On a rainy October night in Washington, D.C., the friends and family of Jeremy Blake gathered for a private memorial service at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. Blake, an art-world star acclaimed for his lush and moody “moving paintings,” shape-shifting innovations mixing abstract painting and digital film, had ended his life on the night of July 17, walking into the Atlantic Ocean off Rockaway Beach, Queens, never to return.

“I am going to join the lovely Theresa,” Blake, 35, had written on the back of a business card, which he left on the beach, along with his clothes. Police helicopters searched for him for days on the chance he might still be alive. Friends prayed that he was, talking of how his passport was missing, he had bought a ticket to Germany. Then on July 22, a fisherman found his body floating 4.5 miles off Sea Girt, New Jersey.

“The lovely Theresa” was Theresa Duncan, a writer, filmmaker, computer-game creator, and Blake’s girlfriend of 12 years. He had found her lifeless body on July 10, in the rectory of St. Mark’s Church in Manhattan’s East Village, where the couple had been renting an apartment. There was a bowl full of Benadryl pills, a bottle of Tylenol PM, and a champagne glass on the nightstand. There was a note saying, “I love all of you.” Duncan was 40. The last post on her blog, “The Wit of the Staircase,” was a quote from author Reynolds Price about the human need for storytelling and the impossibility of surviving in silence.

No one who spoke at Blake’s memorial service that evening at the Corcoran said anything about Theresa Duncan. Almost no one mentioned her name. (It happened to be her birthday, October 26.) No one talked about the dark stories and wild speculation that had emerged after news of the couple’s “double suicide” hit the media. There had been reports they had become “paranoid,” obsessed with conspiracy theories, believing they were being harassed by Scientologists. The Internet filled up with conjecture about government plots and murder. Something about their story seemed to capture the modern imagination, if only because no one knew exactly why two such accomplished and attractive people had chosen to make their exit.

They looked as if they shared a secret, one of those cosmic kinds of love.

Only Blake’s mother, Anne Schwartz Delibert, ventured near the controversy, saying from onstage that “Jeremy didn’t die from love, but of pain, and an inability to find a way out of it.” In a slide show going on behind her, a blond, mustachioed man could be seen holding Blake as a baby. It was his father, who died of AIDS when Blake was 17, but she never named him.

No one told the love story of Theresa and Jeremy. They remembered Blake’s handsome face, his style, his cool, his artistic originality. “He invented something new,” said his gallerist, Lance Kinz, of Kinz, Tillou and Feigen in New York. The slide show shuffled forward with scenes of Blake’s solidly suburban childhood in Takoma Park, Maryland. There he was as a gawky teenager, drawing, and as the impossibly suave and perceptive-looking young man he was to become. And then, finally, there was Theresa Duncan.

“Lovely” didn’t seem strong enough a word. Maybe gorgeous, sexy, charismatic. With her streaky blond hair and effortless chic, she looked like a 60s movie icon. Her intensity seemed to jump from the screen with a howl at the way no one was talking about her. How could you talk about Jeremy without talking about Theresa?

“They were remarkable people,” said David Ross, former director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. “I can’t think of one without the other. It was flattering to be in their presence. You felt good that they liked you.”

There were Theresa and Jeremy, arms wrapped around each other, staring into each other’s eyes. They looked as if they shared a secret, one of those cosmic kinds of love. But as the snapshots traveled forward, following them from Washington to Los Angeles to New York, they began to look unhappier, brooding, worried, tired.