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.
“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.”