1100 AM Marco
Mia didn’t see him when she walked into the church.
He was sitting with Alison Liu in one of the back pews, and when Mia came in with Rami and Nina, she went right by him without turning her head.
For a second he considered doing something to get her attention, like standing up, or saying her name, or speaking too loudly about something totally unrelated to her so that she heard his voice, turned around, and smiled.
He did none of these things; instead he remembered the fight he and Emily had had yesterday.
In his lap was a paper program, on the cover of which were a black-and-white photograph of Adam and the words In Memoriam in a weird, archaic font.
By now the church had filled with a mix of people from Adam’s life: colleagues, Rami’s family, friends Marco didn’t know.
He read the front of the program again, curling the corner of it between two fingers.
Then he watched as Mia continued down the length of the nave, passing Sasha and Theo and slipping into a pew a few rows back from the altar.
Her hair was combed straight. It was longer than the last time he’d seen her.
“When was the last time you saw Adam?” Alison asked.
“I don’t know. It must have been a few years ago now. We were still wearing masks.”
“Oh. So, like, a while.”
“Yeah. A while.”
Alison nodded, slowly twirling her wedding ring with her thumb. For a few seconds she was quiet. Then she said: “I saw him last month.”
“Oh yeah?”
“I was running in Brooklyn Bridge Park and he was there with Rami and their daughter, Leslie.”
“I think it’s Lucy?”
“That’s what I said. Anyway, I stopped and we chatted for a bit.”
Rami leaned over to whisper something to Mia. He handed her the little girl, setting her in Mia’s lap, and then stood up to speak to the priest, a young man with a graying beard dressed in white vestments. Mia stroked the little girl’s head.
Marco said, “You’re lucky you got to see him.”
“We were actually pretty close. I’m devastated.”
“It is, objectively, very sad.”
Alison told Marco that when they ran into each other in the park, she and Adam had debated whether Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce were actually dating or if it was a cynical publicity stunt created in a boardroom by a bunch of agents.
Then she said that she had tickets for the Eras Tour in Paris, and started to cry.
Marco wondered how to respond. In the week since Adam died, he had seen pictures of him posted to Instagram, so many pictures, along with lists of memories and elegies about the important space he had occupied in everyone’s lives.
Reading them, he worried he also should be posting a picture, or sharing a meaningful and specific memory about something nice Adam once did for him, and the fact that he hadn’t meant that everyone else would secretly think that he was heartless or at the very least lazy.
He had, for a while now, worried that he was heartless and lazy.
When he got to the church twenty minutes ago, he had seen Adam’s aunt standing in the vestibule and had gone up to her to pay his respects.
He said, “Hi, Patty, my name is Marco Bernardi. I was a friend of Adam’s.
I’m so sorry for your loss.” She had looked at him a little strangely, like she was trying to place him, and when she couldn’t she set a clammy hand on top of his and said: “Adam had so many friends.” It was true—Adam did—but it also made Marco want to clarify, in the same way that Alison was clarifying to him now, that he wasn’t just anyone, that in fact he and Adam had been closer than most of the people in the room.
For instance: they’d texted each other all through the night of the 2016 elections.
The next morning when they were both gutted and hungover, they’d called each other and asked questions like “Should we go to Mexico or Canada?”
He didn’t really understand it. Years ago someone he knew from high school had committed suicide by swallowing thirty Ambien, and for the month afterward people kept posting messages on his Facebook wall.
Marco tracked it obsessively, checking in to see how many likes something like “Rest in power, bro” could get in a single day.
It had all seemed so grotesque and competitive, like everyone was trying to siphon off a little attention from this poor guy’s misfortune, but now he wondered if it was something else.
A neediness, maybe, or a craving for affirmation.
They shared every other part of their lives, so why should grief be any different?
Why shouldn’t they want to have their own private sadness acknowledged as a public commodity, something to be compared and judged and commented on and liked?
And if they did, then whose fault was that?
No one’s, really, aside from the companies that had convinced them that sharing was a good idea in the first place, and that happiness was all about performance and direct-to-consumer denim.
He found that the older he got, the less he knew about what was right to say or feel.
Maybe everything had fundamentally changed, and he was the one who was the idiot for trying to pretend that it hadn’t.
Maybe the best thing to do when someone died was post a picture and write, “I miss him too.”
Alison kept crying; Marco opened the program again. He read through the schedule of the service, and then the priest asked them to please rise for the opening prayer. He whispered, “You’re going to have a great time in Paris,” and reached down to hold her hand.
He’d taken the train up from Washington early this morning, the 6:30 AM Northeast Regional to Moynihan Station; last night Emily had come by the apartment with David to pick up Ava and Margot.
They were spending the weekend in Annapolis, where David had a home, and they wanted to leave early in the morning to beat the traffic.
Marco had said to her that it wasn’t a problem—it was his week with the girls, and he could drop them off on his way to Union Station in the morning.
But Emily had told him to stop making things difficult.
“We said we weren’t going to fight over things like this,” she said.
“Besides, it just makes more sense for everyone if they stay with us in Kalorama.”
Marco was packing his weekend bag when Emily rang the doorbell at his condo; the girls were on the sofa, watching television.
He let Emily and David in, nodded at David, and returned to his bedroom to unzip his suit from its dry-cleaning bag.
As he opened the closet, he heard Emily ask Ava what Marco had given her for dinner and whether there were any vegetables involved, and then David say something about spending Saturday on a sailboat.
A minute later, Emily stood in the doorway to the bedroom.
She knocked on the frame as if Marco weren’t already staring at her, and then glanced at the pile of clothes sitting on a chair beside the bed.
“How long will you be up there?” she asked.
Marco laid the suit out. He picked out a tie, decided it looked cheap, and exchanged it for a different one.
He said, “Just the weekend. I can pick them up on Sunday night, if that makes things easy.”
Emily nodded. As she started to leave the room, Marco said, “You could still come, you know. Sasha’s going to be there.”
“We haven’t spoken in so long.”
“Okay, well, it’s not like you didn’t know Adam.”
“Marco…” She sounded tired and annoyed, which in turn annoyed him. “We’ve been through this. David and I have had this trip planned for a long time. He’s excited for the girls to see the house.”
“Right. Yeah. Of course.”
She and David had met a few months before the divorce was finalized.
He was an orthopedic surgeon, and one of Emily’s new colleagues had introduced them.
A year earlier she had left her job at Sibley Memorial and was now employed by a concierge medical service that didn’t take insurance; basically, from what Marco could gather, she was paid nearly twice what she used to make at the hospital to now perform colonics on women in Bethesda.
David’s house in Kalorama had five bedrooms, a swimming pool, a den with uncomfortable and expensive leather furniture, and a four-car garage; after staying there for a week, Ava had come back to Marco’s condo on Capitol Hill and asked why his house didn’t have any stairs.
He didn’t really have an answer for that one—only that the State Department paid less than orthopedic surgery, and that if having stairs in her house was suddenly a big deal to Ava, he could buy her a stepstool for the bathroom.
She seemed satisfied with that answer; he thought about the question every day for the next six weeks.
It made him hate David more than he already did, which was saying something, because he had never hated someone so much in his entire life.
“To be honest I’m surprised you’re even going,” Emily said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“When was the last time you saw any of those people?”
Marco threw a pair of socks into his bag.
“I can’t tell if you’re actually being serious right now. A friend of mine died, and I’m going to his funeral because I want to see other people who we were both friends with. I want to see people who I have known for a long time. That seems pretty straightforward to me.”
Emily lifted both her eyebrows, looking around the room again. She curled her lips inward and exhaled sharply through her nose.
“Well, you’re putting a lot of thought into what you’re going to be wearing, that’s for sure.”
“What has gotten into you?”
“Is Mia going to be there?”
Marco shook his head. Emily twisted her mouth to one side and lifted her eyebrows again, as if to say, Well?, and then looked away.
“For God’s sake,” he said.
“It’s a little tacky, don’t you think? Going to a funeral to see your ex-girlfriend?”