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It was past four o’clock before the last, or next-to-last, of the well-wishers left. Now there were only caterers packing up in near silence, and Emily.
“It’s like one of those Runway functions forty years ago,” Andy said to her. “You and me at the bitter end.”
Emily smiled, but not with humor. “Not quite forty,” she said. “And not quite bitter.”
“Not quite,” Andy agreed. She let herself look for the first time all afternoon at the large framed photograph on the easel just inside the entryway. Miranda’s headshot, circa 2005, when she was the woman Andy had fallen so desperately in love with. She felt the wild grief stir in her throat and prick at her eyes, and she quickly looked away.
“Let’s go back to the study and let them finish up,” Andy said, gesturing to the catering crew. She turned and walked down the hall, knowing Emily would follow, knowing that she would first talk briefly to the manager and make sure everything was settled. She would keep taking care of Miranda as long as she could.
When Emily joined her, Andy was pouring two fingers of Scotch into each of two heavy-bottomed glasses. “It’s the end of Miranda’s 1981 Macallan,” she said, handing a glass to Emily. “Her last vice.”
Emily snorted. “I doubt that,” she said, taking a sip. She made an appreciative sound. “God, it’s like drinking money.”
Andy laughed. “It should be.”
“Isn’t this stuff about a thousand dollars a bottle?”
“You’re half right.” Andy gestured for Emily to sit down in one of the large, comfortable armchairs that faced each other in the center of the room. She sat in Miranda’s; she wasn’t prepared to see anyone else sitting in it yet. Emily noticed, and Andy noticed her noticing, but neither of them said anything.
For a long moment they sat with their fragrant tumblers, and then Emily leaned forward with hers. “To Miranda,” she said.
“To Miranda,” Andy echoed, clinking her glass to Emily’s, and they drank. The rich strength of the whiskey burned her throat and would almost certainly go directly to her head; she had hardly eaten anything for the last four days.
Four days. It seemed like years, and it also seemed as if it hadn’t happened at all.
There was another short silence, though not an uncomfortable one, and then Andy looked up and met Emily’s eyes. “Before you jump on the bandwagon,” Andy said, “it wasn’t a relief and it’s not a blessing.”
Emily raised an eyebrow—so Miranda, that gesture—and said, “I wouldn’t think so.”
“Lots of people do think so,” Andy said grimly. “Because being dead is supposed to be better than being old.”
Emily quirked a small smile and said, “I honestly never thought of her as old. She just became ... even more so.”
Andy laughed.
“She hardly lost a step, after all. Not where it counted.” Emily tapped her head.
Now Andy winced. “Not that she let anyone see,” she said, after a long moment. “There were some bad times, though. Near the end.”
Emily looked suddenly distraught. “I’m sorry. I had no idea. I knew she was in pain—”
“More than you can imagine,” Andy murmured. “More than I can even imagine.”
“—But. God. What ...” Then Emily shook her head. “You don’t have to tell me.”
“I don’t think I will,” Andy said wryly. “Miranda would have hated it.”
Miranda had hated it. She’d hated the whole process of decline. They’d sold the townhouse and moved to this apartment, a classic eight on Fifth Avenue, after Miranda’s second hip replacement made the stairs unmanageable. Things had still been pretty good. Andy hit fifty and jogged every morning in Central Park. Miranda had finally retired, though her retirement hobby had turned out to be, of course, starting a magazine. She’d wanted to call it Crone, but she’d been talked down. A monthly, thank God, so she only worked the full-time hours of an ordinary human.
Eighty brought the bypass and a dramatic slowdown. She had never been the same after that surgery, a not-uncommon result that no doctor will inform you of before the fact. The aftermath hadn’t been happy for anyone. Miranda had resented her enfeeblement, and resentment had made her cruel. Cruel had always been her metier, but it had been a long, long time since she had been quite so awful to Andy.
And then, memory. Small things at first, hardly noticeable. A name, a date. Then the current date, or the day of the week. When Miranda had started having trouble with words, Andy had tried not to panic, but she began to dread extended conversations because they almost always contained at least one long silence where Miranda groped for language she seemed to have lost.
Last week, they had been talking about the girls (still and always “the girls,” though they were nearly fifty) and Thanksgiving plans, and Miranda had said, “I certainly don’t want to force them into an appearance. Surely Caroline and ... Caroline ...” She faltered. Andy looked up and caught a look of such devastation and horror that she had to turn quickly to hide her own despair. Miranda had forgotten her daughter’s name.
Three days later, she was dead.
Andy stood suddenly and walked to the wall of photos that they had made in this room. The art in the rest of the apartment was gorgeous and valuable but not personal. They had decided that here they would hang only their own memories. There were pictures of Cassidy and Caroline and Andy herself, even a montage of Patricia and Vincent and Bowie and the rest of the line of sweet, stupid dogs that had lived with them, but Andy could not see anyone other than Miranda. Miranda at her desk. Miranda on the funicular in Barcelona. Miranda at Kennedy Center. Many, many of Miranda with Andy, and in every one Miranda was looking not at the mountains or the beach or, God help her, the President of the United States, but at her.
“It was the best life anyone could have had,” she said, surprised by hearing herself say it out loud.
“It was extraordinary,” Emily said, nodding. “She was extraordinary.”
Andy didn’t bother to correct Emily’s misunderstanding. She hadn’t meant Miranda’s life; she’d been talking about her own.
She poured out the last of the Macallan (a finger to herself, a splash to Emily who hadn’t put much of a dent in hers), sat back down, and took a mouthful. She breathed out smoke and peat. It tasted like the last time she’d kissed Miranda.
“What am I going to do with the rest of my life?” She meant to say it with rueful humor, but to her astonishment and embarrassment, it came out half hysterical. It was, after all, a real question.
Emily answered, “Anything you like, I should think.” She too might have meant her words to be lighter than they sounded, but there was an edge there.
For good reason, Andy thought. She was sixty-one. She was wealthy, well-connected, and accomplished, and the woman she was mourning had been nearly eighty-seven years old and ill. It was, to all appearances, an awfully good time and manner in which to be a widow.
Still. “I haven’t taken a breath in my adult life without her,” Andy said. “I was twenty-four when I met her. I was so young that I didn’t even know I was still a child. And it’s not as if we joined our lives. I became part of hers.” She took a slug of her Scotch, apologizing to it silently for being unable to appreciate it as it deserved. “And Christ, living with her was like living in a wind tunnel. It was all I could do just to stand up most of the time.”
Emily laughed, full and appreciative. Andy twisted her mouth into something like a smile, too.
“I’ve been managing Miranda for thirty-seven years,” Andy continued. “That was my job. Not writing, not broadcasting, not the interview series or the books. Those were hobbies compared to managing Miranda.” She looked over at Emily, who was frowning ever so faintly, and realized how what she was saying must sound. “I’m not complaining,” she said. “I’m not. It was the best goddamn job anyone could have. But now it’s over.” She giggled, the hysteria bubbling back. “I finally got fired.” Abruptly, with one deep, harsh breath, she was crying—no, sobbing: messily, snottily, and thoroughly. For a moment she tried to get herself back under control, but she decided immediately that it was not going to happen, and let herself unravel.
She came back to herself to find that Emily had pulled her into a tight embrace, one hand firm on the back of her head, the other arm around her shoulders. She was just holding her, no murmured platitudes or godawful patting, and thankfully, she hadn’t joined Andy in her tears.
“Wow,” Andy said thickly, breathing through her mouth, pulling away but letting Emily keep an arm around her. “That’s the first time I’ve fallen apart like that.”
“It won’t be the last,” Emily said.
Belatedly Andy remembered that Emily would know. In the previous two years she had lost her mother, her sister, and her husband, a string of escalating disasters that she had powered through without publicly collapsing, or even relaxing. It was somehow comforting to realize that even Emily had gone to pieces now and then.
Emily stood, giving a parting squeeze to Andy’s shoulder before she took a step away, letting Andy have a little breathing room. She looked at the pictures that Andy had been eyeing a few minutes before, and a tiny mischievous smile quirked her lips. “What was she like?”
Andy was momentarily confused. “What do you mean? You knew her as well as anyone.”
Emily glanced back over her shoulder, wicked humor in her eyes. “Not the way you did. What was she like?”
“Oh. That.” Andy couldn’t help grinning. “What you’d think, honestly. Demanding. Impatient. Intemperate.” They both laughed. Then Andy continued, more thoughtfully, “Unexpectedly sweet. Once in a while romantic, though always understated. One rose on the pillow, you know, not three dozen at the office.” She drifted, remembering. “Adventurous,” she added with a small, sly smile. “And very passionate.”
Emily held up a hand. “Details not necessary.”
“Wasn’t going to provide them,” Andy parried. “She’d find a way to kill me, I’m pretty sure.” But a part of her, the part fired up by the Scotch and awakened by the question, wanted to go on. She always looked me in the eyes while she fucked me. Unless she had me on my knees, which she liked, or bent over a table or a counter or a desk, which she also liked. She liked to mark me. She liked me to beg. “Ask for it,” she’d say. And I did.
“Nigel always said that your foreplay was probably cutting remarks and shining optimism, respectively.”
“We were a bit more physical than that,” Andy retorted, rolling her eyes.
Emily snickered. “Oh, I knew you two had a healthy carnal connection. You weren’t as quiet in Miranda’s office in those early days as you obviously thought you were.”
“Good lord,” Andy said feebly. That was something she was glad she hadn’t known all these years. Miranda might well have enjoyed an audience, but she certainly wouldn't have wanted it to be Emily.
She was extremely visual, of course. She was particular about what I wore, or didn’t. She liked me tied, she liked me spread for her. She looked and looked, with that little smile and that eyebrow raised—she loved to watch me.
“What’s this?” Emily asked. She indicated the one drawing on the wall of photos.
“Cassidy drew that,” Andy said, focusing with difficulty. “Her first or second year of college, I think.” It was a pencil sketch of Miranda, sitting behind a desk or table; at the bottom was written Andy’s favorite of the very few public statements Miranda had ever made about their relationship. She’d said it to Hilton Als during an interview for his profile of her in The New Yorker, published not long after Andy and Miranda became the scandal of the hour. “I don’t let it bother me if people call me a bitch. I am, and they do. Why should I care if they call me a dyke?”
Emily nodded. She said, “So talented. Almost a pity she ended up a designer and not an artist,” and walked further along the wall.
I touched myself for her, I fucked myself for her, I fucked other people for her; I let her photograph me and film me. The only reason we had a television in the bedroom was so that we could set up a camera and she could watch me being fucked while she fucked me.
Andy tried to keep the thread of what Emily was saying. “Cassidy would tell you that she is an artist.”
After the bypass, when she was no longer physically strong enough to take me, she still wanted to see me. She wanted to see me naked, wet, holding my knees open, exposing myself to her gaze. She wanted to see my clit swollen, my cunt filled. Even if it couldn’t be her hand entering me, she loved my pleasure.
“Of course,” Emily said, correcting herself. “She is. The fall line was … really, I’ve never seen gorgeousness so perfectly paired with function. I don’t imagine she draws much anymore, though. It’s all holographic modeling and capacitive sculpture.”
“I suppose,” Andy answered, not having any idea and not really caring. She was well beyond this conversation, in another life and time.
But when I made love to her she closed her eyes, or she covered them. She’d turn her head and put her face in the crook of her elbow. It hurt so much at first—I thought, She can’t look because it isn’t me she wants. It took nearly a year for me to ask her, and she gave me that look, the one that focused all her penetrating energy on me alone, and she said, “It’s too much. It’s too beautiful. I’m afraid I’m going to explode.”
After Emily left, the stillness of the apartment was both soothing and oppressive. Andy walked slowly through the rooms, amazed at how empty they seemed. A week before there had been only one additional person there, a physically small, frail, elderly woman. How could it be that there had been so much more life in it then?
Andy wasn’t sorry to be alone. There was a lot more she—and the Scotch—would’ve liked to have said, but she was glad she’d been prevented. She and Miranda had been as happy as it was possible for two people to be, she firmly believed that, but it hadn’t been perfect. Emily wanted to think it was, though. She didn’t know or need to know about Andy’s very occasional, very discreet lovers in the last few years, no more than she’d needed to know the details of the sexual joy Andy had had with Miranda for so many years before that.
She didn’t need to know about the note. Andy, though, would never again not know about the note, no matter how much she wanted to be able to scrub it from her mind.
It wasn’t as if the note itself had said anything hurtful, or even particularly surprising. It had been efficient, unsentimental, and businesslike—very Miranda-esque. But the note had been written because, in the end, even Miranda thought that Andy deserved better.
Andy hadn’t wanted better. She hadn’t wanted anything but what she had, and she had never stopped wanting more of that.
She went into Miranda’s study and sat down at her desk. She had had to come in here the day after, to find Miranda’s will and directives, and she’d found not only those items—pulled out and placed in the center drawer, for Andy’s convenience—but two deep drawers full of ephermera of their life together.
One drawer was full of hard drives, DVDs, memory cards, and other obsolete and semi-obsolete storage formats; they contained, Andy knew, hours and hours of her own body, writhing and thrusting, being stroked, spread, sucked, entered, satisfied. There were images of her alone, of her with Miranda, of her with a handful of others. Miranda had particularly liked to watch her with men, for reasons Andy didn’t fully understand. That it turned Miranda on had been enough for Andy. (And it certainly did. Andy had learned to give herself a full day to recover when they had a gentleman visitor; whatever she took from him, she would take harder and faster from Miranda once he left.)
The drawer below that was full of notes. At first it had looked as if Miranda had saved every scrap of paper Andy had scrawled on over their thirty-seven years together. That wasn’t true, of course. Miranda had kept only artifacts of particular events. Andy didn’t remember them all, though some she did. “Get the white bowl from the fridge and come upstairs!” one read—that was the night they’d ruined a set of sheets with chocolate pudding. “Welcome home. I’m naked. Come up,” she’d written on another. She had no specific memory of that, but she’d left notes like it often over the years.
Andy wondered if Miranda had had a memory attached to each piece of paper, if this had been her recreation in the last few years: pull out a note, relive an evening, feel and taste and hear again a sensual experience from a decade or more before. She hoped so. She loved to think of Miranda enjoying their sex life again and again. God knew they’d put enough energy and resources into it. Just the money Miranda had spent migrating her library of Andy’s body from one digital format to the next could have endowed a chair at NYU.
She wondered, not for the first time, if these memories had begun to desert Miranda near the end as well. She wondered if that loss would have contributed to the writing of the note, the hoarding of the pills.
“I would have given you new memories, Miranda,” she said out loud. “Every day, if that’s what you’d wanted. If you’d wanted to see my sagging tits and my gray-haired twat, I’d have laid myself out for you every single day. I’d have given you anything. I didn’t care that you were eighty-fucking-seven. I cared that I was yours.”
She noticed that, again, her eyes were filled and spilling down her cheeks, and she decided to ignore it. “Maybe that’s not what you wanted,” she whispered. “Maybe there was nothing I could have given you to keep you here. But god damn you. God damn you, Miranda, you should have let me try.”
She spun the wheeled chair away from the desk, turning her back to it. She’d get rid of the scraps. And she didn’t need to keep Super-8 tapes or mini-DVDs; she’d hang on to the most recent versions of Miranda’s files—someday, when the hurt was less fresh, it might be nice to take a look at her thirty- or forty-year-old self being ravished by her fifty-five- or sixty-five-year-old lover—but she could certainly let go of the originals.
The memories she would hold onto as hard as she could, as long as she could. She would not forget Miranda’s taste, Miranda’s scent, the feel of her elegant fingers. She would find ways to remind herself, as Miranda had. If someday she started to be unable to recall these things, she might find herself on the road Miranda had taken; for now, though, she would work on keeping Miranda, and herself, alive.
“Do you remember,” she said aloud, dropping her head back onto the back of the chair and closing her eyes, “the New Year’s Eve we spent in Rio? You had me go out onto the balcony in nothing but a robe, and then you told me to let it fall open. You told me to hold onto the railing and look at you. And you took pictures.”
She pushed up her dress, drawing her hand up her thigh, smiling. “Hundreds of people below us in the street, and you were taking pictures of me mostly naked just above their heads. Then you put the camera down and came out on the balcony. Remember?” Her voice began to get rough; her fingers slipped into her panties. “You started to touch me. My breasts, my belly. I wanted to go inside and you wouldn’t let me. You said, Hold that railing. I’m standing here with the most beautiful woman in Rio, and I want everyone to know it. And then you put your hand between my legs …”