She stood over his grave. The earth smelled damp as it had the day of the funeral, the day she stood over the open hole with her rose, looking down into the dark. She could still feel where Meredith had wrapped her fingers around Josie’s throat. All around her, in the tightly squeezed graves marked by plaques on the ground, the dead muttered in their hollows. All in some way misinterpreted, misunderstood, gradually forgotten, and the memories of their lives altered to fit some more palatable version of reality. The complicated, difficult woman suddenly became the good wife and mother. The furious, bitter man was transformed into a gentle husband. She hated stories that were rewritten, films that were remade. Michael said history existed only in the human mind, subject to endless revision.
You’ll have to remember for both of us.
Who said she had to? Who said? Maybe she would check out too and there wouldn’t be one goddamn person in the world who would remember.
He never even told her the real story. For instance, about the hyperintellectual Harvardettes he’d fucked when he was supposed to be a virgin. Or Meredith not letting him go to school when it was him all the time. Or about being très sportif, a ranked player, with golf clubs and three pairs of skis. What was she supposed to remember, when he had held out so much of himself, had changed the story? There were all these new pieces, how was she ever going to understand him? He hadn’t wanted her to, not really. But then she couldn’t help him. Each man kills the thing he loves. That’s what Oscar Wilde said.
“Why does each man kill the thing he loves?” she’d asked him that day at Dante’s View. Hot and smoggy, the sunset coming a little earlier each day, heady with the scent of laurel sumac, the bright pungent green that was the smell of California, merging with the smell of water in the little oasis. They lay on their picnic tables, shaded with eucalyptuses, guarded by giant agaves twelve feet across, fleshy and blue-gray and edged with thorns. Prehistoric. Her soft dress floating around her thighs as he drew her. Reading The Ballad of Reading Gaol, a small book, an owl embossed on its cover, the pages thin as onion skins. It was about a man on his way to be executed. That line kept coming up. “I don’t get it. Why would you kill the thing you loved?”
The softness of his voice. Even now, under the deodars in the Court of Freedom, her feet in the grass over his silent body, she could hear his voice, clear but soft, you had to stop whatever you were doing, and lean close to hear it. And he had replied so quietly it took a few seconds for it to register. “You kill it before it kills you.”
But he was wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. Sitting here on a bench in the Loewy family plot, she knew you killed it by accident. Thinking you were doing something else. It was a cherished vase that broke while you were cleaning it. The phone rang and you dropped it. Shattering, when all you wanted was to keep it safe.
She held herself around her thin waist, her stomach brutally empty, she couldn’t stand to eat now, couldn’t stand the heaviness in her own body. She has no body, she’s too poor . . . She wished that was true. She was tired of hauling her body around. The clocks had all stopped, except the clock in the body. She had killed the thing she loved, and she was still here, needing to eat and sleep and pay the rent. She didn’t know what she was now, if she was real or just someone Michael had dreamed up.
She watched an old man struggling up the hill, he was overweight and breathed heavily. He stopped at a grave in the Court of Freedom, she could hear him wheeze. He had no flowers and his empty hands looked unnaturally large. He picked a leaf off a grave and absently fingered it as he gazed down. She thought he had said something to her.
“Pardon?”
“Stinks,” he said.
“What?” She wasn’t sure she had understood him.
“Life stinks.” He pulled a handkerchief from the pocket of his Windbreaker and hawked into it, folded it, and put it back in his pocket. “It’s rigged, and the house always wins. Remember that. They talk about Nature, how great it is and all that. Believe me, Nature’s no walk in the park. This is my wife here. Fifty-three years. Cancer of the pancreas.”
She nodded. A month ago she would have been embarrassed at the confidence. Now she felt a surprising kinship. She was a citizen of the new land, a country she had never before visited, only a rumor, this vast unseen tract, its boundary exactly that of the whole world, taking up the space and shape of the world but completely unlike it. It had a different atmosphere, hard to breathe, and how heavy you were here, it pulled you down like the gravity on Jupiter. At the observatory, there was a room with scales, showing what you’d weigh on the different planets. On Jupiter she’d weigh three hundred pounds. You would hardly be able to walk, or even stand up. The new world was just like that.
She looked at the old man in the growing darkness, gazing down at his wife’s grave. Fifty-three years with one person. “That’s a long time,” she said.
“I shouldn’t speak this way to a young person,” he said. His eyes were owlish in round glasses, under a plaid cap. “But it’s a rigged crap game. I spit on it.” And he actually spit on the smooth groomed grass.
She shivered, pulling her yellow coat tighter around her, the shawl collar framing her small face looking down at the silvery roses. “My boyfriend killed himself.”
The words hung in the air, untouched by wind or water. The old man scratched the back of his head, making his cap fall forward onto his brow. “That’s tough,” he said. “I got no answers.” He scuffed his brown, rubber-soled shoe in the grass. “You know, when my wife was going into the hospital, she made me a month’s worth of food and put it in the freezer. Labels on each one. Thursday. Saturday.” He took out that same handkerchief and wiped his eyes underneath his glasses. “I can’t eat them. I go get Burger King instead.”
“That’s not good for you,” Josie said, imagining him having a heart attack one night because he wouldn’t eat his dead wife’s cooking. That was probably what the woman worried about, so much that even with cancer of the pancreas, she went into the kitchen and managed to cook those meals for him before she went.
“I can’t sleep at night,” he said. “I go down to Gardena and play pan until the sun comes up. Then I go home and sleep. The house is just too damn quiet.”
The land where the clocks stopped ticking. All night, that relentless absence. “I never played pan.”
“It takes up a lotta time, that’s what I like about it. They got those other games, too, those Chinese games. It’s a Chinese place. They really go crazy. But I always play pan.”
She couldn’t help but think how Michael would have loved this old man. He loved when people talked to him like this, just regular people. It made him feel human, connected, if someone was comfortable talking to him, saw him as an ordinary man, perhaps he wasn’t as estranged from the world as he felt himself to be.
“We liked to go to Vegas, me and Dotty. We usually go to Caesar’s. What a brunch they’ve got there.” He smiled, hitched his corduroys around his stout middle. “Telephones in every room, even the can. She liked to call the kids and say, ‘Guess where I’m calling from.’”
Josie smiled, imagining her father doing the same thing. Calling from the toilet in a fancy hotel, saying, “Guess where I’m calling from.” “My parents got married in Las Vegas.”
“Yeah, they got those parlors. ‘Feeling lucky today?’ Goyim.” He laughed, shook his head, as if only crazy people would get married there. “No offense. Dotty, she liked blackjack. Always lost, but did she love to play. Said it made her feel like James Bond. Every day she’d set a limit, how much she was going to lose, a C-note or two. But boy did she have a good time losing, more than most people have winning.”
Was that the secret? Even if the house always won—you could still feel like James Bond, have a good time losing your two hundred bucks. Instead of sitting in a window, staring out at Bosch, thinking how you had to beat the house.
The old man gazed down at the green blanket under which his wife lay. “You know, she came to me once
. I mean, after she died. You’re going to think I’m crazy, but I saw her. She was in the bedroom, at the foot of the bed. She looked like she did when we first got married, in Chicago. Her father drove a truck for a bootlegger. She was wearing this blue dress she used to have, and her hair was dark again. She was so beautiful. And she said, ‘Morty, Morty, I saw my mother, and Artie Cohen’—he was a neighborhood kid who got hit by a streetcar.” He shook his head. “I hadn’t thought of Artie for sixty years.”
It occurred to her that old people probably knew more dead people than living ones. To have to go through this over and over again, until everyone you knew was gone. She thought of the old men at Michael’s funeral, how familiar they seemed with the place, the men who Cal Faraday said sat for a week every night at Meredith’s house. How could people stand it? “Did they do the thing where they came to your house for a week?”
“Shivah. Sure, they came.”
“Did it help?”
He shrugged. “Gets you through the week. But then you’ve got the rest of your life.”
His life was only going to be a few years, though. Hers had no end, it was like when you set up the mirrors in the dressing room, so they reflected each other in a long row, getting smaller and smaller but just more of the same. She was having trouble breathing. Years like this. But she didn’t have to. Michael had showed her. Cal said they had no choice, but they did. There was always a choice.
It frightened her to even think it.
It was getting cold now, it felt like rain. The light was fading fast. “Would you like to get a drink or something?” Josie asked.
“No, sweetheart, but I’m flattered as hell. I’m going to my daughter’s for dinner,” the old man said, zipping up his Windbreaker. “Later I’ll be at the Four Queens, on Normandie. If you can’t sleep, I’m down there every night after ten.”
She watched him edge sideways down the hill, picking his way gingerly through the graves, careful not to trip. She wanted to call him back, to stay with her, but he had somewhere to go. She wished she did.
She missed old men, like her own grandfather, Daddy Jack, with his Brylcreem and his Old Spice, Paul Harvey in the morning, Dodgers in summertime, live from Chavez Ravine. Daddy Jack didn’t know she lived right around the corner from there, though she had never been to see the team play. She hoped he was all right, him and Gommer Ida. She didn’t know any old people here. It made LA seem glamorous, but unstable. She wished Michael had had a grandfather like this guy Morty, someone to tell him, “It’s a rotten deal, the house always wins. Just sit at the table and play for all you’re worth.” Instead of one who showed him how to die.
12
Jeremy
The neon signs of Little Tokyo were just coming on when Josie arrived at the Atomic Café. It was really a terrible place, a tiny punk joint on the bad end of First Street. The food sucked and the service was worse, but it was near the Chinatown clubs and had the best jukebox in LA. She paused in the doorway, looking for Jeremy. She spotted him, at the third table by the window, like an army dug in, papers and notes and books colonizing the tabletop. He posed, tall and blond and famously distracted, forelock in his face, coat around his shoulders like a cape. In his mind, she knew, he saw himself seated before an audience in an immense theater filled with rapt young filmmakers, plying him with questions about how he got his start, his early films, how he became so successful. He woke up in the morning to the sound of his own applause. On the jukebox, Tom Verlaine sang “See No Evil.” They said Patti Smith learned to sing from him, the same nasal croon, the odd breaths.
He half stood when he saw her, then sank back into his chair. “Jesus, Josie. What happened to you?”
She knew what he was thinking—was she using, or was she having a breakdown? She lit a Gauloise, watched the tiny Japanese waitress in a towering hairdo shuffle aimlessly behind the counter, looking for something she had already forgotten. There was the Atomic Café in a nutshell.
Jeremy smiled, too wide, too white. “Josie. I don’t mean to say you don’t look great, you always look great, but my God, eat something, get some sleep.” Your fake Englishman, Michael used to call him. Jeremy’s mother was Danish, his father American, he’d been sent to boarding school in England, where he’d picked up that accent, so it wasn’t entirely fake, though he laid it on a bit thick. “You’re not a vegetarian, are you? Get a steak, take some vitamin C. B. You can get shots, I know someone —”
“Is this it?” She reached for the stack of pages, bound with brass fasteners through the holes. Glasshouse. She flipped through the pages the way she’d look at a magazine. Jeremy’s movies were all variations on a theme, there was no need to read it. She was the Girl in an unnamed city. Walking night streets wetted down with a hose to reflect the neon signs, wearing high heels and black leather, or silver lamé. It didn’t really matter what was in the script, Jeremy always threw out the script anyway. He said it was because he didn’t like to be hemmed in, but it was just that he didn’t really know what he wanted to shoot until he shot it. Which was fine with her, she was good at making things up. She knew just how it would look, what her part would be. The Girl looks. The Girl walks. The Girl was mysterious, fatally alluring, always moving, and ended up dead. She would do a lot of running, looking back, and casting smoldering glances.
“It’s a thriller. Psychological. Very stylish. Sort of Antonioni meets Buñuel.”
A phrase that would have sent Michael into ecstasies of loathing. Sort of Einstein meets Jayne Mansfield . . . Hitler meets Roy Rogers. She remembered the first time Michael met Jeremy, in the lobby of the Vagabond. She and Michael had just seen a Fellini double bill. She’d cried in La Strada, the strong man and the little clown. She has no body, she is too poor . . . Jeremy spotted them in the lobby and descended like a big gangly bird, interposing himself between her and Michael. Going on about the Fellini, he called it “awesome.”
“Was it really?” Michael said, taking her hand. “Did you sink to your knees, did you soil yourself in terror?”
Jeremy stopped talking just for an instant, like a skip in a record, and then continued as if he hadn’t heard him, or perhaps he hadn’t, he didn’t listen well, he only heard himself, and Michael was so soft-spoken, all the more so when he was angry.
“We’re taking Angel Baby to Toronto.” We, he already spoke of himself as if he were an entire production company. It was his second-year project at USC, a twelve-minute short they’d shot at Union Station and a skid-row hotel near Wall. He had his leather jacket hooked over his shoulder with one finger, a gesture stagy as a false beard, and tossed his hair out of his face. “Well, it’s not in contention, but we have a screening off campus, so to speak.”
“That’s great, Jeremy,” she said, taking Michael’s arm, trying to steer him to the exit before he started a fight. “Let me know how it goes.” It was so hard, the way Michael disliked all her friends, and he had a special loathing for grandiose young men who didn’t question the meaning of life, who had a plan for everyone and everyone in the plan.
“I’m shooting a band next month, I’m dying for you to be in it,” Jeremy called after her. “They’re paying. Twenty a day. How about it?”
“Twenty-five,” she said. “I’ll call you.”
How angry Michael had been as they walked back to the car, she could hardly keep up with him. All because Jeremy had kissed her. She hadn’t thought a thing of it. Film students always kissed, they were baby operators. She was used to it but Michael fell into a black sulk. “How can you suck up to a phony like that?”
“He’s not so bad.” Sure, Jeremy was stagy, but he wasn’t totally phony, he did make his films, he was already directing commercially and he wasn’t even out of film school yet. Lots of people wanted to do things, but Jeremy did them. Maybe he wasn’t the genius Michael was, but did you have to be a genius to do something in this world? The important thing was, Jeremy liked using her in his films, he kept asking her, said she looked like a punk Jeann
e Moreau, his fetish heartthrob. And he always made her look good. It was fun. It was not that she wanted to have some big acting career, she just liked being someone different.
As she leafed through Glasshouse, she was relieved at the thought of being the Girl in Jeremy’s film, a girl who didn’t have to think for herself, who could run glamorously in high heels and mouth someone else’s words and let the ending come as it may. Car crash this time, it looked like. Fine. She wanted to work, keep busy, and never have to go home. A Jeremy film would take up all her time for a while.
Out the window, an old Japanese woman and a young one, both in Western hair but wearing kimonos, walked by. The old woman was about three feet tall, and a hundred years old, and she was laughing, her hand over her mouth, hanging on to the young one’s arm with the other hand. Josie stared after them, wondering what an old woman like that could possibly find to laugh about. Tottering along, all hunched over and twisted and wrinkled as wet crepe. How could old people bear it, all the things that life could do to you?
She found some quarters in her purse and went over to the jukebox, punched in Richard Hell and the Voidoids doing “Going Going Gone” and “Lost Boys Love Dead Girls” by Lola Lola, a song about Edie Sedgwick. Lola Lola came on first, her operatic voice going down to gravel, then talk-singing like Dietrich. Sprechgesang. God, she even knew what it was called. He kiss her picture in the tattered magazine, came the familiar voice, and their waitress sang along, imitating Lola’s threatening growl. Ferdi and Edie and Darby, John Lennon. It was a year of loving dead people.
The petite waitress finally brought their orders, or at least something on a plate, though it was all wrong, a cheese-and-mushroom omelet instead of her udon soup, Jeremy’s burger, but cold, and with salad instead of fries, but they ate them without complaint. That was how it was at the Atomic. You placed your order and then you ate what the waitress or the cook or Fate served up. You never got what you wanted but sometimes what you got was edible. Just like life. The old guy from Mount Sinai would approve. She’d never taken Michael to the Atomic, he was too fussy about getting exactly what he wanted.