The Late, Lamented Molly Marx (2 page)

There’s Dr. Stafford right there. Goodness, she looks quite moved. I always imagined that when Barry and I were carrying on at her sessions she was thinking,
How did I get stuck with these two completely shallow, nonintrospective, loser brats? Oh, I have three private school tuitions to pay. That’s why
. But I see tears and I can tell they are real.

The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, and when he takes away big-time, I have discovered he compensates you with a finely tuned bullshit detector. It is a minor consolation, but I think I am going to like it.

“And now we will hear from Molly’s husband,” the rabbi says. “Barry. Dr. Barry Marx.”

Barry kisses Annabel on the head and untangles his hand from hers. She takes a look at Kitty—who forbids the word
grandma
—and considers whether to move closer to her. “Kitty smells funny,” she used to say. “It’s just her cigarettes, honey,” I would respond. “Don’t smoke when you grow up or you’ll smell funny, too.” I hope Annabel remembers that. If she becomes a nose-ringed, tattooed fourteen-year-old hanging out in the East Village with a cigarette dangling from her lips … there won’t be a damn thing I can do about it.

Kitty is wearing a severe black suit—either Gucci or Valentino. She’d be horrified to know I can’t tell or appreciate the difference, though I admit it looks stunningly appropriate. The tailoring shows off her yoga-buffed sixty-four-year-old body, which, in clothes, we both privately acknowledge looks a good bit better than mine. Today she seems to have hijacked the first floor of Tiffany’s. With Kitty, more is more. She is wearing diamond studs the size of knuckles, a sapphire-and-emerald brooch dribbling over her breast like Niagara Falls with a
bracelet to match, and a black lizard handbag that, no doubt, contains her smokes.

I hope Annabel eventually inherits some of Kitty’s baubles. I’m not saying Kitty’s glad I’m dead, but at least she has a good excuse now for not willing me any jewelry.

When Barry arrives at the front of the synagogue and bounds up the six steps, he clears his throat and takes some notes from his jacket. He tears them in half with a flourish. I knew he would do that! We saw the same stunt at my aunt Julie’s funeral last year. Does he think my family won’t notice he stole it? Ah, but he doesn’t really care about them, does he? And what makes it worse is that except for the Divines, everyone in the congregation is buying into his heart-wrenching grief. From every corner, I hear sniffles and snorts and see tiny tributaries of tears.

“I fell in love with Molly when I was a senior at college,” he begins.

I was a sophomore. He was the pre-med guy who finally had room in his schedule for a class on twentieth-century art and took a seat next to me in a darkened auditorium. Barry wanted to become a collector, he said, and I remember thinking the remark pretentious; no one I knew aspired to own anything more than an Alex Katz dog litho or a student’s work snagged at a silent auction on open-studio night. But Barry dreamed on a grand scale. When five years later I found out that he’d become a plastic surgery resident at Mount Sinai in Manhattan, I wasn’t surprised. If ever a doctor were born to woo women into rhinoplasty, it was Barry Marx, who managed to incorporate his own nose into his well-delivered pitch.

At least forty of his patients must be here today. All those weepers with the delicate, symmetrical noses aren’t my mommy-buddies, magazine pals, book club friends, or cycling partners. Do Barry’s patients have a phone tree, like the one at Annabel’s school in case of inclement weather? Did someone start making calls at 5:30 A.M.? “Sorry to wake you, but I thought you’d want to know Barry Marx is single. The funeral’s at ten. Pass it on.”

“There are four things you should know about my wife, Molly,” Barry begins. “First, she had the most musical laugh in the whole world. Many of you know that laugh. I married her for that laugh. I cannot believe I will never hear it again.”

So far, okay. To be fair, there was a lot of laughing, and no one thinks Barry married me for my breasts, which most wives of plastic surgeons would have had enlarged from nectarines to melons.

“Second, Molly was the most brutally honest person I know. You couldn’t get much past her. She was honest about her shortcomings—”

He’s going to discuss my
shortcomings
?

“—and mine.”

Would that include flirting with more than half of my friends?

“Third, I have never known anyone who loved life more than Molly. She should have lived to be a hundred.”

No argument there.

“And one more thing …” Barry falters. “One more thing …” He bows his head slightly. I don’t need a bullshit detector to realize he must truly be bereft, because his yarmulke drops, which allows the whole congregation to see his baby bald spot. Barry doesn’t rush to return the yarmulke to his head. Rabbi Sherman comes over and cradles him with his arm. Barry walks to the casket, kisses his fingers—on one he’s wearing his wedding band, which he usually keeps in a drawer—and presses them to the mahogany. Then he returns to his seat and pulls Annabel onto his lap.

I guess I’ll never learn what the other thing is.

“Molly’s closest friend, Sabrina Lawson, wishes to speak now,” the rabbi says. “Sabrina Lawson.”

I am glad Brie has volunteered for this eulogy, because I can safely say that Brie, who has recently decided she is a lesbian, is one friend who hasn’t succumbed to Barry’s charms. She definitely wasn’t gay when we were roommates, but last year she met Isadora, the gorgeous Chilean architect who wound up moving into the loft she designed for Brie. Isadora tenderly kisses Brie on the lips before Brie walks to the front.

I have always been proud to be Brie’s friend. We were quite a pair. She is almost six feet tall—a model before she became a lawyer—and I topped out at five-three. Today her glossy brown hair is braided down her back and she is wearing a flawless charcoal trouser suit over a crisp white blouse. Everything about Brie is hard edges except her heart.

Brie takes no small measure of pride in being the first of our friends to try girl-on-girl sex. I’m glad she’s found Isadora, but I
wouldn’t bet my life, if I still had one, that Brie won’t switch back to Team Hetero. I can’t believe that anyone who liked men as much as Brie did will give them up. In a voice that sounds ready to break, she begins.

My poetry appreciation stalled at e. e. cummings, but Brie kept Emily Dickinson by her bed. When she gets to the last stanza, she sobs and bites her lips.

After a moment, Brie goes on. “Molly sometimes forgot to eat, yet she had more energy than anyone I know. She was always begging me to go on long bike rides. Just last Saturday, she picked me up with Annabel in her bike seat and insisted we pedal over the Brooklyn Bridge to go to this diner….” Another memory is of us getting lost on a mountain trail in Aspen. I wonder if people aren’t now thinking of me as an extremely dumb jock.

“We have one last speaker,” Rabbi S.S. says. “Representing the Divine family … Lucy?”

No one ever took the two of us for sisters. We were fraternal twins, though I wondered why there wasn’t a more apt term. At our bat mitzvah, Lucy towered over me by eight inches and outweighed me by forty pounds. Everyone clucked about how awful it must be that I hadn’t gone through puberty yet, when Lucy had bazooms. But I know she
hated looking at me in my mini, and I just thought she was fat. Envy spiced our relationship like a red hot chili pepper, and most of it came from Luce. I got married, while every relationship she’s had has ended—often with a guy moving to another continent with no forwarding address. I had a child. She wants one, desperately. People misunderstand Lucy. She wasn’t an easy sister, but I adored her.

“When Molly and I were five,” she says, “she convinced me that broccoli was an animal, and that my real name was Moosey. We were Molly and Moosey.”

Her timing is good. The congregation laughs. I am sorry I saddled her with that name, which stuck until she left for college—
she
got into Brown—and probably cost my parents twenty thousand dollars in therapy bills. Lucy rambles and shares too many anecdotes from seventh grade. Mourners check BlackBerrys. “I will tell you one thing,” she concludes. “We will find out who did this to my sister, Molly. If you are out there, the Divine family will hunt you down.” My sister sounds as if she is giving a speech on the eve of a doomed election.

People snap back to attention. The rabbi does not like Lucy’s tone any more than the buzz of conversation that has trashed the decorum of his service. He rushes over to Lucy, who shoots him the fierce look that scared away her last five boyfriends. She stares down Barry. He won’t meet her eye.

“Interment will be private,” the rabbi says quickly, “but shiva will begin tonight at the Marx home.” He announces our address and then, suddenly, a stranger with an unmistakable Barry-crafted nose breaks out in song. Accompanied by the synagogue’s turbo organ, her volume crescendos. “I could fly higher than an eagle,” she sings, knowing that the Upper West Side is the closest she will get to Broadway, “for you are the wind beneath my wings.”

I am mortified. Thank God I am in a box. Every one of my true friends—there have got be at least sixty in the room—as well as my parents, sister, and aunts and uncles are embarrassed by this ignominious display. Is this song Barry’s idea of a joke? Or Kitty’s?

Kill me. Kill me now.

don’t know if I am dead or alive. I remember little. The spires of Riverside Church. Pain everywhere. A long, bottomless blackness.

This wasn’t the way I’d planned it. My bike? Where did it go?

I hear the river, steady, like a pulse. Instinctively, I count the waves, which match my weakly pounding heart. One, two, three … forty-eight, forty-nine … one hundred one, one hundred two.

Cold.

Cold.

Cold.

Snow falls. Flakes cover my face.

So.

Damn.

Cold.

I am still wearing one biking glove, shredded and streaked with blood, which exposes my frostbitten fingers.

Never.

Been.

This.

Cold.

Nev—

With the wisp of a shallow exhale, I am gone. A leaf blowing away, an ash falling off a cigarette, a dewdrop evaporating on a flower petal.

Just.

Like.

That.

No.

Big.

Deal.

I have watched too many bad movies. There is no traveling down a tunnel with an eerie white light, harps and—on the other side-clouds like Provence crème. I have crossed over, but there is just darkness and the
whoosh-whoosh-whoosh
of traffic on the Henry Hudson Parkway.

Dawn arrives. Not ten feet from where I lie, under the tangle of bushes between the rock-bordered Hudson and the bike path, I begin to hear runners. This time of year, at this hour, they pass infrequently and keep their gazes straight ahead, because this is not Central Park, a social watering hole. The path is lonely and narrow. “Only an idiot would jog here,” Barry said once to a friend who boasted about the purity of running by the river. “I don’t know why you ride your bike there, either,” he added, turning to me.

It was one of my favorite short trips, up to the George Washington Bridge, where a little red lighthouse still keeps guard on a tiny spit of land in its vast shadow—for me, a small, private holy place. I loved reading the little red lighthouse book to Annabel, just as I loved when my mother had read it to Lucy and me.

The runners continue, and then I hear her voice. “Oh my God,” she says, barely audible, and then she yells the same words. Her footsteps grow closer. Above my legs stands a woman in tight black running pants and a loose parka. She removes an iPod earbud. “Are you alive?” she shouts to me. “Are you alive?” She tries, unsuccessfully, to push away brambles that cover the upper half of my body as she bleats those words again and again.

Her voice is trapped in her throat, as if she were screaming in a dream. She takes out a cell phone, pulls off her gloves, and punches in 911.

“I’m in Riverside Park,” she says between heaving breaths. “There’s a woman here—and I’m not sure if she’s … alive.”

I learn that my angel’s name is actually Angela, a grad student in philosophy at Columbia. I am sorry because I know that for the rest of her life she will carry the hideous image of how I looked in death.

When the police and paramedics arrive, they determine that I have been dead for several hours. There is no record, they say later, that I was reported missing.