Seeing Dead People
by Richard Froude

Judith Campbell Exner, September 25th

Age thirteen: Judith is sent to a boarding school adjacent to expansive zoological gardens. In the evenings, she negotiates the fire escape to creep between shadows in the alley. She climbs a stone wall and arrives in the zoo near the polar bear enclosure. She has made arrangements with a starving botanist. He meets her there, near the polar bears, to exchange his cigarettes for covered plates of stroganoff, or fishcakes, or suspicious goulash. His choice of meal is at the discretion of the boarding school chef to whom Judith will deliver the cigarettes at breakfast the next morning.

This is how Judith starts smoking. Rather than return via fire escape to her boarding house, she wanders past caged okapis, dozing penguins, and smokes from the carton dispensed by the botanist. She tarries between aquaria. Makes her way between exotic shrubberies to recline beneath the evening sky on the roof of the elephant house.

*          *          *

Judith never really enjoyed golf. She played and understood the game with a talent that bordered on instinct, but it was never something that brought her pleasure. Throughout her thirteen year marriage to professional Dan Exner, she refused to play. Her reasons, never imparted to her former spouse, were really little to do with the game itself. In the moments of her backswing, before striking the ball, she would be flooded by thoughts of her past. Things she would rather forget. Something akin to dreaming: an uncontrollable surge of lost conversations; broken images of old lovers; beginnings, endings spliced out of sequence. Her own secret lives exposed, and retold in these moments she would now knowingly avoid.

*          *          *

She is a painter. And she names her paintings after various zoological species. These can be misleading to the layman, since the forms she paints bear little physical resemblance to the species of their titles. For example, zebra is made up of elliptical figures in a faint chartreuse, imposed upon a turquoise wash; tapir is something like portraiture in a world built only of right angles.

Mr. Exner didn’t understand her paintings. Neither did Mr. Kennedy, Mr. Sinatra or Mr. Roselli. Mr. Giancana or Mr. Campbell. Neither do I. Not that there is anything there to understand. And Judith will volunteer this: what is there, really, one can understand about a life? What is lost in naming? What have we sacrificed in our love affairs with right angles?

*          *          *

After death, in Union Station, Judith Exner smokes in departures. Nobody writes nice things about her. Who knows what ‘nice’ means anyway