One morning she called me at home and asked me to go that same day to a certain archival library and ask for a certain book. She wanted me to go through this book, an antique bound typescript that was not permitted to be taken out, and cull from it specific details about the lives of the people of whom the woman she was writing about was a descendant. She said that I should call ahead and ask to have the book waiting for me when I arrived. But I didn’t call ahead—I doubted that this was really necessary—and was surprised when I had to wait more than an hour for it to be brought to me.

When she saw my bill for that day’s work, she questioned the amount. When I explained about the wait, she reminded me that she had told me to call ahead; if I had done so there wouldn’t have been a wait, she said. We had words then. In the end she agreed to pay me for the extra hour and would have been happy to move on. But I didn’t want to work for her after that, and I never did again.

All this was more than forty years ago. In all that time I rarely thought about her, though I was aware that she did in fact finish her book and that it had been published. From time to time, I’d hear something about one of her glamorous parties. But as one who does not regularly read obituaries, I missed hers when it first appeared, and it wasn’t until just recently that I learned that, a few years ago, she had jumped from the penthouse apartment where she had moved sometime after I last saw her.

None of the photographs that were published with the obituaries I have seen showed her as she was at the time of death: old—about twice the age as when we first met—and depressed. Most matched the image in my head: curly dark hair, toothy smile in a thin bony face. She had a frothy ever-excited-sounding voice and a tendency to gush: Everyone was adorable. Everything was divine. The silver (or they might have been gold) ballet flats she wore around the house. Her jagged penmanship, like a drunk’s or a child’s. An exaggerated fear of getting sick. (Do you have a cold? I won’t go near my own children when they have a cold.) Shuddering as she told me about a close friend who’d found what turned out to be a malignant tumor in her neck. And it was just this tiny lump, she wailed. Gingerly palpating her own long thin neck.