Page 49 of On Fire Island

“It’s just a bicycle with three wheels instead of two. Why is it such a big deal?”

“Because. I’m tired of being infantilized. The other day a girl at the market asked me if I needed help bringing my grocery bag to my bike. Age prejudice is a real thing, you know.”

It was hard to tell if Ben was caving or just losing patience. Either way, Shep succeeded.

“OK, fine—but I can’t keep doing this for you. Veronica called before with a preemptive warning—she said to cut it out.”

“She called here?” He grimaced. “I’m surprised she remembered the number.”

•••

Ben locked up his bike at the edge of town and instructed Elizabeth to leave Shep’s on the sidewalk.

“Won’t someone take it?” she asked.

“One can only hope.”

She looped her arm around Ben’s elbow and while it wasn’t quite motherly as Shep had suggested, it was most definitely sweet. They walked through town like bookends, and I began to worry that she had become a pushover. At this juncture a pushover was the last thing he needed in an agent.

“How are you?” she asked.

“I’m fine,” he lied.

It was a dumb question that was asked of him so many times since I passed that it even made me want to scream. Just once Iwish he would tell the truth, saying something like, “Every day is worse than the last.” But he never did. She asked again, “No, really, how are you?” She dragged out the wordhowlike it had six syllables.

He just shrugged.

He got a table at the next place they passed, the Skipper and the Swan. It was his least favorite restaurant in town, but her motherly transformation was beginning to unnerve him, and if he didn’t get her arm off his soon, he thought he may lose his cool entirely.

Be nice, I tried to remind him.It will be easier to get your deadline extended.

He seemed to have heard me—or at least to remember what I would say to do in this situation. When she rested her hand on his at the table, he let her leave it there for a full five seconds before lifting it to call for the server and order a bottle of sauvignon blanc—her favorite.

After a few large sips he came right out and asked her.

“What’s going on, Elizabeth? You seem—different.”

“You can call me Liz,” she said.

“No, thank you—seriously, what gives? What did you do with my tough and demanding agent whom I had grown to love?”

“Did you?” she asked.

“I guess I did,” he admitted.

She laughed. “It’s Julia’s fault actually. I was at the shiva and—”

Ben interrupted, “Sorry about that.”

“It’s OK. I was glad you were at large. You would have hated it. Remember that time at the Texas Book Festival when everyone wanted a piece of you and you escaped to a gay bar down the street? It was like that, but heartbreaking.”

Ben nodded aimlessly. Between my family’s visit and this littleinterlude, he was already nearing his limit on patience and kindness. Liz continued.

“Everyone was saying nice things and recalling loving anecdotes about Julia. It got me thinking, what would people say about me after I died? It was my Alfred Nobel moment.”

We both laughed.

In 1888 Alfred Nobel’s brother Ludwig died of a heart attack and one of the French papers mistook him for Alfred, and wrote a brutal obituary. Alfred had invented dynamite and manufactured explosives, so they labeled him the merchant of death and called him a war profiteer. Desperate to change his image—and therefore his future obituary—he created and funded the Nobel Prize, for which his name would forever be remembered.

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