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Marina laughingly protested, no, certainly not. She wasn’t a woman comfortable with being looked at, considered . She hadn’t a normal store of vanity, and that was indeed a handicap. She’d run to her car after the summons came to her, drove twenty-three miles in whatever clothes she’d been wearing, denim shorts, a T-shirt that fitted her slender torso loosely, bare pale legs and well-worn sandals. Tendrils of damp hair stuck to her forehead and neck like seaweed. She hadn’t glanced at herself in any mirror in hours and she wondered how desperate she would seem, to Adam’s critical eye. Marina for Christ’s sake get hold of yourself .
    Or would he say, sobered by his near-escape, Marina, thank you! For coming to me on such short notice .
    Marina was being warned. Of what? The young man and the Asian-American woman in their crisp hospital uniforms. Warning her she should prepare herself? How, her self? Car keys clutched in her hand. Her sweaty palm. She’d been entrusted with these keys, and told that Adam’s Mercedes was parked behind Emergency. (How anxious they’d been, the cookout couple, to transfer the car keys to Marina, and to be rid of the nuisance of Adam’s car.) She was being led into a large refrigerated room.
    The morgue. Stark lighting here. A powerful chemical odor. “Yes.
    That’s—him. You have the right man.” Idiot, why had she said such a thing? Yet her voice was even and calm, and reliable. Marina Troy was one of those whose concern is to behave in a civilized manner; in a way helpful, not hurtful, to others. She was not a woman of raw emotion. She was not a woman to break down in tears. She was not a woman to break down at all. In public. Yet her vision had narrowed strangely (good, for she was in a medical facility, if she were having a hemorrhage or a stroke it could not be happening at a more convenient time) so that she was able to see little in the fluorescent-lit space except the man who lay motionless on a gurney beneath the strongest of the lights. “Adam?” How bulky this body was, how graceless. Yet profound. Had Marina ever seen any person, living Middle Age: A Romance
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    or dead, looking so profound? Adam might have been a sculpture of subtly colored lead. It would weigh, what would it weigh!—a literal ton. This thing both was and was not Adam Berendt, her friend. The indignity of being near naked, in strangers’ eyes! Marina had seen Adam in swim trunks, she’d been struck by his barrel-like torso covered in swaths and swirls of silver-glinting hair thick as an animal’s pelt, but at such times he’d been in motion; always in her memory, Adam had been a man in motion; and that made all the difference. Here, lying exposed on his back, no pillow for his head so that his head too rested flat on the aluminum surface, Adam was clearly “dead”; “deadness” lifted like a vapor from his ashen, slack skin, the sightless eyes, the mouth partly agape. Which of the eyes was the blind eye, now you could not have told. Both were nearly shut, sickly-white crescents. “Adam? It’s Marina.” She was whispering.
    Though she knew that Adam was dead, yet she was close beside him whispering. As if some secret might pass between them, unknown to observers. Marina fumbled to take hold of Adam’s hand. So heavy!—she could lift it only with difficulty. Adam’s muscles were rigid in the death-lock of rigor mortis, was that the explanation? This man who’d been so special in life, unique, subjected now to the most common of death symptoms. And decay to follow. “Cremation. His wish was for cremation.”
    Marina spoke distractedly. She was but half conscious of being questioned. “He must have next of kin, in the Midwest I think, or the West, but—I don’t know who they would be. I—I’m not the one to know.” If her questioners had believed her the lover of Adam Berendt, now they must be reassessing her. But she’d taken Adam’s hand firmly in hers, as if to