“But what are we doing up so early?” She pinched his nipple, he liked that more than you’d think. “We were at Cocteau’s party until dawn, remember? You were Pierrot, and I was Columbine.” The moon-drunk clown and his silver lady.
He dangled a stem of grapes above her lips, so she could reach up and bite them off one by one. “We have to shop,” he said. “Before it’s picked over. Monsieur Clemenceau le boucher always tries to sell us the worst meat. We know if he wants us to buy the veal, it must be old. Non, monsieur, les côtelettes d’agneau, s’il vous plaît.”
“You go shop. I’m staying in.” Drinking the coffee, which he had ground in the brass tube he’d bought in the market in Istanbul.
“Ah, but sometimes I forget. . . . Last time the daffodils were so pretty, I spent all our money on them, remember? A whole armload, and dropped them onto you one by one while you slept.”
The idea of him, embracing an armload of flowers, dropping them on the bed in Montmartre to wake her up. All that yellow, lighting their room. They could have had that. They should have just gone. Tears flowed down her temples into her hair. She couldn’t understand. All these things had been within reach. But he was so damn perverse, he preferred to dream it than to make it come true.
Of course, it wouldn’t be La Bohème in Meredith’s flat in the sixteenth. She knew what it would look like. Plaster leaves on the ceiling, striped-silk drapes and chairs with pale wood legs. Not their artist’s room in Montmartre. But couldn’t they have had just as good a time in the luxury of Meredith’s apartment off the Avenue Foch, antiques and wallpaper, clean sheets and a maid?
Maybe. It would have been fine for her. But she knew it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted Montmartre, where he was the young artist, fighting his way to himself. The Montmartre of their dreams, the two of them, living on their wits and what they could scrape together from odd jobs. Him playing piano in cafés, her modeling and singing in bars—really, just what they were doing in Echo Park. But in the flat in the sixteenth, he would be the son again. Like a prince, both important and irrelevant. His value only by association. And Michael had been trying so hard to matter to himself. That’s what he was doing here in his own just-starting life. The real Paris, that you could get to on a plane, wasn’t their Paris. There was no Cocteau anymore, he’d been dead for years, no Duchamp or Apollinaire, no Blaise or Jeanne, they were gone even when the poem was written. For all she knew, the Sacré-Coeur might be a disco by now.
She lay in the stale bed, gazing up at the ceiling, its tongue-and-groove surface bare of the pagoda paper lanterns and painted birdcages, the spiral of tassels they’d found in a box on Alvarado and tacked up there. This had been their Montmartre. Right here. This haven they’d made. The afternoons they lay in this bed, making love so slowly and thoroughly it wasn’t even sex anymore, it was a world of its own. And he read her his books, filled her with light, he changed her, he dreamed her up and there she was. He hadn’t told her about the flat in the sixteenth because she wouldn’t have understood, that this was their Paris.
She hadn’t understood him even that well. It was right there in front of her. Her idiocy made her lungs ache.
So why had it stopped being a refuge, and become something else—a dogtrack, a bullring, where there was nowhere to hide from his dark drama? July, or August. Things had been fine up to then. They’d gone to TJ and Ensenada—and he’d had that show, the review in the Weekly. He’d painted the Meredith picture, an exorcism. Was it her working on that film with Jeremy? Was it Reynaldo, the strain of supporting himself? First he quit, and then he was painting those mad monks, and then he stopped painting altogether. His mood moving from twilight to midnight. She remembered walking on Cerro Gordo by the water tank, and pointing out leaf patterns impressed in the sidewalk, that unexpected beauty, and he said, “Some leaves blew into the wet cement, Josie, it’s not the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.” The world that was the emanation of the divine had been reduced to a handful of dust.
He was the one who had taught her to watch for signs of the true world and suddenly it was as if all that had never happened. She was left alone, and he began to stiffen when she touched him, when once he would have pulled her into an embrace. “What did I do?”
“I just don’t want to be pawed,” he said.
She never knew what she’d done to deserve that. She’d thought it was his painting not going so well. Then the accusations, the jealousy, before he had any reason. Accusing her of lying to him, when it was him all the time. From the beginning. Pretending to be a virgin. Saying he didn’t play sports. Letting her believe there’d been no other girls, that he never talked to his father. He’d lied to her from the very first day. Shaping a picture of himself that had certain things in common with the real Michael, but left so much out. He wanted to appear much more helpless than he was. He certainly didn’t trust her enough to tell her about Saint-Tropez.
He hate he love her that way. There it was. Josie may have pulled out the rug from under him, but it was Meredith who put it there. Unthinkable. And yet, why not. All kinds of things happened in this world, a brother, a sister, a mother, a son. She could picture it. It wasn’t such a stretch.
A hotel room with shutters, like that painting by Matisse. She’d come in, just to say good night, talk over the day. Adjoining rooms, of course, you wouldn’t have to go through the hall. The line that was so thin, it was not even there. She could see it. His mother walking in on him reading a book. Stroking himself as he read, he liked that, doing things while he did something else, to know and not know in that way. Meredith in a light robe, maybe her hair up in a towel. “Busy?” Probably half-crocked, she was disciplined in some ways but not in all. Lonely. No man in Saint-Tropez to flatter her, only the handsome son. Seeing him pull his hand out from under the sheet, pretending not to, yes, they both were like that. Talking to him as if nothing had been seen. Lounging around, having a good little chat. Her robe falling open.
He always said he loved Josie’s delicacy, her lightness, her small neat form. For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame . . . But maybe he’d just been looking for someone who didn’t remind him of Meredith, and that night in Saint-Tropez, the woman who came in through the closets of a dream. Was that all, Michael? Was I nothing to you but the anti-Meredith?
It started with those goddamn phone calls. Stockholm, Reykjavik, Hamburg. July, August. Though maybe he’d been making collect calls to Meredith the whole time, what did she know? She was as blind as the blind Merediths times ten. Restless, not sleeping, the painting had taken a bad turn. Had he longed for her, the room in Saint-Tropez, her warm full body exposed in the light robe? His eye drawn to the dark patch at the V of her legs, Meredith saying, “If you didn’t know me, would you find me attractive?”
Michael wouldn’t have stopped it. He always moved toward the thing that frightened him. The two of them, you know what they were like. The crippled boy, the deaf-mutes. He once told her Meredith liked to pretend she was his mistress in public, it was a game they played, in cafés and in galleries, the handsome boy and the elegant woman, a game and not a game. The boundaries already so blurred. He’d been taught since he was a baby how different he was from everyone else, how different they all were, the Loewys, rules didn’t apply. Did you touch her, Michael? Did the smell of her make you dizzy, so familiar, the smoke of perfume, the dark musky smell of her body? It was a night which had been brewing for years. He just wouldn’t have known how it would feel, to carry it around, his judgment of himself.
His erection visible under the sheet, hard and flat against his belly. Maybe she laid her head on the pillow, her breast falling from the robe. “What if we were strangers.” He so loved to pretend. Her hand caressing his face, how it might have happened. Maybe kissing him a bit openmouthed, letting herself forget for a moment it was her son, just a handsome young man, the feel of him jumping under the sheet, her hair a mess on the pillow, how warm she was, how familiar, her
breast in his hand, it’s only a dream, Michael, it’s not real, something he must have dreamed about, dreamed and feared. Afterward, listening to the sound of the surf . . . Shhh, don’t think about it, don’t say anything . . . her hand to his mouth . . .
He hate he love her that way but he was helpless to stop it. There was your fucking sad destiny. There was some fucking ming.
And the next day Meredith would have tried the adjoining door, for the first time found it locked. She would have knocked, called out, but he wouldn’t answer, never again. And when he came down to breakfast, he wouldn’t have met her eye, would have answered her superficial remarks in monosyllables. That day he didn’t go down to the beach, he stayed in the hotel, called his father collect, said he wanted to come home, wanted to go somewhere to school, could Cal arrange it? Be like the other boys, though it was already too late. His father got him into Ojai, it must have been Cal. And she let him go, knowing she had gone too far, knowing she had lost him. He didn’t want to be her little husband anymore, now it was way too real. He ran. Threw himself into school and played handball, fast and mean, yes. And all the rest, everything that had come after.
And Josie understood why he couldn’t tell her. Because, unlike Tommy, he had loved that dark damaged woman. He couldn’t betray her, who had betrayed him in the worst way. He started calling his father, just to shoot the shit. But he could never admit how twisted things had gotten with his mother. His loyalty to Meredith was absolute, to the end. Yes.
So who was Josie Tyrell in the story, really? Someone who would stir no memories, who might help break the bond? And was that all? We loved each other once . . . Didn’t we? Until now she would have said, Yes, of course we did, what do you mean? But now she didn’t know. Maybe that summer, when Meredith called him from Hamburg and Denmark, he started to see Josie as she was, not as a project, but the bare fact of her, unsophisticated, half-literate, without much to recommend her at all. And maybe he realized the world he had chosen was really very small. Perhaps it had all started closing in. Maybe he had grown tired of playing artists in garrets, just as Meredith had predicted, and didn’t know how to stop. The pressure building. He’d made a mistake. Had wanted to give Josie up but couldn’t bring himself to. Couldn’t betray his dream of a man’s life for himself.
She reached for her purse, hanging from the doorknob of the bedroom, but her damn cigarettes were in Meredith’s pool. She could go down to Gala’s, but she didn’t want to go out into all that light, it was too much to bear. She felt helpless, exposed, like Dave in 2001, the computer closing the spaceship doors behind her. Cut off in deep space. Open the bay doors, Hal.
She hauled herself out of bed, went out into the living room, it smelled like swamp and dead plants. It was so bright, it cut her in two. She found a few long butts in an ashtray, opened them, rolled the tobacco into a bum’s cigarette that tasted like trash and burned leather. She knew she should go into the kitchen, get rid of whatever it was that was stinking so badly, but she’d used the last of her energy. She sat heavily at the peeling dining table, smoking the acrid cigarette, opened the drawer, hoping to find some decent smokes, but there were only scissors and pins and her old tarot cards, folded in a Moroccan pinch-dyed scarf.
He was going to design a whole pack for her, but he’d only done the one painting and a series of sketches. She spread them on the table, not reading them, just looking at their pictures, like old friends, the Empress, the Chariot, the Fool. The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn’t Michael at all. It was her. You fool. She brushed at tears with the back of her hand.
And which one was he? The Magician? She’d thought he was. She’d thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his crosstree. Unable to go backward or forward.
The phone rang on the orange footlocker. Michael once told her about Zeno’s paradox, that showed there were an infinite number of small movements to doing anything, and you could divide them smaller and smaller, so that you never really arrived at the final point. You swam toward the surface but you never could reach it. Josie saw herself going through the infinite number of small gestures that arrived at picking up the receiver. “Oui, c’est moi.”
“Josie? Thank God you’re all right.” Meredith. Chipper as hell. “I went into your room, I knew you couldn’t possibly still be sleeping. And you were gone. Sofía said you went home. What, did you forget something?”
And who was Meredith? The Empress? The High Priestess? Or only the Queen of Swords, ruining everything she touched, the Typhoid Mary of ming.
“I had some things to think over.”
“You’re not nervous, are you? Trust me, Josie, it’s going to be fine. The presenters take care of everything, and I’ll be right there showing you the ropes.”
The ropes. Which ropes, the ones that bound the Hanged Man to his fatal cross?
“Josie? Are you there?”
She found the Queen of Swords, saber in one hand, the other outstretched, beckoning. “Just thinking.” She looked through the deck, found the World. Put it between the Queen and the Fool. She could have the world. But at what price? The Hanged Man gazed up at her from his gallows.
“Josie, listen to me. There’s nothing to think about. It’s not an organ donation. Four days we’ll be there, and I’ll treat you to the best dinner you ever had.”
But what of her own shredded bathing suit of a soul? Wouldn’t there always be a dark swimming pool, a murky swamp, waiting in Zurich, Vienna, even an apartment in the sixteenth? How far could you run to escape a boy in his grave?
“Josie? Josie, you know, it’s all right to give yourself something good. After all you’ve been through.” Her voice was low and confiding, persuasive, a beautiful voice, so understanding. “You deserve it. As you yourself said, he’s dead everywhere.” But Josie couldn’t get away from the sickening feeling of the cliff crumbling underfoot. Like that night at dinner with Boulez. Everything that Michael had loved about her gone. Smart, original. She’d been unrecognizable.
“Think of it, you’ll have a whole new life, a fresh start.”
Josie walked her fingers up the curly cord of the phone. The picture of little Jeanne and Blaise in the blue train compartment, their heads together, watching her. Remember. “I’m not sure I can.”
Meredith’s voice came like a whisper, like a voice in her own head. “Think how you’ll feel if you’re not on that plane. Someday, you’ll be washing dishes in a trailer in Lancaster. You’ll have four screaming brats hanging on to you and you’ll look out the window at the laundry hanging in your yard and think, ‘I could have had a different life. I could have had something better.’”
Like Pauline? she wanted to ask. Her mother had met all those famous people. Tagged along, tried to fit in. She’d started as someone and became nothing at all. Finally, she had a chance to redeem something of herself and she hocked that ring and headed for parts unknown. Left a child behind, that was how bad she needed to go. Josie ran her fingernail through the fake fur of the couch, parting it like hair, like a furrow for seed. She wanted to ask, but she had done enough damage. “I just need to do some thinking.”
“I just don’t understand you!” Meredith snapped. “You’ve got a seat on the plane, I’ve got your passport. I’m offering you everything. What in the world is bothering you?”
Meredith thought none of this would ever catch up with her. Michael, her father, her mother, Lisbeth and Wien, 1934. Saint-Tropez. Everything. She thought all she had to do was stay in the spotlight, keep moving. But it was like the swimming pool. She could go to Paris or Bayreuth or East Fuckwalla, it would still be there waiting for her. She was the most frightened woman Josie had ever seen. “Look, Meredith, I’ll either be there Tuesday or I won’t. I have to go now.”
She cou
ld hear Meredith breathing, her lips close to her ear. When her voice came back it was flat, businesslike. “Ten o’clock Tuesday, Air France. It’s up to you now.”
You take care your own soul. She is what you have now. Josie gathered up her cards and put them back in the deck.
33
Drive
The clogged arteries of the 210 snaked east through Pasadena, Arcadia, Monrovia, suburbs that splashed up against the dark bulk of the San Gabriels like water thrown on a dirty floor. It wasn’t such a hard drive, more like taking your place in line at the DMV. Thousands of people, all caught in profile, locked into their mobile fish tanks. Each face, each car, transporting grief, boredom, rage. Someone in one of these cars was contemplating murder. Someone, right now, in the privacy of his aquarium, threaded the beads of his suicide through his fingers, praying along the chain like a rosary. Someone begged for help from a God he didn’t quite believe in, yet had no one else to appeal to. The rest thought only about dinner, tonight’s episode of Dallas, the day’s argument with the boss.
In an alternate universe, she would be going home from a day at the bank, the Auto Club, the State Farm office, thinking about her own kids and what she would make for dinner in her suburban kitchen in El Monte. Tuna casserole with potato chips crumbled on top. Her young husband picking them up at day care. What was so wrong about that? Something simple and basic, attainable. She wanted too much, that was her fault, not just Michael’s love, but everything everything everything. Genius and wealth and culture, art and achievement, that whole Loewy trip. If she had just stopped. Had taken off the blindfold of her magical thinking.