He handed her the envelope.
She opened it. Inside was just a piece of scratch paper Gordo’d used to work out some figures, but she imagined it was another piece of paper, another overdrawn account. An overdraft of the worst sort. I hope you find someone who can meet your needs better than I could. She’d overdrawn her account, all right, down to the last penny and beyond. The tellerman knew. The head office had it all on file. Death’s little bureaucrat in a crisp white shirt was here to tell her it was over. Account closed.
She folded herself onto the leather couch like an accordion receding between its two plates. She pressed her hand to her forehead, fighting panic. “Maybe it’s a mistake.”
He dropped his eyes to the gold chain circling his chubby wrist, rotated it with the hand that held the briefcase. “You can talk to management,” he ad-libbed.
“You’re from the head office. You can do something.” She was cornered, she needed a friend. She felt Elena’s fear, suddenly exposed, and immediately covered it up—everything was fine, under control. Smiling, showing off her mouth, her legs, the silky hose whispering against itself. “I know you can help me.” She stood, slowly, coming close to where Death’s tellerman stood on his mark, fearing to fall out of frame. She fingered his lapel. “You can do it for me.”
He stiffened. “I’d lose my job,” he said starchily. Faggot. He wasn’t interested in her legs, the flirt of her eyelashes.
The way he said it infuriated her. Death didn’t care about sex, about love, human weakness. It had what it wanted, a toupee and a gold chain bracelet, tasseled loafers and a part in the movie. She never thought Death would be so petty. It had Michael, this vain little creature, and for what. “You love this, don’t you. Playing with us all. You get your little scrap of power, that’s what you care about. You—bureaucrat.”
She could see the sting of humiliation on his prissy face, and knew she was right “You don’t have to get personal, miss.”
“You think this isn’t personal?” She held out the paper. I hope you find someone . . . Her voice rising. “There’s nothing more personal.” Tears, her eyelashes unpeeling, the liner running. She reached out and slapped him, hard, in the face.
The Teller of Death’s eyes opened wide, he turned on his heel and left, Gordo’s briefcase in his hand.
“Cut!” Jeremy yelled. “Oh Josie, you angel.”
Josie walked past Jeremy and the stricken Mr. Cairo in the foyer rubbing his cheek, out of the flat front doors into the surrealistic night. She climbed up the dark street to her car and let herself in, and sat, listening. There was nothing but silence, the distant noise from the Strip. She howled, stretching her face up to the sky, but the only response was from dogs across the street, breaking into furious salvos. She fished in the ashtray for a roach, but found nothing. Her fingertips were black and she wiped them across her forehead, like the Catholic kids on Ash Wednesday. Forgive us . . .
Of course Jeremy would have to use it in the movie. Nothing escaped the movie. The movie was the black hole in the universe where everything went in but nothing came out.
The Mysterious Phone Call. Elena sat in the white leather reading chair with an art magazine. Her legs in their slick white boots crossed on the footstool, the shot was all about her legs. The set phone rang, like the clamor of a bad conscience. She lowered her legs, the whisper of nylon, the slight animal smell of the raw silk of her suit, the glide of the pearls she’d found at a yard sale, as she walked elegantly to the couch. Picking up the sculptured Sixties handset from the coffee table, she answered, “Yes?” But there was no one. “Who’s there, please?” No one.
She returned to the reading chair, crossed her legs Elena’s showy way, the top parallel to the lower, at a perfect diagonal. She was a girl who played to the back of the house in an empty room. As she flipped through the magazine, she paused at a painting of a boy standing in a rubber pool, masturbating. The light like the light from the pool outside, lurid and underlit. None of us is quite himself these days, she thought, her own audience.
The phone rang again. She crossed impatiently. “Hello? Who is this?” Again, no one. She hung up slowly, then suddenly reached for it again, sensing it was about to ring, though it didn’t. She drew her hand back and waited, calm but nervous under the calm. Like a painting they’d seen once in Venice Beach. It was a big abstract oil that was just green stripes. She never understood art like this, but Michael explained, “It’s not a green painting, see? It’s a red painting under a green one.” He pointed to the edges, where the green didn’t quite cover the red.
That was Elena. Red under green. Her rawness just visible around the edges.
She sat still as a cat, her whole body listening, motionless but for the tip of its tail, never taking her eye off the phone. Her number was unlisted. No one knew she was here, she had no friends, only the Movie Director, whom she was fattening for the kill. Yet someone knew she was here. Maybe they were watching right now through those plate windows. She looked up and saw herself, her reflection on their print-free surface, the corona of blond hair, the couch, the navy suit Made in Hong Kong. Perfectly poised. Red under green.
Someone was trying to get through. Remember me?
She didn’t want to remember. Elena had it good. A cushy house, an important boyfriend. She opened the box on the table, full of cigarettes, Kents. Even the ciggies were period. She put one in her mouth, and flicked the free-form lighter, knowing with certainty that people who would fill a vintage box with vintage cigarettes would keep the lighter filled. It sparked and lit. She inhaled and stood, graceful and controlled as a leopard on a leash, and walked to the windows. Left foot, right foot, with the slight crossover of a runway model. Elena didn’t miss a trick.
Her reflection in the plate glass. A woman who had overdrawn her personal account in the worst way. She’d been skating along the surface, imagining nothing would touch her. But the end was coming. She was pounding away on a piano, when children were sealed in the walls.
He loved you. And you killed him. How could you have forgotten so soon?
And there was her face, smooth and untroubled, a face that could shoot a man in the heart and leave him bleeding on a sidewalk in November. She wanted to hurt her, make it real. You bitch. She banged her face into the glass. She didn’t know she was going to do it, but then she did it again. You evil cunt. Now she wanted to cut that face, with glass edged with green. It felt crazy good. She knew she shouldn’t, the glass could break, but she couldn’t stop. She thought someone would stop her, but nobody did. Bang. Bang. Finally, it didn’t break, and it hurt, and she’d exhausted her fury. She pressed her arms against the glass, cradling her head, smoothing back her hair, and she smoked the rest of the cigarette.
“Cut!”
And everybody clapped. As if it was a goddamn performance. She could have put her head through and nobody would have lifted a finger. She was in trouble here. On the high wire wearing nothing but a tutu, holding a parasol, over the eightieth floor.
Jeremy threw his arms around her, picked her up, twirled her around. “My God, Josie! Ab-so-fucking amazing! Now that’s acting!”
She wriggled and kicked until he put her down. Acting? Was that what it was?
Talking, everybody talking at once. She knew she shouldn’t cry, her eyes would take a half hour to repair. She concentrated on getting the end of the cigarette to her trembling lips. Jeremy was framing the reflection in the glass with his fingers formed into double L’s, imagining the reverse shot. Wade, his hair dark for Franco, the alter ego, came up and whispered, “Fantastic, Josie.”
She smiled and backed away. He shouldn’t even stand near her. Her life had become a stage tilting toward the edge, she didn’t know what she would do next. She shouldn’t be allowed to walk around. She might hurt someone.
She went back to the bedroom and closed the door, sat at the dressing table. In the mirror was a face Michael would have recognized, spectral, all in pieces. The eyes too big, the forehead too high. S
he was seeing it as he had, everything was broken. The brunette came in with some ice in a bag. “I was holding my breath the whole time,” she said.
Josie pressed the ice to her forehead with her left hand, touched the lashes with the pinkie of her right. She was going to have a whacking big bruise, but it wouldn’t show until later. Like everything. She pulled out the voddy and had a shot, eyeing Elena’s face, that mask. And her own face underneath, also a mask. And under that? What was under that, Jeanne of Montmartre? Daisy Mae? Something hideous, that Michael would paint in the mirror? Maybe you just kept peeling and never got down to the real face, maybe it just got smaller and smaller until there was nothing at all.
22
Nick
It was noon by the time she arrived home, her nerves jangling like a great set of keys. One more scene, always just one more. She wished she hadn’t done those white crosses, even though it was how she always got through those long shoots. Wired was the last thing she wanted to be. She pulled the noose on the gate and walked down to the house. As she neared the bottom, she slowed, stopping before the door. Something in her didn’t want to go inside, as if there were something terrible waiting for her. Ridiculous. She forced herself to open the door. An empty living room with four empty walls, nothing to be afraid of. Get it together, Josie, she could hear Pen’s voice in her head. Don’t go fucking psycho on me, okay? We’ll go to the Rose Bowl, we’ll buy some new fucking stuff. It ain’t pretty but you’ll live.
She was exhausted, she’d been up some twenty-eight hours now, she needed some sleep. She sat on the blue couch and smoked a ciggie, staring out the windows at the flat light, overcast, a weird greenish tinge to the sky, like an old bruise. She thought she heard something coming down the stairs outside. Damn it. She felt so exposed in there, suddenly. She half rose, listening, but then she didn’t hear it. She got up and opened the door, but everything was the way it usually was, the splintered stairs, the peeling pipe-railing, the giant birds-of-paradise, purple and vaguely mocking. She closed the door and locked it. Though the door itself would give way to one well-placed kick.
The windows suddenly looked so raw without curtains. As if they had never moved in. They used to love it like that, but now all those houses on the opposite hill stared, without compassion. “What are you fucking staring at?” She got her purse and went into the kitchen that was less exposed, sat in the breakfast nook with the cutout hearts, and drank the last of the vodka, wishing she’d put away something before the shoot. She should have known she’d be like this, a night shoot. What she wouldn’t give for one of those Percocets now. Almost worth going in for some emergency dental work. She thought of the Diazepam bakery, but it was too early, the stone-faced Salvadoran didn’t come in until five.
She missed the painting of her cooking that always hung there, above the nook. Everywhere, the ghosts of the vanished objects glared—missing paintings, absent china, furniture, along with the boy who made them, bought them, loved them. What isn’t there. She didn’t want to look at any of it anymore, she hated this place, she should move, if only she had somewhere else to go, but she didn’t want to see anyone, explain anything. She retreated to the bedroom, where Montmartre still covered the walls. La Bohème. Lucky that Meredith hadn’t figured out how to steal the walls. When she did, no doubt she’d be back, and the walls too would disappear, the whole house, folded up and carried away.
She drew the felt curtains and lay in the fusty bed, willing sleep, the bed where he’d lain with his headaches, his mind grinding like a mill, just like this, grinding him away. She wanted the grinding to stop, the clocks. The Duke of the Dark Castle with his frozen hands. She had to sleep. She needed a pill, Christ, something that would knock her out cold, hide her in sweet oblivion. Compared with her, Michael was brave. He always moved toward the thing he was afraid of. Sitting in that chair, night after night, looking right into its face. Painting it in the mirror. When she couldn’t stand much at all. If only she could make it just stop.
She went out and phoned the house on Carondelet, but nobody was home. She called Tilly’s Cafe but Pen wasn’t there either. Genghiz answered at the salon on Melrose, Shirley was there but she had her hands in color, could she call Josie back? She tried the pay phone at the Teriyaki Oki Dog, a boy answered it, Matt somebody, but she didn’t know anyone who was eating there. She finally got hold of Paul at Cashbox, he didn’t have anything better than Sudafed. She washed dishes, she folded and restacked her clothes, mopped the kitchen floor, made the bed. Shirley never called back. At three in the afternoon, she put her dress back on and drove over to the Fuckhouse.
It was a broad-porched, two-story Prairie-style house on Franklin Avenue, built in the ’teens for a big, prosperous family, but the block had declined considerably since those old dirt-road, pepper-tree Hollywood days. Making what seemed to her to be a thunderous amount of noise, she clattered up the wooden steps, past the broken furniture on the porch and through the unlocked front door. In the living room, a boy she didn’t know with spiky red hair sat on the couch watching a nature show on TV with the sound off, listening to Dead Kennedys. Onscreen, an alligator was eating a heron. The house smelled of garbage and cigarettes. The ashtray had overflowed onto the coffee table, but she didn’t live here anymore, she didn’t give a damn. “Where’s Nick?”
“He’s not up,” the boy said, then finally turned his head, saw her in her newly bleached hair and the Pucci dress. “But I’m here.”
Josie checked in the kitchen to see if anybody was in there, Hector or Robbie slurping down a first mug of resinous coffee, but only the cockroaches were up, busy in the sink, feasting off the dirty dishes in their bath of filthy water. Back copies of the Weekly, old Creem and Crawdaddy, Puke, buried the wobbly table. Bags full of beer cans and bottles rested by the back door, waiting for someone to turn them in for cash when money was tight. She’d once lived like this. Had even thought it glamorous, the bands, manic boys and outrageous girls, and she had been the homecoming queen, a sort of Chelsea Girl in the movie of her mind.
She heard the water come on upstairs, someone in the bathroom taking a shower, and she climbed the bare wooden steps, white boots clattering on each step. She wondered how late they had all gotten home. The walls were covered with spray paint, drooling down the dirty white surface, NO GOD. WHO CARES? NO ONE HEARS YOUR CRIES. She touched her own name in the stairway graffiti, JoC, and in the C a knifed heart. It seemed like another life. She walked down to the door at the end of the hall, plastered with stickers for bands and motorcycles, Nick’s two chief loves, and opened it without knocking.
The sun tried to penetrate the red pull-down blinds that bathed the room in a spooky daytime glow. It smelled like seven days of sex and three of speed, and Nick was fucking some skanky brunette doggie-style in his rumpled bed, the mattress half-exposed where her grip on the sheets had pulled them away. His poor face looked harsh and thin and hagged out, but his body was tight as a wire, a body somebody should cast in hot metal.
She knew she should just close the door and let him finish, but she was feeling difficult, a prima donna, and yes she had to admit it irked her to see her ex fucking such a cow, reminded her that for Nick it didn’t matter what pussy he got, it was all about as personal as a public toilet. So she threw a load of clothes onto the floor and sat on the butterfly chair with the tiger-stripe cover she had made for him when they’d been together, crossed her legs like Elena, and watched him do it, as if she were at the symphony. She lit a cigarette, threw the match on the floor.
“Watch me make her scream,” he said. He changed his rhythm from slow to little fast jerks, then plowed all the way into her, holding a fistful of her dirty hair like a rider holding a horse’s mane, and even now she knew what that would feel like, though she pretended she didn’t, just an indifferent spectator. Sure enough, the brunette went from her deep-in-the-throat moans to a real earsplitting howl as she came.
Nick arched back and froze, gripping the girl’s ass
so hard she’d probably have bruises, and then collapsed on top of her like a toad on a rock, then rolled over, his cock still hard in the red window light.
“Like her?” Nick asked, slapping her big ass. “There’s enough for everybody.”
The girl turned over. She recognized her, somebody’s girlfriend, Tammy, Terri, she waited tables at Canter’s Delicatessen. “Hi, Josie,” she said, pulling the covers up over her big beach-ball tits, looking uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure if Nick and Josie might have gotten back together again. Trini.
“Hey, Trini,” Josie said. “Nick, I want to talk to you for a second.”
Trini yawned, stretched, and snuggled down in the dirty covers for a postcoital snooze.
“So talk.”
“Alone.”
“You sat there and watched me fuck her, suddenly we’ve got secrets?” Nick said. “Gimme a ciggie.”
Josie threw him one of her Gauloises. He pawed through the debris on the bedside table—it looked as if he hadn’t cleaned since she left—found a cheap Bic lighter and shook it, struck the flint, took a drag, frowned. “Shit, what are these things?” He pulled a shred of tobacco off his tongue.
“Dried moose turds,” Josie said.
“Yeah, I guess. So, what are you doing here, I thought you’d be all in mourning. She walks the hills in a long black veil and whatnot.” Nick squinted against the harsh smoke, pushed his long stringy hair out of his hypothyroid blue eyes. “You couldn’t even talk to me that night at Lola’s, you think I was too stoned to remember? You were really a bitch.”
“Sorry.”
“You should be,” he said. “You can’t take that shit out on me, I didn’t even know the guy.”
“He was beautiful,” Josie said. “I was in love with him.”
“Well, what am I, last night’s cumstain?”
She said nothing. Next door, she could hear Robbie’s hacking cough. “Hey, I didn’t say it.”