DIED 2004
MY DEAREST FRIEND—THE MENSCH’S daughter—has had extremely bad luck with men. While some seemed dubious from the moment you saw them—the uproarious painter who ordered whole bottles off the bar, the unkempt, paranoid “filmmaker” in combat fatigues—this guy had a certain appeal. He was a surrealist poet from outside Los Angeles, with smooth, California-colored hair, a feline languor, a good vocabulary, a pack of Marlboro reds, a gentlemanly addiction to whatever anyone might have on hand. At the time, my husband had Vicodin, Klonopin, and sublingual morphine tablets, so the two became close. Look, here we all are on the boardwalk in Bradley Beach, New Jersey, the summer my boys were one and three. The sun is an orange-brown pill bottle in the sky. Lounging on a bench, the men squint through the taffy air at little hands waving from the Ferris wheel.
“The folly of mistaking a paradox for discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us,” wrote Paul Valéry, apparently a realist after all. Along these lines is the folly of mistaking a deluded alcoholic kleptomaniac for the love of one’s life. He probably had slipped in his own mind from being a good person to a bad person long ago, but we didn’t know it until we took him to a weekend-long birthday party near the Big Bend and so many fine lighters and sunglasses disappeared. Back in Brooklyn, he turned violent and she had to call the police to get him out of the apartment. Eventually the pleading, remorseful letters petered out and the next thing she heard he had overdosed in Europe, his head on the desk between a bottle of wine and a baguette of nearly surreal staleness.