Walter Mosley - Debbie Doesn't Do It Anymore

“... to come and see Theon,” Marcia concluded.

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.