Paint It Black (35 page)

He hate he love her that way
but he was helpless to stop it. There was your fucking sad destiny. There was some fucking
ming.

And the next day Meredith would have tried the adjoining door, for the first time found it locked. She would have knocked, called out, but he wouldn’t answer, never again. And when he came down to breakfast, he wouldn’t have met her eye, would have answered her superficial remarks in monosyllables. That day he didn’t go down to the beach, he stayed in the hotel, called his father collect, said he wanted to come home, wanted to go somewhere to school, could Cal arrange it? Be like the other boys, though it was already too late. His father got him into Ojai, it must have been Cal. And she let him go, knowing she had gone too far, knowing she had lost him. He didn’t want to be her little husband anymore, now it was way too real. He ran. Threw himself into school and played handball,
fast and mean,
yes. And all the rest, everything that had come after.

And Josie understood why he couldn’t tell her. Because, unlike Tommy, he had loved that dark damaged woman. He couldn’t betray her, who had betrayed him in the worst way. He started calling his father, just to shoot the shit. But he could never admit how twisted things had gotten with his mother. His loyalty to Meredith was absolute, to the end. Yes.

So who was Josie Tyrell in the story, really? Someone who would stir no memories, who might help break the bond?
And was that all? We loved each other once . . . Didn’t we?
Until now she would have said,
Yes, of course we did, what do you mean?
But now she didn’t know. Maybe that summer, when Meredith called him from Hamburg and Denmark, he started to see Josie as she was, not as a project, but the bare fact of her, unsophisticated, half-literate, without much to recommend her at all. And maybe he realized the world he had chosen was really very small. Perhaps it had all started closing in. Maybe he had grown tired of playing artists in garrets, just as Meredith had predicted, and didn’t know how to stop. The pressure building. He’d made a mistake. Had wanted to give Josie up but couldn’t bring himself to. Couldn’t betray his dream of a man’s life for himself.

She reached for her purse, hanging from the doorknob of the bedroom, but her damn cigarettes were in Meredith’s pool. She could go down to Gala’s, but she didn’t want to go out into all that light, it was too much to bear. She felt helpless, exposed, like Dave in
2001
,
the computer closing the spaceship doors behind her. Cut off in deep space.
Open the bay doors, Hal.

She hauled herself out of bed, went out into the living room, it smelled like swamp and dead plants. It was so bright, it cut her in two. She found a few long butts in an ashtray, opened them, rolled the tobacco into a bum’s cigarette that tasted like trash and burned leather. She knew she should go into the kitchen, get rid of whatever it was that was stinking so badly, but she’d used the last of her energy. She sat heavily at the peeling dining table, smoking the acrid cigarette, opened the drawer, hoping to find some decent smokes, but there were only scissors and pins and her old tarot cards, folded in a Moroccan pinch-dyed scarf.

He was going to design a whole pack for her, but he’d only done the one painting and a series of sketches. She spread them on the table, not reading them, just looking at their pictures, like old friends, the Empress, the Chariot, the Fool. The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn’t Michael at all. It was her.
You fool.
She brushed at tears with the back of her hand.

And which one was he? The Magician? She’d thought he was. She’d thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his crosstree. Unable to go backward or forward.

The phone rang on the orange footlocker. Michael once told her about Zeno’s paradox, that showed there were an infinite number of small movements to doing anything, and you could divide them smaller and smaller, so that you never really arrived at the final point. You swam toward the surface but you never could reach it. Josie saw herself going through the infinite number of small gestures that arrived at picking up the receiver. “
Oui, c’est moi.
”

“Josie? Thank God you’re all right.” Meredith. Chipper as hell. “I went into your room, I knew you couldn’t possibly still be sleeping. And you were gone. Sofía said you went home. What, did you forget something?”

And who was Meredith? The Empress? The High Priestess? Or only the Queen of Swords, ruining everything she touched, the Typhoid Mary of
ming.

“I had some things to think over.”

“You’re not nervous, are you? Trust me, Josie, it’s going to be fine. The presenters take care of everything, and I’ll be right there showing you the ropes.”

The ropes. Which ropes, the ones that bound the Hanged Man to his fatal cross?

“Josie? Are you there?”

She found the Queen of Swords, saber in one hand, the other outstretched, beckoning. “Just thinking.” She looked through the deck, found the World. Put it between the Queen and the Fool. She could have the world. But at what price? The Hanged Man gazed up at her from his gallows.

“Josie, listen to me. There’s nothing to think about. It’s not an organ donation. Four days we’ll be there, and I’ll treat you to the best dinner you ever had.”

But what of her own shredded bathing suit of a soul? Wouldn’t there always be a dark swimming pool, a murky swamp, waiting in Zurich, Vienna, even an apartment in the sixteenth? How far could you run to escape a boy in his grave?

“Josie? Josie, you know, it’s all right to give yourself something good. After all you’ve been through.” Her voice was low and confiding, persuasive, a beautiful voice, so understanding. “You deserve it. As you yourself said, he’s dead everywhere.” But Josie couldn’t get away from the sickening feeling of the cliff crumbling underfoot. Like that night at dinner with Boulez. Everything that Michael had loved about her gone.
Smart, original.
She’d been unrecognizable.

“Think of it, you’ll have a whole new life, a fresh start.”

Josie walked her fingers up the curly cord of the phone. The picture of little Jeanne and Blaise in the blue train compartment, their heads together, watching her.
Remember.
“I’m not sure I can.”

Meredith’s voice came like a whisper, like a voice in her own head. “Think how you’ll feel if you’re not on that plane. Someday, you’ll be washing dishes in a trailer in Lancaster. You’ll have four screaming brats hanging on to you and you’ll look out the window at the laundry hanging in your yard and think, ‘I could have had a different life. I could have had something better.’”

Like Pauline?
she wanted to ask. Her mother had met all those famous people. Tagged along, tried to fit in. She’d started as someone and became nothing at all. Finally, she had a chance to redeem something of herself and she hocked that ring and headed for parts unknown. Left a child behind, that was how bad she needed to go. Josie ran her fingernail through the fake fur of the couch, parting it like hair, like a furrow for seed. She wanted to ask, but she had done enough damage. “I just need to do some thinking.”

“I just don’t understand you!” Meredith snapped. “You’ve got a seat on the plane, I’ve got your passport. I’m offering you everything. What in the world is bothering you?”

Meredith thought none of this would ever catch up with her. Michael, her father, her mother, Lisbeth and Wien, 1934. Saint-Tropez. Everything. She thought all she had to do was stay in the spotlight, keep moving. But it was like the swimming pool. She could go to Paris or Bayreuth or East Fuckwalla, it would still be there waiting for her. She was the most frightened woman Josie had ever seen. “Look, Meredith, I’ll either be there Tuesday or I won’t. I have to go now.”

She could hear Meredith breathing, her lips close to her ear. When her voice came back it was flat, businesslike. “Ten o’clock Tuesday, Air France. It’s up to you now.”

You take care your own soul. She is what you have now.
Josie gathered up her cards and put them back in the deck.

33

Drive

T
he clogged arteries of the 210 snaked east through Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, suburbs that splashed up against the dark bulk of the San Gabriels like water thrown on a dirty floor. It wasn’t such a hard drive, more like taking your place in line at the DMV. Thousands of people, all caught in profile, locked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, right now, in the privacy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didn’t quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to. The rest thought only about dinner, tonight’s episode of
Dallas,
the day’s argument with the boss.

In an alternate universe, she would be going home from a day at the bank, the Auto Club, the State Farm office, thinking about her own kids and what she would make for dinner in her suburban kitchen in El Monte. Tuna casserole with potato chips crumbled on top. Her young husband picking them up at day care. What was so wrong about that? Something simple and basic, attainable. She wanted too much, that was her fault, not just Michael’s love, but everything everything everything. Genius and wealth and culture, art and achievement, that whole Loewy trip. If she had just stopped. Had taken off the blindfold of her magical thinking.

On the tape, Patsy Cline sang
I fall to pieces, each time I see you again
. . . She’d bought it at a gas station in Glendale, it was the closest thing they’d had to the blues. How Pen would have laughed if she could see her now, singing along, she knew every word, every cowgirl hiccup, like her own heartbeat, she could hit every high note, and capture the quaver and the chin-up bravery. Patsy was Piaf in fringe and white boots. But Meredith had the Piaf, she had Louis and Django and Bing, right along with Brahms and Bartók, she’d even swept Josie’s old Merle Haggard into her net. Sitting now in a heap in Michael’s old room.
I don’t think I’m coming back, Josie.
She would lock up the house and never return. Fifty years from now, that stuff would probably still be sitting there, the pile of their things covered in a layer of dust thick as felt. They’d all be dead, but their things would still be waiting, the records still playable. Who would it go to when Meredith was gone? Knowing that woman, it would just go on and on. Some bank paying the taxes, the whole house silently crumbling into the ground.

She should think about her own soul, what she was going to do with this funky tattered pond-dank item. Dark and stained, a ruined thing. She could not do what Meredith was planning, just lock the house and leave town without a forwarding address. Although she was a girl who killed the thing she loved, she could do one thing that that frightened woman could not—go to the end with him. She could take it all the way.

Traffic inched down the valley, past Azusa and Glendora. In the orange-grove days these had been real towns, each with its railroad siding and general store, but now it was one big snail track of suburb, one great sleepwalking sprawl. Yet, still, what she wouldn’t give for a piece of that ordinary life, to share with the boy she loved, like a loaf of plain, warm bread.

Out in Pomona, ghostly white balloons hung in the night sky over the car dealers lining the freeway. Weird white surreal clusters against the black, tugging at their tethers. She could feel them in her throat, in her chest. The dark batons of palm trees shot up darker than the sky. The moon rose above a bank of clouds, the great grinning Oz of a moon. Was that God, she wondered, just the man behind the curtain, working His cranks and levers? Covering His own inadequacies? Just a cheesy music video made in someone’s garage, with lots of Mole fog and uplighting?

Michael had driven this same road, past these very same car lots, these exact palms. Did he know just where he was going? Or did he rent a car from the National counter at the Ambassador Hotel and just spin the keys? East was the desert, a dead sea, salt flats, the great missile testing range. Did he know it would be Twentynine Palms, or had he just passed each exit in turn, waiting to be moved by a fatal instinct? Why not one of the eight exits of Pomona? She watched them go by.
Fairgrounds, Garvey, Towne, Indian Hill. Etiwanda,
why not Etiwanda? Or Montclair, or Ontario. How far did he think he had to go to meet what could have been met right there in the house on Lemoyne?

Finally, the suburbs loosened their grip on the land, the commuter traffic thinning toward Colton. She could tell, no one lived in Colton and worked somewhere else. People didn’t even commute to Pomona from here. The billboards changed from gentlemen’s clubs and car lots and overnight communities to fantasies centering on the vacation traveler, women in feathers, or else floating in pools, men in white pants playing golf. Spas and the hotels of Palm Springs and Las Vegas.
Feeling lucky tonight?
She couldn’t remember the last time she felt lucky. She thought of that old man, Morty, and his wife, driving out here on their way to Las Vegas, their big Caddy on cruise control, listening to Sinatra on four-speaker sound. She liked knowing he was awake down at the Four Queens in Gardena, that he’d be awake all night. She wondered if he thought of her when he visited his wife. Did he ever look over at Michael’s stone and wonder what happened to that girl in the yellow coat, who had never known anyone who’d died? Now it seemed unbelievable, the innocence of a girl in a fairy tale.

The train yards in Fontana sat forlorn under orange crime lights, empty cars waiting on sidings, full ones moving slow as a dream, going somewhere with their load of steel and oranges, trains without beginning or end. But not their train, Blaise and Jeanne’s, the one that started in Paris and went through a war in Siberia to end at the sea in Harbin, China.
The Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake
. . . Easy enough to die in Fontana, you could lie down on the tracks and be divided neatly, top and bottom. Or you could just pick a fight in a beer bar, expending the smallest insult, and let someone else do the job, bashing your skull against the concrete curb of the parking lot.

This very second, she could jerk the wheel of the car to the left just ever so slightly, and the sixteen wheeler with the slick, shiny cab could crush her like a candy wrapper. Her hands sweated. She tried to think of something else, but she could not stop thinking how it would feel, how long would it take. Just an accident. You didn’t really have to know what you were doing. You could deny it all.
I just fell asleep for a second.
Swilling barbs and voddy and falling into a pool. The brave thing was to admit it. To say,
I have fucking had enough.
To take the fucking gun and put it in your mouth and pull the trigger.
I’m doing this, assholes, and it ain’t no accident. Look, here’s how.
If you were going to do it, you should know that’s what you were doing. Your eyes wide open.

She wove through the serpentine knot of freeway exchanges, the split between the 10 and 15, one heading to Beaumont, Banning, and Indio, the other moving north to Las Vegas. She felt panic, imagining Mort and Dotty turning off here, leaving her alone to continue east, she had almost believed they were with her. She drove on.

Redlands
10
.
She thought of Pen, growing up out here, scrappy mad and dreaming of LA so hard she could taste it. She missed her like an arm—Pen, with her great love of life, her sense of fun and her rough practicality, that gap-toothed smile. Pen had never considered taking an extra pill or five, crashing into oncoming traffic. How furious it made her to see Josie succumbing to the Loewy spell. She could never explain to Pen why she was going to Twentynine Palms, why she had to know, once and for all. Why she had to take it all the way. She didn’t fully understand it herself, but she felt if she was ever going to save that last shred of soul, she had to go into it, right up into the asshole of death.

In Redlands, a little carnival churned and blinked, a Ferris wheel, a miniature roller coaster, her favorite kind of ride. But she would not stop to investigate. He hadn’t been looking for a carnival.
Carne
for meat.
Carnevale.
The feast before Lent, getting ready for Easter, the death of Christ and His miraculous recovery.

He’d taken her to Easter Mass last spring, in a pink brick church on Vermont. It surprised her, but she liked when he got an idea in his head, to do something weird like this. She put on a nice dress and heels. “What if it happened?” he said on the way over. “What if they rolled the boulder back and found the tomb empty?” They came in late and sat in the back. The church was packed, every kind of person, hair color, fashion choice. Big flowers in front filled the sanctuary with their scent, and honey candles, full-voiced choir. The larger-than-life Christ sagged on His cross. How thin He looked, such a terrible fragility. Broken. Forsaken. The priest spoke, the congregation responded. Suddenly, everyone turned around and shook each other’s hands, saying, “peace be with you,” “and with you.” How seriously Michael had done it, said,
and peace be with you.
She wondered what they would have thought if they knew he was half-Jewish. A priest walked down the aisle with an altar boy carrying a bowl of water, and shook a bell-like contraption on a wooden stick, watering them with a sharp hard rap. The surprise at the cold water, amazing it didn’t raise blisters, considering who they were. Michael’s eyes shining. What was he thinking he was doing here, she’d wondered, a Jewish boy whose grandfather had to flee Nazis with the clothes on his back? But now she understood. He wanted faith, that the boulder would someday roll away, and the Son would walk free. That he would be released from the tomb he was sealing himself into.

She felt such searing pity, she had to pull over. The cars crashed by as she sat trying to breathe, her chest tight as a fist. Why had she not seen it? She’d just watched, without a thought in her head except when would they go and have lunch. Afterward, they’d stopped at a side altar, he lit a candle, knelt and prayed before a beautiful Virgin with flowers around her neck. Josie paid the dollar and lit a candle, but it was just a game. She thought of the Virgin over his bed in Los Feliz. Why a Virgin, instead of a Jewish candelabra or star? She had always thought it was just a piece of kitschy decor. But it wasn’t. This was the Mother he wanted to watch over him in his anxious sleep, someone who could love him without condition, take his pain away. Not one whose genius taunted him at every turn, a mother who raised him up with one hand just to cut him down with the other, who blurred all the lines, who tunneled with secret doors into his soul. He wanted to be loved purely, simply. No expectations. And she herself wasn’t free from that guilt. She had wanted things from him too, needed as much if not more.

And so, she and Meredith, the women who’d failed him, were left with their sins, and the boulder never did roll away. She sat and smoked a cigarette, the tears drooling down.

After Redlands, the road climbed into some sort of pass. In the dark it seemed lush and wooded. But on the other side, she was met by wind that shoved the car halfway into the next lane. A Buick blatted its horn. At first she thought something was wrong with her tires. It would settle for a minute, five, she thought it was gone, and then suddenly the car skidded sideways again. She fought her way through battered Calimesa, a town from the Forties, pickup trucks and small-town feel, its Bob’s Big Boy the center of visible nightlife. And all around in the flat western landscape, scattered lights winked way off in the distance. She understood people who’d choose to live like that, isolated in a dry, hard terrain, so far from comfort. People who didn’t want to love their neighbors as themselves, or rather, loved their neighbors about as much. Hard people, whose own company was even more than they could stomach.

She fought the wind for an hour, her arms weary and aching, her nerves peeled to a thread by the time she pulled into the Denny’s in Beaumont. She was glad just to be somewhere. Raw cold cut her as she left the car, all she had between her skin and the wind were a pair of dirty jeans and a sweater, a dog-torn leather jacket. Well all right. She didn’t need a five-hundred-dollar pony-skin coat, a new full-length down cocoon. You couldn’t swathe yourself in goose down when you were taking it all the way. It was cold and hard and it was her choice.

The hostess took one look at her punked-out hair and jacket and seated her away from the families, at a window where she could watch the lights on the highway, and her old Falcon with the marks of a hundred small-time bands. She ordered a burger from the bow-tied waiter, a middle-aged Latino. “You’re not from around here,” he said. “Have a hard drive?”

She smiled, declining conversation. Maybe she was wrong about the people out here. Maybe it was herself she was thinking of. The windows bowed as the wind hit them. She imagined them popping, the customers all sliced by glass, blood flowing, pooling on the patterned salmon and teal indoor-outdoor carpeting, the brightness of heart blood. Did Michael sit here in the Beaumont Denny’s with a cup of weak coffee, listening to the wind and the trains going by? It was a Dust Bowl sound, it stirred something in her own blood. She had never felt so lonely in her life as she did at that moment, listening to the train whistle cry.

A man with a gray crew cut and gray eyes and gray skin sat in a booth facing her, his hands cradling his coffee. His body was there but his eyes were a thousand miles away. She wondered what he was seeing, where those eyes had gotten stuck. She ate half her burger, but wasn’t hungry after all. The meat made her ill, the pickle. She ate a few of the fries and let the waiter bring her more coffee, she lit a cigarette and watched the gray man, a dead man in a coffee shop under fluorescent lights. The papery crinkles of his skin, the gray eyes staring at nothing. She understood just how that could happen. She understood very well. She finished smoking, her Gauloise as odd in a Beaumont Denny’s as a fur at a Fourth of July jamboree.