10
After
Her head lay on needlepoint. She could feel the hard threads against her cheek. There was blanket on her, some kind of fuzzy wool. A leather couch, buttons. She opened her eyes. Puffy slits admitted diffuse light that seeped from the sides and bottoms of heavy drapes. Geometric figures on the floor. Oriental rug. Her boots stood neatly together. Something reeked. She peered over the edge of the couch—gently, her head a seismic device—and saw the wastebasket alongside the sofa. Slowly, she sat up, gagging, picked it up and carried it as far as the window, where she groped under the drape, releasing a knife blade of light, to find the metal window crank, felt for the hole, turned until she could breathe fresh air. She slid back onto the couch the way a child slides into first. What time was it? She recalled leaving, but not coming back. Rolling down the gutter on Bank Street. Do you think I did the right thing, Josie? Children buried in the walls.
The door opened. She could hear the piano out in the living room. Meredith was up. The maid came in with a tray, set it down, opened the drapes, her straight-backed figure disappearing into glare like a nuclear flash. The woman picked up the wastebasket with an impassive glance, didn’t even look at Josie as she took it away. “Sorry,” Josie croaked, through her parched lips. The woman closed the door without a sound.
She felt like a lowlife but was glad the wastebasket was gone, and that whatever the woman brought didn’t smell. Her brain spun when she closed her eyes, but hurt when she opened them. You’ve got two options. Clean little sounds came through the open window. A sprinkler, Rain Bird-style, shhhttt sht sht sht sht sht shhhttttt, the beeping of a backing truck. But what time was it? Her lips were cracked and her tongue was bitter. She groped her way to the desk, squinting down at the offerings. Glass of ice, can of Seven Up, a dish with aspirin. Some round crackers. Toast sticking up like records in a record rack. All on a lace-edged napkin.
She stared at the tray, trying to understand. Michael was dead. And there was this china. And a small vase full of tiny flowers. She started to cry. How could there be something so beautiful when he was dead?
She opened the Seven Up, the angry hiss, drank from the can. Her stomach lurched and plunged. She nibbled a cracker. The maid sure knew what to bring. Must have done this before. She swallowed a couple of aspirin, waited to see if they would stay down. She wondered if Meredith was in the habit of tying one on. A spot just above her eyebrow throbbed, like some tiny monster was about to pop out of her forehead. Like those paintings Michael painted, things crawling out of his face.
How furious Michael would be if he knew she had come here. Spying on him. Letting Meredith tell her version of his life. Alternatives to old favorites. Tearing at the fabric of his image in her mind. Like the one where Meredith hadn’t let him go to school. She doesn’t like him to mix with the world. She pressed the cold can to her eyebrow, the throbbing little devil boring its way out. Though it was possible Meredith was the one who was lying. Very possible. Do you think I made a mistake, Josie? But even if she was lying, who could blame her? Her son was dead. No one wanted to think of himself as the bad guy.
And in the end, she would never know the truth. It was hidden between them. If Michael were right here, they’d each stick to their version, pass the blame between them like a football. He was like that, you know. Blaming me for things he was afraid to do. Yes, that was true. He could believe something passionately, then later, deny what he had said. Even hand his position to you, while he argued the exact opposite point of view.
She tried the dry toast, thick, home sliced, took two more aspirin, ate a bit more of the toast. Eating in the enemy’s lair. She remembered a story Michael told her, about a kidnapped girl who ate six pomegranate seeds in the underworld, so she had to stay and be the queen of the dead. Josie put the toast down. Then she felt stupid and picked it up again. She was a girl who would eat from a tray on a lace napkin when her lover had killed himself. Deep down, she was glad something still worked.
She drank most of the can, waited for the relieving belch, buttered a slice of toast and slowly ate it. Over the mantel, an elongated thoroughbred eyed her with its buggy green eyes. “What the fuck are you looking at?” Her mouth tasted like the gutter after a parade. She found her purse, lit a cigarette, using an enameled ashtray with a gold ML interlaced in the bottom. Mauritz Loewy. His desk. All the rows of inlaid drawers, like secrets in people’s minds. She tried one of the little knobs, but it wouldn’t slide out. It was locked, but I know where she keeps the key. Meredith had had this twice, her son and her father. No wonder she hadn’t wanted Josie to leave her alone.
Josie opened the bloodred leather door. Music billowed out from the living room, she could see just the end of the giant piano. The sun filtered in through the window, more gold than white, it must be later than she’d thought. You had to admire the woman. Her son was dead, but instead of lying in bed on a morphine drip, she could turn to her music. Josie wished she had something like that. Michael had had painting, though in the end he didn’t trust it, it was a source of pain and no solace. But Josie had nothing, a book with appointments, a makeup case, her own bony self.
She had to go to the bathroom. There was one in Michael’s old room, the monastery library. She padded up the stone risers. The cut-glass knob felt cold in her hand, and she hesitated, listening, but Meredith just kept playing, the maid was nowhere in sight. She quickly went in. That resinous smell—linseed oil, turpentine, pine, mothball—made her catch her breath. That wonderful smell. It was all just the same. The gray blanket stretched tight across the narrow iron bed, the Virgin, crude and painted on a wooden panel with a curved top—what did a Jewish boy need a Virgin for? There were gaps in the sagging bookcase where he’d taken books to their house on Lemoyne.
She felt an odd disembodied resistance, as if the room itself resented her intrusion. She could almost hear the motes of dust settling. Michael, I’m sorry. Please believe me. But there was no answer here. Only the sad smile of his Mexican Virgin. Josie used the bathroom, washed, dried her face on the stale towel. Not a terry-cloth towel, but a linen one, like a napkin but bigger. Left over from the last time he was here, a year and a half ago. Meredith had not changed the towel. Once she might have thought that was crazy, to leave a towel dirty so long, but now it seemed perfectly reasonable. Josie hadn’t touched his laundry, either, could not sleep in their bed. Maybe a year would go by, who knew how long it might take.
His old toothbrush stood in its holder over the sink. Her teeth needed brushing but she could not bring herself to use his toothbrush. He was gone but these things were still his. Instead, she shook some tooth powder into her hand, scrubbed her teeth with a finger. Its pallid mint taste so recalled Michael, as did the scrap of shaving soap in a cup on the lip of the sink, that pine smell, Lightfoot’s soap, he had it sent to him all the way from England. A fine monk you would have made. But no one loved old-fashioned things the way he did. Tooth powder, nightshirts, shoe trees, handkerchiefs. He shaved every morning with that soap and a badger-hair brush, a straight razor with its tortoiseshell handle. Tilting his head to one side, shaving under the jaw, a razor sharp enough to cut your throat. She remembered watching her own father shave. Glenn Tyrell did it fast and angrily, as if he could not allow himself the possibility of enjoying it. Tough guy. Where Michael shaved slowly, luxuriously, his long fingers making an art of it. His neatness displayed everywhere. Pinching his nose and shaving the lather off his upper lip, stretching his neck long and drawing the blade gently along the knots and sinews. How terrifying it had been to watch him shave, knowing how easily that razor could cut those sinews. And yet that was not what he had chosen at all.
She caught a glimpse of her tired face in his small bathroom mirror, her dirty blond hair all stuck together from her night on the couch, what was left of her eye makeup a sooty blur. She turned off the light and went back to his room, the Virgin over the bed watching so lovingly. She imagined him lying there, in the unforgiving
bed, praying to be relieved of his blessings. The deaf-mute, the crippled boy, who played the piano and tennis. She touched the stretched-tight blanket of the bed, the heaviness of his death sitting on her heart like an old-fashioned iron, the kind Gommer Ida still used, that you set on the stove.
She didn’t want to be like this, sneaking, spying. But there had been so many secrets, and she was hungry for more of him, anything. In the top drawer of the dresser, silky socks nested, and neckties in careful rolls, like flowers. She trailed her fingers through the air just above them, not wanting to disturb their perfection. A box of cuff links and round little buttons with earring backs, thin little pieces of white plastic, she had no idea what they were for. She opened the door to his closet, paused from the shock.
It was big as the room she shared with her sisters in Bakersfield. Along the walls, suits and crisp long-sleeved shirts hung in perfect formation. The cedar and mothball smell was intoxicating. She ran her hand gently down the sleeves of the shirts, as if stroking the strings of a harp. She couldn’t believe how many clothes he had. She had only seen him in denim work shirts, and his one silk shirt from Goodwill, olive green. Here were suits—pin-striped, black, pale gray, even a seersucker and a tuxedo with a shiny collar, blue jackets with gold buttons on the sleeves, a white silk one, a leather jacket. He’d worn only one jacket as long as she’d known him, the one that had belonged to his father, who called him Sissy-Boy. She couldn’t imagine the Michael who had worn these clothes. Her Michael so loved his thrift stores and garage sales, a three-dollar suit from the Salvation Army. But no tweed jacket. Meredith probably wore it when she was alone, Josie would have. She wondered if Meredith knew there was a sprig of yellow mustard in the pocket, from when they went hiking up at Dante’s View.
The shoes of the dead were the emptiest of all, the saddest shoes in the world. Polished shoes, black ones with thin soles and laces, businessman ones with those little holes. She couldn’t imagine him wearing something like that. Who were you, Michael? Didn’t I know you at all? In a corner, rackets and sticks leaned against a golf bag, and three pairs of skis, and a fishing pole. But La Bohème didn’t have skiing. There were no fish in Echo Park lake.
Which had been his real life, this one, with its patent leather shoes and jackets with gold buttons on the sleeves? Or the life they’d made up together, Montmartre in their shack on the hillside?
“Josie.” That sharp, half-whispered voice, the way you call a dog, to get it out of a room, fast, but she heard it. Christ. She turned off the closet light, came out into the room, and there was Meredith, standing in the doorway.
Josie wished she could disappear. Just vanish. Meredith looked better than last night, her hair had been washed, but she wore no makeup, and her beige sweater was unflattering. Her mouth was in a straight line, white with rage. “What were you doing in his closet? You shouldn’t be in here. No one gave you permission.”
“I-I had to use the bathroom.” It sounded lame even to her. The closet was nowhere near the bathroom. She felt her face flush hot, like being caught with purple nail polish in your pocket in the Woolworth’s beauty section.
“There’s a bathroom downstairs.” Meredith turned sideways, an invitation to pass her, but Josie realized that Meredith would not, could not enter the room herself.
“Sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know.” Liar, she knew exactly.
“You don’t just go wandering in other people’s houses,” Meredith said. “It’s considered very ill-mannered.”
In case you don’t know it, Daisy Mae. Josie stood in Michael’s room, exhausted, headachy, disgraced.
“You can see your way out, can’t you?” Meredith said crisply, her nose sharp as her tone. “I have an appointment at two.” And she swept away down the hall like a Thirties actress, Norma Shearer or Joan Crawford, leaving a perfume trail in her dark, smoky wake.
11
Cemetery
Cold air rushed in from the mist-filled hills, lush again after the November rains. She was wiped after the five-hour sculpture class in Pasadena, but her nerves twanged like a cheap guitar. Thank God for the clouds, for the absence of light. On the car radio, the B–52’s bounced out “Planet Claire”: She drove a Plymouth Satellite, faster than the speed of light. She usually loved this band, but today their cheerfulness made her want to crash the car. She punched in a tape, Debussy études. The fluid string of shimmering notes soothed her with its asymmetrical dreaminess. No matter that it was a Meredith Loewy tape. These days, she clung to each last shred of beauty. People thought beauty was bullshit, just a Band-Aid slapped over the abyss, but they couldn’t be more wrong. It was like Lola Lola had said, beauty mattered, it was the only thing that fed you when everything else turned to shit.
She shouldn’t have gone creepy crawling in Meredith’s house, what the fuck was she thinking? She should have gone in and said good morning. She could have done the right thing, for once. What did she think she’d find in Michael’s room anyway? A dead boy’s neckties. It wasn’t the point. It wasn’t the point at all. What had she learned in his room, except that everything she’d thought about him was a lie. And the one person who knew him now thought Josie was exactly what she’d first assumed—stupid white trash who threw up in wastebaskets and passed out on driveways. Who wandered through people’s houses uninvited. You should never have even shared a sentence. Where the night before, she’d held out her hand in friendship, or at least mutual need. You can show yourself out. It still smarted.
She looked up and found herself already on the back side of Griffith Park, the green hills rising into the five o’clock mist. She’d missed her exit, and driven into the metropolis of the dead. Christ. Forest Lawn, here was the sign. Mount Sinai. She hadn’t been back once since the funeral. As if not seeing where he lay would negate the reality. Why hadn’t she come? What difference did it make what fucking Meredith Loewy thought or didn’t think, why did she care? Michael was lying up there, victim of ming. She cut across two lanes of traffic and shot down the exit ramp at Forest Lawn Drive. Through the gates at Sinai and past the long building where they’d said the prayers, and Cal had been kicked out of the family box. She wound her way up the road to the Court of Freedom. What was it exactly that court judged? Was it a merciful venue, or a just one?
Once she parked her weak-mufflered car, silence sealed itself over the park again. Her heels sank in the overwatered grass as she hiked through the checkerboard of brass plaques to the sandstone enclosure, the white Loewy tombstone. The heavy-branched trees mourned stoically, her only company, dark pines and deodars.
His grave. It wasn’t a dream, not her imagining. He was still here. Though there was no marker yet, just the family one. The seams on the sod were already growing together, the fingers of grass twined and blurred the edges. In another few weeks, it would all blend into the rest. In a vase punched into the grass, big grayish mauve roses bloomed, sad and Victorian looking. So perfect and dejected, just right for a dead boy. Meredith must have brought them. Who else would know about roses like that? She leaned over and sniffed, surprised at the intensity of the scent, not a rose smell at all, but spicy, like mulled wine.
The land of the dead, with its sad roses, its five o’clock in the afternoon, a new country. There was a children’s book they used to read together, about the evil Duke who stopped all the clocks in his castle with his cold, cold hand. It never occurred to her that that was death. But now she understood, the land of the dead never changed, you were just left with its rituals, kirs at sundown, a certain picnic table at Dante’s View, The Prose of the Transsiberian, Louis Armstrong and the Hot Five.
She sat on the bench, lit a cigarette for him, so he could smell it, wherever he was. She wasn’t going to cry, but she couldn’t help it. She couldn’t believe that a human being could physically weep so much. These days everything made her cry. If she couldn’t find the address of her sitting. Seeing a pigeon living in a red-light cylinder at Alvarado and Beverly, or a high-heeled
shoe left on top of a mailbox.
Shirley K. said the dead understood everything once they crossed over, that they didn’t hold grudges. She hoped it was true, but forgiveness had never exactly been a part of Michael’s repertoire. He could never put himself in the other person’s shoes. He never forgave anyone anything, least of all himself.
“You don’t believe in me, in my work,” he’d said to her. To her, of all people. Who was working three jobs, once he quit Reynaldo? But she didn’t believe in him. “You’re undermining me.”
As he lay on the couch while she went out on the third job of the day. After he told her Señor Music had had enough of screaming brats and playing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” and being groped by Señor Reynaldo. Which left her to support them both, the rent and paint and gas and canvas. If that didn’t show her faith in him, what did? But he tested her, the way you tested a tooth that had a cavity, seeing if you could make it hurt. He could not forgive her for supporting him, though he needed her to. And she didn’t mind, but why did he have to be so mean about it? He stopped reaching for her, he flinched if she touched him. What had she done that was so terribly wrong, that she had to be punished like that?