DIED 2016
I MET HER BECAUSE she was madly in love with her upstairs neighbor in the apartment building, the dashing, handsome, totally gay Southern Gentleman. The first mention of her in my inbox is him telling me—typos galore, he’s already failing—that she’s brought red roses for the party he’s having that night, the last big one. The two of them with their sprightly gatherings! What with that creaky old elevator and its upholstered bench, you felt you were going to a cocktail party in the 1940s. Her “salon” involved a potluck hors d’oeuvre spread on her mahogany table, deviled eggs, smoked salmon on brown bread, and a generous open bar. She drank martinis, but you have whatever you want, dear. The walls were crimson, covered with paintings.
She had once been the top-seeded women’s squash player in Maryland, but now she was the skinny, kooky old lady with bad hips and a fluffy dog, whom she took everywhere, as if Baltimore were Paris, and several months a year they would go to the real Paris, where I assume she met with less resistance when taking him to restaurants and theaters. Fucking A! she would say, if they wouldn’t admit the dog, and throw her tickets in the trash and go home.
Despite her jaunty air and festive urges, there was something desperate about her. She was lonely and secretive, deeply miserable about growing old. I did not fully grasp this until the night I arrived in her lobby with a plate of tuna canapés and no one answered the buzzer. Then I saw the note taped to the door: our hostess had been hospitalized. A few months later, she failed at suicide for the third time, destroying her liver and kidneys. A committee went to the hospital to beg the doctors to let her go.
I had many questions, but most of them would never be answered. I did learn, at the cocktail party held in her apartment instead of a funeral, that she had appointed guardians and left a bequest for the care of her dog. Which led to the realization that, despite certain worrisome similarities, I am far luckier than she. I was never an athlete, I have no secrets, and I would not in a million years leave the dog.