So then …

We are, for the time being, the living, maimed and defective. And, today, in strange circumstances – riding in a multibillionaire’s stretch limo, the kind with amber windows and a TV aerial boomerang mounted on the trunk. And following the remains of an old pal who, for an interval (two hours), arranged to escape from the grave.

Any one of the headstones we passed but couldn’t see through the immunizing, smoked limo windows might have been that of my father (my mother was buried in Arizona). You wouldn’t expect such a personality as mine to go for family piety. I hadn’t been out in the cemetery for years and years.

Hereabouts our neighbors and some of our schoolmates lay buried.

If I’m going to do anything at all before my turn comes, I thought, I’d better begin to make my moves.

‘Has it all been arranged? For Jay, I mean. If we should arrive with his coffin and no grave waiting …’

‘Oh, it’s dug. I took care of that … What really worried me was that the casket might open when it was being lifted. I thought the body might fall out.’

‘It crossed my mind too,’ I said. ‘But it couldn’t happen. These guys know their job. It’s routine, and the equipment is complete. They lay the coffin on those canvas bands, and then the little engine starts up, and in one smooth minute the coffin is lying on the bottom … You have the look of thinking something special, Amy.’

‘Something like musical chairs, as they used to be played in kindergarten,’ she said. ‘When the piano stopped, you dropped into an empty seat. Getting buried in my dad’s grave was Jay’s idea of a witty thing.’

And how did I fit into this picture? My seldom barbered, spiky black hair, chub lips. Yes, and those concave shins you saw again and again, leafing through Hokusai. I kept a fat book of his drawings in my office on Van Buren Street. Yet Amy and I, as high-school sophomores, had often had petting parties, as they used to be called. She had liked me well enough then. We kissed madly and gripped each other. I sank my face in the musky damp of the raccoon fur.

‘There’s something I have to ask you, Harry,’ said Amy. ‘I’ve been fighting it, but I can’t help asking one more time. I’ve never had a satisfactory answer. Did you or did you not listen to me on tape?’

I held my breath for a few pulses; then, like the practiced liar that I am, I denied it again. But sometimes the truth will hitch a short ride with your finest lies. I saw that she didn’t believe me, so I passed to what was more important. I said, ‘Listening wouldn’t have changed a whole lifetime of feeling. First you married Berner and had kids by him. We were in the shower together.’

‘Yes.’

‘Jay had a wife then. You were still married to Berner. Only a year earlier, I had eloped with Mary. Next thing I knew, you were Jay’s wife. My feeling for you remained what it was.’