Paint It Black (18 page)

“Hello?” Numbah Foah. She had a high, girlish voice, she sounded about Josie’s age.

“This is Josie Tyrell. Michael’s girlfriend?”

“Oh!” Mrs. Cal took a short breath. “Of course. How are you doing? You all right? I’m just so sorry, what a terrible thing. I would have come out for the funeral, but Becky had a fever. . . . We just loved him so much —”

She knew it wasn’t true. Numbah Foah saw Michael as a threat to her little ones, the leftover child. In the days of kings, Michael said, the elder children would poison the younger ones, not to have the competition for the throne. “Is Cal in?”

Cal’s wife paused, as if trying to be sure it was worth bothering him. Josie knew she sounded drunk and depressed. “Well, you know it’s very late, Josie,” Harmony said in her high, funny voice, she sounded like a cartoon character.

“He said to call whenever I needed to.”

Then there was no sound at all, she must have caught them in bed, she pictured the wife’s hand over the receiver. “Josie.” Calvin sounded hearty, as if she had not awakened him, or caught him in some stage of lovemaking. “How’s it going, kiddo?”

Josie told him everything, the break-in, that Meredith took everything she thought was Michael’s, including things he had given to her. Even the suicide note. Leaving out the part about her not letting Meredith have the painting, leaving out the part about Michael in Meadowlands and how she told Meredith as payback. The partial truth and nothing but. Just as she left out every other thing she had done to deserve this. She struggled not to cry, but the booze, instead of numbing her, which was what it was supposed to do, just made her feel more lost. She hated weepy drunks, and here she was, being exactly that.

“She’s obviously lost it,” Calvin said. “Jesus. Well, this kind of thing brings out the worst in people.”

Where’d he read that, in a magazine in the globe-trotter lounge of British Airways? Cal Faraday, spiritual adviser. He probably couldn’t remember the names of all his children, their ages, what grade they were in at school. “She can’t just walk into my house, Cal.”

“Listen, honey. I know it’s outrageous, but, look what she’s been through. Did you lose anything important?”

“His books, his art, all kinds of things. The fucking note, Cal.”

Josie heard Numbah Foah say something to Calvin, probably to get that drunk off the phone. She pictured them in bed, a bedroom set that all matched, fairly new because they hadn’t been married that long, just a few years, done in Mrs. Cal’s style, because after all those marriages, Cal was probably used to the idea it would end up belonging to her anyway, and he was gone most of the time at that. She imagined he wore pajamas, as she thought East Coast people would, slippers and robes.

“Maybe I should call the cops.”

“Christ, don’t do that,” he said quickly. More muffled talk between him and Mrs. Cal, she guessed he had his hand over the receiver but not tight enough. “Listen, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say, but listen, Josie, you ask me, really? It might be the best thing that could’ve happened.”

“You dick.” Josie couldn’t believe he’d have the guts to say that. Easy for him to say in New York with his wife and his new kids and his best-selling fucking life.

“No, listen, remember what you said that day, about the note? Remember?”

“Yeah, I remember.”

“You said, ‘What do you do with this? Carry it around all your life?’ So now someone’s made it easy. No, don’t say anything, just listen to me. I know you’re upset, but just stop and think. You’re very young, Josie, and at some point you’re going to need to get on with your life. This could be a huge blessing, though I know you can’t see it right now.”

She could hear he was winding it down, getting ready to hang up. Getting on with his own fucking life.

“She’s still in love with you,” Josie said, desperately. “She’ll listen to you. Can’t you call her for me?”

“Didn’t you see how she kicked me out of the mourners’ box that day? I’m sorry, I can’t do anything with her. And not to put too fine a point on it, under the law, well . . . she is his mother.” She heard the finality in his voice, like someone closing a gate in front of a store. “Now, Josie, it’s very late, we’re three hours ahead. Can you call me in the morning?” Impersonal as the man on a movie-theater recording. She was afraid he was going to say “Have a nice day.”

“Hey, Cal? You fucking get some sleep, okay? Get some nice sleep. And fuck you very much.”

S
he lay in bed, drunk, moving in and out of sleep. She dreamed she was walking through an enormous hall full of Chinese people at tables playing cards, throwing dice on green tabletops, money and chips, green and red, looking for the old Jewish man from the cemetery. Floppy-breasted waitresses on unicycles passed by with trays loaded with flowery drinks. Chinese people gathered around a pit, yelling, with money in their fists, like in
The Deer Hunter
when Robert De Niro and Christopher Walken played Russian roulette. But it was her at the table with Meredith, the gun between them, and Michael in a lifeguard’s chair up above them. He didn’t seem to realize it was her, just watching from behind his blue glasses, and the avidity of his face as he watched reminded her of the way he stared while the dog spun in the street. Meredith wore the same blue glasses. She spun the gun.

Josie glanced around, desperately, wondering how she could get out of this game, she didn’t want to play, but they were surrounded, not just by Asian people but by Cal and the old men from the funeral, even Daddy Jack, and Gommer Ida, making bets, their eyes glittering greedily, but she could not tell how they were betting. She started to cry at the idea that they were betting against her. The game was fixed, she remembered. The house always won. The gun’s barrel pointed at Josie. Her turn.

“Go on,” Meredith said. “You wanted it.”

She had no choice but to pick up the gun. She held it to her head. It was cold, and she knew there was a bullet in the chamber. The game was fixed, there was always a bullet. So what were they even betting on? She struggled to think of another way, so that she didn’t have to pull the trigger—she was too young. The crowd shouted angrily for her to do it, the money in all those fists. She closed her eyes tight and squeezed.

17

Meredith’s Room

T
he rain had stopped, but the trees still dripped all around her. No lights shone in the tall, iron-framed windows of the Dark Castle. She walked to the gate, which didn’t seem so lacy and festive anymore, just heavy and cold and formidable. Now the chain was locked for real. Josie went back to her car and sat smoking, the faint verge of dawn sky glowing in the side mirror, watching the driveway with ferocious patience. They would have to unlatch that gate sometime, to let in the gardeners, the cook and the masseuse and the piano tuner. Someone would be sent to the store for salmon and Scotch. It was only a matter of time, and she had nothing but time. She could wait all day if she had to.

She hunted for a roach in the ashtray and found half a joint, a small spark of grace. She lit it and turned on the radio to the classical station. The DJ had a snooty, flat voice, he reminded her of her English teacher in seventh grade, Mr. Pella, who made them read
Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea
and humiliated Josie in front of the whole class when she couldn’t remember any of the characters’ names.

She dozed off and startled awake several times, keeping her eyes on the gate in the side mirror, fighting sleep. After a night like that, she was in no hurry to dream again. What did it mean when you died in your dream? She could guess it was not a good sign. She’d never died in a dream before, she had always awakened just in time. She could still feel the gun against her temple, the bullet drilling in, and knowing that her life was over. Game over, no reset.

She was surprised to discover how sick the feeling made her, the idea of a sudden death. Did she still want this life so badly? Was there something deep inside her, a Tyrell thing, an Okie stubbornness, that would not let her succumb? What had she done in her short time on earth but meet Michael Faraday? It was like the Gauloises at the liquor store. She didn’t even know what there was to ask for. She had no education, no languages. She had never so much as been out of California. The only thing she’d ever had going for her was a certain kind of look, the ability to make an interesting shape in space, and that her body remembered things.

If she died now, all that would remain would be her image folded into some tattered sketchpads, a figure walking through a handful of student films. Her parents would remember her, maybe. Her brothers and sisters, at least the younger ones, Corinne and Bo. Pen would. And Meredith Loewy. Yes, Meredith would remember her. She would remember Josie, clearly and precisely, until the day she died.

A pickup truck moved slowly along the street in the grayness of early dawn, men bundled in sweatshirts throwing jacketed newspapers onto the driveways. One threw Meredith’s at the gate, but it didn’t go over, it caught in the spear points and fell into a puddle. She was somehow surprised Meredith even took a newspaper, that she would be interested in such transitory things. Josie’s paper was still coming, though she threw it out unread now, wrote
Deceased
on the bill. There was no news in the land of the dead. No urgent meetings with heads of state. No weather, no sports.

Michael had loved his newspaper. Lying on the blue couch, he could spend half the morning reading it. Arguing with it, making clever remarks. He was obsessed with the obituaries. She’d never read them before, he couldn’t believe it, to him it was like someone who’d never read the funnies. At home, they were nothing special, but in LA, you had to be someone. They were for people who’d done things—invented machines, created art, started companies, inspired people. Sometimes they were so famous, even she had heard of them. Michael always wanted to know what they died of—accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer.
Was it a suicide?
That’s what he really wanted to know. Tears shot to her eyes, stinging like fumes. And she hadn’t thought twice about it. Just another of his funny eccentricities. Obits and classifieds. That’s what he liked. There might be no news in the land of the dead, but there were classifieds. They were as much a part of it as those silvery roses. What else were you going to do with the stuff of the dead?
What would you do with his things, cart them around for the rest of your life?
Old people’s dogs, the youth bed the dead child never got a chance to use. Needlepoint supplies.
Estate sale everything must go.

A light came on in a neighboring house. A low wooden annex with square windows off a fieldstone house with steep roofs, a sycamore in the lawn. Kitchen, she guessed. Someone up making breakfast. Still nothing at Meredith’s. Maybe she was a day sleeper, like all musicians. Or did she sleep at all? Maybe she went down to Gardena and played cards with Morty all night. Some version of Russian roulette.

Josie sat listening to Horowitz play the songs of Schumann, sure she was still watching the gate, but when she awoke, the sun had come up as much as it was going to, somber and dull through the trees, the jays squawking. She had to go to the bathroom, she was out of cigarettes, her mouth tasted like rotting garbage. She should give up and go home. But then the maid appeared, in a brown tailored dress, unlocking the chain, picking up the newspaper from the driveway. She carefully looped the heavy links around the bars, but didn’t clasp the big padlock.

After a few minutes, Josie got out of the car, walked quickly back to the gate, lifted the chain. It groaned its iron lament, but she suspected the morning was already noisy enough that no one would notice—the traffic had already started down on Los Feliz Boulevard, and a news helicopter overhead whipped at the gray clouds. She slipped inside and rearranged the chain, quickly walked up the drive and then into the trees. She pulled down her pants and peed, watching the house, then fumbled back into her clothes.

She circled around the side of the house to the terrace, the pool. Leaves lay steeping at the bottom, like tea leaves in a massive cup. If only she could read them. If only she could have read them that first day, when she swam in all that lovely green water, Michael’s eyes on her. What would she have done? Left him alone, or gone down this long dark hall again?

Edging up to the back door, she peered in through the window, the rusty screen. It was all the same as the first time, the black and white tiles, the overloaded cabinets. The maid sat reading at the small table, coffee cup in a saucer, her black hair tidy in its painful bun. Josie quietly tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, but she would never get past the maid. Michael would have gone in like he owned the place, even if it was someone else’s house. Probably ask the maid to make him some breakfast. She had seen that side of him, the Little Prince.

She watched and waited. Finally, the phone rang, and the woman got up to answer it, put the receiver on the counter and left the room. Josie took her shoes off and slipped in, keeping her hand on the knob so the bolt wouldn’t reengage until she had shut the door behind her. It closed with a brief click. Shoes in hand, she ran through the kitchen, ducking into the butler’s pantry between that and the dining room. She could hear the maid on the phone in the hall, “The Señora is sleeping. No, the concerts have all been canceled. I don’t know about that, you must call Señor Markovsky.”

She waited for the maid to return to the kitchen, then crept out into the dining room, that vast lake of mahogany, the chandelier exposed now, catching every bit of light. She trotted across the terra-cotta tiles of the foyer, cold under her bare feet, climbed the stairs. She hesitated at Michael’s room, the first room on the right, but something made her continue down the hall, to the last one.

Silently, she cracked the door and slipped in. The drapes on the windows kept out most of the light, thick carpet gave under her feet, and the room smelled of smoky perfume and the heaviness of drugged sleep. The dark head lay framed by the shiny satin headboard that gleamed subtly in the dark, in the very bed where she and Michael had made love that first day, those perfect hours. You couldn’t tell the color in the dark but it was sky blue, as were the satin drapes that fell from a frame suspended over the bedstead where Meredith lay sleeping, hair spread on the pillow, thick and tangled as if from a bad night of dreams. She wore a satin robe over her nightgown, the covers wrestled into a heap.

Josie stood over the sleeping woman, thinking, how odd, really, that people had to do this every day. Shut down and go somewhere else, leaving their bodies behind. She wondered where Meredith went at night, was she too in the card palace in Gardena, spinning a loaded gun? Suddenly, it occurred to Josie how easy it would be to kill a person while she was sleeping, pour something into an open ear. You could slip right out of the house again, and no one would know. How helpless Meredith looked, lying there. This woman who so hated her, a woman she admired, feared, could not help wanting to know. An accomplished, remarkable person. If Meredith died right now, there would be a half-page obituary in the
Times.
Her career, her father, her famous ex-husband, the tragic death of her only son. Her skin glowed in the dark room, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, her mouth half-open, snoring softly. She suddenly wanted Meredith to open her eyes and find her there. She gave her every chance, strolling around the room, the carpet thick and padded underfoot, taking her time, not trying to be especially quiet, looking at the perfumes in their glass tray, unstoppering a few, looking for the one that she really used. She inhaled the various fragrances until she found it. An openwork glass stopper with a silk tassel. She put some of it on her wrist. It didn’t smell the same on her.

Bits of jewelry lay in a dish on the dresser, photographs massed on a bedside table. Black-and-white, in silver frames. One was of Meredith in a black dress reclining on a couch, her striking profile. Another was Cal, Meredith, and Michael as a toddler on some kind of rooftop, looking out on an Arabian kind of city, with domes and flat, cutout roofs. Cal and Meredith lay on either end of a daybed, she wore a Juliet dress and heavy eye makeup, the baby in her lap playing with her enormous earrings. Cal’s hair was dark and he had muttonchop sideburns, he sported a Nehru jacket. The kind of photograph they ran in Laura’s old
Vogue
s.
People Are Talking About
. . . So glamorous. They’d thought they were untouchable. When they had so much to lose. And one of Michael, fairly recent, only his hair was longer. He leaned on a building, a wool scarf around his neck, thinking something funny, she could tell from the set of his mouth. Harvard. He should have stayed there. He should never have met her.

She picked up Meredith’s strand of pearls and held it up to her neck. The white pearls softly gleaming on top of her hole-filled gray turtleneck in Meredith’s beveled mirror. With dark hair and false eyelashes, she could be Meredith in the photograph. It wasn’t so special. Just another costume. Meredith moaned on the bed. Josie quickly put the pearls back in the dish and went to the bed. She gazed down at Meredith, imagining this was what it had been like for Michael when he was little, when Meredith would sleep all morning after a concert, and he would have to be very very quiet. Hoping she would wake up but afraid she would be angry if he woke her. But she didn’t wake. On an impulse, Josie left her vintage shoes by Meredith’s bed, toes pointing in, just where she had been standing. She walked out, closing the door.

In Michael’s room were all the things Meredith had taken from their little house. Not sorted at all, just thrown in. The paintings, the books, even the goddamn piano and the painted dresser. How had she known Josie would be gone that long? Veronica, naturally. Meredith must have paid everyone off. Josie burned to think of Meredith directing traffic on the stairs, Veronica just watching, not saying a word, counting her hundred. Shoes for the babies, gas for the car. But where were the journals? That’s what she wanted. What Meredith had wanted too. Why hadn’t she hidden them, why hadn’t she known? She dug through the heap of his things, their things. She found the pipe-cleaner circus in a box. She looked for
The Ballad of Reading Gaol
and
The Prose of the Transsiberian,
the poems of Paul Valéry, but there was no time, her mind wasn’t working, she had exhausted her burst of determination. She ended up grabbing the box with the circus, the painting of Blaise and Jeanne, and one of her in his armchair by the window, her hair a mess of gold.

The scary maid was on the phone in the foyer as she came down the stairs. “Morning,” Josie said, continuing to walk without missing a beat, barefoot but regal, Elena descending, the box in one arm and the paintings under the other. “Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.”