The death of us

"Everyone remembers your pasta, Jenny," Andrea said, leaning in to the elderly Italian woman seated in front of us. She smiled thinly, nodding: "Cavatelli, gnocchi, orecchiette..."

"And lasagne," Andrea added.

"Si, lasagne. Giusepp' love my lasagne." Jenny's hands were folded on her lap, dressed in widow's black. She looked remarkably calm for a woman who had just lost her only son two days ago. Especially since her son predeceased this 82-year-old woman.

Another woman approached. "I'm so sorry, Jenny. Your son looks so handsome. He was so handsome. He's the spitting image of you."

"Everyone loved Joe," said another woman sadly. "Everyone."

Joe and I had met more than 20 years ago. It had been about that long since I'd seen Jenny. I wasn't sure if she'd recognize me.

"Hi, Jenny, I'm so, so sorry. I don't know if you remember me. I'm Kieran."

She looked at me for a moment before her eyes lit up. They were Joe's eyes. "Ah, Italia," she said. She remembered. During my junior year of college in 1983, I studied in Madrid through NYU in Spain. Joe was living in London. After my semester finished, we drove in a teeny tiny Fiat with a snooty Italian classmate of mine up through Spain, across the French Riviera and Monaco, into Milan. We ended up in the countryside outside Milan, where Joe's cousins lived on a farm. They had the first cappuccino maker I'd ever seen. They could not pronounce my name, so they called me Skrisbee. I ate the most fabulous food and drank the most fabulous wine.

We traveled next to Latina, a suburb of Rome, to visit more relatives. Joe and I would head into Rome by train each day and take the last train back to Latina every night. We once got caught in a 6-hour train strike, and for a few days we stayed in a hostel near the Spanish Steps where we met some Canadians who invited us to play a drinking game called Bunny. One night while returning to Joe's aunt and uncle's house in Latina, we fell asleep and lost track of the station stops. When we woke up the train was stopped, and we asked someone where we were. When she said "Latina," we bolted from our seats just as the train started moving. "What should we do?" I said, but Joe had already jumped onto the platform. I jumped seconds later and found myself being propelled down the length of the concrete platform. I smashed into Joe, and the two of us fell headlong onto the ground, skinning our knees through our jeans. It took a few minutes for us to recover, and we were laughing so hard our bleeding knees didn't bother us. When we got to the end, we had to cross over the tracks to exit. A carabiniere stopped us and asked us in Italian if we had just jumped from the train. Apparently it was illegal to do so. We both pretended not to speak italian, and just then Joe's uncle showed up to greet us. He explained to the policeman that we were with him. Joe later told me that his uncle was an ex-carabiniere and saved us, or, like Lucy and Ethel, we might have spent the night in jail.

But it was our trip to Bari, in the south, where everything went horribly wrong. After returning to Milan to pick up our things, we took a 9-hour train ride and then a 2-hour bus ride to a very small town to visit Joe's relatives. When the dust cloud from the bus we got off of settled, it became instantly clear to me that I was different from everyone in town.

One aunt said she couldn't put us up because she was holding a vigil for St. Anthony with 20 of her closest friends and had no room. A cousin was racked with cancer and was too sick to host us. Another aunt had a room but was expecting her daughter home from school any minute. Joe was incensed and embarrassed, but I said that maybe a phone call ahead of time might have been a nice idea. Instead, we were turned away, like Mary and Joseph at the inn, at every turn.

Finally, Joe's cousin Giuseppe took pity on us and let us stay in his apartment where, miraculously, there were two cots. He was leaving for Bologna the next day an offered to drive us back up north. So we piled into his little Audi, stopping at Rimini before continuing on to Bologna and on to Milan again.

Joe and I traveled up to Paris and then to London. We stayed with some of my relatives in Essex. Joe went back to the States, and I returned to London, where I caught a bus that landed me in Madrid 36 hours later to catch my flight back to New York.

Some of the fondest memories of my life are from that trip. But when we got home to the States, our friendship took an ominously dark turn.

I had not been out very long when I met Joe. We met about 6 months before he left for Europe, through a mutual friend. From the beginning I had a terrible crush on him that was clearly unrequited. I desperately wanted to sleep with him, and he knew it. In every town in Europe we visited he had a paramour, usually a guy he'd picked up in a bar and developed a whirlwind romance with. The guys he met were usually pretty cute, and when we stayed at hostels sometimes Joe would spend the night with the guy while I stayed alone in the room. The only time it bothered me was when we had to check out by a certain time and Joe hadn't returned from his tryst and I'd get stuck paying the hostel bill. I couldn't let on that I felt spurned, but I think Joe knew. He loved the attention, and he cavalierly asserted that every man was after him. He was somewhat attractive, but not the kind of attractive that would leave men swooning. In retrospect I was attracted more to the mystique surrounding him--and to the fact that he seemed unattainable--than to his looks.

For the rest of the summer after we returned Joe and I didn't see much of each other. By the end of our European trip we were ready to take a breather. There had been some awkward moments in London between me and the boyfriend we were staying with. He was an older, rich alcoholic who felt threatened by my presence, and I could never figure out why. In a way I blamed Joe for setting up this tension and allowing two grown men to have an Alexis and Krystle common brawl in a lily pond over him. We didn't see much of each other until the fall, when I finally moved into my first apartment with two roommates.

Joe came over to visit, and we played cards. He had just gotten a job as a proofreader at a big downtown law firm, and we celebrated by having wine. The card game went late into the evening, and by around midnight and a couple of bottles of wine later, it got too late and risky for Joe to drive home. I had a full-size bed, and I said he was welcome to stay over if he wanted. By this time my attraction to him had waned, and it was safe to say nothing was going to happen. I suggested we sleep at odd ends, which worked out fine.

Neither of us seemed to be able to sleep, and we were both pretty relaxed from the wine. Joe repositioned himself, and suddenly I found myself sleeping face to face with him. For a while I closed my eyes and could feel the air between us get heavier and heavier. I realized I was turned on, and then I realized that Joe's hand was between my legs. Next thing I knew we were making out. "I want you so bad," Joe said. "But I know I shouldn't." "Why not?" I said, caught up in the heat of the moment. I don't remember much of what happened next.

Toward morning I woke up and noticed that Joe was not in the bed. The light was on in the bathroom. It stayed on for quite some time, over an hour. I began to wonder if Joe was all right, whether he'd passed out or something. I listened at the door and could make out a sporadic noise that sounded like sniffling. I listened more closely, and it dawned on me that Joe was crying. I didn't know what to do, so I went back to bed and waited for him to come out. I ended up falling asleep, and when I got up a few hours later, Joe was gone.

I didn't know whether to call him to see if he was all right or just let things lie. I suspected he was upset by what had just happened, but what was I going to say? And why was he so upset when he had said what he'd said and had taken an active part in it?

I figured we'd talk about it in when the dust settled. But a day later I got a letter in the mail from Joe. It was rather long, handwritten neatly, on lined stationery. The letter got right to the point. Joe said he was distraught over our sleeping together, and he had to go to the bathroom afterwards to throw up. He couldn't believe he had slept with me since I was not his type, the letter said, and he felt sick to his stomach that he had lowered his standards. My heart leapt into my throat as I read these words, the insults becoming worse with each line. By the end of the letter the dysfunction had taken a turn, with Joe telling me how much he loved me and valued our friendship.

My ego was so devastated I didn't know what to say or do. I was completely numb. My self-esteem wasn't so high to begin with, and this had brought me down even lower. But perversely, I started thinking that Joe was right, that what we did was wrong, and that compared to other men I'd seen him with I wasn't the kind of guy he would be attracted to.

We didn't talk about that night again until 5 years later. By then our friendship had decayed to an occasional phone call or letter. Joe had moved to San Francisco and was in a relationship, and I was living in Virginia with my boyfriend. I wanted to let sleeping dogs lie, be adult about everything. I was going to be studying at Stanford and decided it was time to bury the hatchet between us.

Joe said he was thrilled I'd called him. During our conversation a new, more self-aware Joe emerged.

"I can't tell you how mortified I am about sending you that letter. I'm so ashamed of myself. I hope you burned it."

"Of course," I lied. The truth is, I couldn't burn a letter like that. It's not that I ever wanted to lord the experience over him, but the pain it caused me was so great that I had to remind myself that it was real. After that I could never really trust him again.

And Joe knew it. Our friendship was irreversibly scarred by our hormones and, later, by fear of confrontation. If I had been less introverted and passive, I would have let Joe know how I felt, but I was more ashamed of myself for feeling that I deserved his betrayal. I knew that I was equally complicit in that night, had maybe even set up the circumstances to satisfy my selfish lust. Sex is easy to come by; friendship considerably harder.

Over the next 20 years Joe and I continued to see each other socially, mostly because of our mutual circle of friends, but I could never feel close to him again. He sent me a birthday card every year and made tremendous efforts to set things right, but our friendship had become like an antique lamp with a big crack that will never regain its value. I was at his bedside the day after Sept. 11, 2001, when discovered he had a very low T-cell count. He cried and held my hand when he saw me. "I can't believe you came," he said. I felt compassion for him, but that wedge was always there, preventing us from making our friendship whole. He got well again, went on the cocktail, took care of himself for a while, but over the past year or so, I heard that he'd stopped taking his meds, and he wouldn't stop smoking. This year he developed KS and PCP, the two acronyms that those of us who have lived through the plague from day 1 fear most. Tuesday night his heart failed. He had just turned 46.

It's profound, sobering, ineffable to see a peer lying lifeless before you. It makes you cling to those close to you that much more tightly. At the wake were friends I hadn't seen in many years, people with whom I'd marked all my rites of passage into adulthood. Now looking back I realize that holding on to feelings long ago faded is senseless and petty. Joe looked so peaceful in his blue suit, holding a rosary. When I looked at Jenny's eyes, I could swear I saw Joe looking back at me through them, such was the resemblance. When I knelt to say a prayer for Joe, I promised him that I would only remember the good times and that, as far as I was concerned, the letter was nothing but a pile of ashes.