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with a brassy-haired, sloe-eyed creature, who sprawled naked and comatose across Wylie’s beanbag chair. However, through impotent rage, not to mention wretched heartache, Ben and I had come together, as if our imperative screwing would have to last us a lifetime, which it almost did.
    When we emerged from the bedroom, I heard a very drunk Wylie chanting, “This is your lucky day, this is your lucky day, this is your lucky day.”
    “Make him shut up!” I screamed. Then I wept against Ben’s chest until he guided me back into the bedroom, lowered me to the mattress, and calmed my hysteria with more sex.
    Sometime during the night, Alice Shaw consumed an hallucinogen and threatened to jump from Wylie’s first story window. We let her jump.
    Later Alice denied the drug, the bad trip, and her “suicide leap.” We let her deny.
    Patty accepted the tragic news stoically. She attended Stewie’s wake, but she didn’t indulge, even though Wylie urged her to drink, snort, smoke, swallow the ample supply of amphetamine candy. Instead, she drifted through the room like a wraith, changing records, covering Ben’s drugged-out date with a blanket, emptying ashtrays. And nobody—not even I—tried to turn Patty inside out to expose the hurt and allow it to heal.
    “Earth to Ingrid.”
    I rubbed my eyes like a swimmer who had just emerged from a chlorinated pool. “Sorry, Patty, daydreaming. I do that a lot. Old age.”
    “We’re the same age,” she replied indignantly, “and I don’t consider myself old.”
    “Neither would anyone else,” I soothed.
    It was true. Patty and I had been born three months apart, yet she looked ten years younger. An almost invisible web of fine lines, radiating from the corners of her sad eyes were the only evidence that she had tiptoed past the big four-oh and was gracefully heading toward decade five. Maybe there was a senescent portrait inside the Jamestone attic.
    As if she had read my mind, Patty said, “Do you want to see Wylie’s painting? It’s considered part of his estate, but he wanted you to have it and I shall honor his request.”
    “I’d rather talk about Wylie.”
    “I don’t want to talk about Wylie.”
    “Hey, Patty, we’ve been best friends since kindergarten. We’ve shared everything from our first period to our first set of high heels. We cried together over Bambi and that part in Lassie where the little dog dies, and we practically destroyed our friendship when we both chose the same Beatle to marry.”
    “Paul.”
    “No. We wanted to marry George.”
    “You’re wrong, Ing. It was Paul. We wanted to sleep with George and marry Paul.”
    “We wanted to sleep with John.”
    “Alice wanted to sleep with Wylie.”
    “What?”
    “It’s true, Ingrid. Alice once told me that if she couldn’t F-word Wylie, she’d die a virgin.”
    “Alice doesn’t use the F-word, Patty. Do you think that’s why she married Dwight? So she’d stay a virgin?”
    “I don’t know. Probably.”
    Subtle me changed the subject, hoping to elicit tears. “Are you planning to bury Wylie in New York?”
    “I don’t plan to bury him at all.”
    Aha , I thought. That’s why she won’t talk about Wylie. Because she can’t admit he’s really gone . Maybe that’s the reason she acted so dispassionate following Stewie’s death .
    “My husband had some very definite ideas about his funeral,” Patty continued. “He insisted that we wait for a windy day, stand on that rise above Cripple Creek, and scatter his cremated ashes.”
    “We?”
    “The Clovers. He wanted us to sing that old song Ray Charles recorded with Betty Carter.”
    “Baby, It’s Cold Outside?”
    “Correct.”
    “God, that’s so Wylie. Why Cripple Creek?”
    “The gambling. He said life was one humongous gamble. At first he suggested we toss his ashes over Monaco and sing ‘True Love,’ you know, that Bing Crosby-Grace Kelly ditty? He said the first person he wanted to greet on the other side was