The mad monk stared evilly at her. How could you leave him at the station?
But she hadn’t wanted him to go, hadn’t wanted him to get off in the first place, not with the war on, hadn’t she told him not to go? “I told him not to. I told him.” But she had let him get off, she should have known better.
“Told him what, Josie?”
The dying people reaching through the window, wanting her to save them, but she couldn’t, and the way she banged the window on them, and Michael . . . “We were on a train, I told him not to get off.”
Meredith’s night hair frizzed around her diamond-shaped face, a night face pale and unreal as a woman climbing white stairs. “I know you did,” she said. Her hands, smelling of her smoky, Japanese-incense perfume, were cool on her face. “I’m sure you did, Josie. We’re going to put you in the guest room. This is no good.”
“No. I want to stay here.” Josie clutched at Meredith’s hands. “Please.” She turned her head to the side, in the pillow that smelled of him, the one thing she knew, sleeping here was like curling up inside his mind, she could hear the hum of his brain, the thump of his heart, if only she could have kept him on the train.
“Josie, you’re going to listen to me.”
“No.” Her throat was so raw. “I’m sorry I screamed. It was a bad dream. I won’t be any trouble, I promise.”
Meredith’s cool hand against her cheek. “Just lie still.”
“Please.” She threw off the covers, tried to prop herself up, but she felt so heavy, weak as water. Meredith did something with the blankets, turning the edge of the sheet, making a smooth edge over the blanket stitching. Such a kind gesture. Something a mother would do. “Please?”
The maid appeared out of nowhere like a ghost, wearing a plaid bathrobe, her hair down around her face, cascading down her shoulders, far longer than Josie would have thought. “We need some aspirin,” Meredith said to the woman. “A thermometer. Something for her to drink, too, some water, no, tea. And a washcloth. Her lips are all chapped.” Meredith, shining in the satin robe, pulled a chair up to the bed. The tight line of the Spaniard’s mouth, the arch of her nostrils. The disdain, having to wait on a girl like her.
Meredith settled into the chair and pressed her cool hand to Josie’s forehead, that scent of incense and cedar. “When I was a very little girl, and I was sick, my mother used to put her hand across my forehead, like this, and sing me a song.” Her huge hand, and she sang. “Oh, what a beautiful morning.” She had a terrible voice. How sad, a woman with such music in her soul could not sing. Everyone in Josie’s family could do more than justice to a tune. “There’s a bright golden haze on the meadow . . .”
Josie wondered if Meredith Loewy had ever seen a haze like that. When the almond trees were blooming, and the new leaves came out on the grapevines that were trained like so many Christs strung up by their wrists. Meredith’s bare night face, the deep eyelids shining in lamplight, her voice cracking like a junior-high boy’s. Josie wanted to tell her, it was a hard song, you had to have a good range and the ability to hold a note without wavering, and Meredith had neither.
The tea came. A washcloth. Aspirin, scratchy and bitter. They propped her on the pillows, tipped tea to her lips, too hot, she spilled some on the sheet. Meredith filled a spoonful, and blew on it, her lips pursed, his lips, blowing. Her mouth opened as she spooned it into Josie’s, her hand underneath to catch drips. Her breath smelled of Scotch and chamomile. Taking care of her. Michael said Meredith never took care of him when he got sick. Said she was terrified of illness. Too many people depended on her, she couldn’t afford to catch anything. Yet here she was, blowing on tea, spooning it into Josie’s mouth. How astonished he would be. Jealous. Yes. He would be jealous that his mother would take care of Josie like this when she wouldn’t do it for him. It should have been Michael. But Michael was dead. Michael didn’t need anyone to spoon tea for him now. She could be Michael, just for a little while. The mad monk glared at her over Meredith’s shoulder. Impostor. But she ignored him. She needed someone, and Michael didn’t anymore, it wasn’t her fault, anyway she was too sick to resist.
She let them change her, Meredith and the maid, like a child, stripping away the sweat-sodden clothes, the tennis sweater, the leggings, toweling her off. They threaded a nightgown over her head, over her arms, the soft cloth that smelled of mothballs. She understood she was shedding her skin, she was being given a new one. They changed the sheets, folded her into them like a letter. She felt better in the high-necked flannel gown, a blue and green plaid, the white embroidery on the yoke, and drifted back to sleep, and dreamed of a boat, a canoe made of stone, on a dark river, and three dark fuzzy-haired people paddling her away from the shore. The snaky roots of trees growing out of the water. Is he here? Is he near here? she kept asking, but nobody would tell her. She was afraid of the dark and the fuzzy-haired people and where they were going.
In the morning, music rose through the floor, filling the bright room, drenching it in light like a sponge cake in bourbon. Lords and ladies drifted down wallpaper, ladies on swings, ladies with parasols, ladies with crooks and lambs. Where was she? What room was this? But the music told her. A guest room, they must have moved her in the night. And she was secretly glad of it. That room bred nightmares, the pile of their sad things, the mad monk, all the hundreds of books that hadn’t helped him live. They should be locked up and the key buried. How much better to be in this bright place, a good place, like light in a fog.
She had forgotten the fog. A game they played, from a book, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon. These wonderful questions. What was the best kind of fog in June? What scenes improved from being painted? The book had opinions, the way Michael did. She never would have thought about it, how should June be, what was the best kind of fog? She’d always had to take life just as it was. She would have been afraid to consider an ideal, knowing how unlikely she was to ever achieve it.
She edged her head closer to his on the pillow, so she could look up into the green-lined paperback he held over their heads. “What’s the best kind of fog?” he’d asked.
She tried to think about kinds of fog. “When it’s sunny and foggy at the same time,” she said. “Like being inside a paper lantern. And it’s your birthday, and you wear a party dress, and you’re inside. And everything’s bright, nothing but brightness. And you disappear into the fog.” If death could be like that. Just disappearing into the soft and white.
Sweat dripped down her back, slid into the crack in her ass. She liked the light but it hurt her head. She turned, and kicked off the covers, looking for a cool place on the sheet, and faded back into sleep, dreamed she lay in bed with her mother, watching Giant on TV, the part where Elizabeth Taylor meets James Dean. The boss’s wife and the oil rigger, but they were somehow her mother and father, and you could read their tragedy a long way off. “He died just after they finished it,” her mother said in the dream. “Why are you all in such a hurry? All you young people.”
Later, the Spanish maid came and Meredith, they wiped her face with cold cloths, fed her a boiled egg like a sun in a spoon, walked her haltingly to the bathroom, her legs wouldn’t stay up. Cold marble underfoot, the white rug. Music. A flower in a vase on the tray. A January rose, it wouldn’t last long, all big and full-blown like that. He loved things like this, fragile, that wouldn’t last. She touched its silver-mauve petals, a hundred layers like an old-fashioned petticoat. The Japanese would say that’s their elegance, the brevity of their beauty.
But Josie wanted things you could lock away, she wanted time to stand still. The rose would bloom and drop its petals, the rose would break her heart. If only she had known Michael would be like that. Slipping through her fingers like mercury from a broken thermometer. What’s the best kind of fog? What should the weather be in November? His birthday, that he shared with Spiro Agnew and Hedy Lamarr, Kristallnacht and Dylan Thomas’s death.
“What is the best kind of November?” she asked, l
ooping her leg over him. He was good at this. Like the book, he knew how things should be.
“In November in LA, it should be murky and warm.” He took a drag of his cigarette. “The haze takes on a blue tint toward evening, and there’s a hint of smoke in the air. The sun sets bloodred, and there’s a sprinkling of lights in the hills. It makes you think of Istanbul, or Cairo. It makes you want to be somewhere else.” And she could see it, the reflection of the bloody sky in his eyes.
“I’ve never been anywhere,” she said, watching smoke ripples arabesque overhead, into the painted lanterns.
“What about Paris?” He rested his head against hers. Temple to temple, the love flowing back and forth, better than sex, better than anything. I remember, Michael . . .
But truth shuffled in, that bitter old woman, opening her toothless old mouth. There never was Paris. You just dreamed it, on a salvaged mattress, in a room with a floor that sagged toward the windows. No Paris, no Japan or butterflies from Brazil, it was all just a hash pipe you smoked.
She turned and watched the ladies pour down the walls, ladies and their pudgy courtiers. Such fragile moments, but they’d been real, they had been, and she would do anything to have them again. The touch of his chest on her cheek, his smell. The way he described his roommate at Harvard, Odious Thomas, who left his coffee cups around the room, growing mold. He’d been a scientist, and believed only in reason. Michael imitated a ritzy East Coast accent, with its own funny drawl. “‘There’s your God, old son,’” holding an imaginary, moldy cup up to her nose. “‘There’s your Platonic Ideal.’”
She dreamed she’d gone back to her parents’ house. And the coyote came for her, its crazy gold eyes. It trotted away through the cars in the impound and she followed it, in her nightgown, barefoot, her gown kept catching in the cactus, except there was no cactus in Bakersfield, even in the dream she knew that. They were on the desert, in the starlight, and suddenly there were helicopters, sweeping the ground with their beams. She hid behind rocks, but they found the coyote. Its eyes glowed for a second, like a small devil caught in God’s headlights. And then they shot it. Leaving her alone in the middle of nowhere.
“Josie.” Meredith shook her. “This is Dr. Edelman. He’s come to take a look at you.” An old man with very blue eyes. He leaned over her, his hands gnarled as roots, his face full of canyons. She knew him. He’d been at the funeral, he’d carried Michael’s coffin. His old fingers probed her neck, he looked at her throat with a Popsicle stick, scraped it. Meredith sat her forward and the old man listened to her back with a cold stethoscope, thumped her. What was a pallbearer doing here? Shouldn’t he be a bank teller? Rick, from the head office?
He gave her a shot. Her body seemed far away. She was mesmerized by the crevices in his old man’s face and the clarity of his eyes, as if his old face was a mask and his real face peered through. He and Meredith stepped away to talk in the doorway, she knew they were talking about her. What were they saying? She felt a spark of fear. What if the doctor wasn’t really a doctor, and even if he was, doctors could kill you in ways that wouldn’t even show up. Who knew what might be in that shot? She waited to see if she felt any worse, if she would suddenly stop breathing.
The doctor left, and Meredith, wearing a soft blue sweater like clouds in the morning, settled in the chair next to the bed, a wing chair upholstered in white silk. “You’re a very sick girl,” she said.
A very sick girl, somehow it seemed like a title in an old silent movie. Josie Tyrell as A Very Sick Girl. Even a bit of prestige. Was that it, her role here? Meredith held Seven Up to Josie’s parched lips, the bent straw. A girl who needed taking care of. Those long leopard eyes. Wiping Josie’s face and neck with a cold cloth, always a fresh one, they never smelled like mold, like when her mother would wash their faces in the bathtub, she and Corinne and Bo, all in the dirty water together.
“Feeling better?” she asked.
“A little,” Josie said, though she didn’t know if it was true or not. She did feel better with Meredith there, taking care of her, paying attention to her.
“Let me brush your hair.” She had a soft burnished-silver brush in her hands, its bristles yellow with age. “Would you like that?”
Her sweaty, repulsively dirty hair? She didn’t think the old brush would get through the bleached strands—when they tangled, they matted like felt. But Meredith had already started, working the sweat-dampened tangles, brushing it back from her forehead, and talking to her the way you talk to a dog when you’re grooming it, no point to the talking but filling silence with sound. Her deep voice hypnotic and musical.
“That nightgown, you know where that came from? There was once a store called Lanz, down on Wilshire near Fairfax. My father got all my clothes there, they imported them from Europe. I had to be comme il faut.” She stopped to tease out a snarl with her bare fingers, and then took to brushing again. “It means ‘just so.’ That’s what he was like. Just so. Completely old-world. I don’t think he ever got used to being in California. These were his brushes. They had the same hair, my father and Michael. Only my father’s turned silver. He was quite vain of it, most of his friends went bald.” Brushing, the rhythm, her hair all smooth now, the rhythmic stroking, the slight scratching of scalp, like being pushed on a swing, it soothed her, made her sleepy. “Women adored him of course. We had wonderful parties here, all the émigrés, the writers and directors, the actors. Vicki Baum and Galka Scheyer. Rita Hayworth danced the tango with Rudolph Schindler, the architect. Do you know who Hedy Lamarr was?”
“The movie star.” She’d been photographed nude in a movie in the Thirties, Josie went with Michael to see it once at the New Beverly. Hedy backstroking in a pond, like a white mermaid in the water. The dark water. Ecstasy. Meredith’s father had scored her studio movies in the Forties.
“They were good friends,” Meredith said. “Sometimes she stayed over. She’d sleep in this very bed.”
Hedy and Michael and Dylan Thomas, all linked in some mysterious abacus. Dylan Thomas died in a bar in New York after drinking eighteen whiskeys in a row. He was a man who wanted to die but didn’t want to know it. A fat man with bulby eyes, she’d seen a picture of him on the cover of his poetry book. Dylan Thomas wasn’t beautiful like Hedy Lamarr but his words soared like music. A stranger has come to share my room in the house not right in the head, a girl mad as birds . . . Michael loved that poem. And she was that plumy girl.
How sleepy she felt, warm and clean, her thoughts untangled along with her hair, under Meredith’s hands, her perfume, the sound of her voice, instead of out in the dark with the dead coyote.
“I’ve missed having someone to take care of,” Meredith said. The brush, caressing, comforting. Michael used to draw self-portraits with nightmares hidden in his curls. “I’m taking good care of you. You’re all I have now.”
You’re all I have. Yes, that was right, they needed each other. Who else was left? Although somewhere under what the doctor had given her, a small cowlick of mind rebelled, twanging alarm. Don’t buy it, kid. You were the one standing there, thinking how easy it would be to kill her in her sleep. But the sound of Meredith’s voice was so soothing, the brush in her hair. And she was tired of being afraid of her, circling her beauty and grace like some abused dog. The rhythm of the brush, Meredith’s father’s brush from Europe, comme il faut, and her deep voice, inviting Josie in. It felt inevitable, this was why she had come, and she would let herself fall into the bright fog. The small voice went inside a trunk and sank to the bottom of the sea.
26
Pen
In the cold green brightness of the living room, Josie lay under a woven throw, drinking smoky Chinese tea and listening to Meredith play Debussy on the black Steinway. After her illness, she felt empty and purified, light and bleached as driftwood left on a beach, like the abandoned clothes of the people who rose for the Rapture. Her aunt Cora used to tell her all about it. People going to Heaven without having to die, leaving behind t
heir clothes and their cars and their shopping carts, the ice cream melting in the parking lot. She never thought about going to heaven herself, it was all those shopping carts that caught her attention. That’s what it felt like to be up here in Meredith’s living room. There was no after, no next. Everything that was going to happen already had. What tremendous safety, that it was all just over.
Through the tall windows, camellia bushes twenty feet high strained noon’s passage with their winter green. They were so old they had grown into trees, bearing white flowers, a few of which floated in a crystal bowl on the table. This was all she wanted, to be allowed to lie still and drift and listen to Debussy, hidden away from the clear light of day that stood you against a wall and frisked you like a cop. A little softness was all she asked for. A stopped clock.
She could see her feet sticking out from under the blanket. How absurdly small they looked in flannel quilted slippers that matched the green and blue plaid of the gown. She touched her hair, washed and neatly combed, tied with a ribbon. She had sat at the mirror while Meredith parted her hair, combed it smooth. Josie didn’t tell her she didn’t wear her hair parted on the right. She knew without a doubt that this was how Meredith had parted Michael’s hair, combing it just so. Comme il faut.
On her lap lay Michael’s Dylan Thomas, she’d found it in the pile on his piano. The fat man with the bulby eyes, who wanted to die but didn’t know it. Scores of little paper slips marked the yellowing pages, Michael’s precise vertical handwriting with its g’s like 8’s and e’s like 3’s filling the margins. She turned to the poems he had marked, letting their strange phrases jump out at her like faces in a crowd. Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house, the gentleman lay graveward with his furies . . . In the margins, he’d written things like: Death in the tomb of the Christ. Hangnail=nail=Christ to Cross. Remainder of creation’s expermt. Such a fury in him to climb inside the world and look out through its eyes. He was ravenous for that, had to conquer it like a mountain. . . . And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies . . . Michael lay graveward with his furies, leaving her, she supposed, the dog, dancing with its mouth open.