Cult Classic(77)

Do you remember this? The magazine ran a photo of a leathered groundskeeper leaning on a shovel, looking like he couldn’t care less about you following him around all day, asking him questions. He explained that most people on the island spend their lives looking at the person next to them at the market or bus shelter, knowing there’s a decent chance they’ll be buried one on top of the other. But the question the magazine asked—the question you asked—is how would you treat other people, knowing the next person you see could be burrowing holes into the back of your head for eternity? For the most part, it deepened the sense of community. But there was also a “see you in hell” undertone to it all.

The groundskeeper told you about the hurricane that blew through years prior and flooded his burial plots. Coffins got mixed up in the mud, and the old groundskeeper, his incompetent cousin, had managed to put half of them back upside down. Strangers were not just lying on top of each other but facing each other. It was ages before they figured it out.

You called me from your hotel while you were working on this story. I was so excited because there you were, in this pink-sanded paradise with an ocean-view suite, where you could be with anyone, talking to anyone, but you chose me. It was some hour so late, it seems possible they don’t make it anymore, and I could hear the sound of the ocean, beating against rocks. At one point, you picked up the hotel phone to order room service. I found it intimate, listening to you ask a stranger for something you wanted, being so regular. That was the height of my romantic feeling for you (it was all downhill from there). But I remember wanting to tell you right then that I loved you, wanting to address the tension. Even if you denied all emotions and nipped all confessions, I would get more out of talking about it than I would by saying nothing.

But the moment never presented itself. You were going on and on about the groundskeeper, about the upside-down coffins, about the unremarkable buzz of death.

“It’s just skeletons,” you read from your notepad, quoting him, “all skin gone, all muscle gone. All memories gone. It’s man skeletons and it’s woman skeletons and they almost the same.”

Then you flipped the notepad closed.

“And that, my friend,” you announced, “is the kicker.”

I worried it might be too morbid, even for a piece about death. It might upset advertisers that we could not afford to lose. It might also upset Modern Psychology readers, who, let’s face it, were already subscribing to a magazine called Modern Psychology. They had come for insight and practical tips and perhaps did not want to read about floating bones. This came out harsher than I meant. I was mad at you about a conversation we’d never had and never would have. At first, you didn’t say anything. Then I heard you slide the screen door open, walk onto your balcony, and light a cigarette. I listened for the ocean, to know I hadn’t lost the connection.

“Lola,” you said, as if you were already looking into the future, “sometimes people just need to be told what they want.”





ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Enormous gratitude to my agent, Jay Mandel, who has never heard a filtered thought from me in his life, and to everyone at MCD and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, especially my clear-minded editor, Sean McDonald, Jonathan Galassi, Mitzi Angel, Sheila O’Shea, and Sarita Varma. In the early pages of this novel, a character calculates the percentage of his life he will have spent knowing our heroine. It makes my heart swell, thinking of how significant that number is for many of us. Thanks also to June Park, for the phenomenal cover, and to Stephen Weil, for his tireless efforts on behalf of this book.

Thank you to my family, for their ancient and unbreakable enthusiasm, and to my extraordinary and extraordinarily supportive friends for allowing me in their midst. I adore you. I am also grateful to Yaddo for the sleepover, Scribe for the California dream, and the great city of New York forever.