Yes, that was a good one. A bubbly woman whose biggest regret was that she didn’t start eating mangoes until she was fifty.
“I ate one once when I was a kid, and couldn’t stand the slimy texture,” she’d told me forlornly from her hospital bed. The chemotherapy had vanquished her eyelashes, but her eyes were still a bright, sparkling green. “But then my husband made me try one while we were on vacation in the Philippines and I almost had an orgasm over how good it tasted. Think of how many mangoes I missed out on by not eating them for fifty years!”
I was pretty indifferent to mangoes, to be honest. I preferred tarter fruits like raspberries. But today I was going to search the city and find a really delicious mango. Then I’d sit down and enjoy it like it was the best thing I’d ever tasted, letting the juices drip down my chin and appreciating every fleshy morsel. Thanks to Camille, I’d save myself a potential regret.
If only it was that easy to free myself of the rest of them.
12
The Harlem death café was a hassle to get to on the subway. But after I emerged from the urine-laced humidity of the underground and saw the brownstones basking in twilight, I was glad I’d made the trip.
Leo was Harlem-born and -raised. On the occasions he’d babysat me as a kid, he’d taken me to his favorite ice-cream joint, dazzling me with stories of speakeasies and jazz as we strolled beside the row houses. He rarely visited the neighborhood anymore—he couldn’t bear seeing the fingerprints of gentrification on the streets he’d loved as a child. But I liked to let him know that some of the places he remembered still remained intact. I thought I might even pick up a pint of ice cream for him on my way home that evening.
The death café was hosted in a drafty community hall with a pervading scent of peppermint. The moderator’s family owned a nearby soul food restaurant, so they often served fried chicken and biscuits at the meeting—another reason I considered it worth the arduous subway trip. I arrived fifteen minutes early to tackle the buffet before everyone else crowded around it. With a paper plate piled high (mac and cheese was an added flourish that night), I settled into a chair in the corner of the room and paid closer-than-necessary attention to spearing my food with the plastic spork. As I predicted, seven people were soon shuffling shoulder to shoulder along the front of the buffet, competing for the choicest bits of chicken.
A long trestle table sat in the room’s center with ten chairs positioned haphazardly around it. Aside from Phil, the moderator—a large man whose cherubic cheeks and kind eyes kept him eternally youthful—I didn’t recognize anyone. There was usually quite a turnover at these things since the constant talk of death was too confronting for some attendees. Plus, I think a lot of people came to this one just for the comfort food. I liked that Phil never forced me into conversation, even though he knew me as a semi-regular. An exchange of nods was enough for both of us. I sat down and held my breath as if on an airplane right before takeoff, hoping the seat next to me would stay empty. Thankfully, the old man on my other side seemed just as averse to friendly chatter. We sat silently as I contemplated getting one more piece of chicken before the introductions began.
“Clover!”
The back of my neck prickled. That enthusiastic male voice could belong to any number of people, and not the person I was dreading it might be. I began calculating how rude it would be if I didn’t turn around and instead just ignored it. Unfortunately, the answer was well below my lowest threshold for bad manners.
Sebastian, the suspected funeral home/real estate/life insurance shark, was removing his scarf when I turned to connect the voice with a face. His wide grin sparked a flash of anger in my chest—was he touring the city’s death cafés in search of unsuspecting targets? I was tempted to expose him immediately to everyone in the room, but I would at least need to gather some proof first. A symptom of spending a lot of time alone with your thoughts like I did was that sometimes they could run a little wild.
“Of all the death cafés in all the world,” he said, very poorly channeling Humphrey Bogart. I considered myself a pretty worthy judge—I’d seen Casablanca at least thirty times and could pretty much recite it verbatim.
I pretended to look confused. “I’m sorry … do we know each other?”
Sebastian flinched but maintained his grin. “Yeah! We met at the death café in the New York Public Library, remember?” His smile receded slightly. “You mentioned your grandmother had just passed away.”
The nerve. If I really did have a grandmother who had passed away recently, she’d be long buried by now and not in need of whatever he was peddling. Was he just playing the long game and trying to find out if I had any other ailing older relatives?
“Please take your seats, everyone,” Phil said, looking pointedly at Sebastian.
As he shuffled his chair closer to the table, Sebastian seemed more relaxed than the first time we met. Probably because he now knew the run of play at death cafés. Or maybe that nervous-newcomer act had all been part of his ruse? He trotted out the same story as last time—that his family never discussed death—during introductions. Likewise, I stuck to my lie about my grandmother recently dying. (I mean, he’d just announced it to the room, so it would’ve been odd if I didn’t acknowledge it.)
Phil was a little more improvisational in his approach than other café moderators. Instead of suggesting a topic to get the conversation flowing, he opened it up to the room.
“Well, then—let’s get things rollin’,” he said, his Ss catching gently on his teeth. “Who has something they want to discuss?”
A redhead in bright, clashing patterns raised her hand eagerly, waving it unnecessarily since she was competing with nobody. I’d already suspected she’d be opinionated—you could always tell by someone’s dominant posture, elbows on the table, and the way they scanned the circle hoping to lock into eye contact with someone.
Phil nodded sagely in her direction, briefly consulting the torn notebook sheet in front of him. I could see he’d drawn a diagram of the table during introductions and written each person’s name in their position.
“Tabitha, is it?” The redhead nodded eagerly, like she had a secret she was bursting to reveal. “Well, Tabitha, what do you have to share with us?”
Tabitha clutched the large, pink crystal hanging around her neck.
“So,” she said, scanning the rectangle of faces eyeing her uncertainly. “Have you ever wondered if we all have a specific time we’re meant to die? Kind of like a set fate? You know when you hear those stories of people who escape death, like in a plane crash or a building collapse, and then they die in a freak accident a few months later? It’s like death has their number and they can’t escape it.”
Though I’d never admit it to her, I’d often thought about the same question. I’d witnessed enough peculiar things over the years to suspect that everyone had a predestined expiration date. A few years ago, I had a client—a stockbroker in his fifties—diagnosed with a terminal illness and given three months to live. To his doctors’ bewilderment, he made a full recovery, but then, three months later, fell off a ladder while changing a lightbulb in his lake house and died of a head injury.
“I definitely believe there is,” piped up a stocky young girl with winged eyeliner and draped layers of black clothing. “I think it’s already decided the day you’re born.” She leaned over her mac and cheese, lowering her voice for dramatic effect. “The question is: If you could know the date of your death in advance, would you want to?”
The room fell silent. A siren crescendoed nearby as the proposition sunk in. This was a hypothetical I hadn’t considered.
Sebastian broke the silence.