Paint It Black (5 page)

“She was really pissed.”

“I can imagine. You don’t know how they used to be. Just the two of them, in their own little world. No intruders welcome. Meaning me of course.” He coughed and drank, went back to turning the glass in his hands. “Yeah, she taught him all the diva tricks. I tried with him, you don’t know. But I didn’t hobnob around with Arnold Schoenberg, I’m just a rustic. He thought of me as some kind of clown. My own son.” He signaled to Willie Woo, a raised crooked forefinger, for another JD.

Did Cal feel inferior to his son? She was about to argue with him, but he held up his hand.

“Hey, I know what he thought. He despised me, because I couldn’t handle his mother. It’s devastating to have your mother reject your father for you. Screws up the whole Oedipal chain of command.” He watched one of the punks hovering by the jukebox, trying to choose the most appropriate tear-jerking Lotus Room selection for his late beer breakfast. Sammy’s hadn’t updated its playlist since 1963. The kid put quarters in the slot, and the machine whirred and began to play Julie London torch singing “Blue Moon.” Willie Woo sang it under his breath as he put Cal’s fresh glass on the bar in front of him.

Nobody was saying shit about what had really gone down. She wasn’t going to be drawn into Cal’s scenario. She had known Michael too well for that. “So that’s why you called him Sissy-Boy? To help him feel close to you?”

“He was still on that?” Cal lifted his drink to his thin Oregon lips. “That is a misquote. What I said was, ‘Don’t be a sissy-boy.’ He damn well knew what I said. He was quite a dramatist, just like his mother.” Her cigarette had gone out, he lit it for her with her own lighter, shielding the flame with his rough hand.

“And the thing with the ball?” The baseball he’d thrown at Michael, that hit him in the head.

“He could’ve caught it,” Cal said, shaking his head. “He just wanted to make a big deal in front of his mother. He could be tricky like that, working the angles. He played handball at Ojai. At Harvard he was a ranked player. I played with him up there, Parents’ Weekend. He was fast, and mean. Beat the pants off of me.”

I am not sportif.
What was Cal talking about? “He didn’t play sports.”

Cal took out his wallet, removed a photograph. A boy in white clothes, reaching up with a tennis racket to smash a high ball. Red cheeked and dark haired, she knew it was no mistake. No shred of adolescent gawkiness. It was too much to understand. She just wanted to lie down and sleep.

Cal replaced the photo, on top of a picture of two small girls. The most recent set of Faraday half sibs, children of the latest wife, Harmony, whom Michael called Numbah Foah. One on top of another, like the building of civilizations. Michael must have normally been near the bottom, but his suicide had brought him to the top. How Michael resented that about his father, that he could make a mess and then walk away, start over. Move on to the next woman, make new kids, the world always fresh and new. When Michael couldn’t walk away from anything.

Well, Cal wasn’t walking away now. Michael had finally gotten his father’s full attention.

“You know, I was nosing around up at the house. I had a feeling Meredith was holding out on me.” Cal pulled out an envelope from the breast of his blue jacket. He opened the brown manila and removed two white envelopes. He took one and slid it down the bar, put the other away.

Josie Tyrell.
Written in that familiar vertical hand, the
e
’s like
3
’s, the down-crossed
t
’s. The envelope was spattered with brown. Just a light spatter, like the overspray from an airbrushing. “I found it in the desk, in her old man’s study. She locks it, but I know where she keeps the key.” Her father’s study, Mauritz Loewy’s, who shot himself in the head. The red leather study Michael had told her was Cal’s. “She doesn’t know about limits. It’s the way she was raised. Remember that if you run into her again.”

She turned the envelope over in her hands.
Josie Tyrell.
This was for her, and she was afraid. The envelope had been opened, a wavy ink line torn blatantly in two. “She read it?”

“That or the coroner.”

“Did you?”

He furrowed his brow in an expression of pity and dismay. “No, thanks, I got one of my own.”

“What did yours say?”

Cal Faraday heaved a great sigh, blew the air through his mouth. He reached for her cigarettes, glancing at her for objection or permission. She nodded and he lit one, took a sad exhale. “My son was an angry person. I have to take some responsibility there. Not all, though. Not all.”

Josie crushed out her cigarette, and opened the torn flap of her letter, feeling sick, but steeling herself, expecting the worst . . .
Josie, you bitch, you Judas cunt, you low-life piece of crap. I curse the day I met you.
“Why did she have them?”

Cal shook his head. “Must have been the coroner. But he wanted her to see them, he was a smart boy, he had to know she’d open them. So read with a grain of salt.”

She took out the letter and held it in her hands, forced herself to start at the top. Motel letterhead,
Paradise Inn.
Highway 62. Twentynine Palms.
Blood spatters had seeped through the envelope, faintly printing the thin off-white paper in an unholy constellation.
Dear Josie,
it said.
We loved each other
—. She stopped, held her breath, read it again. Maybe he didn’t blame her, maybe she hadn’t done this after all.
We loved each other . . . Didn’t we? I can’t remember.
You’ll have to remember for both of us.
Oh God. Oh God oh God oh God.
I hope you find someone who can meet your needs better than I could. I’m just not up to it. See you in the next life. Michael.

Simple lines across the page, slicing her open, clean and fast, like a cold razor. Then in a less certain hand below, the ink blobbing, the letters mashed together—he must have been drinking—
I’m so sorry. Sorry sorry for everything. I’m so fucking sorry.
She put her hand to her forehead, so Cal wouldn’t see the tears dripping down her nose, onto the bar.

Cal reached out to press his hand over hers, warm and callused, and she let him. “It’s not your fault,” he said. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

She snatched her hand away, wiped her eyes, and read it again. The last words he ever wrote. “What do you do with something like this? Keep it in the drawer with your underwear? Along with the love letters? Carry it around all your life?”

“I don’t know,” Cal said. “I’m plumb out of answers today.”

5

These Days

J
osie lay on her stomach in the stale white bed that still smelled of Michael, though less each day. She wore his green flannel shirt that she’d found in the laundry, it was filthy and dank and only smelled of her now, metallic with grief. She closed her eyes and pressed her face to his pillow, trying to catch his scent, but it eluded her, she could smell it only by accident now, like a glance caught in a crowd, then lost forever. Out in the living room, Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five played “Big Butter and Egg Man,” and her heart lay crushed in an eggshell mosaic.

She turned over slightly and let her eyes cross the Siberia of the sheets to drift along the walls, where they’d painted Montmartre. Their café with its little round tables, Blaise and Jeanne, the street in front, the shops, painted it together in their first weeks in the house. Days he didn’t remember. That he didn’t want anymore. How those walls had once begged for violation, like a snarky virgin. She’d asked him to paint them. “A picture would be so great here,” she’d said, embracing the bare surface. “Please?”

“Mae Fong strictly forbid,” Michael said. Their landlady, a gritty sixtyish chain-smoking City Hall secretary, admonished them when they moved in not to touch anything, the walls had just been repainted. Navajo white, landlord’s delight.

“Come on, she knew we were going to do it the moment she left.” She went out and got his drawing things, the charcoal and pencils. “Do us in Montmartre.”

The way he looked at her then. He’d been to Harvard, but it had never occurred to him to defy a landlady’s orders. “What’s she going to do to us, Michael? Nothing.”

“This is what I love about you,” Michael said, pressing his forehead to hers, his arm around her neck. “You give me permission, you don’t even know.”

“I’ll give you more than permission,” she said, rolling her forehead on his, drinking in that smell, pine and moss. “I’ll give you the whole enchilada.”

He picked up a piece of crayon, and started on the blank closet doors, drawing a café, the bar, and at the tables, circus people, the strong man and the bearded lady, and in the foreground, a little ballerina at a table alone.

“But where’s her lover?” she asked him. “You can’t let her be there all on her own. Look at her. Look how sad she is.”

“He’s coming. He’s picking her some violets to pin to her coat.”

“Well, he better get there, before she leaves with the strong man.”

He laughed easily, the flash of those big white teeth. He quickly sketched himself in, an artist in a floppy tie, uncombed hair long in the front, a rumpled jacket, a sketchpad before him on the table, a bottle of wine and a squat glass.

He mixed acrylic paints in Dixie cups, and surprised her by giving her a brush. “Do that with the red,” he said, pointing to the area on which he was sketching paintings in frames. “You’re in this now.”

So they painted side by side, listening to Louis Armstrong,
Le Jazz Hot.
Django Reinhardt playing his jazzy Gypsy guitar. Piaf and her heartbroken streets. Michael painted the hard parts and she did the easy ones: the wall, the basic shapes, silhouettes, bentwood chairs, the underpainting of the figures in the foreground, while he did the faces and clothing, the little pictures with which the artists had paid for their drinks when they were broke. Just a few strokes, and there was a Picasso—a sad clown and his girlfriend huddled over their drinks. The black candle trees of Van Gogh. The Sacré-Coeur. She had seen these pictures before in the art books where she’d searched out new ideas for poses, but now they were
our Picasso, our Van Gogh.
Every day they got up and painted some more, went for walks, made love. Who knew where Montmartre ended and Echo Park began? Each colored the other, like watercolors, bleeding.

How could he not remember? It was like not remembering his name, like forgetting the color of the sky. She remembered everything, everything. How they carried the last of the boxes down from the street and collapsed on the enormous couch that someone had managed to haul down there. The way the light streaked the wide planks of the floor and filled the windows with trees. Michael stretching out his lanky shoulders in his peculiar gesture, wedging his wrist behind the joint and pressing the whole arm forward, first one and then the other, as he surveyed the box-filled room, the rough posts that held up the ceiling. Then he slipped his arm around her waist, pressing his head to hers. She loved that best, even more than fucking. She could never have imagined such a little thing could fill her with such indescribable sweetness, she felt too small to contain it all. She could feel it even now, the hardness of his head, the smell of his sweat, like a liquor, the way the view shimmered in the summer light, the long silvery eucalyptus leaves that blew across the window like a girl’s hair. She’d never lived in a place with a view before, like a tree house. She felt like she could finally breathe. As if there had been a big black frog sitting on her chest as long as she could remember, and now it was gone.

Well, it was back now. Squatting there like a sandbag full of buckshot. Out in the living room, the fucking phone was ringing. “Piss off,” she told it. There was no one here answering to a name. No more names, no more numbers. But on the bedroom walls, Montmartre was still there. Their room over the café, the cobblestone street that sloped down to the warren of artists’ studios at the Bateau-Lavoir. Their greengrocer and the charcuterie man. The shadow theater of M. Rivière. All so clear. And the lovers who lived there, Blaise and little Jeanne, Picasso and Fernande, Toulouse-Lautrec and Suzanne Valadon. How many evenings had they sat up in this bed, drinking wine, her wearing only the black stockings that drove him crazy, as he read poems to her. Valéry in French—
ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes, entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes
. . .

The tombs. Among the tombs, Christ, she’d never thought about it.

Out in the living room, the Louis record ended. Silence filled the house.
Ce toit tranquille, entre les tombes
. . . She couldn’t take the silence. She stumbled out into the living room, and started the album over again, a music scratchy with yearning. She lay on the blue furry couch, open like a book that had been abandoned, a book she knew by heart, a book with all the pages torn out. She lay on her back with her arm across her eyes, letting the clarinet complain, then joined by Louis’s horn, “Lonesome Blues.” Imagining Michael was here again. Dancing with her, naked. She had never lived anywhere so private before, that you could do just what you wanted, with the windows wide open. Drinking kirs, the champagne opening with a soft pop, not splurting out of the bottle, just a fizzy smoke, and he’d filled the glasses, the drinks turning pink with cassis. They toasted their new house with one hand as he slid the other up her thigh. The wine sweet and cold, his fingers warm, exploring her as she drank, until they forgot their drinks and made love, and again.

But he wasn’t a virgin.

Virgin or no virgin, what did it matter. She wasn’t going to let that asshole Cal take it away from her. An afternoon like that, and after, when they just lay on the couch, not talking, not listening to any music, just watching the sun get lower through the open windows, the color of orange sherbet, melting all over the hills. They had that. They had that. She could still feel that breeze, and his fingers, the look on his face, the lines near his eyes, the lashes fluttering against his cheeks as he fucked her with his piano-strong hands, his cock, practiced, unpracticed, what the fuck difference did it make, it was beautiful beyond anything she’d ever imagined. She pretended her fingers were his, holding her breast, touching her, making her sex ripple like a flamenco skirt. She was almost there when the lock rattled in the door and she just had time to stop fingering herself when Pen walked in with a bag of groceries on one hip.

Reluctantly, she pushed Michael’s shirt down, put her arm back across her face.

“Is this what you’ve been doing all day, just lying there jerking off, listening to old records?” Pen said. She went over to the stereo and yanked the needle off the Hot Five. “This is no good. Pull yourself together, Josie. Enough’s enough.”

The phone rang again and Pen waited for her to answer it, but Josie didn’t want to, it was just going to be Meredith breathing and then hanging up on her as she had been doing for days. Pen picked it up, annoyed. “It’s for you,” she said, passing the phone to Josie. When Josie wouldn’t take it, Pen stuck it in front of her nose, and when she still wouldn’t touch it, dropped the receiver onto her face. Josie picked it up reluctantly.

“Yeah?” she said. Nothing good ever came over a phone line, hadn’t she learned that by now?

“Josie, it’s Cal,” came the voice over the line, that sandy, western voice. “How you holding up?”

She was glad it was him. This surprised her. But Cal knew what it meant to lose Michael Faraday, that specific being, that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.

“I had this dream, Cal. That he was alive. He was in this white city, and he was carrying this goat down to the water.” He looked so beautiful, all tanned and naked except for a pair of cutoffs, with a red goat slung around his shoulders, he was holding it by its legs. “I tried calling but he didn’t hear me. Then all these women in white came out onto the stairway, and I couldn’t get by them.” A religious procession, moving so slowly, carrying a plaster saint. “I knew I had to reach him before he got down to the water. There was a boat and if I didn’t reach him, he’d be gone forever. But they wouldn’t let me get past.”

“I know,” Cal said. “Mine are about looking for him after a disaster, a crash in the Andes, an earthquake. I slept about three hours last night.” He sighed heavily. “Look, I just wanted to call, to say goodbye.”

Goodbye? “Where are you going?”

“Home, Josie,” Cal said gently. “I’m leaving on the red-eye.”

Home. He was going home. He was going back to Numbah Foah and her children in New York. He’d be in bed with her by morning.

Suddenly, she was as jealous of him as if she had been Cal’s lover. How dare he have someone to go home to. How dare he have a life. He was already on his way, his thoughts moving ahead to his new family and what he had to do tomorrow, he was
getting on with it.
When she was lying here fucking herself on this couch like a shipwreck stranded in the middle of a currentless sea.

“Listen, here’s my number. If you want to talk, call me. Anytime.” But she knew she wouldn’t call because if she did, he’d be taking tango lessons in Buenos Aires or beating the bush in Kuala Lumpur. Nevertheless, she pawed in the debris on the orange footlocker to find a pencil, the tears in her eyes keeping her from seeing right. She finally found one, wrote down his fucking number.

“We’ll go on, Josie,” he said. “We have no choice. We’ll find a way.”

Will we? Will we really, Cal?
You
dickhead.
You
find a way. You fucking find a way.
After she hung up, she just sat for a while, staring at the phone beyond her bare knees. Pen came out with a bowl of Cheetos.

“Get dressed,” Pen said. “People are coming over.”

“What people?” Josie said. She couldn’t imagine there was still anybody left in the world.

“Your friends,” Pen said. “Get some fucking clothes on.”

Shirley Kamaguchi came over, and Genghiz, her boss at the shop, a self-proclaimed Aztec from Pico Rivera, fourth generation, and Ben Sinister, and David Doll. They brought boxes of sushi and ate at the battered table. “This is a nice place,” Ben said, glancing up at the Chinese characters on the lamp.
Tao, ming.
“Did you do those?”

“Michael,” Josie said.

“He always seemed nice. I liked him,” said Shirley K., her Kabuki red mouth making a sad pout.

Pen didn’t say anything. It was the first time Josie had ever seen her hang on to her opinion, leave a thought unvoiced.

It was surreal to have all these people here. No one ever came to their house, it was their kingdom, their province, lair and clubhouse and center of the universe. Now the spell was gone and people were just walking in. It got dark, and Paul Angstrom came from work at Cashbox with a bag of tamales and Mason and PJ came with Stoli and popcorn. Pen must have put a bulletin up at the Hong Kong Café. They were all so sorry, really kind, but not one of them had known him, no one had known the first thing about him. They talked about other friends who died. Pen told them all how Meredith attacked her at the funeral, and Genghiz talked about a friend of his who had killed himself while he was taking hormones for a sex-change operation. “I just think of the last time he called me, I was in a rush, I said I’d get back to him and then I didn’t. I just forgot. And then he was dead. Like, what if there was something I could have done? I mean, I’d just had coffee with him. We weren’t that close but it was like, I should have been there.”

These are my friends,
she kept telling herself.

They drank the Stoli, and PJ had some blow, and Genghiz brought poppers from one of the boys’ clubs on Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t quite the high she wanted, she really could have used some big fat reds, but you took what you got and were goddamn grateful for it. The poppers blasted her head blank for five minutes, it was great not to have one fucking thought. The blow got her blood moving, she even laughed a little. High, she could even imagine Michael was out shopping at the Chinese market, or down at Launderland, any minute he would come back through the door, unshaved and rumpled in his tweed jacket, and wonder why the fuck his house was full of people he’d never liked. Ben Sinister picked up Josie’s blue child-sized guitar that Michael had given her last Christmas, and played a few Bowie songs, “Suffragette City,” “Spiders from Mars.”

Paul sat down at Michael’s old battered upright and put his hands on the keys and started to play, softly, something she recognized but couldn’t name, and then she could, the slow opening chords to Patti Smith’s “Birdland.” He sang it all the way through. It was about a boy whose father died, and the spaceships that were going to pick him up, with his father at the controls.
Take me up, Daddy
. . .
don’t leave me here alone
. . .