The chauffeur came to the door of the limo to help Amy out. I stood at her back, my fingers interknit behind me.

It was Jay Wustrin’s theatrical will to come back from the grave. That was why the deal was made with Amy’s father. As kids fifty-odd years ago, he and I had seen so many grave movies with Boris Karloff or Bela Lugosi. Lonely churchyards in the Carpathians, gloomy castles in the background. When the Count of Monte Cristo escaped from the Château d’If, Jay, who was wildly excited, said that I was cold-blooded. My answer was: ‘I’m not going to let them lay all kinds of feelings on me.’

‘I’m the one with the heart!’ Jay declared. ‘You’re too remote a one.’

In the stretch limo, a world unto itself, as much so in the cemetery as on Michigan Boulevard, we slowly followed the van. ‘This is all Jay’s idea. He got us out here, this winter day,’ said Amy. ‘Even though in the last year or two he was so thin, so meek. He was looking for familiar faces, and people were cutting him, which normally would have driven him wild –’

‘I admit I avoided him too.’

‘Why did you?’

‘A business matter. Money from Burma he was supposed to be holding for me. I wasn’t supposed to have any such money, and I sent it by messenger. He signed receipts when he took it. Then, when I asked for it, he said he’d have to pay it back in installments.’

‘It’s the first I hear of this.’

‘No reason why you should have heard. And actually Jay was a generous friend. He never forgot my birthday. He made me fine gifts – a beautiful set of Jowett’s Plato, and The Decline and Fall in an old edition. I still own them, read them. I occasionally try to tell people what’s in them.’

‘Tell me about the Burma money …’

‘That was hanky-panky. Let’s not go into it.’

‘It’s your call,’ said Amy. ‘But his body had to be moved. I couldn’t have my parents separated. My mother would never forgive it. What if my dad did lose his marbles? After fifty years of the marriage bed, her wish was that it should be eternal.’

Just as Amy and Jay had for decades slept nude together, inhaling each other’s odors, her hands familiar with the man’s body hair. Even her face creams and his night grunts would have entered into it. And shared cakes of soap and clothes closets and dinners – such a complex of intimacies.

One can give such particulars too much value. Bourgeois habits have no claim to be sanctified or eternalized. All that is mainstream stuff, and I’ve never really been a mainstream type. I’ve always been a fairly hard judge of people. Especially if they thought too well of themselves – were proud of their intelligence or believed they knew everything there was to know about the British Empire or the US Constitution – I put them down, no quarter given, no margin for mercy. So why should I go easy on Jay Wustrin! He married the only woman I had ever loved, and he made an utter fuck-up of their life together.