Six weeks after his college roommate died, Ben thought he saw him in London: the square jaw and pale skin, the round eyes and devilish grin. But it was only a stranger in the crowd on Oxford Street. In the weeks that followed, Ben saw lots of people who reminded him of Mike. It seemed the city was suddenly populated with dozens of men who shared his fondness for gray parkas, cheap tight jeans, baseball caps and bargain boots.
Of course, Ben didn’t know if these items were still in Mike’s wardrobe when he died. He hadn’t seen him for two years when he got word that Mike had drowned off the coast of Fire Island. He was just remembering him as he’d looked at Yale.
Ben flew in from London for the memorial service in New York. He couldn’t take any time off, but with the time difference he was able to make the trip work. He left Heathrow Friday night and arrived in the city an hour before the service Saturday afternoon. Saturday night he spent with college friends. A few of them took Mike’s mother, Maryanne, out for dinner — he remembered a quiet Italian place — then Sunday he woke up early, went to a movie with friends (one they told themselves Mike would have liked), and caught a late afternoon flight back to London. There was a mishap with the car service and he rode to LaGuardia in a long white limo only perfunctorily cleaned from its stag party service the night before. Back in London, he took a cab straight to work. It was a whirlwind, but he was glad he’d gone.
Ben told himself the sightings in London were a symptom of his grief. Mistaking a stranger for someone you once knew so well, someone with whom you’d spent those carefree, heady years of youth, must be common after a death. Mike had gone on to law school, then started work at a firm in New York. He’d been there three years and was doing well, loved unabashedly the money and the lifestyle. Most of Ben’s friends talked of getting out, doing something else. Academia? Politics? Maybe a smaller firm somewhere else? Mike was aiming for partner at Freeman, Fred and enjoying every penny. His first year as an associate, he bought his mother a car.
There was something refreshing about having Mike for a friend. You didn’t have to feel bad talking about your salary because there was Mike bragging about his. You didn’t have to hide the fact that you were thinking about buying a condo at the beach because there was Mike showing you pictures of his. He was eccentric and wacky, fun to be around, and you couldn’t fault his love of money because he hadn’t had any growing up. He was the first in his family to go to college; his mother lived in a double-wide. He was the only person Ben had known at Yale on a full scholarship. In those years, Ben said often, “I’m just glad there are still people like him here,” when what he meant was that he was glad he’d met him, for a lot of reasons, but foremost among them the idea that it distinguished him, Ben, in some way. It made him seem more remarkable in his choice of friends. Also, Mike was gay.
But that Ben didn’t know at Yale. Mike came out afterward, in New York, during a reputedly wild time while he waited tables and applied to law schools. Ben was at the London School of Economics then. When Mike went to Harvard the following year, he settled down to his studies and worked actively for Lambda Legal. What started as a rowdy coming out party turned more thoughtful and productive. He made law review and when he graduated was offered the job of his dreams in New York. He lived with his on-again, off-again boyfriend in a big apartment downtown. He was happy. He was a black-and-white movie made-over in Technicolor. He was a years-dormant Christmas cactus suddenly in bloom. He worked long hours, but still had time for a book club. He was reading fiction for the first time, he told friends, after far too much case law. He became something of an evangelist for fiction, in fact, and started giving all his friends extravagant gift certificates to Barnes & Noble.
Then, in his fourth year at Freeman, Fred he took two weeks off at the end of August and rented a house on Fire Island with a group of friends. Two weeks was the longest vacation Mike had ever had. At the end of the first week, he called his mother in Seattle and told her he was having the time of his life. He wanted to do this again next year and bring her out for part of it. She agreed, was glad he was so happy. The next afternoon he went swimming and was pulled out to sea by a rip tide. It took lifeguards three hours to recover his body.
Many of these details Ben learned while he stood in the lobby of the funeral home on Madison Avenue before the service that warm September Saturday. He was looking for a place to stash his suitcase and people were saying the body was in good shape; it was nice to be able to say goodbye. Perhaps it was the jetlag, but Ben never realized they were talking about an open casket in another room and so he never went to see it. Later, when he started believing he was seeing Mike in London — in the turn of a cheek, a certain stride — he regretted this. He thought maybe the problem could have been avoided if he’d said goodbye with more finality, had seen Mike’s dead face. That seemed like part of the problem; it was hard to accept that Mike was gone. He’d worked harder than most for everything he’d attained. How could it be that the one thing he couldn’t work for was not granted to him in large supply?
Ben thought the sightings might also be latent memories of the summer he’d spent with Mike in London. Three of them had traveled on student visas between their junior and senior years. Mike was the first to find a job: selling perfume at Selfridges. Ben and the other friend, Jason, looked for work and went every other day to the employment center, but, the fact was, Ben and Jason didn’t have to work. Their families could make up the difference. Their families felt the experience of a summer in London was more important than the money.
“Must be nice,” Mike would say, counting out his food budget for the week.
Mike hated selling perfume. He was working on commission and his aggressive tactics didn’t go over well with the polished patrons of Selfridges. When he got a job at a pub in Paddington, he switched immediately. And when he was offered the chance to live in the flat over the pub, he moved out the next day. Ben and Jason thought at the time it made sense: the flat the three of them were sharing in Kensington was tiny.
His frugality was extolled at the memorial service by friends who’d known him longest. Newer friends spoke of his generosity. His high school sweetheart remembered a camping trip during which Mike insisted they save as much money as they could on food; he was furious with her when she bought a name-brand pasta instead of something else. Then an associate Mike worked with at Freeman, Fred spoke about the book club dinners Mike hosted, for which he usually prepared filet mignon. People shook their heads and wiped their eyes. It was like watching a beatification, a life of frugality rewarded with plenty, if only for a brief time.
His mother did not speak. Later, at their Italian dinner, Ben remembered her talking a lot, but at the service she sat silently in the front row, eyes glistening, feverish circles in her cheeks. Mike had always called her by her first name, which allowed his friends in the years before they met her to picture an individual, not just a mother. And yet it seemed to them unfeeling. Ben thought she was a sweet woman, obviously overwhelmed. She seemed distracted during the service, rubbed her legs often. He wondered what she made of some of the things that were said. Several people spoke about what they gently phrased as Mike’s difficult side — the temper and stubbornness that everyone who knew him encountered at one time or another and that could make people angry, desperate, even fearful when Mike was in a particularly perverse mood. At the memorial service it was variously described as having high standards for himself and his friends, as a fierce sense of loyalty, as perfectionism. All seemed true. A woman from college, a woman Ben remembered as being in another circle of Mike’s friends, said something about how ravaging it was that Mike had drowned. Her remarks were ill-prepared and unclear, but it seemed she’d readied herself for the possibility of HIV, not that Mike might be taken by something so ordinary as drowning.
Back in London, Ben tried to shake off the mood. Each sighting had an explanation, after all. The shape of a face, the slope of a shoulder. These things were so strongly reminiscent of Mike that anyone would do a double take. He was sure of it.
He threw himself into work. When he could, he traveled. Never more than a three or four day weekend, typical of the life of the lawyer ex-pat, particularly one in securities, but he thought it would help. He thought things would get better soon.
