The Ray we all knew should have had one hell of a memorial service, in Riverside Church (that's the biggest, I think, that isn't Roman). Celebrity spotting would have been a given, and the people who spoke would have spoken beautifully if you could have heard their words through their tears. They would have been well-dressed New Yorkers, nothing flashy though, and a few Virginians, family come north for the occasion. The guestbook might have been auctioned off later by Glenn Horowitz along with the whole collection filling bookcases, solid under the bed, and sometimes stacks by a table, first editions, galleys, all signed, like a guestbook after all. And the quilt his mother made for him, always on the bed which had been raised to permit more book storage, perhaps even the tiny needlepoint pillow with an "R" surrounded by rosettes which I gave him on my first visit there. I swear I'm not making any of this up so far, although it's possible there may have been some flashy dressers that I didn't know he knew.

I didn't know how alone he felt until one fall afternoon I was walking across town in the 20's and saw him waiting at a bus stop. This is Ray Roberts, who always took cabs when he wasn't walking by preference, or so the myth goes. He always found you a cab to send you home at the end of a perfect evening and they were always perfect evenings. I digress. It was Ray. He stood there in his raincoat, shoulders hunched and head forward as if against the rain but there wasn't any rain. He looked so damnably alone. I didn't go over. And I never told him what I saw, that reality of him when no one was looking. It made me so goddamn sad because I knew there was nothing I could do about it. It wasn't like the pulmonary fibrosis pain, the kind of pain that my credentials could deny out of existence. Once upon a time, I thought that I could enter the aloneness and then it would no longer be, by definition. You have to be very young to believe that, and you can't be up against a pro. The once great love of my life was beyond question a pro, and he was for that matter beyond questioning.