The Devil Is in the Detail

 “Okay, you win.”

Regina Wiley eyed an unfamiliar arrangement of rainbow-colored fireflies in the darkened room. Miniature bulbs, strung across the top of an overstocked bookcase, fell in strands to the floor at either end, like jerky illuminated sideburns. She regarded her husband from comfortable habit. Not counting past lives, they had logged thirteen years of marriage, with no formal attention paid to Christmas—no tree, no carols, and no midnight candlelight service. Old souls, in sync at the start, they had declared New Year’s Eve to be their personal celebration. They had fled from the year-end chaos of the city to raise gloved hands, tilt reddened chins and swig from a bottle of vintage Champagne—their gift to each other—as they greeted possibility on the cold, hard sands of Montauk. This year would find them again wrapped in the susurrus at land’s end, braced for the pulsing sea.

“The lights look great,” she cheered and immediately shuddered. Here it was. That feeling of well-being that sometimes unnerved her.

“I support sustainable marriage,” her husband quipped in a British accent worn at the heel after more than a dozen years in Manhattan. David Hawthorne knew he’d prevailed. He’d made the effort this year. Christmas was always largely ignored at her request. Or rather, at her hedging a bet that if it were left up to him, no move would be made. 

Two young cats skittered around his ankles, chasing an ethereal mouse. They had visited the shelter a month before. Just to look. Still, maybe, not quite over the death that summer of her old cat.

“We can call them fairy lights,” Regina said.

“Besides, it’s their first Christmas,” David insisted.

David held fast to the memories of his family in Leicestershire, where he’d grown up. The clutter and sparkle of cheap decorations lovingly preserved, the fireplace mantle topped by miniature village scenes sunk into blankets of artificial snow. He remembered, fondly, the desiccated turkey and overdone veg, gorging on sponge cake soaked in sherry, always feeling a trifle bombed by the end of the night. The three of them—an insular family—never tempted by the outcropping of aunts and uncles and cousins, and always within taut personal boundaries. The death of his parents contrived to hold these memories in place.

Regina had an unholy attachment to family that she longed to sever, but could not. Christmas, for her, recalled a tree painstakingly trimmed, all the more remarkable because her overdone father was blind drunk by the time he’d perch precariously on the hassock and, ever so delicately, like a sheepish driver submitting to a sobriety test, place the angel atop the tree. There was nothing remotely sweet about her mother, who invariably threw up her hands, angrily insisting on ordering dinner in. Her sister—bitter and vengeful at predicted disappointment—tore through presents with cyclonic force. Regina’s parents were dead. Her sister’s life had been reinvented, Regina sidelined.

“I smell heat,” Regina sniffed. “What the—? Why do they do that? It’s practically summer out.”

“The radiators are off,” David reminded her.

“I know. I know,” she huffed. “But it gets worse every year.” Regina hurried to yank the living room window open from the top a few inches. “Can’t let the terrorists win. Get the phone, would you?”

Recognizing the number, David knew Regina was on the outs with the caller. “It’s Gabe.”

“Let the machine get it,” she shot back. “I don’t have time for his shit.” 

“No message,” David said. “Still pissed at him?”

“Maybe. I don’t know,” she said, “but I don’t want to spoil the moment.”

“Steady on. You know how he is,” David replied.

“How he is,” Regina muttered, “is what pisses me off.”

After Regina had lost her full time editorial position, her husband had put down his guitar full time to pick up the slack. David found work as a security guard. The pay was negligible but he was outdoors a good deal at a wildlife conservancy in Queens, and they needed health insurance. They agreed it was only temporary. 

She’d met Gabriel Price in the aftermath of 9/11, when many with comfortable incomes were forced to recalibrate and take meaner positions with fewer incentives. Gabriel was a couple of decades younger than Regina. He blinked at her radical political views, critical and unwilling to take it all on until he’d recycled the information, tailoring it to his peculiar proselytizing. From a Fundamentalist Christian family, he agonized over what was obvious, confiding in Regina, the older freelancer, with whom he felt safe. Although he was characteristically flamboyant among his social circle, and generally out with his coworkers, he feared the denunciatory edicts of his mother and the church back home in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania.

Earlier, Regina and David had spent the day in SoHo, at the offices of God’s Love We Deliver. They’d joined an amiable bunch of volunteers, many of whom they recognized from year to year. They stuffed gifts donated for the homebound into paper shopping bags decorated by school children. Regina knew it didn’t entirely define the holiday for her husband, but he loved the whole New York feel of it.

On Christmas morning, the volunteers would meet at Cleo’s on Ninth Avenue, usually frequented by lifers in the theater. At an hour long before regulars took their customary bar stools, sleepy-eyed altruists gathered around a fearsome confectionery mound provided by a popular doughnut shop. They downed steaming cups of hot coffee. Fortified by sugar and caffeine, they’d head to their assigned neighborhoods to deliver gift-laden shopping bags, along with a prepared holiday meal. They had—and would do so again—visited emaciated young men in tenement walk-ups, grizzled warriors in SROs, resourceful old queens in rent-controlled apartments and low-income women in housing projects, some with children staring wide-eyed at the strangers bearing gifts.

At Regina’s suggestion, Gabriel—not one to be left out—had also signed on to volunteer. He couldn’t “do Christmas” because he was flying home, but he eagerly agreed to help fill the Christmas bags. For weeks around the office of a teen magazine, where he and Regina free-lanced, he’d babbled enthusiastically, basking in the attention he received for his “good deed.’’ He’d failed to mention Regina’s part in it.

As the morning inclined toward afternoon in SoHo, David had had to remind Regina over and over what Gabe was like, that maybe it was a rural thing, his inattention to time.

“To anyone else’s time,” she’d snapped, stuffing a bag. “Girl, you need to get one of them cell phones,” she minced, making David laugh. Afterward, exiting onto Sixth Avenue on an unusually temperate winter afternoon, she recognized Gabe’s car at the curb. He waved frantically, laughing and mouthing the familiar “sorry” refrain, beckoning them to the car. Breathless, Gabe leaned across to the passenger side window.

“Oh my God! You won’t believe what happened. I was so, so, so on time and then—.” Regina studied her watch. He giggled, the prelude to wangling forgiveness. “Let me make it up. Buy you guys a drink?”

They had dismissed Gabe, pleading a prior engagement. Undaunted, he’d called after them, “Have an awesome day folks. Love ya!” Seemingly on the spur of the moment, David had stopped into a hardware store and purchased the lights.

“Tea?” David asked, heading for the kitchen.

“M-m-m, dunno Sweetie.” Regina watched the cats following David, their Piper. She turned to the rows of books and cds shelved like subway riders in rush hour. “Is it too early for a drink?” She picked a cd at random. Her personal timeline ran from doo-wop through to the Beatles and Dylan, to the Sex Pistols, jazz, rockabilly, to the classical music she received as gifts. Though nowadays she rarely listened to any music other than her husband’s.

Mozart’s Exultate Jubilate bubbled from the cd player and filled the room. David hollered from the kitchen, “Haven’t heard that in a while!”

Regina scanned the shelves. Her gaze traversed a lifetime of books, her old friends. She lingered on an author she’d once read avidly. She reached up to stroke the thick spine of Flannery O’Connor before grabbing it off the shelf. “Born disenchanted,” she muttered.

David handed her a full glass of Pinot Noir. “What’s that?”

“Nothing,” she replied, putting the book down. Palming her glass, she said, “Well, I mean the lights look fab.” She smiled, more inwardly, but he got it. She raised her glass to him, to the lights. “Thanks for all this.”

He nuzzled her shoulder, intuitive as ever. “Pecker up, lad. I’ll make us something to eat. Get that wine down your neck.”

It was a generational thing, she reasoned, her upset with Gabriel. She’d had many close gay friends in her life, still did. Years ago, some, younger than she, had struggled painfully

in a more hazardous environment. She became a confidant of sorts until they bashed their way out of the closet and she found she was no longer necessary. It was fine with her. She understood they needed to make their own path. Her close friends were older, bellwethers in their time.

Now was the time, though, that you wanted someone—gay or straight—serious and mad as hell. Someone who put aside feather boas and inconsequential personal drama. Gabe’s circle seemed so self-congratulatory, frothy and liable to disappear when you needed them. She had to be honest with herself. She was angry with Gabe, not so much for his absence earlier, but for something that had happened less recently. 

Just before Thanksgiving, he’d confessed to her that he dreaded the return home, how flustered he would be, so closeted with his family. He and Regina had talked for hours. She’d urged him to come out. Mothers need to know, she told him, and lies just made everyone sick. She had seen it in her own family. He’d returned from the holiday in high gear, ready to take on the world. “Whew-e-e-e!” He knew what it meant to be truly born again. His family was shocked. Shocked! But he had prevailed. Then, in a heartbeat, he’d turned on Regina over some remark she’d made regarding the furor that had resurfaced over “Don’t ask. Don’t tell.” She’d cautioned against being deflected from even greater issues.

“dadt’s lobbed around like a political football,” she said.

His response was instant and lacerating. “You are a hetero! What do you know about it?” To her amazement he unleashed a tirade. “I’ll tell you what you know about it. Nothing. You know nothing about it!” 

She’d come home steaming. “You get too involved,” her husband had chided.

Regina flipped through a hefty volume of letters. “You have to push as hard as the age that pushes against you,” wrote Flannery O’Connor. Maybe she was just worn down by circumstance, unfairly harsh with Gabe. At least he was true to himself, not like that pastor who chastised his congregation for going to social networking sites, calling them “portals to infidelity.” Later it was revealed that he’d had a three-way with his wife and a male church assistant. Gabriel didn’t so much apologize as seduce her with his capacity for fun. Better playmate than friend, she thought.

Caller i.d. prompted Regina to pick up the phone. Her expression caused David to lower the volume on Teresa Stich-Randall, and he watched as Regina’s jubilation disappeared. He picked up that it was something to do with family. She replaced the phone in its cradle. It was late. Taxis were dear, but they would have to get a cab downtown from the Upper East Side to an address in Greenwich Village. She advised David to bring his cell phone. “This is bad. This is very bad,” she said.

In a nondescript, reconverted warehouse on Greenwich Avenue, a thickset, unsmiling policewoman stood sentry at Lucien’s front door. David liked Lucien Edwards well enough, though he saw his wife’s cousin rarely and had never been to his apartment. He knew the cousins had hit a speed bump some time ago and slowed the pace of their relationship. 

Regina presented the requisite paperwork from the local precinct. The officer, somewhat mollified, guided them under the taut strip of caution yellow stretched across the entrance. Inside, Regina and David moved stealthily through the gloom, as museum-like as its place in her memory.

A muted yelp brought the policewoman to Regina’s side. 

“Sorry, Ma’am. Didn’t they tell you at the precinct?”

Regina averted her eyes from the mirrored walls reflecting a king-size bed, from the tangle of burgundy-colored satin sheets enveloping the long, white limbs of her dead cousin. His pronounced jaw was still exaggerated by a delicately drawn line of beard that met a trim goatee at his chin. He was sprawled like an afterthought, one eye open, and mouth agape, unclothed but for black boxer briefs, a full-page Calvin Klein advertisement.

“They haven’t come yet,” said the officer. “It’s a bad night. Lotta parties.”

Regina and David stared uncomprehendingly.

“The Coroner’s office, they should be here soon. I’m only here because the Sixth is having their party. I was sent over from the Seventeenth.”

“The seven—?” Regina started.

“Sutton Place. It’s pretty quiet over there.”

“Oh,” said Regina, eyes downcast. “We just need to pick up some clothes for the, you know, the funeral.” She shivered and the officer acknowledged that she had opened the windows earlier.

“He’s been here a while,” she added, not unkindly.

Regina blanched. “I feel a little weird.”

David hurried Regina to the kitchen and ran cold water from the faucet. Alone, they conversed in lowered tones. Regina knew they had more to do than gather a good suit, shirt and tie from her cousin’s closet. And shoes. Even dead he would need socks and shoes.

Regina studied the dark eyes in the officer’s plainspoken face, an expression that was not altogether official. “Listen, I need to ask you something.” She took in the close-cropped wiry hair, the masculine posture. “There’s things….”

“Ma’am,” the officer counseled, “Do whatever it is you needa do. My mother…” She stopped and gestured toward the vcr. “I’d start over there with that.”

Regina’s younger self—more boisterous and outspoken—had knocked around with Lucien. They were the oddballs in the family and their friendship was a kind of protest. Lucien was fiercely tall and he had a wicked laugh. Used to have, Regina thought. Though he’d been demonstrably out in the city, Lucien shrank into a straight man’s carapace around his widowed mother, Eve. Regina guessed it was the same for him in the school where he’d taught music. He was also organist and choir director at a church in Greenwich Village, but Regina had little time for that aspect of him. She had been urged to a few of his concerts and always came away disconcerted at seeing her Aunt Eve. Afterward, Regina was eager to reward herself with numbing cocktails at the Waverly Inn nearby. The strait-laced imperative of her aunt to “show generosity of spirit and embrace the Lord” drove her nuts. Eve was a bitter, closed-minded, holier-than-thou propagandist. She repelled Regina. Prediction slipped off her aunt’s tongue like a satiated leech. “Burn in hell” was a familiar conclusion. Oddly, Regina was still profoundly affected by an uncharacteristic wobble in her aunt’s voice on the phone earlier when she told Regina about the detective’s call. Lucien had not shown up at school. Her son was dead.

Fueled by dry gin martinis and heart-pounding meth, Lucien had once revealed the contents of a darker closet—bizarre things Regina had gazed at glassy-eyed, things she wanted immediately to forget. 

It was too much information, even for the free-spirited Regina. He’d boasted newly installed bedroom mirrors, satin sheets that, when lit from above, called up a burning bed. She had not understood and discomfort had crept over her like sunburn. How could he do all that good work in the church, teach music to children and still—?

“Because the church is Satan’s workshop,” he’d told her.

When he’d heard Regina was married, Lucien insisted on meeting the lucky guy. They kept their meetings playful and public, usually at Lucien’s favorite Spanish restaurant, where he inevitably ordered the Shrimp Diablo, until those meetings tapered off. 

David announced that he’d found the trash bags. “Let’s get to it,” he said. Resolute, they began with the videos and uncovered a large cache of Polaroid images of young men—too young. Very quickly they discarded the idea of sifting through the lot for anything that wasn’t questionable. There would be no keepsake photos for Aunt Eve. 

They searched through the hall closet. She pulled a conservative dress suit from a hanger, quickly picked a black tie from the rack. A collection of military caps was tossed in the trash; Lucien’s leather motorcycle jacket left untouched. David added a pair of black shoes and socks. Regina held out two dress shirts for appraisal.

“Blue or pink?” she asked.

“Pink,” David replied with a sly grin. 

Lucien’s final dress shirt would be periwinkle blue.

Regina peeked into the bathroom, at the walls papered with old Playbill covers. She cleared the medicine cabinet.

In the bedroom, Regina searched under the bed, careful to avoid looking at her cousin’s body. She found nothing. At the officer’s direction she lifted the seat of a boxy chair at bedside. She spied the contents in the false bottom. Grasping the edge of the bed, she sat down before hastily rethinking her miscalculated move.

David dragged the trash bag to her. She hauled out whips, handcuffs and leather masks, sex toys that were more frightening than playful to her. She interrupted David’s inquiries with, “Don’t ask.”

“Anyway,” David said, “it was his life.”

Regina forced herself to breathe. “Exactly.”

They rummaged through desk drawers. “Quickly,” Regina urged.

“But we don’t want to toss anything his mother might need,” David said. “You know, bills and bank stuff.” He held up a sealed envelope marked personal. “What about this?”

Regina tore it open, suspecting the contents. There it was: instruction to destroy everything listed on the sheet of paper she held in her trembling hands. The false-bottom chair and the videos had already been taken care of. 

“Right.” She exhaled slowly. “Let’s start at the top.”

They were halted by conversation in the front room. Two men, one doughy and pale, the other red-faced and thin, strode into the room like a silent comic duo. They nodded and quickly set about preparing the body. A gurney was retrieved. In a heartbeat her cousin’s body was bagged and gone.

The officer asked how it was going. Regina grimaced, showing her the list. “Okay, Ma’am. Let me know if you need any help.”

Regina pulled back a length of black velvet hung from the ceiling. It revealed a closet door. She stared at the doorknob. Her next move could pitch her down a very dark hole, a tainted Alice.

David ripped the cloth from its moorings and shoved it into a bag. “Let’s just get on with it,” he urged.

Religious vestments hung in the closet like forgotten extras in “The Exorcist.” Gingerly she pushed through them, revealing vestments embroidered with symbols she had shunted from memory a long time ago. On the shelf above stood engraved chalices and thick, black candles roped into bundles, like dynamite. Sealed tightly in the kind of plastic bags that usually housed more innocent items, such as sweaters and woolly hats, were the books she knew to be The Satanic Bible and The Book Of Lucifer. Another shelf held folders with pages and pages of liturgies and musical scores—her cousin’s handiwork—and she flinched when she recognized his feathery handwritten notes scrawled in the margins.

Like a curious child who had made the wrong turn in search of a gingerbread house deep in a frightening forest, she imagined tearing away from the terrible scene as fast as her legs would carry her. She jumped at a gentle nudge from David. “You okay?” he asked. Regina assured him that she was.

David lifted the last of the trash bags into the hall. They watched as the officer sealed the apartment. She lifted one of the bags, directing them to the elevator. “I can’t drop you anywhere. Regulations,” she told them apologetically.

In the street, David took the bag from her. They shook hands awkwardly, surrounded by the jumble of trash bags.

“We need to—,” David started.

“There’s a dumpster around the corner,” the officer advised.

Freed of their burden and clasped tightly to each other, Regina
and David headed toward Christopher Street, seeing no one in the quiet neighborhood normally rollicking with tourists and hardcore inhabitants. They crossed Sheridan Square and spied an all-night coffee shop.

“Coffee?” David asked.

Regina answered quietly, “Yes, please.” 

They sipped tepid coffee in the flyblown interior, picking at a puck-hard round of coffee cake. 

“I’ll call him.”

“Who?” David asked.

“Gabe. I’ll call him after the holidays.”

At the counter a disinterested cashier rang them up. His fingers shot from the register as if it was white-hot.

“Whoa,” he whispered. “Number of the Devil.”

Regina stared, fascinated: $6.66.

Before she could say anything, David slammed a packet of mints on the counter and the cashier readjusted the total. “There you go,” David declared. “We just beat the Devil.”

The taxi sped uptown with the kind of abandon cab drivers embrace in the middle of the night. The radio was tuned to some talk show that enabled shouting. They rode in silence until they reached their corner.

Regina sat up. “Shit!”

David rolled his head, coming out of a comfortable slump, digging for his wallet. “What?”

“The fridge! I didn’t check that. God, there’s probably poppers in there.”

Confused, David responded, “Popovers?”

“No,” she replied. “You know, the disco drug.”

David paid the driver. “Too ’80s. They don’t still do that?” 

Regina imagined aloud her aunt uncapping a small brown bottle of liquid and sniffing out of curiosity. 

A passerby saw them emerge laughing from the taxi, and smiled inwardly at the couple’s gay evening.

MOOD

you see I know it’s near
I always know when it’s coming
conversations with my fearful heart
go on for days before it drones
seeking an arrival time
I draw my request in the sand
fix a message with my bones
words lift like fog from the brain
answers arrive on eyelids
turned down for the night
some call it dreaming

12.18.19 nyc

The Churchgoer

“These people think they have problems? I have a fucking brain tumor. I have a problem.”

Throats cleared. Heads turned and people stared. Ann McDonald covered her mouth, muffling an involuntary gasp. Her friend, Stéphanie Gayle, had done it again.

In a light-filled room, simply yet elegantly appointed with small yellow flags hung on the walls and turquoise valances strung above pristine altars, a gathering of seekers of enlightenment perched cross-legged and straight-backed on dark blue pillows set across a polished blonde wood floor, overseen by the identical contemplative gaze of multiple bronze buddhas. Ann never quite got used to the shocked expressions on Stéphanie’s unsuspecting victims. Hearing her friend growl, “…fucking brain tumor,” in a room full of the self-possessed made it seem somehow deliciously profane.

Ann turned to Stéphanie. Ignoring passive frowns, she asked quietly, “Do you want to leave?”

Stéphanie Gayle stared eerily from her good eye and nodded. The black eye patch, a recent change, was off-putting.

“You sure?” Ann whispered. “The snacks probably aren’t out yet.”

They left the room of devotees before the mallet struck the singing bowl, before someone with the right livelihood, the right effort or the right mindfulness, uttered another whiny testament to an unfulfilled life and whatever impeded the nobler path they felt entitled to tread.

Ann bowed hurriedly. Stéphanie barreled past her to the empty reception area. Acolytes had placed bowls of beige comfort dip onto long, cloth-covered folding tables. Grapes—purple and green—filled brightly colored plastic bowls. Yellow and white cheese cubes were stacked on paper plates alongside baskets of low-sodium chips and gluten-free crackers.

Food, notably free food, halted Stéphanie’s furious exit. Ignoring the hummus, she expertly filled stickless bindles with crackers and cheese and grapes. She gathered up the corners of the bulging paper napkins and shoved them into her commodious handbag. Heading for the elevator, they passed the fishbowl of donations Stéphanie had ostentatiously overlooked upon arrival. Buckling under the scrutiny of a student volunteer, Ann dropped a generous fistful of bills into the bowl.

Oppressive summer heat stunned them at street level. The drift of jasmine off slender joss sticks gave way to the sour, sweat-stained remains of the day.

Ann reconsidered their escape from the air-conditioned loft. Unsure, she looked up the block toward Seventh Avenue. They stood for a moment on the quieter midtown street of characterless loft buildings and skyscrapers that left the pavement scored with lengthening shadows. She’d dodged a bullet. Again. 

Ann and Stéphanie were unalike in many ways—childhood, family, education and temperament. Their differences were often lodged, like makeshift dams, in their ebb and flow. It was left to Ann to unplug the detritus.

Stéphanie’s parents had gifted their daughter with a flawless fawn complexion. Her charcoal-colored hair curled into soft ringlets, now veined with silver. She had her mother’s animated, inquisitive eyes and her gap-toothed smile: small, perfectly white teeth marked with that tiny dark door to Stéphanie’s soul men longed to go through, ignoring the obvious consequences that had kept her single.

She was a graduate of a liberal arts college, sprung in a decidedly white hamlet nestled above the Hudson River. College life had been a challenge, she being the only black student in her class. Stéphanie rose to it, though not exactly effortlessly. In addition to her academic and professional achievements, she expanded her arsenal on her personal war with the world.

Turmoil was born from a childhood of misplaced responsibility and implied deprivation. Her mother was an elegant, dark-skinned artist who rarely stepped beyond her world of creative eccentrics. The company of sculptors, musicians, politicians and judges whom she dazzled reflected her adamant blackness. She was Nina Simone black. For her entire life, Stéphanie’s mother affected a capricious reality. Sales of her art funded her travels, her unconventional jewelry, and a dash in any direction away from motherhood. When forced, she fell back on substitute teaching in the public schools, until she had to rely on her daughter’s exacting generosity in the years before she died.

When Stéphanie turned eight years old, her father fully deserted them. After years on the road as a musician, with only sporadic touchdowns at their Upper West Side apartment, he’d finally bolted. He returned to Paris with his saxophone, to an urbane world of jazz and French women who reflected his upbringing and divined his needs. They replaced the alabaster arms of a patrician mother who had tucked him in at night, leaving his snowy bed linens, his freshly ironed embroidered pillow, and his downy cheek scented with her perfume. He abandoned his irrevocably aggrieved daughter and her younger brother, Pierre, who paid for Stéphanie’s daytime rages and tearful nightmares while their child-like mother enlivened her circle and left mothering to Stéphanie.

Ann was a good ten years older than Stéphanie. She was married long and comfortably to a working musician. In Stéphanie’s words, “A bit too married.” Ann was an only child whose upbringing had none of the drama of her friend’s story. Her parents had lived weary, indifferent lives in pointless persistence in Astoria, Queens. Her education depended on parents who were financially challenged, who had a blinkered worldview and were just not that interested in Ann’s future. Her mother had struggled with erratic mood shifts and protracted depression, along with the shame of it at a time when people didn’t talk about those things. Her father escaped through the back door that alcoholics think will give them a way out.

Ann left Astoria for good. She found a job and an apartment in Manhattan. Night classes suited her. She developed a habit of journal-keeping she would sometimes let lapse, but would never break. Eventually her personal recollections inhabited the fictional places and characters she began to write about. 

What she saw in the mirror was of her own making, until she reached the age when a daughter is fundamentally recast in her mother’s image. Descended from a mongrel mix of German and Irish women, her waist thickened of its own accord. Her blonde-gone-brown hair grayed slightly and, at her husband’s insistence, was left untouched. Not so the chin hairs that she plucked assiduously.

The more profound difference between Stéphanie and Ann was that one had a brain tumor. The other did not.

Stéphanie agitated at Ann’s side. “Why can’t I have a fucking—.” She made a sudden move. Ann caught her arm and checked Stéphanie’s escape. 

“What’s the one that kills you quick?” 

“What are you talking about, Stéphanie?” 

“You know,” Stéphanie wailed. “What’s its name? Fucking butterfly tumor, a year at the most.” She pressed a forefinger to her brow. “Boom! I’m dead.”

A passerby slowed his pace, and avoiding eye contact, held back for a split second. Ann readied for the onslaught. 

“What the fuck is his problem?” Stéphanie snapped.  Grimacing like a deranged pirate, she raised a hand, ringed on every finger, and readied a punch at the fleeing man. 

Gently, but deliberately, Ann pushed Stéphanie into an unlit doorway, away from the lighted windows of the corner bookstore giant that left them cruelly exposed. Ann might have said, “The tumor you have will kill you…eventually.” Twelve years of suffering, possibly longer, was a very long eventuality.

“It doesn’t matter,” Ann urged. “Breathe.”

“It does matter,” Stéphanie whimpered. Flustered, she rummaged distractedly in her handbag, shredding paper napkins as if she were building a nest. “I forgot the name—.”

“Of what?” 

“The other one,” Stéphanie said, drifting. She looked up from her opened bag. Relief purged the hard lines from her brow. “Bilateral glioblastoma multiforme,” she gasped, clutching a grape webbed in bits of torn napkin. “The butterfly tumor.” 

“Whatever. I’ll ride up the West Side with you,” Ann offered. “Take the crosstown bus home.”

Stéphanie clawed Ann’s arm, swaying alongside her as they headed west on Twenty-Second Street toward the multifarious outdoor cafés clogging Eighth Avenue. Ann steered her friend through hurriedly indifferent pedestrians. She ran interference among office workers preoccupied with loosening the harness in brief retirement at the bottom of a frosty margarita glass. A taxi was out of the question. Small spaces were combustible. They made a careful ascent at the bus stop. It would mean a longer, slower route for Ann, but her husband would understand. When she had the energy, Ann walked from Stéphanie’s building on West Ninety-First Street, across from the Trinity School, to her own apartment on East Ninety-Seventh Street. Traversing Central Park proved a reliable path to the breathing space that welcomed her at home.

Ann dipped her MetroCard twice, circumventing the now embarrassingly tiresome drama of Stéphanie’s “lost” card. The bus was summer empty. It was past rush hour. They settled into seats generally reserved for the handicapped. Stéphanie tugged at her too-tight, too-short dress, and stared ahead. 

Like Ann, Stéphanie was a native New Yorker. They had met in Paris ten years before, introduced by a French writer, a mutual friend. They’d discovered that they both worked in magazine publishing. Ann liked Stéphanie, though she found her a bit bossy, a bit snobbish. Unlike Ann, Stéphanie was small-boned and once had the grace of a guarded dancer. Her intellect sliced through a conversation like a hard-flung cleaver, straightaway separating the meat from the bone. Both confessed to a secret writer’s life. Ann in her journal and short stories and Stéphanie in a play she’d been working on for decades. Ann had to be on her toes around her and she appreciated the challenge. 

Ann was a doer. Any insecurity due to a rudimentary education was kept well below the radar, made up for by a curious, receptive intelligence. Her love of travel and an open-minded friendliness brought her in contact with the kind of people who became her education.

Stéphanie had forged a relentlessly aggressive path to a top-ranked position as copy chief at a multinational media corporation. Ann, on the other hand, mastered a steadier rise to a highly paid senior editor position at a French-owned publishing company in Manhattan. 

The bus lurched to avoid a cyclist, provoking gasps among the few passengers. Stéphanie adjusted her eye patch, turned away from Ann and gazed out the window, scouring the sea of humanity.

Ann recalled the phone call that started it all as if it had come yesterday and not ten years ago. Both women had recently returned from their first meeting in Paris. Both knew the demands of their jobs left little time for social calls at work. Ann was swamped on a regular basis, meeting deadlines, juggling writers, photographers and freelancers. An impatient managing editor had bivouacked in Ann’s office, armed with layouts of health spas, E-Z dessert recipes, knitting how-tos—all aimed at the kind of woman Ann was not.

“Ann MacDonald here.” Her curt greeting caused Stéphanie to ask if it was a bad time. The tone of Stéphanie’s voice had given Ann pause. The obvious conceit was not in evidence. Ann waved off the managing editor and shut her office door. 

“What’s up? I’m a bit—.”

“It’s back.”

“What’s back?” Ann asked. She recalled how her stomach had seized when Stéphanie told her about the tumor, how she had rebounded from the first surgery and rewarded herself with Paris. She thought Ann knew. It was the first time Ann had heard those words, “benign meningioma.” 

The bus moved uptown. Ann looked over at her friend, at the scowling, bloated, listing figure she’d become. They rode in silence. Ann was thankful for a nearly empty bus. She stole another look, but Stéphanie’s gaze remained directed at the passing scenery and she seemed calm.

Ann recognized the glazed look, the slack-jawed relief that came after every confrontation. She’d heard the involuntary yelps on the occasions when Stéphanie had let rip in public. Waiters, taxi drivers, theater ushers, and shopkeepers suffered her outbursts. Strangers who brushed against her unawares, or strode in the wrong direction down a city street, suffered a swift thumping. Stéphanie reprimanded strangers’ children to sit straight, forcibly prodding their pocket-sized shoes from the subway seat. A too-long wait at a red light released a barrage of insults at the back of a cabbie’s head. In any public gathering, she found someone in the wrong clothes, an unflattering fashion faux pas—someone who failed her rigid ideal—and then in a stage whisper, she’d announce, “She looks like she fell out of the ugly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

In every instance of street shoving, taxi rants, and predictably angry reactions from a child’s parent, Ann caught the eye of the injured party, staving off confrontation with a raised eyebrow, a knowing grimace, shrugged shoulders and a hastened withdrawal, never forgetting the words of Stéphanie’s neurosurgeon, Dr. Son. “These tumors may have been present at birth.”

“At birth.” A tumor that was so tiny yet had made its nearly invisible presence known in unusually angry tantrums when she was a child. During her teenage years, Stéphanie’s classmates were left perplexed when her acutely vivacious nature suddenly turned stubbornly sour. As an attractive, whip-smart young woman, she endured advice from friends who claimed her Achilles heel was her choice of men, until they saw lover after lover buried under a mangled pile-up of incomprehensible accusations.

The subject that evening at the dharma gathering was “staying in the moment.” Stéphanie’s moment was unavoidable. She had not been spared the terrible eventuality. Her surgeon—top in his field—would not risk another operation, not even by gamma knife, and he’d directed Stéphanie to a clinical trials program headed by a neuro-oncologist. Dr. Hunter, a petite, child-like waif dressed in adult designer clothes, with the wisecracking delivery of Woody Allen and the warrior stance of a pint-sized Amazon, pushed for radical experimentation. Meningiomas were tough nuts, she said. Stéphanie’s primary care doctor protested. The drugs had no successful track record. The side effects were potentially horrendous. They were reminded, again and again, that this was not cancer. Cancer was easier. Both knew what was to come.

Stéphanie, now deserted by the fulgurate rage that drove her, turned dully from the window. She stared ahead as the bus headed uptown on Amsterdam Avenue. “What street are we at?” she asked.

“Nearly there,” Ann said. She searched for an opening to lighten the mood. “It was a good talk tonight, right? Baker’s always got something to say. Funny, kind of dry humor?”

“Fuck that. Fuck enlightenment,” Stéphanie retorted. “Fuck God.”

When Ann left Stéphanie at her apartment, she knew they were not going to return to Shambala. They had come to the Tuesday night dharma gatherings, as they were called, by circumstance. Circumstance was the stubbornly benign, yet recurring tumor crowding Stéphanie’s brain. The tumor had been, for some time, the elephant in their friendship. Eventually, Ann had come to know every inch of that elephant: the toughness of its hide, how its eyes narrowed when disturbed, and then the way it rampaged with tusks raised. Some meningiomas, like Stéphanie’s interloper, disabled at a deceptively moderate pace, a serial killer with limitless patience. It smothered normalcy in barely perceptible degrees that infuriated strangers and left friends and family aghast and wary. It was far from benign. 

The call to Ann’s office had marked the beginning of her quotidian role. Without actually noticing, Ann became Stéphanie’s advocate. She waited with her in claustrophobic anterooms for countless MRIs, sat in on innumerable meetings with brain surgeons, and held Stéphanie’s hand after every surgery that disfigured her face by degrees, every reconstructive surgery that invariably fell short. At the direction of a noted ophthalmologist, Ann held a prism to her own right eye and saw for herself the kaleidoscopic chaos that was Stéphanie’s vision. She accompanied Stéphanie to endless rounds of chemo and radiation treatments. She laughed at Stéphanie’s predictable joke about chemo having its upside, and then saw the lost weight redoubled with each gallon of ice cream, each bucket of fried takeout, each carton of junk food ordered online.

Stéphanie’s extended maternal side gathered at the hospital after every surgery, fussily apprehensive. Aunts and cousins, nieces and nephews crowded into the visitors’ lounge, and each time Ann was reintroduced as if for the first time. They never spoke of anything in particular. Some prayed. Politics never entered the picture until Barack Obama’s presidential campaign, which coincided with Stéphanie’s last operation. Two by two they paraded in and out of Stéphanie’s room, each with a tale to tell of her bravery, her recovery, and of her anger. Invariably one of them returned, head shaking and whispering of an “…unholy shit fit in there.”

Stéphanie’s brother was a self-described black sheep. He was a delicate version of Stéphanie, a father of three, and a jazz guitarist. Despite her description, Pierre had none of the “little devil” about him. He never called her Steph. He quailed, like the others, when he incurred her wrath over some minor offense. Mostly, he stayed away.

Friends dropped from her like inexperienced, unsuspecting climbers negotiating the face of an avalanche-prone mountain. The few Ann had met were nearly always in passing. “They have all deserted me,” Stéphanie cried.

Her team of unflappable therapists, surgeons, and her neuro-oncologist, Dr. Hunter, were prepared for behavioral extremes. Stéphanie was what most people called unapproachable. Yet at the start and close of every meeting with her doctors she insisted on an awkward, drawn-out embrace. She was the good girl they rewarded with life.

After a while, Stéphanie stopped talking about her play, dismissing Ann’s enquiries. Ann continued keeping a journal and writing short stories. Apart from confiding in a few friends, she kept that to herself.

Encouraged by her husband, Ann joined a writing workshop. The claustrophobic atmosphere of unfledged writers scrambling for notice in a too-small nest rattled her comfortable cage. She stopped going. She liked her private, unbothered escape into writing. She had friends who cheered her, calling her a natural writer. Stéphanie read Ann’s stories. Though she was patronizing, she was unwilling to contradict their mutual friend in Paris. Stéphanie, too, commented that Ann was a natural writer, but followed with sly offhand remarks, “…for someone who never actually studied. You have something, I’m not sure what.” 

She persisted in criticizing Ann. “Understand that I have an advanced degree in literary criticism and text theory,” she said. The stories were too long. And Stéphanie hated the novels of Anita Brookner, a favorite of Ann’s. “Too depressing, all those boring stories about single women. Try to write like David Sedaris,” Stéphanie urged. “You know, keep it light.”

When the eye patch became necessary, Ann read to her. They kept to Stéphanie’s apartment until, at the urging of her long-time primary care doctor, Ann coaxed Stéphanie outdoors into sunlit weekends. They started with the lighter fare of popular humorists until the jokes ran into each other. Stéphanie suggested Sun Tzu’s The Art Of War. The actor, Kevin Bacon, was walking his dog in Central Park. He heard Ann reading aloud and nodded to the book. She held it aloft. He grinned and flashed a thumbs-up.

“Who was that?” Stephanie grumbled.

“Kevin Bacon, the act–?” Ann said.

“I know who that is. Fuck him.”

They read the slim volumes of a female Buddhist monk about what to do when things fall apart, or things scare you, and they tried to get their heads around starting where you are. Ann’s speaking voice seemed to calm Stéphanie and they discussed meditation. This led them to the weekly dharma gatherings on East Twenty-Second Street.

Shambala was out of the question now. They did not return to the dharma gatherings. Ann went to church.

An avowed atheist, Ann had once been a cranky non-believer who’d carried her atheism around like a sledgehammer until the argument was just too tiring. She’d begun, instead, to seek a quieter disaffection with religious belief. Stéphanie believed in God and staggered between anger and pleading. Ann resisted commenting on the late-night TV miracle cures Stéphanie clung to: tiny bottles of holy water, prayer beads, money sent to histrionic evangelical preachers. A solution that smelled very much like baby oil prompted Ann to suggest that Stéphanie was wasting her money. “You have the best surgeons in the country. God won’t help you with any of this.”

Ann had been the first to face a broad swing of the ax that left her unemployable, at least at her former professional level. It wasn’t a surprise. Women in her department had been circling the drain for months prior to her layoff. The company was being restructured, which meant that older women earning high salaries, in particular, were jettisoned. She’d joined, unenthusiastically, the freelance circus. Young clowns at the door dismissed her age and treated her accordingly, which meant patronizingly or with undisguised rudeness. The industry was in free fall. Every revolution on the carousel spun her from one struggling magazine to another.

Lunchtime walks at freelance jobs in any neighborhood solved multiple problems. Eating out was an avoidable expense. She usually found a vest-pocket park, at least, where she could choose a bench or café chair and eat a lunch brought from home. She walked off her agitation with spiky self-absorbed art directors whose personalities were dictated by panoramic tattoos and capricious piercings. She jotted ideas for stories in little spiral-bound notebooks. 

The first bad-weather day drove her indoors, as it happened, to a church. It was midday and the place was mostly empty. There she felt the presence of her own unquiet mind ripple as over still water in ever-widening circles, until the tension disappeared at the horizon.

Neighborhoods determined the kinds of visitors. Some pews held homeless men and women hunched over bulging plastic bags, willing invisibility. Other churches welcomed stout ladies in kerchiefs, alone or in mute pairs, fiddling their rosaries. Quiet, dark-haired children sat alongside mothers who spoke to them softly in Spanish.

A church in Times Square was the busiest, where she saw actor types curtsy theatrically in the aisle, while a businessman slipped hurriedly into a seat in the rear of the church. Tourists wandered in, clutching their guidebooks like bibles. Ann preferred the noticeable absence of travelers in the Church of the Transfiguration on East Twenty-Ninth Street. 

Ann had discovered the Little Church Around the Corner, as it was called, after a particularly aggravating morning tolerating the antics of a maddeningly vainglorious art director—an overwrought diva—decades younger and with none of Ann’s hard-won experience. She left the office and wandered further downtown on Park Avenue South, turned aimlessly toward Madison Avenue and was surprised and enticed by a brick path winding through cultivated greenery. After that, she escaped regularly into the quietly unpretentious storybook chapel.

Stéphanie lost her job. An obdurate relationship with Human Resources had come to an end, and she frankly terrified her staff. After so many years of a threatened firing, she’d finally been defeated by a sweeping company layoff.

Freelance jobs, saturated with the victims of ever-increasing layoffs, dried up. Ann had more time for crowded doctors’ waiting rooms and impersonal labs. She sat with Stéphanie on hard plastic chairs in windowless government benefit offices. They made their case across the institutional desks of harried employees who dutifully assessed Stéphanie’s disability.

They escaped from Stéphanie’s increasingly mercurial relationship with the public into daytime movie screenings. Ann and Stéphanie settled into nearly empty, darkened theaters, sometimes too early for the gunboat of popcorn Stéphanie required from the concession stand. Once, they watched as the White Queen theorized wistfully to Alice. Her sister’s demented behavior, she said, and her large head, might be signs of a tumor pressing against the Red Queen’s brain. Stéphanie groped for Ann’s hand, gripping it forcefully. 

“I love you,” she whispered. 

“I know,” Ann said.

Stéphanie’s gait became increasingly unstable and she canted like a half-blind, overburdened mule on uneven cobblestones. Steroids were prescribed. The new-style rollator walker the doctor had urged Stéphanie to purchase met her rage—and its fate—at the bottom of her building’s lobby stairs. When both weather and mood lightened, they ventured from Stéphanie’s apartment, teetering in sync down a steep path to the Hudson River. On Stéphanie’s really bad days they remained indoors. Ann read Emily Dickinson’s poetry to her. “To fight aloud is very brave….”

After so many stops and starts, Stéphanie’s condition deteriorated alarmingly. Bruised evidence of her falls—like Rorschach tests—appeared all over her body. At Stéphanie’s now desperate urging they explored alternative therapies. They met with a famously unconventional cancer researcher. They sat in his expensively appointed office, awash in fleshy pink hues. “Your tumor is not cancer,” he said. As if they did not already know that. He guaranteed he would cure Stéphanie with massive drips of Vitamin c. Her insurance would not cover the costly procedure. Ann bit her tongue. Apprised of Stéphanie’s former profession, the man reached into his drawer and drew out a manuscript, as a jeweler would a rare diamond. Would Stéphanie consider giving him an opinion on his first novel? Ann hustled her enraged friend from the office and left him to his stupefaction.

“I want to die,” Stéphanie said. “Kill me.”

“I can’t do that,” Ann insisted. “You can’t ask a friend to do that.”

“I don’t have friends anymore, except you.”

When the meningioma returned and reclaimed the ninety percent removed from Stéphanie’s brain at the last surgery, their world shrank to the far West Side neighborhood of St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital. 

Ann found relief inside the grand, Gothic-Revival Church of St. Paul the Apostle, a short walk from the hospital. She waited every week while Stéphanie was wheeled from one test to another: blood tests to check white and red blood cell counts, tests for balance and cognition. Increased MRIs. A full-body PET scan was ordered. Dr. Hunter conducted the highly experimental drug trials, offered like chairs to a worn-out person only to be pulled out from under again and again
and again.

Ann was not a sentimentalist. She rarely had an emotional response, even to Stéphanie’s increasingly dismal outlook. Seated in waiting rooms, she only thought about God when she heard other people’s take on cataclysmic events. 

“If God brings you to it, He will bring you through it.”

“Honey, let Him do the worrying for you.”

“God has a plan for all of us.”

Ann welcomed escapes into the increasingly familiar surroundings of St. Paul. The ornate, brightly painted altars, the sweeping archways beneath lofty cathedral ceilings, the massive, gilt-edged bible upon an oaken pulpit, and murals of the history of the faithful hung on marble walls all served to distract her. Sometimes she would leave her seat at the back and wander along a row of silent confessionals. Organ pipes rose like mutated coral from a biblical sea. Ann marveled at the deceptive scale of stained-glass windows looming high above the nave. Polished stone floors reflected the sweep upward and she felt as if she were walking somewhere between heaven and earth. Tiers of candles, like piano keys, burned with an ivory-white light. The outstretched arms of the figure of Christ, perpetually crucified, held her gaze.

Surrounded as she was by the deity’s tokens, Ann found only the absence of the outside world, a break from sterile hospitals and anxiety-charged waiting rooms, from tentative replies that said it was difficult to “tease out” what caused the changes in Stéphanie’s equilibrium, and the apprehension that came with Stéphanie’s calculated restraint.

Dr. Hunter strongly urged her patient to break what she called a vicious cycle. If cooking had become an insurmountable chore, enlist friends to shop, to prepare meals. To be immured was no longer an option. She had been lucky and now Dr. Hunter recommended “fun.” They listened and left quietly. Both knew what that meant.

“Fuck fun,” Stéphanie grumbled.

She surrendered her e-mail addresses to Ann. It was a formidable list. “They won’t respond,” Stéphanie predicted.

“We can only try,” said Ann.

Ann was stunned by the return on her enquiry. Friends responded like the ex-communicated welcomed back into the fold, their sins forgiven. Many had friendships with Stéphanie that reached back years.

“We were in school together, probably since first grade!”

“I am an old friend of Stéphanie’s. Stuck in a remote part of Italy. Please tell her I’ll see her as soon as I get back and will help in anyway I can.”

“She never returned my calls. I had very nearly given up.”

“It’s been extremely difficult for years. I feel guilty that I should have done more for her. I feel I let her down so terribly and wasn’t a good enough friend.”

Some had suffered her tantrums, unaware of her condition. Others took her at her word, that she was busy all the time. Still others knew and remained steadfast, but at the arm’s length Stéphanie had thrust them, leaving Ann an unknown.

Ann continued to reach out. Stéphanie’s old lovers were encouraged to join forces, put aside arguments and hurt feelings. They eagerly made up for lost time. Friends shopped and laundered in turns. They brought prepared meals and non-skid rugs. Ann organized visits, sent updates and answered their myriad questions as best she could. Stéphanie basked in their attention.

The e-mail arrived in the dead of night. Ann was awake, ready for it.

“Dear Ann,” Stéphanie wrote, “There’s no sun up in the sky. Stormy weather.”

Ann and her husband wasted no time. They got into a cab and Ann contacted Dr. Hunter. Within the hour Stéphanie was admitted to St. Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital.

Friends and family visited. Some offered reiki, some read to her. They rubbed lotion into her hands and feet. They kept her lips moistened. Prayers were offered.

Stéphanie’s speech became greatly impaired. She was disoriented from the morphine. She was moving toward the inevitable, leaving by degrees.

On the day the feeding tube was ordered removed by Stéphanie’s family, Ann was granted a few moments alone with her friend. Suddenly Stéphanie’s hand, now ringless, gripped Ann’s with the same force she had shown in the movie theater. Her right eye darted back and forth as if it were unglued. She made a gurgling sound and Ann leaned in close.

“This sucks,” Stéphanie rasped.

Ann nodded her head in agreement.

“Writing?” 

Taken aback, Ann replied, “Yes.”

“Long?”

Ann bit her lip, fighting tears. She stroked Stéphanie’s hair and tried to remove her hand from Stéphanie’s viselike grip. 

After a few moments, Ann said quietly, “My story is as long as it needs to be.” 

Stéphanie’s eyelids fluttered, two delicate butterflies seeking escape. She bared her teeth and flashed a rictus grin. She released Ann’s hand.

Ann left the hospital, feeling unusually calm. At the great church she started up the stairs, wavered, and returned to the street.