I gave Marcia the address of the mortuary while Talia hung up and waited.
After I disconnected the call the displaced hippie said, “I can take you down to see your husband now, Mrs. Pinkney.”
He was wearing a tan suit with his favorite Stetson in the coffin. I realized that Lana must have helped them get the clothes. I came into the cool, dark chamber alone. Talia had left me at the door.
Lewis was standing over the earthly remains of my poor lost husband. Theon was smiling. It was his natural smile. I had never before seen a corpse made to look as the person had in life.
Dardanelle had done a brilliant job.
“He looks just like Theon,” I said.
“It was as if he did the work himself,” Lewis told me. “The muscles of his face found that smile with the smallest urging. He was a man who enjoyed life.”
“Every minute,” I said, “like he was going to die the next day.”
“In my business you learn to take advantage of the span you’re allotted,” the undertaker told me. “We see so many who fall before their time.”
It was a simple pine coffin, unfinished as I had wanted it to be. Seeing him there I felt the emptiness created by his absence. It wasn’t so much that I missed him but that he had been there in ways that no one else ever could. Now, for the next two days at least, I would be alone.
“Could you bring a cot in here?” I asked the lanky mortician. “I’d like to spend the last night at his side.”
“That’s against policy.”
“Does that mean no?”
It was a simple canvas cot with X-crossed wooden legs at either end. The blanket was army surplus and very scratchy but that wouldn’t interrupt my sleep. I sat there next to my dead husband, thinking that he would have been happy that I didn’t have a book. The light in the small interment room was no more than forty watts—I wouldn’t have been able to read anyway.
It would have also made Theon happy if I decided to have sex with him one more time before he went into the grave. At some younger, wilder time I might have given him that last good-bye.
But that night I just sat there feeling so at ease and comfortable.
I was considering taking off my dress and lying down when a knock came on the door.
I thought it was an overly formal Dardanelle, but when I pulled the door open Marcia Pinkney stood there. I had forgotten her completely.
That night she was wearing a black dress and a dark gray hat with a gray, loose-net veil. Her eyes were still shocking in their intensity but the wan smile she had from days before had been put away.
“Is he here?” she asked.
I stepped to the side, ushering her in with the movement. Her gait was stiff-legged; so much so that I stayed close to her side in case she stumbled.
The pine coffin reminded me of Queequeg’s coffin in Moby Dick—the passage of death that also made room for life.
“Oh my God,” Marcia said, standing over her son.
I put my arm around her shoulder.
She reached out and wept silently. I imagined that her tears would have felt hot.
“I treated him like a dog,” she muttered.
“He acted like a dog, Marcia. That’s why I loved him.”
“You did?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Even after all he did to you?”
“Of all the doors I could have run through, his was the kindest. He never hit me and he always listened—even when he didn’t understand.”
“I could have helped you buy a better coffin,” she said.
“Come sit on the cot, Marcia.”
The coffin was set on the floor and so when we sat on the makeshift bed we could look down upon Marcia’s dead son’s smiling countenance.
“He looks very natural,” Marcia said. “I guess that sounds clichéd but it’s true.”
“You couldn’t have stopped this from happening,” I said. “I was his wife and I couldn’t do it. Theon was after something that he could never have and he was gonna push it to the limit until he went off the side.”
“But it was my fault.”
“You can’t look at it like that, Marcia. Theon was a man. You have to respect a man to live his own life, and if you do that then you have to let him be responsible.”
“But I’m his mother.”
“So let it hurt you that he’s gone. Feel the pain of his death but don’t climb in there with him.”
The old woman took me in a feeble embrace. She cried on my arm and shook in gratitude and despair. She patted my hand and whispered my name, my real name.
After all that, she leaned away and said, “Thank you. I didn’t do anything to deserve your kindness.”
She left soon after. I didn’t accompany her because I knew that Lewis would see her to her car. I was relieved to be alone again. Marcia’s emotions were too intense for death.
In the cool light, on the stiff cot next to my dead husband, life slowed down to a reasonable pace. The death chamber was cool and sedate. There were no sounds from anywhere.
If I glanced to my right I saw Theon’s smiling visage. For days I’d been hearing his voice on and off. But now that I was lying there next to him the words ceased. He was dead. I was as good as dead.
Drifting into sleep I was in the coffin with him. We were floating on a calm sea in the bright sun. We were both dead but Theon had accepted his passing and no longer had to look or think or guess. Our passage was uneventful, would always be. But for some reason I didn’t get bored or restless. Theon’s natural smile and the gentle sway of the coffin-boat on the water lulled any desire.…
“Mrs. Pinkney,” Lewis Dardanelle said. He was shaking my shoulder gently.
I was naked on top of the coarse army blanket. This didn’t disturb me. I had spent my entire adult life naked in front of men, and women.
And I was like all the other naked bodies Lewis dealt with every day of his life. They were all dead, of course, but I was on that cusp too. Maybe Lewis intuited my nearness to death. I stood up, retrieved my dress from the end of the cot, and put it on.
“It’s late,” he said. “You have a visitor.”
“What time is it?”
“Eleven.”
“Oh my God,” I said, remembering the same words issuing from Theon’s mom. “Who’s here?”
“She says that her name is Bertha Blueblood.”
“Hey, Deb,” the plump makeup artist and wardrobe designer said as she rolled her portable closet into the vault.
“Hi, B.”
“Oh,” she said when she saw Theon. “Wow. He looks really good. I guess that creepy old Dardanelle knows what he’s doing.”
She glanced at the cot and my rumpled dress but didn’t say anything.
She opened the movable closet and said, “It’s pretty dark in here but I got a light panel in the trunk. Let’s plug in and get to work.”
At twelve fifteen I walked out of Threadley Brothers Mortuary. My white satin dress matched the ass-length platinum blond wig, and my glasslike coral-tinted high heels lifted me five inches off the ground. My eyes were cobalt blue and I showed enough cleavage to have made Jayne Mansfield blush.
Lewis Dardanelle opened the back door to the pink stretch Cadillac limousine. Bertha got in first and I followed. Theon had already been loaded into the black hearse and was on his way to a final restlessness.
“Baby, you look great,” Bertha said when the car left the curb.
“Theon would have wanted this,” I said. “It’s the least I could do.”
When we got to the cemetery, located halfway between L.A. proper and the Valley, it was just a few minutes shy of one o’clock. Rash Vineland, in a shabby but becoming ash-colored suit, stood out in front of the chapel waiting.
He didn’t recognize me at first. I smiled at his looking around my tightfitting dress to see if his friend was going to climb out of the car.
“Aren’t you going to say hello, Rash?” I asked him.
&
nbsp; “Sandy?”
“This is my friend Bertha. She did my clothes.”
“Hi,” he said to the wardrobe mistress.
She smiled at him and shook his hand.
Inside, the chapel was empty. There was a high podium and Theon’s coffin sat before it. The hundreds of seats were vacant except for the little pamphlets with Theon’s picture and the details of his life. I picked up one for his mother when, and if, I saw her again.
The room was appropriately empty and silent.
Rash was looking down on Theon.
“He looks very manly,” he said to me.
“He was just a boy in his heart,” I said. “Like my father and most other men.”
This pronouncement caused Rash to lower his head and once again I felt like kissing him.
And once again I did not kiss him.
“Does your girlfriend know you’re here?” I asked instead.
“I told her that I was coming,” he said. “I even told her that she could come along but she said that if I went that I shouldn’t come back.”
“Why put yourself through all that?” I asked. “Why not just stay where you are?”
“Because I … I …”
“What?”
“I looked you up on the Net.”
“My films?”
“No. They cost money. It was just a lot of parties and some famous people you’ve been seen with.”
“If you want to know something you should ask me,” I said. “And just so you’ll know—I got dressed like I used to because Theon would have liked it. This is the last time I’ll ever be seen like this.”
“You sound angry.”
It was true. I could hear the rage in my voice, feel it in my shoulders and balled-up fists.
“It’s okay,” I told the young architect. “I’m not mad at you. It’s just the last time I’m playing the role of Debbie Dare and it weighs on me.”
“You talk like a completely different person.”
“And what do you think about her?”
“I’d, I’d build her a house in the woods if she’d come live with me there.” I could tell that he’d been practicing those words.
“What if she got fat and ugly?”
“I don’t care about how you look.”
“What if I only came in the summer months and spent the rest of the year doing … I don’t know … other things?”
He nodded his acceptance of my “what if” demands. I felt a hard knot rise up in my esophagus.
“I have to go, Rash. Can we talk about this some other time?”
“I’m sorry. I know this is the wrong place.”
I turned away from my awkward suitor and approached the pulpit where Lewis Dardanelle stood wearing his forty-year-old tuxedo. He’d worn that outfit to thousands of funerals. Death permeated every fiber.
“Everything is ready, Mrs. Pinkney,” the tall man assured me. “The caterers are at your home and Talia made sure that everyone who donated has an invitation. I have only one question.”
I’d never liked Lewis. His demeanor was so practiced as to be synthetic. But now I saw something inside the man: an empathy that seemed to exist only for me.
“What do you want to know?” I asked.
“Who will you want as pallbearers?”
“My brother Newland,” I said immediately, “and Jude Lyon because Jude was Theon’s closest friend. If Myron Palmer comes he’d be a good choice because they, they’re kind of the same. Neelo Brown can be my special representative and then Kip Rhinehart and Chas Mintoff. All you need is six, right?”
The undertaker smiled and lowered his head in a half nod.
“Anything else, Lewis?”
“I assume that you won’t be having a religious ceremony.”
I smiled and said, “No. No minister is coming.”
“So what will be the order of speakers?”
“I’d like you to say a few words.”
“Me?”
“I know that Theon would come down to Threadley’s sometimes to see you. I have no idea what you guys used to do, but I know he came home in a cab as many times as he drove.”
“I’d be honored,” Dardanelle said.
“Then you could introduce Jude Lyon. I’ll be the last speaker, after that.”
“I’ll make sure that Mr. Lyon sits up front with you.”
As Dardanelle walked away a voice said, “Let me take a look at you, hon.”
It was Bertha. She came at me holding a palette of various kinds of makeup.
“Sit down so I can get to your face, Miss Amazon,” she said.
She worked on my forehead and cheeks, lips and neck. She ran a comb through my fake hair and then looked me over.
“How do I look?”
“Just like Theon would’a wanted you to.”
Flower arrangements had arrived by the dozens. Huge frames of every color and kind. These concealed the seats next to the podium and I went back there to hide from the growing crowd.
The mourners were filing in by then. You could hear the din of their conversation and sporadic laughter. The people who attended the funerals of our kind were given to laughter and tears, alcohol and drugs, violent outbursts and deep depression.
It was not unusual for a suicide or two to come in the wake of any event like Theon’s.
They would be well dressed, some scantily so, as everyone would want to be seen as well as pay their respects. Funerals for our crowd were literal celebrations, like the primitive peoples of Europe reveling in life and death before a dour Christian God stripped them of their phallic symbols and painted faces.
I caught glimpses of them through the heavy foliage. The dominant theme was black cloth and cleavage but there was a good deal of pink and scarlet and white. There was a lot of kissing and hugging and holding on. Two film crews took over the back of the chapel. The back row, in front of the cameras, was occupied by a dozen well-known porn directors.
I could see no toddlers or children. There were a few babies in young women’s arms. Maybe one or two of them belonged to Theon. He’d once bragged to me that he’d fathered a child of every race on the planet.
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was playing. Lewis knew Theon well enough that he didn’t have to ask me about the music.
I was secure behind that hedge of memorial offerings and yet still had a feeling of belonging. The service was like a going away party for both Theon and me. By then I had definitely decided to use my father’s pistol to kill myself in the creditors’ house after the wake for my husband. The feeling of comradeship and certain death caressed me and the world was right—for once.
“Hey, Deb,” Jude Lyon said. He was wearing a beautifully tailored medium gray suit with a bluish shirt and a scarlet-and-royal-blue tie.
“You look good, Jude.”
“Every time Theon saw this suit he asked for my tailor’s name.”
The little assassin sat down next to me. He grabbed my hand with unexpected strength and said, “I know this must be hard for you.”
“It’s the life we lived.”
“Have you had any more problems?”
That was the first time I realized that I had not called the cops on Ness. He had come into my house and shot at me. But it meant nothing.
“No,” I said. “I think that little talk you had with Coco settled it all.”
“Call me if you have any more trouble,” he said. “That’s the very least I can do.”
I could see in his eyes that Jude was nervous. He had a folded piece of paper gripped in the fingers of his left hand—the speech no doubt.
When I put my free hand on his he shuddered.
“It’s okay, Jude,” I said. “This is what he would have wanted you to do.”
An inquisitive light came into the college-educated killer’s eye.
“Do you understand who I am, Deb?”
“I don’t understand a damn thing, J. All I know is that I have to keep on movin’ forward and for th
is little stretch of road you and me are on it together.”
I could tell he wanted to say something, just a sentence of agreement or harmony, but instead Jude put his head down and let it bounce in a little nod.
The crowd was getting louder. Bold men and saucy women were sharing memories and despair. The chatter seemed to be an attempt at holding off the silence that was so deep inside that chapel.
The chapel was almost as large as the Rock of Ages House of Worship where my family prayed—but the big church at Day’s Rest was a house of Death, not hope. The only reason people gathered there was because someone had died. There were no Sunday school lessons or weddings in this place. The transient parishioners bellowed and laughed, keened and cried to keep off the extraordinary quietude and the inescapable reality that no proper house of worship could ever really contain.
I closed my eyes and let the sounds of the mourners’ words and laughter wash over me. Again I had the feeling of being far out at sea. I couldn’t make out the individual words and sentences of the babbling gurgle, but I understood the meanings of the rising and lowering octaves.
All this brought a smile to my face.
“Are you ready, Mrs. Pinkney?” Lewis Dardanelle asked.
I opened my eyes, realizing that I had drifted into dreams while waiting for the service. It seemed so perfect that a chuckle escaped my lips.
Dardanelle was shocked and that pleased me. He was so used to being in charge of the final interment. Not only did he orchestrate but he knew every emotion and action that went through the minds of the principals. My nearly joyous ejaculation threw him off his game and that brought out a stronger laugh.
“Do you need a moment to collect yourself?” he asked, still flummoxed by the sudden lightness of my mood.
“Absolutely not.”
Lewis turned away, walked out into the public eye, and took the few steps up to the podium. There was a control board up there that he used to turn the music down, but not off.
The clamor of the mourners lowered to hushed whispers.
The tall coffin banger (as he was sometimes referred to by the women who fucked him in his casket-bed) cleared his throat and the whispering stopped.
“I have been asked to say a few words before the next speakers,” he said in his deep, soft voice. “This is unusual because I almost always represent the funeral home and not the deceased.
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