Olga Dies Dreaming(4)
“Carol,” she spoke loudly into the phone, to set an example to all the other vendors readying the hotel ballroom for the festivities. “With all the business that I throw your way, I expect you to accommodate my fucking staff requests and at the very least give a bitch a call if you’re going to make a change like this. I really—”
But she had been cut off by Carol’s sobbing. It was all so sudden, she said. Olga dropped the phone. She couldn’t deal with this now. Meegan, sensing something was wrong, was just standing in front of her, with her stupid, na?ve, eager face.
“Jan isn’t coming to work because Jan is dead.”
A POLISH WAKE
Jan’s wake had left Olga even more glum than she’d anticipated. The mourners, gathered at a funeral home in a stucco-faced storefront on a corner of Greenpoint, had revealed Jan’s rigidly segmented double life. On one side of the room, beneath an oversized framed photograph of Pope John Paul II, sat his mother, surrounded by a gaggle of black-clad Polish women who Olga could only assume were his aunts. On the other side, below an oil painting of a Polish pastoral scene, sat Christian and his team of mourners—a group of once and future cater waiters, nearly all gay boys whom Jan and Christian knew from their two decades living together in their Chelsea walk-up.
Observing them, Olga was unsure whom to greet first. She’d never met Jan’s mother before, wasn’t even sure if she and Jan were close. But her own Catholic, outer-borough upbringing had ingrained in her an unspoken ethical code (an ethnical code?) that required deference to mothers, no matter how estranged. The inverse property of “yo mama” jokes. She walked towards the Polish contingent.
“Mrs. Wojcick?” Olga placed her hand on the grieving mother’s shoulder. “My name is Olga; I was a friend of your son’s. I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Mrs. Wojcick took Olga’s face in her hands, kissed her cheek, and whispered something in Polish that a younger woman next to her translated.
“She said thank you for coming. She always wanted to meet one of Jan’s girlfriends.”
“Oh no,” Olga said gently. She turned directly to Jan’s mother and, as one instinctively does when bridging a language gap, raised her voice. “Jan and I worked together. He catered some of my parties. I plan weddings. He was very hardworking.”
The younger woman translated to the mother, but not before throwing Olga a miserable look. After a moment, the mother laughed out loud, looked at Olga, and said, “My Jan too handsome!”
Olga politely smiled and turned away, relieved that the awkward exchange had come to an end. She felt a tap on her arm. It was the translator.
“Listen, I told my mother that Jan wouldn’t commit to you because he wanted to play the field. If anybody else asks, can you just—I don’t know—act the part?”
“She didn’t know he was gay?”
The sister motioned to the photo of John Paul.
“It’s bad enough he killed himself, she needs to know he was gay?”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Olga offered curtly, respecting the sister’s grief enough to suppress her own vexation.
The room, she saw now, was more battlefield than funeral parlor. At stake was the way in which Jan would be memorialized: with fact or fiction. Lest she come across as sympathetic with the enemy, Olga crossed the room, where Christian greeted her warmly.
“Darling, thank you for coming.”
“I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Olga truly meant it. She’d had dinner with Jan and Christian a handful of times over the years and while she didn’t know Christian well, she had a deep affection for him and had delighted in the playful aspects he brought out in a sometimes somber-seeming Jan. She leaned down to embrace him, inhaling him deeply. He smelled of Chanel No. 5, cigarette smoke, and vintage clothes. His scent recalled that of her grandmother, a woman who, even in dire times, would never run low on either Chanel No. 5 or cigarettes. Christian, a cabaret singer who’d met Jan while working a club together, had draped a black cardigan over his shoulders, and paired it, tastefully, Olga thought, with a sleeveless cream silk blouse with a tie collar. In a nod to Jan’s Catholic roots, Christian had accessorized this with several mother-of-pearl rosary strands. His face was weary, but his elegant demeanor did not appear smote.
“Girl,” he said, stepping back, “there isn’t anyone sorrier than that motherfucker. Wait until I catch up with him on the other side and give him a piece of my mind. Making me sit with his crazy-ass family like this.”
They chuckled in spite of themselves.
“How is it possible that they didn’t know he was gay?” Olga whispered.
“Olga, people always thought we had an open relationship because I was a ho, but really I just wanted to give him one place to have nothing to hide.”
She wondered aloud, “Was it the secret keeping that killed him, do you think?”
“Fuck that,” Christian said. “Jan was a sad motherfucker; he could get pretty … dark. But, mainly, I think he was scared. A few months back he found out that he was sick. I could never convince that man to get on PrEP; he always had a reason he couldn’t figure it out. He took some chances, tested positive, and I just watched him withdraw. A few weeks later, I found him in our closet.”