Paint It Black (6 page)

It was exactly what she wanted to hear. She went and sat in Michael’s chair by the window, looking out at that light-spiked view they had so loved they never had curtains. The lights on the side of the glen, Silverlake, Hollywood. She ran her hands over the torn upholstery, where he’d picked at it, staring out the window, late at night, drinking his red wine, brooding. She’d tried to cheer him up. Sitting on the arm of the chair, pressing her face to his, looking out at the same view, these same sparkling lights. “Look, it’s beautiful, Michael,” she’d say.

“It’s like something from Bosch,” he’d say.

And it fucking was.

Ben started playing “Satellite of Love” and Paul joined in on the piano, everybody knew the words, but Josie wasn’t really in the picture. How could she pretend she hadn’t seen it coming? Now she couldn’t help but see. Bosch was everywhere. In the Astroturf at Mount Sinai, in Michael’s blown-out eyes. In
I hope you find someone who can meet your needs better than I could.
It was here in the living room full of people who clearly cared about her, though God knew why.

The phone rang, and Pen answered it, her Camel Straight dangling from her lip like a dame’s in a noir film. “Hello? Well fuck you too.” She slammed the receiver back on the cradle. “It was that bitch again,” she called over to Josie. “Your ex-future-mother-in-law.” Josie watched Pen in the window’s reflection, as her friend came over and sat on the torn arm of Michael’s chair, held her against her T-shirt, stroking her dirty hair. “Look, Josie. I talked to Maddie this morning.” Maddie, the models’ booker at Otis. “Phil Baby needs a model Tuesday, a sitting with Callie McClain. I told her you’d do it. No, don’t say no. It’ll be good for you, believe me.”

How like Pen. Just sign her up, without even asking. Josie sat there with her eyes closed, leaning against her friend, the hands stroking her hair. She knew there were reasons to stay home, good reasons. She could barely stand upright, or take a full breath. She had forgotten her name, how to button a button. She was so transparent, they might not even be able to see her.

And yet, when would it end? She would still have to pay rent, and eat. And Michael would still be dead. He was dead everywhere.

6

Otis

J
osie drifted down the hall at Otis, paced by her own ghostly image reflected in the display of student work—her clumpy unwashed hair and pale face, her yellow fur coat. She felt like a hyena, ugly, outcast, a disease. Only the familiar smell of the drawing studio soothed her, the charcoal and sweat, the sound of graphite on paper, Phil Baby bent over some girl, pointing out a problem, and she knew Pen was right, it was good to be here, in this grimy studio where she’d posed so many times. This was real. Phil Baby looked up, his eyes round in surprise, though they were always round, it was the little glasses that did it. He hurried to her. “My God, Josie, what are you doing here?” he whispered, taking her hand in his. Pen named him Phil Baby because he looked like a beatnik, the glasses and beret and pointy beard threaded in gray. Sweet Phil Baby. She wished he wouldn’t look at her like that, she couldn’t stand anybody to be nice to her right now, she was trying so hard to keep it together.

She shrugged. “They said you needed a model.”

“Yeah, but not you. Christ, Josie, what are you doing?” Poor Phil. Just the kind of man who would fall in love with an impossible girl like herself.

“Killing time,” she said. She didn’t know what she’d do with the rest of her life, but for the next three hours, it wouldn’t be a problem. Yet Phil Baby wasn’t Henry Ko, who viewed her as a glorified bowl of fruit. Phil wanted to hug her, adopt her, give her the key to his soul, his apartment, his checking account. He wanted to save her. “It’s okay, Phil. I’ve got to get used to it.” She pulled away from his graphite-dark hand, hitched her bag, and walked back to the screen where the models changed.

Phil Baby returned to his student, a girl in overalls sitting in the chair where Michael used to sit. The seat closest to the windows. Suddenly, Josie felt a rush of fury. She wanted to go over there and yank that girl out of that chair, turn it over, kick her to the floor.
Do you know whose seat you’re sitting in?
But she didn’t. And it wasn’t his seat anymore. No, he’d given up any and all seats. He’d written himself off the seating chart.

On the modeling stand, flame-haired Callie moved through her gesture poses. She caught Josie’s eye over the art students’ self-barbered coiffures, not moving her head, but her eyes speaking sympathy. Josie didn’t want anybody’s pity. Why wouldn’t they just let her get on with it, become an inert shape in space? She liked Callie, though, the way her body challenged the students’ ideal of beauty, its elongated breasts and the weals of multiple pregnancies. Josie appreciated that courage. At first, she’d thought, if she ever looked like that, she would disappear into the house and never come out, make love with the lights off. How had she ever been so ignorant? How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one’s capacity to endure it.

She went behind the screen and removed her clothes, her shoes. Everything seemed suddenly sharp, dangerous, the hooks, the splintered supports with their graffiti—
Yolo ’
64
, Ben
+
Harriet.
She felt like old people who forgot what shoes were for, each gesture calling meaning into question—unbuttoning a button, breathing. Movement slowed to half speed, quarter speed, as if the air had thickened. She could take nothing for granted, her hand on her shirt, her ability to keep the floor underfoot.

The students were playing Devo, their geeky mania filling the air. Normally she liked Devo fine, but today she wished she was at Phil’s place over at the Villa Elaine—he played Coltrane while he painted, Miles Davis. She wrapped herself in her sarong of a flowered tablecloth and came out to watch Callie. Ridiculous to have to cover herself, when she would be naked in front of them in a few minutes, but it was the convention and she hadn’t the energy to protest.

As Callie finished her gesture poses, the baby artists sketched furiously. How real their own futures seemed to them. When any of them might be dead tomorrow. She thought of the prayer Michael told her the Jews said on their New Year: “On Rosh Hashanah it is opened and on Yom Kippur it is closed, who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water, and who torn apart by wild beasts . . .” She looked at the students, wondering which of them would be mangled in a car wreck, who would die by a stray bullet coming in off the park. The boy in the skinny tie? The girl in the shaved Mohawk? All looking at the model as if they didn’t own flesh, as if they couldn’t mount the stand themselves. Their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form, but so much like Cal, talking about “the bereaved” as if it didn’t apply to him.

She walked behind them, glancing over their work. Some had airbrushed Callie, they were looking right at her and yet something inside their minds couldn’t let them see her nursed-out breasts, her belly’s record of babies, while others exaggerated her flaws, like brave children facing monsters, turning stretch lines into claw marks. This body. Who could just look at it as it was, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness? This class should be taught by shamans, not art teachers.

Callie’s timer went off. She picked up her robe and slid into it, an olive green kimono that made her freckled skin glow. She came off the stand and threw her firm arms around Josie. She smelled of sweat and roses, her wild flame hair of Prell. “I’m so sorry, Josie. I heard. That lovely, lovely boy. I remember him.” She traced her fingers across Josie’s neck. “What’s this?”

A ladder of green bruises, the mother’s hands closing.
How dare you.
“Nothing. Forget it.”

“Josie, they’re bruises.” Callie’s eyes darkened with concern.

“Let’s just get on with it, okay?” Josie said, sounding colder than she liked to sound. Callie blanched, dropped her hand, left her alone. She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.

She climbed onto the model’s stand, set her timer, shrugged off the tablecloth. The little model’s heater hummed. She began her own short gesture poses. Thirty-second poses were her favorites, they let you take chances, go off balance, reach and twist. She was good at this. When there was nothing else, there was the body. She could always make an interesting shape in space, naked and barefoot before a classroom of strangers, even with her bruised neck and her stricken face. It felt good to put herself aside along with her clothes, and just be.

The sun from the dirty skylight fell onto her shoulders and hair. The students studied her like a puzzle that needed to be solved. She had always liked the way their eyes brought her into focus, found beauty in her assemblage of parts, neck and backs of knees, the knobby piano of a spine. She had not been thought beautiful growing up. No one had looked at her twice. One glance and they knew. Just another Tyrell.
They breed like rats. Why doesn’t anyone wash their faces? The mother’s not all there, you know. She sits in that house, I don’t know if she’s been out in ten years.
LA gave her a face of her own. It hung glamour around her like a champagne mink. That was what Michael had fallen in love with. Not understanding that nothing was under it.

She moved between poses, concentrating on creating positive and negative space.
What isn’t there is as important as what is,
Phil always said. What wasn’t there. The girl in Michael’s seat drew in big dramatic gestures, her hand making jagged bursts on the paper. A pimply boy dropped his eyes to his work when she met his gaze. She always knew the ones who were in love with her. They were shy once she dressed, or else talked to her in a weird forced normality, as if they hadn’t seen her nude, as if they’d met in a supermarket. This body and its freedom gave her the only power she’d ever had.

On a normal day, she would walk around after a session and let them show her their drawings. Some were proud, others nervous. As she looked at their work, it often occurred to her that no one existed in fact. Simply existed, the same for all. You could see it on every easel. Some fixated on the darkness of her bush and the hair in her armpits, in contrast with the wild bleach job. Others preferred the delicacy of her bones, or the attitude of her sober gaze and the unsmiling mouth. Marco, her first boyfriend in LA, called her an exhibitionist, said she should get a job in a strip club if she liked it that much, it paid better. She did like it, but it wasn’t what people thought—a sex job. It was the opposite—a statement, personal, frank, without intention to please.
Here I am. This is me. My fact. I can do this, can you?
Callie with her stretch marks, Frank, who was almost a dwarf. Each body held some truth the baby artists needed to see. Even that of a seventeen-year-old dropout from Bakersfield.

How she used to envy them. Someone was shelling out big money for each and every one of those seats—tuition, rent, art supplies. Although she’d gotten herself out of Bakersfield, and created a life she’d always dreamed about, a glamorous life—modeling, acting in student films, knowing the people worth knowing—still, she’d envied them. All this instruction, everything so well thought out, people like Phil Baby unlocking the world step by step. Nobody had ever shown her shit. Only Michael.

But now, she knew something else. That all the education in the world was not enough. It wasn’t always what you knew. Michael had gone to Harvard but it hadn’t kept him alive. Ignorance was familiar as sunshine, but now she knew it was possible to know too much.

She remembered the poems Michael once showed her, things he’d written as a kid. Beautiful strings of words like music, talking about the true world, the way he could feel the presence of God like a face gleaming behind a curtain. “These are gorgeous,” she said. “You’ve got to write more.”

“They’re garbage,” he said, taking them from her. “Third-rate imitation Eliot. Dash of Dylan Thomas. A little Sexton on top.”

She shifted her pose, twisting, extending her arms, a dancer’s pose she’d seen in a book about Matisse. Red bodies against blue. She could re-create that pose, and it was still beautiful, even if it had been done before. But to satisfy Michael, everything had to be absolutely original, better than anything ever before, paintings or poems or music. She had always believed that knowledge helped you do things, but Michael’s knowing just took away his courage, his freedom.

“My mother always said,
There’s no place in the world for a good concert pianist,
” he said.
“There are too many geniuses.”

At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.

She looked again at the girl in Michael’s seat. Every term, there would be a new student in that chair by the window, someone who hadn’t known that Michael Faraday once sat there and fell in love with a model named Josie Tyrell. With whom he should never have shared a sentence.

Her timer went off. She wrapped herself and walked over to the table with the coffee urn, poured herself a bitter cup, wondering what had happened to his jacket. Meredith. She had to have it. She had the notes, of course she had the jacket. Josie blanched, thinking of how the woman had attacked her at the funeral, when she had every right to be there, every right and more. Whatever Meredith thought, Michael didn’t belong to her. She might like to think it, but it wasn’t true, it hadn’t been true since that day in the blue bedroom. She should have told Cal she wanted that jacket, maybe he would have grabbed it for her while Meredith lay passed out on her satin bed. Josie craved its coarse weave, a memory so strong it made her stagger.

Callie was there, arm across her shoulder. “Are you all right?”

She nodded, staring at her bare foot, thin and childlike, she had painted the toenails black two weeks ago, but it was all chipping off. Her foot looked strange to her, a thing, this odd-shaped thing attached to her. She wondered if she even knew how to move it, it was so stupid, it made no sense, this object, she had forgotten what it was for. Michael’s feet were elegant as hands, the long toes, she remembered the first time she’d put those toes in her mouth in the bathtub—how astonished he’d been, that she would think to do such a thing, to give him that pleasure. When she would have done anything.

They had been happy. If she forgot everything else in the world, she would remember that. She was the only one who could remember it now.

She and Callie mounted the modeling stand together. A two-model pose challenged the intermediate student, there were so many angles, so much foreshortening. Callie set the timer, and they found a good pose, Callie on the stool, Josie behind her with her hand on the older woman’s freckled shoulder. The softness of Callie’s flesh under her hand, its warmth. Not like Michael’s at the morgue. His living body turned into a thing. Cold, wooden. Intentional.

She felt Callie’s shoulder stir slightly. The body. That had been a source of so much joy. But in the end, it was just a hunk of cold chicken, wasn’t it? A weird flesh machine, that kept breathing in and out, mindlessly, digesting, shitting, Bosch on two legs. Good enough to carry you around for a few decades before things started to go wrong. No difference between this body and a load of dead animals carted out from the animal shelter. And there would be fifty years more of moving this puppet thing around, creating other puppet things to replace you. The thought was unbearable. She felt bluish white and raw, like an Egon Schiele woman—Michael’s favorite artist.

“He makes everyone ugly,” she once told him.

“He’s just not sentimental,” Michael said.

After class, Phil Baby stopped her before she left. “If I can do anything . . . anything at all.”

“Sure, Phil, thanks,” she said, and got out of there before he made her cry. She hurried into the dank courtyard with its monstrous rubbery plants, stopping to light a cigarette, but nobody was coming up to her with a cheese Danish with white raisins, and his aquarium eyes. She stepped out into the cold winter sun.