Once I went to watch fireworks with M., and as we were lying on the dark grass in the summer heat, our friend Nancy on his other side and all of us giddy and goofy—especially him, with an audience of two ladies who were in good moods and shorts—he named all the fireworks as they exploded and fell. I can only remember now the Countess’s Necklace, but they were funny and made me happy to be with someone who could amuse me when fireworks, which always make me sad, were rising into the dark and causing me to dissipate with them.

The summer after Kathy died, Emma had a fireworks party at her house, and we all went, lots of people, to watch them over the Hudson. And strangely, we couldn’t see them at all, just giant puffs of smoke and the concussive sounds that would follow. Emma and I running from dark hill to dark hill trying to see them, but the whole event was invisible to us, and I kept thinking, It’s like Kathy; we can all feel her, but we can’t see her, we just have to know that she’s out there sending out her sparks while all we get is the smoke.

Back on the roof, sitting in those elephant-print chairs, Kathy talking to the shy young woman with the broom who was astonishing in the way that so many Indian women seemed to be. In America the hyper-beautiful are monetized into movie stars or married to moguls, but here they were also pushing brooms or balancing their bales or begging. Once when we were in a car being driven through the cacophonous Delhi traffic, an older woman came to the passenger window where I was and begged with her eyes, holding out a palm and murmuring something. She looked like someone’s grandmother, her hair white and slightly bouffant and a silk scarf tied around her neck like an old-fashioned stewardess. The driver snarled at her but I reached into my pocket and got all the money I could find, many bills that probably amounted to five dollars, and thrust them at her. I could no longer bear not responding, could no longer bear having to look away, could no longer bear the feeling that the beggars were the equivalent of flocks of pigeons in a Roman square, rising up en masse as tourists moved among them to see the fountains. So I gave her all I could grab and when the driver admonished me, Kathy leaned over and said, reassuringly, “That was good to give her money—she was a widow…when her husband died, they turned her out into the street.” And then she told the driver in Hindi to shut the fuck up in her light lilting failing voice.