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watched the sun set from Dante’s View. Made love on the picnic table under the weeping eucalyptus.
    Old men stood around on the steps, talking in groups of two and three, like they were going to a business lunch. Uncles, friends, music people of Meredith’s. She had never met any of his relatives, though she knew him better than any of them. She could tell they had been here before, citizens of this country, Death. They knew its customs, its rites. Yet the men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you’d stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt. She glanced around nervously, watching for Meredith, that proud head of dark hair. How could she bear to invite people to her only son’s funeral? How could she stand it?
    Josie ground out her cigarette and went into the Hall of Remembrance. Inside, everything was beige and muted and the light came from nowhere at all. There was a box of satin caps, she took one but a man shook his head. “It’s not for ladies,” he said, plucking it out of her hand.
    Instead, she accepted a booklet from a young man with a rose in his buttonhole, a slender man with a low forehead—why was he looking at her like that? Did she smell of pot, or was it the yellow fake fur? Or did he know who she was, the one who let him slip away.
It’s all your fault, Josie Tyrell.
    She sat in the back, against the far wall. Onstage, the closed coffin gleamed like a black piano. She was glad it was closed, that she would not have to see him like that again. Though they would have him all fixed up, wouldn’t they? She suddenly had the strangest feeling that Michael was going to open the lid and sit up and sing “Just a Gigolo” in a funny tremolo voice like Bing Crosby on the Twenties record, or recite a speech, like Meet Mr. Lincoln that day at Disneyland. How they’d howled when Lincoln stood up and said the Gettysburg Address. They’d practically pissed their pants. A short squatty attendant had to come over and tell them to leave. “This is America,” he’d hissed. “Have some respect.”
    She shouldn’t have smoked that weed. She was fucking losing it. He wasn’t going to sit up and sing any song. He was never singing anything, ever again. He was in there and this was for real and he was never coming out.
Never and never.
Had Meredith seen him the way Josie had, at the coroner’s? Or had she waited for the funeral home? Had she closed the lid, the way she would close the top of her Steinway? Closing his music inside. If Josie hadn’t seen his body in the coroner’s basement, she would have felt different about the closed casket, but she’d seen enough.
It’s a project I’ve been thinking about.
And this was the project, his last work of art.
    Piped music filtered in from no visible source, muffled, hushed. A group of old women with set hair turned and stared at her. She pushed the sunglasses further on her face. They knew. She pulled the fake fur tighter, glad she had it, garish as it was, it was freezing in here, the smell of cold flowers. What did she care if the coat was wrong, she deserved to be here, she was the only one who knew him, she had fucked him, had held him in her arms in the early hours, had laughed with him, a million little jokes, had sat through his fury, his gloom. She had loved him more than all these people combined.
Go ahead and stare, you bitches.
They thought they knew her. They didn’t know a thing.
    Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner’s Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk