The gracious host. At our first meeting, when she was interviewing me for the job, a maid entered the room carrying a tray: white wine, crackers, and pâté, the pâté served in a small clay flowerpot. The gauche guest: after a too tightly held cracker snapped between my fingers I was too self-conscious to touch anything else.

From the obituaries and in memoriam pieces I learned several things about her that I hadn’t known before and was reminded of other things that I had known once but had completely forgotten. It was often recalled that, while she was still in school, she had had an affair with old William Faulkner.

A moment of remembrance, then, as I sat in the park, looking up at my friend’s windows. Those windows that had just been scrubbed as clean as Orwell’s ideal prose.

At my side: my grocery bags, the eggs and bread and salmon and kale and ice cream that she will never eat. That I will eat and eat until I am so full that I can eat no more. Yet will eat more.

Along comes a man with a broom and a long-handled dustpan. I know him. He is a neighborhood volunteer who keeps the park free of litter, bless him.

And bless the woman who comes each day to feed the squirrels and the birds.

Bless the squirrels and the birds.

But now that couple, across from me. They have just sat down, a young couple, and they are arguing. I can’t hear them well over the fountain’s burble and splash, but I believe they are speaking French. They have sat down on the edge of the fountain. They are young and they are beautiful—even in anger, they are beautiful, the way young people are. I do not know what they are saying but I can tell—you can always tell—that they are fighting.

Oh, please don’t fight, young people. Let this be a place of peace.

I too had a fight with someone, this very morning, I could tell them. I could interrupt the couple right now, like a crazy lady, the sort of crazy lady you meet in the park. Break into the middle of their fight, start telling them all about my own fight, the fight I had this morning on the phone with my ex. Because I told him I was afraid I couldn’t do it, I did not think that I could lie. We were going over it all, once again. If you are present at the time of death, he said, it’s a given that you’ll be questioned. I know, I know, I said, because of course I did know—how many times had we been over this? But I could imagine how, in that very moment, it might be hard for me to lie. Or, at least, to lie convincingly.

Was all I said.