The water boiled in the speckled enamel tea kettle Michael liked because it did not whistle. She turned off the gas, and pushed past Meredith and her prize. “It’s not a shopping trip.” She went outside, down into the garden, plucked some mint he’d planted in a stack of tires he’d found down there. That fresh, menthol smell. How small it had been then, just a fifty-cent plant, he’d put it right under the hose bib. They’d planted everything here themselves, this small dark garden. How lovely it had been, to buy plants at the nursery and then plant them in their own yard. Josie had never planted so much as a pansy. Their jungle was going to be like the Garden of Eden. The mint was knee high and two feet wide now. How bitterly ironic, that the mint was thriving so vigorously, but the boy who planted it was not. She tucked leaves from the plant into her sweater front like a pouch.
Everything in the place called his name. The angel-wing begonia, the calla lilies, the morning glories that had grown up into the trees. She went back up to the house, where Meredith was going through the books, looking for something. Let it go. Let it go. She began making tea, thinking, what didn’t bear the imprint of his personality. The jars and tins of exotic spices stacked against the painted tiles, from Thai groceries, Indian shops, Korean, Turkish, Salvadoran, Ethiopian. Their battered pots hung from a bicycle wheel over the stove. She couldn’t get away from him. They could have the mint tea that they always drank, or Earl Grey, which he hated, but even his hating it made it his. She was beginning to understand why people gave away all their possessions and left town, just moved into a motel off a highway in Bishop. Maybe she should give everything to Meredith and leave with nothing but the clothes on her back. She put the mint into the celadon teapot they’d bought at a student sale at Otis, the color of duck eggs. Elegant things. Their game, from a book of his, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. “Duck eggs? That’s elegant?” she’d asked.
“They’re a particular color of green,” he said. “Very beautiful. But you should know that, you’re from the country.” He had no idea, a tow yard in Bakersfield was about as far from the country as Los Feliz. She poured boiling water into the crackle green pot, releasing the fresh brightness into the air. A moment later Josie heard, “Oh God.”
Something in the sharpness of the cry made her wipe her hands on a towel and run into the living room, where Meredith crumpled onto the low couch like she was folding herself into an envelope, a tight package of shock, hand over her mouth. She had finally noticed the big painting, Civilization and Its Discontents. On her face was the same blinkless horror that Michael got the day they saw the dog hit by the car. The way it writhed in the gutter and he couldn’t do anything, staring with exactly that same helplessness. Caught through the eyes, unable to respond or help or turn away.
There on the wall, Meredith finally saw herself, climbing the stairs in her son’s nightmares, bearing the world’s strange cargo in her arms. Every woman with her face, blind and ascending in a trance. Their idealized faces lacked the ravages his death had ground onto the genuine one. Meredith sat perfectly still, but even so, something inside was making panicked circles, just like the dog.
There was nothing she could have said to make it better. She poured tea into the tiny celadon cups, beautifully glazed. They had once done a real tea ceremony with this set. The tea was powdery and bitter, he whisked it up with a tiny broom. Everything so slow and beautiful, it lifted time away, and you were in that eternal space, it made where you were the true world. Though Meredith wouldn’t have noticed, she gave the cup a half turn before she offered it to her. You always turned the cup.
But Meredith didn’t take it, she could not turn her head from the picture. It was like having Michael here, in that mood when she couldn’t talk to him, but moved quietly around the place so he’d know he wasn’t alone.
That’s how it was with his death. There were still more punishments in store for them. Every day there was something new. As if one death was not enough, it spread out, a feast of loss with ever more courses, surprising and painful in ways you could never anticipate. “How can you live here?” Meredith whispered. “I can’t even go into his room.”
“Sometimes I pretend he’s not really gone,” Josie said, sitting down next to her, finally handing Meredith her teacup. “I tell myself he’s just gone to the store, or he’s down at the library, he’s coming back anytime. And sometimes, I talk to him, like he’s here, I just can’t see him.”
The older woman put her long hands to her face, the heels of the palms cupped into the sockets of her eyes, the fingers wrapped around the top of her head. “I can’t take much more.”
That’s what Michael used to say, and she would argue with him, reminding him that these moods passed, that there were good times and they would happen again, if he could just stop making himself miserable, get out of the house, maybe go back to work, start painting again. Why didn’t she listen? Why didn’t she hear? She was starting to think there might be such a thing as karma—that repetition—maybe you lived through the same thing over and over until you stopped caring. Maybe eventually it got less intense, until it was just nothing. But it only seemed to be getting worse. Through the window in the front door, two, three hummingbirds fought in short vicious jabs over the red blooms of the hibiscus. “Have some tea before it gets cold,” Josie said, and sipped her own, the fresh clean scent. Meredith raised her tea to her lips and drank mechanically. She was still caught in the painting. All those blind Merediths, climbing the white stairs. Blind. It wasn’t just Meredith, not by a long shot. “We grow the mint ourselves.”
“There’s no we,” Meredith said dully. “It’s just you.”
Everywhere she turned, a reminder, every tiny sentence a trap and an endless revision. Better to stop speaking altogether.
“I think this was a mistake,” Meredith said, putting the cup down, getting ready to rise.
And now Josie was the one who didn’t want her to go. “I thought you wanted to see it.”
Meredith’s sable hair hung before her face as she looked down at two books in her lap, pulled from the case. “These are mine,” she said, in a voice both weary and commanding. One was The Poems of Paul Valéry. It was in French. She opened the embossed black cover to the inside leaf, where her name appeared in a strong triangular script. The other was green leather with gold letters: Heart of Darkness. She opened it to its marbled endpapers, showed Josie the bookplate, a white square printed in blue with a music stand and a baton and Thirties-style moderne script saying From the library of Mauritz Loewy. The L shaped like a swan. A very short book about a man who goes up a river in Africa, to bring back this other fellow who’d made kind of a cannibal kingdom for himself way back in the jungle. It was the story Coppola made into Apocalypse Now, which they’d gone to see at the Vagabond. The journey to capture the white man gone mad, freaky death everywhere, a haunted, vicious place way up the river, which was the place all your fears became real. Michael said everyone had a Kurtz in them, and Josie had argued with him, heatedly, as if by disagreeing she could push away the darkness that she could already feel deep down in him.
Meredith shut the book with a clap, like slamming a door. “What difference does it make?” she said, throwing it onto the sofa beside her. “When am I going to read Conrad? Never. Sell it. You can get something for it, it’s a first edition.” She looked around the room again, out at the view. “Was Cal paying for this? I always wondered. Frankly, how did you have a pot to piss in?”
“We worked.” Josie stirred honey into a second cup of tea.
“You worked, you mean.” Meredith’s wide mouth twisted sardonically. That mouth.
“He had a job too.” Josie sipped the tea, the freshness reviving her.
“Michael?” The older woman turned to stare at her, as if she were speaking in tongues. She had seen that once, at a tent revival Gommer Ida took her to, the spirit coming in, people writhing around on the ground. It struck Josie as funny. She didn’t think there was going to be anything fun
ny about this afternoon, but you never knew. Meredith thought she knew all about Michael, but she didn’t know everything.
“He played piano for kiddie dance classes,” Josie said. “They called him Señor Music.”
Now Meredith laughed, she threw back her head and laughed with her mouth wide open, you could see all her big square teeth, just like his. She kept laughing, wild and desperate, and then tears began to slide from the ends of her long eyes, into her dark hair. “Señor Music? But he abhorred children. Even when he was young. The Little Barbarians, he always called them.” She wiped at her temples with the back of her hand.
“He didn’t hate children. We talked about having a baby.”
The laugher faded and Meredith’s face recomposed its tragic contours. “Well thank God for small mercies.”
Josie’s hands were trembling, she wanted to hit this woman, suffering as she was, watching her blind self climbing the stairs.
“Don’t look at me that way. Can you imagine, your father killing himself before you were born? Then being raised by some ignorant Okie?”
Okie. She hadn’t heard that in a while. It was what her father’s people had been. They came out to California to pick cotton, to pick oranges. Gommer Ida and Daddy Jack hadn’t wanted their daughter to marry that Okie, Glenn Tyrell. Okie. That was what she was. After all those years. Just as they looked at Meredith and thought Jew. No matter how well she played that fucking piano. She stood and moved away from the woman on the couch. It was probably Meredith’s first thought, the very day they met, the fear that a Tyrell would worm her way into the Loewy family with a pregnancy. It was only the oldest movie in the world.
But if she had had a baby, they both would have had something of Michael’s. He would have gone on. Now he was gone forever, without a trace. “You’re a real bitch, aren’t you?” Josie said, picking up the tea tray. “I think you should go now.”
She took the tray into the kitchen, set it on the rough wooden counter, dumped the contents of the pot into the sink, wiped the mint out of the pot with her fingers. She put the leaves in the compost can, though why, she didn’t know. She didn’t compost, that was Michael’s thing. Composting was important to him, you put the nutrients back into the soil. As if there was a future. Why shouldn’t the earth be as raped and sterile as everything else?
Meredith pushed through the wooden beads, stopped at the refrigerator. “I’m sorry, Josie. Forgive me. The things I worried about, they don’t even make sense now.”
“You wouldn’t have even wanted your own grandchild. Michael’s child, because it would also be mine.” She took a Gauloise from the ashtray on the windowsill over the sink, lit the butt. “You’re really a piece of work.”
“Look, tell me more about Señor Music.”
“No.”
His mother ran the beads through her fingers, like she was combing long hair. “Josie. This has just been so much harder than I thought it was going to be. That painting.” She whispered this last. “Please tell me. Tell me about him being Señor Music.”
Josie rinsed out the pot, looking out at the blue mountains to the north, a line of snow on the ridges. “He liked it because he didn’t have to be a genius, he just had to show up. He found out he was good enough, and that’s all he had to be.” She was not used to being cruel, but Michael had taught her how. Everything she knew she’d learned from him. “It was a relief for him. He was sick of having to be the best at everything.”
Meredith stared down at the worn streaked linoleum, dark eyelashes resting against her cheeks just as Michael’s did, like pulling down a shade. It was torture to see those expressions again—she felt like she was going crazy.
His mother pressed long fingers to the flat place on her forehead above her eyebrows as if she’d like to stick them through her brain. “You think I pushed him too hard.”
Out the window over the breakfast nook, a V of ducks crossed the pale winter sky, heading for evening roost at the river, long necks outstretched. She remembered her father and uncles shooting ducks on the Kern River in the evening, her uncle Dave had a black Lab named Teddy who would fetch their dead bodies. Michael taught her to recognize all the silhouettes from this window—hawk, crow, egret, gull. She liked the ducks’ neat formation, but Michael loved the hawks best, redtails with their broad chunky wings. The hawk on fire hangs still . . . “What do you care what I think?”
“So what happened? Was he fired?” Meredith asked, then dropped her voice. “Was it drugs? Really, I want to know. He always denied he was on drugs, but I could never be sure.”
Josie laughed, once. Jesus, who wasn’t on drugs? Michael told her once Meredith hadn’t slept a night without pills since she was nineteen. “That wasn’t it. He was tired of working for Reynaldo. He quit.”
“He was always quitting,” Meredith said. “He would have done the same with the painting, eventually, you know.”
Should she disagree? Or just get Meredith out of the house without a fight? “The dance teacher was in love with him. It made him uncomfortable.”
“He should have been flattered,” Meredith said in her husky voice, her light-filled eyes full of knowledge of the world. Except that there was something she didn’t know, something Josie could say that would wipe the smirk off Meredith’s face. Michael would kill her, but he was gone.
“No, it scared him. You know, after the rape in Meadowlands.”
Meredith had been reaching out to look at an old calendar that they’d put on the side of the refrigerator, but then the gesture faded away. Blink. Blink blink.
Josie washed out the teacups.
“What rape?” Meredith’s glazed expression, unfocused, unsure. “You’re making this up.”
“That would make it easy, wouldn’t it?” The clean feeling of the washrag inside the cups—Michael didn’t like sponges. The water didn’t heat up very fast, so she washed the dishes in cold, not bothering to catch the cold water in a dishpan to save for the plants. She didn’t care now if the plants died or not.
“What rape?”
“His roommate. But you knew that.”
His mother slid down the doorjamb, until she was sitting on the floor in her straight black skirt, her cashmere and pearls, her legs out at angles on the warped linoleum, like a doll on a shelf. She had her hand up to her throat, as if someone had offered to cut it. “The one with the pimples.” She pressed her forehead, and tears came down. “Why didn’t he tell me?” A flash of anger burst through the grief. “I would have crucified them!”
Josie tipped the water from the dishes, put them neatly in the drainer. “He wanted it to be over. You’ve never been raped, you can’t understand.”
Meredith ground her clenched fist into her forehead. “Oh God. Oh Christ.”
Josie gazed out at the hills to the north and the west, it was Bosch in all directions.
“Why didn’t he tell me?” Meredith said, and said it again, though she should know the answer. “I should have known. How could I have not known, my own son?”
And Josie suddenly felt she had done a wrong thing, to want to hurt Meredith this way, revenge herself for the Okie crack. Meredith was no Calvin Faraday, she was willing to blame herself and everybody else, which was far more appropriate. Josie stood there a long time, looking out at the view, the shadows lengthening in the short winter afternoon. How could she not have known, how could they not have known? The blind Merediths, the blind Josies. Nobody knew anyone else’s private world. In the end, they were all alone as inmates on death row, side by side. Sometimes you could get a look at one another with a little pocket mirror, cell to cell, but that was all.
She heard the scramble of shoes and the slamming of the bathroom door. She heard the water running, and then the deep seal-barking sound of Meredith’s sobs. In the spice cabinet, she found her little stash, went out onto the porch in the flat light of January, and smoked the skunky pot she had gotten from Pen, looking out at the tiny houses on the hillsides, listening to the grind
ing of trains up at Taylor Yards. She peeled paint off the rail that they had painted turquoise when they moved in, but now it was blistered from the western sun, exposing the chalky white underneath. One of the hawks had landed in its favorite eucalyptus, on a bare branch about level with the porch where she sat. The hawk on fire hangs still. Dilly dilly, calls the loft hawk, come and be killed.
16
Stripped
Rain yesterday, rain the day before. All the voices of the rain, on the roof, down the gutters. She wanted to curl up and be very small, very silent. But Jeremy called, nattering on about his film in his cheerful, fake-English, cliché-ridden way. He didn’t know Michael was dead, and somehow that made it possible to imagine that there was an alternate universe in which Michael was still alive.
“As soon as this rain lets up, we’re set to go,” Jeremy said. “So you meet with Wardrobe, no? Laura’s got these fabulous ideas, absolutely brill.”
Wardrobe. Jeremy talked about his films as if he were already Francis Ford Coppola. My Producer. My Editor. Already seeing himself accepting an award from AFI. She knew who Wardrobe would be. A certain kind of capable girl desperately in love with Sergio, the sloe-eyed Cuban boy from San Diego who shot all Jeremy’s films, My Cinematographer. Sometimes she wondered whether Jeremy picked Sergio for his camerawork or for his female camp followers who would do just about anything to be near the sullen, handsome Cuban—drive, move lights, get food. They were a regular mafia.
She didn’t want to go out, she’d rather sit here and imagine dancing with Michael as Ethel Waters sang “Sweet Georgia Brown.” But in the end, she got dressed and drove out to the Fairfax district, where the storm drains backed up and water eddied above curbs calf deep every time it rained. The worn wipers of the Falcon just smeared water around the windshield, their scraping metronome synchronized elegantly with the Joan Jett tape. She loved Joan, thought of her as a lot like Luanne, a big sister who’d kick ass for you. Though at ninety pounds, Luanne wasn’t kicking ass for anybody anymore. Josie spotted a panel van pulling out of a space and snagged it just ahead of a Mercury Cougar, the driver giving her the finger, she could see it, misty, through the passenger window. She pulled up the hood of her black plastic slicker and waded out into the flood, water three-quarters of the way up her red rubber cowboy boots, and dashed down the street to the girl’s building, a nice courtyard complex paved in shiny Spanish tile, its empty fountain full of petunias.