, it was a warm day. A couple of years ago, we buried my uncle, Jack Skilo-
witz, Claire's husband, on a bitter, gray February morning in Westchester, and the con-
signment of the body to the frozen earth was terrifying to me, a commonplace and ne-
cessary errand that seemed unimaginably cruel.
When Billy's ceremony was over, Danny and I stopped at a fancy hotel for a stiff
drink—I had two, actually—and then we drove back to Billy's family's house, where
people had gathered to eat and drink and laugh and remember that the world wasn't yet
over for the rest of us. It was a festive wake, lively. Most of it took place outdoors, at
the back of the house, and I was standing there near the garage talking to Andy, I think
it was, when Catherine, my former girlfriend, whom I'd been with for five strenuously
emotional years and hadn't seen in ten, not since the day of my mother's funeral, came
walking up the driveway.
Catherine had gotten to know Billy when we were together and had taken to him the
way women often did—he was funny, nonthreatening, attentive, and unusually solicit-
ous, if eccentrically so—and after she'd moved to Los Angeles they'd socialized a few
times. But when we split, the friends got divided up and Billy was returned to me. Bobby,
who had also been friends with Catherine, and I had both written to tell her about Billy's
death and the funeral, but neither of us had heard from her so we assumed she wasn't
coming.
Then, shortly after the burial, she sent word that, coincidentally, just that afternoon
she'd been cleaning out an old email address's inbox and discovered our messages. She'd
called the funeral home, she said, and found out about the gathering at home.
“Would it be all right if I came by to pay my respects?” she wrote.
“Of course,” I wrote back.
An hour later she was standing in front of me in the driveway. She looked stunning,
the way ex-girlfriends always seem to when their ex-boyfriends catch a glimpse of them
again after years and years.
“Thank you for the 'Of course,' ” she said. “I really didn't know if you would want
me here.”
