Episode 6: A Man in a Fedora

A MAN IN A FEDORA

by Marina Rubin

It was because he was dead that I started looking for him. Retracing my steps. As if he were something I lost on the way to work, a pair of gloves, a scarf. I started searching for him in my big leather purse, in my gym bag; he was like an expensive jar of cream that rolled into the toe of a sneaker. I never had to look for him before, even when he was gone for months on end, sometimes years, I didn't worry. I knew he was somewhere out there, doing whatever fantastical thing he said he was doing, and he would turn up, eventually, when the time was right, with birthday greetings and happy new year’s, or just congratulating me with some ridiculous random holiday.

“Please accept my warmest wishes on this remarkable World Malaria Day!” he would announce on the other line.

“Maxie,” I would sing, overjoyed to hear my old friend. “Is that really a holiday?” 

“Of course. Look it up on your calendar!”

“But I don't have malaria.”

“That's why congratulations are in order,” he would laugh, and we would immediately make plans to meet for dinner, somewhere in the city, some place small, cozy and delicious.

And now he was dead. Some girl I didn't know, some model-wannabe, Vero Nique, posted a photo album on Facebook entitled, “R.I.P. Max Florentine.” A bunch of people I’ve never heard of, supposedly his friends, flooded his timeline with sad faces and condolences—Rest in Peace, dear friend...62 is just too early...We'll all meet there one day...I sat on my red couch in the living room, drinking coffee when I saw the post. Something round, resembling a tennis ball, formed in the pit of my stomach. What? What happened? When? I kept asking, staring at the screen. The girl posted the album only a few days ago – photos of her wearing a white cotton nightgown reminiscent of the Civil War fashion, her hair parted in braided ponytails, she was holding a rifle. I recognized the inside of Max's East Village apartment, the warm yellow light he used for photo shoots. She was lounging in his oversized fur-clad armchair where he once photographed me. 

Thanksgiving, eight years ago. I was sitting in the same chair, wearing a black strapless gown more appropriate for the opera than Max's tiny place. I was enjoying a cigarette after dinner. I turned to him, slowly. “This is my last, Max,” I told him, “remember me.” He took the camera, extended his arm, and clicked. Just one shot. Since then the photograph became bigger than life, I posted and reposted it every Thanksgiving, celebrating another year of clean, glorious living. The original hung in my bedroom, boxed inside a rustic champagne frame. I emailed the girl immediately.

“Hi Vero, I am sorry to bother you, but may I ask what happened to Max Florentine?” 

“He is gone.”

“What do you mean? When? How?”

“Two years ago. He was diagnosed with not-operable cancer and they decided to "leave" with his wife.”

“Leave?”

“Double suicide. Shoot to death.” “His wife? You mean Ivy?”

“I didn't know her at all.”

“How did you find out about Max?”

“His best friend tell me. So I find this pictures he took long time ago and post them.” 

“Who is his best friend?”

“Listen, I am not sure I have to answer your questions.”

“I knew Max really well, he was like my uncle, he was virtually my godfather.” 

“So I am not right person to ask this questions!”

“Ok. Thanks for your help.”

What a horrible bitch, I thought. Just in case, I clicked “like” on every photo in her album, in memory of Max. Then slowly, methodically, one foot in front of the other as if I was carrying a teaspoon of hot water I was afraid to spill, I walked to the bathroom and threw up.

He's been gone for two years and only this Facebook announcement, some stupid girl’s vanity display, a girl who could barely write in English, informed me of my friend's death? I couldn't believe it. It can't be true, it just can't, it simply cannot—I repeated in agony, going through Max's social media accounts. No activity since 2015, about 2 years ago. If Max was terminally ill and had decided to kill himself, why didn't he tell me, why didn't he say goodbye? We were very close. I always thought he would leave me his library. He had an amazing collection of rare books that he loved and he also loved me. Like a daughter he never had; a favorite niece, an orchid. 

“You are an orchid,” he would say, sighing, “a reminder that there is something beautiful in this life.” I grabbed my phone and tried to call him. But 13 years of friendship had generated 22 different numbers for Max Florentine, (and that was when I still copied them off the caller ID when he called, and I had given that up years ago.) As I sifted through the list, desperately dialing one non-working number after another, it began to sink in that my friend was hopelessly, irreversibly gone.

I looked around my apartment. Everywhere my eyes landed I saw something from Max—a gift, a memento; on my walls, in the bookcase, on my nightstand. A figurine of a cat sitting on a stack of books, surprisingly heavy for a 2-inch thing. The first present Max ever gave me. “All you have is two books and a cat,” he said. I was 25. I had a cat, and two chapbooks of poetry no one read.

“I also have you,” I protested.

“Yes, you do,” he kissed me on the arm, somewhere between the wrist and the elbow.

There was a tiny music box on my nightstand, a Hanukkah gift. If you turned the knob it played Yellow Submarine. There was also a silver candlestick, not taller than my index finger; and in the kitchen—a cutting board so small, it could only fit one slice of cheese, and maybe a mouse.

Everything Max gave me was miniature, delicate, precious. Even “Death in Venice” came in a special pocket-sized edition. “So you can keep it in your cosmetics bag,” he suggested.

“Why? Because every time I put on lipstick I must read about Aschenbach?”

“Bingo!”

Aschenbach. That's who Max reminded me of, with his sophistication and grace evocative of a different, more elegant era. He was small, about 5 feet tall, (maybe that's why all his gifts were so petite.) A bit of a dandy. He wore a Burberry trench coat, cuff-links, and a fedora hat with a military pin. He smoked a pipe. He had small hands. 

One day he came to my place as I was cleaning out my closets. “Oh, don't throw those away,” he said, grabbing a pair of leather gloves I bought in Rome that no longer fit, or simply bored me. I asked why. He said it was impossible to find leather gloves that fit him in the men's department. 

“Take them, take them all,” I exclaimed, pulling gloves out of my drawers. For the next twelve years, throughout all the freezing New York winters, whenever he picked me up, I watched his little hands on the wheel, in my gloves.

The jewelry chest with rows of elephants and many compartments for rings, earrings and necklaces sat on my armoire. That was for my 30th birthday. Max said he brought it from Africa, some miniscule country whose name I could never pronounce. I saw the same chest in Chinatown; a group of muscular black men were selling them on the street, but every time the police sirens went off in the distance, they threw their goods in a blanket and scuttled down Broadway.

One day in a car on the way to the opera, Max gave me a blue velvet pouch. Inside I found a tooth. The tooth of a shark, hanging on a thread.

“Where the hell did you get that?”

“In another far-away land,” he waved me off. “It's supposed to protect you from evil.”

“You are really a man of mystery, aren't you, Maximilian?” I stared at him, shoving the tooth back into its pouch.

Where was it now? I started rummaging in my medicine cabinet. I remembered stowing it away together with questionable herbs and diet teas. I found the pouch next to my old birth control. I held the tooth in my hand, its knife-like peak piercing my skin; I wrapped the thread around my fingers in an elaborate game of cat’s cradle, all the while trying to make sense of what happened. How could I lose him? How could I miss the signs? It's been two years since we spoke? Really? What was I doing all this time? Yes, it’s true—I was caught up in my own world of writing, publishing, playing dress-up, Instagramming, posting, and dating. And what did that ever get me? All I had now was four books and a cat...and Max was gone. It never occurred to me to check up on him? Why? Was I a terrible friend, a self-centered, shallow person?

My phone rang. It was Virginia, my oldest and dearest friend since our university days. Her refined taste, sensitivity, and infinite love of literature made her my most valued, unofficial editor.

“Did I just see you ‘like’ 20 pictures of some girl with a rifle?” 

“Never mind her,” I sighed. “Max Florentine is dead.”

“What? No! Max Florentine, that old guy you were supposed to go to Paris with?” 

“Yes. But let's not talk badly about the dead.”

“I'm sorry. That elderly gentleman you were so fond of...How did he die?” 

“He was terminally ill and he killed himself.”

“Wow. That’s terrible. When was the last time you spoke to him?”

“I don’t know,” I moaned. “It was maybe two years ago. He wanted to see some folk singer perform at this jazz club around the corner. I didn't want to pay a $20 cover charge, so I suggested we meet after the concert. When he called me after the concert, I told him something came up. But Virginia,” my voice broke, “I lied…Nothing came up. I was just sitting on the couch with my cat.”

There was a long silence on the other line, and finally she said, “Well, isn't life sad...”

I spent the rest of the day moping, circling my apartment like a restless panther, walking from the living room to the bedroom, to the refrigerator, through the maze of hallways, bumping into corners. I looked at the paintings on the wall, at my bookshelves. I pulled out one book after another, opened it, closed it. I started mopping the floor in the kitchen but after soaping three feet of tiles I suddenly felt tired, fatigued, so I dropped the mop in the middle of the room. I decided to get some air but when I walked outside it was sunny and beautiful. Life was radiant, teenagers played football, cars streamed down the highway, spring was just a few weeks away, and I thought Max can't see any of this anymore, life was tedious, and I had to go back inside, close the shutters, lie down across a fully made up bed wearing a down jacket and an aviator hat, pulling its ear-flaps tightly around my face. Thinking, remembering.

How did I first meet Max Florentine? I had just started working at a high-tech placement agency (where I was still employed) and he was looking for a job, programming in C++. I found him a contract at JP Morgan, rewriting a legacy application. He accepted the offer and came to my office to sign the paperwork. No... he asked me to bring the paperwork downstairs because he couldn't find parking. He waited for me outside, leaning on a gold pre-war Volvo, all dressed in white, in a summer fedora, as if he just stepped off a yacht on the Cote d'Azur. He gave me a corsage of pink roses and offered to drive me home. We stopped for dinner at a little place on Brighton Beach that served pierogi and blini.

“What are you doing here?” he asked, as if he knew me. “You are out of place. You should be in the South of France, or at least in Paris.”

I snarled something brisk and insulting in response, left him in the middle of those silent streets leading up to the boardwalk, and walked home alone. The next morning, he faxed his signed paperwork together with a personal note, “I dreamt I was in Paris walking a panther down Montparnasse.”

A month after Max started at JP Morgan, my boss Ian received a call from the client.

“Hm. Agh...okay...I see...okay...We'll take care of it,” I heard Ian on the phone in his cubicle. Then he asked me to grab Max’s number so we can call him together from the conference room. 

“Are they firing him?” I asked, biting my nails.

“No. But we need to talk to him.”

In the sunny conference room overlooking the battered downtown, my boss Ian didn't beat around the bush and attacked the problem head-on. “Max, I understand you are supposed to gather data from the users and build a new application. There's been some concern about the way you interact with the users. To put it plainly – you scare the shit out of them. Can you explain?”

“Ian, are you familiar with the rapid-fire interrogation technique?” Max asked in a thick British accent. “The tactic is most effective during military action to gather Intel from the enemy. It requires a series of questions, asked directly, assertively, building up speed and intensity, bam, bam, bam!” My boss looked at me, his mouth hanging open. “Until the enemy crumbles and gives it all away...My commanding officer, I mean my manager here, the lovely Mademoiselle Sanjucta from Hyderabad, instructed me to get the data at any cost. I am just doing my job, sir.”

“Max,” Ian paused, choosing his words. “You are doing a great job, obviously. But these people are not prisoners of war, you are not in Guantanamo. You are a C++ programmer. You need to be nice to the users.”

“I will try,” Max promised. “Although sometimes it’s very difficult.” 

My boss hung up. “Holy shit. What a character!” 

“But see, they are not firing him,” I gloated.

A few days later Max called me up and said he had business in Brooklyn, and he could give me a lift home. We drove in the rain, my smoking hand hanging outside the window, another posy of roses resting in my lap. I was dating two boys at the time, neither gave me much joy. I watched the washed-out roads ahead of me, the windshield wipers heaving with pain. This is life, I thought, in all its knockout beauty and boredom…and the true test is to love it for this tedium, not for what you want it to be, but for how it truly is. I said it out loud in the car. 

Max looked at me and smiled, “With that line you had returned to me, finally returned, from another life, a century ago.”

And so began the summer of fables. Max picked me up from work twice a week. We took trips to Floyd Bennett Field, an abandoned naval airport where we sat on the bench overlooking the river and talked about books, cinema, war. He told me about serving in Afghanistan, how his troops blew up a maternity unit and he switched sides to the Mujahideen. Then he was in Beirut, training civilian militia on how to use parachutes. He worked for the Americans in Sarajevo where he negotiated with kidnappers between two jugs of gin. Everything he said sounded half-mythical, half-true, but it didn’t matter…we all created our own reality, and then told stories about it.

He became my personal news anchor, my covert colonel who kept me abreast of all world conspiracies, political intrigue, and international espionage. I continued seeing the two boys on the weekends, but they were just an afterthought, a footnote in someone else's biography, a bookmark to a future story, fictitious of course. I waited for the Mondays when I would see Max Florentine again, on the corner of Cedar and Broadway leaning on his ancient Volvo, proudly, as if it were a Rolls Royce. When he found out I had many artist-friends he asked me if any of them would be interested in painting his car. “It’s hardly a job for an artist,” I shrugged.

“Not if you want the car to look like it was riddled with bullets and ravaged by a bomb!”

We started meeting on the weekends, driving to the Hamptons, Montauk, Far Rockaway. We soaked lobsters in butter on the veranda of Nick's Lobster as if it were the Riviera, and why not. We watched a four-hour documentary about Leni Riefenstahl, who made movies about Hitler and scuba-dived at the age of 94. We went to a premier of a silly little film called, "Gary Buys a Hat.” We sat front row at a fashion show at the Empire Hotel rooftop where all the models looked like prostitutes, and Max claimed he had slept with most of them. I gave him my flash fiction stories and he liked them so much, he said I was heading straight for Oprah's couch.

“Do you believe in God?” I asked him once.

We just had dinner on the boardwalk, eating quails in raspberry sauce, and then took off our shoes and walked on the sand. It was still light, but the shoreline was hidden in a pillow-like fog. We climbed the ladder to the top of a lifeguard station and sat in a high-rise chair, listening to the waves we couldn’t see.

“I don't know,” he said. “Maybe there is a God up there, but he doesn't care for me.” 

“How could you say that? If there is a God, he loves all his children the same.”

“Oh, don't get me wrong—there is no bad blood between us. It’s just that he left me alone and said whatever. And I'm okay with that,” he nodded.

“As long as you are okay with that...” I whispered into the thick white fog.

He invited me to celebrate Thanksgiving at his place, just the two of us. 

“Welcome to my tabakerka,” he said, as he escorted me to a plush reclining chair in the middle of the room and told me to unwind, while he frolicked with skillets and knifes in the kitchen.

“A snuffbox” in Russian, his apartment was diminutive and snug, with a single low cot standing unassumingly in the corner and two towering bookcases, housing my favorites – Marquez, Maupassant, Balzac. Photos of his mother, a regal gray-haired woman who played the piano at the Philharmonic, sat on his bedside table. A theater coat rack doubling as storage blocked the doorway; he had to move it every time he left the snuffbox. We ate chicken with potatoes and asparagus, simple yet delicious. He was a great chef, he could make a feast out of nothing, salt, and pepper. Every Thanksgiving he made me chicken, veal, fish, or lamb, but never a turkey.

“All undercover agents and 007s love to cook!” He told me about an idea he had for a cookbook thriller called ‘Spies in the Kitchen.’ “Imagine, here you have a biography of a famous intelligence operative and across the page—his favorite recipe!”

On the wall in the hallway, I came across commendation letters from the White House, and photos of a young Osama bin Laden. “I met him back in Afghanistan,” Max explained. “You know he used to be a friend to America…But no one wants to remember that now.”

In the car on the way home, I was unusually quiet. Was any of it real? I wasn't sure. 

“Maxie, your project at JP is coming to an end,” I said. “Do you have a new job lined up?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact, I’ve been offered the post of an American ambassador to Burkina Faso. You can come with me, as my very young wife. You can lead the movement of amputees against landmines. You’ll be their Princess Diana.”

“Burki whata whata?” I laughed with abandon. It was such a long time ago.

I opened my laptop and googled, “Max Florentine obituary.” Zero matches. I tried putting Max Florentine in quotations, without quotations. I tried Maxim, Maximilian, Maxwell, Maks, and Mac. Nothing. Dead end. Just for the hell of it, I typed in James Bond Florentine, then plain James Bond. “There's nothing about you on Google,” I teased him once. 

“I know. I prefer it that way. It’s all on a need-to-know basis,” he replied in a serious, contemplative manner.

What did I expect to discover now that he was dead? An out-of-this-world announcement, a mother of all obituaries, shining a projector into every dark corner of his life, unlocking every mystery? I started thinking of who I could call to find out more about his final days, the place of his burial. It suddenly occurred to me that he didn’t introduce me to anyone. He talked about his friends. Luc in Nice, his student Boris in Estonia, some war buddies from Kuwait, and a guy who wrote the script for the movie Syriana. I knew he had a mother but...I didn't know her name.

“What do you really know about this man?” I remembered Virginia giving me a third degree when I first told her about Max Florentine, 13 years ago.

“When I'm with him I feel like I'm in a Patricia Highsmith novel,” I told her, exhilarated. 

“But everyone she writes about is a con man, or a murderer,” Virginia pointed out.

I showed up for work disheveled, my hair in a bun resembling a pineapple. I told my boss Ian that Max Florentine was dead. 

He made a joke. “Well, I hope they buried him with his favorite AK47.” 

I shook my head until he mumbled he was sorry and walked away. It had occurred to me to pull Max's file from 2004, when he worked for us. It should have a copy of his passport, and more importantly an emergency contact, hopefully his mother’s. 

But he was a consultant and none of that paperwork would have been required. Inside his file, I found a contract for a company Pirates International, a PO Box address in New Jersey, and another disconnected number. There was also Max’s resume, spanning twenty-five years of experience across different countries, and 3 college degrees—from Estonia, Slovakia and Germany. 

To humor myself, I googled Pirates International. Of course, nothing came up. Another dead end. But even if I had his mother’s number, would I call? What would I say? Express my condolences? Ask about her son’s funeral? Visit the grieving lady at a nursing home, caress her gnarled hand trying to explain my relationship with her dead son?

When we took a trip to Canada, Max called his mother every day and never mentioned me. At the time I was seeing a barely divorced man with two children, who spoke to me in retractions. For every good thing he did, for every hope he gave me, a disclaimer followed, “You realize my life is very complicated right now.” 

I sat on the couch with my cat, smoking, crying. Max stole me away for a long weekend to Quebec. He drove for eleven hours straight. I was tired, mean-spirited; I wished I were taking this trip with the divorced man. Max reserved two suites for us at a charming bed and breakfast next to Chateau Frontenac. We argued, made peace, took a carriage ride around the Old City. At night we sat on the bench in the Main Square and listened to a street guitarist play Moonlight Sonata. 

I fell in love with this European piece of cake. I bought a Victorian (revenge) corset at a boutique with a waiting room designed especially for wealthy husbands. Max sat in the plush burgundy room, in a suit and his summer fedora, smoking a pipe. We walked through the art quarter, past cannons on the promenade, down cobbled streets, terribly mismatched, Max—the perfect Humbert Humbert and me, in my red skirt and heartbreak. The odd couple, incompatible, yet so right...nothing between us, but consensus on what constitutes joy. 

In the morning before we left, we ate crepes and watched the pouring rain in the window. We stopped for dinner at a tavern in Maine where all the furniture was made out of freshly carved pine. Max drove through the night. I slept in the passenger seat until 6 o'clock in the morning. When the Connecticut license plates began to rise in front of us on the highway, I was through with the divorced man. I was 28, it was going to be a great summer.

When was the last time I saw him? The question tormented me. I started looking through my work calendar, my Google schedule, I pulled my diaries for the past 13 years and scoured them for just two words – Max Florentine. I became an unrelenting private investigator, an unauthorized biographer. What was I looking for? Proof of death? A suicide note? A farewell letter?

I remembered him at my book launch party on the Upper West Side. That was in 2013. He was wearing a three-piece suit, a silk scarf, and a gold chain hanging from his vest.

“Is that him?” Virginia asked. She too was impeccably dressed, her hair flawless in a new Jackie O style. “That’s Max Florentine? Wow. He looks like he is on stage in a Chekhov play. He is Uncle Vanya!”

“Yes, that's him,” I nodded. “I'll introduce you after the reading.”

But he didn't stay for the party, he left right after the reading. He was disgruntled and annoyed. Apparently, he got into a fight with one of my friends, Marigold—a power lesbian, the only one strong enough to man the door at the book launch.

“What happened, Maxie, why were you so upset?” I asked him later. 

“That woman wanted to put everyone through a metal detector!”

“What? Of course not, that’s ridiculous. She was just checking the tickets,” I laughed, until a crazy thought crossed my mind. “Maxie, you didn't bring a gun to my book party, did you?”

“Oh come on, your imagination is running wild,” he replied.

It was around that same time when I heard about Ivy, or rather received semi-confirmation that she might be real. Max told me he had married a French girl named Ivy. I never met her, nor did I want to. I saw her profile on Facebook; she looked barely legal, with beautiful brown hair and a fresh face with no makeup. I always thought she was his imaginary wife, until she sent me a lovely email, congratulating me on the release of my book. She told me she bought three copies at Barnes & Noble and wanted to get them signed through Max. Then she started liking everything I posted on Facebook, photos, book reviews; I sneezed and she liked it. I still thought it was a fake profile until Virginia told me she saw Max Florentine walking down Bleecker with a young, tall brunette. “Well, maybe she needs a green card,” we decided after a long round of speculation.

I teased Max about his little wife taking on his name. He assured me she would.

“Ivy Florentine, really? Sounds like a new seed of flower in Garden & Gun magazine.” 

“Aren't all women flowers?”

“Does that line actually work on women?” 

He smiled. “Sometimes.”

I never met Ivy, not to this day. That woman Vero Nique said it was a double-suicide, but I didn't believe the young girl killed herself. Max would not have allowed it. At the end, I thought it was just Max all alone, with his gun. I checked Ivy's Facebook page, just to see if my theory was correct—no activity since 2015, same as Max. He had to take his creation with him.

I came across our last correspondence on Messenger. Max wrote to me as always, from an undisclosed location. When I read it two years ago, it meant nothing. Now I drank in every word.

“How's the weather back there where you are? We've got rain here...The rain is always a good omen for me—but not a flush as it is in Texas. Everything seems to be at its natural limit here...Guns, girls, boots, cars and videos....”

He also attached a photo—a black-and-white snap that could have been taken in the 1930s. An old-fashioned cigar bar with a tailor’s mannequin, and Max’s face reflected in the glass library. 

I studied the image almost under a microscope, looking for clues, trying to decipher its meaning. He included a link to some article called, “Live forever with a new social network.” 

I didn’t open it then. Now I read it as if it were Max’s last will and testament. The essay described advancements in artificial intelligence that would allow people to continue posting online after their death. I held my breath. This was it, I thought. Max's farewell…subtle, cryptic, unsensational. Not in a million years would I have guessed what he was trying to say. Of course now, in retrospect, it all seemed obvious, elementary even. When I saw my unknowing response to his farewell letter, “Ugh, I am tired of social networks,” I closed Messenger, crawled into bed, and turned my head towards the wall.

In the next two weeks I went to work on autopilot, sat at my desk, chewed on a pencil. Our agency was going through a merger, we were consolidating email systems and signing up for new benefits. Straight from the office I rushed to get on the train as if I had a child waiting for me at home, then I sat on the couch with my cat and my grief in my hands, molding it like plasticine. Sculpting a ball, a box, a heart, a headless man. 

Memories came trickling in, each story dragging in five more. There was Max at a book party in a townhouse on Madison Avenue. He showed up with business cards that read, “Literary agent.” One of the editors had his extended family there with a toddler learning how to walk. Max stared at the family and the toddler for a long time, and then said, “It's so rare to see a naturally-born child these days, instead of one adopted from a Third World country.” 

I was mortified. I grabbed Max and hauled him towards the cheese table. But the family didn’t seem offended; they smiled and waved to him from across the room.

I remembered Max at the New Yorker Hotel, in a shearling coat with a huge fur collar and a fedora, leaning on a cane with a rhinestone-encrusted handle, trying to get into Fashion Week.

“Please check the guest list again, Mademoiselle. I know my secretary had RSVP’d on my behalf,” Max insisted, drumming the floor with his walking stick.

“I am so sorry, sir, but I don't see you,” the frightened coordinator shuffled through the list of attendees. “What is your name again?”

“Maxwell Demarchelier at your service. My secretary made the reservation. I must have left the tickets in my office at Conde Nast...”

Of course we didn't get in. “What were you thinking, Maxwell?” I teased him in the hall. 

“I don't know what happened. 99% of the time I get in.”

There was one perfect day in the summer, when I put on a fire engine red strapless dress, and Max picked me up in a Porsche he said he borrowed from a friend. We hit the road and drove until the road ended and there was nowhere left to go, and before us opened up a beautiful meadow with gazebos and chandeliers hanging from the trees, and loveseats on the shore. I lay like Danae in red on a white couch surrounded by pillows, and I was a model and Max was taking photographs, and he was Maxwell Demarchelier, if there ever was one.

“He is the kind of friend I could call in the middle of the night, if I was ever in trouble, and I know he would show up for me, no questions asked!” I praised Max to Virginia.

“But most of the time you don't know his number,” Virginia contested, softly.

Of course, I would have preferred to call Virginia, but she had two kids and a husband who would kill me if I called after 9pm. But I appreciated her kindness and tact when it came to Max.

Others were not as gracious.

“Your friend Max Florentine is full of shit!” I remembered an ex-boyfriend screaming in a drunken fit. “Where is he now? Let me guess, he is in Somalia, single-handedly saving the country from a civil war. Yeah right! You know where he is?! He's at home, jerking off while spinning the globe. Wherever the cum lands, he looks at the map and says—hey that's where I am!”

Jealous ass…For every night that guy spent at my place, he stole a packet of oatmeal.

I was on to him. He knew it. One morning he texted me:

“you are so good to me; you left a bowl of water for my oatmeal. thank you, my love.” 

“what bowl of water?” I replied, confused.

“the one on the kitchen counter, I threw in the oatmeal and heated it up, quick, easy.”

I wanted to laugh in his face. Stealing my cat's water. Eating from my cat’s bowl. You fool. If only my cat knew! My cat was arrogant, narcissistic, vindictive, and adored Max. Whenever Max came over, he would murmur a few mur-murs and fur-furs into the feline’s ear, and the cat would lie on his back with his legs open, smiling all night.

A year after Max completed his contract at JP Morgan (with superb references) I received a distressed call from a man who introduced himself as Dragomir. He spoke with a distinct Slavic accent, Serbian or Croatian. Stuttering, he explained he was trying to hunt down Max Florentine, he knew our agency placed him. He said they met at the bank and became friends while consulting on the same project.

 I told him the best way to reach Max was to email him or connect on LinkedIn. The man argued he had tried everything—calling, emailing, texting, and still no answer. Apparently, Max had borrowed a considerable amount of money and then disappeared. 

“I just can't believe I was so dumb as to give that swindler money!” Dragomir berated himself on the phone, distraught. 

I didn't know where Max was...Sudan, Nicaragua, some other bleeding dot on the map, but I emailed him right away and told him a man named Dragomir was looking for him.

“I know Dragomir…I know he is looking for me,” Max replied.

“Why is he looking for you, Maxie?” I wrote in my most childish voice.

“He is a good man. I treated him despicably. One day I will fix it…but not now.”

I paused, cracking my knuckles, considering his response.

“Perhaps you should write to him and tell him exactly that,” I suggested.

“I don't think he will be satisfied with that answer.”

We didn’t speak about Dragomir again. I wondered if Max ever made good on his promise, settled his debt before pulling the trigger. But then again, when wrapping things up it’s hard to say what becomes a priority and what falls off the table.

On the weekend, I finally scraped myself off the red couch, and went to visit my parents in Coney Island. I told them about Max Florentine. 

My mother folded her arms across her chest and said, “Oh honey, I am so sorry, I know how much he meant to you.” 

And then of course, she had to bring up the buffalo wings. One night after my reading at Cornelia Café, we all went out to dinner. Since then, every time my mother heard about Max, whether we were seeing a movie, or driving to Montauk, she had to say it!

“Remember how he was eating those buffalo wings? He ordered an entire bucket, ate two, maybe three wings, didn’t offer to anyone and let the waiter take it away.”

“So what?” I defended him like a criminal attorney. “He still paid for his meal.” 

“A normal person would have taken his food home with him, in a doggie bag.”

“He doesn’t have a dog, mom. Maybe he was going to see his mistress and didn’t want to show up with a doggie bag. Maybe he was going to see his mother.” 

“Even worse!” my mother exclaimed. “Obviously then, he doesn't love his mother!” 

…And then, my father had to bring up Paris…I haven’t thought about Paris in a long time. It’s funny, when you remember the dead—you somehow skip all the bad stuff as if you have selective amnesia, and remember only moments of happiness and amusement.

Thanksgiving, eight years ago, after I stubbed my last cigarette in a vintage ashtray and Max took that photo of me, we hatched a plan to go to Paris. We picked ten days around Memorial Day, so we could celebrate his birthday and my divorce-from-nicotine in style. I had never been to Paris. Max promised to show it to me through the eyes of a real Parisian.

“The city of Rodin, Piaf, Sarah Bernhardt and Yves Saint Laurent will lie at your feet,” he pledged. “We’ll go to Musee de Cluny, we'll sing at Lapine Agile—the oldest French cabaret, not the one with topless harlots, but real chanson!”

I bought airline tickets, I booked a hotel next to Jardin du Luxembourg, I read intelligent books “How to find your inner French girl,” and “1812: Napoleon, still not a cake.” And then, four days before our trip, Max sent me a message saying the circumstances had changed and he couldn’t go. I was furious. I yelled at him on the phone, I cursed him out by email, I told him he was the worst man I had ever met. Then I went to Paris alone.

The hotel where I was staying had long, morbid corridors, resembling airplane aisles with doors on both sides leading into matchbox rooms. By day I explored the city on foot—Champs Elysees, Latin Quarter. I stood in line with hundreds of tourists. I visited de Cluny and sat among ancient beige bathtubs, thinking how grand this trip would have been with Max. 

But for me alone—Paris was one giant cigarette, lighting up, inhaling, flicking off the ash, stubbing it out, while I so desperately clawed to my sobriety. At night I rolled on the floor in my matchbox room like a lone beetle caught by a thoughtless child, suffocating from smoke...

And then I met the devil. Romain. He was so beautiful he took my breath away, the night porter. I couldn’t sleep, I went downstairs to book an airport shuttle for my departure the next day. I stood at the front desk in my nightgown, wet, swaying in a haze of smoke, just me and Romain—the devil. 

He offered me a cigarette as he typed my request in the computer. He asked for my room number, he said his shift was over in an hour, he held the cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, he exhaled slowly, looking at me with the eyes of a beggar. Of course. Of course, I sighed, he had to be that beautiful, that enticing, to test me, trick me, take me down the dark alley, bring me back to smoking hell. I said thank you, good night, and tiptoed back to my room. When I turned around to look at him one more time, I saw the front desk engulfed in flames, but it was almost dawn and I was already hallucinating. 

The next evening, I stood in the lobby with my suitcase, waiting for the airport shuttle that never came. They didn't have my request in the computer. 

“Happy New Year! Santa always knows where all the good girls live...”

About five, six months after Paris, I received a text from an unknown number. I thought it was one of my ex-boyfriends, the oatmeal guy, or some other creepy Virgo who never let go, yet could never be the man I needed. I was in Austria at the time, visiting a ski-resort town where I lived as a girl during immigration. Walking in the winter park down lanes of manicured fir trees, when my heart was fully open, and all my senses truly awake, and my eyes breathing, it suddenly hit me—of course it was Max Florentine. As much as I hated him, I still waited for him all these long months, and he finally reached out. 

I texted the number back.

“Maxie...?”

“What took you so long?” he answered.

A week later, we arranged to meet at the Scandinavia Film House, where we ate Swedish meatballs and kissed each other on the cheeks non-stop. For God's sake, we had loved one another for so many years, through so many lives and characters. We watched a funny movie about Danish gardeners, then stood in the foyer drinking stolen champagne, trying to catch up on news, gossip, adventures. Not a word of complaint, resentment, or hurt...only love.

Now, as I wore my grief around my neck like a two-tone necklace, or a black chiffon scarf, I realized I wasn't just grieving for Max, I was also grieving for myself. The years that vanished without a trace with nothing to show for it, months I couldn't account for, spent in constant worry or utter numbness. Relationships that became glum fiction, the boredom, the overall absence from being; with the only signals of life, a pulse, coming in through social media. 

There was something fundamentally wrong with the way I was living. Max's death brought it all to the surface. This was the essence, the heart of the matter—a friend being alone with a death sentence, shooting himself in his closet-like home, his precious snuffbox, never saying goodbye, and me finding out on Facebook two years after his death. My midget, my man of mystery, my 007...I missed you, I had failed you, somehow.

One day I stopped looking for him. I decided to live with both my eyes open, put down my phone, delete Instagram, quit Facebook, and concentrate on the people I love. I spent an entire day listening to my mother talk about a pressure cooker she was buying from an infomercial.

“There are 3 sizes—6, 8, and 10. Which one do you think I should get?” she kept asking, obsessively counting the pros and cons of each size. “Why are you staring at me like that?”

“What do you mean?” I said. “I'm just listening to you talk about the pressure cooker.”

“But you never listen to me. I hardly ever see your face. Just the top of your head, huddled over your phone.”

“Well, mom, things are going to be different now,” I promised.

She dragged me to look at a pressure cooker at her neighbor Helen's apartment. “See how it works—you throw everything inside, close the lid, and before you know it, it's done.”

“That's exactly what ISIS promised!” I said, cracking up at my own joke. Something only Max would say…I didn't need to look for him anymore, he was always with me, in me lived eternal Max Florentine. My mother and Helen shook their heads, dismayed.

For the first time in months, I put on lipstick and showed up for work, wearing high heels. 

“Hallelujah,” my boss exclaimed. “You were beginning to look like your cat's hairball!”

I met Virginia for lunch. On the way back to work, we stumbled on a shabby flea market. We bought two fake fur coats, three sizes too big, for $12 each, and sashayed down Wall Street, like two female Puff Daddys.

On Sunday, I cleaned my apartment with the vigor of a manic episode. I steam-vacuumed the red couch, tossing the cushions around, removing stains and cat hair. I stripped the closets of clothes I have not worn in years. I collected household items that were taking up space, holding me back. I went to Goodwill and donated four bags of stuff I didn’t need. I stood in line, waiting for my tax receipt, the overflowing bags at my feet on the floor.

“My goodness, look at that fun skeleton shirt!” a young woman, Williamsburg yuppie type, standing behind me with her bags, pointed to the top of my pile.

“Oh, it's not a shirt, it's a skeleton skin suit. I got it for Halloween, but never wore it.”

“It's very chic, you must keep it,” the yuppie advised, holding up the suit against her body.

I considered it for a second; now that I was fully awake and living, I could wear the glow-in-the-dark skeleton suit, pair it with heels, go trick-or-treating with Virginia and her kids.

“Neh. Definitely not,” I laughed. “What are you donating today?” I asked the girl.

She bent down to showcase the contents of her bags, and the first thing she pulled out was a fedora. It was beautiful. Coffee-colored. Classic wide brim. Grosgrain ribbon with a flattened bow. Out of all the things in the world—I thought to myself, astounded.

“I’ll tell you what, you take the skeleton suit and I'll take the fedora. A swap!” I suggested. 

“Yes!” The girl screamed. “But can we really do that?”

“Sure, we can. We are donating bags and bags of stuff. They won't miss two little items.” 

We shook hands and said goodbye. I took my tax receipt and left the Goodwill store.

I walked down the street. I was never a fedora type of woman, but if I could find an elegant brooch, or a feather, I could pin it up and wear it just like Max Florentine. I stopped to model the hat in a store window, adjusted it to one side, tried another angle, pulled my hair up, pouting at my reflection, doing my most dazzling Marlene Dietrich. A cute sales guy inside the store smiled at me and gave me the thumbs up. I laughed and marched down SoHo, humming in my new fedora. 

It was already summer, life was charging in on rollerblades, even in its dreariness and grief, there was a nifty kind of magic to it, and I loved it just as it was, I finally loved it. Max had become my guardian angel; he had managed to send me this hat. Even from the afterlife, he was still sending me gifts, greetings of love and affection. He had never missed my birthday, or forgotten a holiday; he had loved me in this life and in all other lives, previous and future, on this planet and beyond…

He had never missed my birthday.

Never missed my birthday...

I said it again and again. Something clicked. I stopped in the middle of the street, took off my fedora and held it tightly against my chest. Never missed my birthday, echoed in my head. Was I breathing? I am not sure. People were going around me as if I were a wrecked car on the road; tourists, weekend shoppers, deli workers, some bumped me on the shoulders, others brushed past me. I stood with my eyes wide open. Was I blinking? I doubt it. I stood on the sidewalk, counting, calculating, my memory—a giant computer, dialing, searching, searching, 0000 0001 0010 0011, searching data, retrieving records. I pressed my hand over my mouth…Max was alive.

I grabbed a cab on Spring Street and gave the driver my work address. I sat in the backseat tapping my foot on the floor, wiping away tears, sporadically bursting into laughter. I ran into my office, empty and pitch black on a Sunday. 

For the life of me, I could not remember the code to disable the alarm. I turned on my computer in the dark. Like a thief, to the sound of screeching sirens, I searched my emails, but this time I knew exactly what I was looking for and where. Since our company had merged with another firm, all our old emails were archived into system folders, that's why nothing came up when I first started searching for Max. Somewhere in the back of my mind, I always had a gnawing feeling he was alive and what I was looking for, all this time, was not a farewell letter or the location of his tomb, but proof of life, plain and simple.

And there it was…I screamed, drum-rolling my desk with my fists, there it was, an email from Max Florentine sent from a completely different Gmail account, less than ten months ago. There it was! How could he be dead for two years, when he emailed me ten months ago!?

“Happy Birthday to you!!!” it said...That simple.

“Max, where are you? What the hell is going on?” I sent an email to the new address, then put on my fedora and sneaked out of the building before security arrived.

I took the train home. Staring at a scribble on the wall in the shape of a lightning bolt, I smiled all the way to my station. I didn't have to wait long before I received a reply from Max.

“Wow! So lovely to get even a short letter from you! I am in Istanbul. How are you?” 

“Max, some crazy chick posted photos on Facebook and said you were dead!”

“Ahh that...Right...I pretended to be dead. Please don't spoil the legend. It's a secret.” 

“What? Why? What happened?”

“It's a long miserable story, and not one for the emails. You know how life is...Things were not going the right way...it kept getting worse...there was no other way…except this.”

What was he saying? How did I even know it was him, and not some felon, or an artificial intelligence machine?

“I'm sorry, but I need to confirm your identity,” I wrote, cautiously.

“Sure…Go, right ahead,” he replied.

“I am going to ask you two security questions:

One: What bank did I get you a job at when we first met?

Two: Where did we drive to every summer and sat on the bench watching the waves?” 

“Floyd Bennett Field…Bank was in NJ. I'll be damned if I remember its name...JP?” 

“Maxie! It's you! I missed you! I was devastated when I heard the news.”

“Frankly, I didn't think anyone cared if I was gone…You seemed so busy with your young, glamorous life. Thank you very much that you exist...the very fact makes this world more bearable!”

“Maxie, I was going crazy looking for you. You are alive! And you love me?!”

“I love you with all my heart – as well as all other parts of my body…Listen, I am going to be in New York this weekend…let's meet for dinner and talk about everything..."

“Great! There is going to be a party at our favorite Empire Hotel. Shall we go?” 

“Oh no, not that place…Unfortunately, I am considered dead there.”

"Is there a place where you are not considered dead?" I asked, not trying to be funny.

"How about I come to your place and make us dinner? Let's say Saturday 7pm sharp, right after it gets dark…I will make you a magnificent trout!"

Max Florentine was alive! I wanted to laugh, scream, cry, go for a long walk. I felt like everything I had ever lost—gloves, scarves, money, iPods, childhood friends, faith in God, love, had returned to me in one instant, a stranger left it all in a box on my doorstep. I wanted to share the news with everyone. 

But if I called my parents, they would caution me against our meeting, alert me to the dangers of associating with someone who had committed fraud; somehow the buffalo wings would come up. If I told my boss Ian, he would insist we call the police, the FBI, the CIA, even Interpol, in case there was a reward. I could confide in Virginia and she would rejoice with me, but somewhere in the conversation, softly, nonchalantly, she would let it slip, "I wonder…what kind of shenanigans does a man need to get into, that the only way out is to fake his own death?"

On Saturday, I woke up early and cleaned the kitchen counters, the stove, prepared a frying pan for Max's trout. I emailed Max, asking which dessert works best with a fish main course. Then I picked the fanciest dress in my closet—a black Badgley Mischka with a sweetheart décolletage and a tulle ballerina skirt. In the late afternoon when I hadn't heard from Max, I went out and got three different desserts—the chocolate Opera cake, the sugar raspberry tart, and the caramel flan.

At 7pm sharp, I sat on my red couch wearing layers of tulle and eyeliner; candles lit on the table, the cat curled at my feet, his fur brushed, nails clipped. I watched for the light in the foyer. I listened to the doorbell. I looked at my shipwreck clock on the wall. 7:12pm. 7:26pm. 

Any minute now, Max would walk in through that door with a microscopic gift in one hand, and a filleted trout in another, and exclaim, "Do you have any flour?" 

"Of course not, Maxie, you know I don't cook!" 

And he would put on an apron and make us a feast out of nothing, salt and pepper. I emailed him again. I wanted to call him, but I didn't have his number…After all this, I still didn't have his number. I remembered the angst in Dragomir's voice when he said he could never reach Max, never, the man was unreachable. 

I looked out the window, dark silence. I checked my email, nothing. I listened to the motion of the elevator. At 10 o'clock, I ate the Opera cake in my lap and then spent twenty minutes picking out crumbs from the tulle. 

Memories of Paris flew by, Max's Volvo, his apartment, photos of his mother, Bin Laden. What did I really know about Max Florentine? What did I know for sure; except that he was a man in a fedora. By midnight, I had finished the caramel flan and threw away the stale raspberry tart.