“Michael loved this piece,” Meredith said, starting something new, quiet, intentionally hesitant, odd stops and starts, a little oriental sounding. “It’s called ‘Jimbo’s Lullaby.’ Debussy wrote it for his daughter, Claude-Emma. Jimbo was her toy elephant.”
Josie could see the stuffed animal lumbering through a dream jungle, running, coming out into a clearing in the moonlight. She liked Meredith telling her things. It was like Michael, the pleasure of him showing her something. He gave her so much, when she gave him nothing, though it was all she had.
I am the long world’s gentleman, he said, and share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
“If you’re feeling better by the twenty-eighth,” Meredith said, “Pierre Boulez is going to be in town, an all-Debussy evening. They’re sending me tickets.”
She would wear her blue silk Elena suit. She would know enough not to clap between movements.
The maid came in, her starched apron and starched face. She checked the small fire, put another log on, then leaned across the low coffee table, filling Josie’s teacup from the porcelain pot without once looking at her. “Thanks,” Josie said, hoping to win a smile, but it was like talking to a chair. The woman despised her, treating her like a bit of dogshit Meredith had picked up on her shoe, that she had to keep cleaning up as the boss tracked it around the house.
Josie sipped the smoky tea, Lapsang souchong, propped on the plump pillows, wearing her gown and robe and slipper set from Lanz, the flannel that smelled of mothballs and time. Meredith’s own childhood. Full length, the gown was too long for Josie, making her feel more childlike than ever, like a pampered invalid in a movie set in the Victorian era, fussed over and propped before sunny windows in a wicker wheelchair.
How beautiful Meredith looked as she played, the fine head bowing over the keyboard, dark hair held off her face with a barrette and curling around her shoulders as she played the falling-water music that soothed Josie like fingers across her brow. Not doubting, questioning, like Brahms, Debussy was forgetfulness, dreams, life malleable as green water. Meredith knew Josie liked it, she was showing it off like a dragonfly showing a new set of wings. And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother’s gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but he couldn’t let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.
The doorbell rang its old-fashioned carillon, eight notes that repeated, but Meredith did not even lift her head. Josie was gripped with admiration for the woman’s cell-level certainty that someone else would answer it. It was so much like Michael. Whether it was aristocratic egotism or the sense that what they were doing was more important than what was coming to them from the outside, it didn’t even matter. Josie arrayed the blanket over her knees, lay back in the cushions. Sofía would get it. The chimes rang again.
Finally, the maid bustled across the red-tile entryway, and they could hear a male voice, and then a higher one, female, she almost recognized it, but could not place it until the visitors were admitted, and she saw them at the top of the steps.
A cop, and Pen.
Over the top of the book, the shock on Pen’s face mirrored her own. Pen’s mouth an O edged in dark lipstick. Her face and the studs on her jacket gleamed in the dark foyer. Pen took the whole thing in at a glance, the robe and the tea and the good-girl part in her hair. Josie could hear the judgment as loud as if Pen had screamed it. What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Josie Tyrell? The maid showed them into the living room, pressing a finger to her lips to instruct them not to speak while the Señora was playing. As if it were church.
The cop took a seat on the couch opposite Josie, she was lying on the near one, taking up the whole expanse. Pen irritably folded down next to him, her face as white as Josie knew her own to be, eyes and nostrils flaring messages of outrage. Josie concentrated on the black words on the white page, avoiding Pen’s glare. She’d really screwed up. Had completely forgotten Pen and her instructions to call the cops and everything else. She wished she could disappear. She looked at Meredith but the woman kept playing as if she were absolutely alone. She realized that she’d wanted to be forgotten, had wanted to step into brightness, and disappear. But when had Pen forgotten anything?
She could feel the heat of Pen’s outrage, but she kept her eyes on the page, and groped for a likely story in the swirl of thoughts, the way a woman gropes in her purse for her sunglasses. It was an honest mistake, it wasn’t her fault. She was a very sick girl, she’d had a fever, it wasn’t her fault she’d forgotten about the world down there. She had arrived in the place where the clocks had all stopped. But Pen was a clock that kept ticking, she would open the drapes, drag her out into the cruel noon light.
Maybe this was just a hallucination left over from the fever, Pen sitting in Meredith’s living room next to a cop. Look how absurd it was, the cop’s hat held respectfully over his crotch, goggling around as if he had never been in a room before. This was exactly what her father used to tell her about people like the Loewys, how they could get the Man to take his hat off and make him wait while they finished their Debussy. Leaving him gawking around the room like a hick. She was embarrassed for him, disgusted with how impressed he was, eyes leaping around like a badly trained dog, jumping from the gilded mirror to the silver candelabra to the Chinese horses big as deer, the oil painting of Meredith as a girl posing at the keyboard, blue ribbon in her long dark hair. Across the leather-topped coffee table, Josie still couldn’t look at Pen in her studded miniskirt, eyes narrowed to furious slits. Pen knew exactly what she was doing there, what she was betraying. The little world they had created of the torn scraps and broken pieces of down there. Like abandoned children holding hands and singing bravely in the dark woods. There was no solace there, no beauty, only make-believe. Though she knew Pen saw it the other way around, that down there was the real world, and this was the elaborate charade.
Josie played with the fringe at the edge of the blanket, hearing the final spill of notes, which bled in the air for a long time before fading away. Only when Meredith’s fingers left the keys did she look up and notice that she had guests. She blinked as if she had just arrived off the plane from Paraguay. “Can I help you?”
The cop rose and introduced himself as Officer Ricketts, a stocky young white man with razor burn and a few bruised-looking pimples on his jaw. “We had a missing-person report, ma’am. One Josephine Tyrell.”
Josie pulled the blanket up higher, waiting for them to disappear as you would wait for the sun to set, as you waited out an acid trip that wasn’t going too well. They couldn’t stay here forever, it would be over eventually. They would go and the peace and the music would return.
“It’s been five days, Josephine,” Pen said. “Nobody’s seen you, heard from you, Josephine. What was I supposed to think? You said she took out a hit, for Christ’s sake.”
Josie glanced over shamefaced at Meredith, who had risen gracefully from the piano, giving no sign of having heard a thing, and Josie was reminded just how good she was, exactly Elena, the control that could come and go at will. Worlds away from Pen with her purple-streaked hair, the broad studded bands on her wrists, seething like a jealous lover. How dare you lie there, how dare you seek refuge in the enemy’s lair? This was how, Pen. This was how you shed your skin, how you walked out on a country road and left yourself behind.
Meredith came around the white couches in her fluid hip-walk, like a stalking cat, and stood behind Josie. “There’s been a misunderstanding,” she said, her hands covering the balls of Josie’s small shoulders. “The girl had the flu, she was delirious. I’ve been taking care of her.”
Pen knit her black eyebrows, her mouth fell open with disbelief. She turned
to the cop. “She said this bitch had hired someone to take her out. Tried to kill her at the funeral, you should’ve seen the bruises. Josie was terrified of her. Tell him, Josie.”
Josie blanched. She wished Pen would just stop talking, would see how it was and drop it. She didn’t have to keep this up, pin her to the wall, force her to lie. “I—I was upset, I wasn’t thinking clearly.”
“What funeral?” the cop interrupted. “Wait a second.” He pulled out a little notebook and set it on his knee, the pen hovering.
“My son.” Meredith’s voice came from behind her. “Passed away. December fifteenth. This girl was his . . . dear friend.”
The warm weight of Meredith’s hands on her shoulders. She felt them both looking at the cop in exactly the same face.
“Sorry for your loss, ma’am.” The cop wrote in his notebook. “Cause of death?”
No one said anything. Josie met Pen’s eyes for the first time. Don’t say it. Just don’t. Pen stared back at her, You are so fucking full of it, but she said nothing out loud. Meredith’s fingers tightened. The cop glanced under his pale eyebrows from Josie to Meredith.
“My son was depressed,” Meredith said quietly, over the choke in her voice. “He had—mental-health issues.”
“I see.” The cop folded the notebook and put it away. “Sorry to have troubled you, Mrs. Loewy. My condolences.” He looked down at Pen accusingly, his signal to vamoose and make it snappy. Pen stood. There was a hole in the knee of her tights, a red streak on the toe of her motorcycle boot.
“I’d like to talk to my friend for a minute. In private,” Pen said.
The cop looked to Meredith to say yea or nay, as if she was the parent. “Of course,” Meredith said in her deep, cultured voice. “Josie, why don’t you use the study. But, please, don’t tire her, she’s just starting to feel better.”
“Oh, I won’t tire her,” Pen said.
Josie didn’t want to, she wanted to stay there, a Very Sick Girl, where Meredith and the cop would keep Pen from ragging on her, but Meredith nodded her on, like a reluctant toddler, so Josie removed the blanket and sat up. Her head reeled for a moment, then stilled. She stood slowly, steadying herself on the back of the couch, took her cup and saucer and, lifting the hem of her gown, shuffled across the wood in her too large slippers, across the worn carpets which she had come to learn were extremely valuable, eighteenth century, through the tiled foyer and into the study where Mauritz Loewy had shot himself in the head. She sat down on the tufted leather couch, set her tea on the table, and crossed her arms, sulky, like a child caught in a petty crime.
Pen closed the padded leather door behind her. “What the fuck do you think you’re pulling, Josephine? Fuck, man. I was worried about you.” Standing over her, on the rug into which Meredith’s father’s blood had seeped. She imagined she could still see a slight discoloration in the light portions of the pattern. But Pen wasn’t looking, not at that. She was not looking at the gold spines on the books or the tassels on the velvet curtains or the crystal decanters in the bar or the painting of the weird, long-bodied thoroughbred over the fireplace. Pen was glaring at her, sparks flying from her eyes. “What kind of shit is this? I’m all worried about you, and then I find you here like this, some fucking little princess? What the fuck was going on out there?”
Josie shrugged. “I got sick. She decided she wanted to take care of me.” She looked down at the overlong robe, the slippers, knowing she looked like a first-class idiot, but she had never had a pair of slippers that matched the robe that matched the nightgown. Neither had Pen, of course, and Josie knew just how you had to hate things you could never have. But it was such a little thing. She had lost Michael, couldn’t she have the slippers, and the tea, to pretend for a little while what it might be like to be him? “I know it’s a little strange. But she’s lonesome. I give her something to do, I’m sort of a project, I guess. We’re all we have left.”
Pen threw herself into the studded wing chair, put her feet up on the table, her Doc Martens with their thick soles. “That’s so bullshit, Josie. This stinks to high heaven. You saw her that night and suddenly you’re sick, she’s got you up here like some goddamn invalid, don’t you think that’s a little suspicious? What if she’s, like, poisoning you or something?” She eyed Josie, who was lifting her cup of tea to her lips.
Josie looked into the cup. Yes, she could be, it was possible. The doctor and his needle. A Very Sick Girl. But she drank it anyway, gazed into the cup, the little shreds of Lapsang souchong clinging to the eggshell porcelain, the little flowers painted at the bottom, flowers that would never grow old and die. “Pen, the truth is I don’t really care. I’m tired of my fucking life.”
“Don’t say that! You’re depressed, okay, you’re depressed. But this fucking house, shit, Josie . . .” Pen put her hands into her pockets and shivered, though it was warm in the room. “It’s a fucking creep factory, and she’s got you brainwashed, I mean, look at this place—they ought to rent it out for slasher flicks. And you’re in some kind of trance. You gotta snap out of it. Get your stuff and let’s get out of here.”
Josie lowered her eyes and shook her head softly. “I’m not leaving. There’s nothing down there for me, Pen.”
“Are you goddamn nuts?” She slid her boots off the table, leaned forward, her black eyes flashing like pinwheels. “Don’t even say it. Fuck, Josie! You got friends! You got modeling, and what about that fucking movie guy, he’s been looking for you. You’re disgustingly gorgeous. Jesus, if I was you I’d be rolling in clover.”
Rolling in clover. Pen sitting there, blinking at her, having no idea what it meant to have your heart ripped out by its ragged roots and then be expected to walk around like that, with a big black hole in your chest. “Guess what, I’m not rolling in clover. Guess what, I really loved the guy. Guess what, I like being in his house, it makes me feel closer to him. It smells like him. He’s everywhere here.”
“He’s fucking dead, Josephine,” Pen said. She was digging with her thumbnail into the leather arm of the chair. Outlining the letter P. Christ, she was going to gouge her name into Mauritz’s leather armchair.
“Pen, don’t do that.”
She looked up, amazed. Josie had never told her what to do before. “Do what?”
“Fuck up that chair.”
“Fuck the fucking chair, Josie.” She stood and kicked the chair over with a heavy boot. She knocked the table with its magazines to the floor, the teacup and saucer. The teacup cracked into three pieces. “Fuck this house, fuck all this shit. What’s wrong with you? You don’t need this shit. These are not your people.” She grabbed Josie by her arm. “She is not your fucking friend, Josie. We are. Me and Shirley and Paul and Nick and that guy Jeremy, Phil Baby, we’re your life, Josie. Not this. Now get your shit and let’s go.” She yanked on her, trying to pull her off the couch. “Get the fuck up!” Josie struggled but Pen was stronger, she had a grip like handcuffs. It was just like at home. Nobody reasoned with you, they just dragged you where they wanted you to go.
Suddenly, the door opened and Meredith and the cop stood in the doorway, staring, Pen with Josie’s arm in her leather-studded grasp, the overturned chair, the mess on the floor.
“That’s quite enough,” Meredith said.
“Josie,” Pen pleaded, but she let her grasp loosen. “Listen to me.”
“She doesn’t have to listen to you, not one more minute.” Meredith strode past Pen, put her arm around Josie. “I think it’s time you go. Are you all right, Josie?” The extralong nightgown and robe pooling around her. The toppled table, the broken teacup.
“I’m all right.” She leaned on Meredith, her head spinning, a Very Sick Girl. Meredith helped her toward the door, leaving everything where it was, the chair and the cup and the ashtray and the magazines.
“I’m awfully sorry, ma’am. We’ll be leaving now,” the cop said. “You. Let’s go.” He went to take Pen’s arm but Pen pulled away.
“And you can
kiss my ass, Josephine. Listen, when you need a friend again, don’t think of me.”
Josie gave Pen one last look as the cop led her to the door. “I’m sorry.” Knowing she was choosing against her all over again, Michael over Pen, Meredith over Pen, Loewy over Tyrell. Traitor.
“Fuck you, Josie. Just fuck you up the ass.”
Then the cop and Pen were gone. Josie and Meredith settled back into the living room, Meredith at her piano, playing Debussy as if nothing had ever happened. Josie picked up her Dylan Thomas, pretended to read it, though her hands were still shaking. Pen was gone. Her last link to down there. And she was here, in Meredith’s house, she was staying.
27
Phone
Josie sprawled on the couch in Mauritz’s study, smoking, wearing her own clothes now, since Sofía had brought them up from the house on Lemoyne. She enjoyed the red-paneled room, it was nice and gloomy in there, smelling of leather and cedar, the oaks barely admitting the afternoon sun. On her knees, big as an atlas, lay the musical score she’d pulled from Mauritz’s bookshelf: Schubert Symphonie Nr. 8 h-Moll D 759, “Unvollendete.” The long page of lines covered with music, like wash hanging in the sun. Each line was assigned a different instrument, Ob., Fl., Timp. Oboe. Flute. Timpani. Even the drum had music. She liked the look of the sweep of notes, their shapes on the pages, trying to imagine how it would sound all together.
At every moment, each instrument knew what to play. Its little bit. But none could see the whole thing like this, all at once, only its own part. Just like life. Each person was like one line of music, but nobody knew what the symphony sounded like. Only the conductor had the whole score.