afternoon of my twenty-first birthday wandering with her and the filmmaker around the ruins of the vast Sutro Baths at the northwestern tip of San Francisco, where the waves smash hard enough to send the spray dozens of feet up; while walking on a local hillside in the greenness of early spring, stopping to throw rocks in the swimming pool of a world-famous old rock star who was giving young girls hard drugs for the usual reasons; wading in an icy forest stream until our feet were blue during a heat wave, after an expedition to fly her kite failed to turn up any winds; Marine about nineteen, blasé and impatient in a hospital gown after a speed binge resulted in dehydration and collapse; at home, cocking her head to one side to regard her baby pictures, declaring she looked exactly like Mussolini in them; us tossing the filmmaker’s father’s thorny backyard roses at her onstage, roses that the band’s singer took as a tribute to herself; Marine and I climbing the wall of the Catholic cemetery down the street from her family’s apartment as all the dogs at the adjacent school for the blind barked; coming home six months before her death to a message on my answering machine that said in tones of lighthearted wonder, “I love you. It’s Marine!”
When I called back her band’s house the next day to ask about funeral arrangements, I said, “But she seemed so happy, she seemed to have got everything together at last,” and the musician said, “Marine was never happy for herself. She was happy for you.” He told me that after our outing she’d gone home to take care of her grandmother while her mother went away and from there went to a party that Tuesday night. At the party she took something that killed her. It wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine’s corpse was and urged me to go see her at the funeral chapel. This, with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we’d been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two. That Saturday I suddenly walked out of a symposium and went to the chapel.
I’d never been to such a place before. A Georgian portico, a long hallway with doors on both sides, a family with children gathering for a funeral there looking at me doubtfully. The hallway confused me until I noticed lecterns with guest books outside each doorway. The book at the last lectern had Marine’s name written on it, and the curtained glass door was ajar, so I stepped through. The room was a dim mock-chapel. There was a strange hush, there were huge candles and a stained-glass window through which dull, faint light filtered above a vast, ornate, ivory casket like a pastry, set on a bier like an altar, inside which there was a little boy vampire. From the doorway, in profile, she looked tranquil, a sleeper. Up close in that light, she looked only half-familiar, and I realized how much her constant flickering motion had been a part of the impression she made. The coffin was lined with white satin, soft as a bed, and I found myself whispering, “Marine, Marine, Marine, wake up.”
Her mother called me up every once in a while for a few years afterward, and during one call told me that the night Marine died was her wedding night. The man she married was young and well-off, halfway between their ages, and Marine had talked about how much she hated him, though she never mentioned the marriage. Her mother came home the morning after the wedding to the celebratory bottle of champagne that Marine had bought her and to her own mother saying, “You must be strong, you’re going to have to be very strong.” With this revelation, the facts reordered themselves again: it seemed that, in the bitter upset of a marriage that might put
When I called back her band’s house the next day to ask about funeral arrangements, I said, “But she seemed so happy, she seemed to have got everything together at last,” and the musician said, “Marine was never happy for herself. She was happy for you.” He told me that after our outing she’d gone home to take care of her grandmother while her mother went away and from there went to a party that Tuesday night. At the party she took something that killed her. It wasn’t surprising and it wasn’t quite real. I kept thinking it was a bizarre mistake or a made-up story, until I called her mother, who told me how beautifully made up Marine’s corpse was and urged me to go see her at the funeral chapel. This, with her cigarettes still in my ashtray, her hair still in my brush, her clothes still in my car, her voice still in my ears, so soon after we’d been looking at ourselves together in my mirror and she the more lithe, the more fluidly beautiful of the two. That Saturday I suddenly walked out of a symposium and went to the chapel.
I’d never been to such a place before. A Georgian portico, a long hallway with doors on both sides, a family with children gathering for a funeral there looking at me doubtfully. The hallway confused me until I noticed lecterns with guest books outside each doorway. The book at the last lectern had Marine’s name written on it, and the curtained glass door was ajar, so I stepped through. The room was a dim mock-chapel. There was a strange hush, there were huge candles and a stained-glass window through which dull, faint light filtered above a vast, ornate, ivory casket like a pastry, set on a bier like an altar, inside which there was a little boy vampire. From the doorway, in profile, she looked tranquil, a sleeper. Up close in that light, she looked only half-familiar, and I realized how much her constant flickering motion had been a part of the impression she made. The coffin was lined with white satin, soft as a bed, and I found myself whispering, “Marine, Marine, Marine, wake up.”
Her mother called me up every once in a while for a few years afterward, and during one call told me that the night Marine died was her wedding night. The man she married was young and well-off, halfway between their ages, and Marine had talked about how much she hated him, though she never mentioned the marriage. Her mother came home the morning after the wedding to the celebratory bottle of champagne that Marine had bought her and to her own mother saying, “You must be strong, you’re going to have to be very strong.” With this revelation, the facts reordered themselves again: it seemed that, in the bitter upset of a marriage that might put
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