She pulled into the parking lot, parked sloppily, trying to see through tears that stung like bleach. They had been happy, they had been. She got out and pushed her way between the trees, blindly, brushing their sticky needles with her hands, the smell overpowering, clinging to her arms. She wanted him desperately, fiercely. She wanted him back, now, right now, she didn’t think she could live one more moment. “Miss?” A pimply-faced box boy was peering at her through the branches. “Miss, are you all right?”
“Do I look all right to you?” she said, clutching at pine branches. Her hands smelling of pitch pine and loss. “Do I fucking look all right?”
She gave up and drove over to the Diazepam bakery, which was doing quite a business tonight, pan dulce and Valium. She put some fresh pan dulce on the tray and wrapped a twenty in a couple of ones, and the small, blank-faced Salvadoran put a little something extra in her bag.
All along Sunset, telephone poles and boarded-up windows were pasted thick with advertisements for Club Bahía, Chicho Montoya y Gloria Núñez, Sábado 9 de Diciembre, 8 PM. La Laguna Azul con Brooke Shields. A stoic young man in a hooded sweatshirt sold oranges on the corner at Alvarado. He would have to sell them all before he could go home, probably just a room hotbedded with three other migrants in Pico-Union. No better Navidad than hers. She rolled down her window and held out two bucks, he brought the sack over, a small corpse in his arms, she passed the money through and took the weight from him. She could smell it, saffron over sour green, it smelled better than the stink fruit in the back, she threw it onto the passenger seat, and tore open the bag, peeled one on the steering wheel as she drove. The rind was thick, the orange smaller than it should have been, cold and sour, but she ate it anyway, knowing somewhere there was a place where the oranges would be allowed to ripen all the way. They would fall off the trees before they were picked they were so ripe, the smell was only a promise. That’s where they should have moved, somewhere things were allowed to ripen all the way. Oranges there would be sweet as kisses in paradise.
On the side streets, Christmas lights festooned the houses, in the trees and across balconies, around barred windows. Little houses with their little families, getting ready for Christmas. Flickering lights at the rooflines, trees in the window. Why couldn’t they have stayed like that, her and Michael, the way they were last year? She tried to look into the windows of the houses. So pretty. So hopeful, that instinct for light in winter, believing, waiting for a miracle. While she was left with just this, a stinking fruit in the backseat, a bed of snow.
That was the frightening part about believing in things. You could wake up one day and it could all be gone. And you were just left with Bosch, crabs and grandmothers and fake snow, Feliz Navidad. And here were these tiny houses made beautiful by their lights. She knew that the true world was there somewhere. But not for her. This is how Michael had felt, when he looked out the windows at Bosch. He’d just passed it on, that son of a bitch.
She stopped at Gala’s and bought another half-pint of voddy and two packs of Gauloises, and ran out before Mrs. Ramirez could wish her a Merry Christmas. Two packs of ciggies and a pint of Smirny on Christmas Eve, couldn’t you read her life right there? She drove back along Sunset, her fingers sticky from the orange on the wheel of the car, while Darby screamed no God to fear—no God to hear your cries . . .
People on foot pushed baby strollers, going into the 99¢ Store and Launderland. She wiped her tears on the back of her hand. How he’d loved that. Folding clothes hot from the dryer, just so. Not just cramming them into the duffel like she would have done, but snapping and folding, speaking Spanish to the ladies waiting for their own loads to be done. “This is real life,” he once said. “Not those middle-class assholes with their Whirlpools and all the conveniences of home.” When any woman there would have sold her soul for a Whirlpool and all the conveniences of home, not to have to drag her family’s weekly wash through the streets, each child carrying a part of it in a garbage bag or a box like a laundry parade. But Michael loved being in there, loved laundry done in public, learning what he could about ordinary lives. Nothing he hated more than a closed door, though he was adamant about his own secrets. Oh yes.
She passed El Tigre, and the little botanica with its herbs and saint candles. She should stop, buy him a candle, say a prayer. But what would she pray now? Sleep well, asshole. Thanks for leaving me here all alone. She considered the Valium in the bag with the bread, it would go well with the voddy, she’d have to pace it if it was going to last through the night.
She turned the Germs up to 9, all she wanted to hear was Darby screaming his voice raw, Pat Smear smashing away on his guitar, fuck all of you assholes. She passed Burrito King, passed the Guadalajara with its blacklight sombrero bar and the tiki bar by the TV station, where her fake ID was no good. She turned up Vermont, all done for Christmas, tinfoil and ribbons on the light posts in front of the Italian delis and bakeries, there was a crowd at the door of Sarno’s, where the waiters sang opera in between serving your lasagne, and sometimes a patron would stand up and sing. She wanted to stop, buy a cannoli or some spongy Italian cake flavored with wine, lean on the bakery counter and listen, just be in that warmth, the smells of the food and that surprising beauty pouring out of just plain people. But she knew she would feel like a hyena, a jackal, some ugly scavenger, and kept driving.
Half of LA crawled along Los Feliz Boulevard, gawking at mansions decked in vast seas of light, sucking up more power than a village could use in a year. Each one trying to outdo its neighbor. It was disgusting. It was not the true world. Not the same as the small houses with the lights. Just waste and arrogance. She opened her windows so they could hear what the Germs thought of them.
She turned up a side street, bore right and climbed. She knew where she was going. The last place she should. It was as if the car was going there of its own accord. Light emanated from the big houses, windows blazing, you could see into them like dollhouses. Why didn’t they pull their curtains? If it was up to her, she would install thick velvet drapes, no one would be able to look inside. How supremely confident you’d have to be to show off like that, when there were people in this city who would kill you for a leather jacket. Here was a Christmas tree, it must be fourteen feet high. That one had a fireplace, and lights reflecting in a tall gold-leaf mirror. One was having a party, there was a wreath on the door and people were arriving, their arms laden.
She drove higher, until the lights all disappeared. No more Christmas trees or fireplaces or white living rooms. She turned down the tape, and finally, turned it off. Now the houses retreated behind high walls and hedges. She recognized the gate, the Spanish house at the top of the drive. Via Paloma. Only the living-room window was lit, obscured but not completely hidden by the big deodar. Josie pulled over and parked opposite the lacy ironwork gate. Here was the hugeness and the darkness she wanted. The mushroom softness of the old stucco wall and the moldering sadness of the place, its abandonment, its smell of cedar and pittosporum. It was as if she had been circling this house since Michael died, moving in tighter and tighter orbits around this epicenter.
She rolled down the window to the cold, breathed in the night’s wintry freshness. There could be a frost, the stars bristled in the sky like white flecks on a black enameled roasting pan. A piano started, then stopped, started again, the same phrase over and over. She peeled another orange, throwing the peel out the window that she left rolled down for the fragrance of the pines and the music. You would not know it was Christmas up here. This house in its dignified mourning was out of reach of all festivity, any hope of salvation. From behind the palms and the spiky yuccas and the funereal cedars, the piano repeated the phrase, like a bad conscience playing in your head.
She took a Valium, washed it down with voddy, it didn’t burn anymore. She lit a Gauloise. As she watched the house, the gate, she could see the little boy standing there, looking out from between wrought-iron curlicues, his little hands wrapped around th
e bars. She had never met anyone as lonely as Michael. Lonely, and despising his own loneliness, disdaining the crowd while hoping for connection. For her, in childhood, loneliness had been a rumor, a distant country, an alpine place with rugged mountains jagged against the sky, the rarefied air fresh as snow. She would have given anything for such loneliness as a child, no one yelling or talking or taking stuff away from you, fighting or saying mean things about you because you were a Tyrell. Although Michael said loneliness was a terrible thing, she had only been able to imagine the quiet and the order of such a life. The words only child rang with overtones of luxury, attention, dreamy solitude.
The piano stopped, and she could see the dark-haired figure rising, leaving the lit arch of the window, moving into the half shade of the next one. A small lamp came on, illuminating Meredith’s face as she lifted the phone’s receiver, dialed. She waited and held the phone awhile, and Josie could almost hear the phone in her own house in Echo Park, ringing. How this woman despised her. Josie’s crime—loving her son, loving him, but not enough to save him.
The monstrosity of the idea, that she could have saved Michael. He tried to save her, she tried to save him, and neither one got their fucking wish. You’re exactly what he needed. Cal did seem like a clown now, self-serving in his idiocy.
Josie looked up at the two lit windows and wondered what it would have been like to have grown up in a place like that. It had always amazed her that Michael, who had come from all this, thought her life was more authentic than his, when in fact it was thin and paltry, all her glamour just a brave child playing make-believe. The awful precious moment of receiving her first new dress, store-bought, pink and stiff, with net that scratched her skin. She got it for Christmas when she was seven. Her mother was home from the hospital but she didn’t have a baby this time. “Your mother’s just tired,” her father said, when her mother wouldn’t come out of the bedroom, week after week. She’d been afraid to even sit down in that dress, wore it only twice before she outgrew it and handed it down to Corinne who got red punch on it that never did come out. She should have worn that dress. She should have worn it like hell, every day, to school and everything. Maybe her life would have turned out different.
Michael had had tutors and hotels in Europe. Maids. Seats in first class. When he was twelve, Meredith sent him to Cotillion, where he learned to dance with girls who would never have spoken to Josie Tyrell. She’d seen girls like that, with their shiny perfect hair and braces on their teeth, new leather shoes. They played tennis at the country club, out in Stockdale. She and Corinne once rode their bikes out there, sat and watched those girls. They hadn’t even hated them, they were so far away. The flash of their tanned legs in white skirts and white shoes, the light gleaming on their faces. She and Corinne never talked about it, but it had remained, in the very back of her mind.
She gazed up at the dark house. She loved this house. That was the truth. This somber place, with its graceful, rusted gate and heavy dark trees. Darker than Stockdale, but even more compelling. This was the place he grew up, the place that had made Michael. It was in his blood, like the Loewy plot at the cemetery. Ming. Light glowed through the iron canopy and the trees, the leaded window. The piano started playing again, slow, painful.
Josie sectioned another orange, peeling the bitter felt from the pale meat. She could smell the groceries in the backseat, the stinking fruit, the bean cake. Feliz Navidad. Last year this time Michael was painting, full of ideas, he was teaching her to dance the Charleston. Last year this time, she thought she’d signed a lease on paradise.
She gazed at the yellow light through the window, imagining Meredith up there, in the living room with its threadbare old rugs smelling of must and floor polish. The last time she had been in that house, it had been fall. A sunny morning in October. The leaves had all been swept, and she’d worn her yellow print dress with the geishas on it. They’d been together almost two months, and she was going to meet his famous mother. Meredith was back from tour and needed to talk to him, right away. She’d just found out that he hadn’t gone back to Harvard. The lawyer told her, that rat fink.
“Come with me, Josie,” Michael said. “I want you to be there.”
So they had gone, right through those gates. She was nervous and excited to finally meet this woman whom her son so hated and admired.
The house had changed, now that its owner had returned. The furniture was dusted, the tall windows cleaned, dark floors gleamed with wax. An elegant woman in green slacks and a crisp white shirt rose to meet them, dark hair framing her strikingly boned face. Sea green eyeshadow made her eyes even more translucent above those decisive cheekbones. Eyes just like his. When she saw Josie, her smile flared and died, like a scrap of paper that burns out in a second.
“Meredith, this is my friend Josie. Josie, my mother, Meredith Loewy.”
His friend? Suddenly she was his friend? After fucking him senseless the night before, his friend? Josie followed him down into the living room, face flaming, across the polished floor, the worn-out rugs, if they were so rich, why did they have such junky old rugs? His mother stood by the couch, tall like her son. She smiled at Josie, a flicker, then turned to Michael, who came to her and kissed her, lightly. “Michael, we need to talk. I hadn’t expected . . . company.” A quick flicker of green.
“Josie’s not company, Meredith,” Michael said. “She’s my girlfriend.”
Soothing, healing waters, cooling her face, her heart. Girlfriend. She felt restored, she had a right to be here.
“But we need to talk, darling,” Meredith said. “I thought Irv explained to you —”
“There’s nothing that you can’t say in front of Josie,” Michael said.
Now, sitting outside the great dark mushroom wall of the house, Josie understood exactly why Michael had brought her along that day. She had thought he wanted to introduce her to his mother, show her there was going to be a new setup. Announce that they were together. But now she saw he was afraid he would weaken, give in, if she wasn’t there to remind him of what he wanted, who he’d become in the months his mother had been away. He had drawn courage from her. She thought of Cal: Storming of the Bastille, you don’t even know.
“I see,” Meredith said. “I’ll have Sofía bring us some coffee.” She walked up the three steps to the foyer. “Michael, will you help me for a moment?”
“I’ll wait here with Josie.” They settled on one of the white couches in the room where all the grandfather’s friends had gathered to drink and flirt and forget and remember the Europe they’d left behind—brilliant parties that sometimes went from one day to the next. Composers and writers and movie directors. Stravinsky had once sat here, Billy Wilder. Schoenberg, who at the time was making a living giving piano lessons to rich brats in Beverly Hills. The very air seemed permeated with their foreign voices, the energy of their genius. And here was Josie Tyrell from South Union Avenue, Bakersfield, being invited to the party.
His mother returned, folded herself onto the couch opposite, defended by the leather-topped coffee table with its bowl of bronze chrysanthemums. She reached out and plucked a sagging bloom from the bowl, threw it into the empty fireplace. A painfully upright woman with black hair scraped into a chignon came down the steps balancing a tray filled with cups and saucers, the silver coffee set now polished to a satin shine. She carried it the way you’d carry a crown on a cushion, her nose high bridged and aristocratic.
Michael spoke to her in Spanish, Josie could tell the woman was thrilled to see him, though she pretended she wasn’t, wouldn’t look at him straight on. Josie would never have guessed her to be the maid, she looked more like a scary Spanish teacher in her gray wool dress. She set the coffee things down, and sent Michael a glance full of messages, then turned back to her boss. “You like me to pour, Señora?”
“No, I will, thank you, Sofía,” Meredith said. “That will be all.”
That was over a year ago and she could even remember that flashing gla
nce Michael had exchanged with the maid. And how intimidated she’d felt, sitting there, in a room where Marcel Duchamp had once played chess with the grandfather. Even the maid acted like royalty.
“So,” Meredith said, crossing her legs, folding her hands over her sea-green knee. “Irv tells me you’re not going back to Cambridge.” Irv, the fink lawyer.
“That’s right,” Michael said. “I’m in art school. I’ve decided to be a painter.” He put his arm around Josie.
How Meredith’s eyes flicked almost imperceptibly at the sight of it. As if the eyes themselves could not believe what they saw, the arm, the ease with which they were together. “You never painted before. Why this sudden interest?” She poured coffee into the cups, handed Michael one on a saucer, black, poured another. “Cream?” She was talking to Josie.
Josie shook her head. The mother passed her the cup and saucer, white with little blue designs painted on it, the handle like pointy lace.
“I’m enjoying it,” Michael said. “I’m not even half-bad.”
“I like ice cream. But I don’t drop out of Harvard for a double scoop.” His mother’s knuckles tight on the saucer, Josie could see the white bone. “Think, Michael. How are you going to compete with people who have genuine talent? Who have dedicated themselves, who have drive and self-discipline?”
Josie took the cup, the saucer, she wished Michael would say something, stick up for himself. Why didn’t he say something? But he didn’t, just turned a little white along the jaw, and his mother kept going.
“And I suppose you expect me to support you in this little venture, you and your little friend.”
“It’s Josie,” Michael pronounced, slowly and clearly. “Tyrell.”
“Of course. Miss Tyrell,” his mother said, her eyes like green welding torches. “Do you understand that my son has dropped out of Harvard College? That this is his senior year?”