The tenth of December is still a difficult day. Cowboy Mouth (this was a reference to Mamet) is turning thirty two. I blindfolded Michael for his surprise party at Orso with black satin at the flat ...

He wore polished black calfskin pumps with ribbed silk bows, a butterfly bow-tie, wing-collar shirt with pleated front and studs, and Ralph Lauren. (No man ever wore a dinner jacket so beautifully.) I dressed in a sheer cream chiffon blouse, that stern black Katharine Hamnett riding skirt he bought me after an argument, high black curving heels. As we entered, all conversation stopped. I guided him around the tables.

And then, of course, he crashed into a chair.

He had come home to a stairwell alive with balloons. I spent the afternoon inflating them with a neighbor. My mouth felt raw. With each step, he sent the happy, gassy things bouncing and scattering. That expression of his when he reached the top: I will never forget it. The haul? His presents included a thick Liberty peacock-print dressing gown, black velvet slippers from Tricker's, elite men's toiletries. This must have cost me a small fortune, he laughed. I feigned surprise. Well, I said, that soap-on-a-rope was rather expensive, but they threw in all that other stuff for free.

The following morning, he left me a postcard - Michael loved postcards - featuring the usual 1950's lawnmower-and-Astroturf Americana: What would I do without you? Dry up, blow away, and join the food chain, I guess. He kept his word.

* * *

Before dinner that night in 1995, Luke and I stopped at Gleebooks for the launch of a book by a novelist whose greatest talent was looking (as Luke put it) like a goat. We were soon bored by the chatter and browsed. In a whimsical mood, I bought a slender philosophical work on mortality and then we left. I laughed a lot that night and so did Luke. It was a memorably joyous evening.

There was a parcel by my front door: Paulo Coelho had sent me a signed copy of The Valkyries, his novel about angels. Luke later interviewed Paulo for the Australian and liked to leave answering machine messages in an acetone-soaked Brazilian accent: I am Paulo and I am very mystical and I like to smoke the cigarettes. (Paulo and I are friends, but he and Luke did not get on.) I kicked my heels off and activated the answering machine. Two calls: one from my closest friend in London, former Mojo editor Mat Snow (Nick Cave wrote a song about us entitled Scum; Mat was delighted), the other from an English friend in Sydney.

Similarly sanguine (a week after the World Trade Center attacks, Mat wrote: Many happy returns! Here in the Northern Hemisphere we're all looking forward to World War III. How are things at your end?), both ordered me to call when I got in. Those voices, fluttering. There was a pause as I reviewed the room. Inhaling, I dialed the number of my local English friend. I'm coming over, she quavered. The words I spoke were not my own: Michael's dead, isn't he? She briefly hesitated, and then said: Yes. I am still grateful for her honesty. A moment passed in which bees swarmed.

I hurled the receiver at the wall and screamed.

Belgian Surrealist Rene Magritte painted a head as an explosion of luminosity and that night, his head was mine. How did he know? I did not know that at fourteen, Magritte had watched his mother's body fished from a river: that wet nightshirt clinging to her face exposed her dead breasts and dead sex. (She had, of course, committed suicide.)

He responded by quickly tipping his anguish into art. Magritte - who, with Balthus, has always been my favorite artist, a real exquisite - had one of the most distinctive symbolic lexicons: nightshirts, obscured faces, disembodied female torsos, men transfixed by moons, oceans, mermaids, fish. Unlike his mother, mermaids and fish do not drown, and moons have always symbolized the maternal: the female cycle is governed with the tides and Selene, the full moon's goddess, is a also deity of light. Rare in his understanding of weight, Magritte had dragged his mother's corpse ashore with his eyes. He resuscitated her with oils as with ink, I resurrect Michael.

© 2003 Antonella Gambotto

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