Paint It Black (3 page)

Was he snickering at her, a real swell joke? But he’d seated himself at a green iron table littered with droppings, unpacking his charcoals, his pad. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked. “The water’s
wonderful.
” If you were a polar bear.

“No thanks. I am not
sportif,
” he said.

That made her laugh. Boys always bragged about their sportiness, their prowess at things they couldn’t do. They never admitted their deficiencies. “How
sportif
do you have to be to float in a pool?” He shook his head, and she dove under again, revealing a flash of ass—mooning him.

And here on the yellowed paper, her white shape took form under black water, blurry as a half-conscious thought. The uncertainty of the pale flesh rising to specifics of face and small breasts. The layers of darkness around her. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around.

The snake in her gut coiled, flexed. She had to stop looking and just breathe. Michael watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature. When all she’d been thinking that day was how quiet it was, after the constant noise and bickering at the Fuckhouse.

And he’d told her about the deaf-mutes. The people who lived there, a woman and her crippled son. Recluses. “She doesn’t like him to mix with the world. I tutor him sometimes,” he said, working charcoal over the surface of the large page.

“So where are they now?”

“At the hospital. The boy has a heart condition.”

And a leaf came spinning out of the trees and landed in his dark cropped curls. Yellow. Why could she remember that, and he couldn’t remember their whole life together, couldn’t remember one damn thing?

And she’d asked, “What about his father?” Not realizing what caves were burrowed in every lapse.

“Dead,” Michael had said. “He was epileptic, subject to rages. One day his brain just burst. The boy found him on the study floor, blood pouring out of his ears.” He sketched, his hand moving boldly across the pad, making these eucalyptuses, these pittosporums.

A sad house. She knew it even then.

“Want to see it? Come on. They won’t mind.” He picked up his portfolio, and held out his own hand. She hesitated, but could not resist, she had never seen a house like this. He took her hand and pulled her from the water in one swift movement. He was so strong. She hadn’t imagined that from looking at his tall, lanky, lazy body. Behind him loomed the silent bulk of the house, the brooding eyes of its windows. She dried herself off with her dress before putting it back on, slipped her feet into her shoes. He found the key under the mat.

With its old-fashioned hexagonal black and white tiles the big kitchen was a disappointment, a sink with the built-in washboard and a faucet that came right out of the wall. Not at all elegant. China piled up to the ceiling on sagging shelves inside glass-fronted cabinets. The house had an odd scent, like floor polish and cedar and mothballs. In the dining room hung a chandelier bagged in muslin like a cluster of bees suspended over a vast lake of table. A silver tea service gathered dust on the sideboard, and she remembered thinking,
Maybe cleanliness was just middle-class.
How would she know, she grew up on a tow yard in Bakersfield.

The living room, down three steps. All that fragrant wood under enormous, worn-out Oriental rugs. At the end, a piano gleamed. Black and long as a pickup truck. “Which one plays?”

“They both do,” Michael said. “They play music for four hands.”

Deaf-mutes playing songs for four hands that neither of them could hear.

Under the sweep of stairs, a room paneled in dark red leather lay hidden. She had never seen anything like that. Like a womb. Against the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling, bookcases bore elegant leather-bound volumes. She pulled one out. It was filled with music, but not the way it was usually written, just single lines down the page—
2
Flöten,
2
Oboen,
2
Klarinetten in B.
Notes in the margins.

“The father’s room,” Michael said. “He died, right there on the rug.”

Someone had died there, but not the father. The house was nothing but
ming,
with its great sweep of staircase, iron railed, floored in stone. She’d run her hand along the strange sponginess of the curved stucco wall, it was as if the house had grown there, like a fungus after rain. He’d opened the door at the head of the stairs, let her in first. “This is his room.” The boy’s.

It was decorated like the library of a monastery. No rug on the wooden floor, a trestle desk, a narrow iron cot guarded by a primitive painted Madonna and made up with a coarse gray blanket woven with a single red stripe. And books. All the books, tattered and whole, tall leather-bound ones and paperbacks, vertical and horizontal. “Lucky he’s deaf and not blind,” she’d said, teasing him. After all, how would a crippled boy climb all those stairs? But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.

They moved through the French doors into the crippled boy’s studio. Where he was supposed to have been.
I need the space, Josie, try to understand.

But she didn’t understand. She didn’t. Maybe it was the voddy and the Percocets and maybe she was just stupid but she didn’t. Maybe she was blind and mute and deaf and falling in the darkness, but she didn’t. He was finally working again, they were good again, it was good. He’d been so cheerful. He loved her, they were going to give it a chance. It was just going to be a few days.

She could see it so clearly, him in that studio, the windows opening onto trees through their rusty screens. His orderly worktable, cans full of brushes. That smell of turpentine and linseed oil, a canvas on the big easel, as it had been that day, when she’d tried to peek under but he stopped her, smoothing the tarp. “He’s an artist too, the deaf boy?”

“He’d like to be,” Michael said, turning his back to her. “But he hasn’t the confidence. He’s afraid he’ll never be great.”

Try to understand.

“Does it matter so much?”

He straightened the charcoal twigs that were already straight. “It’s the only thing he’s really suited for.” Flicked the tip of a brush in the coffee can, running his thumb over the clean bristles. “If he can’t do that, then why exist.”

“As long as he likes to do it, what difference does it make? He’s just got to do it, and fuck what people think,” she said. “Otherwise it’ll get all twisted up inside.” Brushing her cheeks with a fan-shaped brush, like she was putting on makeup. “We had this neighbor, once. He’d been crippled in Vietnam. He used to get drunk and sit on the porch in his wheelchair and pretend to shoot you.”

Michael smiled, looking down at the art supplies, so fastidiously arranged. “I heard you have to have a permit.”

And here she’d thought he was someone who could see. She could feel the disappointment in her mouth, it tasted like dirty nickels. “It wasn’t funny. He was imagining blowing your head off.” That asshole’s house, bottles on the porch, the broken panes repaired with newspaper and duct tape. The sound of his laughter when he “got” you. Her brothers threw dogshit on his porch, so it would get in the wheels of his chair and then onto his carpet. “He wanted to kill you, don’t you see? He wanted to. If he’d had a gun he would have.”

Michael shook off the smile then, dark eyebrows knitting over pale green eyes. Now he was listening, now she knew she could trust him. She picked up a sketchbook, started to open it, but he pulled it away. “Please don’t, Josie.”

Jo-cee. No one else ever said it like that, they always said Jozee. She let him have the sketchpad when he asked. She might have teased him over it, allowing it to bring them over the line to touching, to kissing, but she’d never been with a boy like Michael before, it made everything different. She’d only gone with boys like her brothers, they’d share some Olde English 800 and cheap reefer with you and tear your clothes, too mean to undo the buttons. Nick Nitro’d been a god by comparison. But this, this was altogether new, and made her unsure. Putting her hand to his cheek, his scratchy beard, she drew his face down to hers. He was trembling. She felt like she was the boy and he was the girl and that gave her courage. She might not have gone to college but she knew about this, how to press against a boy, wake him up.

That kiss. Sewn on her body, stitched into her skin.

“Show me what to do,” he whispered. “Show me what you want.”

She led him to the narrow iron priest’s bed. The way he looked at her as she unbuttoned her dress made her tremble too. She ran her hands under his jacket, over his jeans, he was more than ready.

“Wait,” he said. “Come with me.” He took her hand and led her down the hall to the last door. The blinds were drawn, stale air suffused with a smoky perfume. He opened the drapes, cranked open the old-fashioned windows. An astonishing room. Luxurious, feminine, all blue and white, its antique white furniture with burnished gold trim. He turned down the bed to reveal blue sheets with white piping, shed his clothes, all but the white shapeless underwear, the kind her mother bought her brothers in packages of twelve, and slid in. Lying on the pillows, his bony square shoulders, his cropped dark hair. The well between his ribs, the line of hair. The pleasure of his complete attention. If only there was a drawing of that.

She took his long finger in her mouth, it still tasted slightly of graphite, and his closed green eyes flickered like a dog having a dream, and he moaned.
Oh
. . .

How could he have killed himself when we could make love like that? How?

She stripped off her dress, still damp from the pool, and guided his hand down her body, between her legs, she could feel herself pulsing and curling around his fingers. His face, as he memorized her. “There,” she said. “You ever play a guitar?” His hands so strong, he could do her all day. Worlds away from everything she had ever known. His beautiful body, long and slender on the blue sheets.

Not white. Not dead and cold, wrapped in a sheet with a knot at the chest. On the stereo, under the dark windows, Richard Hell on KROQ sang “Going, Going, Gone.”

If only she hadn’t been careful that day. If she’d gotten knocked up, at least she’d have something now, some proof he existed. Instead of these lights, and some paintings and the rest of her goddamn life. She never wanted to be alone like this. She’d finally found someone who could give her everything, and then he took it away. Just took it away.
You asshole!
The joy, the delight, where did it go?
What did you do with it?
Her gut ached, as if her love was being dug out of her with a dull knife. She needed him to make her feel good again, right now.
You son of a bitch. You son of a fucking bitch.

Tears dripping onto the drawings, ruining them. She closed the sketchpad. She wanted to remember him on the blue sheets but all she could see were those blackened eyes, those inky lips. Were they the same lips he kissed her with? What about what he felt like in her arms, and how they danced to Louis Armstrong? That’s what she had to remember. The pleasure they had taken in each other.
Couldn’t you remember how I loved you?
But he didn’t. The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

The phone rang on the orange footlocker, by Pen’s sagging right hand. Pen groaned and turned, her heavy hand dropping to the floor, and crammed the pillow over her head. Josie staggered over, shin banging into the footlocker, and grabbed at the phone. “Yeah.”

The sound of hoarse breathing. Then a slurred, deep, woman’s voice. “Why are you alive? What is the excuse for Josie Tyrell? I ask you.”

She should hang up, there was nothing but grief on the line. As if there wasn’t enough here in the house.
We don’t need any more, thank you. We gave at the office.
But she couldn’t hang up. This woman had known Michael Faraday. She knew what it meant to lose him. They were sharing a respirator on the same airless planet.

“Tell me,” the woman mumbled. “I dare you. Say, ‘If Michael never met me, he’d be alive today.’ This is all your fault. I curse the womb that bore you.”

If it was anyone else, she might have admitted it. Of course it was her fault. But she wouldn’t admit it, not to
her.
“You don’t even know me.”

A laugh like a bark, a single note. “Know you? You’re an absolute
bill
board. Josie Tyrell.” Spitting out the last two syllables with more pure loathing than Bakersfield could ever have assembled. “Why didn’t you stay up there in Tuleville where you belonged? You and he should never have shared a sentence. My son didn’t love you. He was just slumming.”

Slumming.
So blind. The blind Merediths climbing the white stairs. He’d been dying up there.
The crippled boy. The deaf-mutes.
Mother and son, in all that decaying luxury.
We fucked in your room, Meredith. We came on your blue sheets.
“I guess he thought it was more real than living with you.”

There was silence, some kind of scuffling. Cello music in the background, and the heavy breathing of someone who’d been crying, who’d put away a fifth of something expensive. “I could make a call right now. Within an hour, someone would come and end your miserable life. Five grand, and you’d just disappear. I think it would be worth it.”

Josie looked over at Pen, facedown on the furry couch, her skirt all hiked up behind. She had holes in the ass of her tights. “I loved him too, Meredith. You weren’t the only one.”

But his mother didn’t hear her. She just kept talking, like a drunk arguing with ghosts toward closing time. “You thought you were latching onto a good thing. But he slipped from your clutches. You didn’t think of that, you little whore —”

“I hope this is making you feel better —”

“I don’t want to feel better. I want you to suffer, the way I’m suffering now.”

“Then you didn’t even have to call,” Josie said, hung up the phone.

3

Funeral

A
t nine forty-five on Friday morning, Josie Tyrell drove through Griffith Park, her rattly Falcon covered with band stickers making the only noise there was. She passed the lawns and old trees of Crystal Springs, the silent merry-go-round with its proud carousel horses, tented for winter. Last weekend, thousands of people had mourned the dead Beatle here. Today there was only the empty sandbox, the vacant swings. She followed the signs around the zoo parking lot to the back of the mountain, the air heavy with eucalyptus and laurel sumac, pitchy and green. And there it was, just as he said it would be, the metropolis of the dead. Forest Lawn, then Mount Sinai. He’d called as he said he would. Inspector Brooks. “It’s Sinai,” he’d whispered. “Tomorrow morning, ten o’clock. Off the Five at Forest Lawn.”

Mount Sinai didn’t look like the Bakersfield cemetery. There were no headstones, just acres of open rolling hillside, green closely cropped lawns, plaques flat on the grass. Easier to mow. You could ride right over the graves. It made her sick just to think of it. And Michael had never wanted to be buried anyway, he’d wanted cremation. But it wasn’t his choice. He had nothing to say.
You didn’t think about that. Nobody gives a crap what the dead want. It’s all her show now. Nobody’s asking you shit.

They were parking cars in a big lot before a massive sandstone building, one luxury car behind the next, tight, like concert parking at the Hollywood Bowl. No leaving early. A young man flagged the weak-mufflered Falcon in behind a Cadillac. The colorless light held the mountains in high contrast, blue and pale gold, and the sky was blue and far away. She adjusted her black sunglasses and got out of the car. She probably shouldn’t have gotten high on the way, but she didn’t know how else she was going to get through this. Everybody was probably doing Valium by the fistful anyway, what the fuck was the difference?

She walked away from the dusty blue Ford, touching her
Germs
sticker—for memory, not luck. The cold air was shockingly fresh. A Rain Bird rhythmically watered the stiff Saint Augustine grass. She knew she shouldn’t have worn her yellow fake fur coat, though she’d cleaned it, though it was the only warm one she had. She knew there was something in her, a persistent defiance, that wouldn’t let her do things the way she was supposed to. Even now. Even today.

The other people, wearing drab grays and browns, talked quietly in the sun. She tucked a bit more of her hair into her beret and tried to look as sedate as she could as she followed the passengers of the Cadillac, an elderly couple, the man in a business suit and overcoat, the woman in a fur tipped in sunlight, as far as the Hall of Remembrance. But then she couldn’t force herself to go through the doors.

She moved to one side and lit a Gauloise, looking through her big square sunglasses at the naked-trunked eucalyptuses glowing white against the dark green chaparral of the park. How often they’d hiked on the other side of this mountain, watched the sun set from Dante’s View. Made love on the picnic table under the weeping eucalyptus.

Old men stood around on the steps, talking in groups of two and three, like they were going to a business lunch. Uncles, friends, music people of Meredith’s. She had never met any of his relatives, though she knew him better than any of them. She could tell they had been here before, citizens of this country, Death. They knew its customs, its rites. Yet the men eyed her with the automatic mix of curiosity, lust, and aesthetic judgment they always gave young women, subject to object, the way you’d stare at an animal. She pretended not to notice. To remind them she was a person was too much effort. Objects bore no guilt. She glanced around nervously, watching for Meredith, that proud head of dark hair. How could she bear to invite people to her only son’s funeral? How could she stand it?

Josie ground out her cigarette and went into the Hall of Remembrance. Inside, everything was beige and muted and the light came from nowhere at all. There was a box of satin caps, she took one but a man shook his head. “It’s not for ladies,” he said, plucking it out of her hand.

Instead, she accepted a booklet from a young man with a rose in his buttonhole, a slender man with a low forehead—why was he looking at her like that? Did she smell of pot, or was it the yellow fake fur? Or did he know who she was, the one who let him slip away.
It’s all your fault, Josie Tyrell.

She sat in the back, against the far wall. Onstage, the closed coffin gleamed like a black piano. She was glad it was closed, that she would not have to see him like that again. Though they would have him all fixed up, wouldn’t they? She suddenly had the strangest feeling that Michael was going to open the lid and sit up and sing “Just a Gigolo” in a funny tremolo voice like Bing Crosby on the Twenties record, or recite a speech, like Meet Mr. Lincoln that day at Disneyland. How they’d howled when Lincoln stood up and said the Gettysburg Address. They’d practically pissed their pants. A short squatty attendant had to come over and tell them to leave. “This is America,” he’d hissed. “Have some respect.”

She shouldn’t have smoked that weed. She was fucking losing it. He wasn’t going to sit up and sing any song. He was never singing anything, ever again. He was in there and this was for real and he was never coming out.
Never and never.
Had Meredith seen him the way Josie had, at the coroner’s? Or had she waited for the funeral home? Had she closed the lid, the way she would close the top of her Steinway? Closing his music inside. If Josie hadn’t seen his body in the coroner’s basement, she would have felt different about the closed casket, but she’d seen enough.
It’s a project I’ve been thinking about.
And this was the project, his last work of art.

Piped music filtered in from no visible source, muffled, hushed. A group of old women with set hair turned and stared at her. She pushed the sunglasses further on her face. They knew. She pulled the fake fur tighter, glad she had it, garish as it was, it was freezing in here, the smell of cold flowers. What did she care if the coat was wrong, she deserved to be here, she was the only one who knew him, she had fucked him, had held him in her arms in the early hours, had laughed with him, a million little jokes, had sat through his fury, his gloom. She had loved him more than all these people combined.
Go ahead and stare, you bitches.
They thought they knew her. They didn’t know a thing.

Josie examined the booklet, candelabra on the cover, a program. Brahms, and then Psalm 16, Psalm 32, Bach. A prayer, the Mourner’s Kaddish, in the flamelike Hebrew, followed by an English pronunciation, a translation. At least she would not clap in the wrong part. She remembered that night at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Michael so handsome in his iridescent thrift-store suit and green silk tie, she in her Lana Turner black lace and spike heels. How they peered down from their seats in the top balcony at the horseshoe of musicians with their stands and instruments. When the music stopped, Michael caught hold of her hand. Lacing his fingers in hers, he tenderly bit her knuckles. She would have been the only one applauding.

In the Hall of Remembrance, the cold air was dense with flowers, easels and stands and baskets, like someone just won the Kentucky Derby. The beige drapes rippled softly, and on the left, a separate side area, the family sat hidden behind gauze curtains. She could hear sobbing under the music. She should be sobbing like that. He deserved someone better, a girlfriend who would run up there and throw herself on the coffin, screaming. Not sitting back here, stoned, unreal, as if this was happening to someone else. Ahead, people talked and shook hands, they all knew each other. She was the outsider. This was his other world, that she had never seen.

A man with a lion’s mane of gray hair came in, tanned and blue eyed, wearing a wrinkled trench coat, and you could hear the buzz of conversation, people rising to shake his hand, squeeze his arm, embrace him, it had to be the father, Calvin Faraday. He wouldn’t come when Michael was alive, but he could manage to attend the funeral. Big of him. Making a theatrical entrance, all that was missing were the trumpets. He went through a door to the family area behind the gauze curtain and suddenly, they could all hear Meredith’s voice, its angry shrillness, screaming at him. A few moments later, he was back, red-faced, raking a hand through his great head of hair. He took a seat among the old people, put the little hat on, his broad shoulders expressive, shrugging, embarrassed, apologetic. His hair was too bushy for the satin cap, it kept falling off, he had to hold it on with one hand.

The crowd wasn’t large, plenty of room in the hall, eight or ten empty rows between her and the rest of the mourners. Didn’t they know a million people, his famous parents? But maybe they were keeping it quiet. A few old friends, second cousins. Nothing in the
Times
this morning, no obit. Michael would have hated that, it was his favorite part of the paper. Maybe Meredith just couldn’t bear calling people—it was too cruel. Someone had to, but how could you have the strength? Flying all the way back from Uruguay or wherever. Michael’s father looked hagged out under his tan, he was older than Meredith, must have come straight from the airport. She couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, the way Meredith screamed at him, he was old, it couldn’t be good for him. Even if he had been a shitty dad.

The canned music stopped and four old men came onstage with their instrument cases. They sat in a half circle of folding chairs, their sheet music already on the slender stands. Black cases opened and beautiful amber instruments emerged into the old hands. They began to play. It was the Brahms. Yes, that was right, Meredith was right to choose the Brahms. Michael had loved this. The little flavors of Bach you could hear from time to time. He’d even put on the Bach so she could hear it.

“Bach believed the world made sense,” Michael explained. “He believed in God. Now listen to the Brahms.” He put the other back on and folded himself next to her on the furry blue couch. She listened hard, and yes, she could hear it, the same melodious order as the Bach, but then it all fell apart, into stormy wildness. “It’s like he’d like to be Bach, but can’t keep it together,” she said.

Michael was just like that too. He wanted God, but he was too full of moods and doubts. And she had lost that world, where she could sit on the blue couch, listening to music with her face pressed to his chest. She felt the tears coming, but she didn’t surrender to them. She didn’t know who she would be crying for. For him or for herself.

The quartet ended, but the old men stayed in their places, their instruments laid across their laps like infants. Two rabbis came to the podium, a chubby middle-aged one with glasses on his nose, and the other old and jowly in a silver tie. Both wore white shawls with blue stripes and long fringe. She wondered if they came with the cemetery. She doubted they were Meredith’s. The heavy rabbi sang prayers in Hebrew, and people followed from a book in the back of the seats, singing along, rocking forward and back. Sometimes they stood and sometimes they sat, like a concert. She did what the other people did. The jowly old rabbi spoke. His eyebrows were impressive, his voice important in a fake way. “Dearest friends, we are gathered here to bid goodbye to our loved one, Michael Loewy Faraday. A boy of rich promise, a light in the lives of his parents, Meredith Elizabeth Loewy and Calvin Peter Faraday.” She could tell he didn’t know Michael from a hole in the ground, he was just saying what he thought they wanted to hear. She preferred the Hebrew, songs so old they scraped the bottom of your heart like a burned pan.

“Who can know God’s intentions? Who can know His Mind?” She looked at the coffin, lying there like a giant question mark. Like the monolith in
2001
.
One big fucking question. But at the end of the day, who needed a God who’d let Michael get so lost that he’d do something like this? What was the point of a Devil if there was a God like that? Maybe there was just the Devil, the real God of this lousy world. Or maybe there was just nothing at all. And everybody was sitting around praying to a great big nothing, like people praying to airplanes, thinking they were gods. The world one big cargo cult.

She was glad when they told everyone to rise for the Mourner’s Kaddish. She read along with the others, following the English phonetics:
Yit-gadal v’yit-kadash sh’mey raba b’alma dee-v’ra hirutey
. . . It sounded like a made-up language, the kind kids invent and pretend they’re speaking Eskimo. The translation said nothing about death, only God, praising, blessing. Where had God been when Michael was sitting in that room in Twentynine Palms? It reminded her of the Iranian hostages. You ended up taking the side of your captors, it was called the Stockholm syndrome. Well she wasn’t going to fucking praise that kidnapper, that terrorist.
Fuck you, God. Fuck you and your brother too.

The silent box reproached them all. How could he stand it in there? He was so claustrophobic. The pyre on the Ganges, that’s what he’d wanted. What he had seen at ten, in India with his mother. “The burning releases the soul,” he’d said. “So it can go on into the next life.” They’d been sitting in Echo Park, eating strawberries and watching the Latino men fishing where there were no fish, the flowering lotus five feet tall, safe from thieves because nobody could reach them across the water.

“Do you really believe in that?” she asked, sucking the strawberry juice off her stained fingers. “Reincarnation?” Shirley K. was always into that. How you were working off your karma and shit.

He shrugged, watching a yellow swallowtail dip and dive between the pink lotus blooms. “I don’t know. But I like the idea of purification in fire. Public cremation. The bones right there in front of everybody. You see it. It was kind of horrible, really, I had bad dreams about it for years. Not everybody gets burned right, some people are too poor, they don’t buy enough wood. Then they just dump the bones in the river. But if it’s done right? It’s really satisfying. I don’t want to go into the ground.” And all she’d thought was,
He’s been to India.
Only now did it occur to her, what the fuck did Meredith think she was showing him? What kind of a mother took a kid to see dead people getting burned up? Was that her idea of a tourist attraction?