as a sounding board. That was what she would do, talk, smoke and drink, pretend she had velocity. Robert would be her shield against slowness and the loneliness that came from it, the morbid tranquillity. She would keep him here until morning, until the sun came up and the birds were in the trees and she could take him out to breakfast. Scrambled eggs did not remind you of death. (Did they? Yellow eggs on a blue plate. A warm feeling, farms or home, the morning sun, a nook with folded cotton napkins. Unless you thought instead about the beginning of eggs and then you went from beginning to end—eggs found in an autopsy—eggs themselves in their sensuousness or sterility—once, when she was pregnant with Casey, she had found a red fleck in an egg and thrown up.)
Whatever, she didn’t have to have eggs.
Toast maybe. A waffle. A waffle could not remind you of death.
Could it?
What she didn’t want above all, she knew—watching him as he knelt down beside her with a tissue bunched in his hand to wipe the cleft of her belly button—was to lie there in the half-empty bed waiting to fall asleep. She was afraid of the certainty of those minutes, the cold night shining through the window onto the threads of her white cotton sheets.
2
The complex was manicured and bland, a sprawling suburb for the dead. Susan had taken a backseat and let Casey and T. handle the arrangements, so this was her first visit: for the coffin, the funeral service, the burial, all of it, Hal couldn’t have cared less and she followed his lead.
Once she’d asked him to make a will—she’d read a magazine article in a dentist’s waiting room that ridiculed people for dying intestate—and he had said absentmindedly that he would, but then he never bothered. She’d asked once if he had a preference for his body, in terms of being dead. She asked that mainly because she panicked one night about claustrophobia and beetles and wanted to tell him her own preference (cremation). But he had shrugged and said only yes, his preference would be not to be dead. On the subject of disposal he had no strong opinion; overall he was an agnostic, with a secular, institutional orientation and a general lack of interest in matters of the spirit. So-called matters of the spirit, he would have said, so-called spiritual matters.
T. had already seen his body, long before it was embalmed. He had seen it in Belize City when it lay on the ground, seen it there in the street, seen it right where he fell. When Hal failed to meet him he’d flagged down a rattletrap taxi and told the driver the name of Hal’s hotel. He had described this part to both of them, under duress, after Casey badgered him.
From the half-open window of the taxi, breathing the fumes as it sat idling in stopped traffic, he had noticed rubbernecking crowds gathered curbside. Without a clear motivation he had paid the driver and got out. The crowds had nothing to do with him, for all he knew, but still he found himself walking across the street and peering over the heads of bystanders. People were shorter there, he added.
And then he’d seen Hal on the ground, dying—already dead or maybe still dying, he never found out which. He pushed his way through and fell down on his knees beside him, soaked the kneecaps of his pants in the warm pool of blood, but Hal’s eyes were closed and he lay unmoving. T. felt no pulse, felt no breath. Finally the ambulance came.
When given the opportunity to see the body herself, Casey had shaken her head and said no, she preferred not to remember her father that way. Susan thought she was right, Susan was glad. But herself she had to see him, so she was going alone. They had insisted on laying him out formally in a private room. A young man in a gray suit escorted her to the door of the room and then left.
She went in with a feeling of duty, trying to carry herself well. The walls were a placid beige and there were flower arrangements on a sideboard and the cloying smell of a deodorizer: a bouquet called orange blossom, she suspected, or tangerine breeze or mango blush. Its chemical sweetness conjured industrial parks along the Jersey Turnpike where scents were manufactured for cosmetics, malls, fast food. And here was the coffin,