Paint It Black (12 page)

11

Cemetery

C
old air rushed in from the mist-filled hills, lush again after the November rains. She was wiped after the five-hour sculpture class in Pasadena, but her nerves twanged like a cheap guitar. Thank God for the clouds, for the absence of light. On the car radio, the B–52’s bounced out “Planet Claire”:
She drove a Plymouth Satellite, faster than the speed of light.
She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car. She punched in a tape, Debussy études. The fluid string of shimmering notes soothed her with its asymmetrical dreaminess. No matter that it was a Meredith Loewy tape. These days, she clung to each last shred of beauty. People thought beauty was bullshit, just a Band-Aid slapped over the abyss, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It was like Lola Lola had said, beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything else turned to shit.

She shouldn’t have gone creepy crawling in Meredith’s house, what the fuck was she thinking? She should have gone in and said good morning. She could have done the right thing, for once. What did she think she’d find in Michael’s room anyway? A dead boy’s neckties. It wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the point at all. What had she learned in his room, except that everything she’d thought about him was a lie. And the one person who knew him now thought Josie was exactly what she’d first assumed—stupid white trash who threw up in wastebaskets and passed out on driveways. Who wandered through people’s houses uninvited.
You should never have even shared a sentence.
Where the night before, she’d held out her hand in friendship, or at least mutual need.
You can show yourself out.
It still smarted.

She looked up and found herself already on the back side of Griffith Park, the green hills rising into the five o’clock mist. She’d missed her exit, and driven into the metropolis of the dead. Christ.
Forest Lawn,
here was the sign.
Mount Sinai.
She hadn’t been back once since the funeral. As if not seeing where he lay would negate the reality. Why hadn’t she come? What difference did it make what fucking Meredith Loewy thought or didn’t think, why did she care? Michael was lying up there, victim of
ming.
She cut across two lanes of traffic and shot down the exit ramp at Forest Lawn Drive. Through the gates at Sinai and past the long building where they’d said the prayers, and Cal had been kicked out of the family box. She wound her way up the road to the Court of Freedom. What was it exactly that court judged? Was it a merciful venue, or a just one?

Once she parked her weak-mufflered car, silence sealed itself over the park again. Her heels sank in the overwatered grass as she hiked through the checkerboard of brass plaques to the sandstone enclosure, the white Loewy tombstone. The heavy-branched trees mourned stoically, her only company, dark pines and deodars.

His grave. It wasn’t a dream, not her imagining. He was still here. Though there was no marker yet, just the family one. The seams on the sod were already growing together, the fingers of grass twined and blurred the edges. In another few weeks, it would all blend into the rest. In a vase punched into the grass, big grayish mauve roses bloomed, sad and Victorian looking. So perfect and dejected, just right for a dead boy. Meredith must have brought them. Who else would know about roses like that? She leaned over and sniffed, surprised at the intensity of the scent, not a rose smell at all, but spicy, like mulled wine.

The land of the dead, with its sad roses, its five o’clock in the afternoon, a new country. There was a children’s book they used to read together, about the evil Duke who stopped all the clocks in his castle with his cold, cold hand. It never occurred to her that that was death. But now she understood, the land of the dead never changed, you were just left with its rituals, kirs at sundown, a certain picnic table at Dante’s View,
The Prose of the Transsiberian,
Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five.

She sat on the bench, lit a cigarette for him, so he could smell it, wherever he was. She wasn’t going to cry, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe that a human being could physically weep so much. These days everything made her cry. If she couldn’t find the address of her sitting. Seeing a pigeon living in a red-light cylinder at Alvarado and Beverly, or a high-heeled shoe left on top of a mailbox.

Shirley K. said the dead understood everything once they crossed over, that they didn’t hold grudges. She hoped it was true, but forgiveness had never exactly been a part of Michael’s repertoire. He could never put himself in the other person’s shoes. He never forgave anyone anything, least of all himself.

“You don’t believe in me, in my work,” he’d said to her. To her, of all people. Who was working three jobs, once he quit Reynaldo? But she didn’t believe in him. “You’re undermining me.”

As he lay on the couch while she went out on the third job of the day. After he told her Señor Music had had enough of screaming brats and playing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and being groped by Señor Reynaldo. Which left her to support them both, the rent and paint and gas and canvas. If that didn’t show her faith in him, what did? But he tested her, the way you tested a tooth that had a cavity, seeing if you could make it hurt. He could not forgive her for supporting him, though he needed her to. And she didn’t mind, but why did he have to be so mean about it? He stopped reaching for her, he flinched if she touched him. What had she done that was so terribly wrong, that she had to be punished like that?

She stood over his grave. The earth smelled damp as it had the day of the funeral, the day she stood over the open hole with her rose, looking down into the dark. She could still feel where Meredith had wrapped her fingers around Josie’s throat. All around her, in the tightly squeezed graves marked by plaques on the ground, the dead muttered in their hollows. All in some way misinterpreted, misunderstood, gradually forgotten, and the memories of their lives altered to fit some more palatable version of reality. The complicated, difficult woman suddenly became the good wife and mother. The furious, bitter man was transformed into a gentle husband. She hated stories that were rewritten, films that were remade. Michael said history existed only in the human mind, subject to endless revision.

You’ll have to remember for both of us.

Who said she had to? Who said? Maybe she would check out too and there wouldn’t be one goddamn person in the world who would remember.

He never even told her the real story. For instance, about the hyperintellectual Harvardettes he’d fucked when he was supposed to be a virgin. Or Meredith not letting him go to school when it was him all the time. Or about being
très sportif,
a ranked player, with golf clubs and three pairs of skis. What was she supposed to remember, when he had held out so much of himself, had changed the story? There were all these new pieces, how was she ever going to understand him? He hadn’t wanted her to, not really. But then she couldn’t help him.
Each man kills the thing he loves.
That’s what Oscar Wilde said.

“Why does each man kill the thing he loves?” she’d asked him that day at Dante’s View. Hot and smoggy, the sunset coming a little earlier each day, heady with the scent of laurel sumac, the bright pungent green that was the smell of California, merging with the smell of water in the little oasis. They lay on their picnic tables, shaded with eucalyptuses, guarded by giant agaves twelve feet across, fleshy and blue-gray and edged with thorns. Prehistoric. Her soft dress floating around her thighs as he drew her. Reading
The Ballad of Reading Gaol,
a small book, an owl embossed on its cover, the pages thin as onion skins. It was about a man on his way to be executed. That line kept coming up. “I don’t get it. Why would you kill the thing you loved?”

The softness of his voice. Even now, under the deodars in the Court of Freedom, her feet in the grass over his silent body, she could hear his voice, clear but soft, you had to stop whatever you were doing, and lean close to hear it. And he had replied so quietly it took a few seconds for it to register. “You kill it before it kills you.”

But he was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Sitting here on a bench in the Loewy family plot, she knew you killed it by accident. Thinking you were doing something else. It was a cherished vase that broke while you were cleaning it. The phone rang and you dropped it. Shattering, when all you wanted was to keep it safe.

She held herself around her thin waist, her stomach brutally empty, she couldn’t stand to eat now, couldn’t stand the heaviness in her own body.
She has no body, she’s too poor
. . . She wished that was true. She was tired of hauling her body around. The clocks had all stopped, except the clock in the body. She had killed the thing she loved, and she was still here, needing to eat and sleep and pay the rent. She didn’t know what she was now, if she was real or just someone Michael had dreamed up.

She watched an old man struggling up the hill, he was overweight and breathed heavily. He stopped at a grave in the Court of Freedom, she could hear him wheeze. He had no flowers and his empty hands looked unnaturally large. He picked a leaf off a grave and absently fingered it as he gazed down. She thought he had said something to her.

“Pardon?”

“Stinks,” he said.

“What?” She wasn’t sure she had understood him.

“Life stinks.” He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his Windbreaker and hawked into it, folded it, and put it back in his pocket. “It’s rigged, and the house always wins. Remember that. They talk about Nature, how great it is and all that. Believe me, Nature’s no walk in the park. This is my wife here. Fifty-three years. Cancer of the pancreas.”

She nodded. A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter. At the observatory, there was a room with scales, showing what you’d weigh on the different planets. On Jupiter she’d weigh three hundred pounds. You would hardly be able to walk, or even stand up. The new world was just like that.

She looked at the old man in the growing darkness, gazing down at his wife’s grave. Fifty-three years with one person. “That’s a long time,” she said.

“I shouldn’t speak this way to a young person,” he said. His eyes were owlish in round glasses, under a plaid cap. “But it’s a rigged crap game. I spit on it.” And he actually spit on the smooth groomed grass.

She shivered, pulling her yellow coat tighter around her, the shawl collar framing her small face looking down at the silvery roses. “My boyfriend killed himself.”

The words hung in the air, untouched by wind or water. The old man scratched the back of his head, making his cap fall forward onto his brow. “That’s tough,” he said. “I got no answers.” He scuffed his brown, rubber-soled shoe in the grass. “You know, when my wife was going into the hospital, she made me a month’s worth of food and put it in the freezer. Labels on each one.
Thursday.
Saturday.
” He took out that same handkerchief and wiped his eyes underneath his glasses. “I can’t eat them. I go get Burger King instead.”

“That’s not good for you,” Josie said, imagining him having a heart attack one night because he wouldn’t eat his dead wife’s cooking. That was probably what the woman worried about, so much that even with cancer of the pancreas, she went into the kitchen and managed to cook those meals for him before she went.

“I can’t sleep at night,” he said. “I go down to Gardena and play pan until the sun comes up. Then I go home and sleep. The house is just too damn quiet.”

The land where the clocks stopped ticking. All night, that relentless absence. “I never played pan.”

“It takes up a lotta time, that’s what I like about it. They got those other games, too, those Chinese games. It’s a Chinese place. They really go crazy. But I always play pan.”

She couldn’t help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn’t as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.

“We liked to go to Vegas, me and Dotty. We usually go to Caesar’s. What a brunch they’ve got there.” He smiled, hitched his corduroys around his stout middle. “Telephones in every room, even the can. She liked to call the kids and say, ‘Guess where I’m calling from.’”

Josie smiled, imagining her father doing the same thing. Calling from the toilet in a fancy hotel, saying, “Guess where I’m calling from.” “My parents got married in Las Vegas.”

“Yeah, they got those parlors. ‘Feeling lucky today?’ Goyim.” He laughed, shook his head, as if only crazy people would get married there. “No offense. Dotty, she liked blackjack. Always lost, but did she love to play. Said it made her feel like James Bond. Every day she’d set a limit, how much she was going to lose, a C-note or two. But boy did she have a good time losing, more than most people have winning.”

Was that the secret? Even if the house always won—you could still feel like James Bond, have a good time losing your two hundred bucks. Instead of sitting in a window, staring out at Bosch, thinking how you had to beat the house.

The old man gazed down at the green blanket under which his wife lay. “You know, she came to me once. I mean, after she died. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I saw her. She was in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed. She looked like she did when we first got married, in Chicago. Her father drove a truck for a bootlegger. She was wearing this blue dress she used to have, and her hair was dark again. She was so beautiful. And she said, ‘Morty, Morty, I saw my mother, and Artie Cohen’—he was a neighborhood kid who got hit by a streetcar.” He shook his head. “I hadn’t thought of Artie for sixty years.”