Good Mourning (14 page)

I'll admit it: I was relieved not to be in that room. It didn't bother me so much that Charlie/Charles/Chuck had cheated—although it was certainly not ideal. I was bothered
by the fact that he had done it so fully. He didn't have some quiet fling; he went out and had a whole other family. I couldn't imagine how Linda must have felt, seeing her husband's kid and not being his mother. If anything, Sarah at least had a piece of her husband through the child. Linda just had her memories, and even those were probably tainted now. Can you love someone if you didn't know a whole other part of their life even existed? Does that count as really even knowing them? I didn't know the answer, but I did have one idea: a scavenger hunt. The Crawford employee orientation video (yes, that actually existed) had specifically said not to play hide-and-seek with children in the funeral home—too much opportunity for a traumatic dead-body ­encounter—but it never mentioned scavenger hunts.

“What's your name?” I asked the boy.

He swung his legs under the chair, back and forth, back and forth. “Peter,” he said, never taking his eyes up from the floor.

“Well, Peter, it's nice to meet you. I'm Liz. Do you want to play a game with me?”

Peter shook his head.

“Aw, please?” I said. “I need somebody to play with. It's a fun game, I promise.”

There were no services going on until much later that day, so I made a short list of things Peter might find in the funeral home—mints, tissues, latex gloves, coffee cups. The kid had never played scavenger hunt before—I thought children
in the suburbs
lived
for that kind of stuff—so I explained the rules and he quickly caught on. By the time Sarah and Linda were walking out of Tony's office an hour later, Peter had a paper cup filled with little “treasures” he had collected. Even Monica had given him one of her Sharpies in a rare moment of compassion. “Here, take a red one too,” she'd said playfully. For a moment, I actually liked her. Well, sort of.

Charlie was Jewish, and so the funeral was the next day. I got to Crawford early, which had become my new norm. Only the
shomer
was there when I arrived.
Shomrim
were usually hired by Jewish families to act as a “watchman” of sorts; the idea is that a person's body must be guarded until it is buried. The
shomer
is also
supposed to say prayers over the body, but on one occasion at our sister funeral home, a bunch of them were caught watching porn on the company computer. They weren't even savvy enough to delete the browsing history, and so when the web browser started auto-­filling with things like “free Asian hardcore” whenever someone typed “F,” there was no denying what was going on. (It was also totally obvious who was doing the searching, since most of the activity happened overnight. The bosses were pretty sure the corpses weren't Googling porn.)

“Morning,” I said to the
shomer
, dragging my bag into my office. Tony had taken over most of the arrangements for the Pressman funeral, but since I had initially taken the call, I wanted to be there to make sure everything was going according to plan.

Tony showed up an hour later. The plan was this: Linda Pressman would host a service for Charlie at ten thirty a.m. with her friends and family, and then Sarah would host a ­separate service that afternoon. The women each paid for a service but split the cost of the casket—and even though flowers aren't traditional at a Jewish funeral, they had them anyway, and split those too. The only official “swap” we would make was to very specific arrangements. For instance, we would wait to bring out the rose arrangement with a ribbon that said “Loving Father” until Sarah's service. The women also agreed not to divulge too much in the obituary. Usually, the last line included names of close family members—but they just left that blank. Charlie was “loved,” but nobody was naming by whom.

After the first service—which went off without a hitch, despite my anxiety—Linda was supposed to go home and then come back after all of Sarah's guests left for the burial. But instead she lingered in the room, staring at her Charlie . . . who also happened to be someone
else's
Chuck. She was still in there when Sarah and Peter walked in to say their own private good-bye. “Should we do something?” I whispered to Tony. This was supposed to be Sarah's time—she had paid for it, and they had agreed.

“Let's just wait a minute,” said Tony.

And then it happened: one of the moments of genuine compassion that can sometimes only happen at a funeral. Sarah invited Linda to stay. They didn't hug or anything, but the
women looked at each other warmly, and Linda glanced at Peter with—I swear it—a look of love. He might not have been her son, but he was Charlie's son—and that was still something. Maybe real love isn't knowing everything about someone, but embracing the parts you do know ­wholeheartedly.

Linda spent most of the service lingering in the back. Nobody who came knew who she was, nor did they ask. Once the last of Sarah's guests left—she had requested a private burial, so everyone knew to skedaddle—she, Linda, and Peter got into a black limo and drove off to the cemetery. Who knows? Maybe each really did suspect the other had existed all those years. Maybe they loved Charlie enough, both of them, to ignore any suspicions. As crazy as it sounds, I was glad, in that moment, that Linda had Sarah. Sarah was the only other person who could understand
exactly
what she was going through. I wondered if the two would remain friends, or if the burial would be the end—a final good-bye after the final good-bye, each now knowing a little more about the man she'd loved.

BY THE
TIME
I got back to my apartment that night, it was seven thirty. I didn't even have time to change out of my black suit—my friends were coming over in half an hour. I had stopped at Lobel's, a small, upscale butcher near Crawford, and bought a roasted chicken I could possibly pass off as my own. I opened my fridge to see what
I could summon from the dead for a side. After a quick assessment, I decided the wilting vegetables I had ordered a week before on FreshDirect would have to do. I used to make more elaborate meals—rack of lamb with mint jelly, vegetarian lasagna with fresh garlic bread—but this was the best I could do at the moment. I hoped I could pull off a meal that would say,
Look how amazing I am at juggling my life!
but I had a sinking feeling that I would have been better off ordering sushi.

Gaby and Ben arrived together, with Max following fifteen minutes later. He had been working such late nights at the office, I was surprised he could make it at all. “And miss my chance to see my long-lost sister?” he joked. “Never.”

“You're starting to sound like Elaine,” I said, giving him a hug.

“If that were really true, I would politely request you just shoot me right now,” he said.

“I won't worry until you start calling me lovey girl,” I said. Even though I was exhausted, not to mention unnerved from the Pressman drama, it felt so
good
to be around family and friends again. I had been spending so much time consoling others' loved ones that it was sometimes hard to muster the energy to be there for the people
I
loved most.

“You guys won't believe the day I had,” I told them, pouring us each a glass of wine. Ben grabbed the same corner of the couch he always did and pulled a cashmere blanket around his feet.

“Do tell!” he said in a fake WASPy accent. “Leave no detail out.”

“No, I'm serious,” I said, not seriously at all. “It was insane. We had two funerals for the same guy, because
both of his wives
wanted to have a service. He had two wives!”

Gaby was the only one who elicited the expected reaction. “
Oh my!
Are you serious?” she said, her big eyes growing even wider. “Why would someone even want that headache? I mean, it would just be so exhausting.”

“You would think, but this went on for years,” I said. “The guy somehow pulled it off.”

Ben shrugged. “Dudes at the hedge fund do that stuff all the time,” he said. (Ben was an up-and-comer at a large fund in Manhattan. Even at twenty-five, he was making more than a million a year.) “Pretty much any time we go out on a ‘client dinner,' one of them is cheating on his wife. And girlfriends, it's like, forget it. Girlfriends don't even count.”

I felt a small pang hearing the last line. A year earlier, I had dated a guy—I'll call him Carlo—who seemed like bad news from the get-go. He was beyond handsome—probably the hottest guy I had ever met—and while I'd never been lacking in confidence, even I thought,
Don't go near him, he'll totally cheat on you
. But Carlo was persistent; even though he worked eighteen-hour days at a hedge fund, he would cook late-night dinners and have a glass of wine already poured for me when I walked through the door. After we had been dating for a month—casually, or so I thought—
he took me to a bookstore, walked me to the travel section, and said, “Pick a place.” I looked at him like he was nuts. He knew my fascination with travel; I kept a map where I actually crossed off places I had been and big circles over countries that were next on my list. But this was over the top.

“Oh my God, no,” I said, smiling. The gesture was sweet, but a random trip to
anywhere
with a drop-dead gorgeous guy I barely knew?

“Come on,” he said, tickling my side. “You're the girl who's up for anything. Well, here's your anything. Where should we go?”

I wanted to go somewhere he had never been as well, and so after a half hour of deliberation, we settled on Vienna. “Now let's go to your place and pack your bag,” he said. “We're going tonight.”

When we got back from Europe, my little fling with Carlo was turning into a full-fledged relationship. I kept telling myself that I needed to be careful, but even my guy friends said Carlo seemed like a winner, and I had to admit, he
was
a lot of fun. I was just starting to let my guard down when Carlo called one day to ask for the keys to the garage where I kept my bicycle. It was in my mom's building—I hadn't touched it since my dad got sick, since he and I used to ride together in Central Park. It was too painful. A reminder of my father's decline.

“I told you,” I said. “I can't go in there. It's too hard.”

“What if I bring your bicycle to
you
instead?” he said.

Later that afternoon, my buzzer rang, and there was Carlo standing on the sidewalk with my bike. He had had it cleaned—it looked better than when my dad bought it for me almost a decade earlier. I held back tears as I saw him standing there with it, and again as we rode through Central Park together.

About a week later, Ben called. “Liz, I have to tell you something,” he said. His voice was so somber, I thought he was going to tell me someone had died. “And I hate that I have to call and tell you this, but as your friend, you need to know.”

“Okay,” I said, my heart sinking.
What happened that could be
this
bad?

“Carlo cheated on you,” he said. Just like that. No explanation, just four flat words that felt like a dagger.

“Okay,” I said.
Liz, you expected this. You knew it would happen. You knew it all along
.

“I'm sorry,” said Ben. He went on to describe how he knew: The woman Carlo had been hooking up with on the side was angry that he wouldn't commit to her. So she stole his phone and forwarded an e-mail Carlo had sent her—a very flirty e-mail—to all of my close friends. (We ran in the same circle, so Carlo had most of their contact info in previous group e-mails.)

“Send it to me,” I said, hanging up the phone.

I took a deep breath when the e-mail popped up in my
inbox a minute later. It wasn't the message that bothered me, although it
did
make me a little queasy to have my suspicions about Carlo confirmed. What hurt most was the time stamp. It was marked at 3:40 p.m.—just twenty minutes before Carlo had been standing outside my building with my bike.

Does an e-mail count as cheating? Meh, that depends on the person. For me, the fact that Carlo could do something so sweet and so personal, and then, at almost the exact same time, flirt with another woman—that was the ultimate betrayal. A drunken kiss at a club, a playboy attitude—those wouldn't have hurt so much. I once broke up with a guy because of all the women constantly throwing themselves at him at parties. “But, Liz,” he told me, “I would
never
cheat on you.” I told him that it was just a matter of time, like a loaded gun in his pocket. As a joke, he bought me a necklace made out of bullets before I walked out his door and out of his life. That's just how it was: the people I knew were going out all the time. A generation of kids raised by doormen grew into a swarm of twentysomethings who barely knew what a healthy relationship even looked like. Parties and fund-raisers, fancy dinners and Tuesday-night black-tie galas—that was our world. Everyone was rich. Everyone was attractive. Add in an open bar, and, well, things happen. I was always realistic about that.