The bubbling of birds filled the air. A line of quail burst from a shrub and dashed across the parking lot, their tiny hats bobbing. Like Jeanne’s hat in the dream. The same question mark.
She stubbed out her cigarette against the motel wall and stood, wrapped the quilt around her like a stiff evening gown, and walked out past the pool onto the desert.
She found a faint trail in the dust, an old dune-buggy or jeep track, stretched toward the warming horizon, and she followed it. It didn’t much matter where the path went, she wasn’t the least bit curious, she just needed a direction. She followed it up and over a rise, then another, stopping every so often to gaze back at her shadow, Giacometti tall and thin, streaming back against the pale rocks and blond bleached grasses. I am the long world’s gentleman . . . And every rock trailed its own blue pillar of shadow, each so clear it was almost alive. Blue and tan hills rolled in low lines on either side of the valley, their slopes sharp and distinct, each from the next, like a paint-by-numbers landscape.
She wandered from rise to rise in the bitter cold, the cheap motel bedspread snagging on cholla. Their fur of spines caught the early light in auras, like halos on saints. She’d never been much of a nature person. She liked the city, people close all around, crowds, the feel of something happening. Music, nightlife, being on the list, the girl everyone wanted to know—the possibility of more than dishes and diapers and the grocery store. But these days, she didn’t much care to see people living their lives. It seemed pointless, like the swimming of a hit dog in the street. She could understand what people saw in the desert. What wasn’t there, like Phil Baby always said. No people swarming over each other, everyone with a motive, everyone with a dream or a nightmare, so much wanting and longing, clutching, desiring, passion and hatred and terrible need. Even their kindness swarmed, like devils in the hair of Michael’s self-portraits. Out here, death was suitable, there was room for it, the grip of life’s relentless urges slackened, replaced by this icy simplicity.
She kept walking, turning, aimless, dragging the quilt, even the jeep track had disappeared. Whatever you were, whoever you were, nothing distracted you from it here. The desert left you absolutely to yourself, it was zero embodied. It should have frightened her out of her wits to be lost in such emptiness, alone, like that dream with the coyote, but it was morning, and she wasn’t afraid.
She turned to see if she could make out the Paradise, but it had vanished. The world had been reduced to its barest outlines, abstract—cactus and Joshua trees and rocks, the vast sky, the far blue mountains. Spaces for forgetting. She tried to remember her life before Michael, but it seemed like somebody else’s. How busy she’d been, living at the Fuckhouse, days full of color and plans, nights feeling glamorous and part of it all. She never appreciated how much she’d had then. Maybe she shouldn’t have let him wake her, learn something better, let him change her. For this is where his road led. This dead end.
Now it was just her. She didn’t know where there was left to go. It didn’t seem to matter, Europe or LA or nowhere at all. Death was bigger than anything. Bigger than love. Big as the universe. Death now or death later, that was the real question. So much like the Atomic Café, only everything on the menu was the same, there was only the question of how long you wanted to wait, how many quarters you had left for the jukebox. The pain of living another day, and another after that. How long did you want to lie on that rock with life’s dirty bird chewing on your liver?
She oriented herself to a big square chunk of rock at the top of a rise that showed its pale gold side to the sun, keeping its blue face toward her, and made her way up to it. At least it didn’t smell like swamp out here, not meat or moss or the sea. No surprise scents to wring you and twist you and make you cry out.
When she reached the crest, she paused, drawing the pure clean nothingness into her sad, tangled soul. She sat on the rock and noticed the square-shaped stones perched there. She sat staring at them, like listening to music in a far-off room.
It was a duck. Such an odd sensation. Someone had been here before her. Way out here in the randomness of fucking nowhere. Someone had been here, and had bent over and picked up those rocks and placed them here. At the corner of a boulder at the edge of a rise. To mark the way for another human being, who might or might not ever happen by.
Or for himself.
Would a man getting ready to erase himself leave one last marker, a prayer?
The desert stood still as she gazed at those rocks, sitting on a boulder in the long-shadowed dawn. It could have been him. Or it could have just been a hiker, taken by impulse, leaning over and picking it up, setting it on end, capping it with another. Kilroy was here.
But that was the thing about zero. Its weakness. Even if zero had taken over the entire universe, the biggest fascist of all, one tiny gesture could deny it. One footprint, one atom. You didn’t have to be a genius. You didn’t even have to know that was what you were doing. You made a mark. You changed something. It said, “A human being passed here.” And changed zero to one.
There it was.
Right there, on this waiting, breath-held desert. In a couple of ordinary rocks. It was here all the time. Shining in the first morning light. He’d lost faith in it, but there it still was. It hadn’t died in room 12. It hadn’t been eaten by zero, it hadn’t been lost in the labyrinth. It wasn’t back in the house in Los Feliz, it wasn’t at the Hotel Diplomat. It was in this—what he had given her, Josie Tyrell, from South Union Avenue. Art model, student actress, and whatever else she was to become. This was his gift, marking his own passing.
She put another rock on the duck, and turned back to look at her own blue shadow stretching across the sand. In the distance, the dog zigzagged from cholla to cholla, stopping to piss on a tumbleweed. A roadrunner dashed across the gully. The curtain so thin after all.
Josie sat on the bed in number 4, smoking a ciggie. The sunlight shone bright and cold through the open door. She knew it was time to leave. There was nothing else to do but pack up and head home. And yet, how could she leave this place where he’d made his end? She sat up against the rickety headboard and picked cholla spines out of the bedspread, flicking them into the ashtray. Maybe she should take up knitting. Something quiet and productive. She didn’t want to go back home, back to the empty house, as if Michael had fallen through a hole in the ice and just disappeared. But she couldn’t drag his raw death through her days like this, like a giant bleeding moose head. Michael had made his choice. He wasn’t dragging anything now. This wasn’t her death. It was his. That was the sad and honest truth. Though it would stay with her, it would be more like a black onyx heart on a silver chain, worn privately, under her clothes, close to her body, all her life. The guilt, the beauty, everything. It wasn’t over, it had only begun.
From where she sat, leaning against the plywood headboard, she could see the manager’s office through her open door. The girl was already up, working in the laundry room. That busy little form, bending in the darkened room at the elbow of the motel. How alone she was. This terrible place. Terrible yet mundane. Hell was perfectly simple. Just a few walls in the middle of nowhere. Just another part of the labyrinth.
Josie abandoned the bedspread, ground out her cigarette, and pulled her boots on. Feeling strangely thin and pure in the clear winter sunlight, she walked down to the laundry room. That dryer smell. How he loved that. The memory so clear it stunned her. She ducked into the warm darkness, dropped the key to number 12 on the neat stack of towels the girl had just finished folding. “I’m sorry you got mixed up in this. I wanted to thank you.”
The girl snatched the key, dropped it into her sweater pocket, not looking at Josie. “He gets up soon. I must put back.” She started for the door.
Josie put her hand on the girl’s arm. “Listen, I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’m leaving in a bit. Why don’t you come back to LA with me?”
The German girl stared at Josie. “To LA?”
“Why not?”
Storms followed one another across the girl’s face “I . . . I know no one. What would I do there?”
As if only movie stars lived in LA, as if nobody sewed sleeves onto dresses or fried chicken or cleaned rooms in cheesy motels in a town of eight million. “Sleep on my couch. We’ll find you something.”
Josie didn’t think the German girl could get any whiter, but she’d been mistaken. “Bitte. Please. I cannot.” She shrugged off Josie’s hand and ran into the manager’s office, shut the door.
Josie laid her face on the warm towels, pressed her nose there, waiting for the girl to return. When she didn’t, Josie went back to her room. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, tried to do something about her matted hair, spit on some toilet paper and wiped at the raccooned mascara under her eyes. No wonder the girl didn’t want to go with her. She looked like she’d slept on Hollywood Boulevard.
She assembled her guitar and her schoolbag, smoothed down the bed and hung the towels in the bathroom. She washed off her sunglasses in the bathroom sink. She opened the curtains to the morning light, pocketing the roach clip. She knew she couldn’t control what happened with the German girl, any more than she could control Michael or Meredith or anyone else. All she could do was try moving a stone. She could feel the girl now, hiding from her, beyond the door of yellow panes, probably wishing to Christ this wild-haired girl had not offered her a way to leave, making her feel her own gutlessness and fear that much more.
Josie waited a few minutes longer, fooling with “Big Butter and Egg Man” on the child-sized guitar, but still the girl didn’t come, and Josie was awake, hungry, ready to be on the road. She had done all she could do here now. It was time.
She carried her things over the gravel to the short end of the L and packed up the Falcon. The manager’s door remained closed, hospitable as a barbed-wire fence. So she got in, started up the car, ran it for a minute, giving the ancient engine a chance to warm up, rattling and shaking in the cold. She had to admit to herself, the girl wasn’t coming. She too had chosen her labyrinth.
She turned on the radio, Buck Owens, and put the car in gear, backed and then headed down the drive, past the gate of the Paradise Inn, signaled left, and pulled out onto the highway. The sun behind her. Heading west. She had no idea what time it was, before eight for sure, on a Sunday morning. Even if she stopped for breakfast in Banning, she’d be home by noon.
She was about a hundred yards down the highway when she saw the girl in her rearview mirror, running down the drive of the Paradise and out onto the highway, a pink bag over her shoulder, her braids flopping in the early morning light. She waved her arms in the air as if Josie were in a plane, waving her down. Josie reversed down the empty two-lane, and the girl threw her bag in the back and hopped in, that mousy thing glowing bright as a lightbulb. She watched out the rear window as the Paradise grew smaller.
Turning front again, she threw a green book on the dashboard, about the size of a funeral prayer book. Josie picked it up. Reisepass. Republik Osterreich. She opened it on her thigh and spread it out in front of her on the wheel. A picture of the girl looking like a dog in headlights, just before the car hits it. Wilma Rutger. Wilma. Wilma and Josephine. Well, okay then. Okay.
Acknowledgments
I’d like to thank those who gave so generously of their care, love, and attention during the writing of Paint It Black. Muchos abrazos to the Three Musketeers, writers David Francis, Julianne Ortale, and Rita Williams, for their unceasing insight and encouragement, that willingness to read a scene just one more time. Many thanks to my wonderful readers Trudie Arguelles, Charmaine Craig, and Gus Reininger, who helped me see the forest again, when I could only see leaves and twigs.
Grateful thanks to my generous informants: Brazil-based concert pianist Ilan Reichtman and Peter Stumpf, principal cellist for the LA Philharmonic; artists Enrique Martinez Celaya, Greg Colson, and Lucas Reiner; art models Nancy Keystone and Melinda Ring; Warren and Leroy at Diamond Towing; Lia Brody; the Skirball Museum, for their remarkable exhibition Driven into Paradise, which gave me a rare look into the world of the European exiles in Los Angeles in the Thirties and Forties; Anthony Hernandez, Director, Los Angeles County Department of Coroner; and the many websites supporting survivors after suicide, particularly 1000 Deaths.
I want to thank William Reiss, my agent, and Asya Muchnick and Michael Pietsch, my editors at Little, Brown, who stuck with this book through its long hard journey. No words suffice. And most of all, I thank my daughter, Allison, who has had to deal with such an awkward and demanding sibling on a daily basis—thank you for putting up with me.
Copyright Acknowledgments
The author is grateful for permission to include excerpts from the following previously copyrighted material:
The excerpts from “Riding the Elevator Into the Sky” on pages 372 and 379 is are from The Awful Rowing Toward God by Anne Sexton. Copyright © 1975 by Loring Conant, Jr., executor of the Estate of Anne Sexton. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.
The excerpts from The Poems of Dylan Thomas by Dylan Thomas are reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and are copyrighted as follows: “Altarwise by Owl-Light,” copyright 1939 by New Directions Publishing Corp.; “Love in the Asylum,” copyright 1943 by New Directions Publishing Corp.; “Over Sir John’s Hill,” copyright 1952 by Dylan Thomas; “In Country Sleep,” copyright © 1967 by the Trustees for the copyrights of Dylan Thomas.
The author would also like to acknowledge the following: The lyrics on pages 18 and 381 are from “They Ain’t Walking No More,” by Lucille Bogan; lines from “The Prose of the Transsiberian and Little Jeanne of France” are from Complete Poems by Blaise Cendrars, translated by Rod Padgett, University of California Press, 1993; the lines on page 378 are from “Burnt Norton,” by T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets, Harcourt, 1943; the lines on page 376 are from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” and “The Waste Land,” by T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land, Harcourt, 1930; the lines on pages 265 and 266 are from The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, translated by Ivan Morris, Penguin Classics, 1971. The Thirteen Clocks by James Thurber, Simon and Schuster, 1950, is the children’s book referred to on page 122 and elsewhere.
About the Author
Janet Fitch, a Los Angeles native, is the author of White Oleander, an Oprah Book Club selection. Now translated into 24 languages, the novel was the basis of a movie by the same name. Her short stories have appeared in journals such as Black Warrior Review, Room of One’s Own, Rain City Review, and Speakeasy. She received the Moseley Fellowship in Creative Writing at Pomona College in 2001 and currently teaches fiction writing in the Master’s of Professional Writing program at the University of Southern California. She lives in Los Angeles.
Janet Fitch, Paint It Black
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