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helping his needy friends. Straining his back, after a New Year’s Eve party at the Hoffmanns’, helping a drunken friend dislodge his enormous luxury Lexus from a snowy ditch on Old Mill Way.
    When Adam remarked to Marina that he wanted to be cremated, not buried, in a simple, private ceremony, and his ashes scattered on his property, mixed in the soil of his garden, he’d continued to ask Marina if she would be his “personal executor”; and Marina, deeply moved, but agitated, not at all wanting to pursue the subject of her friend’s mortality, had quickly said yes, yes of course—whatever “personal executor” might mean.
    (Seeing to his household effects, maybe. Assuming care of his dog. Oh, poor Apollo! Marina had tried, but she’d never been able to feel affection for Adam’s part husky, part shepherd mongrel who eagerly licked any part of Marina’s body he wasn’t prevented from licking.) Nor had she taken the opportunity to ask Adam about his family, relatives, who should be noti-fied in a time of emergency, where did these mysterious folks live; would Adam be leaving a list of instructions with his lawyer? None of these practical questions had Marina asked. Instead, she’d laughed nervously and allowed Adam to change the subject. She hadn’t wanted to think that Adam would die before her. (As if, considering that Adam was in his early fifties and Marina in her late thirties, this wasn’t likely.) If you catch me and I don’t escape you . These mysterious words were from Plato’s Phaedo, which Adam sometimes quoted, the lyric, long death of Socrates who, having drunk poison, awaiting death, in the company of his friends, had turned playful. But the dead are easily caught, Marina was thinking. The dead escape no one. “Oh, poor Adam. You weren’t ready, I know. Darling, I’m so sorry.” She was greedily kissing Adam’s hands, both his hurt, stiffened hands. She was pressing against him, absorbing cold from him, the terrible bulk of him, a fallen colossus, heavy as lead; she kissed his forehead, his half-shut eyes. She cradled his head. She stroked his quill-hair. Kissed his lips. Dared to kiss a dead man’s lips. She’d been going to ask him frankly Do you know how I love you, Adam? Though risking the end of their friendship. Adam, why don’t you know? She pressed herself against him. She was shameless, desperate. She passed out of consciousness, in a swoon. A smothering wave rose in her, again came the sensation of being deep under water, and doomed. Her strength drained from her, she was weak, falling. She was wracked with spasms of vomiting.
    
    J C O
    She would strike the side of her head against something metallic and sharp and when they lifted her, to wake her, speaking her name urgently, she would discover that the front of her shirt was covered in a foul-smelling glutinous liquid, she’d coughed up the rank river water that had drowned Adam Berendt but of what help was this, Adam was still dead.
    
    “S, M Tell me: what’s the purpose of life?”
    They were hiking together, Marina and her friend Adam Berendt, in the Eagle Mountain Preserve, north of Hastings-on-Hudson. They were not a couple, though often together. “Just friends. But very close friends.”
    Marina understood that Adam had many friends, and he was a man who enjoyed plying them with sudden sharp questions. It was known that Adam’s interests were impassioned but curiously impersonal. You would never get to know the man intimately. But you might get to know yourself.
    It was May of the year preceding Adam’s death. Marina was the only woman friend of Adam’s who enjoyed the out-of-doors and who was hardy enough to accompany him on hikes. He teased and baited her, he embarrassed her, but she didn’t mind. She said, “Do you mean what’s the purpose of ‘life,’ or what’s the purpose of ‘my life’? There’s a crucial distinction.” Adam said,