As if it was her fault. As if she had anything to do with Michael’s choice. She blushed to her hairline.
“I’m painting, it’s going very well. What’s the big deal? It’s not like I’m going to be a lawyer or anything.” His hand was on Josie’s neck, stroking the fine hair at the nape. “You’re an artist, Cal’s an artist —”
“You’re not an artist, Michael,” his mother said, like God separating the light from the darkness. “And I can’t abide a dilettante. Art history was the perfect choice for you, I don’t understand this sudden change of heart.”
“I don’t want to study what other people paint, I want to do it myself. I’ve always drawn.”
“Fiddled. Diddled. Dabbled.” Meredith sighed and sat back in the deep pillows of the couch, her voice low and patient, like a nursery school teacher. The morning light streamed in through the big French windows, softened by giant camellia bushes twelve feet high. She sipped from her blue and white cup. “It’s not something you can just pick up. Oh, I’m going to be an artist now.”
“Kandinsky was forty.”
“He’s really very good,” Josie interrupted. “You should see what he’s doing.”
His mother turned her attention to Josie, surprised, as if she hadn’t noticed her sitting there before. It was a little frightening, the ferocity of that face, like being two feet away from a leopard. Speaking slowly, as if she wasn’t sure Josie spoke English, Meredith said, “And just where did you acquire your knowledge of fine art, Miss . . . Tyrell?” Sipping from her coffee, holding the saucer just so, the porcelain so delicate you could see the design right through.
She knew that tone. She’d heard it all her life. You’re one of those Tyrells, aren’t you? “I model at the art school. I’ve seen a lot of work and he’s wonderful. His teachers think so too.”
“A model,” Meredith said. Not a question, a statement, as if a piece of the puzzle had fallen into place.
“There’s nothing wrong with your hearing, Meredith. What’s this all about?” His arm was not around her anymore. He curled his hand around his fist, leaned forward over the chrysanthemums. “This is not about me and Josie.”
“Oh God, Michael, don’t be stupid,” Meredith said. “Of course it is. I see it all quite clearly. We meet the little match girl and out goes Harvard, we’ve dropped out and suddenly we’re playing La Bohème down there in Echo Park. Alas, poor Mimì.” His mother drained her cup and set it on the leather-topped table, settled back into the pillows of the white couch, edged in antique fringe. She plucked at the fringe. “You know why artists live in garrets, Michael?”
“Fresh air?” he said.
Meredith wasn’t smiling. Her tone became harsher. “It’s not La Bohème if there’s money from home. You understand me? Go back to Harvard. You’re almost done, you cannot keep changing your mind. Especially for this . . .”
Meaning her. His mother was threatening to cut him off, because of Josie. She felt a surprising pang of guilt. It had never occurred to her that Michael might have dropped out of Harvard for her. That wasn’t what he said. He just wanted to paint.
“I hated Harvard,” Michael said. “It’s cold and we were reading things I read at nine. I wasn’t learning anything that I couldn’t have learned just as well at the public library.”
“Yes, but you’ll need the credential to be anything in the art world. All I’m asking is that you finish your degree. Surely that’s not too much to ask.” Meredith uncrossed her legs, leaned in toward her son, that electric face, the intelligent leopard eyes. “I know it’s late, but you’ve already read the books, I’m sure you can catch up.” She smiled a quick smile. “After that, you can go anywhere. Florence, Paris, I’m sure the Sorbonne has a program. But not this, Michael. Why don’t you and . . .” she paused for an instant, catching a slip before it emerged, “Josie,” a smile, “discuss it on your way home. Then you can give me a call when you’ve decided.”
Michael reached across the leather-topped coffee table and took Meredith’s hand, surprising her. Still looking her in the eye, he said, “I’ve already decided.”
Her eyes flashed green fire. His own were a cloudy sea.
Declaration of Independence, storming of the Bastille. The man he had begun to become, that day when he’d fucked her in Meredith’s own bed.
She unscrewed the top of the voddy, took a swig, let it go down, warm, took another, and screwed it back as jarring fistfuls of notes crashed down through the darkness. Meredith must be pounding on the keyboard with her forearms. A shriveled leaf from a sycamore blew onto the windshield, lingered there like a begging hand.
She’d been so proud of him that day, when Michael sat unmoved, unafraid, across from that furious woman, and told her he no longer needed her approval, that she had no hold on him anymore.
Though of course, it was only an act.
When they got home, he collapsed onto the legless blue couch, his long hands drooping between his knees. “Now what the fuck do we do?”
She put her face against his. “Go back to work.”
They sat, breathing each other in. He sighed heavily, drew her close. “I’m going to tell you something I’ve never told anyone. I’ve never had a job. Pretty fucking useless, huh?”
She stroked the sides of his face with her fingertips. “It’s not a big deal. You’ll find something.”
“Like what?” Running his hands through his rumpled dark hair. “Washing dishes? Walking people’s dogs?”
“Sure, you’d be a great dog walker, why not?” And she created a story about the dogs, his charges, how he’d walk them eight at a time, winding around his legs, snapping at each other at the end of eight leashes. Making him laugh a little. It was just work. No big deal.
But his gloom washed in like a red tide. “But realistically, Josie, what can I do? Nothing.”
She shrugged. What did people do? “You can wait tables.”
He rubbed his cheek against her hair. “Listening to people’s bullshit all day? Watching them shovel food in their faces? I’d kill myself.”
She struggled to understand him. Sure, waiting tables wasn’t easy, all the standing, and you had to hustle, but it paid well, and every job description included fielding people’s bullshit. But then again, maybe it wasn’t the same for him as it was for her. He was sensitive, and he had such pride. He would be easily insulted, and people could be so funny about their food. Maybe she couldn’t really see him with a white apron and an order pad. “How about teaching people’s kids, you know, math and things?”
“No car,” he said. “And how would I even get a job like that?”
“Put notes up on bulletin boards?”
He kissed her hair. They sat like that for a while. “I’ll find something,” he said.
And he looked. He circled things in the paper. He even tried a waiter gig. True to his sense of it, it lasted about half a day. Then one day she came home from a sitting and the house was empty. No Michael in the kitchen chopping fish heads with his heavy cleaver on the round cutting board. No Michael painting by the window, barefoot in his splattered white pants and old T-shirt. Five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. She was getting worried, when he marched in the door with a huge bunch of sunflowers, picked her up, crushing the flowers as he twirled her around.
“What happened? I thought you got hit by a car.”
“I got a job,” he said, putting her down on the blue couch.
“Doing what?”
He didn’t say anything, just sat down at the upright piano and started playing some honky-tonkish number, the razzle-dazzle right hand, the bottom holding the rhythm.
“Michael, what did you get?”
“Oh, but I am not Michael. From now on, you may address me as Señor Music.” He switched into a simple little waltz. “At Señor Reynaldo’s Escuela de Baile. Four afternoons a week, from tres to seis y media, and Saturdays, de diez a cuatro. I may suck royally, but you don’t have to be Serkin to play ‘I’m a Little T
eapot’ for a bunch of five-year-olds. Also Señor Reynaldo appreciates Señor Music’s rugged good looks.”
Señor Reynaldo with his army of little tiny kids, leading them through hula hoops edged in silk flowers. How Michael had loved that job. How proud he was of those checks, written on Reynaldo’s lilac check stock. He even started thinking kids weren’t so terrible after all. A gang of little goslings dreaming of Swan Lake. Those were good days. Michael working, painting, her modeling and getting student films. In the mornings they made love, and on the weekends they hunted through garage sales and swap meets. At night, under the covers, they read books. The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. The Ballad of Reading Gaol. The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Jeanne of France. Michael reading aloud to her, her face against his chest.
Their Thanksgiving, he roasted a duck. And for the first time in her life, she had something to feel fucking grateful for. Their one Christmas, the tree in their living room decked out with homemade decorations, little candles in tin candleholders. Exchanging presents. She gave him a white muslin shirt she’d made up in secret, and a French folding knife with a wooden handle, the blade long enough to cut salami and bread when they traveled to France. He gave her a tiny hand-sewn book, its pages opening to reveal the painted folds of a vagina, entitled Your Little Book, and a blue child-sized guitar.
Her little book, from which he’d read every page, sentence by sentence, with the care her aunt Cora gave her Bible. And still he could write: We loved each other . . . Didn’t we?
She started feeling the Valium kick in. She put the seat back, thinking how beautiful it had been before it all got so fucked up. Until he started staring out the windows at the light-dotted hills, like a mathematician staring at a problem on a blackboard. His brain grinding, grinding, like pepper in a mill. When all she saw were lights suggesting the shape of the hills. She liked to imagine it was a foreign city, like Istanbul or Cairo, the gabble of languages, smells of pepper and spices in markets, baskets piled on the ground, paprika and cumin and cinnamon. Streets where you’d have to pay small boys to take you where you needed to go, you would never find your way on your own. The cypresses were minarets. She imagined it all as she breathed the saltiness of his hair while he unconsciously pulled at the worn fabric on the arms of the chair and drank off the last of the wine in his glass and poured more from the bottle.
The true world disappearing, heavy curtains slowly closing across the face of God.
The music drifted in through the half-open window of the car, less fragmented now, she recognized it, one of the Brahms intermezzos. It was a simple piece, the kind people learned in piano lessons, but she knew it was one of the last things Brahms ever wrote for piano. Michael played it beautifully, but never like this. Meredith played it very slow, slower than even a beginner, but each note had such a well of sadness in it, more than you’d think it was possible for a note to bear. It was exactly what Josie wanted to hear. The opposite of that sink full of crabs. Meredith played it as if a person could start over, and make slow patient sense out of the world, that there could be order and comfort and safety, for all the sorrow in it. Josie could stay here all night, listening to Meredith play. She felt sleepy, she hadn’t slept for so long. She couldn’t remember the last time. Always waking just as she faded down. But here, outside this house, listening to this music, she knew she could. She curled up on the seat, and dropped into nothingness.
9
Meredith
A rap on the car window dredged her from sleep, a bright light shining in her eyes. She squinted, held up her hand, the hot beam from a flashlight pointing at her face. The figure rapped again, mimed a rolling gesture. Behind her, a black-and-white. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. She crawled to the top of her drug- and alcohol-thick torpor, a long way. She unrolled the window, her heart thudding dully. The cop leaned down. “You got some business here, miss?”
She blinked into the light, pressed her rubbery lips together as if she could squeeze some probable excuse from between them. Fuck. “My mother,” she said, finally. “We had a fight.”
“Your mother.” She couldn’t see his face behind the beam, only a mustache, but she could hear the smirk in his voice. Smart-ass. “You don’t live up here, girly.”
Fucking cops. She never met a cop who didn’t think he was the funniest thing on two legs. Josie pointed at the lit window. “Right there.”
He flashed the flashlight along the bench seat, its beam caught the vodka bottle, then pointed back in her face. “Can I see your driver’s license, miss?”
This couldn’t be happening. Christ. Don’t show him shit, she could hear her father saying. Hell, you weren’t driving. He don’t need your fuckin license. No crime if you ain’t drivin. “I’m just sitting here,” Josie said.
He finally lowered the light. His name tag over his badge said Ignaciewicz. She wondered how he pronounced it. He was about thirty, with a black mustache that he fingered, glancing up at the house, back at her, not believing her for a weasel-eyed minute. Knowing she had no business in a place like this, that whatever she was up to, it wasn’t anything a cop was likely to approve of. “Well, why don’t you go on up and make nice. You shouldn’t be out here by yourself. All kinds of types lurking around at night.”
Meaning her. Christ. “I’m not quite ready. Can’t I just sit awhile?”
The cop nodded, he was enjoying this whole thing. Asshole. “Well, that’s not an option I’m giving you. You’ve got two, the way I see it. One —” He grasped his fat forefinger. “You can go on in. That’s what I’d do, if I were you. Or two —” He added a second to the bundle. “You can start up that jalopy and clear on out.”
In which case he’d pull her over in half a block and charge her with DUI. Merry fucking Christmas.
She hated cops with a pure Tyrell hatred. Coming around, butting in, throwing their weight around, just because they had a fucking badge pinned on. She wanted to spit in his face, but she wasn’t that stupid, even fucked up. She knew what Pen would say, Kiss my Mexican ass, motherfucker. But it wouldn’t be her first DUI, she might go to jail. Fuck. What would she say if she really was Meredith’s daughter? What would Michael say? “Well, since you put it so charmingly,” she said, and grabbed her purse, got out of the car. She made sure not to stumble as she made her way across the street to the gate, no, she was sober as a Sunday school teacher, she’d never been more sober in her life. She could feel him behind her, watching her with his greasy eyes, waiting for her to screw up. The cold helped, and the cold hatred, that this fucking cop thought he knew exactly who she was, where she came from, so sure she didn’t belong. You’re an absolute billboard, Josie Tyrell. It was the one thing she hated most in the world, being ID’d at a glance. She unhooked the chain on the gate, the chain that was not really locked, how’d you like that, Officer Law? If this isn’t my house, how’d I know a thing like that? She went through and closed it behind her.
It smelled fresh here, clean. She could just sit under that tree, out of sight, and not bother anyone. But she could feel Officer Dickwad watching, waiting down there. She didn’t even have to turn to see him. So she kept walking, careful not to stumble on the uneven bricks laid out in a herringbone, like a tweed. A tweed jacket. The air dense with pittosporum and pine. She walked slowly, deliberately, acting the part. The girl in the movie, going home after a fight with her mother, hesitating to have to give in. She wasn’t such a bad actress. Her heart thumped low, her chest like an empty street.
She was at the door, no idea how she had ended up in such a situation. Christ, she could be down in OC, bashing head against head in the Black Flag mosh pit, drinking herself stinko. She wiped her hands on her pants, her blood pounding in her throat, trying to think of what she could possibly say to Meredith, as she knocked with the heavy knocker.
The piano music stopped. There was silence, and the porch light came on. She tried to compose herself, feeling herself being inspected through the spyhole under the little grated window. Then
the front door opened, a crack of light escaping from behind the figure in the quilted satin robe. She forced herself to raise her eyes to the visible slice of the woman’s face. Meredith looked like a ghost of herself, her face pale and drawn, wide lips with no lipstick on them, dark hair dragged back in a ponytail, her eyes ringed with shadows. Her eyebrows came together in two vertical lines, as if she were nearsighted and could not quite make out Josie’s face. “What are you doing here?”
What was she doing here? She sighed and told the truth. “Nowhere else to go.”
She waited for Meredith to slam the door in her face, but she didn’t. The older woman turned and walked away, leaving the door open behind her, her aqua satin robe trailing behind her on the floor. And she realized, this was where she’d wanted to be all along. From the very first. She gave the cop the finger and closed the door.
Meredith swept across the foyer and, navigating with the aid of the wrought-iron handrail, down the three steps into the living room, where a small fire burned low in the fireplace. The slick floors gleamed like the surface of a dark lake. Loch Ness. Michael said it was a thousand feet deep. She stepped onto the black water, following Meredith trailing along unsteadily in her movie-star bathrobe, looking like a drunken Myrna Loy in some Thin Man movie. The woman grabbed a fat tumbler, then visited the drinks cart, where she sloshed some liquor into the glass. She didn’t ask Josie if she’d like a drink, not that Josie really expected her to. “They’re all gone. Thank God. All over. Alone at last. Ha.” Although Meredith’s voice was weaker, it still held that rich, thrilling tone. “So many friends. My good friend what’s ’is name. Funny, how things work out.” The way she said it, it wasn’t funny at all. Josie wasn’t sure if she was supposed to be following this or if Meredith was talking to herself, down into the crystal tumbler. “Sorry, we’re so sorry. Sorry for your loss. Then they go off and have their teeth cleaned, eat dinner.”