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sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As a consequence, I couldn’t really make a personal connection to the news, not yet at any rate, but what I could picture now – and vividly, intrusively – was Melissa, tall and slender in a creamy silk sheath dress on our wedding day, sipping a Martini in Vernon’s apartment on the Upper West Side, her pupils dilating … and smiling across the room at me. I could picture her perfect skin, her shiny straight black hair that went half-way down her back. I could picture her wide, elegant mouth not letting anyone get a word in edgeways …
    The waitress approached with our drinks.
    Melissa had been smarter than anyone around her, smarter than me, and certainly smarter than her older brother. She’d worked as the production co-ordinator of a small cable TV guide, but I’d always pictured her moving on to bigger and better things, editing a daily newspaper, directing movies, running for the Senate.
    After the waitress had gone, I lifted my drink and said, ‘I’m sorry to hear that.’
    ‘Yeah. It’s a shame.’
    But he said it like he was referring to a minor earthquake in some unpronounceable Asian republic, like he’d heard it on the news and was just trying to make conversation.
    ‘Is she working?’ I persisted.
    ‘Yeah, she’s doing something, I think. I’m not sure what. I don’t really talk to her that much.’
    I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been having photo-album flashes of me and Melissa, and of our little slice of time together – like that one of our wedding day in Vernon’s apartment. It was psychotronic, skullbound stuff … Eddie and Melissa, for example, standing between two pillars outside City Hall … Melissa doing up lines as she gazes down into the mirror resting on her knees, gazes down through the crumbling white bars at her own beautiful face … Eddie in the bathroom, in various bathrooms, and in various stages of being unwell … Melissa and Eddie fighting over money and over who’s a bigger pig with a rolled-up twenty. Ours wasn’t a cocaine wedding so much as a cocaine marriage – what Melissa had once dismissively referred to as ‘a coke thing’ – so, regardless of whatever real feelings I may have had for Melissa, or she for me, it wasn’t at all surprising that we’d only lasted five months, and maybe it was surprising that we’d even lasted that long, I don’t know.
    But anyway. The point here and now was – what had happened with them ? What had happened with Vernon and Melissa? They had always been very close, and had always played major roles in each other’s lives. They had looked out for each other in the big bad city, and been each other’s final court of appeal in relationships,jobs, apartments, décor. It had been one of those brother-sister things where if Vernon hadn’t liked me, Melissa probably would have had no hesitation in just dumping me – though personally, and if I’d had any say in the matter, as the boyfriend, I would have dumped the older brother. But there you go. That hadn’t been an option.
    Anyway, this was ten years later. This was now. Things had obviously changed.
    I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarettes, but I just couldn’t get Melissa out of my head now. I wanted to ask him questions about her, I wanted a detailed up-date on her situation , and yet I wasn’t sure what right I might have – if any – to information here. I wasn’t sure to what extent the circumstances of Melissa’s life were any of my business any more.
    ‘Why do you smoke those things?’ I said finally, fishing out my own