Paint It Black (29 page)

“Reading it,” Josie said.

Meredith lifted her thick, shapely eyebrows. “It’s a beautiful piece. Would you like to hear it sometime? I’ve got some of the most wonderful recordings. Furtwängler, with the Vienna. And Bruno Walter did a marvelous one with the Chicago, few people know about it.” She picked up the book and paged through it. “You’re looking very pale, Josie. You should sit in the sun. I don’t want anyone accusing me of
poisoning
you.” She slid the symphony back onto the bookshelf where it came from. “Let Sofía know when you’d like lunch.”

“Sofía doesn’t like me much, if you can’t tell,” Josie said.

Meredith laughed, musical. “Josie, who cares if Sofía likes you? If anybody likes you.”

Josie tried to imagine a person who wouldn’t care if people liked them. What about Meredith? The way she spooned tea for her, the hand on her shoulder. Didn’t Meredith like her? “Don’t most people? Want people to like them?”

Meredith perched on the arm of the leather couch, her heavy hair falling over one shoulder. “At one time, there were a handful of people I cared about, but their numbers seem to be diminishing.” She sighed, tried to smile, it twisted her face into an awkward grimace. “In any case, don’t worry about Sofía. She’s a servant, she’ll do what she’s told.”

Michael told her Sofía had been a young widow in Seville when Meredith hired her, during her first European tour, back in the Fifties. Josie didn’t like her any more than Sofía liked Josie, but she’d never heard anyone described so callously.
She’s a servant, she’ll do what she’s told.
She could imagine Elena saying it, though. As if a servant was somehow different from a real person. She wondered what Meredith would think if Josie told her that she’d scrubbed toilets in the Sunnyvale Motel, scraped down the grill at Rollerama.

“Now I’ve offended you.” Meredith stood, brushed down her skirt, her dark hair rich around her pale face. “I didn’t mean to sound so Marie Antoinette. It’s just the way we live. Is it so hard to get used to, getting what you want, when you want it? Having someone taking care of your needs?”

Her needs. Christ.

Josie wondered, who was that
we
in
the way we live?
Did it mean her and Meredith? Meredith and Michael? Mauritz and Meredith? Or just people like the Loewys. Was she included in that
we?
It was true, it wasn’t hard to get used to. Josie suddenly felt as strange to herself as a fledgling must feel when it sheds its baby down and feels the sharp feathers piercing its skin from the inside out.

A
s commanded, Josie lay by the pool in a patch of weak winter sunlight, wearing her yellow coat and sunglasses, a scarf tied Grace Kelly-style around her head and throat. She listened to the instruments, each with its own voice, meeting, arguing, separating, coming back together again. She felt grand, pampered, at ease. It was warm in the sun but an underlayer of cold revealed itself whenever a cloud came by. Watching the surface of the dark water, the ripples when a leaf fell in, she felt herself sink into a sweet lethargy. She had the sense that the phone call to Jeremy might be her last volitional act. From now on, she would float like a leaf on Meredith’s pool, like a phrase of Debussy.

At some point, she heard clicking heels on the concrete. Sofía approached and stopped at her side, stiffly asked if she needed anything. Where before she might have asked
if it was okay, would she mind,
now she just said, “Yes, I am a little hungry,” the way Michael would. Not saying what he wanted, but just that he had a need, and it was the rest of the world’s job to fill it.

“You want I make you lunch?” The woman didn’t look her in the eye, but gazed somewhere over her head. With her thin face and sharp, high-bridged nose, she spoke to Josie the way you’d talk to someone taking a crap, at an angle, as if they weren’t really there.

“Breakfast, I think,” Josie said. She could feel herself wanting to add
if that’s okay,
but forced herself to leave it off. Every attempt to show herself a good person in Sofía’s eyes had failed anyway. Maybe she preferred the Loewy imperial style. Or maybe it just didn’t make any difference. But it maddened her. “Sofía, you don’t like me, do you?”

The woman’s full mouth drew into a sudden line.

“What did I ever do to you?”
Who cares if Sofía likes you? If anybody likes you.
“Look, I’m here now. I’m not going anywhere, so you might as well get used to it.”

“I make you breakfast.” Her low-heeled pumps clicking away as she marched back to the house.

“And if you go out,” Josie called after her, “I could use some cigarettes. Gauloises, in the blue box.”

Sofía ran her hand over her slicked-back hair, touched the chignon, and kept walking.

Well, where had wanting to be liked ever gotten her? People liked people who didn’t care. She lay in the sun behind her dark glasses, listening to a jay argue with a squirrel, and the Brahms. How cold it was, even in the sun. Michael was always cold. Maybe that’s why he headed for the desert. Maybe he hadn’t gone there to kill himself, maybe he’d just hoped it was warm. The desert was a mystery to her, why people went out there, where there was nothing but a bunch of rocks. It wasn’t even beautiful, like Sequoia, or the beach. Why would he go there? Why didn’t he just do it at their house? Maybe a gesture of caring, that he hadn’t blown his brains all over their bedroom, where they’d made love and spawned their dreams. A last act of consideration. That or a final fuck you.

After a while, Sofía returned with her breakfast, set up on a linen mat—a boiled egg in a cup, toast, honeydew, and the thin dry Spanish ham that Michael liked. She set it on a small table by the chaise, and never once looked at Josie. Sofía might have to wipe her Tyrell ass, but she’d still manage to regard her as untouchable.

“You know, Sofía, I’m really not so bad,” Josie said.

For the first time, the other woman met her eyes. And the expression in them was a surprise—not loathing but stranger, almost pity. Josie felt a surge of confusion, anger, humiliation. Pity? How dare Sofía pity her? But then it was gone. Sofía straightened and went back to the house, her apron’s crossed straps and bow starched as a napkin.

28

Photo

W
hile Meredith was occupied downstairs with the string quartet, Josie ripped through the pile of raided items in Michael’s old room. His things. Their things. All jumbled together. The dresser and toys and pictures, records and books.
They had to be here somewhere, they had to be here.
Those black sketchbooks, in which he had told the truth, all the things she did not know about him. She wanted them. The thought of them invaded her nights. But Meredith had clearly stashed them elsewhere.

Defeated, she sat on the crippled boy’s bed, contemplating the massive heap of objects. If she were an artist she would draw this, the angles of paintings and falling books, the points and bundles of soft clothing. A cubist rendition of a stillborn life. But she wasn’t an artist, she couldn’t depict the abandonment of things the way Michael could. He could make a simple object mean something, touch you.

His fiancée.
What she wouldn’t have given. Though she never mentioned it to him. It would have ruined their fantasy, that it was just the two of them in their private true world, forever and always. She loved that dream, tried to live up to that. Their love as a dragonfly, skimming over Echo Park, stopping to visit the lotus. They weren’t going to be like everyone else, they were Blaise and Jeanne, eating dreams and drinking blue sky.

Out in the brighter studio, the winter light fingered its way through the leaves of the live oak. The last time they had been here was when they packed him up for the move to Lemoyne Street. They’d had the house to themselves. He made her dinner and served it to her in the vast dining room. And she’d imagined someday she would return here, yes, and it would really be their home, why not?

And now she was here, without Michael. The irony. She could dismantle this jumble, clean it up, put the things that upset her in the back of the closet—the mad monk, the Merediths—hang some of the other pictures. But she doubted Michael would have wanted it. He would have wanted the mess to be out, for them to have to look at it.
See what you did to me?
The mad monk glared.
All you bitches.
She had to admit, she preferred the luxury of the guest room, the blue and white wallpaper, the gilded white wood, to the monastery library. She could hear Pen yelling,
You’re just like everyone else.
Maybe she was. But Michael hadn’t thought so. She had to hang on to that.

But maybe he was just seeing himself in her mirror. Michael had purposely made this room severe, to distance himself from his mother’s indulgence. He wanted something harder, purer. He wanted to feel real to himself. She lay head to foot on his hard narrow bed and looked up at his Mexican Virgin. Who had not protected him. Who had not spread her wings around him and hidden him from the light. Her feminine uselessness with her big brown eyes. One more woman who had failed him. Across the room, the blind Merediths still climbed the white stairs. Josie in her black stockings, her own idiotic tenderness.

She wished Sofía had brought her cigarettes. It was the only thing she still needed the world for.

She picked up an armload of clothes, opened the closet and turned on the light, began hanging things up, shirts, pants, but the smell of the closet overwhelmed her, the scent of pine and moss, that cedar. And here was the green silk tie he’d bought for three dollars at the Salvation Army, the one he wore to the symphony. She slung it around her neck, remembering how it made his eyes so green she could hardly bear it. She pressed the silk to her lips as if she could kiss him through the fabric. Looking in the mirror at the back of the closet, she tried to tie it, the way he had shown her, around and around and through. It was lumpy and lopsided, hanging over the raveling knit of her sweater. She could still see his fingers making the knot, neat and precise. A three-dollar tie, but those fingers knew what to do with it.

She looked in the mirror, the very mirror that had seen him as a child, as a fuzzy-lipped teen. It had drunk his image ten thousand times. She leaned against the mirror, her face against the cool glass.
Michael, why’d you have to do it? Why did you leave me here all alone?
Smearing her wet cheek on the glass. Then she saw the knob. A doorknob of faceted glass, like all the other knobs in the house. The mirror was hung on a door. A door inside a closet. She took the knob and turned.

It opened into another closet, but this one was all white—white painted wood, white carpeting. Light streamed in from the next room, while Brahms came up through the floor, accentuating the silence. The smell of cedar and smoky perfume.

Connecting closets. His and hers.

The thought gave her a headache. She was tired of learning new things about him, each revelation further watering down the memory of the boy she’d known. She wanted to hold on to the way she remembered him, to what she’d thought was true. She was losing him and then losing him some more. She was tired of the truth.

And yet she couldn’t help but walk through.

The white closet in fact was even larger than his, a complete dressing room with a window and a white tufted hassock. The walls of neatly hanging clothes, garment bags and racks of shoes and shelves of purses. In a series of quilted bags hung long gowns, sea green and dark green, black and burgundy, white and flowered. She couldn’t help running her hands over the silks. A rough nail caught on a sea green chiffon. Crap. She shouldn’t be touching these things. She zipped the bag hurriedly. Meredith wouldn’t know, it would be a while until she wore these dresses again.

Here were not one but a half dozen fur coats, a dark brown plush, a full-length black mink, a long-haired spotted chubby—lynx, she imagined. Her shoes were like a display in a museum, there must have been a hundred pairs but only one of tennis shoes, Keds, three eyelets, perfectly white. Even the flats were leather. Josie couldn’t resist trying on a pair of black satin strappy sandals woven into an intricate Chinese knot, and held up her jeans legs in the three-way mirror to see what they looked like. They were way too big, but they made her legs look like a movie star’s.

Wool suits and silk suits, each type arranged by color, from white to buff, sea green, French blue, navy, black. Coats, trenches and overcoats, leather jackets, even a long black-velvet cape with a red satin lining. What kind of woman could wear a full-length velvet cape and get away with it? Who could walk into a room and own it like that, used to people standing up when she walked in? Signing autographs without even blinking.

And just on the other side of the door, her son. Nipping in and out the back way. Getting him to zip her up. Maybe he spied on her this way, too, watching her dress. Of course he would have. He could not help watching, he could be caught through his eyes like a fish on a hook. It was something she hadn’t needed to know about him, that he could come into his mother’s room this way, and she into his.
You know what they were like.
This door had always been there. Their secret passage. He hadn’t known Josie then, but she still felt as if he’d been unfaithful, not to have locked it years ago.

She wondered if the journals were here. She looked in cupboards above the closet. Hats and suitcases, boxes of letters, but no journals. No, Meredith would have them under lock and key by now. Down in her father’s study? Maybe not even there. After all, Cal had breached security. No, they were in a safe-deposit box in some bank downtown. Fuck. She should know better than to underestimate Meredith. She had it all thought out.

In the bedroom, light filtered through the trees and the raised blinds, the blackout drapes tied back, everything fresh and white and blue—the pleated and tufted blue satin of the headboard, the gleaming silk of the spread, where she and Michael had made love that very first time, a year and a half ago. His closed eyes flickering. Where he whispered,
Show me, show me what you want.
And she’d thought he was a virgin. Christ, what a fool. Could a virgin have made love to her like that? Did she really think she could have taught him so quickly?

And where his mother had lain in her drugged sleep, Josie standing by the bed, thinking how easy it would be to kill her.

She glanced around the room. She could hear the Brahms from downstairs, the complicated patterns of music. She knew she should not be here, what if that sneaky maid caught her? And yet, she was family, now.
His fiancée.
And family made itself at home, didn’t it? Michael wouldn’t have hesitated. She imagined belonging to a room like this, the dresser gleaming in the early afternoon light, its inlay of flowers in a basket set like a marvelous puzzle into the cinnamon-colored burl. All that work, so Meredith would have a place to put her underwear. She ran her hand across the top, with its perfume tray. She could see herself in the fancy beveled mirror over the dresser, wearing Michael’s tie, her scroungy punk hair with the roots already starting to come in. She was going to have to decide soon, if she wanted to be a woman who deserved to have a room like this, or to stay the ragged innocent Michael had loved.

In the top drawer, Meredith’s stockings lay in neat rolls tucked between dividers in a long satin case like bees in their comb, scented with sachets of sandalwood and winey roses. Slips, all embroidered, exquisite, lay in a perfect stack. She touched the smooth needlework on a white satin half-slip—appliquéd flowers, their petals drifting toward the scalloped hem—taking care that her rough fingers didn’t snag the silk. She flushed to think of the bra she had bought from the Goodwill, that she had tried to impress Michael with. How pathetic she must have looked, the scratchy turquoise lace and her torn underwear. In the next drawer, sweaters, cashmere, lamb’s wool, thin, soft as clouds. Below that, bigger sweaters, shawls.

Who was Meredith Loewy? The woman down there commanding the Steinway, leading the strings, she had performed this Brahms piece in great concert halls. The woman who had raised Michael, the woman who could say one moment,
She’s a servant, she’ll do what she’s told,
and the next could beg,
Don’t leave me. You’re all I have now.
Into whose hands was she giving herself? She didn’t understand Meredith any more than she had understood Michael. They both had such secrets. She didn’t know if she’d even recognize them if she found them. It might be like sitting in Mauritz Loewy’s study reading the Unfinished Symphony. Clues could be staring her in the face right now, and she would have no idea.

The Brahms turned tender through the floorboards, the yearning of the violins, one higher, one lower, the brightness of the piano, the sadness in the cello. The sadness everywhere. She sat in Meredith’s satin-striped lounge chair, listening. The photographs in silver frames rested on the bedside table by her elbow. Michael gazing out at the camera over the tops of his Ben Franklins at Harvard. Where he went to try to best his father. His green eyes teasing, she could tell he was about to say something witty. She touched his face, the cheekbones, the planes, the wide mouth, the way it curled in the corners.
What didn’t you lie to me about, Michael?
She wanted this photo, she had no photographs of him. It would be so easy to turn it to the back, open the hooks, slide it out from the frame. But she let it stay.

She wondered who had taken the picture. Whoever it was, she was already jealous, that Michael would have looked at her that way; she knew that look, it was intimate, his guard down. She had already seen
People Are Talking About
the Loewy Faradays, in their groovy Sixties getups, on the Arabic rooftop, tiles and domes. The picture that caught her attention now was Meredith in her pearls, propped on a couch, one arm thrown back behind her head. Michael once had Josie pose exactly in that position, on the furry blue couch. So here was the original. Meredith, regretful and yet seductive, polished and sophisticated in a linen sheath dress, the bare underarm, eyes rimmed in dark eyeliner. She was a woman for whom a man would buy a diamond ring or a new car, just to cheer her up. She tried to gauge Meredith’s age, but it was hard to tell with her. She hadn’t gained any weight from then to now, and the simple clothes could have been from any era. She wore her hair loose, to her shoulders, it could have been yesterday or twenty years ago. The light flooded out any possibility of wrinkles on the black-and-white film.

Who was the photographer, admiring her like that, bathing her in such tenderness, such sympathy? Cal. Suddenly she understood it was a way of having him without copping to the fact she was still carrying a torch for him.
It’s what’s not there that’s most important.
A photograph she chose to look at every day of her life. Though she surely must have liked the way she looked, the sexy seriousness of her face, the large breasts evident but not overexposed, it was a way of keeping Cal without admitting she still cared.

The music stopped. Josie listened, holding her breath to hear better, but they were just discussing something about the piece. She waited until they started again, the same section they had just played. She felt a bit the way she used to feel in Bakersfield when she would touch herself in the bedroom she shared with her sisters, listening in case anyone was coming.

She saw that the round table holding the photographs was actually a small bookcase that revolved on a pedestal of white wood and brass, rising from three clawed feet like a drum on stork’s legs. She rotated it, allowing the titles to flow past,
Immortal Beloved,
Anna Mahler, Arrau. Books about Horowitz, Rubenstein.
Life and Liszt.
A group of unmatched leather-bound books caught her eye, all different colors, black, red, brown, green, blue. She pulled one out, bound in black pebbly leather, full of old photographs, mounted on thick black paper with black photo corners, each one carefully titled in white ink in a spiky handwriting. Pitched roofs, houses, people. Cafés, funny old-fashioned cars. It had to be Europe. She had always thought she would go to Europe with Michael, sit at café tables like these.

Café Central, Wien.
A lively group of people, the women in pulled-down flapper hats and T-strap shoes and sweaters with fur collars, men in coats and vests and ties had pushed several small tables together and grinned for the camera over coffee and cigarettes, their names all listed below their images,
Schatze, Siggy, Jan, Hector, Kaspar, Mauritz, Lisbeth.
Mauritz. There he was—young. Dark and animated, with wavy black hair and a sexy smile, his arm around a dark-haired woman, Lisbeth. She could see why women had wanted him. Laughing against a stone wall, his arm thrown around another man. How affectionate he was, she wouldn’t have guessed. How free.
Herrengasse, August
1928
.
At a table with a group of people on a sidewalk, holding his glass up for a toast. In a darkish room, writing in a music book at a piano, wearing a tie but no coat.
Klaviersonate cis-Moll,
1929
.