Vigil for a Stranger by Kitty Burns Florey Page B

had never seen such a contented man, and without his down jacket he wasn’t really all that huge.
    Rosie and Ruby moved in with me the next day, and James two weeks later, and the new Jimmy Luigi’s opened on Valentine’s Day and was a smash hit from the beginning. I quit my job with Dr. Mankoff. James showed me how to keep the books for Jimmy Luigi’s and then dumped everything in my lap. He hated that part of it—his old profession. He wanted only to make pizza. Sometimes I helped out on Friday and Saturday nights, working alongside Jimmy and his chief assistant Raymond in the hot kitchen. I grew to love the heat, and the good-natured insults, and the clean, redstained aprons we all wore, and the overpowering smells of tomato and oregano and yeast. I learned how to flatten a ball of dough and twirl it into a circle, but I could never make mine as thin as James’s. What I liked best was removing the finished pizza from the oven with a long-handled wooden paddle, flipping it onto a metal tray, and slicing it—zip zip zip—into perfect eighths.
    And that’s all there is to say about my life with James. We were a phenomenon: two people who managed to be happy together. It was that simple, and after the complexities of life with Emile, simplicity was what I was looking for.
    I did my best to put Alison Kaye and her Filo-Fax out of my mind, but I didn’t succeed. All day Wednesday, I was conscious that the next day was Thursday, and that her lunch date at Chez D. was for 1:30, but I didn’t let myself do any of the things I wanted to do, which ranged from getting out all my old pictures of Pierce and studying them with a magnifying glass to making frantic phone calls to try to locate Haver & Schmidt or Chez D. or Alison Kaye herself. Consequently, I did nothing. James was working, and I was supposed to be painting and doing laundry. I sat around all day staring out the window at the wind ripping the leaves off the trees in our back yard.
    On Thursday morning, I woke with a sense of urgency, still gripped by the violent and bloody atmosphere of a dream I could mercifully remember nothing about. As soon as James left for work at eleven, I gathered together all my photographs of Pierce. There weren’t many. His official college photo in the Oberlin yearbook, a candid shot (taken at a picnic) also in the yearbook, the photo of the two of us (in color, with red eyes) in front of his apartment building, and another photo (black and white, and rather murky) of Pierce and two guys he knew in drama school wearing huge straw hats and serapes and holding guitars and grinning insanely.
    I got the rectangular magnifying glass out of the little drawer at the top of the compact edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (the boxed set, which Emile had purchased in 1976 when the Book of the Month Club had a good deal on it—when I was in the Yale–New Haven psychiatric ward learning to make baskets). I couldn’t look at the OED without resentment—that my husband had been so undisturbed by my troubles that he could perform the prosaic act of ordering from the Book of the Month Club a two-volume, 4000-page dictionary in a language he was making secret plans to repudiate along with his wife. In fact, he left the dictionary behind when he took off with Denis for France, and I would have given it to the book sale along with Proust except that it was too heavy to carry.
    I looked at the graduate school photograph first, because Pierce was wearing a hat—I thought I might catch a hint of the Mr. Pierce in the hat by the Frick. But all I could see was my Pierce: close up, how white his teeth were (I remembered them as yellowish), what a smile he had, how his hair hung in his face. And, from a detective’s point of view, how nondescript he was—an ordinary guy, neither handsome nor ugly, not big, not little, no distinguishing features, no visible quirks. Anyone asked to describe