“Lorelei,” I roar. I’m surprised at the ferocity in my voice.
Maura looks nervous. “Paul, what are you doing?” she asks.
“Lorelei,” I yell again. Lorelei appears in the doorway. “Sic!” I say, and point at Maura. Lorelei just looks at me.
Maura jumps up. “Oh, my God,” she says.
“Get her, girl!” I shout. Lorelei looks from me to Maura and back again. She lets out a single bark, responding, I suppose, to the loudness of my voice.
“Are you nuts?” Maura says to me.
“Apparently,” I say. “Go on, Lorelei! Get her!”
“I’m leaving,” Maura says. “You’ve really lost it, Paul. Let me out of here.” She grabs her purse and walks quickly to the door, giving Lorelei a wide berth.
I follow her and stand in the doorway as she retreats down the front path.
“And stay out!” I yell after her. It’s strangely satisfying. I start to laugh. I watch Maura drive away, and then, laughing, I walk back into my cluttered living room to continue my research.
TWENTY-FOUR
Lexy and I had been married six or seven months, I think, when she got the call to make the mask of the dead girl. She called me at work.
“Hi,” she said. “Do you know where Van Buren’s Funeral Home is?”
“Um, I’m not sure,” I said. “Why, did somebody die?”
“No. Well, somebody did, but it’s not anyone I know.”
“What?”
“I just got this call, out of the blue,” she said. “It was from a woman whose daughter just died, and she wants me to make a mask from the girl’s face.”
“Oh, my God,” I said. “And you’re going to do it?”
“Well, I was a little put off when she first started telling me what she wanted, but the more she explained it, the more sense it made. I guess this girl—she was nineteen, she was in college—it sounds like she had some kind of cancer. Her mother sounded very calm and rational; I think they knew this was coming for a long time. Anyway, this girl was a theater major, and she was kind of quirky, and she wasn’t afraid of death, her mother said. Her parents think she would’ve approved of this. They think it would be a nice way to remember her.”
“Uck,” I said. “I think it sounds creepy. Don’t you think? It doesn’t sound like a very healthy way to grieve, to keep a mold of your daughter’s dead face around. What are they going to do with it, display it on the coffee table?”
“Yeah, I know,” she said. “It’s kind of weird. But there’s something about this that appeals to me. It’s important work, you know? More important than most of the things I take on. I mean, this is the last chance they have to capture their daughter’s face the way it really looks.”
“The way it looks in death. Don’t they have any pictures of her, pictures of the way she looked when she was alive?”
Lexy sighed. “Maybe I’m not going to be able to explain it to you,” she said. “But I think I understand. You know, death masks have been around for thousands of years. And I read once that back when photography was new, people used to have pictures taken of their loved ones in their coffins. Or mothers would take their dead babies to be photographed. It would be the only thing they’d have to remember them by.”
“That’s very sad. But I still think it’s a strange request.”
“I don’t know. I think there’s something sacred about capturing the human face in the moment of death. Think about this—if no one ever wanted to remember the way their loved ones looked after they died, then why would we have open caskets at funerals?”
“Well, I’m not too crazy about that either,” I said.
“I think there’s something comforting about it,” she said. “You know, death is this big mystery, and it’s something we’re all afraid of, but when you see someone who’s actually dead, they look peaceful. It doesn’t look so bad. Especially if it’s someone who’s been through a lot of pain and is finally at rest. Maybe that’s what this girl’s parents want to capture.”
“I suppose,” I said. “But are you sure you want to be a part of this?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m sure.”
At the time, I found the whole business unsavory. It seemed to me an act of desperation on the part of the girl’s parents, an unwillingness to let go. Even without knowing this dead girl, I doubted she would have chosen this as the way she wanted her parents to grieve. To keep her dead face in their home, always in sight? To keep them rooted forever to the moment of her death? If the goal of grief is to learn to move on, I thought, to learn how to inhabit the same space as absence and to keep living anyhow, then surely these sad people were doing a disservice not only to themselves but to the memory of their poor lost daughter.
But now, having come to know grief as intimately as I have, having lived in its bare rooms for so long and walked its empty halls, I’m not so sure they were wrong.
When Lexy died, I admit I took some cloistered comfort in seeing that her face had not been bruised in the fall. And in spite of what I may have said, when the time came I did have an open casket at her funeral, and every time someone said to me, “Oh, she looks so beautiful,” it was like a balm to me. When I knelt by her coffin, my mind wiped suddenly blank of all my childhood prayers, and I reached out to touch her cheek, I stared as hard as I could bear to and I fixed in my mind every detail of the way she looked, because I knew it would be the last time I would ever lay my eyes on her. Would I want a mask of Lexy as she looked in death, to hang on the wall, perhaps, next to the mask of Lexy as she looked in life? No. But I would not presume to tell any other grief-sick wanderer that what he needs is wrong. I would not dare.
I was afraid that embarking on such a morbid project would throw Lexy into a fit of melancholy, but when she came home she was glowing.
“She was beautiful,” she said. “Very gaunt, from the illness, but you could see she had really beautiful features.”
I tried to picture the dead girl, waiflike on the slab. I could not quite imagine beauty there.
“They hadn’t put the makeup on her yet, you know, for the funeral, so her skin was very pale. I had to work quickly—they needed me to be done by this afternoon. But it didn’t take me very long to make the mold. Not to be morbid, but it’s easier when you don’t have to keep telling the person to stay still.”
“Was she cold?” I asked. I hadn’t spent much time around dead bodies. Even when my father died, I had kind of kept my distance at the funeral.
“Not ice-cold. But cool. Cooler than a living person.”
“Did you talk to the parents?”
“Yeah, of course. I sat down with them to discuss what they wanted the end product to be like.”
“And what were they like?” At this point, I still couldn’t imagine a healthy-minded person doing such a thing.
“They seemed very normal. Sad, of course. The father started crying at one point. But they were very grateful that I was willing to do this for them. They were afraid they wouldn’t find anyone.”
With good reason, I wanted to say. But I kept quiet.
“Listen,” I said instead. “What do you say we go out and get some dinner? After a day like that, you need to be among the living.”
“Actually,” she said, “do you mind if we just order something in? I’m kind of anxious to go downstairs and get to work on this while it’s all fresh in my mind.”
“Okay,” I said. I was disappointed. It was a Friday night, and I’d been looking forward to spending it with Lexy, doing something nice together, getting a start on the weekend. We were still newlyweds, after all. But it had been a while since I’d seen her so excited about a project, and as distasteful as I found it myself, I didn’t want to ruin her good mood. I went into the kitchen and ordered a pizza.