Cult Classic(76)

* * *



Your funeral was Vadis and Zach’s first date. Vadis loves her drama and her rituals, Zach his morbidity and solemnity. I suppose they are both living in preparation for tragedy, just in different ways. A funeral might be the only setting in which they thrive as a couple. It’s too early to say. Zach put his arm around Vadis, and Vadis smacked it away out of habit before apologizing. She’s working on affection. Maybe she got something out of the Golconda too. Maybe it worked on her the most.

And maybe you know all this already because you saw it. Who knows what the dead know? It behooves the living to maintain a one-way street of curiosity. We want to know everything about you, but pray that you are not watching when we’re picking at and rubbing ourselves. But I hope you heard Vadis speak. She was eloquent. Zach made a big deal of telling everyone how he had not helped her with the speech, which she had to explain to him was just as bad as telling everyone he’d written it for her. She said that we should try not to think about what we had lost but that we were lucky to have known you at all. Your loyal servant until the end.

I avoided your ex-wife, whom I’d never met. I don’t think she knows who any of us are. Over the years, you got very good at dividing your life into quadrants. She brought a friend for moral support, hugged your mother, kissed your coffin, and left. She was beamed in from a different time. Cherubic, good-natured, and collegiate, she represented a former version of you. A black cardigan clung to her ass and she wore lanyard jewelry braided by a child. She pulled her hair back when she kissed your coffin. It made me think of her in college, blackout drunk, holding her own hair back over a toilet. Maybe you helped. What a sight it would’ve been to see you at twenty! Your first wife fell for baby Clive, who was surely ambitious, even then, but who could’ve been a congressman or a professor.

Chantal avoided your ex-wife too. She was near catatonic in the corner. Though, I will say, when she could speak, she made sure everyone knew about the beauty conference in Europe that she’d pulled out of to be there. There were other women, too, women I didn’t know. In the end, there’s one surefire way to pull one’s exes into the same spot, one package that never fails. It’s free but it’s permanent.

Errol distributed packets of tissues to anyone who didn’t bring their own. He was obsessed with the tissues. It was his way of maintaining control. He also put “reserved seating” signs on some of the chairs, but no one wanted to sit in the front row, not even the celebrities, who congregated in the back and never took off their sunglasses. Jin is the only one who cried. Really cried. She understood that you were gone at a point when no one else seemed to. Maybe because of her own history, because of her dad and the hunting knife and the garage. She cried like she knew what death meant.

I held it together until the reception, where I felt, for the first of what would be many times, supremely paranoid. Like maybe I’d be shoving quiche into my face and a ghost from my past was going to pop out at me on a spring. Anytime someone approached me to talk about how great you were, I found myself looking over their shoulder. It didn’t help that you were right there, only a parlor away. Eventually, I told Max that I had to use the bathroom. He nodded and kissed me on the cheek, pinching a strand of hair from my dress.

“Go,” he said, watching the hair drift to the ground, “go say goodbye.”



* * *



I slid the dividing doors closed behind me. There were flowers on top of you, arranged in a long bouquet like a fleur-de-lis. Someone, probably Jin or Errol, had crammed a single bird of paradise in there. I heard your mother and the funeral director talking logistics in the hallway. I pulled up a chair and spoke, at eye level, with your coffin. But I didn’t know if I was talking to your head or to your feet, so I moved the chair once more, splitting the difference by addressing your torso.

“Fuck you,” I whispered, just to see how it sounded.

I wanted to be like Jin, to understand your death so immediately, but I was not like Jin. I was starring in a play about a girl who goes to a funeral. The velvet curtain would be closing soon and then what? I’d have to leave you at the theater.

“It didn’t work,” I said.

But this was a lie. The Golconda did work, just not in the way you intended it to. You thought I could be cured by confrontation. But the past is too deep a hole to be crowded out by the present. I think, if closure exists, it’s being okay with a lack of it. It’s to be found in letting the doors swing open, in trusting that if hinges were meant to be locks, well, then they’d be locks. You brought Max and me together, which is what you wanted, for me to choose the future instead of having it choose me. Somewhere, buried beneath those layers of delusion and capitalism, was a generous thing you did.

So shines a good deed in a weary world.

It’s funny, the night before last, I was cleaning the apartment and found a whole pile of Modern Psychology back issues. I’d saved them even when I didn’t have a byline, just because my name was on the masthead. Vadis’s and Zach’s names appeared too, farther down the pile. One of the issues was from early in your tenure, when you were still contributing to the magazine, and it included my favorite story you ever wrote, about the sociological implications of island burial practices. Because places like Turks and Caicos aren’t getting any wider, the majority of their residents get buried on top of each other with a layer of dirt between the coffins, up to five per plot. Every few decades, a groundskeeper digs up the whole thing, takes out the bottom coffins, and chucks the remains back into the ground. It’s Death Tetris.