This was where they had seen the heron that shining morning. A giant blue bird, three feet high, standing in the water, poking through the reeds at the edge of the little island. And time just stopped. The true world glowed in the morning light, the bird and the water, sparkling. They’d held hands, they both saw it, it was right there, the true world. She didn’t know how long they stood there because there was no time, it only started again when, eventually, the bird flew off, under the arch of the bridge. They watched it fly upriver, and knew the moment had passed, but they had seen it. The world was an open door. He’d built a little stack of stones to commemorate it. A duck, it was called. “It’s how you mark trail in rough country,” he said. “Then travelers can look for the next duck, and know they’re on the right path.”
But the rock pile was gone now, and in the lowering light that stained the water with sad mauve, the world was a closed book. They’d gone hopelessly off trail, and there weren’t going to be any other markers, not for a thousand miles.
She sat down on the embankment, watching the river flow in the cold pink afternoon, cracked the bottle of Smirny. The coke had left her wired, her teeth gritting. She drank, her ass growing cold on the cement. Downriver on the other side, some people had dragged a raggedy mattress onto the embankment. She could see, they were fucking on it. Right out in the open. A man and a woman, you could see the rise and fall of his twin-moon ass. She watched, lighting a Gauloise, letting the smoke curl in the still air. It wasn’t very sexy, more like watching ants empty the sugar bowl. Something that once had meant so much, sex, now seemed no more interesting than an oil-field pump jack.
Then after a while, it occurred to her, maybe it was something else. Maybe the woman was struggling, maybe the man holding her down. The peace she had felt before, that tiny moment, was gone. She should do something, but what? If she called the cops and they were just homeless people having a fuck, she’d get everybody in trouble.
Anyway, they were so far away. And really, you couldn’t tell.
Wasn’t that the way it always was? You didn’t know, you couldn’t tell, you just let it happen.
When they separated and the man rolled over, she still couldn’t tell. The woman pulled her dress down and the man stood, zipping his fly, and he was saying something to her, where she still lay on the ripped mattress, and even then Josie could not decide if they knew each other, whether they were joined by love or violence. Then the man walked away, down the embankment, and the woman sat up and looked at the water, her arms around her legs, and Josie knew she would never know. Perhaps they didn’t know themselves. Sometimes the line was very fine.
Yes. She thought of the time Tommy had taken her for a ride out in the country in a stolen GTO. Her oldest brother, the one that coroner’s call should have been about. Tommy Tyrell, the one they were all judged by. She was still in junior high then, and he’d just gotten out of the youth camp, had only been back a few weeks. He’d picked her up after school, in somebody’s red go-fast, and she was flattered that people knew who he was, her badass brother, it was a certain celebrity. “Where’d you get the car?” she’d asked him, running her finger down the glossy red hood.
He shrugged. “Borrowed it.” His handsome face, with the same downturned mouth they all had.
They’d gone out into the flatlands past Pumpkin Center, parked by a ditch under an old pepper tree. He had a quart of Olde English 800 he shared with her, they smoked a Sherm. It was a woozy, junk high, and he told her stories about youth camp, the fights, the things he had learned, dirty tricks, how to make a knife from a bedspring, you kept it in your sock. Listening to Aerosmith on KUZZ. His profile as he stared out at the dry fields was just like her father’s except for the brown eyes. “You were always the good-looking one,” he said. He smelled like motor oil. “How old are you now?” His face was her face, they all looked the same, the same pointed nose, their shiny brown hair the same, though his eyes were hard and full of pain.
“Thirteen,” she said.
“Awful small for thirteen, aren’t you?”
“We’re all small,” she said.
And his face darkened as he turned to look at her straight on, and suddenly she saw what everyone saw when they looked at the Tyrells, the sullen anger at having been cheated of everything worth having before they were born, the hunger to get some of it back. He pulled a knife from his jeans, flicked it open. “Take off your clothes,” he whispered. “Do it.” He held the point to her neck. It was a little sting, not even a bee. She was not afraid, not really. She understood. He just didn’t want to be small anymore. So she did what he asked. It wasn’t that she was afraid he would hurt her, it was knowing exactly how he felt. It was just a body, what difference did it make? It was what it was, just one more sad thing.
She had never told anybody but Michael. But she knew he would understand, how things could happen to a person, and it was hard to find the names for them, there were things that came in between this and that, that were both A and Z. And he did understand. They had lain in bed, smoking in Montmartre, talking about bodies and what they endured. And he told her that during his last year at his swank private school in Ojai, he was sent to a sanitarium called Meadowlands. “The place was a total fraud,” he said, lacing his fingers in hers. “But it looked nice, flowers and fountains sparkling in the sunshine. That’s all Meredith cared about. I wasn’t nuts, just really sad, they put me on Thorazine and God knows what else. But my freako roommate could not resist the opportunities afforded by my helplessness. All I remember was thinking, how pathetic human life is.”
Yes it was. Just like that. Pathetic, vulnerable and senseless. She watched the sun drop to the horizon, a sad wash of red over blue. There were no ducks, no herons now, only the traffic on the bridge and the water, still flowing, for no reason she could understand. Even the raped woman was gone, all that was left was that ragged mattress. She sat alone in the blue twilight, too cold for frogs, as the early sunset bled into the water, the shine of the river lighter than the land.
14
Dining Car
She paused outside Otis to light a cigarette in the noon haze after Melina Varga’s head-study class. The best thing about head study was that she didn’t need to take her clothes off. She wore layers of clothes, bag lady-style, pants and dress and jacket and hat. She was always so cold these days. The light hurt her eyes, though it wasn’t that bright, not through the square sunglasses she wore everywhere now. Students called to her but she pretended she hadn’t heard. The park across the street lay under a light mist. Fountains shot water out of the old lake, aerating its obstinate greenness. A bum wheeled his shivery shopping cart along like a giant tambourine, piled high with bottles and cans, past the silver-gray Jaguar parked at the curb. Fuck.
The smooth continuous motion of the electric window, lowering. That proud head, the rich dark hair. “Josie? Josie, it’s me.”
She would know it at the bottom of the sea. What did that bitch want now? She’d shown herself out for Christ’s sake, did she look like she’d missed the exit? She’d been so wrong to go to Meredith’s that night. To try for comfort like that. As if grief could be shared. They could only struggle over it, like ladies fighting over a shirt at a year-end sale at May Company. It was hard enough just to sit with the things she’d already gotten wrong, ways in which she’d failed him all on her own. Today was not a day for a confrontation. This time she turned around and walked back toward Seventh Street, knowing Meredith wouldn’t suffer the indignity of running after her.
She was mistaken. She heard the footsteps on the sidewalk, felt Meredith grab her shoulder. “Please, Josie, wait.”
Meredith was not dressed for running—she looked like she was going to court, in a black coat with gold buttons, nylons, black shoes with high heels. The coat alone probably cost five hundred dollars, an antique stickpin glittered in the dull afternoon light.
“Josie, please. I just wanted to apologize.” A car passing by showered them b
oth with street grit. Meredith glanced back at her Jag, making sure it was still there, Josie guessed. Just walk away. She knew she should, but something made her hesitate. The tone of the woman’s voice, the urgency, the remorse. She looked into Meredith’s sunglasses, saw her own masked self reflected there, and Meredith, and her in her own dark glasses, on and on, like the man on the Cream of Wheat box, holding another box with another man on it holding the box. “The way I spoke to you that morning. It wasn’t right.” She smiled, awkward, unsure. A woman like Meredith, worried about what Josie Tyrell thought. “Let me do something for you. Buy you lunch, I know a place. It’s not far at all.”
Josie took a drag on the cigarette. “Slumming?”
The older woman took off her sunglasses. The fragile skin around her eyes was stained dark, as if someone had rested a tea bag on them too long. “Josie, you won’t hold that against me. I’m really not like that. I’m not myself these days.”
“Who are you then?” Josie asked. A woman who needed something from her, somehow. A famous pianist standing on a street corner at MacArthur Park, begging her son’s trashy girlfriend to have lunch with her in some swanky place. A woman who wouldn’t have been seen in the same room as her when he was alive. The irony, as Michael used to say, was excruciating.
“I don’t know,” Meredith said, putting the glasses back on. “I used to be someone, but now I can’t remember. Come on, let me buy you a decent meal.”
Josie wasn’t sure what it would mean if she went. Yet she was flattered. Yes, flattered. That Meredith had taken the trouble to find her, wanted to take her to lunch, a woman who never thought of her at all except to wish her dead. How Michael would have hated the idea of his mother and Josie, going to lunch. She gazed at this woman in her coat with the stickpin, her shoes with gold buckles. What does she want with your pissant self? She could hear her father warning, She don’t like you. She wants somethin. Watch yourself. But there was also herself. What she wanted.
The Jaguar smelled of Meredith’s perfume, smoky and lingering, and the leather seats, and a whiff of the house in Los Feliz, the cedar and mothballs, and underneath it all, just a hint of Michael. She had to restrain the impulse to bury her nose in Meredith’s coat sleeve. What she wouldn’t give to have that smell forever.
“Josie, I’m sorry about that morning,” Meredith said, steering the big car from the curb. “Really. I was so glad you were there. I needed the company in the worst way. That’s the truth.”
She had to admit, she was thrilled that Meredith wanted to spend time with her. She knew she was betraying Michael again. Going behind his back. He never wanted her to have anything to do with the Meredith life, that was the whole point, they were as far apart as could be. The buckles on Meredith’s shoes were gold and square, like a Pilgrim’s. She was curious where Meredith would take her, dressed like Ashcan Sally. In truth, she wanted to know this woman. She wanted to know where Meredith ate, what she ordered, how she held a fork.
The Pacific Dining Car sat on the corner of Sixth Street and Whitmer, in the shadow of downtown. A diner in an old train car, it brimmed with businessmen at this hour, devouring steaks the size of baseball mitts. Meredith quietly checked her reservation with the maître d. Josie could tell he knew, he avoided meeting Meredith’s eye for all but the shortest period of time, as if she were terribly burned or disfigured in some brutal way. It struck her—Meredith already had a reservation. She had known Josie would say yes. Meredith turned and waited, and the man helped her off with her coat. The way she did it reminded Josie exactly of Michael’s way of assuming people would do things for him. Josie wanted to see if he would do it for her, so she pulled one arm slightly out of the sleeve of her torn leather jacket, and there he was, helping her off with it, he had no choice.
The businessmen watched them go past, she was sure they were guessing how the two of them went together, the bag girl and Miss Symphony Hall. Parole officer and juvenile offender? Rock star and agent? She liked Rock Star, pretended she was slightly embarrassed to be caught dead in a stiff joint like this. She and Michael—they were artists, the true aristocracy.
The chairs were low and leathery, the menus fat, with plump leather covers and gold tassels. She was afraid the dishes would be in French and she would have to fake it, but no, the list was in plain English. Meredith glanced at the menu briefly, as if it was a catalog and she wasn’t buying anything. She put it aside. She already knew what she wanted.
The waiter came to take their drinks order. He confirmed that Meredith wanted “the usual,” but when Josie ordered a Stoli on the rocks, he gave her a skeptical look, assuming her underage status. She got ready to show her ID, but instead of carding her, he just glanced at Meredith, who raised her eyebrows and gave a small nod. He shrugged, wrote down her order. Josie wanted to remember every detail, the sequence of these tiny gestures. Here was exactly the difference between the rich and the poor, in that one near-invisible interchange. There was a secret code, after all. It was the conspiracy her father always talked about, the line which the poor could not cross because they didn’t know the handshake. There was only a glimpse, you had to look fast, but there it was. You could sell information like that. It was the way the world really ran, in little signs and signals.
She studied Meredith from behind her leather menu. The older woman was dressed very simply in a white shirt and black pullover sweater, a straight black skirt, but such implicit richness in that shirt and that sweater, she knew clothes like that didn’t come from the Penney catalog. What she might have learned from a woman like Meredith. The Hindus called it maya, the false and distracting detail of life’s surface—the very opposite of the true world. But Josie wasn’t so sure that it wasn’t a kind of true world of its own. She wondered if Meredith enjoyed this knowledge, or if she even thought about it. “A fish has no concept of water,” Michael once said. She noticed a strand of pearls around Meredith’s neck, inside the collar of her shirt. They showed pinky beige against her skin, each pearl big as Josie’s thumbnail. Imagine having pearls like that and wearing them inside your shirt so only a few at the neck would show. Elegant things.
The waiter brought their drinks, and Meredith raised a chunky glass. “Here’s to—nothing,” she said.
Josie clinked her tumbler to Meredith’s and drank. She was drinking too much lately, though she rarely started so early. She knew it was a bad idea but these days there seemed to be no good reason not to pursue every bad idea that came along. Meredith ordered a salad with duck. Josie ordered the thing on the menu that sounded the most repulsive, calf’s brains. She was pleased at the waiter’s surprise, she guessed he expected her to order the cheeseburger.
Old-fashioned framed prints of locomotives lined the walls of the plush red dining car. “Did you ever bring Michael here?”
“When he was a little boy, he loved it. The train. But later, he couldn’t bear it. Too many fat cats.” She gestured with her drink at their fellow diners. “He’d rather brave botulism at the Burrito Baron.”
Josie was surprised that Meredith understood Michael’s terror of men like these, men with ties and ruddy aftershaved faces. Meredith smiled, as if she could read Josie’s thoughts. “Of course. It was what he feared most. A life with a suit and briefcase and a cigar. Being part of any club. He’d rather die —” Her face paled, and she took a slug of her drink.
“I know. I do it too,” Josie said.
The way she looked at her then, over the rim of her glass, gave Josie a jolt, it was so like Michael. The green eyes, their huge startled expression, the length and curl of the lashes, the slow flick of wide eyelid. The ache of loss, profound as if someone had gone into her bones and scooped out the marrow.
“He wanted to be one with the people, but he was such a snob in his way.” Meredith played with the saltshaker, unaware of the impact her similarity to her son was having, her gestures, these familiar expressions. “I bet he never once took you to a decent restaurant.”
The emph
atic curve of the brow, the length of the indent between nose and mouth. Josie didn’t know if she could stand it. “We ate at home,” Josie said, swilling the enormous Stoli, watching the melting ice swirl with the heavier alcohol. “He was a great cook.”
Now Meredith was the one to be surprised. “Michael couldn’t boil water.”
Josie smiled. Something Meredith didn’t know about him. How about that? “He went to all these little markets, and if he didn’t know what something was, he’d buy it and find out how to cook it. He has all these cookbooks, Auntie Ono Cooks Hawaiian. Food of the Gods.” Moussaka, and tamales that took a whole day to make. The dark fragrant moles he spent hours on, buying spices at Grand Central, then grating and grinding and roasting chiles and chocolate, everything from scratch. “Once he cooked a whole fish from the Chinese market. The head and tail still on. We even ate the eyes. And the cheeks, that’s the delicacy.”
Meredith listened, her chin resting on her balled-up fist—that fist, it was so Michael. Watching her was like falling on a stake. “Do you think it’s awful, that I didn’t know my own son any better?”
“Nobody knows everything about someone,” Josie said, wishing it wasn’t quite so true.
Just then, a man came over to their table, an older man, handsome and slender, with neatly cut gray hair. He said he had seen Meredith at a recital in San Francisco that spring, sorry to learn of her son, he was a huge fan, blah blah blah. Desperate fan. Meredith just smiled and listened politely, like a queen. So sure she deserved every word of it. Josie wondered for a moment whether she would give him her hand to kiss. The man was no pimply-faced kid, though, he was nice looking for an old guy, he had cuff links that peeped out from under the sleeve of his jacket, and the contrast of his gray hair and his youngish face might have been appealing to an older woman like Meredith. He was sorry for her loss but by God if he didn’t ask for an autograph on the back of a business card. He kept turning to stare at her as he went back to his table.