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.What have you learned, Victor? What have you learned? For your clever little questions, what answers have you found?I’ve done my trials.Please, you’ve been dating a Ziegfeld dancer.And when that got too heavy, you imported a little girl as your nurse.You left me.You left me here.Of course.Me, Ben Lemery.Me, the best of your days, your fugitive, your amorous new body.How can you—What, darling?No one’s perfect.Says the man who never grieved.That’s insane.I have grieved more than anyone could possibly—No, you haven’t.It is the one thing you have not done.You’re like that case study.Me dying was your trauma, I was the hippocampus surgically removed from your life and you’ve refused to deal with the present ever since.You have no right.Well, tell that to the police.What?There’s a patrol car in the parking lot.Seriously.He’s saying something over the bullhorn.He says I’m trespassing.He says I have to leave.Maybe you should put on some shorts.What should I do?Get dressed? Victor, do what you want!What if I don’t know what I want?Do you remember why we were going to Italy?A fresh start.A new ending.Show me.Why did I return home from California?I don’t know.I never knew.Because I loved you.You loved me.Because what we’d done to each other wasn’t due to a lack of love.The point, darling, of that screenplay is that you never know what lurks beneath people, even when they’re perfect on paper.Well, we were different.We knew the depths of each other.It wasn’t about us, because I didn’t need it to be.I sat there at my desk thinking, our last act can still be written together.How many times have you seen The Perfect Human since I died?I don’t know.Liar, it’s a fifteen-minute film, you count everything.How many times have you identified with the man in the box?Twenty-three.And did you kill Ben Lemery?I don’t know.Again.How am I supposed to know? How can I possibly?Go back.You were a child, you were watching TV.Why should you have gotten up and gone over to his house?But I knew what he was planning.I didn’t tell anyone.I’m r esponsible.Fine, but you’ve never taken responsibility, have you? You’ve held on to this virtue of being unsure, unable to trust your memories when instead of grieving and getting over it, you’ve squatted in the middle, clutching your precious relativity, and now you’ve cracked.Real life isn’t relative, Victor, a chair is a fucking chair, we do things or we don’t, and either way there’s a cause.Did you kill him? Did you kill Ben?No.But when Cornelia brought her boyfriend home, weren’t you jealous? When Russell called, weren’t you afraid he’d reclaim your private chef, the daughter we never had?You left me.Like a dog, darling, you smelled her boyfriend off that tissue, the other male in your domain.And Russell, whom you despise—What?You hate everything about him, and still you’re full of envy, for Russell’s sins, for Cornelia’s whimsy, for Regina’s daring, for Lucy’s awareness, for Betsy’s tongue and Joel’s addictions.For life, you hate them, yet you wish more than anything to be right there alongside.Fine, it’s true.What you wanted from Regina and Cornelia, Victor, you wanted from spite.Against me for dying, just when you were being drawn back into life.So to drown, this would be your revenge against me, whom you hated, whom you hate.Yes.Then grieve, Victor.Grieve now.Sara, everything I regret—Grieve, Victor, for yourself.But I don’t know how.fiveBetsy’ s funeral was scheduled for a Wednesday morning, followed by a lunch buffet reception at Jordan Pond.The sunlight was white on the rocks, yellow on the water.Joel and I took the early ferry in together from Little Cranberry to Northeast Harbor, though we drove in separate cars from the parking lot: me in the Audi, Joel in Betsy’s Cutlass Ciera because he’d recently bent the front axle of his Explorer on public property.In the week before she died, when she overheard death making plans, Betsy told Joel and me exactly what she wanted for her memorial.More precisely, she let us know what she did not want: no obituary in the newspaper, no program announcement at a church.“If any of the snobs want to miss me, they can put a plaque up at the polo club: Betsy Gardner was not a member.”To be cremated and have her ashes buried next to Bill’s in the plot in Bar Harbor was Betsy’s wish, and at graveside to have a short testimonial read by Joel, followed by a reception at Jordan Pond, with floral arrangements of mountain laurel and red sweet peas.Only family would be invited, and only the members she liked: Joel, me, Sara’s sister, Miriam, and a few relatives from Bill’s side I’d never met.Miriam, who lived in Kansas City, sent us a foam cooler of frozen brisket.She said that she and her husband would come right away.She said she was glad to hear from me and hoped I was well, and that I might find a way to talk to God about my grief.For the funeral I wore a green tie Betsy had once given me for Christmas, with a pattern of whales having sex.Already a small crowd of people was milling around the entrance.The cemetery was small, overlooking Bar Harbor, surrounded by a pine forest and wild ferns.Joel was nowhere to be seen, though we’d left the ferry parking lot at the same time.The air was absolutely still.I was a little breathless when I arrived, my throat constricting.I couldn’t get out of the car.My blood seemed to get slower by the second.I avoided looking through the windshield and turned up the radio, some man yelling at me about immigration.I felt a hundred things flowing through me, with no sieve to catch them.Miriam stepped away from a stout pair of old women in hats and came over, opened the car door, and hugged me around the waist once I was standing.She looked like Sara only in the nose and eyes, the rest of her was petite and round, but still it was Sara who was standing in front of me.“I always run into you at funerals,” Miriam said, and patted my chest with both hands.I saw not Sara but Betsy in her face, I realized, which cheered me up, oddly.Miriam introduced me to her husband, a recent acquisition, Gary, the potbellied music instructor, a jazz saxophonist my age with a mustache, who nodded more than he spoke.Miriam was recounting a favorite story about Betsy when Joel arrived, parking Betsy’s car at the bottom of the cemetery.The fluorescent orange stripe on the driver’s-side door was brightly visible in the sun.Joel and I had spent a lot of time together in the preceding weeks.He was red faced and sweating, grizzled on the chin and jowls, wearing a wool blue blazer that didn’t fit him, carrying a bouquet of lilacs.I met him halfway to the gate and he squeezed my biceps but wouldn’t meet my eyes.He hitched up his khakis, passed me the flowers, and strode off to speak with the grave diggers, an old Mainer and a young Hispanic guy both wearing neckties tucked into their overalls.We slowly gathered around the burial site.Joel greeted everyone.He started by reading from a piece of notepaper, “My mother was not a religious person.She did not believe in God.She did not believe in a lot of things
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