“Yeah, I know.” Josie came in as far as the top step of the living room, then hovered, not sure whether she should get any closer. Maybe there was a gun among the bottles, drain opener in a drink. But the awareness that she might be in danger was weaker than the strange sensation of comfort. It was good to have someone talking to you, someone who knew what had happened. “I heard you playing.”
“Brahms.” Meredith put her drink on the end of the keyboard and sat at the piano, began the slow, sad, simple piece Josie had heard from the road. “Whenever Michael had a headache, he had to have his Brahms.”
How odd, that there should be someone else who knew something like that about him. Days when he lay in their bedroom, darkened from the felt curtains she’d made for it, drinking Mountain Dew because he thought the caffeine helped, listening to the intermezzos, the piano quintet.
Meredith bent over her piano, playing gently. Even when she was drunk, you could tell Meredith was the real thing. Josie had heard recordings of her room-filling Liszt, the speed of her Chopin, the complicated brokenness of her Schoenberg. But she played the Brahms like thinking. Slow, hovering, considering, then moving ahead, only to turn back and repeat itself. It was private, it reminded Josie of gondolas somehow, those long black boats, like the piano itself, nosing through heavy mists in narrow canals. The splash of the water. Hushed voices, houses rising up on either side. He was going to take her to Venice someday. But it would have to be another life. Next time around.
“My father had them too. Headaches.”
Meredith’s father, the composer, who shot himself in this house. Came all the way from Vienna to shoot himself in LA. Escaped the Nazis but not himself. Michael had never met him, but talked about him as if he had known him all his life. Meredith bent over the piano keys like she was praying. Her eyes so much like his. Swords in the tarot deck. Even knowing how the woman hated her, Josie felt strangely close to her. Close and yet far away, like the moon watching the earth.
She leaned against the wall on the steps, still not daring to enter the living room proper, resting her heavy head against the cool, patted stucco. The Brahms was like someone massaging your temples, gently, and the base of your neck. Him and Brahms, praying for order, praying for faith.
On the carved mantel over the fireplace, fine objects gleamed in the flickering light. A clock in a glass dome, a porcelain camel, things that should be in a museum, in a glass case. Meredith knew what to do with beautiful things, things Josie would be afraid even to own. It occurred to her that she should have left Michael up here, undisturbed, deaf-mute mother and son. Perhaps Meredith would have found a way to keep him safe, in a box lined in velvet. That’s what her phone calls were saying, or was it the voice in her head—Why couldn’t you just have left him alone?
When it seemed that Meredith had forgotten her, lost in her Brahms, Josie quietly descended the steps into the living room, padded across the old threadbare carpets to the fireplace. She didn’t want to sit down, that seemed a bit too chummy, remembering the last time she had been in this room. She began to examine the mantel’s array of offerings. A small terra-cotta head of a young woman, or maybe a boy, part of the cheek and nose gone. The gold clock in a glass case, its pendulum shaped like a harp, dead still. Next to that, a carved ivory ball nested on a rosewood stand. Balls carved inside each other, all intricate with flowers, people, houses and roads—a whole world in a sphere the size of a cabbage. She picked it up, daring Meredith to tell her to put it down. But Meredith was ignoring her, the way you ignore a dog that trots into a room, sniffs around, and leaves again.
Josie turned the white sphere in her child’s hands, she could tell it was old and valuable.
“I’ve often wondered. What do you think my son saw in you?” Meredith asked.
She hadn’t sensed that she was under scrutiny. Usually, she knew, could feel it, but Meredith was still gazing down at the keyboard, looking at the keys, her hands. Long fingered, exactly like Michael’s. How could someone who looked just like Michael hate her so much? Each time she looked at his mother, she kept seeing him.
I’ve often wondered . . . She felt the reverberation of the insult, but hollowly, as if someone had slapped a doll. She knew how she looked to Meredith, fucked up and unwashed, jacket scarred, her punked-out bleached hair and Tyrell face. Another day she might have even cried, but not today. “I think he thought he could rescue me. Like if he could do that, maybe he could save himself.” Let the woman insult her. She had reached some quiet place, like a carved ivory ball down inside five others. The reasons lay one under the other—which ball was the real ball?
“Sir Galahad,” Meredith said. “That doesn’t surprise me.” The touch of her fingers on the keys so different from the bitterness in her voice. “Yes, he would think that.”
“Yes,” Josie said. “He would.”
“No one knew him. Only you.” His mother said this last with such disappointment.
It was true. Only her. How hard it must be on his mother, for her son to be such a loner. She had grown up with famous people, Billy Wilder and Isherwood, Garbo. And now her son was dead, and she was stuck talking to Josie Tyrell, the only one who knew him. In this, they were a nation of two, she and Meredith Loewy.
Running her fingers over the impossibly intricate designs on the ball, Josie imagined the years it had taken to carve this chunk of elephant tusk, to create something of such unnecessary beauty. Merchants with their big bellies. Princes. Women in long robes and pleated fans, layer inside layer. What was the point in creating something that was so futile and so precious? Everything beautiful was like that. A little bit of the true world. Beauty said there was something more than just one fucking thing after another. Time could rest for a moment, stop all that senseless motion.
Meredith suddenly stopped playing. She closed the keyboard cover with a bang, and rose from the bench, glass in her hand. She went to the white couches, lay down on one, her fat tumbler in one hand resting on her stomach. “Did he ever tell you about his father?”
“Some,” Josie said.
“You know what he used to call Michael? Sissy-Boy. ‘Hey, Sissy-Boy,’ he’d call out, and then throw him something, which he’d inevitably drop.” She laughed a laugh that sounded more like a bark, a catch in the throat, the sound a person makes when knifed. “When he was thirteen—did he tell you what his father did?”
“What?” She wanted to hear Meredith tell it, it was a story they all had a piece of.
She took a sip from the tumbler on her stomach, lifting her head just enough not to spill, then dropped back to the tasseled pillow. “I was in New York for a recital, and thought I’d take him to see his father in the Village. Cal had one of those town houses on Bank Street. Between marriages as I recall. Briefly. It never took him long. Anyway, Cal always kept a ball on his desk, signed by all these famous players, Babe Ruth and so on. Fondled it while he wrote, talk about Freudian. Anyway. We were up there, discussing Michael’s future, and he got it into his head to throw it at him. “Think fast!” he said. Like a schoolyard bully. And threw it right at his head. Hit him in the forehead. I thought it would knock him out. You know what Michael did?”
Josie did. It was fascinating to hear someone else tell a story she knew so well.
“He picked it up and threw it right out the window. I mean, Babe Ruth. Rolling down the gutter on Bank Street.” Meredith laughed. She had a beautiful smile, big straight teeth. When she really laughed, she wrinkled her nose and lines in the corners of her eyes fanned happily over the apples of her cheeks. “It was fantastic.” She took a messy sip of her drink, not sitting up, wiped the overflow on the back of her hand. “God, that was one of the best days of my life.”
Josie ran her fingertips over the bumpy carvings in the ivory, wondering if she should throw it in the fire, or pitch it through the window over the piano. Babe Ruth, rolling down Bank Street. The fronts of her legs were growing hot. “Why did he wear his jacket, then, if he hated him so much?
”
“Primal transference,” Meredith said, slurring the syllables. “Like wearing the skin of an animal you’re afraid of.” She lifted her glass to her lips again, spilled it now on the front of her robe, had to sit up, shake it off her hand and brush it from the silk. “Cal was so jealous of him. Jealous of our relationship. He never wanted to share me with a child. He wanted me all to himself, like a big spoiled baby. Sick, no? He thought I was going to trail around the world after him, bearing his typewriter aloft like it was the Grail.” Her thin elegant nostrils flared slightly, like a ripple in silk. She crossed her long legs. They were very white, with fine blue veins.
What chance did he have, Josie thought, with such a father, such a mother?
Meredith set her drink on the table. “You should have seen him, Josie. When he was a child. We’ve all been bright, but Michael —” Her long hands made a beautiful, double fan in the air. “He was speaking in full sentences at two. He read at three. At five, he taught himself Greek from a book. From a book! He’d leave me notes in Greek. Ancient Greek. Someone at UCLA finally translated them for me. Sweet little poems.”
Even now, Josie envied him. Imagine having a mother who would say, We’ve all been bright, without hesitation. Imagine this woman had been her mother, and not poor Janey Tyrell. If this was her house. If she had been lifted up by all this. But she couldn’t picture the first thing. The Tyrells weren’t stupid, but they kept each other down. If you had a bright idea, everybody made fun of you so viciously, you learned not to have them. It was how they made sure nobody got away. And if Michael had been a Tyrell? They would have drowned him at two, with his first full sentence. He would never have gotten as far as notes in Greek.
“Did he tell you I wouldn’t send him to school?” Meredith asked, sticking her finger in the bottom of her glass, licking it off. “That I kept him at home all to myself under lock and key?”
“Something like that,” Josie said.
“It wasn’t true,” Meredith said, tucking her legs up under her on the couch. “He was the one. Begged me not to send him. It was only later that he changed the story, and I became the villain. He was like that, you know. Blaming me for things he was afraid to do.”
She shook the ball, making it turn, ball within ball, flowers and roads and ladies. But deep inside, the central ball was carved in horrors. Dead people in a pile. A horseman, riding down a peasant in a field. Hidden deep inside where the patron would never notice. The swarming murderousness, the almost erotic cruelty, like watching fish feed. She quickly put it back on its rosewood stand. She could imagine the artist, laughing with his secret.
“Josie?” Meredith was holding out her empty glass. “Per favore?”
Josie stared at the hand, the glass. Did she think Josie was going to wait on her? Because she was trash? But she suddenly understood that Meredith would have asked such a thing of Michael. She was asking her in Michael’s stead. And she knew he wouldn’t have hesitated, so she didn’t either. She took the heavy cut tumbler and went to the drinks cart.
“The one with the thistle,” Meredith said.
Josie poured the chunky glass half-full of amber liquid, it smelled like the day after a fire. “Ice?”
“Nein, Fräulein.”
Uninvited, Josie poured a tumbler for herself, the Stoli that smelled like nothing at all. She handed Meredith her drink and sat down on the other couch, not worrying about her pants dirtying the white damask. The woman’s son was dead, what did she care about her couch?
“He had a marvelous education. I took him everywhere,” Meredith said, lying down again with her big drink, one arm under her head. She took a careful sip and set the glass on the coffee table. “You have no idea how bloody uncomfortable a camel can be after the third day.” She rubbed her nose briskly with the palm of her hand. “Ruins were his passion. And I never said no to that child. Never. Did you know the Phoenicians had child sacrifice? At Carthage, they found children buried in the walls. That’s what I remember about it—Dido, and that they invented the color purple, and children in the walls.” She pulled out a Kleenex from her pocket and blew her nose. “They deserved to become extinct.”
Children in the walls. Grandfathers on the rug.
“His Greek period. I had a year’s residence in London. Michael practically lived at the British Museum. Red figure, black figure, the so-and-so painter.” She shifted her long figure on the couch, let one arm drape back over the end of the sofa. She glanced over at Josie to see if she was following. “Pots. He and the pottery man were inseparable, what was his name? David. Davis. Something. God. A real British academic. Mouth breather, corduroys all baggy in the rear. Even asked me for a date.” She laughed a little, completely drunk, letting herself forget for a moment that Michael was dead. “I thanked God when he entered the Renaissance. At nine, he could tell all those tellos and dellos apart, who built the Duomo and who cast the doors and how they did it and in whose honor.” She sat up on her elbow to reach her glass. “He read the Inferno in Italian. Miles beyond anything a school could have offered.” She took a drink. “He had no call to resent that. You couldn’t send a boy like that to school. His father never understood that. ‘He needs to be with boys his own age, Meredith.’” Imitating Cal, pretty well, too. “For an insane half minute, I let him have his way. Allowed him to be sent off like a prize calf to the abattoir. Michael sent me notes like a prisoner, smuggled out by some janitor, the school censored all their mail. Some boys locked him in the boiler room for a day and a half, and nobody told me about it. Well, that was the end of that experiment, I’ll tell you.”
Michael had recalled that scene to her, portraying himself as a flannel-coated, long-lashed schoolyard victim, the master who caned, the cold, the sadistic gym teacher. And Meredith, sweeping in in a fur coat to rescue him like some kind of mythological bear mother. It was not hard to imagine Meredith whisking Michael out of there in his pajamas in the hired limo, trailing the scent of her strange perfume in the snowy air.
But now Meredith was deflated, looking down into her drink. “Do you think I made a mistake, Josie? Do you think I should have made him stay?” Then she lifted her green gaze to Josie, in a gesture that was so like Michael it sent chills through her. “That he would have come out stronger on the other side? His father said all boys go through that. Bullying and tormenting each other.”
It was the last thing Josie would have expected, Meredith asking her if she thought it was her fault. Josie drank the colorless Stoli, hoping it would heat the winter in her veins. She could strike a blow now, tell her this was all her doing, the mess, her fault. But she found she could not bring herself to make the woman feel worse. Even if Meredith had threatened her, tried to run her over, strangled her at Michael’s funeral. Michael was dead. What good could it do to make his mother any more unhappy?
“It would have been insane to leave him there,” Josie said. “Only a sadist would have done it.”
The silence brimmed between them as they drank and the fire burned lower. Maybe that was the only real truth about the world, that there was no answer, that wisdom and experience were no better than a flat-out roll of the dice.
“Put another chunk on the fire, would you? It’s going out,” Meredith said.
Josie found a hairy piece of wood in the metal carrier and opened the fire screen, threw it in. It landed crooked, so she had to shove it with the poker. The little hairs caught on fire, smoldered, and the underside crackled as the bark heated up, smoking, and then soon trickled with orange flame. “Let’s do another,” Meredith said. “I’m freezing.”
Josie threw a second log in, and the fire went out. Smoke streamed into the room, stinging her eyes.
“Push them back, they’re too far forward,” Meredith said.
Josie wiped her eyes and shoved both logs to the back.
“Now open a space between them, about an inch, to draw.”
She did as instructed, opened the hole between. The smoke rose, though this tim
e it stayed in the fireplace, and then flames began their tattered ascent. She stared in at the licking tongues of yellow and orange. Like Michael, his mother was so precise. Like Michael. The thought sent those yellow tongues licking in her. No, not at all like Michael. Not at all. His mother was a devil, she couldn’t be trusted. All Josie needed was to succumb to the comfort, the familiarity. She had enough problems. Josie took a big swig of her Stoli and threw the rest in the fire. It went up in a whoosh, like when her father put lighter fluid on the barbecue. “I better go.”
“Don’t go,” Meredith said, quickly. “Stay here. You can sleep —” Then she caught herself. “Anywhere.”
And Josie realized she was going to say, “You can sleep in Michael’s room.” The way you’d invite someone to sleep in a spare bedroom, when the occupant was gone. She looked at Meredith, struggling to prop herself up on the pillow. And she thought of the dead bodies inside the ivory sphere. This house full of ghosts. This poor cursed place. She didn’t belong to this. Suddenly, she found herself standing. She had to go. She couldn’t pass out here, people died here, they went crazy. Just like this crazy bitch.
“Don’t, really, Josie. You’ll kill someone on the way home,” Meredith said. “Ruin their Christmas.”
“Ho ho ho,” Josie said. She was very drunk, but she could still leave, she should go while she still could. She made her way across the room, holding on to the furniture, station by station, hand over hand, an easy chair, a standing lamp.
“Don’t be like that. Please, Josie, don’t go.”
“On Donder, on Blitzen.” Staggering across the empty spaces, grabbing the rail of the steps up into the foyer, she had to go, it was like those fairy tales where you spend one night and you’re trapped forever.
“God, you’re as impossible as he was.”
Josie stumbled up the stairs and across the foyer, out the front door. In the dark, the cold smell of plants, the rough brickwork drive, she felt like she was waking up from a dream. She realized how warm it had been inside, the fireplace, the gleam of light off the walls, the woodwork. Out here it was just cold and dark, there weren’t even any streetlights. She stumbled on the brickwork, fell heavily onto her hands, sat down. Not hard, but just crumpled. It was cold, lying there on the bricks, but it was more of a thought than a sensation. She looked at her hands, slightly lighter than the darkness around them, but she could not tell if she had skinned them or not in her fall. Her body seemed very much like someone else’s. She felt around for her purse, but couldn’t find it, and it felt like too much trouble to crawl around looking for it, so she curled up on the brick and put her face on her leather sleeve and passed out.