The Inseparables by Stuart Nadler

was the way they bantered these days. It did not escape Henrietta that she sounded just like her husband, which did not exactly feel awful.
    “You must be making dough on that.”
    “Not enough,” she said.
    A week ago the people from Hubbard had sent along a proposal for a book tour. Who thought such things existed any longer? Fifteen cities, radio interviews, speeches at women’s colleges. Her first reaction was to ask why they would send her to all these places if no one would come and see her. Just wait, they told her. You’ll be surprised. They were trying to pass her off as some looked-over doyenne of sexual health. A soothsayer of a new collectively libidinous generation. Yes, the diagrams were still funny, and yes, the story itself was not exactly the work of a great master, and yes, certainly it was true that the new generations were generally sophisticated enough to accept the concept of female pleasure as something obvious and real and not at all worthy of scorn. Yet she felt like one of those ancient golden cities they discovered in the jungle by way of helicopter and thermodynamic imaging: Look! These old people here liked to screw each other, too! It was a shoehorn job, as far as she saw it. They were doing to her book what people had always done to her book, which was to see whatever they wanted to see. The way her editor and her publicist talked about The Inseparables, it occurred to Henrietta that they truly believed a reputation like hers could be amended retroactively. Then came Hubbard’s other requests. Cosmo wanted the young Henrietta to interview the old Henrietta. To this she had merely said, Now where do you suppose we get access to the young Henrietta? More ideas: Would she do an interview with Chelsea Handler from the back of a hansom cab in Central Park? She did not know who Chelsea Handler was. Would she let Morley Safer interview her in a hot-air balloon? This, Henrietta needn’t be reminded, was a nod to a regrettable sexual escapade in chapter 6 in which Eugenia is fulfilled by a balloon captain. Would she let Nigella Lawson cook the recipe—Harold’s recipe—for boeuf à l’orange included in chapter 2? Again: Who exactly was Nigella Lawson? The list of requests felt endless, and at a certain point Henrietta found herself agreeing to it all. Yes, she found herself saying. Yes, yes, yes. Yes to the interview, yes to the hot-air balloon, yes to the teapot and the QVC special where she’d be hawking teapots. Yes to everything! Perhaps time had aged the book and everything would be better in the new century. Time had aged for the better many of the things Henrietta loved most in the world, like red wine and cheese and photographs of Paul Newman. She could, if she tried, imagine charming Morley Safer. She would wear a yellow chiffon scarf. She would be her most charming self. She could, if she wanted. Couldn’t she?
    Jerry dragged on his pipe. He preferred vanilla tobacco. She liked the smell better than the taste.
    “You go to the grave lately?” he asked.
    “Let’s not talk about this. Pick another subject.”
    “Death is the only good subject, Henrietta. As a writer, you should know that.”
    She cringed. “I was never a real writer.”
    “I was there last week while some guy was getting buried.”
    “Jerry, please no burial talk.”
    “This guy was a big baseball fan, I have to assume. His whole grave was filled with these little Red Sox pennants. I figured it was a little boy. Who else has that kind of enthusiasm for baseball? But it turns out the guy was ninety. It was charming the first day. Wind in the pennants and all. Two days later, there’s a fucking million of these dumb flags everywhere.” He fiddled with his pipe. “And that stuff isn’t biodegradable.”
    “And this is coming from a guy who sold aluminum siding.”
    “I took them off Harry,” he said, his voice dropping. “That way you don’t have to.”
    Harold’s grave was a pedestrian thing. She