Paint It Black (11 page)

“He picked it up and threw it right out the window. I mean, Babe Ruth. Rolling down the gutter on Bank Street.” Meredith laughed. She had a beautiful smile, big straight teeth. When she really laughed, she wrinkled her nose and lines in the corners of her eyes fanned happily over the apples of her cheeks. “It was fantastic.” She took a messy sip of her drink, not sitting up, wiped the overflow on the back of her hand. “God, that was one of the best days of my life.”

Josie ran her fingertips over the bumpy carvings in the ivory, wondering if she should throw it in the fire, or pitch it through the window over the piano. Babe Ruth, rolling down Bank Street. The fronts of her legs were growing hot. “Why did he wear his jacket, then, if he hated him so much?”

“Primal transference,” Meredith said, slurring the syllables. “Like wearing the skin of an animal you’re afraid of.” She lifted her glass to her lips again, spilled it now on the front of her robe, had to sit up, shake it off her hand and brush it from the silk. “Cal was so jealous of him. Jealous of our relationship. He never wanted to share me with a child. He wanted me all to himself, like a big spoiled baby. Sick, no? He thought I was going to trail around the world after him, bearing his typewriter aloft like it was the Grail.” Her thin elegant nostrils flared slightly, like a ripple in silk. She crossed her long legs. They were very white, with fine blue veins.

What chance did he have, Josie thought, with such a father, such a mother?

Meredith set her drink on the table. “You should have seen him, Josie. When he was a child. We’ve all been bright, but Michael —” Her long hands made a beautiful, double fan in the air. “He was speaking in full sentences at two. He read at three. At five, he taught himself Greek from a book. From a book! He’d leave me notes in Greek. Ancient Greek. Someone at UCLA finally translated them for me. Sweet little poems.”

Even now, Josie envied him. Imagine having a mother who would say,
We’ve all been bright,
without hesitation. Imagine this woman had been her mother, and not poor Janey Tyrell. If this was her house. If she had been lifted up by all this. But she couldn’t picture the first thing. The Tyrells weren’t stupid, but they kept each other down. If you had a bright idea, everybody made fun of you so viciously, you learned not to have them. It was how they made sure nobody got away. And if Michael had been a Tyrell? They would have drowned him at two, with his first full sentence. He would never have gotten as far as notes in Greek.

“Did he tell you I wouldn’t send him to school?” Meredith asked, sticking her finger in the bottom of her glass, licking it off. “That I kept him at home all to myself under lock and key?”

“Something like that,” Josie said.

“It wasn’t true,” Meredith said, tucking her legs up under her on the couch. “He was the one. Begged me not to send him. It was only later that he changed the story, and I became the villain. He was like that, you know. Blaming me for things he was afraid to do.”

She shook the ball, making it turn, ball within ball, flowers and roads and ladies. But deep inside, the central ball was carved in horrors. Dead people in a pile. A horseman, riding down a peasant in a field. Hidden deep inside where the patron would never notice. The swarming murderousness, the almost erotic cruelty, like watching fish feed. She quickly put it back on its rosewood stand. She could imagine the artist, laughing with his secret.

“Josie?” Meredith was holding out her empty glass.
“Per favore?”

Josie stared at the hand, the glass. Did she think Josie was going to wait on her? Because she was trash? But she suddenly understood that Meredith would have asked such a thing of Michael. She was asking her in Michael’s stead. And she knew he wouldn’t have hesitated, so she didn’t either. She took the heavy cut tumbler and went to the drinks cart.

“The one with the thistle,” Meredith said.

Josie poured the chunky glass half-full of amber liquid, it smelled like the day after a fire. “Ice?”

“Nein, Fräulein.”

Uninvited, Josie poured a tumbler for herself, the Stoli that smelled like nothing at all. She handed Meredith her drink and sat down on the other couch, not worrying about her pants dirtying the white damask. The woman’s son was dead, what did she care about her couch?

“He had a marvelous education. I took him everywhere,” Meredith said, lying down again with her big drink, one arm under her head. She took a careful sip and set the glass on the coffee table. “You have no idea how bloody uncomfortable a camel can be after the third day.” She rubbed her nose briskly with the palm of her hand. “Ruins were his passion. And I never said no to that child. Never. Did you know the Phoenicians had child sacrifice? At Carthage, they found children buried in the walls. That’s what I remember about it—Dido, and that they invented the color purple, and children in the walls.” She pulled out a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “They deserved to become extinct.”

Children in the walls. Grandfathers on the rug.

“His Greek period. I had a year’s residence in London. Michael practically lived at the British Museum. Red figure, black figure, the so-and-so painter.” She shifted her long figure on the couch, let one arm drape back over the end of the sofa. She glanced over at Josie to see if she was following. “Pots. He and the pottery man were inseparable, what was his name? David. Davis. Something. God. A real British academic. Mouth breather, corduroys all baggy in the rear. Even asked me for a date.” She laughed a little, completely drunk, letting herself forget for a moment that Michael was dead. “I thanked God when he entered the Renaissance. At nine, he could tell all those tellos and dellos apart, who built the Duomo and who cast the doors and how they did it and in whose honor.” She sat up on her elbow to reach her glass. “He read the
Inferno
in Italian. Miles beyond anything a school could have offered.” She took a drink. “He had no call to resent that. You couldn’t send a boy like that to school. His father never understood that. ‘He needs to be with boys his own age, Meredith.’” Imitating Cal, pretty well, too. “For an insane half minute, I let him have his way. Allowed him to be sent off like a prize calf to the abattoir. Michael sent me notes like a prisoner, smuggled out by some janitor, the school censored all their mail. Some boys locked him in the boiler room for a day and a half, and nobody told me about it. Well, that was the end of
that
experiment, I’ll tell you.”

Michael had recalled that scene to her, portraying himself as a flannel-coated, long-lashed schoolyard victim, the master who caned, the cold, the sadistic gym teacher. And Meredith, sweeping in in a fur coat to rescue him like some kind of mythological bear mother. It was not hard to imagine Meredith whisking Michael out of there in his pajamas in the hired limo, trailing the scent of her strange perfume in the snowy air.

But now Meredith was deflated, looking down into her drink. “Do you think I made a mistake, Josie? Do you think I should have made him stay?” Then she lifted her green gaze to Josie, in a gesture that was so like Michael it sent chills through her. “That he would have come out stronger on the other side? His father said all boys go through that. Bullying and tormenting each other.”

It was the last thing Josie would have expected, Meredith asking her if she thought it was her fault. Josie drank the colorless Stoli, hoping it would heat the winter in her veins. She could strike a blow now, tell her this was all her doing, the mess, her fault. But she found she could not bring herself to make the woman feel worse. Even if Meredith had threatened her, tried to run her over, strangled her at Michael’s funeral. Michael was dead. What good could it do to make his mother any more unhappy?

“It would have been insane to leave him there,” Josie said. “Only a sadist would have done it.”

The silence brimmed between them as they drank and the fire burned lower. Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.

“Put another chunk on the fire, would you? It’s going out,” Meredith said.

Josie found a hairy piece of wood in the metal carrier and opened the fire screen, threw it in. It landed crooked, so she had to shove it with the poker. The little hairs caught on fire, smoldered, and the underside crackled as the bark heated up, smoking, and then soon trickled with orange flame. “Let’s do another,” Meredith said. “I’m freezing.”

Josie threw a second log in, and the fire went out. Smoke streamed into the room, stinging her eyes.

“Push them back, they’re too far forward,” Meredith said.

Josie wiped her eyes and shoved both logs to the back.

“Now open a space between them, about an inch, to draw.”

She did as instructed, opened the hole between. The smoke rose, though this time it stayed in the fireplace, and then flames began their tattered ascent. She stared in at the licking tongues of yellow and orange. Like Michael, his mother was so precise.
Like Michael.
The thought sent those yellow tongues licking in her. No, not at all like Michael. Not at all. His mother was a devil, she couldn’t be trusted. All Josie needed was to succumb to the comfort, the familiarity. She had enough problems. Josie took a big swig of her Stoli and threw the rest in the fire. It went up in a whoosh, like when her father put lighter fluid on the barbecue. “I better go.”

“Don’t go,” Meredith said, quickly. “Stay here. You can sleep —” Then she caught herself. “Anywhere.”

And Josie realized she was going to say, “You can sleep in Michael’s room.” The way you’d invite someone to sleep in a spare bedroom, when the occupant was gone. She looked at Meredith, struggling to prop herself up on the pillow. And she thought of the dead bodies inside the ivory sphere. This house full of ghosts. This poor cursed place. She didn’t belong to this. Suddenly, she found herself standing. She had to go. She couldn’t pass out here, people died here, they went crazy. Just like this crazy bitch.

“Don’t, really, Josie. You’ll kill someone on the way home,” Meredith said. “Ruin their Christmas.”

“Ho ho ho,” Josie said. She was very drunk, but she could still leave, she should go while she still could. She made her way across the room, holding on to the furniture, station by station, hand over hand, an easy chair, a standing lamp.

“Don’t be like that. Please, Josie, don’t go.”

“On Donder, on Blitzen.” Staggering across the empty spaces, grabbing the rail of the steps up into the foyer, she had to go, it was like those fairy tales where you spend one night and you’re trapped forever.

“God, you’re as impossible as he was.”

Josie stumbled up the stairs and across the foyer, out the front door. In the dark, the cold smell of plants, the rough brickwork drive, she felt like she was waking up from a dream. She realized how warm it had been inside, the fireplace, the gleam of light off the walls, the woodwork. Out here it was just cold and dark, there weren’t even any streetlights. She stumbled on the brickwork, fell heavily onto her hands, sat down. Not hard, but just crumpled. It was cold, lying there on the bricks, but it was more of a thought than a sensation. She looked at her hands, slightly lighter than the darkness around them, but she could not tell if she had skinned them or not in her fall. Her body seemed very much like someone else’s. She felt around for her purse, but couldn’t find it, and it felt like too much trouble to crawl around looking for it, so she curled up on the brick and put her face on her leather sleeve and passed out.

10

After

H
er head lay on needlepoint. She could feel the hard threads against her cheek. There was blanket on her, some kind of fuzzy wool. A leather couch, buttons. She opened her eyes. Puffy slits admitted diffuse light that seeped from the sides and bottoms of heavy drapes. Geometric figures on the floor. Oriental rug. Her boots stood neatly together. Something reeked. She peered over the edge of the couch—gently, her head a seismic device—and saw the wastebasket alongside the sofa. Slowly, she sat up, gagging, picked it up and carried it as far as the window, where she groped under the drape, releasing a knife blade of light, to find the metal window crank, felt for the hole, turned until she could breathe fresh air. She slid back onto the couch the way a child slides into first. What time was it? She recalled leaving, but not coming back.
Rolling down the gutter on Bank Street. Do you think I did the right thing, Josie?
Children buried in the walls.

The door opened. She could hear the piano out in the living room. Meredith was up. The maid came in with a tray, set it down, opened the drapes, her straight-backed figure disappearing into glare like a nuclear flash. The woman picked up the wastebasket with an impassive glance, didn’t even look at Josie as she took it away. “Sorry,” Josie croaked, through her parched lips. The woman closed the door without a sound.

She felt like a lowlife but was glad the wastebasket was gone, and that whatever the woman brought didn’t smell. Her brain spun when she closed her eyes, but hurt when she opened them.
You’ve got two options.
Clean little sounds came through the open window. A sprinkler, Rain Bird-style,
shhhttt sht sht sht sht sht shhhttttt,
the beeping of a backing truck. But what time was it? Her lips were cracked and her tongue was bitter. She groped her way to the desk, squinting down at the offerings. Glass of ice, can of Seven Up, a dish with aspirin. Some round crackers. Toast sticking up like records in a record rack. All on a lace-edged napkin.

She stared at the tray, trying to understand. Michael was dead. And there was this china. And a small vase full of tiny flowers. She started to cry. How could there be something so beautiful when he was dead?

She opened the Seven Up, the angry hiss, drank from the can. Her stomach lurched and plunged. She nibbled a cracker. The maid sure knew what to bring. Must have done this before. She swallowed a couple of aspirin, waited to see if they would stay down. She wondered if Meredith was in the habit of tying one on. A spot just above her eyebrow throbbed, like some tiny monster was about to pop out of her forehead. Like those paintings Michael painted, things crawling out of his face.

How furious Michael would be if he knew she had come here. Spying on him. Letting Meredith tell her version of his life. Alternatives to old favorites. Tearing at the fabric of his image in her mind. Like the one where Meredith hadn’t let him go to school.
She doesn’t like him to mix with the world.
She pressed the cold can to her eyebrow, the throbbing little devil boring its way out. Though it was possible Meredith was the one who was lying. Very possible.
Do you think I made a mistake, Josie?
But even if she was lying, who could blame her? Her son was dead. No one wanted to think of himself as the bad guy.

And in the end, she would never know the truth. It was hidden between them. If Michael were right here, they’d each stick to their version, pass the blame between them like a football.
He was like that, you know. Blaming me for things he was afraid to do.
Yes, that was true. He could believe something passionately, then later, deny what he had said. Even hand his position to you, while he argued the exact opposite point of view.

She tried the dry toast, thick, home sliced, took two more aspirin, ate a bit more of the toast. Eating in the enemy’s lair. She remembered a story Michael told her, about a kidnapped girl who ate six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, so she had to stay and be the queen of the dead. Josie put the toast down. Then she felt stupid and picked it up again. She was a girl who would eat from a tray on a lace napkin when her lover had killed himself. Deep down, she was glad something still worked.

She drank most of the can, waited for the relieving belch, buttered a slice of toast and slowly ate it. Over the mantel, an elongated thoroughbred eyed her with its buggy green eyes. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Her mouth tasted like the gutter after a parade. She found her purse, lit a cigarette, using an enameled ashtray with a gold
ML
interlaced in the bottom.
Mauritz Loewy.
His desk. All the rows of inlaid drawers, like secrets in people’s minds. She tried one of the little knobs, but it wouldn’t slide out.
It was locked, but I know where she keeps the key.
Meredith had had this twice, her son and her father. No wonder she hadn’t wanted Josie to leave her alone.

Josie opened the bloodred leather door. Music billowed out from the living room, she could see just the end of the giant piano. The sun filtered in through the window, more gold than white, it must be later than she’d thought. You had to admire the woman. Her son was dead, but instead of lying in bed on a morphine drip, she could turn to her music. Josie wished she had something like that. Michael had had painting, though in the end he didn’t trust it, it was a source of pain and no solace. But Josie had nothing, a book with appointments, a makeup case, her own bony self.

She had to go to the bathroom. There was one in Michael’s old room, the monastery library. She padded up the stone risers. The cut-glass knob felt cold in her hand, and she hesitated, listening, but Meredith just kept playing, the maid was nowhere in sight. She quickly went in. That resinous smell—linseed oil, turpentine, pine, mothball—made her catch her breath. That wonderful smell. It was all just the same. The gray blanket stretched tight across the narrow iron bed, the Virgin, crude and painted on a wooden panel with a curved top—what did a Jewish boy need a Virgin for? There were gaps in the sagging bookcase where he’d taken books to their house on Lemoyne.

She felt an odd disembodied resistance, as if the room itself resented her intrusion. She could almost hear the motes of dust settling.
Michael, I’m sorry. Please believe me.
But there was no answer here. Only the sad smile of his Mexican Virgin. Josie used the bathroom, washed, dried her face on the stale towel. Not a terry-cloth towel, but a linen one, like a napkin but bigger. Left over from the last time he was here, a year and a half ago. Meredith had not changed the towel. Once she might have thought that was crazy, to leave a towel dirty so long, but now it seemed perfectly reasonable. Josie hadn’t touched his laundry, either, could not sleep in their bed. Maybe a year would go by, who knew how long it might take.

His old toothbrush stood in its holder over the sink. Her teeth needed brushing but she could not bring herself to use his toothbrush. He was gone but these things were still his. Instead, she shook some tooth powder into her hand, scrubbed her teeth with a finger. Its pallid mint taste so recalled Michael, as did the scrap of shaving soap in a cup on the lip of the sink, that pine smell, Lightfoot’s soap, he had it sent to him all the way from England.
A fine monk you would have made.
But no one loved old-fashioned things the way he did. Tooth powder, nightshirts, shoe trees, handkerchiefs. He shaved every morning with that soap and a badger-hair brush, a straight razor with its tortoiseshell handle. Tilting his head to one side, shaving under the jaw, a razor sharp enough to cut your throat. She remembered watching her own father shave. Glenn Tyrell did it fast and angrily, as if he could not allow himself the possibility of enjoying it. Tough guy. Where Michael shaved slowly, luxuriously, his long fingers making an art of it. His neatness displayed everywhere. Pinching his nose and shaving the lather off his upper lip, stretching his neck long and drawing the blade gently along the knots and sinews. How terrifying it had been to watch him shave, knowing how easily that razor could cut those sinews. And yet that was not what he had chosen at all.

She caught a glimpse of her tired face in his small bathroom mirror, her dirty blond hair all stuck together from her night on the couch, what was left of her eye makeup a sooty blur. She turned off the light and went back to his room, the Virgin over the bed watching so lovingly. She imagined him lying there, in the unforgiving bed, praying to be relieved of his blessings. The deaf-mute, the crippled boy, who played the piano and tennis. She touched the stretched-tight blanket of the bed, the heaviness of his death sitting on her heart like an old-fashioned iron, the kind Gommer Ida still used, that you set on the stove.

She didn’t want to be like this, sneaking, spying. But there had been so many secrets, and she was hungry for more of him, anything. In the top drawer of the dresser, silky socks nested, and neckties in careful rolls, like flowers. She trailed her fingers through the air just above them, not wanting to disturb their perfection. A box of cuff links and round little buttons with earring backs, thin little pieces of white plastic, she had no idea what they were for. She opened the door to his closet, paused from the shock.

It was big as the room she shared with her sisters in Bakersfield. Along the walls, suits and crisp long-sleeved shirts hung in perfect formation. The cedar and mothball smell was intoxicating. She ran her hand gently down the sleeves of the shirts, as if stroking the strings of a harp. She couldn’t believe how many clothes he had. She had only seen him in denim work shirts, and his one silk shirt from Goodwill, olive green. Here were suits—pin-striped, black, pale gray, even a seersucker and a tuxedo with a shiny collar, blue jackets with gold buttons on the sleeves, a white silk one, a leather jacket. He’d worn only one jacket as long as she’d known him, the one that had belonged to his father, who called him Sissy-Boy. She couldn’t imagine the Michael who had worn these clothes. Her Michael so loved his thrift stores and garage sales, a three-dollar suit from the Salvation Army. But no tweed jacket. Meredith probably wore it when she was alone, Josie would have. She wondered if Meredith knew there was a sprig of yellow mustard in the pocket, from when they went hiking up at Dante’s View.

The shoes of the dead were the emptiest of all, the saddest shoes in the world. Polished shoes, black ones with thin soles and laces, businessman ones with those little holes. She couldn’t imagine him wearing something like that.
Who were you, Michael? Didn’t I know you at all?
In a corner, rackets and sticks leaned against a golf bag, and three pairs of skis, and a fishing pole. But
La Bohème
didn’t have skiing. There were no fish in Echo Park lake.

Which had been his real life, this one, with its patent leather shoes and jackets with gold buttons on the sleeves? Or the life they’d made up together, Montmartre in their shack on the hillside?

“Josie.” That sharp, half-whispered voice, the way you call a dog, to get it out of a room, fast, but she heard it. Christ. She turned off the closet light, came out into the room, and there was Meredith, standing in the doorway.

Josie wished she could disappear. Just vanish. Meredith looked better than last night, her hair had been washed, but she wore no makeup, and her beige sweater was unflattering. Her mouth was in a straight line, white with rage. “What were you doing in his closet? You shouldn’t be in here. No one gave you permission.”

“I-I had to use the bathroom.” It sounded lame even to her. The closet was nowhere near the bathroom. She felt her face flush hot, like being caught with purple nail polish in your pocket in the Woolworth’s beauty section.

“There’s a bathroom downstairs.” Meredith turned sideways, an invitation to pass her, but Josie realized that Meredith would not, could not enter the room herself.

“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” Liar, she knew exactly.

“You don’t just go wandering in other people’s houses,” Meredith said. “It’s considered very ill-mannered.”

In case you don’t know it, Daisy Mae.
Josie stood in Michael’s room, exhausted, headachy, disgraced.

“You can see your way out, can’t you?” Meredith said crisply, her nose sharp as her tone. “I have an appointment at two.” And she swept away down the hall like a Thirties actress, Norma Shearer or Joan Crawford, leaving a perfume trail in her dark, smoky wake.