Paint It Black (30 page)

The woman, Lisbeth, was more serious than Mauritz, more direct in her gaze, and they were almost always together. Walking on the river. Waltzing, Mauritz in a tailcoat, Lisbeth in a long gown with a handkerchief hem.
Musikverein Ball,
1932
.
Obviously a hot love affair. The woman looked a little like Meredith, but it couldn’t be her mother, Meredith had been born in the U.S., her mother’s name was Pauline. Such handsome people talking, laughing, playing instruments, skiing in old-fashioned black sunglasses, waiters on ice skates. She envied their progress through life, carefully annotated in the white writing, their names, the places, the dates. The liveliness of their faces. Those times were so much more real, those people more alive than people today. The living had a deadness now, where the dead had been so alive. She envied them, each and every one. Mauritz and Lisbeth, Schatze and Kaspar and Jan. She could imagine herself and Michael among them, laughing. That’s where they should have been. If only there had been a way. He would have found himself there. It would have been the right place for him, with Schatze and Kaspar.

The next album, a light brown cowhide stamped in gold diagonal lines, opened in Los Angeles, a jump cut without the help of a train or boat shot, no waving goodbye, no Statue of Liberty, no “Welcome to California.” It made you wonder what you’d missed. Only the dates showed it was the next album, it had to be. The paper of this album was a soft cream, the annotations in black, a round, more childish hand. In California, Mauritz was tanned, he smiled, there were new friends. Dinners with white tablecloths, here in this house. A woman in shorts laughing under a eucalyptus.
Galka Scheyer,
1933
.
Mauritz at the beach, the men wearing bathing suits with tops,
Salka and Eisenstein.
But Mauritz had changed. He reminded Josie of today out by the pool—warm in the sun, but just underneath it, cold like an undertow.

A blond woman with pale eyes made her appearance, wide shoulders in a halter dress before a microphone, her hair in a marcel wave. Lounging at a pool, her long fleshy legs.
Ambassador Hotel,
1933
.
Wearing a corsage and a lace mantilla, Mauritz’s arm around her neck—you could tell she was taller than he was. Their wedding picture.
April
1934
.
Even at their wedding dinner, they were an odd pairing—together, but not in the same way as Mauritz and Lisbeth had been in Vienna. The blonde seemed out of her depth, even at her own wedding, as if she had just been brought along—sitting uneasily with the men smoking cigars around a table full of drinks—she was not intrinsic to the party, not part of it as Lisbeth had been in the black album. She was just with Mauritz.

Suddenly, in a bed jacket, a dark-haired baby on her lap.

Josie bent down to look closer at Meredith and her mother. The eyes were the same. But it was strange, Meredith more closely resembled Lisbeth than her own mother. Many shots followed of Mauritz at parties,
Salka Viertel, Garbo, Huxley
1937
.
Mauritz with Meredith, her Shirley Temple short dresses from Lanz with smocking across the front,
comme il faut.
But there was only one shot of the three of them together, at the table in the garden, she recognized it—it was in this very house, at the same table where Michael had sat when he drew her that day in the pool. Mauritz had Meredith on his lap and Pauline smoked sulkily. She recognized that sulk, oh yes. Pauline at a party with Mauritz, who turned away from her to talk to the dark-haired woman on his right.
Hedy Lamarr, Billy Wilder’s
1939
.
Pauline had a nugget-sized diamond on her finger and an expression like the woman in
Citizen Kane
in the vast empty house, working the jigsaw puzzle.

Suddenly, no more Pauline. She wondered what had happened to her. Michael only said his mother’s mother was a singer who left when Meredith was a little girl. But now, Josie realized there was more to the story, though whether Michael knew it and didn’t say or really had accepted Meredith’s version was unclear. Because really, what woman ever left a small child behind with its father? Seeing that look on the woman’s face in the garden, that mix of boredom and disgust and hopelessness, she imagined a different scenario. An affair, with a musician maybe, a horn player with the band at the Ambassador, someone who didn’t look down on her because she was big and blond and uneducated, just a big American dummy compared to Lisbeth. But she wouldn’t have run off and left her child with Mauritz. No, he must have discovered her affair, and offered to pay her to get lost, if she just left the girl with him. And Pauline took him up on the deal. He never loved her. She had only brought Lisbeth back to him. He didn’t need her anymore.

As Josie looked through the ensuing years, the procession of people, Meredith becoming the kind of girl that people who have children hope for—curly dark hair and the translucent eyes, she couldn’t see their color in the black-and-white photographs, but she knew they were green green green—she couldn’t help but think of Pauline. How she took the money, in an envelope maybe, or one big check, and her furs and the ring, took it all and opened a bar somewhere, a little cocktail lounge in the desert maybe. She was probably out there even now, some blowsy granny who could still belt it out when she’d had enough to drink. Probably counted herself lucky to have gotten out of here with her sanity. She might have married the horn player, who would be the bartender, and had a couple more kids, and they would all have green eyes. But none with the hypnotic quality of her first daughter’s. Just ordinary people, ordinary kids.

Josie went to the window, looked out. Was this the secret to Meredith—that she had replaced her mother in her father’s affection? Just as Michael had replaced Cal.
Screws up the whole Oedipal chain of command.

Oak leaves whirled in small eddies over the bricks. Everything so empty. She flipped listlessly through the red album, the green one. Baby Meredith shakes hands with people, baby curtsies, baby sits at a monstrous keyboard next to proud papa.
First recital, June
1942
. Wilshire Ebell.
Meredith at the keyboard, various ages, an extraordinarily beautiful child in dark dresses with white cutwork collars and cuffs. Piano teachers. Meredith with her father, now silver haired, holding up a cup or a certificate. Parties,
Arnold Schoenberg,
an old man with big ears, bald with a drawn face, white handkerchief in his pocket.
Cyd Charisse, Igor and Vera Stravinsky.

The teachers disappear, leaving just the young woman, triumphant, alone. Tall now, dramatic, skin very pale against the black dress, her dark hair lost in the blackness of the hall. Her luminous face attracting all the light.
Royce Hall,
1948
.
Back East pictures, brick buildings, trees without leaves. Meredith in a dark coat with a tormented-looking older man.
Serkin, Curtis, winter
1954
.
Serkin, her teacher, it had been a big deal.

A picture of a sign,
Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy, Serkin, Oct.
27
.
Carnegie Hall. It didn’t look as fancy as she thought it would. Then the grand piano, the hall, a girl in a sleeveless dress, her long white arms, an orchestra behind her, her face almost ugly with the effort of what she was performing. Then flushed and triumphant, holding a bouquet of roses, a fat old man beaming at her.

Then another unnerving jump, this time to travel shots, cities, landmarks.
Berlin. Covent Garden. Concertgebouw.
Men in tailcoats, with rumpled hair and foreign-sounding names.
Von Karajan, Boulez, Juin
1956
.
Boulez. They were going to see Boulez on the twenty-eighth. This very same man. This world was still going on. Would she too be in pictures like this,
Josie and Boulez,
1981
?
She ran her hands over the postcards from opera houses, postcards from hotels: George V, Hôtel de l’Europe. Meredith in conversation with famous people, you could tell they were famous, there was an aura about them, even the fat old men in heavy eyeglasses. Now the stars are there to see Meredith—
David Niven, Simone Signoret, Maria Callas,
a handsome woman with striking features next to whom Meredith seemed very young and otherworldly.

But not a trace of Mauritz, who killed himself a month after her Carnegie Hall debut.

No little pamphlet from the funeral which Meredith had not attended, no photograph of the grave, no obituary, no pressed flower.
Let’s not say any more about it. Let’s just go from here.
No indication that anything had gone awry, only his absence, everywhere. First Lisbeth, then Pauline, then Mauritz. Death, disappearance, what you didn’t talk about, like a sewer running under a street, the shit was down there, out of sight, but you could smell it, it didn’t go away, it didn’t vanish. It was the absence behind everything. The album ended with the picture of Meredith that was on the table. Lying on the couch, her long arm behind her. And now she saw it, the sadness, the absences in her eyes. Just under the sun-warmed surface of her new life.

People showed you everything in what they left out. No father, but suddenly, here was Cal in the green album,
Cap d’Antibes, Juin
1957
.
How beautiful the letters looked, a place, a season. She tried to say them under her breath,
Cap d’Antibes. Juin.
“Zhwain. Antibe.” The handwriting less childish now, less round. Cal and Meredith, both very tan, on a terrace of a restaurant in the evening. Both so handsome. Cal’s hair was dark like hers, and longer than was the style. The remains of a meal, dishes and bottles and wineglasses crowded the white-clad table. Sitting very close together for the picture—Cal must have asked the waiter to take it. She noticed that Cal’s hand was under the table, she wondered what it was doing as they smiled for the picture. Meredith’s face so poised, so assured, but was that hand between Meredith’s thighs? Pushing aside her handmade lace panties while the waiter told them to get closer, closer?

Cal and Meredith in white, riding a motor scooter up some steep road paved in cobblestones.
Grande Corniche, Juillet
1957
.
“Corniche,” she whispered. Meredith sidesaddle, in a dress and sandals and big sunglasses, clinging to his back. Josie’s heart pounded. Never was she with Michael the way Meredith and Cal had been. Such life in them. Rich and famous and young, beautiful like a matched set of horses.

She turned the page, startled to find a shot of Meredith topless, lying on a striped lounge under an umbrella, her long body tanned against the paler stripes, propped up on her elbows, her breasts large, her nipples dark and erect. Just a photograph like all the others, affixed to the page with the little black stick-on corners. She stared at the shot, trying to understand how Meredith, who was so proper, who labeled in a clear hand all the pictures in a family album as if it would go into a history book, who couldn’t get over that her son had fallen in love with an art model, would include a picture of herself lying on a beach in public with her tits out. Hypocrite. And there was Cal, wearing a tiny racing bikini, his cock’s outlines visible for anybody to see. She flipped ahead to see if there were any shots of them actually getting it on.
Oh Christ, Josie, don’t be such a hick. It’s Saint-Tropez. Don’t be such an Okie. You shouldn’t even notice that Meredith has no top on, that you can see that Cal is uncircumcised.

More dinner shots, Meredith with Cal, Josie recognized Leonard Bernstein, she’d seen his face and thick hair on album covers. She looked more closely at this one. Meredith wore a strapless dress and white gloves over the elbow, and she listened to Bernstein on her left who was talking to her. Cal had his arm stretched across the back of her chair. Territorial. He was listening too, but not as entranced as Meredith was. It looked like they were already married now. Other men vying for his wife’s attention. Already problems, she could feel the strain between them.

And then Michael made his appearance, the small blue-edged birth announcement, date, weight, length. Jesus, how many pictures could they take of one little baby? Cute, with those eyelashes, he looked like a baby in a Disney cartoon.

She envied him. Even dead, she couldn’t help it. How many pictures did her parents have of her in the family album? The family album, such as it was. A shredded white cloth-covered volume with its discolored plastic overlay that never quite stuck down, later photos just thrown in there loose. There were three. One of her with Corinne and Bo in the bathtub. The one of her and Jimmy in the tow truck with their father, and one of her at sixteen on roller skates serving Cokes at the Rollerama roller disco. And that was it. The unfairness of it grabbed at her as she looked at the photo of the three Faradays in a hammock under a live oak. These people living important lives, assuming that posterity would need to know what they were doing in June 1960. Documenting. The photos in her parents’ family album were purely accidental. Someone had a camera, thought something was cute or funny—Uncle Dave passed out on the couch at a party, someone put a bra over his head and ears like earmuffs.

But there was no posterity for the Faraday album. They were a dead end. All that documenting for nothing. Meredith and Michael, sharing a secret on the couch, their foreheads together, his little hand on her breast. God, if she could have had his child. That sweetness, she practically couldn’t look at it. Cal at a book signing. Cal, smoking a cigarette at his typewriter, at the desk in Mauritz’s study, handsome in that craggy way, every shot looked like a book-jacket photo. Meredith on the glider in the yard, reading with Michael, him in diapers. Meredith with Michael on her lap at the keyboard of the big concert grand in the living room, his small hands striking the keys, her big hands on either side of his.
You know what they were like.
Michael on a plane in a shorts suit, solemnly talking to the captain. Michael at four or five, naked in a hammock, reading a book, not a kid’s book, something hardbound, and absently fondling his baby dick. The book was heavy, he propped it on its side. If it had been anyone else’s kid, and he wasn’t masturbating, you’d think it was a staged photograph. The cloud of dark ringlets and the long eyelashes, he looked like a child in a fairy tale, a child who lived in a blackberry bush.