Just writing the words Gary was chills me. Gary, who was improbably good at living. It’s so shocking that he, too, succumbed to the disappearing act that stalks us all. How can he not be around, to spin the mundane story into a three-act play? How could I not call him and hear his affectionate conspiratorial laughter, or go to a party and see his impish grin?

He was one of the world’s great talkers. At all hours of the day and night he was on the phone or writing emails, conversations and dispatches that revealed the range of his interests, his perspicacity, his hilarity. The accounts he gave were ones only he could have given. How operas always end in the death of the woman in the fifth act, which gives the man a story to tell. How one time he was in rehearsals for an adaptation of Chekhov’s Three Sisters, with Gary as Masha, Taylor Meade as Olga, and Jack Smith as Irene; how at Sharon Niesp’s mother’s funeral in Baltimore they’d forgotten to pay the priest and used the money to buy a used car; how he and Susan Sontag slipped out of a six-hour Czech film to watch a kung fu movie. Or just: “Janique––I saw a wonderful little black and white bird yesterday hopping in the grass beside the entrance of the hotel. It would hop two or three times, then raise its wings, then fold them back, like a butterfly.”

For a five-month period, three years ago, we both had bad insomnia, an experience we likened to shared psychosis. During this time, we’d speak every night, to trade tips, and every morning, to commiserate. (Not being totally insane, we never asked each other “how we were.”) He read bits from the books he was reading, or most often, re-reading, aloud to me: Sarah Kane’s 4.48; Henry James’s The Princess Casamassima; anything by Jane Bowles. “Hi hon,” he would say, “Goodnight sweetie.” Despite his formidable reputation—the word “acerbic” is often bandied about—what I remember best is his gentleness, a certain outmoded sense of decorum.

I miss his enormous capacity for friendship, his intimate understanding of desperation. He knew we are all unreliable and broken somewhere inside, that happiness is furtive, that we find each other amidst this loneliness, and this recognition helps us stay alive.

It was 6am in London when I opened my phone and read a message that he was gone. I remembered that his mother, during the Second World War, had delivered death notices for Western Union on her bicycle and a line from Horse Crazy flashed in my mind: “Every death in my life has been delivered by telephone, with no eyes to look into.”

If I could, I would tell him that he had returned to me the sense that a chance encounter with a certain song, a phrase, an image, could change your life. But an overstatement wouldn’t suit him. He would have preferred: “I so enjoyed talking with you.”