Paint It Black (22 page)

Wade wouldn’t shut up, and her head hurt. She went out into the living room, got her bag, and swallowed three aspirin with a swig from her can of Seven Up. Outside, she glimpsed a coyote trotting onto the grass from the wild part of the slope onto the brightly lit dichondra. She held the cold soda can to the knots in her forehead. The gray long-legged beast stopped and gazed right at her. A small head, pointed muzzle. Its gold eyes were crazy and fearless. Hunting up its midnight meal of Chihuahuas and overfed cats. It frightened her, how boldly it stared. What was wrong with it that it wasn’t afraid?

She waited, and so did the coyote. What did it want? Why was it staring at her like that? She felt a chill. Was she supposed to lope off with it, off on four legs, into the wild, like in one of Shirley K.’s Castaneda books? Maybe it was a witch. Maybe it was Fate. Like Elena’s destiny, meeting her out on Old Topanga Road. Maybe it was the message she’d been waiting for. All this time, some sign he was near. “Michael?” she whispered. “Michael?”

She cracked the door, slowly, afraid it would come right into the house. The glass slid easily on its tracks. “Michael?”

She stepped out onto the grass, just a few yards from the doglike creature. It wanted to tell her something. She could feel it. “What is it?” For the longest time, they stood in the misty cold, staring at each other, like a whisper of the true world.

Then Jeremy came crashing into the living room behind her, his booming voice. “You’re going to love this, Josie, it’s totally brill.”

The coyote broke its gaze, started, and trotted away.

“No,” she called out, but it was leaving, out past the irradiated blue of the pool and down into the brush on the far side. “Come back.” Its tail disappearing into the night.

“Josie, come hear this,” Jeremy yelled.

The last of him. She’d finally had a sign, and then fucking Jeremy had to fuck it up. She turned back mechanically into the room. She wanted to die.

“Rick?”

“Yes, I’m here.” The neat little man with his small hands and feet, the gold chain around his wrist.

Jeremy held up a sheet of paper, scrawled over with notes and spotted with grease, a dream sequence he’d concocted, she couldn’t follow a word he said.

“He’s Death, come to settle her account. Get it?” He made quotation marks with his fingers in case she didn’t. “‘Settle her account’? God, I’m such a genius. No no, hold the applause.” He shoved the shaggy blond hair from his eyes. It fell right back in.

They used the same setup as for the Conrad shot, the same blocking. He pushed the little tellerman into position. “Stand right here.” He tapped the spot with his foot, Conrad’s mark, noted with duct tape. “Give Elena the envelope. All you have to say is, ‘I’m from the head office.’ Got it?”

“‘I’m from the head office, I’m from the head office.’ Oh, I know I’m going to mess this up, I just know it.” Mr. Cairo’s birthmark flamed even redder. Poor little tellerman. Rick the bank teller had no idea why this was all happening, as Bob One measured the distance from the lens to his birthmark. He was shaking his hands in panic.

“It’ll be fine, you’ll see,” Josie finally said, the way Michael used to say it when she started feeling sad. When she was afraid, he could always calm her when he wanted to. How good that had felt. When he still wanted to. She gazed at this poor little man, the bank teller, visiting this cold woman in the cold glass house. “Her account’s overdrawn. She thought she had plenty of money, but she’d spent it all and more. You’re cutting her off.”

Mr. Cairo nodded gravely. He knew about that, all right. “Shouldn’t he have a briefcase?” he asked. “He would have a briefcase if he went to see her in person, wouldn’t he?”

Of course he would have a briefcase. Of course he would. What was scary was how this movie was starting to make sense. She’d gone beyond tired, she was in the Zone, where everything made sense, in a surrealistic way. Coyotes, and the Bank Teller of Death and his Briefcase of Destiny. “Gordo has a briefcase. Gordo, can Tellerman use the Samsonite?”

Gordo looked up from the couch where he sat on the phone, scribbling some figures, the ashtray overflowing with butts. “Just don’t mess with it, okay?”

Once the prop was in his hand, Mr. Cairo seemed to find himself. The Great Teller, coming to Settle Her Account.
Get it?
Like goddamn Fellini. The zebra-pants blonde put a piece of paper in a big envelope for him to hand her, and once the Bobs cut some of the lights and Sergio changed the filter on the lens to blue, Jeremy walked them through the scene once more. “And if there’s something you’re not sure about,” Jeremy stooped over the teller, his arm around the small man’s shoulder, “just stay in character. Don’t stop. And for God’s sake don’t look into the camera.”

Rick nodded, holding his envelope, putting it into the briefcase and taking it out, balancing the open hardsider on his knee, practicing saying his line and then handing her the deadly notice.

They took their places, Josie on the couch, the little man by the front door, ready to enter her dreams. Jeremy called, “Action,” and the teller moved to his mark, clinging to Gordo’s battered briefcase. He stared at Josie with his bulgy brown eyes, sweating in great rolling drops, counted to five as Jeremy told him to do. Then he whispered his line. “I’m from the head office.”

Serious, and so nervous, this little Death in his tasseled loafers. She could feel Elena, watching him through her eyes. He looked like a bug to her. So far beneath her she couldn’t be bothered to crush him. “I’m sorry, you must be mistaken,” she said, in a tone so much like Meredith’s. Melodious, icy. Yet at the same time, she knew, under the curtain of her certainty, there was no mistake. She became even haughtier when she knew she was wrong.

He handed her the envelope.

She opened it. Inside was just a piece of scratch paper Gordo’d used to work out some figures, but she imagined it was another piece of paper, another overdrawn account. An overdraft of the worst sort.
I hope you find someone who can meet your needs better than I could.
She’d overdrawn her account, all right, down to the last penny and beyond. The tellerman knew. The head office had it all on file. Death’s little bureaucrat in a crisp white shirt was here to tell her it was over. Account closed.

She folded herself onto the leather couch like an accordion receding between its two plates. She pressed her hand to her forehead, fighting panic. “Maybe it’s a mistake.”

He dropped his eyes to the gold chain circling his chubby wrist, rotated it with the hand that held the briefcase. “You can talk to management,” he ad-libbed.

“You’re from the head office. You can do something.” She was cornered, she needed a friend. She felt Elena’s fear, suddenly exposed, and immediately covered it up—everything was fine, under control. Smiling, showing off her mouth, her legs, the silky hose whispering against itself. “I know you can help me.” She stood, slowly, coming close to where Death’s tellerman stood on his mark, fearing to fall out of frame. She fingered his lapel. “You can do it for me.”

He stiffened. “I’d lose my job,” he said starchily.
Faggot.
He wasn’t interested in her legs, the flirt of her eyelashes.

The way he said it infuriated her. Death didn’t care about sex, about love, human weakness. It had what it wanted, a toupee and a gold chain bracelet, tasseled loafers and a part in the movie. She never thought Death would be so petty. It had Michael, this vain little creature, and for what. “You love this, don’t you. Playing with us all. You get your little scrap of power, that’s what you care about. You—bureaucrat.”

She could see the sting of humiliation on his prissy face, and knew she was right “You don’t have to get personal, miss.”

“You think this isn’t personal?” She held out the paper.
I hope you find someone
. . . Her voice rising. “There’s nothing more personal.” Tears, her eyelashes unpeeling, the liner running. She reached out and slapped him, hard, in the face.

The Teller of Death’s eyes opened wide, he turned on his heel and left, Gordo’s briefcase in his hand.

“Cut!” Jeremy yelled. “Oh Josie, you angel.”

Josie walked past Jeremy and the stricken Mr. Cairo in the foyer rubbing his cheek, out of the flat front doors into the surrealistic night. She climbed up the dark street to her car and let herself in, and sat, listening. There was nothing but silence, the distant noise from the Strip. She howled, stretching her face up to the sky, but the only response was from dogs across the street, breaking into furious salvos. She fished in the ashtray for a roach, but found nothing. Her fingertips were black and she wiped them across her forehead, like the Catholic kids on Ash Wednesday.
Forgive us . . .

Of course Jeremy would have to use it in the movie. Nothing escaped the movie. The movie was the black hole in the universe where everything went in but nothing came out.

T
he Mysterious Phone Call. Elena sat in the white leather reading chair with an art magazine. Her legs in their slick white boots crossed on the footstool, the shot was all about her legs. The set phone rang, like the clamor of a bad conscience. She lowered her legs, the whisper of nylon, the slight animal smell of the raw silk of her suit, the glide of the pearls she’d found at a yard sale, as she walked elegantly to the couch. Picking up the sculptured Sixties handset from the coffee table, she answered, “Yes?” But there was no one. “Who’s there, please?” No one.

She returned to the reading chair, crossed her legs Elena’s showy way, the top parallel to the lower, at a perfect diagonal. She was a girl who played to the back of the house in an empty room. As she flipped through the magazine, she paused at a painting of a boy standing in a rubber pool, masturbating. The light like the light from the pool outside, lurid and underlit.
None of us is quite himself these days,
she thought, her own audience.

The phone rang again. She crossed impatiently. “Hello? Who
is
this?” Again, no one. She hung up slowly, then suddenly reached for it again, sensing it was about to ring, though it didn’t. She drew her hand back and waited, calm but nervous under the calm. Like a painting they’d seen once in Venice Beach. It was a big abstract oil that was just green stripes. She never understood art like this, but Michael explained, “It’s not a green painting, see? It’s a red painting under a green one.” He pointed to the edges, where the green didn’t quite cover the red.

That was Elena. Red under green. Her rawness just visible around the edges.

She sat still as a cat, her whole body listening, motionless but for the tip of its tail, never taking her eye off the phone. Her number was unlisted. No one knew she was here, she had no friends, only the Movie Director, whom she was fattening for the kill. Yet someone knew she was here. Maybe they were watching right now through those plate windows. She looked up and saw herself, her reflection on their print-free surface, the corona of blond hair, the couch, the navy suit
Made in Hong Kong.
Perfectly poised. Red under green.

Someone was trying to get through.
Remember me?

She didn’t want to remember. Elena had it good. A cushy house, an important boyfriend. She opened the box on the table, full of cigarettes, Kents. Even the ciggies were period. She put one in her mouth, and flicked the free-form lighter, knowing with certainty that people who would fill a vintage box with vintage cigarettes would keep the lighter filled. It sparked and lit. She inhaled and stood, graceful and controlled as a leopard on a leash, and walked to the windows. Left foot, right foot, with the slight crossover of a runway model. Elena didn’t miss a trick.

Her reflection in the plate glass. A woman who had overdrawn her personal account in the worst way. She’d been skating along the surface, imagining nothing would touch her. But the end was coming. She was pounding away on a piano, when children were sealed in the walls.

He loved you. And you killed him. How could you have forgotten so soon?

And there was her face, smooth and untroubled, a face that could shoot a man in the heart and leave him bleeding on a sidewalk in November. She wanted to hurt her, make it real.
You bitch.
She banged her face into the glass. She didn’t know she was going to do it, but then she did it again.
You evil cunt.
Now she wanted to cut that face, with glass edged with green. It felt crazy good. She knew she shouldn’t, the glass could break, but she couldn’t stop. She thought someone would stop her, but nobody did. Bang. Bang. Finally, it didn’t break, and it hurt, and she’d exhausted her fury. She pressed her arms against the glass, cradling her head, smoothing back her hair, and she smoked the rest of the cigarette.

“Cut!”

And everybody clapped. As if it was a goddamn performance. She could have put her head through and nobody would have lifted a finger. She was in trouble here. On the high wire wearing nothing but a tutu, holding a parasol, over the eightieth floor.

Jeremy threw his arms around her, picked her up, twirled her around. “My God, Josie! Ab-so-fucking amazing! Now that’s acting!”

She wriggled and kicked until he put her down. Acting? Was that what it was?

Talking, everybody talking at once. She knew she shouldn’t cry, her eyes would take a half hour to repair. She concentrated on getting the end of the cigarette to her trembling lips. Jeremy was framing the reflection in the glass with his fingers formed into double L’s, imagining the reverse shot. Wade, his hair dark for Franco, the alter ego, came up and whispered, “Fantastic, Josie.”

She smiled and backed away. He shouldn’t even stand near her. Her life had become a stage tilting toward the edge, she didn’t know what she would do next. She shouldn’t be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.

She went back to the bedroom and closed the door, sat at the dressing table. In the mirror was a face Michael would have recognized, spectral, all in pieces. The eyes too big, the forehead too high. She was seeing it as he had, everything was broken. The brunette came in with some ice in a bag. “I was holding my breath the whole time,” she said.