I stopped in the vintage shop three doors down and picked out an armful of dresses—things in featherweight silk, the kind of things I never wore because of how impractical they were. As I stepped into a dressing room, the shop’s bell rang, and two young women walked in. They browsed and chatted idly to each other while I stayed behind the curtain, trying on dress after dress until I fit into a long, sparkly purple gown.

When I had it halfway over my head, one of the women said a word so familiar that I stopped and listened.

“…Logan, but apparently she was so crazy that she would literally disassociate,” said one of them, in a nasty, gossipy tone, dripping with delight. “My boss said that once she got so drunk they had to pump her stomach. Nobody was surprised when she did it, you know? I mean, look at her work. It was all one long prelude.”

“Kind of brilliant, if you think about it. She’s like a saint now,” the other girl said. “She owns death.” She sounded jealous, and slightly irritated, like Carey had taken control of an idea that should have rightly been up for grabs. A wave of rage swelled in me. They had no right to say those things about Carey. I wanted to jump out of the changing room and scream at them: You don’t know a thing about Carey Logan. Keep her name out of your thoughtless mouths.

But I didn’t get the chance. I was still pulling the dress from my naked shoulders when the bell rang again, and they walked out the door.

*  *  *

I drove back toward Pine City with the dress on a hanger, intending to pull over before the party to change so that it didn’t wrinkle too much. I felt a current of electric fever as I drove: I was an artist, upstate, going to a party at Max and Charlie’s.

Max and Charlie. My friends Max and Charlie. What a thing to say.

When I first met Charles Eliot—Charlie to me later—he’d looked exactly like every other insecure hetero middle-aged narcissist I’d ever met, a category of Manhattan man whose tastes are so insistent, so domineering and mediagenic, that we now have cortados in every coffee shop and hand-sharpened Blackwing pencils at every subway newsstand, lavender chewing gum and copies of The Gentlewoman side by side with herbal boner pills and magazines called King and Side Bitch to remind us that the world will sell us anything we want. Charlie was another product to me at first, a glossy paper cutout. Lean, tall, dark hair streaked here and there with gray, trendy eyeglasses, fine trousers and shoes, a black cashmere sweater. A man concerned with appearances.

“This is my husband!” Max had shrieked at me when we ran into each other unexpectedly at a party, downtown, somewhere in Tribeca. “Can you believe it?”