Flashback: It All Comes Out In The Wash
Secrets and lies … if they don’t catch up with you when you are alive (which they usually do), they will most certainly catch up with you when you die.
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The secrets we tell.
And those we take to our grave.
Some are silly.
Some are jaw-dropping.
But make no mistake.
It all comes out after you die.
It may be a matter of days.
Or years.
But eventually, everything comes out in the wash.
Example.
That final will and testament Alberto was ever referencing?
As in, if you don’t cremate me, you get nothing.
As in, it’s all in the will.
Yeah.
That will and testament?
Not so much.
He died, as the lawyers say, intestate.
How weird, I thought, to say such things without making the legal arrangements?
Also.
Puerto Rico.
I once suggested the island as a potential winter getaway.
I’ll never go to Puerto Rico, he said, firmly.
Fair enough, I thought. Cubans and Puerto Ricans aren’t exactly famous friends.
A week after he died, I discovered that he had been to Puerto Rico.
Met his first wife there, in fact.
Not exactly a lie.
Not so much a truth either.
Also.
The framed Helmut Newton photograph that hung in our living room?
The one he purchased at auction?
The one that was worth $15,000, now that Helmut had died?
Not so much.
In January, two separate auction houses proved that the comma was in the wrong place.
Oh well, I thought, at least he’s not here to hear the news.
I consigned the photograph and it sold with the comma in its proper market-value place.
Last week, one of Alberto’s ex-girlfriend’s contacted me: she heard I was selling some art and would the Helmut nude be included?
The one I bought at auction, she said. It’s one of two companion pieces.
I gave it to him, she explains.
As a gift.
After they broke up, he didn’t exactly offer to return it.
But, she says, he assured me that in the event of his death—language that he used often—it would be returned to me.
It’s in the will, he told her.
Yeah.
Sorry, ex-girlfriend.
Not so much.
Also.
The stupid Afrin inhalers?
The ones I realized, three years into our marriage, he couldn’t exist without?
Which prompted me to make an appointment at the Ear, Nose & Throat Infirmary with a specialist who promptly put him on steroids?
And who privately told me to remove all inhalers—sniffers were Alberto’s word—from our household?
Well.
I followed his instructions to sweep our apartment for Afrin.
The two ‘withdrawal weeks’ that followed were not awesome:
Alberto hated me for tossing his sniffers.
And making him take the steroids.
They give me acidez, he complained.
Sorry, baby, I said. Doctor’s orders.
Six months after his death, I found a sniffer hidden in the cell-phone pocket of his messenger bag.
Another in his winter coat.
And his wool blazer.
Yeah.
Not so fucking much.
