Paint It Black (10 page)

“No car,” he said. “And how would I even get a job like that?”

“Put notes up on bulletin boards?”

He kissed her hair. They sat like that for a while. “I’ll find something,” he said.

And he looked. He circled things in the paper. He even tried a waiter gig. True to his sense of it, it lasted about half a day. Then one day she came home from a sitting and the house was empty. No Michael in the kitchen chopping fish heads with his heavy cleaver on the round cutting board. No Michael painting by the window, barefoot in his splattered white pants and old T-shirt. Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. She was getting worried, when he marched in the door with a huge bunch of sunflowers, picked her up, crushing the flowers as he twirled her around.

“What happened? I thought you got hit by a car.”

“I got a job,” he said, putting her down on the blue couch.

“Doing what?”

He didn’t say anything, just sat down at the upright piano and started playing some honky-tonkish number, the razzle-dazzle right hand, the bottom holding the rhythm.

“Michael, what did you get?”

“Oh, but I am not Michael. From now on, you may address me as Señor Music.” He switched into a simple little waltz. “At Señor Reynaldo’s Escuela de Baile. Four afternoons a week, from
tres
to
seis y media,
and Saturdays,
de diez a cuatro.
I may suck royally, but you don’t have to be Serkin to play ‘I’m a Little Teapot’ for a bunch of five-year-olds. Also Señor Reynaldo appreciates Señor Music’s rugged good looks.”

Señor Reynaldo with his army of little tiny kids, leading them through hula hoops edged in silk flowers. How Michael had loved that job. How proud he was of those checks, written on Reynaldo’s lilac check stock. He even started thinking kids weren’t so terrible after all. A gang of little goslings dreaming of Swan Lake. Those were good days. Michael working, painting, her modeling and getting student films. In the mornings they made love, and on the weekends they hunted through garage sales and swap meets. At night, under the covers, they read books.
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Jeanne of France.
Michael reading aloud to her, her face against his chest.

Their Thanksgiving, he roasted a duck. And for the first time in her life, she had something to feel fucking grateful for. Their one Christmas, the tree in their living room decked out with homemade decorations, little candles in tin candleholders. Exchanging presents. She gave him a white muslin shirt she’d made up in secret, and a French folding knife with a wooden handle, the blade long enough to cut salami and bread when they traveled to France. He gave her a tiny hand-sewn book, its pages opening to reveal the painted folds of a vagina, entitled
Your Little Book,
and a blue child-sized guitar.

Her little book, from which he’d read every page, sentence by sentence, with the care her aunt Cora gave her Bible. And still he could write:
We loved each other . . . Didn’t we?

She started feeling the Valium kick in. She put the seat back, thinking how beautiful it had been before it all got so fucked up. Until he started staring out the windows at the light-dotted hills, like a mathematician staring at a problem on a blackboard. His brain grinding, grinding, like pepper in a mill. When all she saw were lights suggesting the shape of the hills. She liked to imagine it was a foreign city, like Istanbul or Cairo, the gabble of languages, smells of pepper and spices in markets, baskets piled on the ground, paprika and cumin and cinnamon. Streets where you’d have to pay small boys to take you where you needed to go, you would never find your way on your own. The cypresses were minarets. She imagined it all as she breathed the saltiness of his hair while he unconsciously pulled at the worn fabric on the arms of the chair and drank off the last of the wine in his glass and poured more from the bottle.

The true world disappearing, heavy curtains slowly closing across the face of God.

The music drifted in through the half-open window of the car, less fragmented now, she recognized it, one of the Brahms intermezzos. It was a simple piece, the kind people learned in piano lessons, but she knew it was one of the last things Brahms ever wrote for piano. Michael played it beautifully, but never like this. Meredith played it very slow, slower than even a beginner, but each note had such a well of sadness in it, more than you’d think it was possible for a note to bear. It was exactly what Josie wanted to hear. The opposite of that sink full of crabs. Meredith played it as if a person could start over, and make slow patient sense out of the world, that there could be order and comfort and safety, for all the sorrow in it. Josie could stay here all night, listening to Meredith play. She felt sleepy, she hadn’t slept for so long. She couldn’t remember the last time. Always waking just as she faded down. But here, outside this house, listening to this music, she knew she could. She curled up on the seat, and dropped into nothingness.

9

Meredith

A
rap on the car window dredged her from sleep, a bright light shining in her eyes. She squinted, held up her hand, the hot beam from a flashlight pointing at her face. The figure rapped again, mimed a rolling gesture. Behind her, a black-and-white.
Fuck.
Fuck fuck fuck. She crawled to the top of her drug- and alcohol-thick torpor, a long way. She unrolled the window, her heart thudding dully. The cop leaned down. “You got some business here, miss?”

She blinked into the light, pressed her rubbery lips together as if she could squeeze some probable excuse from between them.
Fuck.
“My mother,” she said, finally. “We had a fight.”

“Your mother.” She couldn’t see his face behind the beam, only a mustache, but she could hear the smirk in his voice. Smart-ass. “You don’t live up here, girly.”

Fucking cops. She never met a cop who didn’t think he was the funniest thing on two legs. Josie pointed at the lit window. “Right there.”

He flashed the flashlight along the bench seat, its beam caught the vodka bottle, then pointed back in her face. “Can I see your driver’s license, miss?”

This couldn’t be happening. Christ.
Don’t show him shit,
she could hear her father saying.
Hell, you weren’t driving. He don’t need your fuckin license. No crime if you ain’t drivin.
“I’m just sitting here,” Josie said.

He finally lowered the light. His name tag over his badge said
Ignaciewicz.
She wondered how he pronounced it. He was about thirty, with a black mustache that he fingered, glancing up at the house, back at her, not believing her for a weasel-eyed minute. Knowing she had no business in a place like this, that whatever she was up to, it wasn’t anything a cop was likely to approve of. “Well, why don’t you go on up and make nice. You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. All kinds of types lurking around at night.”

Meaning her. Christ. “I’m not quite ready. Can’t I just sit awhile?”

The cop nodded, he was enjoying this whole thing. Asshole. “Well, that’s not an option I’m giving you. You’ve got two, the way I see it. One —” He grasped his fat forefinger. “You can go on in. That’s what I’d do, if I were you. Or two —” He added a second to the bundle. “You can start up that jalopy and clear on out.”

In which case he’d pull her over in half a block and charge her with DUI. Merry fucking Christmas.

She hated cops with a pure Tyrell hatred. Coming around, butting in, throwing their weight around, just because they had a fucking badge pinned on. She wanted to spit in his face, but she wasn’t that stupid, even fucked up. She knew what Pen would say,
Kiss my Mexican ass, motherfucker.
But it wouldn’t be her first DUI, she might go to jail. Fuck. What would she say if she really was Meredith’s daughter? What would Michael say? “Well, since you put it so charmingly,” she said, and grabbed her purse, got out of the car. She made sure not to stumble as she made her way across the street to the gate, no, she was sober as a Sunday school teacher, she’d never been more sober in her life. She could feel him behind her, watching her with his greasy eyes, waiting for her to screw up. The cold helped, and the cold hatred, that this fucking cop thought he knew exactly who she was, where she came from, so sure she didn’t belong.
You’re an absolute
bill
board, Josie Tyrell.
It was the one thing she hated most in the world, being ID’d at a glance. She unhooked the chain on the gate, the chain that was not really locked,
how’d you like that, Officer Law? If this isn’t my house, how’d I know a thing like that?
She went through and closed it behind her.

It smelled fresh here, clean. She could just sit under that tree, out of sight, and not bother anyone. But she could feel Officer Dickwad watching, waiting down there. She didn’t even have to turn to see him. So she kept walking, careful not to stumble on the uneven bricks laid out in a herringbone, like a tweed. A tweed jacket. The air dense with pittosporum and pine. She walked slowly, deliberately, acting the part. The girl in the movie, going home after a fight with her mother, hesitating to have to give in. She wasn’t such a bad actress. Her heart thumped low, her chest like an empty street.

She was at the door, no idea how she had ended up in such a situation. Christ, she could be down in OC, bashing head against head in the Black Flag mosh pit, drinking herself stinko. She wiped her hands on her pants, her blood pounding in her throat, trying to think of what she could possibly say to Meredith, as she knocked with the heavy knocker.

The piano music stopped. There was silence, and the porch light came on. She tried to compose herself, feeling herself being inspected through the spyhole under the little grated window. Then the front door opened, a crack of light escaping from behind the figure in the quilted satin robe. She forced herself to raise her eyes to the visible slice of the woman’s face. Meredith looked like a ghost of herself, her face pale and drawn, wide lips with no lipstick on them, dark hair dragged back in a ponytail, her eyes ringed with shadows. Her eyebrows came together in two vertical lines, as if she were nearsighted and could not quite make out Josie’s face. “What are you doing here?”

What was she doing here? She sighed and told the truth. “Nowhere else to go.”

She waited for Meredith to slam the door in her face, but she didn’t. The older woman turned and walked away, leaving the door open behind her, her aqua satin robe trailing behind her on the floor. And she realized, this was where she’d wanted to be all along. From the very first. She gave the cop the finger and closed the door.

Meredith swept across the foyer and, navigating with the aid of the wrought-iron handrail, down the three steps into the living room, where a small fire burned low in the fireplace. The slick floors gleamed like the surface of a dark lake. Loch Ness. Michael said it was a thousand feet deep. She stepped onto the black water, following Meredith trailing along unsteadily in her movie-star bathrobe, looking like a drunken Myrna Loy in some Thin Man movie. The woman grabbed a fat tumbler, then visited the drinks cart, where she sloshed some liquor into the glass. She didn’t ask Josie if she’d like a drink, not that Josie really expected her to. “They’re all gone. Thank God. All over. Alone at last. Ha.” Although Meredith’s voice was weaker, it still held that rich, thrilling tone. “So many friends. My good friend what’s ’is name. Funny, how things work out.” The way she said it, it wasn’t funny at all. Josie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be following this or if Meredith was talking to herself, down into the crystal tumbler. “Sorry, we’re so sorry. Sorry for your loss. Then they go off and have their teeth cleaned, eat dinner.”

“Yeah, I know.” Josie came in as far as the top step of the living room, then hovered, not sure whether she should get any closer. Maybe there was a gun among the bottles, drain opener in a drink. But the awareness that she might be in danger was weaker than the strange sensation of comfort. It was good to have someone talking to you, someone who knew what had happened. “I heard you playing.”

“Brahms.” Meredith put her drink on the end of the keyboard and sat at the piano, began the slow, sad, simple piece Josie had heard from the road. “Whenever Michael had a headache, he had to have his Brahms.”

How odd, that there should be someone else who knew something like that about him. Days when he lay in their bedroom, darkened from the felt curtains she’d made for it, drinking Mountain Dew because he thought the caffeine helped, listening to the intermezzos, the piano quintet.

Meredith bent over her piano, playing gently. Even when she was drunk, you could tell Meredith was the real thing. Josie had heard recordings of her room-filling Liszt, the speed of her Chopin, the complicated brokenness of her Schoenberg. But she played the Brahms like thinking. Slow, hovering, considering, then moving ahead, only to turn back and repeat itself. It was private, it reminded Josie of gondolas somehow, those long black boats, like the piano itself, nosing through heavy mists in narrow canals. The splash of the water. Hushed voices, houses rising up on either side. He was going to take her to Venice someday. But it would have to be another life. Next time around.

“My father had them too. Headaches.”

Meredith’s father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself. Michael had never met him, but talked about him as if he had known him all his life. Meredith bent over the piano keys like she was praying. Her eyes so much like his. Swords in the tarot deck. Even knowing how the woman hated her, Josie felt strangely close to her. Close and yet far away, like the moon watching the earth.

She leaned against the wall on the steps, still not daring to enter the living room proper, resting her heavy head against the cool, patted stucco. The Brahms was like someone massaging your temples, gently, and the base of your neck. Him and Brahms, praying for order, praying for faith.

On the carved mantel over the fireplace, fine objects gleamed in the flickering light. A clock in a glass dome, a porcelain camel, things that should be in a museum, in a glass case. Meredith knew what to do with beautiful things, things Josie would be afraid even to own. It occurred to her that she should have left Michael up here, undisturbed, deaf-mute mother and son. Perhaps Meredith would have found a way to keep him safe, in a box lined in velvet. That’s what her phone calls were saying, or was it the voice in her head—
Why couldn’t you just have left him alone?

When it seemed that Meredith had forgotten her, lost in her Brahms, Josie quietly descended the steps into the living room, padded across the old threadbare carpets to the fireplace. She didn’t want to sit down, that seemed a bit too chummy, remembering the last time she had been in this room. She began to examine the mantel’s array of offerings. A small terra-cotta head of a young woman, or maybe a boy, part of the cheek and nose gone. The gold clock in a glass case, its pendulum shaped like a harp, dead still. Next to that, a carved ivory ball nested on a rosewood stand. Balls carved inside each other, all intricate with flowers, people, houses and roads—a whole world in a sphere the size of a cabbage. She picked it up, daring Meredith to tell her to put it down. But Meredith was ignoring her, the way you ignore a dog that trots into a room, sniffs around, and leaves again.

Josie turned the white sphere in her child’s hands, she could tell it was old and valuable.

“I’ve often wondered. What do you think my son saw in you?” Meredith asked.

She hadn’t sensed that she was under scrutiny. Usually, she knew, could feel it, but Meredith was still gazing down at the keyboard, looking at the keys, her hands. Long fingered, exactly like Michael’s. How could someone who looked just like Michael hate her so much? Each time she looked at his mother, she kept seeing him.

I’ve often wondered . . .
She felt the reverberation of the insult, but hollowly, as if someone had slapped a doll. She knew how she looked to Meredith, fucked up and unwashed, jacket scarred, her punked-out bleached hair and Tyrell face. Another day she might have even cried, but not today. “I think he thought he could rescue me. Like if he could do that, maybe he could save himself.” Let the woman insult her. She had reached some quiet place, like a carved ivory ball down inside five others. The reasons lay one under the other—which ball was the real ball?

“Sir Galahad,” Meredith said. “That doesn’t surprise me.” The touch of her fingers on the keys so different from the bitterness in her voice. “Yes, he
would
think that.”

“Yes,” Josie said. “He would.”

“No one knew him. Only you.” His mother said this last with such disappointment.

It was true. Only her. How hard it must be on his mother, for her son to be such a loner. She had grown up with famous people, Billy Wilder and Isherwood, Garbo. And now her son was dead, and she was stuck talking to Josie Tyrell, the only one who knew him. In this, they were a nation of two, she and Meredith Loewy.

Running her fingers over the impossibly intricate designs on the ball, Josie imagined the years it had taken to carve this chunk of elephant tusk, to create something of such unnecessary beauty. Merchants with their big bellies. Princes. Women in long robes and pleated fans, layer inside layer. What was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? Everything beautiful was like that. A little bit of the true world. Beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. Time could rest for a moment, stop all that senseless motion.

Meredith suddenly stopped playing. She closed the keyboard cover with a bang, and rose from the bench, glass in her hand. She went to the white couches, lay down on one, her fat tumbler in one hand resting on her stomach. “Did he ever tell you about his father?”

“Some,” Josie said.

“You know what he used to call Michael? Sissy-Boy. ‘Hey, Sissy-Boy,’ he’d call out, and then throw him something, which he’d inevitably drop.” She laughed a laugh that sounded more like a bark, a catch in the throat, the sound a person makes when knifed. “When he was thirteen—did he tell you what his father did?”

“What?” She wanted to hear Meredith tell it, it was a story they all had a piece of.

She took a sip from the tumbler on her stomach, lifting her head just enough not to spill, then dropped back to the tasseled pillow. “I was in New York for a recital, and thought I’d take him to see his father in the Village. Cal had one of those town houses on Bank Street. Between marriages as I recall. Briefly. It never took him long. Anyway, Cal always kept a ball on his desk, signed by all these famous players, Babe Ruth and so on. Fondled it while he wrote, talk about Freudian. Anyway. We were up there, discussing Michael’s future, and he got it into his head to throw it at him. “Think fast!” he said. Like a schoolyard bully. And threw it right at his head. Hit him in the forehead. I thought it would knock him out. You know what Michael did?”

Josie did. It was fascinating to hear someone else tell a story she knew so well.