“People should be at their own funerals,” he said. “Edward would have lived—what a crazy thing to imagine—if he had known what his funeral would be like.” He said it half-humorously.

“It did seem for a moment as if we were sharing, as if we were part of one another. It was that old familiar Donne, wasn’t it?” Talk welled up in her like a saving grace. The dreadful arid desert was somehow crossed. They could avoid the emptiness if they talked loudly enough, long enough, drank enough.

“That—and just the people—Tanner and Wadsworth up from Columbia—quite a thing, that—and Warlock,” Damon said with satisfaction as if each of these names were a medal to be pinned on Edward’s chest. He killed himself, but Warlock came to the funeral, Julia thought bitterly. “Pretty lonely for Isabel, I must say. And now she’s got to spend the afternoon trying to get the will straightened out. I hear it’s a mess. The lawyers will get everything they can for the family, of course, and that’s not what Edward wanted.”

“He’s an unconscionably long time a-dying.” Julia wished that it were really over, that they would not have to talk about it any more, yet she knew they would have to talk about it still for a long, long time, get under these surfaces to their own wounds and somehow lick them clean.

“What a queer thing to say!”

“Was it? I guess I resent this feeling of carrying his death all the time inside me, like a dead foetus—when shall we be free of it, Damon?”

“Oh for Christ’s sake, Julia. He’s dead now. That’s what funerals are for, to make it final—didn’t you feel at all relieved? I did.” He was quite cross. She had known he would be.

“Yes, I’m sure you did.” You move so fast, Damon, do you ever catch up with yourself? she wanted to ask. But what was the use of hurting him now?

“You sound quite bitter.”