Page 19 of On Fire Island

Ben put down the paper, breathed deeply, and did what he was told.

We all sat glued to the one-sided conversation.

“Hi, Mom.... I’m sorry.... I texted you that I was OK.... Please don’t come here.... I don’t want to be distracted from my pain; I want to feel the pain.... I’m not alone, far from it.... No, it’s the B-52s.... I actually think it is appropriate.... I am sitting shiva. I have the candle and...”

In a perfect display of good timing, the Tirschwells, our neighbors from down the street, came to the door. Ben waved them in with a genuine smile.

“People are coming to see me,” he told his mother truthfully.

Annie Tirschwell placed a bakery box in his hands, quietly stating, “It’s a babka.”

Ben smiled at her while responding dryly to his mom.

“People with babka, so I have the candle and the people and a babka... I’m not making fun, Mom.” He turned his back to the group and whispered into the phone, “This is the only place where I can breathe. Please, tell the others, I mean no disrespect. I won’t survive if I’m not here. You should go back to Florida.”

I wasn’t surprised that once word got out that Ben was on the island a makeshift shiva would come to him. Sure, it wasn’t formal like the one in the city, where countless relatives and friends were probably wandering around our apartment wondering where Ben was, as they piled pastrami and corned beef and coleslaw and the good mustard atop slices of rye and pumpernickel. Jewish deli meat aside, this less formal version was no doubt better for Ben, and not much different from normal times. People were always popping in and out of our house. Especially since it was so close to the ball field. I loved that part of Fire Island life—how things went from zero to sixty in an instant. I always had snacks and drinks and even party games ready for when the need arose.

The visitors came and went all day, and Ben waffled between passively engaging and actively ignoring them. The latter seemed to take more energy on his part. Renee came in looking almost buoyant, like a bottle that had been shut tight for forty-three years and had finally been opened. I studied her face and her eyes. Renee had most definitely had sex with the long-haired man-child the night before, and from the look of her, my guess was, good sex. This was a huge deal, as I’m pretty sure that she had never had good sex before. She had once told me that sex was “not that important to her”—which, if you ask me, is an indirect way of saying it wasn’t very good.

I wondered if she came home and crossed off “one-nightstand” from the divorce bucket list I knew she had made to mark the end of her marriage.

“It’s a thing,” she had told me. “All of my clients make one.”

Shep and Matty did their best to keep things light, even going as far as coordinating the music to match whomever walked through the door. Shep was a bad influence on Matty—not that the kid couldn’t use a bit of bad influence. They played “Delta Dawn” when Ian Frenchman sauntered in. It was rumored that when his wife threw him out over the off-season, on account of his traveling too much, he moved into the Delta Sky Lounge at JFK. He ate, drank, and even showered there. When Dave Golden walked in with his much younger trophy wife, they played “Must Be the Money,” and for Marty Kranz, a grown man who collected Cabbage Patch Dolls, “People Are Strange.” It kept them both amused, but Ben barely noticed—until the proudly well-cushioned Smith sisters entered to the tune of “I like big butts, and I cannot lie.” Even that got barely a rise out of him—though he was mature enough to tell them to cut it out.

In the end, I was the one responsible for Ben’s only genuine laugh of the day, courtesy of the thrice-married widow Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick. Don’t worry, she only buried one husband. The other two marriages ended in divorce. Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick was both a close and a low talker. It was a brutal combination since your need for auricular satisfaction pushed you to lean in and spatial intolerance pushed you to back up. Ben and I would bury our noses in our books at the first sight of her heading our way on the beach—our laughter making it difficult to get through the page. It was a wonder she got one man to marry her, let alone three.

One night, soon after my diagnosis and the discovery of Tuck’s infidelity, Renee came over for dinner in the city. She was one ofthe few people who didn’t treat me differently because of the *always whispered* cancer. Most people had no clue what to say around me. I would watch them struggle with regular conversation, dodging topics like vacations or babies, and steering clear of complaining about anything in their seemingly healthy lives. Renee acted normal, and I really appreciated it.

She partook in my selection of medical marijuana, pulled Ben’s novelOne Day in Berlinoff the bookshelf, and read the steamy sex scene out loud in her most titillating voice.

It wasn’t just to make me laugh; she was addressing my biggest concern: that Ben would be alone forever. She was convinced that the ladies would be lined up, hoping for reenactments of the way the book’s protagonist, Hans, took the love interest, Ursula, in the luggage compartment on the Deutsche Bahn from Frankfurt to Munich. Ben used to jokingly reenact his love scenes with me as a funny way to initiate sex. It would make me laugh, at first, but by the time he got to the good parts I was no longer laughing.

“We must warn him to steer clear of Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick,” she said, no longer amused. That particular visit coincided with the widow Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick’s current divorce proceedings. Renee’s colleague was her attorney and quite unprofessionally spilled the amusing details of her latest decoupling. The ins and outs of the first divorce had already run through the Fire Island rumor mill. Lisa had a record. She was a silverware klepto. Apparently, this is a real thing that costs restaurants thousands of dollars a year. Ordinary people who wouldn’t dream of pilfering something from a retail store have no problem leaving a dining establishment with their utensils stowed in their pockets or purses. For some reason, which I found odd, considering the vast array of place settings she must have registered for and received over the years, Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick madesilverware stealing a sport. According to court papers, she had collected twelve place settings, over time, of a meticulous copy of Georg Jensen’s cactus pattern circa 1931 that an exceptionally stylish restaurateur had commissioned for his bistro. It was the thing that put the final nail in the coffin of her second marriage. She and Seth Cohen were finishing up dinner with one of Seth’s biggest clients when the maître d’ escorted the police into the restaurant. They instructed Lisa—then, just Marlin-Cohen—to empty her purse.

“Call your lawyer,” she begged her husband while being led out in cuffs.

He called a divorce lawyer instead.

Apparently that wasn’t all there was to her fetishes. After we smoked a bit more, Renee let it spill that during divorce number two, she heard that Lisa had some rather unusual sexual preferences.

“That’s all I’ll say,” Renee had proclaimed, blushing like a schoolgirl.

I was never much of a gossip, but for some reason the combo of my chemo brain and the anger I felt surrounding my current situation led me to enjoy this kind of catty conversation regarding someone else’s self-inflicted misfortune. It obviously cheered me, and gave Renee a good excuse to break her colleagues’ confidence.

“Come on,” I begged, adding with a wink, “I’ll take it to the grave!”

Renee couldn’t resist making me laugh and spilled the whole X-rated tale involving baked goods, most specifically, banana cream pie. By the time Ben came home we were rolling around on the living room floor in hysterics, having decided that the widow Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick would be the first to pounce on Ben after I passed—and how it was a shame that Bendidn’t really care for pie. Ben found the conversation far from funny. In fact, he was furious, and retreated in a huff to our bedroom. His reaction, and the effects of the marijuana no doubt, made us laugh even harder.

I felt badly about it when I finally came to bed.

“I don’t want you joking about this, Julia,” he’d said. “It makes me feel you’ve given up.”

I felt awful about it after that. Until now, that is, when the widow Lisa Marlin-Cohen-Fitzpatrick walked in at the tail end of the fake shiva carrying a banana cream pie. Ben stifled a laugh and excused himself with his usual alibi—walking Sally.

He whispered to Shep through a narrow grin, “Keep an eye on the silverware,” before heading out.

thirteen

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