“You meant every word,” Michael said.
“I wanted you to stop me. I wanted you to tell me you loved me.”
And he laughed then, a tear-filled laugh. “When I grow some balls, I’ll think about it.”
It was a mistake you could never recover from. Though he pretended he had, he never did.
And now she was going to Europe with his mother. It was like murdering someone and then moving into his house, taking his job, his lover, eating his food, sleeping in his bed.
She reached down for her voddy and then it was like a series of photos, a film in slow motion. The chair tipping, her falling, she could see it, like stop-action, the dark water coming closer, her own bright reflection. Her head hit first, shockingly cold, her shoulders, her chest, this is it, she found herself thinking. She assumed she would float but no, her coat filled with water, pulling her down, surprisingly heavy, and the water closed over her, like a book.
Swim, the thought came, but from very far away. She could see the moon through the water, shimmering high overhead, she knew she should swim, but she was too heavy, the moon was too far. She was so tired, it was simpler just to sink. It made sense. At last, she could stop fighting, it could just end.
31
Sofía
Get off me, she said, or thought she said. She took a deep breath and vomited. Lying in the wet and the cold, she started to cry. She didn’t know why, only that it was deep and sad, it felt like it was coming up from the bottom of the sea. Shivering on the bricks. Cold and wet.
“Why you no go? You say you were leave and then you stay.” Someone had her by the hair. “Why you stay?”
She curled on the bricks. Fucking Sofía. She should have left her down there. She was ready to die. “Where’s my fucking coat?”
Sofía hissed an exasperated sigh, standing, wringing out her long hair, water raining down on the bricks. Josie looked up at her. How tall she looked from down here. Furious. So fucking what. Fuck her. Suddenly, the woman was jerking her. Pulling her up. Her legs buckled, but the woman held her up, keeping her from falling. The bright pool was dappled with clouds. Darkness under the bright. Waiting for her. Peaceful. She had no problems there. Where was her guitar? Her little guitar. There. She bent down to get it, lurching forward, and Sofía grabbed her, wrenching her arm as she started to lose her balance again. God, she was fucked up.
She clung to the little guitar tight, tight, as Sofía hauled her toward the house. Yanking, shoving. Why was everybody pushing her around? Nobody would just leave her the fuck alone. If she wanted to curl up and sleep at the bottom of the pool, what the fuck did this bitch care? Sofía just didn’t want her croaking on the property. It’d look bad for the boss. Josie felt her putrid life inside her, heavy, like a bad meal. She wanted to vomit it up. Her evil, foulmouthed, ignorant life. What had Michael ever done to anybody, compared with her?
The Spaniard pushed her into a chair on the checkerboard kitchen floor, went out, the door swinging back and forth, back and forth. Her eyes skittered over the checkerboard pattern, the tiles. Maybe it was a message. Checkers, chess. Marcel Duchamp played . . . But what was she? What kind of chess piece, and what was the game? She shivered spasmodically, though she felt nothing. She needed a cigarette. She pressed the tuning pegs to her cheek. She was crying again. Oh God, oh God. Though there was no God. No rest, no beauty, no truth.
After a minute, Sofía came back with clothes in her arms. She pulled Josie into a room she’d never seen before, small and yellow, with high windows, giving the impression of being taller than wide. A single bedstead in silvery nickel sat demure in one corner. A crucifix. And on the dresser, Michael gazed out from the bricks of Harvard. She’d surrounded him with candles in tall glass holders, a single pink rose.
It was a shrine. Josie hadn’t thought to do that. She had no shrine, no candles. She didn’t know how to do these things. She only knew how to kill the thing she loved. The expression on his face—as if he’d already known what she was going to do, how it would all end up. Ming. “Why’d you save me?” she said. “You should have left me there.” Sofía shook her head, yanking off Josie’s wet clothes, rubbing her hard with the towels. “Hey,” she said. “Ow.” The woman worked fast, shoving a sweater over Josie’s lolling head, jerking on a pair of underwear, jeans, her old leather jacket. No pony-skin coat from Saks.
Sofía sat her on the bed, where she lay down and watched Sofía turn her back and take off her own clothes, towel herself dry. She wore a crucifix around her neck. Her body was thin and her tits sagged and her butt was flat as a frying pan. She dried herself in the same rough way and hurriedly dressed in an ugly white bra and panties. A dress of black wool. Slid her feet into a pair of flesh-tone knee-high stockings and then into pumps. She propped Josie up again and hung her schoolbag purse from its strap around Josie’s neck. Like a fucking Saint Bernard dog’s cask of brandy. Josie was impressed by the efficiency with which Sofía pulled off Josie’s remaining wet boot, then shoved her feet into her Docs.
She got Josie under the armpit, hustled her out like a cop. Josie wanted to go back to the yellow room, where the shrine was. But she was moving despite herself. Stumbling out of the house, into the dark, the garage, the musty oily pine smell, strong and dark. Wet wood. Sofía leaned her against the fender of a station wagon. There was an old Chrysler, and a little sports car, and the Jag. The station wagon’s door came open and the woman pushed her inside. Josie lay on the bench seat, the cloth was warm, it smelled like the couch at home, a comfortable smell, she felt she might even be able to sleep. Sofía got in behind the steering wheel and backed out, through the courtyard, the bump of the bricks, back through the opened gate, out into the night.
“Hey,” Josie said, and it took a long time to say it. She didn’t want to leave the house. Where was this woman taking her? She didn’t want to go back down there. Josie sat up, tried to open the car door.
Sofía reached across and slammed the door closed. Josie tried to open it again. The Spaniard leaned over and grabbed the handle, and they struggled. The older woman slapped her face. “Sit still, bad girl!”
Josie let go of the door handle. She could feel it but only just.
We’ll go and never come back.
Josie leaned against the window and gazed muddily at the glow of the lights as they wove down the empty streets of Los Feliz, past all the pretty mansions lit up like dollhouses, Sofía’s long hair curling and wet on her plain black dress. Her Spanish eyes glittering with determination as if she was fleeing a fire.
“Why do you hate me so much?” Josie asked.
“You fool. You are confuse,” Sofía said. “Who hate you.”
The big houses, going away, the bright windows, the unnaturally green lawns under the streetlamps. The woman’s mouth was set in a line of pure contempt.
“She’s taking me with her. To Paris.”
Sofía hissed like a teakettle. Josie watched the houses. A big Great Gatsby one, with a rubber tree in the sloping front lawn, striped awnings over the windows and all the lights on.
The night sky was thickening, the tufts of clouds coming together in a sad blanket across the moon, forgetting how beautiful it had just been, smearing itself all together. The old ficus trees planted in the parkway glowed yellow in the light from the short, old-fashioned streetlights, and the monstrous entwining roots rose two feet out of the ground.
They came off the hill, down to wide Los Feliz Boulevard, lined with its immense deodars. Sofía flicked on her turn signal, watched the traffic for a break. It was painful for Josie, even fucked up as she was, to watch the Spaniard drive. Sofía was one of those drivers who put the seat all the way forward, and hunched over the wheel, clutching it hard.
“Did she fuck him, Sofía?” Josie asked. She pointed at the Spaniard’s sharp nose, the only thing in focus. “You know.”
A big space opened in traffic, but Sofía didn’t take it. She just kept sitting there watching the oncoming lights, the cor
ners of her lips severe. She shook her head. “Poor Miguel. He hate he love her that way.”
The blinker ticked. Tick, tick, as they sat looking through the windshield at the empty street, the big houses, once decorated with thousands of lights, now dark and silent. Had he loved Josie at all, had he ever loved her? “I loved him, Sofía. So much.”
“Sí, I know.” She sighed. “Miguel, he have too much alma. You know what is alma?”
Alma. Just a name. “No.”
“It mean soul. You take care your own soul, Djossie.” It was the first time she’d ever heard the woman say her name. “Have more respect yourself.” Sofía made her careful left turn.
“You think I have a soul?” Sagging down in her seat, finally resigned to being driven away. “Maybe I just borrowed one.”
“Poor fool.”
They drove down Los Feliz and turned at the big fountain on Riverside Drive, sitting inside its giant ring. The fountain, rainbow colors inside its crown of shooting water, was built in honor of William Mulholland. The one from Chinatown, who got killed in the runoff. Drowned. He didn’t really drown though. Not in real life. The dam burst and he died from the guilt. Fuck, she could understand that. Fuck yeah.
So many memorials. The whole city filled with them. Bridges and statues and buildings. Michael was the only one who ever gave a crap. He was the one who remembered. You’ll have to remember for both of us . . . But how could she, she didn’t know anything, how was she supposed to do it, all on her own? When she had killed the thing she loved.
The long silent blocks, the last bit of Griffith Park. The World War I bridge, the lightless stretch by the 5 where the homeless lived. Their old vans and trucks, a tent city in the bushes, the hillside melted all down into the street, creeping in on Riverside Drive. Sofía’s headlights caught a ghostly, fuzzy-haired homeless man crossing the street in too-short pants, his dog tied to his waist by a rope. Sofía had to swerve to avoid them. Josie watched them through the back window. Was that Death? Somewhere along the line he had lost his toupee and his birthmark, his tasseled loafers and his job at the bank.
The turn on Allesandro. She wasn’t going to help Sofía find it, fuck her. If she didn’t know the way, they would have to go back. But the woman turned right at the school, the pictures of children along the vast cement wall, the silent tractors under the overpass. She knew the way exactly.
“Were you there? When she ripped me off? Why’d you let her do that?” Her eyes kept closing.
Sofía gave that teakettle sound and just kept driving. You fool. The houses seemed worse than ever, tumbledown things clinging to the steep hillsides, the rank vegetation.
She felt drearier than ever, drowned and then dredged up again. She couldn’t even do that right. Sofía should have just left her in the water. Her and what was left of her alma. What good was it to have a soul when you did the things that she had done? “Why do you even bother with me?”
“You are like a . . . one who walk in sleep. After you say you leave and then not, I think, something happen to that girl. So I watch for you.”
A good-sized skunk shambled along the side of the road, in the sick light cast by the orange sodium crime lights. Garbage and abandoned cars. Back home again.
“Does she have alma? Meredith?”
Sofía made that hissing sound again. “She have music. Es todo.”
Josie pictured a scene from a horror movie, the vampire that looks in the mirror and sees no reflection. “So why work for her, if she’s got no soul?”
Sofía shrugged again. She was a handsome woman. Her hair down, curling as it dried, the sharp nose with its high bridge, narrow tip, the fine dark eyes. “I work to her a long time. I know very well. She suffer many thing. Her life very sad. Sometime she does bad thing, I know. But I know to her. No good for you.”
They pulled up in front of the house. It looked small and overgrown and run-down, the fence leaning from the weight of the plants. Sofía parked behind César’s white Riv, pulled Josie from the wagon. She half walked her, half carried her through the gate and down the long flight of stairs, the air smelled of water. The door wasn’t locked. They staggered through the living room like a four-legged beast, edging their way to the bedroom. The woman dropped her down on the bed, tried to pull her guitar away, but Josie fought her for it. She gave up and took off the Docs and pants, pulled the covers over her. “You sleep. And hold on your alma. She is what you have now.” She closed the felt curtains, turned out the lights, shut the door.
32
Soul
She dreamed she was an inmate on a prison island. It was completely surrounded by a malarial swamp, everything shades of gray and murky green. Nothing for miles but dead water, a labyrinth of roots. It was hopeless, no possible way out. But among the prisoners, it was said there was a place you could swim out, a hole down at the very bottom of the swamp, that let you swim through and come out somewhere else, somewhere clean and beautiful, with transparent water and brilliant sky. Although it was just a prison rumor, she came across the spot she was almost sure was the place. She dove into the murk. Down, down, into the ooze, away from the sun, away from the light, and there it was, she saw it, the mouth of a cave. But just as she was getting there, she found she didn’t have enough breath, she couldn’t make it all the way. She turned back and tried to swim to the surface, but she couldn’t reach that either, she’d miscalculated the whole thing, she was drowning.
She fought her way into wakefulness, still smelling the swamp, the dead water clinging to her. Where was she? Her lungs ached, she needed aspirin, but didn’t want to move. She rolled over, sank into the pillow as it all came back to her. The black pool, the darkness and forgetting. That moment of surrender.
You stupid motherfucker. Falling into a pool on pills and booze like every dumb-ass rock-and-roll accidental suicide. If it wasn’t for that flat-ass Spaniard, you’d be dead now. Lying on the bottom of Meredith Loewy’s pool, like Marianne Faithfull in that Shakespeare movie, a crazy girl who’d drowned in a stream because some prince wouldn’t fuck her. Fuck. She was lying here breathing only by accident. She could still remember what she thought when she went in. Yes, that was what she was thinking. Good. Here it is.
She lay in the stale bed, in the musty room, staring through the darkness to the wall where the dresser had been, their green dresser with its silver paisleys, now at Meredith’s, along with everything else. A slit of light barely illuminated the empty room. There aren’t any accidents, Shirley K. always said. If you left your jacket or ran into a post, you must have wanted it. Josie lay in the bed like a shipwreck on a beach, her lungs still hurting. Tears slowly slid down the sides of her face. Was that what she really wanted, just to die? Follow Michael down to the bottom? Like Dylan fucking Thomas, drinking himself to death that night in New York, wanting it without wanting to know it. By any rights, she should already be gone, a bloated potato girl in a fake fur coat. That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.
She shivered with the cold and the dank and the swamp. You take care your own soul. Her soul. She tried to picture a soul. A white feathered thing, like your lungs, those wings. But hers was more like a rotten old bathing suit that had molded on the hook, it would tear clean apart if she tried to put it on. A moldy old scrap only fit for throwing away, not even the devil would take it on consignment.
What was she doing here, alive, when Michael with his beautiful alma was gone? He was the one who cared about things like that, the true world, God, having a soul. Yet what had kept that fucking bitch Sofía awake that night, had not let her drown? Was that God? Was that destiny? Or just sheer fucking dumb luck. She thought of a kid on a skateboard by the sea, the wheels going around and around, praying without knowing it for a girl who didn’t know how to pray for herself.
Her nose was running, she needed water, she had to take a leak. She rolled to the edge of the bed, gingerly pre
ssed herself to a sitting position, waiting for her head to settle back onto her shoulders. It was the worst kind of barbiturate headache, she felt her skull was going to crack in two, like an egg. Duck eggs. Not so elegant today, Michael. Not very elegant at all.
Holding her head, she stood up, groped her way to the toilet, bare feet on cold tile, eased herself down, tried to connect to make herself go. The empty bathtub gaped, an enormous sarcophagus, an empty boat. The hours they’d spent in that tub. Letting out water when it got cold, putting more hot in. Goofing with armies of plastic toys, flotillas of little boats. He once reenacted the whole Battle of Trafalgar for her. The bigger boats were Spain and the little ones were England, they were faster, and the general, Lord Nelson, was seasick the whole time. He died and said, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
She would lie against Michael, away from the faucet, and dream of their room in Montmartre. In the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur. The kitchen behind a curtain, the brass double bed, pancake saggy, the view of all Paris. She felt a rush of nausea. So many things he’d failed to mention, like an apartment off the Avenue Foch.
Her head throbbed like a smashed finger. She flushed and went to the medicine cabinet that was hung so high she could barely see herself, Michael had had to install another over the toilet so she could do her makeup. But she could see well enough to take in her matted hair, her face gray and gaunt, all shattered apart, she was getting a cold sore on her upper lip. She took out the aspirin, shook four into her palm and took them two by two, with swallows of water from the spigot. Who was she? Who was he? Nothing was familiar now, she could take nothing for granted.
She went back into the bedroom, opened the windows, though it was cold, she had to get rid of the swamp smell that still clung to the bed. She buried herself in the covers, as Montmartre came back all around her. She remembered how he used to make coffee in the morning and bring it to her in bed on a tray. He’d come in under the covers and tell her stories about their life on the Butte. The café on the corner, where they drank their café au lait from big bowls standing up at the bar. The dwarf owner, Madame Sorel, who had a platform built up the length of the bar, so she could look the customers in the eye.