Callous

If you were to picture Maria Callas, in her prime, the triumphant years of La Scala, you’d see the haunting eyes, like an intense burn — the long, slim face that Callas had worked so hard to achieve, to be, as she’d prayed, sylph-like.

The tiny figure, the days of being fat, overweight, never to be repeated, never.

Her face in half-shadow was truly beautiful.

The specter type of beauty that you know is not going to last, that it holds the sense of death in its luminosity.

Kate was the spit of her.

An uncanny identical twin in Williamsburg, Brooklyn.

Like some cruel psychic joke.

You wanted to seriously piss Kate off, mention the resemblance to her.

Kate loved the Ramones, adored the Pixies, the Clash.

But Callas?

Forgeetit (heavy lean on the vowels).

Kate had one real heroine and, in line with her quirky worldview, or skewed, more like, it was a fictional character.

The wonderful Claire DeWitt, private investigator in the trilogy by Sara Gran.

Claire DeWitt, private eye, junkie, mystic, practitioner of all kinds of witchery.

Kate did get clean, mostly, bar the odd line of coke and, like in Sara Gran’s novels, she decided to disappear.

To Ireland, where she’d been willed a cottage in Galway.

By her aunt, the late Mary Casey, murdered in the Claddagh.

She arrived in Galway on the sixteenth of September.

The date on which Maria Callas died.