I was odd to look at. Not disagreeable, but neither was I to everyone’s taste. Jay suited all tastes; he was an attractive man with a deliberate erotic emphasis in his looks.

But I must stay with her. At this moment she’s turning off the shower, wondering how thick the snow will fall. This afternoon she has an errand at the cemetery, and a blizzard will make the expressway dangerous. And if the side streets are, as usual, choked in snow, she won’t get through the endless neighborhoods – the bungalow belt. She has to go just over the city limits to – God help us! – the burial ground.

It had to be faced, however. Jay Wustrin, who had died the year before, was buried in Amy’s family’s plot. Behind this was a freakish mix-up, just the kind of screwball joke that appealed to the late Jay. He was a lawyer by profession, but he was also a comedian. In this matter, the comedian had prevailed, so that he now lay beside Amy’s mother, who had disliked – no, hated – her daughter’s husband. For all kinds of reasons, he had to be moved. There were obstacles to this move, bureaucratic problems with City Hall, with the Health Department. But the complicated legal work was finished at last. Jay Wustrin was scheduled to be moved this afternoon to another part of Waldheim Cemetery. After endless paperwork, we were all set to go. She hadn’t asked for my help. I say ‘we’ because I was somehow involved, present or not present, on a parallel mental track. Amy avoided heavy feelings and perplexities. Coming out of the shower, frowning slightly, she worked her way around the problems of exhuming and reburial. As she wrapped herself in the towel, she prayed for a March storm to shut down the cemetery. The day was fuller already than she liked her days to be.

It would have amused Jay to cause so much trouble. You could rely on Amy to do the respectable thing. Her people were respectable, German-speaking Jews from Odessa, educated in a gymnasium. They had brought Amy up to look virtuous, and I suppose it’s true that she had the appearance of a middle-class matron. Jay, by contrast, liked to think of himself and to see himself as a swinger. He chased women; he did very well at it, and he was handsome too, if your taste ran to conventional good looks – on the heavy side as he grew older. He and I had known each other as freshmen at Senn High School when I was an orphan – or non-orphan. We were close friends then. His father had owned a laundry. His mother distrusted me, for reasons I never bothered to think about. Jay and I read poetry together – T. S. Eliot, whom he called ‘El-yat,’ and Ezra Pound, whom he called ‘Pond.’ In his adolescence, he also admired Marie Stopes. Through him I was made familiar with Married Love. He was briefly a vegetarian and also a ‘post office socialist,’ arguing that all enterprises should be government run, just as the post office was. Later, very briefly, he was an anarchist. Through all these phases he was an homme à femmes. Women were his principal interest. Amy Wustrin was his second wife. I suppose he occasionally remembered that I had loved her at Senn, but the distant past didn’t much matter to him. He must have forgotten it altogether, because when he was going with Amy, he invited me to join them at the Palmer House to shower together.