GHOST, WRITER

When a friend died, she left behind a novel that needed finishing.

The last time I visited Rebecca in the hospital, in September, 2022, we spent the afternoon researching hospice options and talking about her novel. Rebecca had been working on it for a decade, and for the past four years she’d been sick: lung cancer that spread to her bones, and then her brain. If I was being honest with myself, and I probably wasn’t, there was a kind of magical thinking embedded in the pleasure of hearing Rebecca talk about her book, which was about the life and times of Peggy Guggenheim, the legendary heiress and art collector. Surely someone this enmeshed in an ambitious project couldn’t die in the midst of realizing it. It seemed like the effort itself would keep her alive.

During that last hospital visit—in her room on the eighteenth floor, overlooking the dirty glory of the East River—Rebecca told me about the unwritten final section of her book: an account of Peggy’s short but passionate affair with Samuel Beckett, in 1938, just as she was launching her first gallery. Rebecca imagined the love affair and the gallery opening as twin strokes of joy and victory for Peggy after an early life shadowed by tragedy: her father’s death on the Titanic; her first marriage, to an angry, often violent artist; her beloved elder sister’s death in childbirth. Rebecca understood the affair as a flare of vivid flourishing: great sex, long talks, days spent wandering the streets of Paris and drinking champagne in bed. She got a sly, affectionate expression on her face whenever she spoke about Peggy. Did I know that she had slept with Marcel Duchamp and John Cage? That she’d eaten meals cooked by Constantin Brancusi in his smelting furnace? Rebecca loved gossip. She knew that it was where the truth lived.