Paint It Black (31 page)

Michael with his six-year-old fingers in Meredith’s long hair, sucking his thumb. Meredith listening to a short black man in a jacket and tie, both holding drinks. Then no more Cal. Another sailor overboard. Exit one husband.

His vanishing fuels a second expeditionary period.
British Museum, January ’
64
.
Bodleian Library.
Michael and a young man studying at a table by a tall window, the shapes of tree branches falling across them.
Bloomsbury.
Michael meeting a hairy, grinning Indian guy, making that bow with his hands pressed to his forehead,
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Parties with brightly dressed groovy people in shades and floppy hats. Meredith in her black concert dress, shaking the hand of a young woman who looked like a horse.
Command performance, Windsor, April ’
64
.
Meredith sitting on the steps of what clearly was Greece,
Parthenon.
Her dark hair long, she wore an oatmeal-colored shift and sandals that wove up her legs. You could see up her skirt to a pair of white panties.

The two of them, then, Meredith and Michael, very tanned, on horseback, on camels, in a tiny plane. Broken columns rising out of the desert like the backbone of an immense dinosaur.
Palmyra.
Latticed windows above worn three-story houses on crooked streets,
Constantinople.
Birds in cages, a tiled dome.
Isfahan.
Smoking piles on steps leading down to a river.
Benares.
The pyres on the Ganges. A dead body burning, right out in the open, black as a barbecue. Not at all as she had imagined, not at all. You could actually see the corpse through the flames.

Michael dancing with a miniskirted blonde, ballroom-style, looking away over the girl’s shoulder as she stared up into his face attentively.
Cotillion, ’
70
.
Michael playing tennis, the shot that his father carried around in his wallet.
I am not
sportif.
Skiing. She could feel the slow drip of anger running down her forehead. Why would he want to present himself as the crippled boy to her, when he could ride a horse, play tennis, swim, drive? What did he get out of it—was it just a put-on, was he laughing at her the whole time? Could she have been in love with someone who didn’t even exist, some puppet he had invented, a life-sized puppet whose strings he pulled?

Michael carrying a bouquet of red flowers.
Siena, ’
71
.
Michael lying on the couch reading.
Köln, ’
72
.
Meredith at a café, looking out at the traffic, her bare shoulder.
Café de Flore.
And another shot, the same café, of the two of them, the waiter must have taken it, Michael was older now, fifteen maybe, their heads together, the same eyes, the same expression.

Meredith and Michael on a striped chaise lounge under a beach umbrella, white boats in the background.
Saint-Tropez, Juillet ’
73
,
she even recognized it by now. Meredith, with her teenaged son, wearing nothing but a string-bikini bottom. She leaned forward, her tits out, not as high, but still attractive, and Michael knelt on the lounge behind her, rubbing suntan oil on her back. She had her head turned, talking to him. Their two dark heads, their faces were so close together, they could have kissed.

Josie’s lungs grew stiff, pressing on her heart. She squinted at Meredith’s serene face. They looked like lovers. Christ, they looked like lovers. She turned back to the café shot, it was there too, sharing a secret. Their heads together. This was not a boy with his mother. A boy with his mother was goofy, sulky, solicitous, tender at best. She returned to
Saint-Tropez,
looked at that picture until she thought the image would begin to dissolve off the page. His face, the eyelashes lying on his cheeks like that, like a sleepwalker. She knew that look. The dreamy look of his sexual face.

Oh, don’t be ridiculous.
Someone took that picture, some friend or other. They weren’t alone. But her brain kept balking, smashing into that picture like waves crashing into rocks. Cold, salty, choking. These weren’t people like the people she knew. Maybe they were like prizewinning dogs, or racehorses, so finely bred they could only fuck each other. They thought Okies were like that, marrying their cousins and so on, when it was them all along.

She turned the page, but it was just life as usual in the Loewy/ Faraday household. As if nothing had happened. Michael at a school with horses, leaning against a fence. Michael sulking dramatically in a chair. Meredith with people in evening clothes . . . but now she knew what to look for. The story wasn’t in the pictures, it was in the jump cuts.
What isn’t there.
Suddenly they weren’t traveling together anymore, suddenly Michael was in school at Ojai, suddenly there were no more intimate conversations over café tables and back rubbings in chaise lounges in France. She gazed at the photo in the silver frame, Michael glancing over the tops of his Ben Franklins against the ivy wall of Harvard. That expression, all his irony, sad and humorous and Bosch, was this what it held,
Saint-Tropez, Juillet ’
73
?

She touched his face, his lips, the wide mouth curling. Had he ever really been hers? Or was the only person he ever loved behind the camera? Meredith’s shadow over everything.

She put the album back in its slot. Now she wished Meredith had burned down the house as she said she would. Before, when there had still been something left of their love, troubled but possible. Now there was nothing but the disgraceful, unavoidable truth that she was nothing to him. An aberration, a failure in judgment, maybe a desperate attempt to hold back the night.

Well, she had known it all along. Hadn’t she asked herself a million times, what was he doing with a girl like her? It wasn’t her at all. How absurd. How ridiculous. She was just a decoy, something you threw out of the car to slow the cops while you made your getaway.

She went back through the closets, then out into the hall, the maid was coming up with a stack of towels. She looked up just as Josie came through Michael’s door.

Josie spoke first. “It was more than just mother and son, wasn’t it? Between them. In France. You were there. You knew.”

Sofía said nothing, just held out two packs of cigarettes, Gauloises Bleues. “You should never come here. This is no your home.” She reached behind Josie and closed the door to Michael’s room. “Leave us.”

“Maybe I will. Maybe I fucking will.”

Josie went into her own room, the room she had come to see as her room, the guest room, unwrapped the cigarettes and lit one. Just like Cal had said, it was Michael and Meredith, from the start. She could tell herself all the pretty stories she wanted, but she was no better than her mother, living in her movie-matinee fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean and Natalie Wood in the middle of a tow yard. She’d walked off a cliff into thin air, not realizing she’d been walking on nothing at all.

29

Paris

J
osie lay on the chaise in the last patch of sun. Inside, the quintet had stopped, they didn’t seem to be starting up again. She held the photo in her hand. Her suitcase was packed, just with the things Sofía had brought from her house, she was taking nothing Meredith had given her. The sun moved toward the observatory. Soon it would be dark.
The brevity of beauty.
She rested her head against the back of the lounge, feeling the last warmth on her face. How elegant, finally, she had become. It was the coldness, she hadn’t understood that before. Coins of light played across the top of the pool, tiny dapples of gold above the dark.

Finally, Meredith emerged from the French doors onto the brick terrace above the pool, like an actress making an appearance onstage. Stretching, first lifting her arms straight over her head, turning her linked hands palms up, then, elbows cocked, bending from side to side, she let her arms drop with a contented sigh. “Ah, that was wonderful. It’s been too long, I’ve been gathering moss. So what have you been doing with yourself all this time?”

Then, Meredith noticed her suitcase.

Josie waited. That’s the way you handled a scene, you controlled the silences. She crossed her legs Elena-style, on the chaise, and lit a cigarette. She felt the cold rage coiling inside her, watching how Meredith moved, her body so like his, that flowing-sea quality, the long legs, long forearms, the looseness of hip and shoulder and wrist. The utter selfishness. There was her rival, right there. All along. She tapped the photo in her hands, drawing Meredith’s attention to it, though the older woman was pretending she saw nothing. Instead, she picked off some dead leaves from a straggly fern growing out of a stone urn, one of the set that flanked the steps down to the pool.

“She’s being mysterious,” Meredith said to the plant. “Nothing like a good mystery at the end of the day.”

Sofía emerged from the kitchen door in her neat day dress and heels, her starched apron, bearing a tray, two tumblers, a Scotch on the rocks for Meredith, the other glass containing something clear. She served Meredith on the terrace, at the table just where her mother had sat that day with Mauritz and herself as a baby, then brought the second drink down to Josie, at the other end of the pool. Sofía managing to offer the tray in a way that she wouldn’t have to actually hand the glass to her. The woman’s narrow face worked with the effort of withheld information. Josie could see that Sofía had not told Meredith about catching her coming out of Michael’s room.
Leave us,
the woman’s eyes said, reflecting her tiny image in their obsidian mirrors—the yellow fake fur, a white dot of bleached hair, the Jackie O sunglasses.

Meredith sat at the table, drinking her drink, and Josie imagined a leopard, spread out on one of these heavy branches overhead, waiting for something sizable to fall down on. Impersonal as God. Though not to the deer, who would feel the fatal drop, the deer who would take it all very personally.

She took a deep draft of her own drink, Stoli on the rocks, the clean burn of it in her nose and throat. It was just what she wanted, that heat, she felt suddenly warmer. It was what you wanted to drink if you were going to Siberia, to see the dead piled by the train. If you were going into the tiger cage.

The woman was up again, prowling around the upper terrace, looking up into the trees, across the valley to the observatory’s domes. Then she swung down the steps, on a diagonal, her stride like a big cat’s slink, weighty and silent. Josie drank again, watching her, you couldn’t take your eyes off someone like that, she could see how she would take possession of a concert hall, no one would be able to look anywhere else. Meredith prowled down the outside of the pool, drink in one hand. Behind her, the gold of the setting sun bathed the heavy-branched live oaks and outlined Meredith’s sable hair. She stopped to tear some browned flowers off a pink camellia and threw them into the bushes. She leaned over and broke the leaf off a plant, tore it, sniffing.

“I love these scented geraniums. We’ve got lemon, there’s peppermint and even chocolate. Have you smelled this?” She came around the foot of the pool, extending her hand, close enough that Josie could see the wet hair around her face from the exertion of the Brahms quintet.

“Tell me about Saint-Tropez.”

Meredith halted in midstep, it was just an instant, but Josie could see her every gesture, as if magnified, the way her eyes paled, pupils contracting. Then she smiled, relaxed, lifting the shredded geranium leaf to her nose. “Just a resort town. A little tacky. People go to Ibiza now. Why do you ask?” And Josie knew that Meredith could see the photograph now. Playing innocent, as her silent leopard’s body came nearer.

She took another big slug of the Stoli, felt the flush in her head. She wasn’t cold anymore. Heat filled her as she stared at Michael’s mother, the source of all disaster. “Was it tacky in ’seventy-three? When you went with Michael?” Clicking her nail on the edge of the photo.

“Maybe,” Meredith said. “But we had our traditions. That was Michael, he loved traditions. I think it gave him structure. We’re a nomadic people.”

“Something different happened that summer.” She could feel the Stoli singing in her ears. She had been so lethargic lately, sedated. It was good to feel the rush of energy, her heart full of blood and outrage.

“Maybe.” Meredith passed behind Josie’s chaise. She could hear the ice rattling in Meredith’s Scotch.

She didn’t want to strain to follow her, she just tilted her head, as the voice moved from her left to her right. She didn’t like Meredith being behind her. Anything could happen when you couldn’t see them. You had to watch them every second.

“What happened in Saint-Tropez, that you didn’t go back?” The damp sheets, the smell of the sea, nobody but the two of them. Who would know? They could pretend it hadn’t happened. They both loved pretending things that weren’t true.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” Now she could see her, she’d moved to the edge of the pool, squatted down, tested the water with her fingers. Then she glanced up at Josie, pinning her with those green eyes.

“I always wondered what your hold on him was. I couldn’t figure it out. Like you were some heroin he couldn’t put down.”

Meredith stopped then, her bullshit testing of the water, it was damn freezing, you didn’t need a college degree to figure that out. She straightened, very fast, it startled her. Was Meredith going to hit her? But the woman only shook the water off her hand. “Where did this all come from? Really, Josie, four hours ago you were happy as a lark. Maybe you shouldn’t mix your meds.” She came and sat down on the chaise just next to Josie’s.

Josie blew a smoke ring, another inside of it. Inside and inside. That’s the way it played up here, one ring inside another. Just when you thought you knew what was up. “Let me tell you something about your son. You know what he liked?” She took the last drink of Stoli, exhaled the heavy fume. “He liked doing things when he was pretending to be doing something else.” She put the glass down on the table between them, just a tiny table. She leaned over so her face was only inches from Meredith’s and lowered her voice to a whisper. “For instance, he liked me to fuck him while he was talking on the phone with you.”

Now Meredith seemed to get it. Josie wasn’t going to be intimidated by her high-class bullshit anymore. This wasn’t going to go down that way. She could smell her smoky perfume, the sharp sweat from the session with the old men.

The older woman blinked, set her Scotch down on the table, leveled her green gaze at Josie. “Why are you trying to hurt me? When I took you in. Treated you like my own child.”

“What happened in Saint-Tropez?”

She flicked the corner of the photograph. Meredith and her leopard son, him rubbing her, her purring. Still the woman made no move to see it, just kept staring at Josie, as if she might sprout another head.

“Michael never got past it.”

“Is that what he said?” Meredith said sharply, then backed off, taking a drink of her melting-ice Scotch that smelled like a forest fire. She smiled. “Oh, Josie, you know what he was like. How self-dramatizing he could be.” Red under green. So it was true.

“You fucked him. In Saint-Tropez.” Josie dropped the photograph onto the table. One Card Pickup.

Meredith leaned over and looked at it, but didn’t pick it up. Didn’t touch it. She took a long breath, not a gasp but a sensuous inhalation, a long, luxurious outbreath. “Where did you get this? Have you been going through my things?”

“Are you insisting on privacy all of a sudden? You, of all people?” Josie stabbed at the photo with her forefinger. “Explain that, if you can.”

The smile widened and a laugh broke over her like a wave, a full-throated laugh, giving her a view of her fabulous square white teeth, even as pavement, and her long column of neck. “Josie Tyrell. What a prude you are. Who would have guessed? You take off your clothes every day, but Lord, see a mother sunbathing with her son, suddenly you’re the morality squad.” She wiped the corners of her eyes, wet with laughter. “God, you’re so American. Terrified of the body, terrified of sex, while being completely obsessed with it. What is it that bothers you the most? That you weren’t there, or is it just someone my age still comfortable in her own skin?”

She could kill her.
Saint-Tropez, Juillet ’
73
.
“That’s too fucking comfortable,” Josie said, pointing at the picture. She wanted to bash Meredith’s face into it. “Way too fucking comfortable, Meredith. That’s your goddamn son.”

Meredith gazed down at the photo, her and Michael, and sadness replaced the smile that had just swept her face. “Our last good summer,” she said, pushing back her dark hair. “Maybe one day you’ll have a son. Then you’ll know. It’s a special relationship.”

Josie grabbed the photo off the table and thrust it in front of Meredith’s face so she could get a good look, a good close look. “You didn’t want him to have a girlfriend. You fucked up everything you could and now I know why.”
Civilization and Its Discontents.
She held out the photo the way a cop holds a badge.
Argue with this, motherfucker.

Meredith didn’t look. She was looking at Josie, her cool gaze unwavering. “Try to understand. I’ve lost so many people. We were close, yes. Have I ever denied it? And yes, I disapproved of you, I thought he could do better. Maybe I was wrong about that and a million other things, and I’ve told you so. But what you’re picturing goes beyond anything I would do. Ever. You’ve got to believe me.”

Josie kept holding out the photograph, but she felt less sure than she’d been. She reached for her glass but it was empty.

Meredith put her cool hand on Josie’s wrist and gently pressed her arm down. The sight of her wrist under that enormous hand shocked her, it looked like a twig under a tiger’s paw. She was suddenly tired.

“In Europe, women sunbathe with their families, and nobody thinks, God, they’re having sex. I swear to you.” She gently pulled the photo out of Josie’s hand, then stood up, facing into the setting sun. The last sunlight licked the domes of the observatory and the oaks and the pool, it was a poster for California from the orange-grove days. “I don’t even care that you went through my things. Go through everything, it doesn’t matter anymore, wear my clothes. Just stop thinking of me as a monster every time you see something you don’t understand.”

She had felt it so clearly before. But now she wasn’t sure. Maybe they hadn’t actually fucked. Maybe it just was what it was, something with a line so fine, it didn’t exist. One more sad thing. She would never know. After all, she hadn’t been there, in that room. She couldn’t be sure.
And what if it had?
There was nothing anybody was going to do about it now. The shape of her back, so much like his. The squared shoulders, the slender hidden strength. She missed him so much. She was so tired, she felt like crying.

Meredith looked at the photo, then slipped it into her pocket. “As a matter of fact, there’s something I wanted to talk to you about.” She came back over and sat on Josie’s lounge chair, down by her feet. “I’ve decided to close up the house. I’m going back out on tour.”

Closing up the house? Just a moment ago, Josie could have killed her. Now she felt abandoned. Leaving? Just like Cal. Picking up and going back on the road, Buenos Aires, Bombay. Leaving her stuck here, discarded, forgotten. Just as Michael had left her. These people, they picked you up and played with you and left you lying in the rain. Meredith back on tour. Applause and fans and five-star suites, while Josie—yeah, what? Went back to the shack on Lemoyne. Insomnia and the hulls of dead dreams blowing across the floor of the empty rooms like dry leaves. “So when did you decide this?”

“I just decided.”

Punishment was swift. Christ. “Because of me. Because of this.”

“No. No, Josie.” She reached out and took Josie’s small hands in her huge ones. “I’m a musician, that’s all. It’s what I know.” Gently, she pulled Josie’s sunglasses off, and looked right into her with that gaze that was like touch. “Look, this isn’t going to get any better. Believe me, I’ve been here before. They say time heals all wounds but they’re lying.” She folded the sunglasses and put them on the table with their watery tumblers. “I know it sounds heartless to go back on the road, but it isn’t what you think.”

Josie hated people assuming what she thought. “How could you know what I’m thinking?”

“It sounds terribly glamorous. Room service and white-tie dinners, limousines. When it’s really a string of practice rooms and rehearsals, and more taxis and train stations than you can imagine.”

That was what she’d thought, but what difference did it make now? Meredith was closing up shop. Taking her ball and going home. Sofía would cover the chandeliers and the furniture and double bolt the door, they would head out for Tunisia or Timbuktu. Just like fucking Cal. Moving on. These fucking people. Leaving her with Michael’s death in her lap. She strained at the air, groped in her schoolbag for her cigarettes.