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skeleton.” A “beautifully coiffed skull” as Elsa Maxwell calls Katharine Hepburn .
    The moment of Miss Kathie’s exit in search of said spoon, my fingers pry open a box of bath salts and pinch up the coarse grains. These I sprinkle between the roses, swirling the vase to dissolve the salts into the water. My fingers pluck the card from the bouquet of roses and lilies. Folding the parchment, I tear it once, twice. Folding and tearing until the sentences become only words. The words become only letters of the alphabet, which I sprinkle into the toilet bowl. As I flush the lever, the water rises in the bowl, the torn parchment spinning as the water deepens. From deep within itself, the commode regurgitates a hidden mess of paper trapped down within the toilet’s throat. Bobbing to the surface, bits of waterlogged paper, greeting cards, the tissue paper of telegrams. It all backs up within the clogged bowl.
    Within the rim of the toilet swirls a tide of affection and concern, signed by Edna Ferber, Artie Shaw, Bess Truman .The handwritten notes and cards, the telegrams reading,
If there’s anything I can do
… and,
Please don’t hesitate to call
. The torn scraps of these sentiments spin higher and higher toward the brim of disaster, preparing to overflow, to run over the lip of the white bowl and flood the pink marble floor. These affectionate words … I’ve torn them into bits, and then torn those into smaller bits, scraps. All of my covert work is about to be exposed. These, all of the condolences I’ve destroyed during the past few days.
    From the downstairs powder room, echoing up through the silence of the town house, the sounds of Miss Kathie’s gorge rises with beef Stroganoff and Queen Charlotte pears and veal Prince Orloff , heaving up from the depths of Miss Kathie, triggered by the tip of a silver spoon touching the back of her tongue, her gag reflex rejecting it all.
    “Fuck ’em,” Miss Kathie says between splashes, her movie-star voice hoarse with bile and stomach acid. “They don’t care,” she says, purging herself in great thunderous blasts.
    The infamous advice Busby Berkeley gave to Judy Garland , “If you’re still having bowel movements, you’re eating too much.”
    Upstairs, the shredded affections rise, about to spill out onto the bathroom floor. Spiraling upward toward disaster. At the last possible moment I drop to my knees on the pink marble tile. I plunge my hand into the churning mess, the cold water lapping around my elbow, then swirling about my shoulder as I burrow my hand deep into the toilet’s throat, clearing aside wet paper. Clawing, scratching a tunnel through the sodden, matted layer of endearments. The soft mass of sentiments I can’t see.
    Downstairs, Miss Kathie heaves out great mouthfuls of gâteau Pierre Rothschild . Bombe de Louise Grimaldi. Aunt Jemima syrup. Lady Baltimore cake. The wet, bubbling shouts of undigested Jimmy Dean sausage.
    The plumbing of this old town house shudders, the pipes banging and thudding to contain and channel this new burden of macerated secrets and gourmet vomit.
    A “Hollywood lifetime” later, the water in the toilet bowl begins to recede.
    The shredded scraps of love and caring, the kind regards sink from sight. Freshwater chases the final words of comfort into the sewers. Those lacy, embossed, engraved and perfumed fragments, the toilet gulps them down. The water swallows every last word of sympathy from Jeanne Crain , the florid handwriting of Her Royal Highness Princess Margaret , from John Gilbert, Linus Pauling and Christiaan Barnard . In her bathroom, the purge of names and devotion signed, Brooks Atkinson, George Arliss and Jill Esmond , the spinning flood disappearing, disappearing, the water level drops until all the names and notes are sucked down. Drowned.
    Echoing from the downstairs powder room comes the hawk and spit sound of my Miss Kathie clearing the bile taste from her mouth. Her cough and belch. A final