Tell-All

calvados , circa 1865, and Croizet cognac bottled in 1906. Campbell Bowden & Taylor port, vintage 1825.
    Stacked against the stone walls are cases of Dom Pérignon and Moët & Chandon and Bollinger champagne in bottles of every size … Jeroboam bottles, named for the biblical king, son of Nebat and Zeruah , which hold as much as four typical wine bottles. Here are Nebuchadnezzar bottles, twenty times the size of a typical bottle, named for a king of Babylon . Among those tower Melchior bottles, which hold the equivalent of twenty-four bottles of champagne, named for one of the Three Wise Men who greeted the birth of Jesus Christ . As many bottles stand empty as still corked. Empty wineglasses litter the cold shadows, long ago abandoned, smudged by the lips of Conrad Nagel, Alan Hale, Cheeta the chimp and Bill Demarest .
    Miss Kathie’s mourning veil falls back, covering her face, and she drinks through the black netting, holding each bottle to her lips and swigging, leaving a new layer of lipstick caked around each new bottle’s glistening neck. Each bottle’s mouth as red as her own.
    Sydney Greenstreet , another no-show at today’s funeral. Greta Garbo did not send her sympathies.
    What Walter Winchell calls “stiff standing up.”
    Here we are, just Miss Katherine and myself, yet again.
    Brushing aside the black rice of mouse feces—in this strange negative image of a wedding—my Miss Kathie lifts the silver picture frame and props it to stand on the shelf,leaning the frame against the tomb’s wall. Instead of a picture, the frame surrounds a mirror. Within the mirror, within the reflection of the stone walls, the cobwebs, poses Miss Kathie wearing her black hat and veil. She pinches the fingertips of one glove, pulling the glove free of her left hand. Twisting the diamond solitaire off her ring finger, she hands the six-carat, marquise-cut Harry Winston to me. Miss Kathie says, “I guess we ought to record the moment.”
    The mirror, old scratches scar and etch its surface. The glass marred by a wide array of old scores.
    I tell her, Hit your mark, please.
    “Are you absolutely certain you phoned Cary Grant?” says Miss Kathie as she steps backward and stands on a faded X, long ago marked in lipstick on the stone floor. At that precise point her movie-star face aligns perfectly with the scratches on the mirror. At that perfect angle and distance, those old scores become the wrinkles she had three, four, five dogs ago, the bags and sumps her face fell into before each was repaired with a new face-lift or an injection of sheep embryo serum. Some radical procedure administered in a secret Swiss clinic. The expensive creams and salves, the operations to pull and tighten. On the mirror linger the pits and liver spots she has erased every few months, etched there—the record of how she ought to look. Again, she lifts her veil, and her reflected cheeks and chin align with the ancient record of sags and moles and stray hairs my Miss Kathie has rightfully earned.
    The war wounds left by Paco Esposito and Romeo , every stray dog and “was-band.”
    Miss Kathie makes the face she makes when she’s not making a face, her features, her famous mouth and eyes becoming a Theda Bara negligee draped over a paddedhanger in the back of the Monogram Pictures wardrobe department, wrapped in plastic in the dark. Her muscles slack and relaxed. The audience forgotten.
    And wielding the diamond, I get to work, drawing. I trace any new wrinkles, adding any new liver spots to this long-term record. Creating something more cumulative than any photograph, I document Miss Kathie’s misery before the plastic surgeons can once more wipe the slate clean. Dragging the diamond, digging into the glass, I etch her gray hairs. Updating the topography of this, her secret face. Cutting the latest worry lines across her forehead. I gouge the new crow’s-feet around her eyes, eclipsing the false smile of her public image, the diamond defacing Miss Kathie. Me mutilating her.
    After a lifetime of such abuse the mirror bows, curved, so sectioned, so cut and etched so deep, that any new pressure could collapse the glass into a shattered, jagged pile of fragments. Another duty of my job is to never press too hard. My position included mopping up Paco’s piss from around the commode, then taking the dog to a veterinarian for gelding. Every day, I was compelled to tear a page from some history book—the saga of Hiawatha , written by Arthur