17
Meredith’s Room
The rain had stopped, but the trees still dripped all around her. No lights shone in the tall, iron-framed windows of the Dark Castle. She walked to the gate, which didn’t seem so lacy and festive anymore, just heavy and cold and formidable. Now the chain was locked for real. Josie went back to her car and sat smoking, the faint verge of dawn sky glowing in the side mirror, watching the driveway with ferocious patience. They would have to unlatch that gate sometime, to let in the gardeners, the cook and the masseuse and the piano tuner. Someone would be sent to the store for salmon and Scotch. It was only a matter of time, and she had nothing but time. She could wait all day if she had to.
She hunted for a roach in the ashtray and found half a joint, a small spark of grace. She lit it and turned on the radio to the classical station. The DJ had a snooty, flat voice, he reminded her of her English teacher in seventh grade, Mr. Pella, who made them read Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea and humiliated Josie in front of the whole class when she couldn’t remember any of the characters’ names.
She dozed off and startled awake several times, keeping her eyes on the gate in the side mirror, fighting sleep. After a night like that, she was in no hurry to dream again. What did it mean when you died in your dream? She could guess it was not a good sign. She’d never died in a dream before, she had always awakened just in time. She could still feel the gun against her temple, the bullet drilling in, and knowing that her life was over. Game over, no reset.
She was surprised to discover how sick the feeling made her, the idea of a sudden death. Did she still want this life so badly? Was there something deep inside her, a Tyrell thing, an Okie stubbornness, that would not let her succumb? What had she done in her short time on earth but meet Michael Faraday? It was like the Gauloises at the liquor store. She didn’t even know what there was to ask for. She had no education, no languages. She had never so much as been out of California. The only thing she’d ever had going for her was a certain kind of look, the ability to make an interesting shape in space, and that her body remembered things.
If she died now, all that would remain would be her image folded into some tattered sketchpads, a figure walking through a handful of student films. Her parents would remember her, maybe. Her brothers and sisters, at least the younger ones, Corinne and Bo. Pen would. And Meredith Loewy. Yes, Meredith would remember her. She would remember Josie, clearly and precisely, until the day she died.
A pickup truck moved slowly along the street in the grayness of early dawn, men bundled in sweatshirts throwing jacketed newspapers onto the driveways. One threw Meredith’s at the gate, but it didn’t go over, it caught in the spear points and fell into a puddle. She was somehow surprised Meredith even took a newspaper, that she would be interested in such transitory things. Josie’s paper was still coming, though she threw it out unread now, wrote Deceased on the bill. There was no news in the land of the dead. No urgent meetings with heads of state. No weather, no sports.
Michael had loved his newspaper. Lying on the blue couch, he could spend half the morning reading it. Arguing with it, making clever remarks. He was obsessed with the obituaries. She’d never read them before, he couldn’t believe it, to him it was like someone who’d never read the funnies. At home, they were nothing special, but in LA, you had to be someone. They were for people who’d done things—invented machines, created art, started companies, inspired people. Sometimes they were so famous, even she had heard of them. Michael always wanted to know what they died of—accidental gunshot wounds, overdose, cancer. Was it a suicide? That’s what he really wanted to know. Tears shot to her eyes, stinging like fumes. And she hadn’t thought twice about it. Just another of his funny eccentricities. Obits and classifieds. That’s what he liked. There might be no news in the land of the dead, but there were classifieds. They were as much a part of it as those silvery roses. What else were you going to do with the stuff of the dead? What would you do with his things, cart them around for the rest of your life? Old people’s dogs, the youth bed the dead child never got a chance to use. Needlepoint supplies. Estate sale everything must go.
A light came on in a neighboring house. A low wooden annex with square windows off a fieldstone house with steep roofs, a sycamore in the lawn. Kitchen, she guessed. Someone up making breakfast. Still nothing at Meredith’s. Maybe she was a day sleeper, like all musicians. Or did she sleep at all? Maybe she went down to Gardena and played cards with Morty all night. Some version of Russian roulette.
Josie sat listening to Horowitz play the songs of Schumann, sure she was still watching the gate, but when she awoke, the sun had come up as much as it was going to, somber and dull through the trees, the jays squawking. She had to go to the bathroom, she was out of cigarettes, her mouth tasted like rotting garbage. She should give up and go home. But then the maid appeared, in a brown tailored dress, unlocking the chain, picking up the newspaper from the driveway. She carefully looped the heavy links around the bars, but didn’t clasp the big padlock.
After a few minutes, Josie got out of the car, walked quickly back to the gate, lifted the chain. It groaned its iron lament, but she suspected the morning was already noisy enough that no one would notice—the traffic had already started down on Los Feliz Boulevard, and a news helicopter overhead whipped at the gray clouds. She slipped inside and rearranged the chain, quickly walked up the drive and then into the trees. She pulled down her pants and peed, watching the house, then fumbled back into her clothes.
She circled around the side of the house to the terrace, the pool. Leaves lay steeping at the bottom, like tea leaves in a massive cup. If only she could read them. If only she could have read them that first day, when she swam in all that lovely green water, Michael’s eyes on her. What would she have done? Left him alone, or gone down this long dark hall again?
Edging up to the back door, she peered in through the window, the rusty screen. It was all the same as the first time, the black and white tiles, the overloaded cabinets. The maid sat reading at the small table, coffee cup in a saucer, her black hair tidy in its painful bun. Josie quietly tried the doorknob. It was unlocked, but she would never get past the maid. Michael would have gone in like he owned the place, even if it was someone else’s house. Probably ask the maid to make him some breakfast. She had seen that side of him, the Little Prince.
She watched and waited. Finally, the phone rang, and the woman got up to answer it, put the receiver on the counter and left the room. Josie took her shoes off and slipped in, keeping her hand on the knob so the bolt wouldn’t reengage until she had shut the door behind her. It closed with a brief click. Shoes in hand, she ran through the kitchen, ducking into the butler’s pantry between that and the dining room. She could hear the maid on the phone in the hall, “The Señora is sleeping. No, the concerts have all been canceled. I don’t know about that, you must call Señor Markovsky.”
She waited for the maid to return to the kitchen, then crept out into the dining room, that vast lake of mahogany, the chandelier exposed now, catching every bit of light. She trotted across the terra-cotta tiles of the foyer, cold under her bare feet, climbed the stairs. She hesitated at Michael’s room, the first room on the right, but something made her continue down the hall, to the last one.
Silently, she cracked the door and slipped in. The drapes on the windows kept out most of the light, thick carpet gave under her feet, and the room smelled of smoky perfume and the heaviness of drugged sleep. The dark head lay framed by the shiny satin headboard that gleamed subtly in the dark, in the very bed where she and Michael had made love that first day, those perfect hours. You couldn’t tell the color in the dark but it was sky blue, as were the satin drapes that fell from a frame suspended over the bedstead where Meredith lay sleeping, hair spread on the pillow, thick and tangled as if from a bad night of dreams. She wore a satin robe over her nightgown, the covers wrestled into a heap.
Josie stood over the sleeping woman, thinking
, how odd, really, that people had to do this every day. Shut down and go somewhere else, leaving their bodies behind. She wondered where Meredith went at night, was she too in the card palace in Gardena, spinning a loaded gun? Suddenly, it occurred to Josie how easy it would be to kill a person while she was sleeping, pour something into an open ear. You could slip right out of the house again, and no one would know. How helpless Meredith looked, lying there. This woman who so hated her, a woman she admired, feared, could not help wanting to know. An accomplished, remarkable person. If Meredith died right now, there would be a half-page obituary in the Times. Her career, her father, her famous ex-husband, the tragic death of her only son. Her skin glowed in the dark room, her eyelashes resting on her cheeks, her mouth half-open, snoring softly. She suddenly wanted Meredith to open her eyes and find her there. She gave her every chance, strolling around the room, the carpet thick and padded underfoot, taking her time, not trying to be especially quiet, looking at the perfumes in their glass tray, unstoppering a few, looking for the one that she really used. She inhaled the various fragrances until she found it. An openwork glass stopper with a silk tassel. She put some of it on her wrist. It didn’t smell the same on her.
Bits of jewelry lay in a dish on the dresser, photographs massed on a bedside table. Black-and-white, in silver frames. One was of Meredith in a black dress reclining on a couch, her striking profile. Another was Cal, Meredith, and Michael as a toddler on some kind of rooftop, looking out on an Arabian kind of city, with domes and flat, cutout roofs. Cal and Meredith lay on either end of a daybed, she wore a Juliet dress and heavy eye makeup, the baby in her lap playing with her enormous earrings. Cal’s hair was dark and he had muttonchop sideburns, he sported a Nehru jacket. The kind of photograph they ran in Laura’s old Vogues. People Are Talking About . . . So glamorous. They’d thought they were untouchable. When they had so much to lose. And one of Michael, fairly recent, only his hair was longer. He leaned on a building, a wool scarf around his neck, thinking something funny, she could tell from the set of his mouth. Harvard. He should have stayed there. He should never have met her.
She picked up Meredith’s strand of pearls and held it up to her neck. The white pearls softly gleaming on top of her hole-filled gray turtleneck in Meredith’s beveled mirror. With dark hair and false eyelashes, she could be Meredith in the photograph. It wasn’t so special. Just another costume. Meredith moaned on the bed. Josie quickly put the pearls back in the dish and went to the bed. She gazed down at Meredith, imagining this was what it had been like for Michael when he was little, when Meredith would sleep all morning after a concert, and he would have to be very very quiet. Hoping she would wake up but afraid she would be angry if he woke her. But she didn’t wake. On an impulse, Josie left her vintage shoes by Meredith’s bed, toes pointing in, just where she had been standing. She walked out, closing the door.
In Michael’s room were all the things Meredith had taken from their little house. Not sorted at all, just thrown in. The paintings, the books, even the goddamn piano and the painted dresser. How had she known Josie would be gone that long? Veronica, naturally. Meredith must have paid everyone off. Josie burned to think of Meredith directing traffic on the stairs, Veronica just watching, not saying a word, counting her hundred. Shoes for the babies, gas for the car. But where were the journals? That’s what she wanted. What Meredith had wanted too. Why hadn’t she hidden them, why hadn’t she known? She dug through the heap of his things, their things. She found the pipe-cleaner circus in a box. She looked for The Ballad of Reading Gaol and The Prose of the Transsiberian, the poems of Paul Valéry, but there was no time, her mind wasn’t working, she had exhausted her burst of determination. She ended up grabbing the box with the circus, the painting of Blaise and Jeanne, and one of her in his armchair by the window, her hair a mess of gold.
The scary maid was on the phone in the foyer as she came down the stairs. “Morning,” Josie said, continuing to walk without missing a beat, barefoot but regal, Elena descending, the box in one arm and the paintings under the other. “Don’t worry, I’ll see myself out.”
18
Goodwill
There it was, the proof. The thing the mother had tried to deny. She propped the pictures on chairs, the one of herself, and the one of Blaise and little Jeanne, a sixteen-year-old poet and his innocent whore, on the road to disaster. Love pure and unbidden as wildflowers growing out of cracks in the sidewalk. Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre? She had the proof, and yet, what? He couldn’t remember it, he couldn’t remember.
She was tired, her nerves stripped like wires, the red and the white. She felt like a saint with the arrows shot through, she was bleeding to death. Out the windows, the city stirred sluggishly, the day moving through blue to disappointed gray. It was already exhausted. The prospect of going out to Northridge and posing this body in the same tired ways, for the same eager students, was too Cream of Wheat box to bear. Maybe it was time to give up. Just pack it in. Though she was dressed, her modeling bag packed, she just ended up in Michael’s chair, next to the little circus that she had returned to its place on the sill. The ballerina, the seal with the ball. She never canceled sittings, prided herself on diligence, she’d always been like that, wanting to show she was not the Tyrell everybody expected. But lately she found herself doing all kinds of things she’d never have dreamed, like standing over a sleeping woman and imagining pouring something into her ear. She called the booker at Northridge, pleaded illness, the flu or maybe cancer, it was hard to say which. But then she found herself wishing there were no more decisions, that it was just over, and it scared her, so she smoked a joint and drove downtown.
It was soothing to walk the long aisles of the big central Goodwill, listening to the stories whispered by the detritus of a million urban lives. She and Michael had shared this love for hunting through old things, rescuing household appliances and dishes and outdated Look magazines. The happy hours they’d spent here. Hey, Josie, look—Burroughs and Brion Gysin, it’s a first edition . . . His green sharkskin suit, her red little Jeanne fall, a purse with silk daisies blooming behind yellowing plastic. Josie pulled a dress from the Fifties from the rack, all scratchy organza skirt and spaghetti straps, held it up to herself, smoothed the skirt, put it back. A dress she once might have snapped up, but now it reminded her of a girl on a date with a boy who drove too fast, a dress that wouldn’t anticipate a blind curve on Mulholland, the sheer drop to the bottom, would not imagine itself covered in blood.
A Latino family stared as they passed. The mother gave her the evil eye as she herded the children, especially the elder daughter, maybe thirteen. As if what Josie represented might be contagious, this incomprehensible white girl in torn leggings and mustard sweater that covered her ass, wild dark-rooted blond hair a punk flag. She was a girl that parents steered their children away from, always had been, though now it was something she’d chosen—for Christ’s sake don’t end up like that. But the girl was still watching, looking backward, memorizing her hair, her spike-heeled boots.
Josie knew she was slipping, bagging on jobs, not to mention standing next to Meredith’s bed, imagining how easy it would be to kill someone while she slept. She tried to remember how it had felt to think that, but it was like she was wearing a raincoat inside her mind, she couldn’t hold it clearly.
Instead, she thought about buying something slick for the movie, to go with the ultramodern house in the hills. That made her a girl with a purpose, not someone hiding out at Goodwill because she didn’t know what she might do if left on her own. Total Sixties, she thought. Not the fringy, fuzzy, peace-love-and-tie-dye Sixties, this was James Bond and go-go boots, Blow-Up and little English sports cars. The Shrimp and Edie and Warhol. Speed and vitamins for breakfast. A pink Pucci wrap dress was promising, and a color-block double-knit stewardess number, its big metal front zipper ending in a ring pull, she could sew up the rip under the arm. Her eyes shuffled through sleeves and collars of dresses so ugly even a h
alf inch of fabric showing at the shoulder was more than enough. Then she saw the sliver of navy blue, the muted gleam of the real, like Meredith’s silverware. The sleeve, unornamented, wide, and three-quarter length, was attached to a collarless jacket of nubby raw silk, accompanied by a ladylike slight-dirndl skirt. The jacket closed asymmetrically with metal fasteners like the ones on firemen’s boots, high on one shoulder, then descending in a row to the left. She opened the jacket to inspect the lining. It was as beautiful inside as out, the French seams, and the label read Made in Hong Kong for I. Magnin. In a suit like that, you could give signals to waiters, run someone down in your Jag. You could hire a hit man or fly to Madrid first class, all for twelve dollars.
She took her clothes to the mirror. There was only one at the Goodwill, though the store was immense. They didn’t make it easy to discover what you’d look like in your purchases. Naturally there was no dressing room, you had to try on the clothes right there in the open. Two large black girls ditching school tried on prom gowns—green satin, red lace, flounces in every wrong place. Josie had never worn such a dress, a dress for a girl imagining herself a princess. By the time she was that old, it was already too late for her.
Finally, the fat girls got done, leaving their dresses on the floor in a pile, contemptuous of fantasies so recently indulged—going to the prom in green satin, with impossibly long nails, acrylic, iridescent as a drum kit, their hair beaded and braided, dripping with crystals, Isaac Hayes watching from behind his shades, asking someone, Who is that girl? Then anger, that they never would have that, the dresses didn’t fit and anyway, they had no dates, so they left the dresses behind as they themselves had been left, walking away, the way a guy who fucks a poor fat girl walks away, leaving her in a pile on the floor.