Paint It Black (13 page)

It occurred to her that old people probably knew more dead people than living ones. To have to go through this over and over again, until everyone you knew was gone. She thought of the old men at Michael’s funeral, how familiar they seemed with the place, the men who Cal Faraday said sat for a week every night at Meredith’s house. How could people stand it? “Did they do the thing where they came to your house for a week?”

“Shivah. Sure, they came.”

“Did it help?”

He shrugged. “Gets you through the week. But then you’ve got the rest of your life.”

His life was only going to be a few years, though. Hers had no end, it was like when you set up the mirrors in the dressing room, so they reflected each other in a long row, getting smaller and smaller but just more of the same. She was having trouble breathing. Years like this. But she didn’t have to. Michael had showed her. Cal said they had no choice, but they did. There was always a choice.

It frightened her to even think it.

It was getting cold now, it felt like rain. The light was fading fast. “Would you like to get a drink or something?” Josie asked.

“No, sweetheart, but I’m flattered as hell. I’m going to my daughter’s for dinner,” the old man said, zipping up his Windbreaker. “Later I’ll be at the Four Queens, on Normandie. If you can’t sleep, I’m down there every night after ten.”

She watched him edge sideways down the hill, picking his way gingerly through the graves, careful not to trip. She wanted to call him back, to stay with her, but he had somewhere to go. She wished she did.

She missed old men, like her own grandfather, Daddy Jack, with his Brylcreem and his Old Spice, Paul Harvey in the morning, Dodgers in summertime,
live from Chavez Ravine.
Daddy Jack didn’t know she lived right around the corner from there, though she had never been to see the team play. She hoped he was all right, him and Gommer Ida. She didn’t know any old people here. It made LA seem glamorous, but unstable. She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.” Instead of one who showed him how to die.

12

Jeremy

T
he neon signs of Little Tokyo were just coming on when Josie arrived at the Atomic Café. It was really a terrible place, a tiny punk joint on the bad end of First Street. The food sucked and the service was worse, but it was near the Chinatown clubs and had the best jukebox in LA. She paused in the doorway, looking for Jeremy. She spotted him, at the third table by the window, like an army dug in, papers and notes and books colonizing the tabletop. He posed, tall and blond and famously distracted, forelock in his face, coat around his shoulders like a cape. In his mind, she knew, he saw himself seated before an audience in an immense theater filled with rapt young filmmakers, plying him with questions about how he got his start, his early films, how he became so successful. He woke up in the morning to the sound of his own applause. On the jukebox, Tom Verlaine sang “See No Evil.” They said Patti Smith learned to sing from him, the same nasal croon, the odd breaths.

He half stood when he saw her, then sank back into his chair. “Jesus, Josie. What happened to you?”

She knew what he was thinking—was she using, or was she having a breakdown? She lit a Gauloise, watched the tiny Japanese waitress in a towering hairdo shuffle aimlessly behind the counter, looking for something she had already forgotten. There was the Atomic Café in a nutshell.

Jeremy smiled, too wide, too white. “Josie. I don’t mean to say you don’t look great, you always look great, but my God, eat something, get some sleep.”
Your fake Englishman,
Michael used to call him. Jeremy’s mother was Danish, his father American, he’d been sent to boarding school in England, where he’d picked up that accent, so it wasn’t entirely fake, though he laid it on a bit thick. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you? Get a steak, take some vitamin C. B. You can get shots, I know someone —”

“Is this it?” She reached for the stack of pages, bound with brass fasteners through the holes.
Glasshouse.
She flipped through the pages the way she’d look at a magazine. Jeremy’s movies were all variations on a theme, there was no need to read it. She was the Girl in an unnamed city. Walking night streets wetted down with a hose to reflect the neon signs, wearing high heels and black leather, or silver lamé. It didn’t really matter what was in the script, Jeremy always threw out the script anyway. He said it was because he didn’t like to be hemmed in, but it was just that he didn’t really know what he wanted to shoot until he shot it. Which was fine with her, she was good at making things up. She knew just how it would look, what her part would be.
The Girl looks. The Girl walks.
The Girl was mysterious, fatally alluring, always moving, and ended up dead. She would do a lot of running, looking back, and casting smoldering glances.

“It’s a thriller. Psychological. Very stylish. Sort of Antonioni meets Buñuel.”

A phrase that would have sent Michael into ecstasies of loathing.
Sort of Einstein meets Jayne Mansfield
. . .
Hitler meets Roy Rogers.
She remembered the first time Michael met Jeremy, in the lobby of the Vagabond. She and Michael had just seen a Fellini double bill. She’d cried in
La Strada,
the strong man and the little clown.
She has no body, she is too poor
. . . Jeremy spotted them in the lobby and descended like a big gangly bird, interposing himself between her and Michael. Going on about the Fellini, he called it “awesome.”

“Was it really?” Michael said, taking her hand. “Did you sink to your knees, did you soil yourself in terror?”

Jeremy stopped talking just for an instant, like a skip in a record, and then continued as if he hadn’t heard him, or perhaps he hadn’t, he didn’t listen well, he only heard himself, and Michael was so soft-spoken, all the more so when he was angry.

“We’re taking
Angel Baby
to Toronto.”
We,
he already spoke of himself as if he were an entire production company. It was his second-year project at USC, a twelve-minute short they’d shot at Union Station and a skid-row hotel near Wall. He had his leather jacket hooked over his shoulder with one finger, a gesture stagy as a false beard, and tossed his hair out of his face. “Well, it’s not in contention, but we have a screening off campus, so to speak.”

“That’s great, Jeremy,” she said, taking Michael’s arm, trying to steer him to the exit before he started a fight. “Let me know how it goes.” It was so hard, the way Michael disliked all her friends, and he had a special loathing for grandiose young men who didn’t question the meaning of life, who had a plan for everyone and everyone in the plan.

“I’m shooting a band next month, I’m dying for you to be in it,” Jeremy called after her. “They’re paying. Twenty a day. How about it?”

“Twenty-five,” she said. “I’ll call you.”

How angry Michael had been as they walked back to the car, she could hardly keep up with him. All because Jeremy had kissed her. She hadn’t thought a thing of it. Film students always kissed, they were baby operators. She was used to it but Michael fell into a black sulk. “How can you suck up to a phony like that?”

“He’s not so bad.” Sure, Jeremy was stagy, but he wasn’t totally phony, he did make his films, he was already directing commercially and he wasn’t even out of film school yet. Lots of people wanted to do things, but Jeremy did them. Maybe he wasn’t the genius Michael was, but did you have to be a genius to do something in this world? The important thing was, Jeremy liked using her in his films, he kept asking her, said she looked like a punk Jeanne Moreau, his fetish heartthrob. And he always made her look good. It was fun. It was not that she wanted to have some big acting career, she just liked being someone different.

As she leafed through
Glasshouse,
she was relieved at the thought of being the Girl in Jeremy’s film, a girl who didn’t have to think for herself, who could run glamorously in high heels and mouth someone else’s words and let the ending come as it may. Car crash this time, it looked like. Fine. She wanted to work, keep busy, and never have to go home. A Jeremy film would take up all her time for a while.

Out the window, an old Japanese woman and a young one, both in Western hair but wearing kimonos, walked by. The old woman was about three feet tall, and a hundred years old, and she was laughing, her hand over her mouth, hanging on to the young one’s arm with the other hand. Josie stared after them, wondering what an old woman like that could possibly find to laugh about. Tottering along, all hunched over and twisted and wrinkled as wet crepe. How could old people bear it, all the things that life could do to you?

She found some quarters in her purse and went over to the jukebox, punched in Richard Hell and the Voidoids doing “Going Going Gone” and “Lost Boys Love Dead Girls” by Lola Lola, a song about Edie Sedgwick. Lola Lola came on first, her operatic voice going down to gravel, then talk-singing like Dietrich. Sprechgesang. God, she even knew what it was called.
He kiss her picture in the tattered magazine,
came the familiar voice, and their waitress sang along, imitating Lola’s threatening growl. Ferdi and Edie and Darby, John Lennon. It was a year of loving dead people.

The petite waitress finally brought their orders, or at least something on a plate, though it was all wrong, a cheese-and-mushroom omelet instead of her udon soup, Jeremy’s burger, but cold, and with salad instead of fries, but they ate them without complaint. That was how it was at the Atomic. You placed your order and then you ate what the waitress or the cook or Fate served up. You never got what you wanted but sometimes what you got was edible. Just like life. The old guy from Mount Sinai would approve. She’d never taken Michael to the Atomic, he was too fussy about getting exactly what he wanted.

She kept thinking about it as Jeremy talked about his Concept for the movie, the locations, some house off Sunset Plaza he pronounced “total Sixties, it’ll blow your mind.” She imagined walking into the house and blowing her head off.

“Someone should tell that moron that language has meaning,” Michael had fumed the night of
La Strada,
walking back to the car. “How can you stand him, Josie, how could you possibly take him seriously?” But he meant let him kiss her.

“You think I’m attracted to him?”

Michael said nothing, which meant of course that he did think so.

“This is going to be so fabulous, Josie,” Jeremy said over his cold burger, shaking the hair out of his wide-set blue eyes. As he talked about the movie, some kind of cheesy psychological thriller, she just watched him. It was like watching TV with the sound off. Of all the people for Michael to have been jealous of. Jeremy Scott, a being absolutely free of interior life. Ambition was the only emotion he registered. Planning, plotting, big dreams. How absurd people were in all their wanting. Big everything, Technicolor. When the only meaning she could see anymore was a fingerprint left on a yellow sketchbook cover, a piece of pine shaving soap, the last trace of a kiss.

Jeremy wanted to make her a star. It drove him crazy when she said, “I am a star, Jeremy.” LA was full of Jeremys—film students and art students, writers and photographers and rock musicians, models and actresses. The armies of the ambitious. For them, the future was like a giant oxygen mask, as if there was nothing to breathe in the present. When the present was all there was ever going to be.

She remembered how she’d taken Michael to one of the shoots, for a goth band, Silent Scream, they shot it in someone’s garage in Eagle Rock. His tolerance for boredom was used up in the first half hour, and the repetition of song phrases drove him mad. “Why is it taking so long?” he asked after having watched Josie walk back and forth through the Mole fog twenty times, its stinking oily smoke that was cheaper than dry ice.
Eat your head, eat your head
. . . They could hear Silent Scream in their sleep for a month.

“You’re not listening to me. Josie, this is serious.”

Jeremy staring at her with his goggly blue eyes. “I’m listening, Jeremy. Of course I am.”

Everything about filmmaking was serious to Jeremy Scott. He once sat her down and outlined her whole career for her. Address of an acting school. Some agents to talk to. More polished head shots.
You’ve got to get serious, Josie.
She hated auditions. It was embarrassing, selling yourself like you were a sweater. At least art modeling was personal, you knew someone and they hired you. What was wrong with not wanting to get anywhere? Was it a crime? Anti-American?

Yet the truth was, she would have liked to be someone. To have some real talent, something to offer. It was her secret. That she would have given anything to have been Michael. With those gifts. It was so tedious to have ambition, to want to be thought special when you were flat-out ordinary. Though Michael thought she was better than that. He couldn’t see how ordinary she was. It was just when she was around him, she was smarter, original. He was like those magnets that changed the shape of the filings, made them stand up like hair. But now, she was back on her own.

“So, you still with that guy, what’s his name?”

He knew damn well what his name was. “No, we’re not together anymore,” she said. She heard herself say it. And it was the truth, he had passed her back, had said,
Thanks but no thanks.
Not even thanks for the memories. No memories. She decided not to tell Jeremy about Michael’s death. It was easier without the sympathy and a pat on the back. What would Jeremy say anyway? This was better, she could just get on with being the Girl.

He wrote an address on the script. It was a Topanga address, she knew it from Charlie Peacock’s drawing class. “We’re starting on the fourteenth, can you make it? We have the two cars for the day, it has to be then.”

She looked in her book. She had Gloria Reyes in Long Beach, but she could give it to Pen. January 14. It seemed impossible that she would live through another week, and another, into February, and March, the whole calendar was an absurdity, its empty pages a thin strip of blacktop across five thousand miles of desert.

Yet she thought of that old woman, laughing. How could she laugh like that, when the game was rigged, when you couldn’t win, when it was all
ming?
A woman that old, she had probably lost more people than everybody on this whole block put together. Internment camps, Hiroshima, who knows what she’d been through? And yet there she was, like some fucking miracle, one foot in the grave, laughing.