So he goes on and on, and I’m frankly having an out-of-body experience. How is it that just the day before, I was safe and in love and getting engaged again, and now I am standing on some steps in Brooklyn, looking into the face of Noah? Noah, whom I now realize I have missed—and still miss—with a desperation beyond all reason. Which is a horrifying thing to realize.

Meanwhile, he’s kept talking and now, from the way he’s staring at me, it’s apparent that he’s asked me a question that he’s waiting for the answer to. I review the last few seconds of the tape in my head and realize he wants to know why I am living in Jacksonville.

“Complicated reasons involving certain financial obligations of an overpriced apartment, I believe,” I say.

“But you had three months! I paid my portion of the rent for three months.”

“Yes, but as you may be aware, those months ran out.” I am smiling.

“Yes, and then you were supposed to find a roommate.”

“Well, I didn’t. Do you really want to stand here in the doorway and discuss the problematic roommate situation in Northern California, or may I come in?”

“Of course, of course!” he says, stepping aside and flattening himself against the wall so I can get past him. When I brush against him, several of my more alert cells notice that he’s something we all once liked. They have conveniently and traitorously forgotten that we are not Team Noah anymore. We are Team Jeremy.

“You brought a suitcase, so I guess that means what—that you’re planning to stay? I get to enjoy your company for more than just an afternoon?”

“For a few days, I thought.”

“That’s wonderful,” he says. “If I’d known you were coming . . .”

“Well, I couldn’t very well let you know when I didn’t even know you were here!”

“No, no. I’m not saying you should have. It’s just a surprise, is all. A very nice, wonderful, amazing surprise. Here, go through that door,” he says, motioning with his head. “Blix has the first and second floors.”

I feel like I have jet lag, even though technically I’m still in the same time zone. Maybe I’ve somehow gone into a kind of weird time warp. As we go into Blix’s living room, I’m struck by the parquet oak floors, the exposed brick walls, the light from the bay windows, the art everywhere. It’s beautiful, in a rundown, funky, Blixish way. I exclaim over it, and he says, “You want the tour? You’ve never been in a Brooklyn brownstone before, have you?”

“I’d love a tour.”

He keeps stealing little looks at me as he shows me around her apartment—the living room and two bedrooms are on the first floor, and the large eat-in kitchen is upstairs along with a study and a hallway and staircase leading to the roof. Also off that hallway, he tells me, is another two-bedroom apartment. A woman lives there with her son, he says. She’s quite attractive. Amazing curly hair, nice body. (He always has to comment on women’s bodies, because, he says, that’s what life is about: noticing the beauty around you.)

“There’s also a guy in the basement,” he says. “Sort of a recluse. Something wrong with his hands and face. Blix collected characters, you know.” He tilts his head charmingly. “Perhaps, now that I think of it, you were even one of them.”

Was I? “There’s so much light in here,” I say. The kitchen is astonishing, with two huge windows looking out onto all of Brooklyn—buildings, rooftop gardens, condominiums under construction blocks away. Outside I hear sirens, crashing sounds, voices, car horns.

“So, wanna go up on the roof?” he says. “We could grab a beer or something, and then maybe you can finally manage to explain why you’re here to see my old auntie who happens to be dead.”

“And you can tell me why you’re not still on your year-long stint in Africa.”

“Oh, well, Africa—that’s a very long, weird story of great bizarreness,” he says, opening the refrigerator, an old model, oval-shaped at the top and painted turquoise. Everything in this kitchen looks old and worn out and possibly hand-painted—a scarred wooden table in the center, and a countertop that runs along the wall—something that looks like it came from a French country kitchen around the turn of the century. The last century. There’s a soapstone sink in the corner and a gas range, little vases with dried weeds and flowers and half-burned candles sitting in saucers on every surface—and the walls are painted a wonderful off-red color, with white trim around the windows and cabinets. The floor is worn and scuffed in spots. There are dishes piled in the sink, and half-emptied cups of coffee on the table.

“I have plenty of time to hear it, and the more bizarre the better,” I tell him. He hands me a beer with some unfamiliar Brooklyn label, and points the way to the hallway and a steep stairway going up. He pushes the door open at the top, and suddenly we’re on an unlikely terrace, with planters filled with grasses at one end, surrounding a fire pit and a low table. There’s a gas grill pushed over toward the corner, and several padded wicker couches, a couple of chaise lounges, and a portable basketball hoop. I have to catch my breath. The view of Brooklyn’s skyline is kind of amazing. I can see rooftops all around me with gardens and water tanks. Big windows blankly looking back at me, catching the sun.

“How long have you been here?” I say.

“I’ve been here, ah . . . three weeks maybe?”

“Were you here when she . . . when she died?”

“Yeah. Although she would prefer we said when she made her transition.”

“I didn’t even know she was sick. I’m so sorry.”

“Thank you. Yeah. Me neither. Not until I flew in. And then I found out she was dying. She’d been sick for months, maybe even years without telling. But then once I was here, she wanted me to stay, to see her across, you know.” He opens my beer and then his own and puts the opener down on the table. “She was a funny one. Kept things like that a secret, I guess. Didn’t want sympathy. Of course she and I weren’t all that close as you know.” He looks around the rooftop and shakes his head. “She was always just my crazy Aunt Blix, saying such weird woo-woo stuff it was hard to pay attention to. But you never know, do you? What’s going to happen to the people you somehow belong to.”

“Odd that you, of all people, would be telling that to me.”

He laughs a little bit through his nose. “Okay. Fair enough.” He looks at me for a long moment, and I’m surprised to see how sad his eyes are. “You have every right to be pissed off at me,” he says. “That was a horrible thing I did to you, and I want you to know that I’ve kicked myself many times.”

I sit down on one of the wicker couches, feeling woozy. “Really? Have you now?”

“Well, let me clarify. I’ve kicked myself for the way I handled it.”

So there we have it. He’s not sorry he left. Just sorry for the way it went down. Nice.

He laughs again. “Please. Let’s don’t talk about this. It cannot lead to anything good.”

“So what happened with Africa? Why aren’t you still there? You had to dump Africa, too, did you?”

He grimaces a little at my joke. “Yes. Africa. Well.” He sits down on the couch across from me and starts peeling the label off his beer, the way he always used to do, and launches into a story that involves Whipple signing both of them up to teach music to schoolchildren as part of a fellowship he’d gotten, but then, as he puts it, bureaucracy happened. Whipple, in typical fashion, hadn’t filed all the papers they needed and after a long, drawn-out time of bobbing and weaving and trying to go through other channels, finally they got kicked out of the country.

“Same old Whipple bullshit,” he says with a sigh. “Fun but sketchy. For a month or so, we hid by traveling around, trying to keep from getting deported. But it was touch and go, and then . . . well, I decided I’d had enough, and—well, I figured I’d come back to the US, and I arrived here in Brooklyn just before Blix died. I think he’s still backpacking around trying not to get jailed.”

He’s silent, picking something off his shoe. Then he looks right at me, and my heart does a little unauthorized flip-flop.

“She liked you, didn’t she?” he says. “That’s why you’re here.”

I look down, suddenly shy. “Yeah, I think she did. She was nice to me.”

“I know. That horrible party at my mom’s. The way she stayed there talking with you the whole time. God, my mom was so pissed that you weren’t circulating! Neither of us circulated much, I guess. Did you know that’s a guest’s job according to my mom? Apparently you can’t just go and have a good time, you have responsibilities.”

“I think I’ve heard something along those lines.”

“Yeah, well—fuck that! I went off and played pool with Whipple because I couldn’t take listening to my mom and all her fakey-fake friends. And—didn’t something else bad happen?”

“Yeah. The Welsh rarebit situation.”

He throws back his head and laughs. “Ah, yes. My mom said you wouldn’t eat it due to some snobbish thing?”