Paint It Black (17 page)

“Sometimes I pretend he’s not really gone,” Josie said, sitting down next to her, finally handing Meredith her teacup. “I tell myself he’s just gone to the store, or he’s down at the library, he’s coming back anytime. And sometimes, I talk to him, like he’s here, I just can’t see him.”

The older woman put her long hands to her face, the heels of the palms cupped into the sockets of her eyes, the fingers wrapped around the top of her head. “I can’t take much more.”

That’s what Michael used to say, and she would argue with him, reminding him that these moods passed, that there were good times and they would happen again, if he could just stop making himself miserable, get out of the house, maybe go back to work, start painting again. Why didn’t she listen? Why didn’t she hear? She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma—that repetition—maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing. But it only seemed to be getting worse. Through the window in the front door, two, three hummingbirds fought in short vicious jabs over the red blooms of the hibiscus. “Have some tea before it gets cold,” Josie said, and sipped her own, the fresh clean scent. Meredith raised her tea to her lips and drank mechanically. She was still caught in the painting. All those blind Merediths, climbing the white stairs. Blind. It wasn’t just Meredith, not by a long shot. “We grow the mint ourselves.”

“There’s no we,” Meredith said dully. “It’s just you.”

Everywhere she turned, a reminder, every tiny sentence a trap and an endless revision. Better to stop speaking altogether.

“I think this was a mistake,” Meredith said, putting the cup down, getting ready to rise.

And now Josie was the one who didn’t want her to go. “I thought you wanted to see it.”

Meredith’s sable hair hung before her face as she looked down at two books in her lap, pulled from the case. “These are mine,” she said, in a voice both weary and commanding. One was
The Poems of Paul Valéry.
It was in French. She opened the embossed black cover to the inside leaf, where her name appeared in a strong triangular script. The other was green leather with gold letters:
Heart of Darkness.
She opened it to its marbled endpapers, showed Josie the bookplate, a white square printed in blue with a music stand and a baton and Thirties-style moderne script saying
From the library of Mauritz Loewy.
The
L
shaped like a swan. A very short book about a man who goes up a river in Africa, to bring back this other fellow who’d made kind of a cannibal kingdom for himself way back in the jungle. It was the story Coppola made into
Apocalypse Now,
which they’d gone to see at the Vagabond. The journey to capture the white man gone mad, freaky death everywhere, a haunted, vicious place way up the river, which was the place all your fears became real. Michael said everyone had a Kurtz in them, and Josie had argued with him, heatedly, as if by disagreeing she could push away the darkness that she could already feel deep down in him.

Meredith shut the book with a clap, like slamming a door. “What difference does it make?” she said, throwing it onto the sofa beside her. “When am I going to read Conrad? Never. Sell it. You can get something for it, it’s a first edition.” She looked around the room again, out at the view. “Was Cal paying for this? I always wondered. Frankly, how did you have a pot to piss in?”

“We worked.” Josie stirred honey into a second cup of tea.

“You worked, you mean.” Meredith’s wide mouth twisted sardonically. That mouth.

“He had a job too.” Josie sipped the tea, the freshness reviving her.

“Michael?” The older woman turned to stare at her, as if she were speaking in tongues. She had seen that once, at a tent revival Gommer Ida took her to, the spirit coming in, people writhing around on the ground. It struck Josie as funny. She didn’t think there was going to be anything funny about this afternoon, but you never knew. Meredith thought she knew all about Michael, but she didn’t know everything.

“He played piano for kiddie dance classes,” Josie said. “They called him Señor Music.”

Now Meredith laughed, she threw back her head and laughed with her mouth wide open, you could see all her big square teeth, just like his. She kept laughing, wild and desperate, and then tears began to slide from the ends of her long eyes, into her dark hair. “
Señor Music?
But he abhorred children. Even when he was young. The Little Barbarians, he always called them.” She wiped at her temples with the back of her hand.

“He didn’t hate children. We talked about having a baby.”

The laugher faded and Meredith’s face recomposed its tragic contours. “Well thank God for small mercies.”

Josie’s hands were trembling, she wanted to hit this woman, suffering as she was, watching her blind self climbing the stairs.

“Don’t look at me that way. Can you imagine, your father killing himself before you were born? Then being raised by some ignorant Okie?”

Okie.
She hadn’t heard that in a while. It was what her father’s people had been. They came out to California to pick cotton, to pick oranges. Gommer Ida and Daddy Jack hadn’t wanted their daughter to marry that Okie, Glenn Tyrell. Okie. That was what she was. After all those years. Just as they looked at Meredith and thought
Jew.
No matter how well she played that fucking piano. She stood and moved away from the woman on the couch. It was probably Meredith’s first thought, the very day they met, the fear that a Tyrell would worm her way into the Loewy family with a pregnancy. It was only the oldest movie in the world.

But if she had had a baby, they both would have had something of Michael’s. He would have gone on. Now he was gone forever, without a trace. “You’re a real bitch, aren’t you?” Josie said, picking up the tea tray. “I think you should go now.”

She took the tray into the kitchen, set it on the rough wooden counter, dumped the contents of the pot into the sink, wiped the mint out of the pot with her fingers. She put the leaves in the compost can, though why, she didn’t know.
She
didn’t compost, that was Michael’s thing. Composting was important to him, you put the nutrients back into the soil. As if there was a future. Why shouldn’t the earth be as raped and sterile as everything else?

Meredith pushed through the wooden beads, stopped at the refrigerator. “I’m sorry, Josie. Forgive me. The things I worried about, they don’t even make sense now.”

“You wouldn’t have even wanted your own grandchild. Michael’s child, because it would also be mine.” She took a Gauloise from the ashtray on the windowsill over the sink, lit the butt. “You’re really a piece of work.”

“Look, tell me more about Señor Music.”

“No.”

His mother ran the beads through her fingers, like she was combing long hair. “Josie. This has just been so much harder than I thought it was going to be. That painting.” She whispered this last. “Please tell me. Tell me about him being Señor Music.”

Josie rinsed out the pot, looking out at the blue mountains to the north, a line of snow on the ridges. “He liked it because he didn’t have to be a genius, he just had to show up. He found out he was good enough, and that’s all he had to be.” She was not used to being cruel, but Michael had taught her how. Everything she knew she’d learned from him. “It was a relief for him. He was sick of having to be the best at everything.”

Meredith stared down at the worn streaked linoleum, dark eyelashes resting against her cheeks just as Michael’s did, like pulling down a shade. It was torture to see those expressions again—she felt like she was going crazy.

His mother pressed long fingers to the flat place on her forehead above her eyebrows as if she’d like to stick them through her brain. “You think I pushed him too hard.”

Out the window over the breakfast nook, a V of ducks crossed the pale winter sky, heading for evening roost at the river, long necks outstretched. She remembered her father and uncles shooting ducks on the Kern River in the evening, her uncle Dave had a black Lab named Teddy who would fetch their dead bodies. Michael taught her to recognize all the silhouettes from this window—hawk, crow, egret, gull. She liked the ducks’ neat formation, but Michael loved the hawks best, redtails with their broad chunky wings.
The hawk on fire hangs still
. . . “What do you care what I think?”

“So what happened? Was he fired?” Meredith asked, then dropped her voice. “Was it drugs? Really, I want to know. He always denied he was on drugs, but I could never be sure.”

Josie laughed, once. Jesus, who wasn’t on drugs? Michael told her once Meredith hadn’t slept a night without pills since she was nineteen. “That wasn’t it. He was tired of working for Reynaldo. He quit.”

“He was always quitting,” Meredith said. “He would have done the same with the painting, eventually, you know.”

Should she disagree? Or just get Meredith out of the house without a fight? “The dance teacher was in love with him. It made him uncomfortable.”

“He should have been flattered,” Meredith said in her husky voice, her light-filled eyes full of knowledge of the world. Except that there was something she didn’t know, something Josie could say that would wipe the smirk off Meredith’s face. Michael would kill her, but he was gone.

“No, it scared him. You know, after the rape in Meadowlands.”

Meredith had been reaching out to look at an old calendar that they’d put on the side of the refrigerator, but then the gesture faded away. Blink. Blink blink.

Josie washed out the teacups.

“What rape?” Meredith’s glazed expression, unfocused, unsure. “You’re making this up.”

“That would make it easy, wouldn’t it?” The clean feeling of the washrag inside the cups—Michael didn’t like sponges. The water didn’t heat up very fast, so she washed the dishes in cold, not bothering to catch the cold water in a dishpan to save for the plants. She didn’t care now if the plants died or not.

“What rape?”

“His roommate. But you knew that.”

His mother slid down the doorjamb, until she was sitting on the floor in her straight black skirt, her cashmere and pearls, her legs out at angles on the warped linoleum, like a doll on a shelf. She had her hand up to her throat, as if someone had offered to cut it. “The one with the pimples.” She pressed her forehead, and tears came down. “Why didn’t he tell me?” A flash of anger burst through the grief. “I would have crucified them!”

Josie tipped the water from the dishes, put them neatly in the drainer. “He wanted it to be over. You’ve never been raped, you can’t understand.”

Meredith ground her clenched fist into her forehead. “Oh God. Oh Christ.”

Josie gazed out at the hills to the north and the west, it was Bosch in all directions.

“Why didn’t he tell me?” Meredith said, and said it again, though she should know the answer. “I should have known. How could I have not known, my own son?”

And Josie suddenly felt she had done a wrong thing, to want to hurt Meredith this way, revenge herself for the Okie crack. Meredith was no Calvin Faraday, she was willing to blame herself and everybody else, which was far more appropriate. Josie stood there a long time, looking out at the view, the shadows lengthening in the short winter afternoon. How could she not have known, how could they not have known? The blind Merediths, the blind Josies. Nobody knew anyone else’s private world. In the end, they were all alone as inmates on death row, side by side. Sometimes you could get a look at one another with a little pocket mirror, cell to cell, but that was all.

She heard the scramble of shoes and the slamming of the bathroom door. She heard the water running, and then the deep seal-barking sound of Meredith’s sobs. In the spice cabinet, she found her little stash, went out onto the porch in the flat light of January, and smoked the skunky pot she had gotten from Pen, looking out at the tiny houses on the hillsides, listening to the grinding of trains up at Taylor Yards. She peeled paint off the rail that they had painted turquoise when they moved in, but now it was blistered from the western sun, exposing the chalky white underneath. One of the hawks had landed in its favorite eucalyptus, on a bare branch about level with the porch where she sat.
The hawk on fire hangs still. Dilly dilly, calls the loft hawk, come and be killed.

16

Stripped

R
ain yesterday, rain the day before. All the voices of the rain, on the roof, down the gutters. She wanted to curl up and be very small, very silent. But Jeremy called, nattering on about his film in his cheerful, fake-English, cliché-ridden way. He didn’t know Michael was dead, and somehow that made it possible to imagine that there was an alternate universe in which Michael was still alive.

“As soon as this rain lets up, we’re set to go,” Jeremy said. “So you meet with Wardrobe, no? Laura’s got these fabulous ideas, absolutely brill.”

Wardrobe.
Jeremy talked about his films as if he were already Francis Ford Coppola.
My Producer. My Editor.
Already seeing himself accepting an award from AFI. She knew who Wardrobe would be. A certain kind of capable girl desperately in love with Sergio, the sloe-eyed Cuban boy from San Diego who shot all Jeremy’s films,
My Cinematographer.
Sometimes she wondered whether Jeremy picked Sergio for his camerawork or for his female camp followers who would do just about anything to be near the sullen, handsome Cuban—drive, move lights, get food. They were a regular mafia.

She didn’t want to go out, she’d rather sit here and imagine dancing with Michael as Ethel Waters sang “Sweet Georgia Brown.” But in the end, she got dressed and drove out to the Fairfax district, where the storm drains backed up and water eddied above curbs calf deep every time it rained. The worn wipers of the Falcon just smeared water around the windshield, their scraping metronome synchronized elegantly with the Joan Jett tape. She loved Joan, thought of her as a lot like Luanne, a big sister who’d kick ass for you. Though at ninety pounds, Luanne wasn’t kicking ass for anybody anymore. Josie spotted a panel van pulling out of a space and snagged it just ahead of a Mercury Cougar, the driver giving her the finger, she could see it, misty, through the passenger window. She pulled up the hood of her black plastic slicker and waded out into the flood, water three-quarters of the way up her red rubber cowboy boots, and dashed down the street to the girl’s building, a nice courtyard complex paved in shiny Spanish tile, its empty fountain full of petunias.

When Laura answered the bell, Josie knew her immediately, a Roman-nosed girl with hair so pink you could hear it. Josie had seen her around at the clubs, she worked at Fiorucci in Beverly Hills, a boutique that sold rich kids punk clothing. Josie sold some of her bottle-cap chandelier earrings there, and bracelets and pins she made from dominoes. “Hey,” Laura said, letting her in, letting her drip all over the hardwood floors. “Great boots. You must be Elena.”

Elena, her character in the movie. Jeremy’s characters all had names like Elena and Chloe and Regine, Marie Claire, the kind of girl you’d never meet in your life. Josie thought to correct her, but decided against it.

Laura took Josie’s dripping slicker and hung it on a coat tree by the little telephone nook, brought her down into the living room. Josie admired the place, a real Joan Crawford apartment with a beamed ceiling, hardwood floors, wrought-iron chandelier, and little balconies off the French doors. Michael would have loved this. Maybe if there had been no hillside, no Bosch to stare out at, if they’d had something more solid than a cliffside shack, things might have seemed more real for him, less precarious.

The two girls sat together on the cat-hair-covered red-velvet couch. Dresses and petticoats festooned the walls like paintings. A gray Persian prowled amid stacks of fashion magazines. Laura poured champagne. “They do this at
Vogue,
” she said. They drank and Josie shared her cigarettes, and Laura showed her brill ideas for Elena’s character. She worked at Fiorucci but she was costuming student films and ninety-nine-seat Equity-waiver theater, getting credits under her belt—not the run-of-the-mill camp follower. “I loved the script, don’t you think it’s fabulous?”

Josie hadn’t even read the script until two days ago. Where Antonioni was supposed to be meeting Buñuel in this thing was anybody’s guess. Probably in shots taken from weird angles, and some sort of heavy-handed symbology. And of course, Elena dies in the end. They always died in the end.

“In a car accident, Josie. Don’t you see? It’s Fate . . . like, Destiny,” Jeremy had said. But just what the hell did Jeremy Scott know about destiny? A grandfather who blew his brains out in the house your mother still lived in, that was some fucking destiny. Not some ridiculous story about a filmmaker and a Girl and the Girl’s ex-boyfriend she thought she had killed, dreamed up one night between bong hits, bits and pieces of other people’s genius tacked together with chewing gum.

Out the casement windows, the rain sighed, beaded, rattled in the downspouts. It was cold in Laura’s apartment. Josie shivered, pulled the sleeves of her turtleneck sweater down over her hands, as the pink-haired girl turned the pages of her old
Vogue
s. “I had something like this in mind,” Laura said, pointing at a bony-hipped model in a white cutaway dress with clear plastic inserts. “That’s Courrèges. Elena’s a slick person, slick surfaces. That’s how I see her, don’t you?”

The slick heiress, glamorously haunted. Well, she could be Elena now. There was certainly nothing slick about Josie, she was just paper, like brown paper bags in the rain. Water beaded up on Elena, it shed right off, like those old sixties clear-plastic umbrellas. She was happy to sit talking about Elena’s wardrobe for this ridiculous movie, grateful Jeremy had made her come. She and Laura got smashed on Spanish champagne, and talked about the mod era, Laura knew a lot about it. She knew about Edie Sedgwick and Andy Warhol’s Factory—all that Mylar and tinfoil, false eyelashes and vitamin shots with speed. The Velvet Underground played there, Lou Reed and Nico. It was the center of everything cool. Laura showed her a Nehru jacket that once belonged to Ray Davies, a yellow brocade.

Josie liked the simplicity of Laura’s mind. Laura wasn’t thinking about God or the true world or whether each man killed the thing he loved. She wasn’t thinking about the absurd or what the soul did after it died. She was thinking about clothing, about accessories, about shoes and earrings and hair. The subtle difference between Yves Saint Laurent and Mary Quant. It was good, Josie thought, finishing the champagne, to spend time with strangers. They had no well-meaning advice, what she should do, how she should cope, no one examining her to see how she was holding up. Soothing not to have to think of anything besides eyelashes—two sets, spiky like Veruschka—and trying on a black-plastic halter dress, a bubble hat à la Courrèges, a patent-leather hatbox purse. And talking about whether she was going to touch up her roots, whether she would recut her hair.

If she could only stay right here, wearing Laura’s huge plastic disc earrings, a feather top and a Mylar miniskirt, drunk and warm and light on the surface of the world. She remembered Shirley K. telling her once about the light masters of China, who could walk across a sheet of rice paper stretched between two chairs. She felt that was worth working toward. Laura put her in a blue-green fringed go-go dress that had nothing to do with Elena, and they danced to the soundtrack from
To Sir, with Love
and Laura worked the topic around to Sergio, how long had Josie known him, what kind of girls did he like? She heard he had a friend with a place in Rosarito Beach, right on the water, maybe they would all go when the movie was over.

J
osie was feeling good when she opened the side gate to the house on Lemoyne, carrying a takeout bag from Canton Express inside her slicker, drunk, splashing in her red cowboy boots. Feeling like she just might get through this, an aspiring light master. Edging down the stairs in the dark, the roughness of the wood, the wet railing, she put her key in the door. It was unlocked. She was surprised to find it open, though these days, she was always forgetting things, leaving her keys in the lock, her purse in the john. She came in and threw the key in the red bowl, turned on the light.

She stood in her own living room, but it was all gone. Blank walls, the empty picture hooks. The piano was gone, the bookcase bare. The toys on the tables, the old flatirons. The pipe-cleaner circus. All his books and journals, his sketchpads. Their records. Everything. She leaned against one of the rough wood four-by-sixes that held up the wooden ceiling of the shack, feeling like a section of her torso had been removed, like one of Laura’s cutout dresses. She could not believe this was happening. She moved into the bedroom. The closet was open, empty hangers. The dresser they had painted, gone. Her clothes in piles on the bed.
This, and this . . . and oh, the dresser, that’s his.
She’d had a crew, had just come in and taken it all.

She could call the cops, but she hated cops and anyway, what would she say?
I’ve just been robbed by my ex-future-mother-in-law.
That would be something to laugh about over donuts at Winchells.
Yeah, and what would a world-famous pianist be doing with a hundred dollars’ worth of your old crap?
But she could not get over the idea, somehow that woman had walked into her house and taken everything. She had to do something. She would do something. But what?

Josie went into the bathroom. The medicine-cabinet door was hanging open. Michael’s badger-hair shaving brush, the Lightfoot’s shaving soap in its white mug, his grandfather’s razor. Even his tooth powder. It was too much to take in all at once. With the empty walls, the place seemed smaller. Not one painting left. Not the one of her at the piano, or as little Jeanne of France. No
Civilization and Its Discontents.
Even the ones she hated were gone, the ugly ones, the crazy ones, but she’d grown used to them, they were part of her life, they were special windows in the walls. And now there were walls with no windows, only nubs of nails and picture hooks. She had even taken the music, all the records and tapes, not just Michael’s but the ones that were hers, and theirs together.

She stood in the center of the raped room, letting the slow stunned jumble of feelings roll down inside her, sorting themselves out like fruit falling into holes on a sizing board in a co-op warehouse. It was not enough that Michael was dead. Now all the things that would help her remember were gone too.
You’ll have to remember for both of us.
She ran her hands on the shelf of the empty bookcase. She should have read those journals when she’d had the chance. What was she doing, protecting a dead boy’s privacy? Now she would never get another chance. She tried to breathe, but air would not fill her lungs. It was like trying to breathe on the moon.

Josie sat heavily on the fuzzy blue couch. Her stomach growled but now the Chinese food smelled disgusting. She shivered with cold and sudden nausea. The woman had seemed so resigned, so quiet during the ride back to her Jaguar. Josie thought that would be the last they would ever see of one another. While Meredith was probably planning this already. She had never felt so stupid, so naive.

She didn’t want to go back out into the rain, but she couldn’t stand the look of the bare walls and anyway, she was down to her last three cigarettes, they would never last until morning. So she climbed the wet stairs and drove over to Gala’s, bought two packs of Gauloises and a bottle of Smirny. When she returned she stopped at the door, picturing herself opening it and it was all just a dream. She often did this, focusing on a vision of Michael sitting on the blue couch reading a book, he was just inside, when she opened the door, there he would be.

She opened the door slowly, but nothing had changed, there were the empty picture hooks, the gaping bookcase. She sat in Michael’s chair and cracked the Smirny, drank a little, and then a little more. She had a sudden, gut-sinking thought and dashed back to the bedroom, pawed through the pile of clothes—her clothes—on the bed, through the underwear, which was where she kept it. Even the blood-spattered note was gone. Everything, everything.

She stormed back into the living room, grabbed the phone. That bitch. That fucking bitch. She dialed the number she knew by heart, the only thing she did know anymore, and the phone in Los Feliz rang and rang but nobody answered it, not even the sour-faced Spanish maid. She slammed the receiver down, and picked it up and slammed it down again, over and over.

But even in her rage, she knew she was partway to blame. Cruel, stupid, greedy. She had wanted to keep everything. She should have given Meredith the painting she’d asked for, given up some of the books. And deep down, she knew she had done wrong to tell her about what happened at Meadowlands, out of sheer spite. It was a long time ago, and what could Meredith do about it now?

Out the kitchen door, she stood breathing in the night air, the cold and the rain, the chairs dripping against the warped wood of the deck, the lights muted and hazy. There was no end to the Bosch. She raised the voddy to her lips, spilled most of it down her chin. Served her right for having a good day, she had gone almost a whole afternoon without thinking of him every moment. Thinking she was doing well, making progress. There was never going to be an end to this. Whenever she thought she could not feel more alone, the universe peeled back another layer of darkness.

She watched a single car, its blurry headlights, threading its way up the hill across the glen. How precarious life seemed. You were only tethered to it by a hair, and all these people sawing away at it. She thought of Cal Faraday, his energy to go on, to start over. How did he find the heart to do it again, again and again? She missed her father, she wanted someone to take care of her, someone who knew what to do.

She lay on the blue couch in the cold, wrapped the granny afghan around her, and listened to the voices of the rain. Where once she might have imagined them speaking to her, or for her, now they were mocking, full of derision and laughter. Even the rain was Bosch. She should go down to Gardena, find that old guy, Morty, play pan until the sun came up. Get Pen to go with her. But she didn’t want to play pan. She wanted to talk to someone who could understand what had happened, who knew all the players. She dialed the New York number Cal had given her.