Paint It Black (16 page)
Yes, Meredith, I get naked in front of strangers. Still. Even now.
“Among other things.”
“And you pay the rent with that?”
“I manage,” Josie said.
Meredith signaled the waiter by lifting a single finger and then pointing to her Scotch, which had disappeared. Josie marveled that the waiter watched her so carefully, he could catch a gesture so small. Imagine having the confidence to believe that someone paid that much attention to you. It reminded her of the movies when people went to an auction, and accidentally sneezed and ended up with some huge ugly vase they couldn’t afford. “Josie, I’ve been thinking about this. I should have asked you before. If you need any help, just call me. You have to understand, I was just so angry at Michael, I thought if he didn’t have any money he’d come home.”
“I know,” Josie said. Like Michael, she’d rather slit her wrists than take money from Meredith.
The waiter brought the new drink, took away Meredith’s empty glass. She was clearly planning on getting plowed. Now the salad was abandoned in favor of the second drink. Whatever Meredith had brought her here for, she had to get good and plastered to say it. Was this it? Regret at cutting Michael off? Regret at the way she’d treated Josie that morning in Los Feliz? Josie was feeling a little woozy from the Stoli herself.
“The guy with the gray hair keeps looking at you,” Josie said.
Meredith glanced at the music fan and his businessman friends without much interest, over the rim of her glass.
“Do you date?” Josie asked. “I don’t mean now. In general.” To hear Michael tell it, it had always been just him and his mother. There was never another man in the stories he told of their travels.
“Dating,” Meredith said, holding her glass in two hands, looking down into it, as if a message was going to print out at the bottom. “It sounds a bit juvenile, don’t you think? ‘Let’s go down to the malt shop, Goober.’ ”
“So you don’t?”
“I have male friends. I’m not celibate.”
“Michael thought you were.”
Now a slow smile spread across her face. A real smile, wrinkling her nose, the lines fanning out from her eyes. “Well, I didn’t wave my relationships under his nose. I once had an affair with a Czech violinist, and Michael was just impossible. Did everything he could to break it up.” Meredith stirred her drink with the little plastic stick, watched the ice twirl. “You think I was so wrong? Should I have forced my sex life on him? Would that have been less Oedipal? Or more? I don’t know. I was all he had, that was the thing I kept thinking.”
But she had set it up that way. He could have had his father, if she’d let him. Or maybe not. It was hard to know whom to believe.
Now, Meredith crossed her arms and placed them on the edge of the table, leaned forward. Her pearls fell out from inside her shirt collar. They soaked in all the light, warmly, they glowed. “I’d like to ask a favor of you, Josie.” She held one huge hand inside the other, and she lowered her eyes onto Josie like a lioness. “I want to see where Michael lived.”
They’ve always got somethin up their sleeve,
she heard her father say.
There’s always a catch. They don’t do nothin without a payoff.
And this was it. Meredith didn’t want to get to know her, take back preconceived notions of Michael’s trashy girlfriend, and so understand a part of him which had escaped her. No. She just wanted to see the place where Michael had finally escaped to. This lunch had nothing to do with getting acquainted, giving her a chance. Her eyes stung with the humiliation. What a fool she was, still. The enticing glimpse of this glamorous world, the Meredith world. Michael’s world. Only to have the door slammed in her face.
“Why? You never wanted to when he was alive.” Never wanted to see their place, have dinner with them, be with them as a couple.
“Please, Josie.” She was practically whispering now. “He’s gone. I just want to see . . . his home.”
Josie drank from her voddy, though there wasn’t much left, just watery ice flavored with vodka. She had some nerve, after what happened at the funeral, and stealing her note. Threatening to have her killed, throwing her out of Michael’s room like a thief.
She could see the older woman struggling with her emotions, wanting to reach out and strangle her again—her enormous hands, she wore no rings, the nails were clipped short, unpainted, buffed to a dull sheen. They were like hands in a painting. Meredith gazed at her imploringly, her face composed into a trembling smile.
“I thought you wanted to take out a hit on me. Don’t you remember that? Calling me and threatening to have me murdered?”
Meredith shrugged apologetically “Josie. People say things when they’re upset.”
“And now I’m supposed to take you on a tour of my private life.”
“You remind me so much of Michael,” Meredith said, pressing her fingers to her forehead, as if to still a violent headache. “So pigheaded. I’m just asking to see it, for Christ’s sake, I’m not asking to move in.”
Josie struggled to hold herself firm, but could feel herself sliding toward Meredith, as if the floor itself had tilted. The woman overwhelmed her, her will, her beauty, her likeness to Michael. She’d never come when he was alive, never wanted to see him living with a girl, as a man. And now she wanted to visit the ruins. Like a tourist arriving after a hurricane.
“Please, Josie. You’ve been to my house, you saw his room, everything.” She lowered her voice, though it was already low. “I’ve tried to imagine his house, but there’s just nothing. I miss him so much. Just a small thing. Please.”
Josie could feel herself slipping, scrambling, like a dog on a polished floor. The low hypnotic voice, soothing her, shaping her into a new form, fragile and passive. She knew it would be wrong to let Meredith into the place where Michael had tried to have a life of his own. His only existence separate from his mother. She owed it to Michael to respect his wishes, didn’t she?
Meredith waited for an answer. She looked wild, desperate, even in her pearls and cashmere sweater. Her mane of sable hair, her living eyes—alive, and Michael was dead dead dead dead. He was the one who’d left her alone. He was the one who’d broken his promises.
“All right,” Josie said. “But I’ll drive.”
Tour
M
eredith left the Jag in the parking lot at Bullock’s Wilshire. Josie picked her up in the Falcon, at the portico behind the venerable store, supremely aware of how much noise its weak muffler made. She and Pen had once gone inside just to see what it was like, all Deco mirrors and frosted glass, but they couldn’t afford to buy anything. Pen kyped a tester of Lanvin. She imagined Meredith had credit here,
Hello, Miss Loewy, Nice to see you, Miss Loewy.
They would remember her sizes, the colors she liked. Josie quickly pitched all the junk into the back as Meredith got in, the black coat gathered tightly around her to minimize contact with the seat. Her pinched face reminded Josie of the time she and Laurie Smart came in from playing at the impound yard, among the towed cars, to find Laurie’s mother sitting next to Janey Tyrell on a couch piled with laundry, both women wishing they were anywhere else, Janey, trying to be a good hostess, offering this rare guest a few Oreos on a plate.
Josie punched in a tape of Meredith playing the
Pierrot Lunaire.
The angular phrases, the German woman sprechgesanging. When she heard the music, Meredith’s head snapped around, staring at the tape deck. She must have imagined Josie would blast her with Fear. Though really, the Schoenberg was weirder. “Good God,” Meredith said, sitting back in her seat, her hands in her coat pockets. “That woman could never get the phrasing right. Singers.”
They drove up soot-darkened Alvarado, past the taquerias and travel agencies, onto Sunset. Shoppers wore unaccustomed parkas and scarves over shorts and flip-flops, the LA winter uniform. Vendors lined up along the wide sidewalks selling everything from their mishmash of carts and coolers—coconut and yuca, chicharrones and tamales and carne asada, shaved ice cones, bags of pot. Discount stores operated under elaborate rooftop neon signs advertising businesses extinct since the Twenties:
Jensen’s Recreation, Foster Brothers, Lux Vacuums.
Proof as to how completely everything changed, and left just a trace. Meredith flipped up the collar of her coat, as if it had grown ten degrees colder, but her jade eyes had the attentive intelligence of the kids who sat in the front of the class.
“There’s our
panadería,
” Josie said. The Diazepam bakery, people standing in line for
Tres Reyes
bread and Valium. And Launderland. “He did our laundry there.” A woman was holding the door open for her kids, a big basket of laundry on one hip, steam escaping into the cold. And again Josie had the strongest feeling that Michael was going to come out, their blue and red duffel over his shoulder. She felt the catch in her throat. “He’d always ask the ladies’ opinions about detergent or what they were reading in the tabs.”
Meredith flicked her long eyes to the small establishment, her head deep in her collar like a turtle, as if someone might recognize her. “Giving up Harvard to do Josie Tyrell’s laundry. Talk about fabric softener with underprivileged hausfraus.” Her wide ironic mouth, like his in his bitter moods. “He was terrified of people of his own class. Thought he could lose himself among the poor. San Miguel de Echo Park.”
Josie gauged the width of the road, to see if she could make a U-turn. She whipped a screaming 180, they were almost hit by a white van coming around the corner.
“Jesus. Are you crazy?” Meredith clung to the dashboard. “We might have been killed.”
“The world might be better off.”
Meredith leaned her head against the rest, closed her eyes. The choppy twelve-tone modernity of Schoenberg had fallen mysteriously into sync with the ranchero music playing in the car behind them. Josie glanced out of the window at a man driving with a Chihuahua on his lap. It stood up, its little paws on the wheel.
Michael had tried to warn her. Meredith wasn’t to be trusted, she was a performer who saved the best of herself for the box with the black and white keys, the upturned faces of the public. She had no right to see their private world,
La Bohème,
the train compartment of Blaise and Jeanne. It was like allowing her into their bed, letting her watch them make love. She turned off
Pierrot Lunaire.
Meredith put her gloved hand on Josie’s coat sleeve. “Josie, please. It’s nothing you don’t know. He had his fantasies about so-called real life, admit it.”
“Is your life so real? Not that I heard.” They passed the rancid grease of a fast-food shop,
Chinese and American Food/Donuts.
“Forgive me. I want to understand. Please don’t.” The voice dropped to a whisper, urgent, secret. Desperate. “Please, Josie. I do want to understand. I’m so sorry, I can be such a bitch and I don’t even mean to. No one is sorrier than I am, you can bank on that.”
And Josie began to slow down. There was something in her voice. She thought of Cal.
It’s nobody’s fault.
At least Meredith wasn’t feeding her that cheesy line. They passed the newsstand, where old men read the Spanish-language magazines, smoking, kidding one another, and a young man and a girl were strolling along, arms around each other’s shoulders, whispering, casting amused glances at the old people, for whom love was just history. Last year that had been her and Michael. Walking arm in arm. It seemed that love was a crop, and her season had come and gone.
“If I bring you,” Josie said, “you can’t say anything. Think what you want, but just don’t talk, all right?”
“I promise. Thank you,” Meredith said.
Josie turned off Sunset, climbing the hill, past the elementary school which was closed, the play yard occupied by older boys who had climbed the chain-link fence for gleeful games of basketball, to skateboard or ride their little brothers’ bicycles in stolen freedom. As they ascended, the streets narrowed, she had to pull over for downhill traffic. An old woman with her gray hair scraped into a bun watered her small garden in bedroom slippers and white socks. A little boy in diapers ran up the sidewalk, laughing, naughty, teasing his young mother. Three men bent over the engine of a banged-up Toyota truck, the regular afternoon auto-repair club. Meredith kept her head tucked in like a spy or a cop, registering everything. Tropical plants grew lush in unkempt yards. Spectacular views opened and closed to the left and right, Hollywood, the hills, Elysian Park, the Russian church with its gold domes. Maybe she was memorizing the way they came in case Josie abandoned her. There was an idea. Let her find her own way home, the globe-trotting pianist in her pearls.
“How do you know I’m not going to take you somewhere and just dump you?”
Meredith appeared unruffled at the thought. “Well, it’s good to know that little something about your fantasy life.”
The street split and joined again, to accommodate the steepness of the slope, the earth in between filled with jade plants and leggy geraniums. Josie slowed and then parked. The front house, César and Veronica’s, was a ramshackle bungalow painted a peeling blue, half-hidden behind a giant bird-of-paradise higher than the roof, its black beaks and pale green crests nesting in the banana-like leaves. It looked pretty to her, but she knew, to Meredith, it might seem tatty and pathetic. She was glad she had forbidden Meredith to speak. She led her to the gate on the side of the house, pulling the noose that opened the latch. Meredith had to go slowly down the steep wooden stairs, clutching the metal-pipe railing. They stopped on the rickety landing at the little back house, shady and private, and Josie opened the door. She could feel Meredith standing behind her, tall, rigid, her long fingers washing each other in nervousness.
Josie put the keys in the bowl on the little table they had painted red, with green mermaids, relieved she’d cleaned a bit, last night, when she couldn’t sleep. Meredith remained at the door, motionless, as if she had walked in on a holdup, someone pointing a gun at her, Josie half expected her to raise her hands in surrender. Long eyes unblinking, taking in the room, dense with Michael’s presence. Walls covered with his paintings and drawings. Their collection of strange hats and hideous neckties and funny props, their arrangements on tabletops and windowsills. The legless couch Josie had upholstered in blue fake fur. And the view, the observatory on the crest of the hill like a king on a throne. The Hollywood sign like a joke in the flat winter light.
“You can take your coat off,” Josie said.
But Meredith didn’t seem to even hear her. She walked toward the windows, slowly, as if she was sleepwalking and was afraid of awakening, afraid all this would disappear. She put her hand on the back of the armchair, noticed the pipe-cleaner circus on the windowsill. She picked up Balthazar, the elephant, turned it gingerly against the light. She went to the bookcase, she was touching the books, the journals. She opened a book of poems, Valéry, Josie wanted to grab it out of her hands. She hadn’t realized how she would feel, Meredith in her house. That violation, seeing their life, touching it, it felt somehow that she was erasing it as she went. The house seemed to be bracing itself against her scrutiny. They had had so little company here. It had been heaven after the chaos of the Fuckhouse, though she had to admit, she had grown tired of their privacy. Trapped here with his moodiness, the way he had taken to testing her, pushing her. The tests she failed, that made her cheat and sneak around, like a kid and not a woman of twenty who could do what she wanted without apology.
She left Meredith to fill her senses with the life she had never wanted to know, went into the kitchen to make some tea. She filled the kettle, put it on the stove, lit it with a kitchen match.
“I love this.” Meredith came back through the beaded curtain to the kitchen, holding a painting, a self-portrait of Michael as the Magician in the tarot deck. Her Magician. The four emblems on the table before him, cup, sword, wand, and coin. “Could I have it?”
The water boiled in the speckled enamel tea kettle Michael liked because it did not whistle. She turned off the gas, and pushed past Meredith and her prize. “It’s not a shopping trip.” She went outside, down into the garden, plucked some mint he’d planted in a stack of tires he’d found down there. That fresh, menthol smell. How small it had been then, just a fifty-cent plant, he’d put it right under the hose bib. They’d planted everything here themselves, this small dark garden. How lovely it had been, to buy plants at the nursery and then plant them in their own yard. Josie had never planted so much as a pansy. Their jungle was going to be like the Garden of Eden. The mint was knee high and two feet wide now. How bitterly ironic, that the mint was thriving so vigorously, but the boy who planted it was not. She tucked leaves from the plant into her sweater front like a pouch.
Everything in the place called his name. The angel-wing begonia, the calla lilies, the morning glories that had grown up into the trees. She went back up to the house, where Meredith was going through the books, looking for something. Let it go. Let it go. She began making tea, thinking, what didn’t bear the imprint of his personality. The jars and tins of exotic spices stacked against the painted tiles, from Thai groceries, Indian shops, Korean, Turkish, Salvadoran, Ethiopian. Their battered pots hung from a bicycle wheel over the stove. She couldn’t get away from him. They could have the mint tea that they always drank, or Earl Grey, which he hated, but even his hating it made it his. She was beginning to understand why people gave away all their possessions and left town, just moved into a motel off a highway in Bishop. Maybe she should give everything to Meredith and leave with nothing but the clothes on her back. She put the mint into the celadon teapot they’d bought at a student sale at Otis, the color of duck eggs.
Elegant things.
Their game, from a book of his,
The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon.
“Duck eggs? That’s elegant?” she’d asked.
“They’re a particular color of green,” he said. “Very beautiful. But you should know that, you’re from the country.” He had no idea, a tow yard in Bakersfield was about as far from the country as Los Feliz. She poured boiling water into the crackle green pot, releasing the fresh brightness into the air. A moment later Josie heard, “Oh God.”
Something in the sharpness of the cry made her wipe her hands on a towel and run into the living room, where Meredith crumpled onto the low couch like she was folding herself into an envelope, a tight package of shock, hand over her mouth. She had finally noticed the big painting,
Civilization and Its Discontents.
On her face was the same blinkless horror that Michael got the day they saw the dog hit by the car. The way it writhed in the gutter and he couldn’t do anything, staring with exactly that same helplessness. Caught through the eyes, unable to respond or help or turn away.
There on the wall, Meredith finally saw herself, climbing the stairs in her son’s nightmares, bearing the world’s strange cargo in her arms. Every woman with her face, blind and ascending in a trance. Their idealized faces lacked the ravages his death had ground onto the genuine one. Meredith sat perfectly still, but even so, something inside was making panicked circles, just like the dog.
There was nothing she could have said to make it better. She poured tea into the tiny celadon cups, beautifully glazed. They had once done a real tea ceremony with this set. The tea was powdery and bitter, he whisked it up with a tiny broom. Everything so slow and beautiful, it lifted time away, and you were in that eternal space, it made where you were the true world. Though Meredith wouldn’t have noticed, she gave the cup a half turn before she offered it to her. You always turned the cup.
But Meredith didn’t take it, she could not turn her head from the picture. It was like having Michael here, in that mood when she couldn’t talk to him, but moved quietly around the place so he’d know he wasn’t alone.
That’s how it was with his death. There were still more punishments in store for them. Every day there was something new. As if one death was not enough, it spread out, a feast of loss with ever more courses, surprising and painful in ways you could never anticipate. “How can you live here?” Meredith whispered. “I can’t even go into his room.”
