Ruffly Speaking

didn’t start until I read about it,” Doug said softly. He glanced anxiously toward the kitchen, as if there were a remote chance that Stephanie might hear him. “In a book Stephanie gave me,” he added. “The book was supposed to, oh, allay one’s fears, I suppose, but it was ghastly, the way it went out of its way to suggest new possibilities, and ever since then, I’ve been plagued by this terror that I’m doomed to start hallucinating visions of Morris. Every time I’m here and I hear sirens, well, I’m on the verge of a flashback, and I’m in the grip of a sort of compulsion to go dashing out to shoo all the police cars and the ambulances away.”
    I had to suppress a sudden, crazy urge to tell Doug about hallucinatory fly catching in King Charles spaniels. To my horror, anxious laughter welled in my throat. What suppressed it was a memory: Doug had gone to work at Winer & Lamb on the day of Morris’s death as well as on the day of his funeral.
    “They came in droves,” Doug continued, his face ashen, “because I kept calling and calling 911. They sent dozens of policemen and two ambulances. It was horrible. First, there was no one, and then suddenly the house was filled with all these enormous men, and then they put me in the ambulance with him, and I wanted to clean him up —Morris would have despised being seen like that; he was a fright—and once we got to the emergency room, I had to wait and wait. And the absolute worst was when they started talking about a postmortem, and I couldn’t understand a word they were saying until it hit me, and I was sick at the thought of these strangers cutting into Morris.”
    I was so confused and overwhelmed that I hadn’t noticed Stephanie’s reappearance on the deck. Without actually touching Doug, she reached toward his arm. She said gently, “Doug, please try to remember. That was not Morris. It was only his body.”
    A Christian priest seemed a peculiar source of those words, which Doug seemed to find oddly consoling. Or perhaps what helped was Stephanie’s presence. Within a minute or two, he’d recovered. To my surprise, he told Stephanie how relieved he was that she was going to take the house off his hands. Neither of them lingered on the topic—the sale wasn’t news to the buyer and the seller— and Stephanie graciously asked Doug whether he’d prefer to skip the party that evening. I expected Doug to take advantage of the opportunity, but he assured Stephanie that he was dying to come, and he apologized to both of us for having made a scene —Doug’s word and his emphasis. His insistence on attending the barbecue puzzled me until I remembered his father’s courtliness. Doug was now making amends for the unpardonable rudeness of having even suggested to his hostess that he felt like reneging on an invitation he’d previously accepted. Looking greatly restored, he picked up the metal toolbox, told Stephanie that there was nothing wrong with the valve on the grill, and launched into one of his normal fits of fussing about all the things he had to do at Winer & Lamb and at home before he’d have the pleasure of seeing us again.
    When Doug finally left, I spoke bluntly to Stephanie. “Tell me something. It’s none of my business, but a lot of people have been assuming that Morris died of AIDS.”
    Her surprise was unmistakable. “Whatever gave anyone that idea?”
    “A lot of people still think of AIDS as a gay disease,” I said, “and this story Doug keeps telling people about Morris being accidentally poisoned sounds so unlikely. In a way, it sounds just like Morris to go wandering around feeling creative and randomly gathering up things and then making a salad, but...” I faltered. “Maybe it sounds so much like Morris and at the same time so improbable that it feels trumped up, so people assume there’s something to whitewash, something stigmatized, and then since Morris was gay, they think of AIDS.”
    “That’s because Doug’s not telling the whole story,” Stephanie said. “What Doug is omitting is that he built the garden, the raised bed.”
    “I know he did.”
    “But Doug ordered the seeds, too. He had a catalog. It had a whole section on edible flowers, and Doug ordered some special collection, and he and Morris started the seeds. They planted them together, some of them indoors, some of them out here.”
    “That’s harmless.”
    “In itself,” Stephanie said. “In itself, it’s harmless, but it’s