When she gets to the bar she buys a new pack of cigarettes, which she smokes to the rhythm of Frene h pop music, and then she fumbles across the dance floor. Two women stop her to talk. She lies clearly and without hesitation to one lover about another, loses interest in the lie midway, forgets the ending, walks away. Slowly she finds her way to the bathroom, refusing help every few steps, her divorce with the body almost final now. She blacks out several times but somehow manages to get herself home. Her dazzling eyes light the way. She moves forward, quicker than she had previously, open-armed, toward light, toward a large, white American car. She nearly runs into it, like a cat giving away its last life.
Back in the apartment she falls to the bed, farther away with each breath now from her intentions, her fingertips freed from the history of art. Who can remember now, she wonders? longer skirts? Shorter hair? Longer hair? The color white?
Soon the police arrive — two young men. “This happens,” they say, covering the body, steady as surgeons. “This happens.” For them it is the only way to see such things. “This happens,” they mutter to each other, looking at her long, beautiful legs, her flawless face. “It was very pure — the heroin. She probably did not know,” they tell anyone who will listen. “It happens, that’s all. C’est tout. C’est ça.”
Later, there will be police photographers.
Later, in the mind, we will try over and over to see this — her body sculpting itself into its final position — but w e cannot.
“On Natalie’s behalf I quote from a Richard Brautigan poem for you,” Marta said quietly.
I don’t want to see you end up that way
with your body being poured like wounded
marble into the architecture of those who make
bridges out of crippled birds.
“If you feel compelled to remember, try to imagine her hunched over pin-ball.”
“Imagine it differently, Marta,” I told her. “Help yourself out of this.” But Marta could not imagine her way through grief and past it. She sank into it and she took me, too. She had never followed the flight of the Topaz Bird. She had never even heard of it.
Natalie is lying in her apartment on the floor with her head propped against a blank wall, drawing conclusions, summing things up. “Do you think it was right,” she asks herself now, “to come here to France, so far from Marta and everyone else?” She reaches across the floor for a pen but finds only pencils and with them carves a few short lines, last words, as the dresser disappears, the kitchen light dims. Her meditation is long and involved; it does not fit on the page and cannot be captured completely by the slowing pace of her hand. The complex thoughts of an abstracting mind flood her whole system.
“Do not picture it that way,” Marta says, “Natalie apologizing, Natalie thanking those she’d always meant to, Natalie saying good-bye, making the ordinary, the simple gestures of love. Do not think of it that way. For some, the most simple things are not possible.
“She probably welcomed sleep, because she was so restless always and had gone without sleep for so long. She probably was thinking about the color red or a new way to cut her hair.”
She probably never once thought of the growing space in front of her eyes. A song from the bar that would not leave her head was probably the last thing on her mind, locked forever inside her skull after the brain closed down. Surely, she could not have known that she was about to die.
“And if someone had told her,” Marta says, “she probably would have laughed and shrugged her shoulders. She probably would not have been listening.”
“My palms once said unjust criticism would follow my death. My palms are gone, their lines incorporated into the world you now see, along with all the dead.”
She looked just as she looked in Martas photographs. As in the photos, empty space enveloped her. She looked lonely out there, in need of company.
“Give me a chance,” she said. “Imagine me,” she pleaded, and she stepped closer, “please.”
“Maybe Natalie isn’t dead,” I said, jumping awake. “Maybe she’s still alive. What if she wanted to trick everybody? Escape her parents? Change her life? Start over? Become French or Italian? Change her name? Maybe she arranged it all w ith the man in the phone booth in Nice. Maybe the whole thing was set up somehow.”
“Vanessa,” Marta said slow ly, looking at me with her flickering brown eyes, “you’re so stupid sometimes.” She took my hand. “These are the facts. I loved a strange and beautiful woman. I never understood her. Our time together was short. I was a season’s diversion for her, a plaything — an exotic object from South America for her impressive collection. When she tired of me, she packed up and left. Do not idealize her. She was thoughtless, selfish, and vain. But I loved her anyway. She never really cared about me. She died that cold night in France. She’s dead. I love her still.”
“But, Marta…”
“There are things that can never be explained, Vanessa, things that will never make sense. I’m unlucky, I guess. I can’t get around the facts; they keep coming back. Natalie is dead. She died for nothing. I can never bring her back.”
Mourning clothes weigh far more than regular clothing. They are not only heavier, but they cling close to the body and they do not come off at night. I was not at all surprised by Marta ‘s stooped posture, her rounded shoulders, her slow motion. I was impressed that she could move at all under such a tremendous weight. It must have taken great effort. She barely picked up her feet anymore; they were covered by mourning shoes.
How did we get up to the catwalk of Main those late afternoons where we stood and watched the sun sink like a heart? She could barely walk most days, but we climbed up there somehow. Where was Jennifer, I wondered, as we stared into the pink light and Marta told stories?
“Oh, off on some project, no doubt,” Marta said, with disdain and affection. She laughed, picturing her friend talking in feminist to the Ladies’ Auxiliary Club in Poughkeepsie or negotiating some treaty with the women at Bard College.
“You’ve got to give Jennifer credit,” she said, exhausted just thinking of the piles of leaflets and petitions that covered the floor of her room.
I miss her, this Marta, only because I have seen her shed for a moment her mourning clothes and join some unencumbered present where she comments on a task of Jennifer’s or a particular professor’s eccentricities or reads aloud some ridiculous article from the student newspaper. I wish for this Marta to be with me all the time. But as quickly as she’s surfaced, it seems she sinks again, so heavy in her clothes of death.
I too had grown fonder and fonder of escape. “Where is the needle, Marta?” I asked.
The Chinese are right to make white the mourning color. It is the color of the eyes rolled back in the head, the color of the blank page that is always before my mother. It is the color of cocaine — the color of heroin.
She is baklava sweet in the stale ground.
“She slipped out of the wreckage of our lives casually,” Marta said, falling into sleep, “as if out of a pair of stockings.”
There was no sign of turmoil on Natalie’s face that day as she discussed with her adviser taking the year in France, then wrote to her parents, on vacation in Africa, for money, then made the plane reservations. She felt calm, relieved even, as if some weight had been lifted.
Not even she knew how much damage had been done. The mind can continue for days or months or years sometimes before allowing chaos in. Not everyone falls apart immediately during a crisis. Some grow stronger at first, more beautiful. The men on the plane could not keep their eyes off Natalie. She knew this, and it brought her some small pleasure as she lit a cigarette and unfastened her safety belt. They had no power over her and she enjoyed that, for she could never love a man and their lecherous and forlorn looks made her quite suddenly giddy. She was in control of her life. How easily she had made all the necessary arrangements.