Meredith leaned her forehead on her hand, looking up at Josie, making no effort to hide her face. The water glistened on her eyelashes, her nose was red. She took the bar napkin and wiped her nose, spoke in her peculiar soft husky voice. “I couldn’t even come back to LA, I just couldn’t stand it. I didn’t go to the funeral. I let his friends bury him, those old men. I had them close up the house for me. And I toured, just living in hotels or in people’s homes like the Man Who Came to Dinner. I was playing with Von Karajan, with Solti, all the great orchestras, and I couldn’t stand to be by myself in a room.”
She hadn’t even gone to her father’s funeral.
“There were men, of course,” Meredith said, signaling to Helen Chow, not a big wave like anybody else, just raising one finger, and then pointing to her empty glass. And Helen nodded. The code even worked here, at a dump like the Lotus Room. “Men are easy. I suppose I shouldn’t begrudge you that. I know what it’s like to be alone and to take someone just because you can.” She turned the picture of Wade facedown, so all that showed was the stamp on the back, Fred Bauman Investigations, an address in Culver City. “Just because there’s nothing inside.”
Josie didn’t want to think about Meredith sleeping with strangers, her aging body naked and vulnerable in a faceless man’s embrace.
Helen came with another drink for Meredith. The older woman drank deeply, wiped her mouth on the back of her hand. “It was only when I fell in love with Cal that I suspected it was possible to live without this pain. I felt maybe I’d paid enough.”
“Paid for what?” Josie asked. “You didn’t kill him.”
“Of course I did. In the Oedipal sense. I outshone him. So I had to be punished. Then Cal came along and I felt, maybe it was over. Maybe I’d paid enough. Maybe there was a chance at happiness.” She drew in the wet on the table, five lines, the vertical bars, a musical staff. “We came back to LA. I reopened the house. We had Michael. For a little while, it looked like the curse had lifted.” She began to place notes on the staff. “Then Cal left me, and I knew it would just be one disaster after the next until the day I died.”
Michael had told her it was Meredith who left Cal. She didn’t know whom to believe, how you would know the truth. She tended to believe Michael, but Meredith had been there. Anyway, this was her story, and it was true for Meredith, part of the map of her own inner landscape. In a way, it didn’t matter—who could tell where a rift between two lovers began? “But I always had Michael. Until you came along.” She wiped out the staff and the music with a quick sweep of her hand.
As if the fact of her coming along would change anything. Meredith was like a cancer inside Michael, one that had spread to every organ of his body. There was no chemo for that, no radiation treatment.
Josie thought of Meredith’s life, the combination of great wealth and talent, with a black thread of tragedy running through. Was it worth having the one if you had to suffer the other? And yet, she reminded herself, poor people had tragedy too, and they didn’t get to play Carnegie Hall, travel the world with their picturesque agony, they didn’t have a beautiful gift. They acted out their tragedies in trailers and dingbat apartments, shacks and slums, every day. Why were the tragedies of little people less profound than those of Meredith and Michael? What was it about having enormous advantage that made tragedy seem so much more tragic?
“I’m thinking of selling the house,” Meredith said. “Getting the hell out of here, I could buy an apartment in New York. Or go back to Paris.”
She would sell the house? Josie felt panic leaping up. The house was part of Michael. Her swim in the pool, the satin bedroom where they made love the first time. The famous people who had come through, Stravinsky and Hedy Lamarr. The way it smelled, the quality of the light. The beauty, the history. She couldn’t sell it. Josie loved the house, everything about it, even its tragic moldiness. If Meredith sold the house, there would be no more Los Feliz, there would only be Echo Park and Launderland and Sammy’s Lotus Room. “It won’t help,” Josie said. “What happened, happened. But the house —”
“It’s a curse. Think how painful it is for me. I grew up there, you don’t know what it was like, how wonderful it was, he knew the most creative, dazzling people. The way we lived . . . But he died there. Those memories, now.”
“But how could you sell it?”
“I haven’t been able to, have I?” She glanced over at Willie Woo, yelling at one of the drunks at the bar, upbraiding him in his abrupt, barking Chinese. “Some nights I think the only way out is to just burn it down. Preferably with myself in it. At least then it would all be over. But I’m too much of a coward. If I was braver, I would have done it a long time ago.”
The Lotus Room began to empty, cocktail hour over, the downtowners heading home, only the regulars staying on to nurse their dollar well drinks through the evening soaps.
Suddenly, Meredith choked and closed her eyes, eyelashes lying on her cheeks the way Michael’s did. “We’re just cursed. Every last goddamn one of us.”
Josie put her arm around Meredith’s shoulders, trying to reassure her, her head against the woman’s dark curls. The smell of her incense-like perfume combined with the smell of the house, the Michael smell of mothballs and cedar. She knew it was fucked up, what she was doing, it was wrong, she should be running out of there, but she couldn’t get enough of that smell, and the breathy murmur of that elegant voice, of being allowed this close. “My family’s like that too,” she admitted. She didn’t know who was the more cursed, the little people or the big-deal ones. Having your composer father kill himself just after your Carnegie Hall debut, your famous novelist husband leaving you, your brilliant son killing himself, or being raised with nothing, having nothing, being nothing, and then losing the one fucking decent thing you ever had.
She felt Meredith’s hand slip into hers, cold as her own, and wet from the drink, big and yet delicate, just like his. It was a shock, like holding Michael’s hand all over again. “Josie, would you consider coming and staying with me for a while? It’s so lonely up there, I feel like I’m going mad.”
Josie pressed her head against Meredith’s skull, two hard heads, like two rocks. She knew there was some reason she should not agree, but she couldn’t remember what it was.
25
Los Feliz
Through the live oaks and rusted screens of Michael’s old room, the full moon appeared, painting shadows onto the silent walls. This room, where she had pictured him, painting. Moonlight washed the old piano and gilded the Madonna, outlined the heap of records and paintings, the books that held only a fraction of what he’d once known. In dying, the worlds he’d taken with him. More than she would know in her next seven lifetimes. Each man kills the thing he loves, and Michael had killed what lay coiled in his head.
She turned over in the narrow bed, the pillow smelling of him, a scent that would never again exist in the life of the world. That smell cut her and filled her and cut her again. She let tears slip down her nose into the goose down. How many times she would catch the scent of him still, in her hair, on her body, while pulling a dress over her head, and have to just stop, halted by the strange power of it. These sheets hadn’t been changed in all the time Michael had been away, coarse and gritty and slightly damp, but permeated with him.
Under the boiled-wool blankets, despite sweatpants and a turtleneck and a white sweater she’d found in the bureau, the kind people wore for tennis—I am not sportif—she shivered spasmodically. You’d think people as rich as the Loewys would have heat, but the drafty room was stone cold. They must not have thought they needed heat upstairs, when all they were doing was sleeping. After all, California wasn’t Vienna.
Although she was giddy with exhaustion, sleep was a lover who refused to be touched, who wanted to stay up all night painting ugly pictures and staring at Bosch. Who held himself at arm’s length, shrinking back as she approached. She’d done one of Red’s downers before bed, but still hadn’t felt the wa
rm fuzziness, that deep puffy nothing. Instead, she lay with her cold clanging heart like an empty drum, sticky with tar and half-eaten with rust.
Opposite the bed, she could see the heaps and piles of paintings and drawings leaning against one another like a playing-card house. The Chinese bridge with its palm grove, and the blind Merediths climbing the white stairs. Little Jeanne in black stockings, the piece he’d submitted for the Barnsdall exhibit. That expression of pure quiet trust. So vulnerable, not a trace of Elena or fox-faced Tyrell. She couldn’t even remember what that had felt like. Like Michael, not remembering. We loved each other once. . . . Didn’t we? The love in the picture had gone missing, like an arm she’d lost in a war, leaving only the sensation of absence. Her face, so full of belief that it would all just go on and on.
She lay under the weight of old blankets, their funky, musty smell, shivering, trying to recall the feeling of being in love, when it was light and kisses and music, when they could pass through space and time riding a line of poetry, the night he put on Louis Armstrong and taught her to Charleston. How well he had danced, easy and natural, unaffected. He’d said all he learned in Cotillion was how to talk to dull girls, but that was only another story, a picture he’d painted of himself for her collection.
And how they had sprawled on the blue couch, their compartment on the Transsiberian, passing the domes of Moscow smooth as almonds. The rush of words creating a world they could ride inside. Blaise and Jeanne slid the door open, put their one suitcase up on the rack, they were seven days from home and the Kremlin was like an immense Tartar cake iced with gold . . . And now it was just a watery shadow, a world lying at the bottom of the sea.
But it had been real. We loved each other once . . . It was up to her to remember, and the look on little Jeanne’s face, yes, there was the proof. Propped against the old piano, resting on the dresser. The poet’s lady, adored for the turn of her mouth and the twist of her spine. Reading in the breakfast nook, wearing the sun like a shawl. One moment out of time, locked onto a piece of stretched cloth that would never change, though the artist was dead and his model shipwrecked. She struggled in the sheets that wound clammily around her like a web in a nightmare. She remembered having been in that sun-filled kitchen, but not how it felt.
That kind of tenderness couldn’t be permitted to last. Nothing that beautiful could live long. It wasn’t allowed. You only got a taste, enough to know what perfection meant, and then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to a rock, who stole fire. The gods made an eagle eat his liver for all eternity. You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal.
She turned over and over in the hot gritty sheets, trying to find a place where her heart didn’t twist and wring itself like wet socks. Lucky for her, Meredith hadn’t made any effort to arrange her plunder from the shack on Lemoyne. The crippled boy’s room wasn’t so much a shrine as a U-Store-It where the woman had gathered the broken pieces of her son, piled them up, and closed the door. Heartbreaking to see this hurried deposit, and yet just as well. The progression of the paintings would have told his mother far more than Josie would have wanted anyone to know about what had happened between them, the progression from little Jeanne, the poet’s lady, to the bruised girl, with her cubist pelvis and red sliced cunt.
She turned over, her limbs tender and burning. She hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep since that day at the morgue. Her body felt like it had been beaten with a hose. This must be what it felt like to get old. It wasn’t that your body fell apart from living so long. It was that you had to take so many stompings from life that you’d be happy when the time came to close your eyes and never open them ever again.
She shivered, despairing of ever feeling the bathwater-warm Seconal creep through her veins. She wondered if Red knew they were for her, and had given her some ancient crap left over from Valley of the Dolls. She closed her eyes, trying to seduce sleep in the fragrant darkness the way she used to try to coax Michael away from black moods. It hadn’t worked then and it didn’t now. Her lids kept opening like a window blind with a sprung catch. Opening onto the horrible self-portrait he’d painted this fall. The dark monk, or saint, clad in his rusty black robe, with crazy overlarge pale eyes in a dark face that followed you around the room, accusing you. It hated her, blaming her for everything. She thought saints were forgiving, you could turn to them in the night, but Michael had couched his fury there, in his murderous holy man.
How much his art had changed since she’d known him. Better? Yes, probably, she could see the impact of the work increasing from the Jeannes and Blaises to the Merediths and the horrible monks, but all the love had gone out of them, replaced by layers of disgust and rage and self-hatred. Now there would be no more, no redemption, just this pile of canvases in a room his own mother couldn’t bear to enter. Meredith had tried to give her the guest room, but Josie wanted to be with Michael, his things, smelling him, feeling him, though it was death all around.
I should just burn the whole place down. Maybe right now, right at this moment, Meredith moved about the house, wadding up newspaper. Now that Josie had come, there were no loose ends, they could have the cremation Michael had wanted. She eyed the oak door with its inset panels, and imagined it locked from the outside. Meredith splashing gasoline, saying a last twisted prayer. Well, why not? If Michael could be dead, what difference did Josie make? She wouldn’t have to go through all that working and cleaning and shopping and paying the bills. Who said she had to go on? Why need a library card, a gas bill, a book of appointments?
Her eyes followed the moonlight shadow of an oak branch stretched along the wall, wide around as the trunk of a tree and almost horizontal. A limb that begged for a noose. She wondered why Michael never thought of it, why he had to go all the way to Twentynine Palms when he could have hung himself here? Or cut his throat with the straight razor that he’d always used. Maybe that’s what he’d thought about every morning, as he gently shaved his neck. Already handling it, the idea of it. But in the end, nothing less than blowing his brains out onto a wall had satisfied him.
Oh, she knew about rage, knew plenty, but she hadn’t known how it could go inside as well as out, could smash things you couldn’t even see, you carried the pieces around forever, and then they worked their way out through your skin years later, like her father’s friend Denny, who’d been caught by a mine in Vietnam. The pieces of shrapnel still working their way out of his flesh all those years later. When he’d been drinking, he’d show you where one was coming out, a dark patch under the hairless, scar-shiny skin. Was that how Michael felt all the time? And how she would feel the rest of her life, pieces of this disaster coming to the surface, cutting through her from the inside out.
She hurt. She hurt like she’d been in a car wreck. Her armpits, her throat, the small of her back, every joint, burrowed into the covers, shaking, but grateful for the quiet. No sounds at all, not the rustle of a leaf or the gurgle of a pipe, no passing cars. Just the cocoon of the night. In Echo Park, the noise never stopped, helicopters and the demented barking of neglected dogs, time-delay soccer games from Ecuador and Brazil, and the pop pop pop of boys settling scores. The time the fucking helicopter cops caught her in the searchlight, outside in her underwear, they hovered overhead, thought it was pretty damn funny. Here the darkness wrapped itself around the house like black mink, a rich woman at a funeral, all decorum and softness and mourning.
He should have taken her with him. He should have killed her first, he should never have left her behind. She had wanted nothing more than to be with him, to belong to him always. If she had found her way here, to the place that made him, he shouldn’t be surprised. She wanted her clothes in the closet next to his, the way they had always been. Her clothes were lonely for him. She liked the narrowness of the bed, like the bunk on the train, rocking on the rails. Blaise, are we very far from Montmartre? His arm around her, his mouth to her ear. A long way, Jeanne. Everything gone except cinders . . .
br /> Now she felt the drug coming on, its creeping warmth. Sleep, a butterfly, uncanny blue, fluttering in the moon-filled room, loosening the grip of the world on her exhausted body, letting her drift. As good as being buried, the earth close around you, heavy and soft, lovely with silence. She wrapped the house around herself, the depth of the walls, massive as a fort, spongy like the insides of a giant cork tree. Wasn’t this what she wanted? Yes, this was why she had come.
She dreamed of a beautiful train with flowered curtains on the windows, little brass lanterns swaying. They were on their trip, the Transsiberian, she couldn’t believe they had made it. And here was Michael, sitting in the seat next to her. Alive. He kept talking to people, just when she wanted in the worst way to get rid of them and have him all to herself.
They pulled into a station, and he wanted to buy them wine and something to eat while he could, it was going to be a very long trip. She didn’t want him to go. She wanted to make love, but he wouldn’t listen. He kissed her and got off the train. Out the window people crowded around the train, pleading to get on, fights broke out, there were soldiers and Michael wasn’t back yet. People trying to climb on the train, holding out their hands in the window. Soldiers hit them back with the butts of their guns. Why had he gotten off here, of all places, there was a war going on, a revolution, she opened the window to look for him down the platform and a starving man tried to crawl in, his hands, his skin, his mad eyes, and she banged the window closed on his arms and neck to make him let go, chopping at them, and then the train started up, slowly pulling forward. It was leaving. She opened the window and screamed for him, but the train picked up speed, leaving the town and Michael behind.
Someone shook her. “My God, what are you screaming about?” Meredith, the moon on her wild dark hair, glazing her quilted, aqua blue robe. The flood of light as she turned on the lamp. Her fingers on Josie’s face like a blind woman, reading. “You have a fever.” Piling the blankets back onto her when it was already so hot. “I knew you shouldn’t be in here. Why is the heat off? Sofía!”