Suddenly, no more Pauline. She wondered what had happened to her. Michael only said his mother’s mother was a singer who left when Meredith was a little girl. But now, Josie realized there was more to the story, though whether Michael knew it and didn’t say or really had accepted Meredith’s version was unclear. Because really, what woman ever left a small child behind with its father? Seeing that look on the woman’s face in the garden, that mix of boredom and disgust and hopelessness, she imagined a different scenario. An affair, with a musician maybe, a horn player with the band at the Ambassador, someone who didn’t look down on her because she was big and blond and uneducated, just a big American dummy compared to Lisbeth. But she wouldn’t have run off and left her child with Mauritz. No, he must have discovered her affair, and offered to pay her to get lost, if she just left the girl with him. And Pauline took him up on the deal. He never loved her. She had only brought Lisbeth back to him. He didn’t need her anymore.
As Josie looked through the ensuing years, the procession of people, Meredith becoming the kind of girl that people who have children hope for—curly dark hair and the translucent eyes, she couldn’t see their color in the black-and-white photographs, but she knew they were green green green—she couldn’t help but think of Pauline. How she took the money, in an envelope maybe, or one big check, and her furs and the ring, took it all and opened a bar somewhere, a little cocktail lounge in the desert maybe. She was probably out there even now, some blowsy granny who could still belt it out when she’d had enough to drink. Probably counted herself lucky to have gotten out of here with her sanity. She might have married the horn player, who would be the bartender, and had a couple more kids, and they would all have green eyes. But none with the hypnotic quality of her first daughter’s. Just ordinary people, ordinary kids.
Josie went to the window, looked out. Was this the secret to Meredith—that she had replaced her mother in her father’s affection? Just as Michael had replaced Cal. Screws up the whole Oedipal chain of command.
Oak leaves whirled in small eddies over the bricks. Everything so empty. She flipped listlessly through the red album, the green one. Baby Meredith shakes hands with people, baby curtsies, baby sits at a monstrous keyboard next to proud papa. First recital, June 1942. Wilshire Ebell. Meredith at the keyboard, various ages, an extraordinarily beautiful child in dark dresses with white cutwork collars and cuffs. Piano teachers. Meredith with her father, now silver haired, holding up a cup or a certificate. Parties, Arnold Schoenberg, an old man with big ears, bald with a drawn face, white handkerchief in his pocket. Cyd Charisse, Igor and Vera Stravinsky.
The teachers disappear, leaving just the young woman, triumphant, alone. Tall now, dramatic, skin very pale against the black dress, her dark hair lost in the blackness of the hall. Her luminous face attracting all the light. Royce Hall, 1948. Back East pictures, brick buildings, trees without leaves. Meredith in a dark coat with a tormented-looking older man. Serkin, Curtis, winter 1954. Serkin, her teacher, it had been a big deal.
A picture of a sign, Carnegie Hall. Philadelphia Orchestra, Ormandy, Serkin, Oct. 27. Carnegie Hall. It didn’t look as fancy as she thought it would. Then the grand piano, the hall, a girl in a sleeveless dress, her long white arms, an orchestra behind her, her face almost ugly with the effort of what she was performing. Then flushed and triumphant, holding a bouquet of roses, a fat old man beaming at her.
Then another unnerving jump, this time to travel shots, cities, landmarks. Berlin. Covent Garden. Concertgebouw. Men in tailcoats, with rumpled hair and foreign-sounding names. Von Karajan, Boulez, Juin 1956. Boulez. They were going to see Boulez on the twenty-eighth. This very same man. This world was still going on. Would she too be in pictures like this, Josie and Boulez, 1981? She ran her hands over the postcards from opera houses, postcards from hotels: George V, Hôtel de l’Europe. Meredith in conversation with famous people, you could tell they were famous, there was an aura about them, even the fat old men in heavy eyeglasses. Now the stars are there to see Meredith—David Niven, Simone Signoret, Maria Callas, a handsome woman with striking features next to whom Meredith seemed very young and otherworldly.
But not a trace of Mauritz, who killed himself a month after her Carnegie Hall debut.
No little pamphlet from the funeral which Meredith had not attended, no photograph of the grave, no obituary, no pressed flower. Let’s not say any more about it. Let’s just go from here. No indication that anything had gone awry, only his absence, everywhere. First Lisbeth, then Pauline, then Mauritz. Death, disappearance, what you didn’t talk about, like a sewer running under a street, the shit was down there, out of sight, but you could smell it, it didn’t go away, it didn’t vanish. It was the absence behind everything. The album ended with the picture of Meredith that was on the table. Lying on the couch, her long arm behind her. And now she saw it, the sadness, the absences in her eyes. Just under the sun-warmed surface of her new life.
People showed you everything in what they left out. No father, but suddenly, here was Cal in the green album, Cap d’Antibes, Juin 1957. How beautiful the letters looked, a place, a season. She tried to say them under her breath, Cap d’Antibes. Juin. “Zhwain. Antibe.” The handwriting less childish now, less round. Cal and Meredith, both very tan, on a terrace of a restaurant in the evening. Both so handsome. Cal’s hair was dark like hers, and longer than was the style. The remains of a meal, dishes and bottles and wineglasses crowded the white-clad table. Sitting very close together for the picture—Cal must have asked the waiter to take it. She noticed that Cal’s hand was under the table, she wondered what it was doing as they smiled for the picture. Meredith’s face so poised, so assured, but was that hand between Meredith’s thighs? Pushing aside her handmade lace panties while the waiter told them to get closer, closer?
Cal and Meredith in white, riding a motor scooter up some steep road paved in cobblestones. Grande Corniche, Juillet 1957. “Corniche,” she whispered. Meredith sidesaddle, in a dress and sandals and big sunglasses, clinging to his back. Josie’s heart pounded. Never was she with Michael the way Meredith and Cal had been. Such life in them. Rich and famous and young, beautiful like a matched set of horses.
She turned the page, startled to find a shot of Meredith topless, lying on a striped lounge under an umbrella, her long body tanned against the paler stripes, propped up on her elbows, her breasts large, her nipples dark and erect. Just a photograph like all the others, affixed to the page with the little black stick-on corners. She stared at the shot, trying to understand how Meredith, who was so proper, who labeled in a clear hand all the pictures in a family album as if it would go into a history book, who couldn’t get over that her son had fallen in love with an art model, would include a picture of herself lying on a beach in public with her tits out. Hypocrite. And there was Cal, wearing a tiny racing bikini, his cock’s outlines visible for anybody to see. She flipped ahead to see if there were any shots of them actually getting it on. Oh Christ, Josie, don’t be such a hick. It’s Saint-Tropez. Don’t be such an Okie. You shouldn’t even notice that Meredith has no top on, that you can see that Cal is uncircumcised.
More dinner shots, Meredith with Cal, Josie recognized Leonard Bernstein, she’d seen his face and thick hair on album covers. She looked more closely at this one. Meredith wore a strapless dress and white gloves over the elbow, and she listened to Bernstein on her left who was talking to her. Cal had his arm stretched across the back of her chair. Territorial. He was listening too, but not as entranced as Meredith was. It looked like they were already married now. Other men vying for his wife’s attention. Already problems, she could feel the strain between them.
And then Michael made his appearance, the small blue-edged birth announcement, date, weight, length. Jesus, how many pictures could they take of one little baby? Cute, with those eyelashes, he looked like a baby in a Disney cartoon.
She envied him. Even dead, she couldn’t help it. How many pictures did her parents have of her in the
family album? The family album, such as it was. A shredded white cloth-covered volume with its discolored plastic overlay that never quite stuck down, later photos just thrown in there loose. There were three. One of her with Corinne and Bo in the bathtub. The one of her and Jimmy in the tow truck with their father, and one of her at sixteen on roller skates serving Cokes at the Rollerama roller disco. And that was it. The unfairness of it grabbed at her as she looked at the photo of the three Faradays in a hammock under a live oak. These people living important lives, assuming that posterity would need to know what they were doing in June 1960. Documenting. The photos in her parents’ family album were purely accidental. Someone had a camera, thought something was cute or funny—Uncle Dave passed out on the couch at a party, someone put a bra over his head and ears like earmuffs.
But there was no posterity for the Faraday album. They were a dead end. All that documenting for nothing. Meredith and Michael, sharing a secret on the couch, their foreheads together, his little hand on her breast. God, if she could have had his child. That sweetness, she practically couldn’t look at it. Cal at a book signing. Cal, smoking a cigarette at his typewriter, at the desk in Mauritz’s study, handsome in that craggy way, every shot looked like a book-jacket photo. Meredith on the glider in the yard, reading with Michael, him in diapers. Meredith with Michael on her lap at the keyboard of the big concert grand in the living room, his small hands striking the keys, her big hands on either side of his. You know what they were like. Michael on a plane in a shorts suit, solemnly talking to the captain. Michael at four or five, naked in a hammock, reading a book, not a kid’s book, something hardbound, and absently fondling his baby dick. The book was heavy, he propped it on its side. If it had been anyone else’s kid, and he wasn’t masturbating, you’d think it was a staged photograph. The cloud of dark ringlets and the long eyelashes, he looked like a child in a fairy tale, a child who lived in a blackberry bush.
Michael with his six-year-old fingers in Meredith’s long hair, sucking his thumb. Meredith listening to a short black man in a jacket and tie, both holding drinks. Then no more Cal. Another sailor overboard. Exit one husband.
His vanishing fuels a second expeditionary period. British Museum, January ’64. Bodleian Library. Michael and a young man studying at a table by a tall window, the shapes of tree branches falling across them. Bloomsbury. Michael meeting a hairy, grinning Indian guy, making that bow with his hands pressed to his forehead, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Parties with brightly dressed groovy people in shades and floppy hats. Meredith in her black concert dress, shaking the hand of a young woman who looked like a horse. Command performance, Windsor, April ’64. Meredith sitting on the steps of what clearly was Greece, Parthenon. Her dark hair long, she wore an oatmeal-colored shift and sandals that wove up her legs. You could see up her skirt to a pair of white panties.
The two of them, then, Meredith and Michael, very tanned, on horseback, on camels, in a tiny plane. Broken columns rising out of the desert like the backbone of an immense dinosaur. Palmyra. Latticed windows above worn three-story houses on crooked streets, Constantinople. Birds in cages, a tiled dome. Isfahan. Smoking piles on steps leading down to a river. Benares. The pyres on the Ganges. A dead body burning, right out in the open, black as a barbecue. Not at all as she had imagined, not at all. You could actually see the corpse through the flames.
Michael dancing with a miniskirted blonde, ballroom-style, looking away over the girl’s shoulder as she stared up into his face attentively. Cotillion, ’70. Michael playing tennis, the shot that his father carried around in his wallet. I am not sportif. Skiing. She could feel the slow drip of anger running down her forehead. Why would he want to present himself as the crippled boy to her, when he could ride a horse, play tennis, swim, drive? What did he get out of it—was it just a put-on, was he laughing at her the whole time? Could she have been in love with someone who didn’t even exist, some puppet he had invented, a life-sized puppet whose strings he pulled?
Michael carrying a bouquet of red flowers. Siena, ’71. Michael lying on the couch reading. Köln, ’72. Meredith at a café, looking out at the traffic, her bare shoulder. Café de Flore. And another shot, the same café, of the two of them, the waiter must have taken it, Michael was older now, fifteen maybe, their heads together, the same eyes, the same expression.
Meredith and Michael on a striped chaise lounge under a beach umbrella, white boats in the background. Saint-Tropez, Juillet ’73, she even recognized it by now. Meredith, with her teenaged son, wearing nothing but a string-bikini bottom. She leaned forward, her tits out, not as high, but still attractive, and Michael knelt on the lounge behind her, rubbing suntan oil on her back. She had her head turned, talking to him. Their two dark heads, their faces were so close together, they could have kissed.
Josie’s lungs grew stiff, pressing on her heart. She squinted at Meredith’s serene face. They looked like lovers. Christ, they looked like lovers. She turned back to the café shot, it was there too, sharing a secret. Their heads together. This was not a boy with his mother. A boy with his mother was goofy, sulky, solicitous, tender at best. She returned to Saint-Tropez, looked at that picture until she thought the image would begin to dissolve off the page. His face, the eyelashes lying on his cheeks like that, like a sleepwalker. She knew that look. The dreamy look of his sexual face.
Oh, don’t be ridiculous. Someone took that picture, some friend or other. They weren’t alone. But her brain kept balking, smashing into that picture like waves crashing into rocks. Cold, salty, choking. These weren’t people like the people she knew. Maybe they were like prizewinning dogs, or racehorses, so finely bred they could only fuck each other. They thought Okies were like that, marrying their cousins and so on, when it was them all along.
She turned the page, but it was just life as usual in the Loewy/ Faraday household. As if nothing had happened. Michael at a school with horses, leaning against a fence. Michael sulking dramatically in a chair. Meredith with people in evening clothes . . . but now she knew what to look for. The story wasn’t in the pictures, it was in the jump cuts. What isn’t there. Suddenly they weren’t traveling together anymore, suddenly Michael was in school at Ojai, suddenly there were no more intimate conversations over café tables and back rubbings in chaise lounges in France. She gazed at the photo in the silver frame, Michael glancing over the tops of his Ben Franklins against the ivy wall of Harvard. That expression, all his irony, sad and humorous and Bosch, was this what it held, Saint-Tropez, Juillet ’73?
She touched his face, his lips, the wide mouth curling. Had he ever really been hers? Or was the only person he ever loved behind the camera? Meredith’s shadow over everything.
She put the album back in its slot. Now she wished Meredith had burned down the house as she said she would. Before, when there had still been something left of their love, troubled but possible. Now there was nothing but the disgraceful, unavoidable truth that she was nothing to him. An aberration, a failure in judgment, maybe a desperate attempt to hold back the night.
Well, she had known it all along. Hadn’t she asked herself a million times, what was he doing with a girl like her? It wasn’t her at all. How absurd. How ridiculous. She was just a decoy, something you threw out of the car to slow the cops while you made your getaway.
She went back through the closets, then out into the hall, the maid was coming up with a stack of towels. She looked up just as Josie came through Michael’s door.
Josie spoke first. “It was more than just mother and son, wasn’t it? Between them. In France. You were there. You knew.”
Sofía said nothing, just held out two packs of cigarettes, Gauloises Bleues. “You should never come here. This is no your home.” She reached behind Josie and closed the door to Michael’s room. “Leave us.”
“Maybe I will. Maybe I fucking will.”
Josie went into her own room, the room she had come to see as her room, the guest room, unwrapped the cigarettes and lit one. Just like Cal had sa
id, it was Michael and Meredith, from the start. She could tell herself all the pretty stories she wanted, but she was no better than her mother, living in her movie-matinee fantasies of Elizabeth Taylor and James Dean and Natalie Wood in the middle of a tow yard. She’d walked off a cliff into thin air, not realizing she’d been walking on nothing at all.
29
Paris
Josie lay on the chaise in the last patch of sun. Inside, the quintet had stopped, they didn’t seem to be starting up again. She held the photo in her hand. Her suitcase was packed, just with the things Sofía had brought from her house, she was taking nothing Meredith had given her. The sun moved toward the observatory. Soon it would be dark. The brevity of beauty. She rested her head against the back of the lounge, feeling the last warmth on her face. How elegant, finally, she had become. It was the coldness, she hadn’t understood that before. Coins of light played across the top of the pool, tiny dapples of gold above the dark.
Finally, Meredith emerged from the French doors onto the brick terrace above the pool, like an actress making an appearance onstage. Stretching, first lifting her arms straight over her head, turning her linked hands palms up, then, elbows cocked, bending from side to side, she let her arms drop with a contented sigh. “Ah, that was wonderful. It’s been too long, I’ve been gathering moss. So what have you been doing with yourself all this time?”