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j Egyptian Margaret Benbow I forget what moron it was who said we should fear no solitude, because there are angels in our midst. Death changes everything. For example, Sam’s and my big bed was no longer the conjugal couch but had become an ancient Egyptian cooling board, which I occupied alone. Night after night I lay awake as the embalmer, memory, practiced his craft. I lost my brains as surely as though he had drawn them out through my nostril with his little hook. My eyes and heart, lost earlier, waited separately on a platter for use in the afterlife. I couldn’t even write about it. There had never been anything, before, that I couldn’t write about. Why, a whole genre existed of widows’ memoirs and autobiographical novels in which the dead beloved rose again: to court and marry, to fight, eat vast pasta dinners, swim nude with the dusk on his skin, screw like a bandit, travel, sicken and then die in diamond-cut prose. The widows were not at a loss; they had kept extensive notebooks of their man’s fits and starts while he was still breathing. I’d missed my opportunity. I’d lost words while Sam was sick, mislaid the vocabularies of the four languages I speak. The few words I still used during those months were not written down, they were always the same, and they were addressed only to the black beast living and waiting on our roof, his eyes bigger than his stomach: “Are you really going to do this, you evil fuck, you evil motherfucker?” When Sam had been dead for a year, I tried clumsily to return to life. I still could not write, but I took walks, went to the store instead of having groceries delivered. My best friend, Sally, insisted that I had to. I even started dating. Once I embraced a man on the cooling board, trying to turn it into a bed again. I could not overcome a profound sense of strangeness. What was he doing there, where big Sam had held sway? I became a chaste moon maiden, discreetly shielding yawns, picking bits of mascara off my lashes. My silent apartment was enlivened by a furiously slammed door. I didn’t want him. I didn’t want, period. Now it had been two years. I couldn’t write, I didn’t date, and my friends had lost patience. Sally, a ferocious mother hen, accused me of wallowing in a rudimentary stage of grief, denial, when by her calculations I should long since have advanced to bargaining with 10   11 Egyptian fate. She watched me suspiciously, as though expecting me at any moment to emerge from my seclusion with a Victorian mourning brooch made of Sam’s hair clapped to my bosom. Above all, she disapproved of a celibacy that she considered unseemly. “Two years?” she screamed. “It’s indecent.” In careful language, she pointed out that a passionate attachment to a dead man has no future. My silence stretched on, became poisonous. Then I said, “You think I need a fuck.” Sally said, “It wouldn’t hurt.” I said, “I’m old.” Sally replied loudly, as though she’d been waiting for this remark: “You are not old. You look ten years younger than your age. Why, the last time you and I went to Schuyler’s—” Schuyler had a butcher shop in the next block, “—you were wearing that sky blue turtleneck , and I heard Schuyler say real low to Marty, ‘I wouldn’t mind a piece of that.’” Well, this was just fucking great. My eighty-year-old butcher had said to his retarded shop assistant that he’d like a piece of me. I wondered which piece. I looked at my hand, small and white; my little left foot, which was beginning to get a bunion. Sally’s practical mind groped for solutions. After researching the topic, she gave me a well-reviewed book that was keyed to those who lack a partner with a beating heart. “Meg, you can’t live with this tension,” she said as she handed it to me. The book warmly recommended certain implements, objects, and cruciferous vegetables. However, you could know Mr. Vibrator for ten thousand years and he would never bite your neck. Señor Broccoli will never pass you a cup of tea in bed on a cold morning. Tension is fine. And I made a secret, revolutionary decision. I...

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