He never considered it might not be Jeremy. Jeremy was someone he despised but secretly envied, someone who could create without worrying whether it wasn’t the finest thing that had ever been done. But Nick Nitro was simply beneath Michael’s field of vision—a screamer, a punk rocker, a broke speed guitarist who rode a junk Japanese bike and looked like the guy who worked on your car.
At the time, she hadn’t considered fucking Nick the same as having an affair. It wasn’t as if she had started something new. She didn’t tremble when she took Nick on his dirty sheets. Having sex with him was more like picking up a jacket or a record album she’d left behind in the hall, or eating cold pizza when she was stoned. Who would know or care what transpired between them? At the time, she thought it was Michael’s fault. If he would only touch her, smile at her. Make love to her the way he could if he wanted to. But that summer all he wanted was to be left alone to make ugly paintings in the mirror and listen to Schoenberg on Deutsche Grammophon, that fragmented, half-mad music.
So she started going around to the Franklin Fuckhouse. Not often, just three or four times, to put off going home. Just somewhere to go to avoid the gathering gloom.
Liar.
It was way, way more than that. She was angry and hurt and it was payback for being treated like garbage. When she would do anything for him. She paid the rent, bought food and did the laundry, paid for his canvas and fucking paints now that he’d quit Señor Reynaldo, up and quit, for no good reason, suddenly he didn’t like the way Reynaldo hovered over him, said he was sick of clumsy infants and playing the same music over and over so many times he was hearing it in his sleep. That’s what he said. Poor Reynaldo probably had no better idea than she did why Señor Music had suddenly grown so sulky and difficult. He hated everyone that summer. Leaving her to bust her butt while he was painting his ugly pictures, guide to his own private Bosch, and then not even kissing her, flinching when she touched him as if it burned. So she would go to the Fuckhouse and get laid hard and good with no questions asked. Honestly, she’d liked Nick better then than in all the time they’d been actually together. He was the ultimate anti-Michael. He had no ideas, he didn’t think their sex meant something. He didn’t wonder if they were getting back together or even ask if she had changed her mind about him being an asshole. The very thing that had been so annoying about him was now his strong point. Didn’t Michael always say your virtue was your vice and vice versa?
Peter, Peter, Pumpkin Eater. She had Michael but she couldn’t have him.
Though he could come to life for his mother, oh yes.
When she’d started calling him from Leningrad and Denmark and Sweden. They’d gotten all chummy again. The woman couldn’t leave him alone. And she knew just how to reel him in, calling from her tour, lonely, missing you. At the beginning he was short with her, but after a while their conversations lengthened, and the worse he was feeling, the happier those calls made him. He still wouldn’t let her give them any money, oh, he was too proud for that, Josie could work three jobs a day and that was okay. But his mother knew just what to say to him, what he would respond to. By the end of summer, they were thick as thieves. You know how they were. Oh yes, she knew.
And when Her Highness called, she wouldn’t even acknowledge Josie with a hello. Treating her like the goddamn answering service, Stepin Fetchit to the Crown Prince.
“Hello, can I speak to Michael, please?” The crackle of the long-distance line.
It was the wrong day to pull that shit. “The name’s Josie,” she hissed into the receiver. “You can fucking say my name, Meredith, or kiss my fucking ass.” It felt fantastic to hang up on her, brilliant.
Michael appeared in the doorway, hands covered with paint, squinting like a mole after the dark cave of the bathroom. “Who was that?”
She turned to him, leaning on the wooden counter. “Who do you think? She calls and doesn’t even say hello. Like I’m the maid or something. No habla inglés.”
“What did she want?” He pushed the beads out of the way, there was still paint on his hands.
“I don’t know, I hung up on her.” She held out a glass of iced tea for him.
He didn’t take it. He just stared. “You hung up on her.”
“Yeah,” Josie said. “I hung up on her.” Her heart beat fast, he was seeing her now. She’d finally gotten his attention. What would he do, hit her? She hoped he would. It was life at least, a reaction.
“She’s in Sweden,” Michael said.
Josie put the jar with his tea down on the counter, backed away. “Well break out the brass band.”
“She’s my mother,” he said, coming toward her. “You don’t just hang up on her.”
“Why the hell not?” She pressed up against the counter, her free hand braced in an attitude that was pointedly casual, afraid and excited by the outrage on his face, finally some emotion there besides his stupid funk. She took a drink of tea, eyed him, waiting to see what he would do now. Would he strike her? Realize how pompous he sounded, like somebody’s father? She wanted to push him hard, see what would happen, though it frightened her too, she wasn’t sure if she was really ready to know. “Your mother’s a snotty bitch and I’m not putting up with it anymore.”
The phone rang again. Michael brushed out through the beads, answered the phone himself, glory be. “Hello? Meredith?” He rubbed his forehead without thinking of the paint on his hands, leaving a green streak. “I know she did. It’s hot here, it’s making us both kind of edgy.”
“Tell her we’ve been together a year, when’s she fucking going to get used to it?” Josie called from the kitchen, but he didn’t appear to be listening.
“Everything’s fine here,” Michael said.
At least he had the decency to lie.
He sat on the blue couch in front of the fan, picking his toenails, settling in to a nice long chat, the gloominess of his face lifting like tule fog when the sun starts to burn it off. Talking to the great love of his life. It was so painfully clear. Josie felt like crying out of sheer jealousy. How a woman calling from five thousand miles away could get that reaction, when she couldn’t with all her clothes off six inches away. Meredith hadn’t spoken to him for months after she’d cut him off. Now she was calling all the time, talking about her tour, the conductors, her exciting life. Michael said she did it when she was all jazzed from a performance, or bored or lonely in her hotel, it wasn’t just him, she’d call everyone she knew and talk forever. Her phone bill was the equivalent of a small country’s gross national product.
“Where are you staying? Sure, I remember Mr. Eriksson. He’s got to be ninety, he’s still there? No, in Sweden it’s the midnight sun. The white nights are Leningrad.” It was more conversation than Josie had had from him in weeks. “How’s Sofía?”
Meredith took the maid with her on tour, to do all the packing, make the travel arrangements, get the cabs and make phone calls and pick up the mail at American Express, do the shopping and cooking. Meredith stayed in suites with kitchens, so she could be sure of eating well on the road. When Michael was a kid, Sofía and the tutor flew coach while Meredith and he went first class. That said just about everything.
“No, I can’t,” he was saying. “Yeah, it sounds great, but we’re pretty busy here.” He glanced quickly at Josie, then away.
She knew what Meredith was up to. She was inviting Michael to join her in Sweden. To seduce him back into his old life, maids and hotels and white nights. Why are you sitting in that hot squalid little shack when you could be here in Stockholm? I’d love to see you, why don’t you ditch Mimì and come out? I’ll send you a ticket. And it filled her with such love for him, that despite everything, his crazy accusations, the nights he spent in the chair by the window avoiding her bed, the way he would shudder if she touched him, he would not leave her to run off to the midnight sun with his mother. He knit his forehead streaked in green, making those planes he liked to turn into tumors in the paintings. “Yeah, well I never fit
in either, so I guess that’s two of us.”
They were still the two of them. She knew what the mother was saying. She wouldn’t fit in. She’s not like us. I don’t know why you’re with her, I really don’t. But still he chose her. He still loved her, he did. He would not leave her for his mother’s siren song. She vowed she would never fuck around on him again, that they would deal with their problems, she would wait for him. They’d get through this together. In her own way, she saw, she’d given in to despair as much as he had.
She dropped the shoulder strap of her slip, so her breast would peek out, the nipple like a bouquet, so he would remember what she could do for him that his mother could not. He rolled his eyes at her, oh please, picked up a drawing pad from the orange footlocker, and tucked the phone against his ear, so he could listen and draw at the same time. “I had that piece in the show at Barnsdall, did you get the clipping? A gallery’s even interested in representing me.”
Barnsdall Park’s municipal gallery was a big deal, lots of famous artists had had their first show there. And out of all that art, the reviewer from the Weekly had mentioned his specifically. Though it shocked Josie that he was talking about it with Meredith. At the time, he’d dismissed it—the show, the review, everything. “They let everybody in, Josie,” he’d said with a sneer. “It’s not the Whitney Biennial. Me and four hundred of my closest friends.” He hadn’t even wanted to attend the opening, but she’d made him go. People loved his painting, Josie nude on the couch in black stockings and her red little Jeanne wig. The reviewer called it Schiele-esque, which Michael hated for some reason, all but called her an idiot. Now he was bragging.
This was the part of Michael she found so impossible—the way he could take a position and then later completely reverse his point of view. He hated it when other people did that, revisionists he’d call them, but he couldn’t see how he did just the same thing. What was worse was that he believed the new version as much as he had the old one. And she was afraid that someday he’d do the same thing with her, the story of his love.
“Yeah, well, the photo wasn’t that great.” He frowned, turning away from Josie, not wanting her to watch him reel out his revised version of reality for his mother’s inspection. She was clearly finding something to criticize. That bitch. She never wanted him to be a painter. He was supposed to become a famous art critic, a curator, so he could travel with Mummy and yet still have something she could point to and say, Oh, my son’s not just hanging out, he’s here for the Schiele auction. Fuck her. She probably knew Schiele and didn’t think it was Schiele-esque enough. Josie could tell Michael wanted her to leave, to let him talk to his mother in private, but there was nowhere else to go—was she supposed to sit in their hot, stuffy bedroom? And anyway, this was her place, really, she was paying for it, she’d goddamn sit anywhere she wanted. She conspicuously plunked herself in the chair by the window, where the smoggy haze stalled over the giant ryegrass and nothing moved but the fan, waving its blue and green ribbons. A toy car on the toy hillside drove past little houses like the models in a race-car set. And beyond, the painted backdrop of a city through smog. What if it was all just an illusion, a diorama at the Museum of Natural History, and they were in it, she and Michael, locked in a two-dimensional world. But not Meredith. She was out there in three dimensions, with her concert halls and Stockholm and breezes off the fjords.
And Michael chatting away as if everything was fine, great, neato. She couldn’t help wishing she could rate that kind of heroic deception, instead of him saving her for the grinding reality, his terrible gnawing doubts about his life and everything around him. The true world so far away, it hadn’t been seen for so long, only this opaque day-to-day shit they were living. She had to admit, it was a relief to hear him happy, to know he was still capable of it. She had to give that much to Meredith. When he got that stranger’s face, and started in on one of his rages, Jeremy or some other crime she’d ostensibly committed, there wasn’t much that could snap him back out again.
She should have made him see someone. She should have not let him distract her. Even if he broke up with her. But she hadn’t been willing to take that chance.
Now, she could hear the actor in the bathroom, showering, singing “Number One,” going up into falsetto. God. She hadn’t thought there was that much hot water. She drank her tea. To think that she’d let him fuck her in Michael’s own bed. Christ. Well, at least she hadn’t enjoyed it.
She remembered joining Michael that day, on the blue couch in front of the fan, how she’d spread her legs and let the air go up her naked crotch, hoping to remind him just what they had seen in each other, how good it could be, but he put the phone on his lap and turned away, concentrating on Meredith in Sweden, which she could only picture as a loose collage of blond stewardesses in blue uniforms, bad disco bands like Abba, or else men and women in horn-rimmed glasses walking on rocky coasts in Bergman films. No wonder Meredith wanted Michael to come out.
He wouldn’t look at her. His mother said something funny, he laughed, and though it was good to hear him laugh, it pissed her off, too. Why could he pull himself together for Meredith, but not for her? It was exhausting to listen to them, they made the air hotter, more oppressive, how could they find so much to talk about?
She put her foot on the fly of his shorts, to see if she could rouse him while he was distracted. He frowned, trying to concentrate. She pressed gently, working the toes and the ball of her foot, feeling him harden despite his frown. She walked her toes up his cock as he kept talking to his mother. She could jerk him off like that, if he’d let her. Keep talking, she thought. It’s Meredith, your mommy.
He didn’t look at her, but slid his hips forward on the couch as he listened. She took a chance and slid her hand into the fly of his shorts. He covered the receiver and mouthed cut it out. But the look of his mouth and the way that he swallowed, she could tell it was turning him on.
“Pretend I’m not here,” she whispered. Like he’d been doing for weeks. She wanted him to want it, she knew there was a spark to be lit, it was still there. This holding her off was a punishment, but for whom, and why, she never could tell. When you loved someone the way she loved Michael, you couldn’t help being punished no matter who it was he was trying to hurt. All that love, all that joy, she knew it was in there, in that body, under that skin, in those green eyes, she’d lived with it, knew it, where could it all have gone?
She could feel the velvety skin of his cock, at least that still knew her. It always remembered her, and she touched him there, light and gentle, not rhythmic, yet it moved under her fingers, on its own, as if he were not attached to it. There was the Michael in her hand and the Michael who was talking to his mother in Sweden, and finally he sighed and shut his eyes, pretending she was not there, his unfaithful mistress, pretending it was the breeze, or the stirring of a thought, a womanless hard-on that grew and sought, without a head or eyes or ears, without knowledge or wonder, but a wanting that came before all of those things. Maybe he was imagining it was Meredith. Was that it? Was that what would get him off? His legs sagged apart, although his face was still turned, and she bent her head and took him in her mouth. At the contact, he gasped involuntarily and put his hand over the receiver, but as Meredith talked he let Josie run her tongue around the head of his cock, he thrust himself in her mouth, “Uh-huh,” he choked into the receiver, then covered it again, and arched and the sinews in his legs were hard as roots, covering the receiver as he bucked and groaned and then his hands in her hair as Meredith told him stories from over the sea.
“Okay, you,” Wade said, coming into the living room, all dressed, showered, and combed—cowboy boots and black jeans and leather jacket. “See you in a couple.”
“Yeah,” she said, not turning, so he couldn’t see the tears streaming down her face. “See you.”
She still wanted him. Fiercely, as she had on that day, as much as she had the first day at Meredith’s, the way she’d always wanted him. He
just wasn’t like anybody else. She’d fucked a lot of boys but never wanted any of them, that was the truth. That was the goddamn truth. She’d never felt a fucking thing. And now she’d lost him, those hands on her body, those bony hips, his lips on her breasts, his tongue in her, his cock, never and never.
She lay on the couch for the rest of the morning, like some crazy girl in a locked ward crying and masturbating all the day long.
21
Sunset Plaza
Orange crime lights illuminated new blacktop along Sunset Plaza as she climbed, her headlights washing the fronts of low modern houses crouching windowless to the street. The concrete walls and ivy and crushed white rock glowed in the artificial light. She parked a dozen houses up from the location, dry swallowed a cross top, and walked down, carrying Elena’s clothes in a bag. She’d just driven in from a four-hour sitting in Palos Verdes, it was going to be a long night. Greek statuettes flanked the flat black double doors she walked through without knocking, hoping she had the address right. The slate entry, walled in frosted glass, gave way to an expanse of immaculate white shag and a sheer wall of windows. Total Sixties, it’ll blow your mind. Beyond the white leather and glass of the sunken living room, past manicured lawn and bright swimming pool, lay the vast jeweled vista of night-crawler LA, spread out like a careless club queen passed out on a bed, skirts hiked above her waist, for anybody to fuck any way they wanted.
The crew had already trashed the carpet, black grimy cable smears and cigarette ash, wires snaking through the shag to feed light stands propped with sandbags. Jeremy and My Producer Gordo conspired, heads together, on a couch of ivory leather. “Whose house is this?” she asked. “Are they crazy, letting you use it?”
Jeremy pushed his lank hair back from his face, goggle eyes alight with a guilty excitement. “Actually, they’re in Aspen,” he said. “Actually.”
These people hadn’t dreamed how dangerous it might be to befriend a student filmmaker, and then say when they’d be out of town. How little he cared about them, compared to his need to use their perfect Sixties house for his movie. She felt like a burglar. Then she thought better of it. She wasn’t going to feel too sorry for people like this. They thought they could seal themselves away behind glass and white leather, but they were mistaken. Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.