“His speech over the open grave was interrupted only by occasional hysterical sobs from the old whores (no one perhaps showed more painfully the transience of flesh and the impending disaster of decay) and hoarse coughs and sniffles from the longshoremen, though he had no way of knowing whether it was actually coughing or a tough, sailor’s brand of crying, a male surrogate for crying, the same substitute for sighs and tears he himself was using as he gave the speech.”
For today, some fiction…
It is said that whores do not experience love. How could they? They’ve broken the connection between sex and love and once you break it, how do you every get it back? But to see what all of those longshoremen saw during Mariette's funeral is to know this cannot be true.
There was Claude, barely seventeen and already with a lower back that bothered him because of the long days spent picking up and putting down wooden crates. His sixteenth birthday gift to himself had been a night with Mariette and he remembered the way she’d looked like a birthday cake when she began to lift her skirt up, all of those layers of ruffled white one on top of the other.
Henri remembered not the short, raucous evenings that they had, but the one morning that they woke up together, Mariette startling awake in the sunlight. She never meant to sleep over, but they’d both been so tired from the day that they had fallen asleep in Henri’s small twin-sized bed. When she looked over and realized it was Henri she was with, she relaxed. Though the room smelled of stale alcohol and drool, they had forgotten to close the window all the way so the salt smell of the port drifted in through the window. She stretched lazily next to him, the sun yellowing the sky, and asked, Quel sont vos plans pour la journée? as if both of them didn’t have to immediately get to work. He actually remembered very little of this morning—not the small hug she gave him as she left, or the way her beauty mark was just smudged, the sound of the other men in the boarding house moving, the floorboards creaking, not the way her dress looked more violet in the light, not the plain white he’d thought it was in the light of the barroom. No, what he remembered was her face when she looked at him and relaxed. He felt known.
Gabriel who thought only one word when he thought of Mariette: orchid. And so his mind was full of white and pink and purple flowers on spindly stems. Death was too much for Gabriel.He abstracted everything. He imagined the idea of the afterlife as a kind of big meadow like the one he’d visited with his grandmother once when he was a child. Mariette was the first person he knew personally who had died. It was too much to imagine this woman gone so he imagined orchids, things he’d seen live and die before and not been too troubled by.
Louis could not untangle his grief from the erotic and so he felt strangely sad and excited as the eulogizer spoke, for the most tangible memory he had of Mariette was from a night they’d spent together during the summer time. He’d hired her more than once and through that, there had sprung up a kind of friendship. Louis was a hulk of a man, one most would be afraid of and Mariette would have been no different. But to Louis, there was intimacy between them and so he invited her to drink with him out on a dock and they got beautifully drunk, so the lights of the boats and the few longshoremen pulling the night shift smudged before their eyes into beautiful kohl drawings of people and ships. He could not wait until they got home because of the allure of her breasts, the small clink of the whiskey glass hitting her teeth, the full yellow moon and so they had sex on stone steps leading to a hidden alley. Louis lay back on the uncomfortable big stones with Mariette on top of him, so he could see her corset, her hair, bobbing up and down, blocking and unblocking his view of the moon.
Some of the men visited Mariette only where she worked, and Paul remembered her as she constructed herself there, in the brothel, a woman lounging on a couch in a tight corset, with a flouncy skirt. She liked green silks and so he liked green silks. She smoked vanilla cigarettes so he ate vanilla whenever he could, even thought it was expensive. She abhorred the French flag, calling its design simple and ennuyeux. Paul once tried to make this argument to the other longshoremen on their lunch break and they had all laughed at him. Paul kept a pewter pitcher in his room and had a cracked porcelain sink that had a badly painted image of a tabby cat on the side of the bowl. To him, it was ugly, but Mariette professed to like the cat, called it le chat étrange and Paul found himself softening to it after that. He consciously thought of her little during the days, but at night he would feel himself longing for her, something he admitted to no one. Paul would not have ever said he loved Mariette, but what is love if not noticing all the things about someone?
Mariette’s mind we cannot know because she was no longer there, so we reconstruct her from their imaginations. But who at the funeral can know her innermost thoughts? What she thought of Claude, Henri, Gabriel, Paul, Louis? What she had dreamed or imagined for herself? What the sunrise over the port looked like to her? How she thought of the sea? Mariette was mourned for weeks by many men, and the mourning continued when boats would dock again after a year, or months. It is not uncommon, still, to see a man mournfully drinking a whiskey at the end of a bar after being told Mariette is no longer alive...
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