Laid Bare: Essays and Observations by Judson, Tom (read 50 shades of grey .TXT) 📕

As things became more and more grim we realized we needed to make some decisions. Everyone in the family was fine with my wish to have Bruce cremated, but they weren’t sure how his Mom would feel about it. I worked it so the two of us were alone in the waiting room and, screwing up my courage, explained to her that, shortly after we met, Bruce and I had gone to their house by the ocean in Rhode Island. We took a bottle of champagne to the beach on a cold, gray December day and talked and talked. It’s when we knew we were in love. I told her I wanted him cremated so, at some point in the future, our ashes could be scattered together on that beach.

“I just want to know one thing,” she said, looking at me exactly like a protective mother would. “Did you guys buy the champagne yourselves or did you take it out of my pantry?” Laughing, I jumped out of my seat and crossed the room to hug her.

“What is it, cuz?”

Frannie’s question brought me back to the present. I guess I must have been sniffling a little; she wiped a tear from underneath my eye as my head lay in her lap.

“When this is all over I just hope, well, I still want to be part of the family.”

Frannie’s hand grabbed a clump of my hair and she gave it a gentle tug. “Huh! You’re not getting rid of us that easy!”

I sat upright and turned to face her.

“That easy?!”

We stared at each other long enough for the total absurdity of what she had said sunk in and then we simultaneously burst out laughing. We were in the throws of hilarity when the door opened and the group came back in from dinner. Bruce’s aunt led the way flourishing a cardboard coffee cup in each hand.

“One martini to go,” she said, handing a cup to Frannie. “And one Negroni, as promised.”

The cocktails made Frannie and me even giddier and caught us up with the drinking that had gone on at dinner, all of which served to increase the volume of our conversation significantly. When the nurse came in to ask us all to hold it down a little, we decided we should probably call it a night. We knew they’d call us if anything dramatic happened during the night.

And it did. They called several hours later and we all made our way back to the hospital. Not a heck of a lot of laughter during that visit, as I recall.

I still feel my spirits dip every year as April 18 approaches. But enough time has passed so that my strongest memory of that night involves an unfinished crossword puzzle, a lot of laugher and a Negroni in a cardboard cup.

How to make the perfect Negroni: 1 ounce each Campari, sweet vermouth and vodka. Stir with ice and pour into a cardboard to-go coffee cup. Serve under fluorescent lights and garnish with a lemon twist and laughter.

WINDS FROM THE SOUTH

Two millennia ago the Roman elite went by barge across the Bay of Naples to one of the most beautiful islands in the world, a journey that took most of the day. In the final decade of the 20th century, I found myself making the same trip, but I traveled above the surface of the water in a hydrofoil and I would arrive less than an hour after pushing off from the pier in Napoli. My reason for going to Capri, however, was very different from that of the Caesars: they went to shed their cares. I was going to leave some of my late husband’s ashes.

I say “husband” because, long before the issue of same-sex marriage entered the national debate, there was really no other word to define the relationship Bruce and I shared. It was intimate and lovely. We had private jokes that only we understood; we fought about sex and money, something understood by every married couple.

Bruce had died from AIDS five months before, which meant we never got to take the trip to southern Italy that was to be our next vacation. So I decided to go alone.

We had traveled extensively, and I had wanted to share with him this wonderful, lemony island, which had counted among its guests not just the Caesars but such diverse personalities as Somerset Maugham and Clark Gable. And Bruce would be able to practice his (very) limited Italian. As expressive and animated as he was, he could never quite wrap his mouth around “grazie.” He would veer from “gracias” to “graziass,” never landing on the correct pronunciation, until he finally settled on an all-purpose “grah…,” letting the recipient of his thanks fill in the rest mentally. The waiters generally understood what he meant by “grah…”, and he would beam like a little boy at his new-found ability. (He did, once, manage to form the word correctly and with a perfect Italian accent. The hotel-keep in Madrid was mightily impressed.)

On this trip I stayed at the Hotel Caesar Augustus which, in 1996, was still an elegant but slightly dilapidated relic of the halcyon days before the war. Its ochre stucco arches opened onto a terrace that boasted a spectacular—if vertiginous—view. The azure sea lay a dizzying 1,000 feet below, and spotlights mounted on the cliff just beneath the terrace illuminated the hotel’s clean art-deco lines.

I decided I would toss Bruce’s ashes off that terrace on the final night of my stay, which I thought would be a fitting end to my trip.

For three days I moped around Capri. One evening I dined in an empty restaurant which the night before had hummed with a