Paint It Black (32 page)

Meredith reached over and Josie jerked her head back instinctively, but Meredith just tilted Josie’s chin up to look her in the eye. “I want you to come with me.”

She heard it, but so faintly through the roaring in her head she wasn’t sure, maybe she’d just imagined it.

“It’s meant so much to me to have you here. Even if you are a pain in the ass, who else do I have now?”

The world, which had just shriveled to the size of a pea, suddenly opened again. Going on tour with Meredith?
Wien, Hamburg, Edinburgh, Concertgebouw?
Her? Was she serious? Her heart thumped in her chest so loud she could hear it like a kick drum. She tried to remember, this was the woman who had eaten him away, who had destroyed him. But she was more afraid of being left behind. She knew she was being asked to forget what she knew, in exchange for something she’d never had. But who would blame her?
Everybody.
But whose business was it? There was nothing stopping her. A jay swooped across the silent pool, retreating to squawk among the camellias.

“But what would I do, when you’re off doing all that?”

Meredith laughed softly, stroked her face with the back of her forefinger. “Well, what do you do here?”

She tried to think, what did she mean, but it was just the giant blank screen, she didn’t even know what to ask.

Meredith embraced her. Took her in her arms, fake fur and all. She could feel the woman’s strength, inhaled the smell of her, the Scotch she’d been drinking. “Josie, you’re my son’s fiancée. My daughter-in-law. You’re all the family I’ve got left. We’ll make sure you have a good time. I promise.”

She heard a small voice, her father’s jealousy.
You got a family. You know where all hers ends up.
But where did Josie’s own family end up? Bakersfield. CYA. Revival meeting. Some shit job if she was lucky. “How long would we be gone?”

Meredith left an arm around her shoulders, still holding her tight. “I don’t think I’m coming back, Josie. I’ve had it with this place. I hope this whole godforsaken city falls into the sea.”

She could really go away like that?
Never,
the sound of it, so big, so final. And yet, it was everywhere, wasn’t it? That was how things went. Things
were
big, they were final.
Never and never.
The person you loved better than anyone in the world died and then you left and never came back.

“Well? You want to come?”

Josie drew in a deep breath, nodded. A very small nod, but it was enough. Signs and signals.

“Good. I’ll call Markovsky. We’ll be off in no time.” She squeezed her shoulder once again and stood. “We’ll start with Paris, I know you’ll love that. I have a flat in the sixteenth, just off the Avenue Foch.” She brushed the wrinkles from her skirt. “Actually, I’m surprised Michael never took you.”

A flat in the sixteenth. Off the Avenue Foch.
She felt like lightning had hit her and cut her in two top to bottom. All those evenings, dreaming of Paris in their shack on Lemoyne, when they could have just fucking gotten on a plane and gone? While Josie was working like a donkey, trying to put together the money for rent and food and art supplies? A flat in the sixteenth?
Was it very far from Montmartre, you fucking asshole? Was it so very far?
They could have gone anytime. But he didn’t want to. He didn’t want her to come in from the cold. He wanted to keep her in the dark like some goddamn potato. As their lives closed around them.

She was glad for the gathering night, she could feel her face burning with anger, her eyes stinging with sudden tears.
Who the fuck were you, Michael?
A figment of somebody’s imagination, but whose? Hers? His? Or some mutually agreed upon fantasy?

Meredith just chattered on, walking around, picking dead flower heads off the bushes. “We’ll have a little stopover in Paris to get our bearings, and then pick up the tour in Frankfurt. It’s six weeks in Germany, three in Switzerland, and then on to Vienna. We’ll stay at the Imperial, you’ll adore that. I’ve got the Brahms Second, God knows why I did that, threw myself to the lions, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

Café Central, Wien.
“I don’t have a passport.”

“Well, I wouldn’t think you would.” Meredith laughed, and came over and picked up the two glasses from the table. “Never mind, Markovsky knows how to speed things up. It won’t take long.”

Even the federal government bent to Meredith’s will. Josie should be outraged, but now she was on the other side of the have-not divide. Not idling beside some Dust Bowl highway, stuck at the California border checkpoint with a mattress and the kitchen stove tied to the roof of the truck. This was a flat in the sixteenth, off the Avenue Foch. She couldn’t have Michael, but she could take his place on the train, his seat in first class. Unlock all the doors. She picked up her suitcase. It seemed ridiculous now, a child running away from home with her teddy bear and a peanut-butter sandwich. She was going all the way now.

30

Drown

T
ime was moving again. All speeded up. All wrong. She had never felt wronger in her life. The house was supposed to be the place where the clocks had all stopped, but they’d all started again.
Tickety-tock.
Her passport had arrived by special messenger. She’d been a good girl and had her roots erased by a Beverly Hills salon, the picture was a girl she didn’t recognize. They were leaving Tuesday morning, first class, Air France.
Première classe.
Meredith up in her room, on the phone. Talking the night away.
Yackety-yack.
Ever since she’d decided to leave, Meredith was like a woman on crank. Contacting her buddies from Brussels to Berlin. She gained energy by the day, like a radioactive mutant in a horror film. Up at nine, practicing until three, running through her repertoire, Bach and Schubert and Beethoven. Mendelssohn and Schumann, Dvor?255–135?ák and Bartók, and the big Second, over and over and over again. The music chased itself in Josie’s head until she had to sit outside and play something on the blue guitar just to get a different tune in her ear.
Saint Louis woman, wears her diamond rings
. . .

She was getting it, humming under her breath. She took a hit of the cigarette she’d wedged between the strings, up by the pegs, the way her daddy played, and tried not to think about Europe, coming at her like a truck that had lost its brakes on the Grapevine. The clothes Meredith bought her, at Saks and Magnin’s and Bullock’s Wilshire, hanging in the closet upstairs. Heavy clothes for the European winter, Christ, she’d never even seen snow, except that once when she and Michael had driven up the 2 into the Angeles Crest. It was hard and crusty and they made feeble snowballs and threw them at each other. “Not warm enough,” Meredith kept saying. “You’re a skinny little kid, you’re going to freeze.” She got lined wool pants and long skirts and high leather boots, a down cocoon and a cape and a brown and white pony-skin coat that cost five hundred dollars. Dresses for receptions and dinners, velvets and chiffons and even an evening gown.

Boulez was in town, they went to see him rehearse at the Music Center. He’d been all over the orchestra, pointing out everything people did wrong, it was excruciating. He called out the third horn player or the second bassoon, made them do bar 49 over about three times in front of everyone until he thought it was all right.

“Are they always this mean?” she’d asked Meredith, sitting next to her in the red-velvet seats of the empty auditorium.

Meredith smiled. Leaned close to Josie, explained in a low voice, “He has a vision of how the music should sound. This is how he shapes the performance. You should see some of them. Especially the ones who hate women. They love to see if they can make you cry.”

Josie imagined some old guy trying to make Meredith cry. Good fucking luck.

Up close, Boulez wasn’t as scary as he’d seemed, a nice old guy, with deep indentations in his cheeks and bright brown eyes. Again, Meredith introduced her as her son’s fiancée. “I’m very sorry, my dear,” he said, holding her hands in his.

She had to admit, it had been interesting to go to the concert after watching them pick the Berg apart bar by bar. Now she knew what to listen for, and afterward, they went to dinner with Boulez and some other people, an unbelievably expensive restaurant with frosted-glass panels like perfume bottles. She sat between Boulez and some guy from the Music Center, at first she’d been flattered that he would sit next to her, ask about her so-called career, the acting and modeling, and tell her a bit about Berg, but then the critic chimed in, and soon they were all talking about some other conductor’s treatment of Berg, which bled into some juicy gossip about the conductor, then a play they’d all seen, a song cycle presented at a Schubert festival, names and places,
Salzburg
and
Aspen
and
Bayreuth,
somebody’s recordings of Poulenc, she might as well have been a nicely turned-out store mannequin someone had propped in a chair as a gag. She could see, it didn’t matter how pretty you were in Meredith’s world, or smart, or original either. If you weren’t Somebody, you just didn’t have a thing to say. She didn’t know how drunk she’d gotten until it was time to go home.

And now they were leaving. Or someone was leaving. Somebody whose passport said
Josephine Tyrell.
Leaving Michael behind in his grave on the hill. Leaving it all behind.

Out by the pool tonight, the dappled clouds spread against the sky like tufts of wool on an old stuffed animal. The moon, bright behind them, held the dark cloud forms against the lighter backdrop of the night. She gazed down into the pool at the sky. She was finally, perfectly high, the exactly correct balance between pills and booze. Weightless, suspended between two brightnesses. In the daytime, the pool was the dark thing, but at night, it was the bright thing in the dark. She concentrated on the simple chord changes,
Saint Louis woman, wears her diamond rings . . .

She leaned over the edge of the pool, ran her fingers into the cold water, rippling the sky. “So what do you think, Michael?” she asked the dark water. “I’m a-goin to Paree. I be sleepin in your bed, whaddya think of that?” The jittery image of herself peered back across the dark mirror, the white of her face, the silver of her hair. “It should have been us.” They could have gone anytime. But no, he wanted to keep her down in Echo Park, scratching like some Okie chicken, like she’d done all her life. She could feel the tears coming. She was really getting to be a sloppy drunk. She wiped her tears, her nose.

Down in the water, her face like a full moon over the tufted yellow fake fur coat. That same fucking face, that face. “What are you looking at, piece of shit? You just shut the fuck up.” Sliding right into his chair. Still warm from his body. Right at home with the leopard people.

In Paris right now it was daytime. That’s what she had to remember. People on bicycles, taking the Métro, drinking Pernod in sidewalk cafés. Splashing water into clear liquid and watching it turn white, the way they used to in Echo Park. Now she’d see the real thing. But not with him. Not even on her own. If she had one stitch of honor that’s what she’d do, just scrape some bucks together and get on a plane. Meredith didn’t have a patent on air travel. But no, that wasn’t what she wanted. She wanted the whole nine yards. His world. His life.

“You shouldn’t have said you loved me if you didn’t,” she whispered to him, in the trees, in the night. “If you really wanted her.” She leaned over and picked up her tumbler of Stoli from the lip of the pool. Felt herself coming out of the chair, she righted herself just in time. Didn’t even spill her drink. “You know you fucking played tennis. You played everything. Why couldn’t you tell me?” He could tell her about Meadowlands, but not about Meredith. Not about
Saint-Tropez, ’
73
.
And now she was going to try to wear his shoes. Move into his room. Yeah, making herself right at home. Leaving him behind in his dark bed, all alone.

Well, wasn’t this what you wanted all along?
something whispered.

It wasn’t true, where the fuck did that come from? Christ, she’d loved him more than she had imagined it possible to love.

But she was remembering it less and less.
You’ll have to remember for both of us.
She wanted to. But how could she, all on her own? It was hard, she needed to forget as well as remember. A fine line. And Meredith being around complicated it even more. She was so goddamn much like Michael, Josie was forgetting what he looked like. She couldn’t remember what his voice sounded like. She didn’t even know whom she was grieving for anymore, at times it felt like she’d just made him up.

You didn’t love him. You just wanted to be him.

No! That was a lie. But . . . what if it wasn’t? That underneath it all, what if this was what she loved? Not who he was but what he was. If what she really wanted was to sit in his seat, eat with his spoon. Her reflection beamed back, down there in the dark, like an unknown moon.

She hadn’t wanted him to die, what was she thinking?
She loved him! She’d always loved him, even when it got bad, like last summer when he pulled away from her, as if her touch was diseased. When he tormented her with his doubts, until she wanted to scream. She’d tried so hard to reassure him that she’d loved him since that first day, when she’d swum here, bathing in the greenness of his gaze.
You envied him, his years in Europe, his family and passports and maids from Seville. You tried to destroy him.

Fuck. She put the guitar down. These were not her thoughts, they frightened her, the way they came out of nowhere. But truthfully? Honestly, she didn’t know what the truth was anymore. She took another swallow of Meredith’s good Stoli, lit a cigarette, let the smoke tumble out of her nose. The reds weren’t working as well as they should have, that piece of shit Red must have sold Nick a bunch of outdated pharmies. She took another slug of Transsiberian firewater.
Moscow, city of a thousand and three bell towers . . .

And now she was on her way to Europe. Josie Tyrell, Bakersfield High Class of Nothing Rien Nada Niente Null. “Well I’m going,” she said up to the black stars. “Hear that? And if you don’t like it you can go screw.” Except that he couldn’t. “No screwing for you,” she said. “Nevermore, croaked the raven.” That beautiful body she could screw all day long when he’d let her. Just to touch him. But he didn’t want to.

And then the fucking dog came along. Every dog had his day and that dog fucking had to have his.

She leaned forward to see her face in the bright water. So treacherous, her and her moon face, her big innocent eyes . . . She spit at herself but her face reassembled, it wouldn’t go away.

In November it should be murky and warm
but it wasn’t, it had been cold and pissing down rain. Michael curled in the passenger seat, mute and sulky, he’d been like that all day. They’d gone to the museum, she thought it might help for him to get out of the house, but he hadn’t liked anything, from the show on down to the cup of coffee he bought—took one sip and threw it in the trash. Staring out at the rain through the heartbeat of windshield wipers. And the dog ran out into the street. It would have made it to the other side, but a car came over the crest of the hill, a patched little Toyota in primer gray, and honked, and the fucking thing lost its nerve and turned back, flew to the curb. The car never stopped.

She should have kept going, she should have just run the fucking thing over, kept going and never looked back, that was the thing to do. But she stopped. Everybody’s fucking Good Samaritan. Ran back to where it was rolling around by the curb, swimming with broken back legs. “Hey, boy, hey.” Holding out her hand the way you were supposed to, but it growled, snapped at her while it kept swimming, she would never forget the way it swam in circles in the dirty water. It was mangled and hideous, still alive, they had to do something, she never knew the right thing, it was what she hated about herself most, being so stupid and useless, and she called out for Michael.

Why hadn’t he just stayed in the car? If only he had just turned up the radio. But he came out into the rain and stood next to her, staring at the dog, the way it was swimming, with its dead hind legs. “What do we do? Michael?”

But he just stood there, staring, like it was some picture in a gallery, like a Lucien Freud or a Francis Bacon, staring the way he stared at himself in the mirror, paralyzed and utterly fixated. She shook her hands as if there was something on them. “Do something. For once, for Christ’s sake!” But he couldn’t. He was just like her, useless, but it was worse because he was a man. And she needed him to do something when she didn’t know, but he couldn’t, and after so many nights of him staring out the window like this, his sulks and depression and his fucking mother, while she was working her ass off like a donkey to pay for it all, and he never fucked her, at least he could do something about a goddamn hurt dog instead of going into the Zone, leaving it all up to her, Christ, her little brother Bo had been more of a man.

And so she started screaming. “What good are you? Do something for once, can’t you?” She just wanted him to scream back, to fight, to wake up, but all he did was stare at the dog dragging itself in circles, its brown coat matted with mud, whining and growling, making her more and more furious, she wanted him to do something, anything, just make a move. And it all came pouring out, the things she had not said in those awful months. “You useless son of a bitch. What good are you? You don’t fuck, you don’t work, you’re taking up air somebody else could be breathing. You mama’s boy, you faggot!” She walked away from him, screaming up at the houses on the hill, their windows closed against the rain. “Isn’t there a man here somewhere? Does it always have to be me?” She stormed back to the car, and threw open the trunk, to see if there was anything there she could use to put the fucking dog out of its agony. It was howling, she couldn’t stand it one more moment.

This was what she had been trying so hard to forget, and now the memory was all coming out like a clown’s handkerchief, one moment tied to the next and the next, how she had stormed back to the car, her piece-of-shit Falcon that kept breaking down though he could have bought her a new one, but no, it was all up to her, all the time. There must be something, a jack, a wrench, she didn’t know what, and there was the brick. She stripped off her leather jacket and wrapped it around her arm and the brick, and the rain was coming down, so cold, and she shoved Michael aside and brought the brick down on the animal’s skull, hard and round as a kneecap, as the dog bit at her leather-wrapped hand, and she pounded and pounded it, gritting her teeth as she hit it again and again, venting her fury at Michael and every boy who hadn’t come through and the world that didn’t care about a damn dog and left it all up to people like her who didn’t know what to do, there was blood on the brick, and on her jacket and her hands, hit it and hit it until the dog was done.

Panting and weeping, she stood in the water by the curb covered with dog blood and the dead dog at her feet, and Michael’s hand came on her shoulder, touching her with more tenderness than he had showed her for months. And she bared her teeth at him, just like the dog, she would have sunk her teeth into his arm if she could have. “Don’t you touch me,” her face contorting with rage and disgust. “I’m sick of being the man. I’m going to go out and find someone with a big cock and I’m going to fuck his brains out, and forget all about you. You go back to your mother and let her clean up after you, I sure as hell ain’t gonna do it no more. I didn’t sign on for this shit. I thought you were a man. Guess I made a mistake.”