“A visionary.”
“A genius.”
“River not saluting the casket, then?”
Honey stops.
It’s Barney’s first wife, Rita. She’s wearing a floral black smock and flat shoes. She’s the same age Honey’s mother would be if she were alive. Some people say Rita helped Barney and Mac develop their first groundbreaking software, but if it’s true, she never did anything else with her career. She brought up his three children, never remarried, and lives a quiet life doing behind-the-scenes philanthropic work with her divorce settlement.
Barney described her as “a stridently good person.”
“I didn’t bring him,” says Honey. She meets Rita’s eyes. Her face is stridently naked. Eyes red and watery like a mouse’s eyes. She doesn’t wear makeup. Honey could do so much with that blank canvas.
“Good decision. None of the littler grandchildren are here,” says Rita. “Although they all adored the old bastard.” A crack of grief.
They look at each other for a moment, and Luisa Long coughs.
“We should sit together,” says Honey.
Rita raises sparse eyebrows. “First and last wives together?”
“Why not all four wives together?”
“You know Svetlana and Meredith hate each other,” says Rita, but she’s smiling.
“Please follow the seating plan,” says Luisa Long. “Please ...” She clears her throat and repeats herself. “Please just follow the seating plan.”
“I think Barney would like it,” says Honey. “To see us all together. Celebrating his life. We’re the mothers of his children.”
“No, he wouldn’t,” says Luisa Long.
“Well,I’dlike it,” says Honey.
Honey sits with Barney’s three ex-wives in the front row on the left-hand side of the Gothic sandstone cathedral, awaiting the commencement of his funeral service. Guests are still arriving, but the pews behind them are already crammed with corporate leaders, government ministers, public servants, tech gurus, breakfast-show hosts, celebrities, and employees. People speak in low voices. A string quartet plays. It feels like a subdued cocktail party.
The guest of honor is at the front, under lights, in a dark rich mahogany coffin with gold inlays and an intricately carved decorative cornice of the Last Supper. It’s draped in a mound of white roses and lilies.
Barney’s elderly mother, festooned in rubies, sits like an angry Christmas tree across the aisle from them.
“Why are you girls making a spectacle of yourselves like this?” she hissed when she saw what they were doing. “This is a Catholic ceremony!”
“Would we call Barney a devout Catholic?” asked Meredith. Barney’s second wife: sharp-edged silk pantsuit, pearls, and attitude. The marriage produced twin boys and ended when Barney had an affair with Svetlana. Meredith is now a senior government adviser on AI ethics.
“We certainly would,Meredith!” snapped his mother.
“Meredith turned into an angry feminist after our divorce,” Barney had said. “Obviously I wronged her and I feel bad about that, but her so-called ethics didn’t stop her taking the Paris apartment, for fuck’s sake.”
(He got another Paris apartment with a better view, but it was the principle.)
Honey apparently “misinterpreted” these early comments about Meredith. She thought that when he said he’dwrongedMeredith, that meant he wouldn’t do the same to Honey.
“I believe inemotionalmonogamy,” Barney explained, calm and only a little condescending, as if this was just another rule of this kind of rarefied life that she needed to master, like tilting and slurping oysters, like holding your wineglass by the stem, lightly, in your left hand so your right is free to shake hands. Like not asking “Which is my seat?” on boarding the private jet, cute the first time, disingenuous the second time.
She’d thought the infidelity she’d discovered meant their marriage was over, but he explained that of course the marriage wasn’t over! Was she crazy? He was keeping her forever.Forever and ever.The relief had flooded her body like the IV infusion therapy they always did the morning after a big night out, and she cried and cried. She was pregnant at the time, so hormonal.
“Sweetie, I lead a complicated life,” he’d explained. “I need distraction. The other women are for medicinal purposes only.”
Perhaps there was a kind of masochistic pleasure in her pain.This is how much I love this man.It was the price she had to pay for the vast canyons of money she hadn’t earned. Sometimes she tried to understand why she wasn’t enough. She imagined slipping on Barney’s body like a costume—the famous face haggard with genius, the big buzzing brain, and she saw herself through the eyeholes of her Barney-head: Beautiful but pathetic. Stunning but boring.
