Henry has something he would like to clear up
About the sterno, which I’m sure he has mentioned. There was a lot going on at the time. Living one life is hard enough. Living two was, I found out, more than I could handle. And when things went sour in the life I kept secret from my family — by which I mean my real life, the one that mattered most to me — I had only the pretend life to shore me up. Which became like hanging a lead vest on a paper doll. And it wasn’t just sterno, although that seems to be the part he has fixated on. It was a handful of Percocet and a pitcher of sangria. Right at the last minute — afraid that a cocktail of pharmaceuticals, alcohol, and fresh fruit wouldn’t do the trick — I larded the sangria with half a dozen cans of sterno. It was supposed to be for a party that had never been thrown, which was part of the original problem. Anyhow, it was under the sink. It was close at hand. I didn’t realize at the time that what I had concocted was a magic potion that would allow me, after some effort, to live one life rather than two. It was in the hospital and later at my brother’s apartment that I opened up to him. I figured that I had burned down one life and now I would burn down the other and see if anything survived. I knew that he hadn’t had an easy go of it either. Our parents, whom he had always been close to, had lived just long enough to see his own marriage succumb, and when all the drama with me started his divorce wasn’t even a year in the past. So we had both seen our share of wreckage, and after tears and words that didn’t come easily in a family raised, as they say, with the good graces to conceal virtually everything from each other, what was left standing was me and him. I can’t say we were transformed into creatures breathing nothing but the air of complete honesty: have I mentioned that he follows me at night, and stakes out a street corner without, he believes, my knowledge? But right now he needs someone to protect, and without that mission I fear he will crack up, like I did, and that his crack-up won’t result in a magic potion but instead the blunt reality of a hole in the head or a rope around the neck. So this is a gift I can give to him, my feigned ignorance, but also a gift I can give myself: the continued presence in this world of one person who loves me.

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