Competitive Grieving Read online

  An aneurysm? Something in his brain erupted? That kind of thing happened to people I didn’t know—a kid at a nearby elementary school; a coworker’s friend’s wife. An aneurysm. I realized I was feeling almost relieved. What had I thought it would be? Murder? “In LA?”

  “I guess? Didn’t you say he was staying in the network’s temporary housing?”

  A nameless, faceless apartment: blank walls, generic Marilyn Monroe and Casablanca prints, popcorn ceilings, beige cabinetry, a chipped sink, the dry heat of the Valley.

  “Was he with anyone?”

  Gretchen shook her head. “It sounds like he was alone.”

  It was exactly as he would have feared, then. We had talked with horror about the lonely ladies no one finds for weeks, who get eaten by their cats. Cat ladies. I was definitely going to have trouble making that cool.

  I pictured my mother’s condolence call to Stewart’s mother, Helen Beasley. The women hadn’t been friends in decades. They probably hadn’t even spoken since Stewart and I were in middle school together. They weren’t fond of each other. But now, with this, past slights were meaningless. I knew I should call my mom, but I didn’t want to—not yet. Hearing her “careful” voice would break me. The slow way she’d say my name.

  “I’m so sorry, bug,” Gretchen was saying. “I know how much you loved him. Love him.” She wrapped her arms around me and hugged me for a long time then, showing no signs of letting go. Her cashmere sweater smelled safe and knowable, like the Jo Malone perfume she’d worn forever—vanilla and fireplace.

  Unexpectedly, I felt Gretchen’s shoulders begin to quake in place of my own as she released a quiet sob. I smoothed her hair. We stayed like that for several minutes, me comforting her.

  Finally, we parted. Is it weird that, even with my closest people, I sometimes feel awkward in those intimate moments? I didn’t quite know where to look. Gretchen wiped stray eyeliner from beneath her eyes and tears from her flushed cheeks.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Yeah,” she said with a shuttering sigh. “You know, I didn’t really like him. He was your friend.”

  Against the odds, I laughed. Sharp and loud. “I know.”

  “It’s just, I didn’t think he was a very good friend to you. After all those years. The way he moved in and out of your world. The way he always criticized your decisions and soaked up all the light.”

  “I know.”

  “And he was pompous!”

  “He could be, yeah.”

  “And he thought he was so adorable. And it was like, oh, God forbid Wren make any friends after high school! Like God forbid you connect with anyone other than him—or have a boyfriend! And I know you think we competed for your attention, but he didn’t own you, you know?! I mean—”

  “G. He’s dead. I think you can put the argument to rest too.”

  Gretchen pressed her lips together. “Right. Sorry.”

  I lifted my legs up onto the couch and hugged my knees to my chest. “So why the tears for the pompous jerk?”

  “’Cause it’s still terrible and so, so sad. His poor mother. His poor family. Poor you. It’s just a shame and a waste and . . . hey, here’s a better question: why no tears from you?”

  I blinked my dry eyes, trying to ignore my thumping heart. “I have no idea. Shock?” ’Cause I’m defective?

  “Totally shock,” Gretchen nodded. “The shit will really go down later. Don’t you worry.”

  I wondered. I knew from past experience—when my grandfather died, for example—that I tended to go quiet in the face of others’ grief. It might have been Gretchen’s tears that staunched my own. As my parents sat at his hospital bedside, heads bent and faces damp, I watched from the doorway, hyper-conscious of how artificial the scene felt, half expecting the cast of some medical drama like Grey’s Anatomy to appear. It felt so scripted; I couldn’t connect to the catharsis.

  “Everyone does grief differently,” my parents assured me, when I confessed to feeling numb. “This is how you cope.” People always want to let you off the hook when you’ve suffered a loss.

  A loss. My loss.

  “Stewart. Gone,” I repeated, hoping to make the news penetrate. “A world without Stewart.” I rubbed my forehead with my palm like a genie might pop out and impart some wisdom—or a different outcome. “I don’t remember life before we met. I can’t believe it’s true. Just something bursts in his brain, something maybe waiting there since he was born, and that’s it? His life is just over? Irreparably? It doesn’t make sense.”

  “It’s so hard to believe; he was larger than life. People always say that, but he really was. I guess it’s just a lesson to never say no to that third martini . . . and sixth beer. Make the most of your time while you can.” Gretchen slumped back against the couch cushions, her eyes finding the TV screen. “Speaking of which, you still watch The Bachelor?”

  “You know I do.” I rolled my eyes. “I named my cat, ‘Chris Harrison, so.’ ”

  “Unbelievable. You look so smart.”

  “Really? You’re going to give me shit? Right now?”

  Gretchen smirked. We went silent, the normalcy of our banter disorienting.

  I exhaled, trying to find my place in the moment. “Stewart. Just gone? Forever? Sorry. I’ll probably need to repeat that eight thousand more times before it begins to sink in.”

  Gretchen bit her lip as her eyes welled. “Don’t apologize. Whatever you need.”

  I felt empty. Like I needed to do something, to fix things, but there was nothing to do. The heat in the apartment kicked on, banging like a baby with kitchen pans. I toyed with a string hanging from the wrist of my sweatshirt. I thought about Stewart, the way he would shrug and smile self-consciously when he made a good joke. The way his body shook when he laughed. I don’t know why.

  After a minute or so, Gretchen gestured toward the TV, a frozen frame of the bachelor seated on a volcanic rock, pondering love, life, and the efficacy of spray tans. “So this is the reunion show, right? ’Cause he already picked the brunette from Alabama yesterday?”

  I looked at Gretchen. I sighed. “Spoiler alert.”

  A few feet away, Chris Harrison the cat puked on the rug.

  The evening was too good to be true.

  Chapter 3

  Stewart. Gone.

  Chapter 4

  A small funeral was planned for two days later. I doubted Helen Beasley was feeling conciliatory enough to put my parents on the guest list. Old habits die hard—even when a person has too. I understood, but going alone sounded like torture.

  Stewart’s older sister, Kate, had reached out via email with the details. Like a freak, I got a jolt of excitement when I first saw her name in my inbox, before I remembered that I’m an adult now and she was emailing because my best friend is dead. I had idolized Kate as a kid. Her wavy red hair and red lips reminded me of Ariel from The Little Mermaid. That would have been enough to win my undying affection, but also, even before Stewart’s father, Ted, started making so much money, Helen had transformed the Beasley’s apartment into something out of a catalogue and her daughter’s room into what seemed to me like a fantasyland. Kate had a full-on canopy bed, the kind with an excess of lace-trimmed pillows and dust ruffles, a crystal chandelier in the shape of a boat hanging from her ceiling and one of those life-size stuffed horses from FAO Schwartz standing guard in a corner. As far as I was concerned, no one actually owned toys like that. They only existed as kid bait, to be ogled through store windows.

  Kate and Stewart bickered a ton—normal sibling stuff. She didn’t want her stupid little brother in her face. But sometimes, on slow Sundays when no one better was around, she would take me by the hand and lead me away from Stewart’s clutter of superheroes and smelly Nikes into the land of all things pink. We would bake muffins in her Easy-Bake Oven or have a tea party with her American Girl dolls.
After the playdate ended, when I returned to my own ordinary bedroom, the expressions on the faces of my stuffed animals, piled high on the twin bed, looked sadder than before. The art supply bins looked more used. Later, as teens, Kate gave me and Stewart our first pot, put us on VIP lists for parties, talked trash with me about mean boys.

  It had been more than a decade since we’d seen each other. Maybe the last time had been at Stewart’s twenty-first birthday party? He was still a struggling actor then. He allowed his mother to throw him this tasteful dinner party at Le Bernardin—all wrong. Afterward, he and I had snuck off to a nearby Bennigan’s and gotten wasted and sick on whisky shots and chili fries.

  Stewart. Gone.

  I stared at Kate’s message:

  Wren, of course by now you’ve heard about Stewart. I’m afraid we lost him on Monday night. We’re still trying to wrap our minds around all of this. I wanted to make sure to give you the funeral details (that feels so surreal to type—I wish I could delete it):

  Riverside Memorial Chapel

  180 West 76th Street

  Thursday; 10:00 a.m.

  At my mother’s request, we’ve kept the list intimate, but if you know of anyone significant who we might have missed, please pass on the details.

  I look forward to seeing you. I wish it was under better circumstances.

  Best,

  Kate

  Riverside Memorial Chapel. Of course. For the Upper West Side Jewish set, it’s the place to go when you’re dead. I’d attended funerals there for my own grandfather, an ex-boyfriend’s great aunt, a close friend’s mother. I tried to picture walking in there to say goodbye to Stewart. I shut my eyes against the image. Despite my flight instinct, I reminded myself that the communal ritual was a chance for catharsis created to help mourners take their first shaky steps forward.

  I adjusted my position on the couch cushions for the eight-hundredth time, my iPhone in hand. Every possible response to Kate’s email seemed wrong. How do you express sadness without appropriating the family’s tragedy? I didn’t want her to feel like she had to comfort me.

  “I’m sorry for your loss” seemed too formal.

  “How can he be gone?” seemed too personal.

  “This must be a difficult time” seemed too trite.

  “I called him an ‘asshat’ the last time we spoke” didn’t seem quite right either.

  I also couldn’t think of anyone they might have forgotten who should be invited. Stewart kept in better touch with our high school friends than I did. He had more tolerance for their antics as time passed. I talked to him regularly, but only saw the rest of our classmates at reunions and chance run-ins on the subway (when I didn’t have time to hide). I’d come to drinks with his various hangers-on throughout the years, too, but had no clue who had stayed in the fold. These groups seemed to swarm in and out of his life like seasonal insects: his college friends, his LA friends, his famous friends. The relationship Stewart and I had was independent of all that, separate from his TV career and my grant writing job, from his many girlfriends and my occasional boyfriends, from his poker buddies and my book club ladies. (Why did I sound like such a loser in the unraveling of this?)

  Our friendship, once we chose it for ourselves, had been its own entity. We’d known each other since birth, of course. Our families had been next-door neighbors, on the same floor of the same prewar apartment building, and our mothers had been inseparable while pregnant, sucking on lemon wedges to quell morning sickness and bonding over itchy bellies. But once Stewart’s family moved to Central Park West, just blocks but also, in Helen’s case, a world away, our mothers lost touch. Stewart and I drifted apart, too, despite being at the same school. Maybe we even avoided each other out of embarrassment, knowing that—literally and metaphorically—somewhere there existed photos of us in the bath together as babies. We had nothing in common—whatever that means when you’re six or seven years old—and we never hung out, until one day our third-grade teacher, Mrs. Thompson, asked me to help Stewart with grammar homework during a “choice” period.

  Resigned, we sat beside each other at a round wooden table, stained with colored ink. We were studying the Middle Ages and someone had left a dog-eared copy of The Once and Future King behind.

  “What part of speech is ‘running’?” I prompted.

  “It’s the part where I go play basketball instead of sit here.”

  “It’s a verb. Because it’s about action: I run, I’m running, I ran.”

  “As in, I’m running away from here to play basketball. Because grammar sucks.”

  I tried not to laugh. Grammar was serious business. But Stewart was charming, even then.

  Our roles stayed the same from then on: I was cast as the voice of reason. He was the fun one.

  Now, I was going to his funeral.

  So far, the day had been a blur. One minute I was shutting the gate to my brownstone building, the next I was a block from the funeral home on Seventy-Sixth and Broadway, waiting for Gretchen, whom I had pleaded with to escort me. It felt like one of those strange, jittery mornings before taking the SATs or leaving on an early flight, unease humming under the surface.

  I was dreading seeing Helen Beasley, especially. Poor Helen. She and Stewart were particularly close. What could I possibly say to his grieving mother that wasn’t all wrong? The truth is, she had never been a huge fan of mine. She always seemed disappointed that Stewart had chosen me as a close friend.

  I searched for Gretchen among the throngs of athleisure-clad mothers pushing strollers past towering apartment buildings. Five years ago, my parents moved out of my childhood two-bedroom, just blocks away. So exiting the subway up here was an emotional test on a good day, the smell of Gray’s Papaya hot dogs wafting from the corner of Seventy-Second Street to deliver a sense memory of freer days. Today, the nostalgia was unbearable.

  Stewart was everywhere. In Needle Park, which hadn’t seen a hypodermic needle since Mayor Bloomberg. In the revolving space that was once an HMV in the days of CDs. In the elegant Apple Bank building where we played “jewel heist” while our parents conferred with tellers. I could barely breathe.

  A skinny man, wearing a crumpled brown suit and a frown, caught my eye as he headed in my direction. Even from a distance, I could see that his hair was styled in the modern-day equivalent of a comb-over (spiky with product to disguise thinning). A scruffy Brooklyn beard did nothing to compensate. It took a moment for me to place that scowl: Keith Farber! Of course. Stewart had been tight with him since eighth grade—God knows why. Keith was so competitive, he’d probably even find a way to hate on Stewart’s death: An aneurysm? What a cop-out!

  An aneurysm. I couldn’t stop thinking about the abruptness; your brain combusting from within. Time’s up.

  Keith was drawing closer. Just before he might have spotted me, I dove into the entryway of a nearby Duane Reade, pretending to be absorbed in my phone. The stench of pee wafted from all corners. I gagged.

  “Why do you look so sketchy?” A voice rang out from a foot away.

  I jumped, like a gun had gone off, and spun around, ready for . . . what? A run-in with a harmless, if annoying, high school acquaintance? Keith wasn’t that bad. Or at least he hadn’t been when Stewart was around to kick me under the table in commiseration.

  The voice belonged to Gretchen, thank goodness, immaculate before me in a draped black jumpsuit and ankle boots.

  I looked down at my own dress: Rebecca Taylor from a million summers ago and, okay, gray not black. Sorting through my closet, I’d discovered a deficit in “death” clothes. In the reflection of the pharmacy window, I looked pale. I examined my honey-colored hair—a bit too long—and my yellow-green eyes that sometimes were my favorite feature and sometimes made my dark circles more pronounced. Eyeliner was already smudged below one corner. I did my best to wipe it clean with the side of my hand. Don’t touch your f
ace. My mother’s voice inside my head.

  “Are you okay?” Gretchen’s furrowed brows said she thought no.

  “I’m fine.” I toyed with a tassel that hung from my bag’s zipper. “I guess I’m just nervous to see people. And deal. With the sadness and whatnot.”

  “And whatnot.” She pursed her lips. “Have you cried yet?”

  “Why?”

  “So, no?”

  “Why does that matter?”

  “It doesn’t. I’m just waiting for the moment of recognition.”

  “Recognition?”

  “Yes. I’m just waiting for you to realize on a cellular level that one of your closest people just died and it’s okay to be sad. You know, instead of psychotically anxious.”

  “I’m plenty sad, thank you. Now please act like the security blanket you’re here to be.”

  “Okay!” She held her palms up in surrender, then took my hand. “Done.”

  Next thing I knew, we were pulling the glass funeral parlor doors open and being suctioned inside by heat. Polished cherrywood, bronze fixtures, and carpeting abounded. The walls were decorated with bright, abstract prints, referencing Old Testament stories. The permeating hush, a particular brand of quiet, reminded me of arriving at synagogue for bat mitzvahs as a preteen. And, all at once, I felt like I should have been arriving with Stewart instead of for him, pretending not to notice the oddity of a thirteen-year-old him in a suit, smelling like cologne. This felt like a poorly scripted performance. The way I was walking, with unnatural posture.

  Except this was real. This was real. Stewart. Gone. Forever.

  A bearded man in a boxy Men’s Warehouse blazer stood in front of an elevator, directing people. I opened my mouth to speak, but failed.

  “We’re here for a service,” Gretchen told him.

  He gave a somber nod. “For whom?”

  “Stewart Beasley.” His name came out like a croak, against my throat’s will. Surely this man would correct me—wrong name, wrong place, a case of mistaken identity.