“I know,” Cal said. “Mine are about looking for him after a disaster, a crash in the Andes, an earthquake. I slept about three hours last night.” He sighed heavily. “Look, I just wanted to call, to say goodbye.”
Goodbye? “Where are you going?”
“Home, Josie,” Cal said gently. “I’m leaving on the red-eye.”
Home. He was going home. He was going back to Numbah Foah and her children in New York. He’d be in bed with her by morning.
Suddenly, she was as jealous of him as if she had been Cal’s lover. How dare he have someone to go home to. How dare he have a life. He was already on his way, his thoughts moving ahead to his new family and what he had to do tomorrow, he was getting on with it. When she was lying here fucking herself on this couch like a shipwreck stranded in the middle of a currentless sea.
“Listen, here’s my number. If you want to talk, call me. Anytime.” But she knew she wouldn’t call because if she did, he’d be taking tango lessons in Buenos Aires or beating the bush in Kuala Lumpur. Nevertheless, she pawed in the debris on the orange footlocker to find a pencil, the tears in her eyes keeping her from seeing right. She finally found one, wrote down his fucking number.
“We’ll go on, Josie,” he said. “We have no choice. We’ll find a way.”
Will we? Will we really, Cal? You dickhead. You find a way. You fucking find a way. After she hung up, she just sat for a while, staring at the phone beyond her bare knees. Pen came out with a bowl of Cheetos.
“Get dressed,” Pen said. “People are coming over.”
“What people?” Josie said. She couldn’t imagine there was still anybody left in the world.
“Your friends,” Pen said. “Get some fucking clothes on.”
Shirley Kamaguchi came over, and Genghiz, her boss at the shop, a self-proclaimed Aztec from Pico Rivera, fourth generation, and Ben Sinister, and David Doll. They brought boxes of sushi and ate at the battered table. “This is a nice place,” Ben said, glancing up at the Chinese characters on the lamp. Tao, ming. “Did you do those?”
“Michael,” Josie said.
“He always seemed nice. I liked him,” said Shirley K., her Kabuki red mouth making a sad pout.
Pen didn’t say anything. It was the first time Josie had ever seen her hang on to her opinion, leave a thought unvoiced.
It was surreal to have all these people here. No one ever came to their house, it was their kingdom, their province, lair and clubhouse and center of the universe. Now the spell was gone and people were just walking in. It got dark, and Paul Angstrom came from work at Cashbox with a bag of tamales and Mason and PJ came with Stoli and popcorn. Pen must have put a bulletin up at the Hong Kong Café. They were all so sorry, really kind, but not one of them had known him, no one had known the first thing about him. They talked about other friends who died. Pen told them all how Meredith attacked her at the funeral, and Genghiz talked about a friend of his who had killed himself while he was taking hormones for a sex-change operation. “I just think of the last time he called me, I was in a rush, I said I’d get back to him and then I didn’t. I just forgot. And then he was dead. Like, what if there was something I could have done? I mean, I’d just had coffee with him. We weren’t that close but it was like, I should have been there.”
These are my friends, she kept telling herself.
They drank the Stoli, and PJ had some blow, and Genghiz brought poppers from one of the boys’ clubs on Santa Monica Boulevard. It wasn’t quite the high she wanted, she really could have used some big fat reds, but you took what you got and were goddamn grateful for it. The poppers blasted her head blank for five minutes, it was great not to have one fucking thought. The blow got her blood moving, she even laughed a little. High, she could even imagine Michael was out shopping at the Chinese market, or down at Launderland, any minute he would come back through the door, unshaved and rumpled in his tweed jacket, and wonder why the fuck his house was full of people he’d never liked. Ben Sinister picked up Josie’s blue child-sized guitar that Michael had given her last Christmas, and played a few Bowie songs, “Suffragette City,” “Spiders from Mars.”
Paul sat down at Michael’s old battered upright and put his hands on the keys and started to play, softly, something she recognized but couldn’t name, and then she could, the slow opening chords to Patti Smith’s “Birdland.” He sang it all the way through. It was about a boy whose father died, and the spaceships that were going to pick him up, with his father at the controls. Take me up, Daddy . . . don’t leave me here alone . . .
It was exactly what she wanted to hear. She went and sat in Michael’s chair by the window, looking out at that light-spiked view they had so loved they never had curtains. The lights on the side of the glen, Silverlake, Hollywood. She ran her hands over the torn upholstery, where he’d picked at it, staring out the window, late at night, drinking his red wine, brooding. She’d tried to cheer him up. Sitting on the arm of the chair, pressing her face to his, looking out at the same view, these same sparkling lights. “Look, it’s beautiful, Michael,” she’d say.
“It’s like something from Bosch,” he’d say.
And it fucking was.
Ben started playing “Satellite of Love” and Paul joined in on the piano, everybody knew the words, but Josie wasn’t really in the picture. How could she pretend she hadn’t seen it coming? Now she couldn’t help but see. Bosch was everywhere. In the Astroturf at Mount Sinai, in Michael’s blown-out eyes. In I hope you find someone who can meet your needs better than I could. It was here in the living room full of people who clearly cared about her, though God knew why.
The phone rang, and Pen answered it, her Camel Straight dangling from her lip like a dame’s in a noir film. “Hello? Well fuck you too.” She slammed the receiver back on the cradle. “It was that bitch again,” she called over to Josie. “Your ex-future-mother-in-law.” Josie watched Pen in the window’s reflection, as her friend came over and sat on the torn arm of Michael’s chair, held her against her T-shirt, stroking her dirty hair. “Look, Josie. I talked to Maddie this morning.” Maddie, the models’ booker at Otis. “Phil Baby needs a model Tuesday, a sitting with Callie McClain. I told her you’d do it. No, don’t say no. It’ll be good for you, believe me.”
How like Pen. Just sign her up, without even asking. Josie sat there with her eyes closed, leaning against her friend, the hands stroking her hair. She knew there were reasons to stay home, good reasons. She could barely stand upright, or take a full breath. She had forgotten her name, how to button a button. She was so transparent, they might not even be able to see her.
And yet, when would it end? She would still have to pay rent, and eat. And Michael would still be dead. He was dead everywhere.
6
Otis
Josie drifted down the hall at Otis, paced by her own ghostly image reflected in the display of student work—her clumpy unwashed hair and pale face, her yellow fur coat. She felt like a hyena, ugly, outcast, a disease. Only the familiar smell of the drawing studio soothed her, the charcoal and sweat, the sound of graphite on paper, Phil Baby bent over some girl, pointing out a problem, and she knew Pen was right, it was good to be here, in this grimy studio where she’d posed so many times. This was real. Phil Baby looked up, his eyes round in surprise, though they were always round, it was the little glasses that did it. He hurried to her. “My God, Josie, what are you doing here?” he whispered, taking her hand in his. Pen named him Phil Baby because he looked like a beatnik, the glasses and beret and pointy beard threaded in gray. Sweet Phil Baby. She wished he wouldn’t look at her like that, she couldn’t stand anybody to be nice to her right now, she was trying so hard to keep it together.
She shrugged. “They said you needed a model.”
“Yeah, but not you. Christ, Josie, what are you doing?” Poor Phil. Just the kind of man who would fall in love with an impossible girl like herself.
“Killing time,” she said. She didn’t know what she’d do with the rest of her life
, but for the next three hours, it wouldn’t be a problem. Yet Phil Baby wasn’t Henry Ko, who viewed her as a glorified bowl of fruit. Phil wanted to hug her, adopt her, give her the key to his soul, his apartment, his checking account. He wanted to save her. “It’s okay, Phil. I’ve got to get used to it.” She pulled away from his graphite-dark hand, hitched her bag, and walked back to the screen where the models changed.
Phil Baby returned to his student, a girl in overalls sitting in the chair where Michael used to sit. The seat closest to the windows. Suddenly, Josie felt a rush of fury. She wanted to go over there and yank that girl out of that chair, turn it over, kick her to the floor. Do you know whose seat you’re sitting in? But she didn’t. And it wasn’t his seat anymore. No, he’d given up any and all seats. He’d written himself off the seating chart.
On the modeling stand, flame-haired Callie moved through her gesture poses. She caught Josie’s eye over the art students’ self-barbered coiffures, not moving her head, but her eyes speaking sympathy. Josie didn’t want anybody’s pity. Why wouldn’t they just let her get on with it, become an inert shape in space? She liked Callie, though, the way her body challenged the students’ ideal of beauty, its elongated breasts and the weals of multiple pregnancies. Josie appreciated that courage. At first, she’d thought, if she ever looked like that, she would disappear into the house and never come out, make love with the lights off. How had she ever been so ignorant? How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvas of experience, a testament to life and one’s capacity to endure it.
She went behind the screen and removed her clothes, her shoes. Everything seemed suddenly sharp, dangerous, the hooks, the splintered supports with their graffiti—Yolo ’64, Ben + Harriet. She felt like old people who forgot what shoes were for, each gesture calling meaning into question—unbuttoning a button, breathing. Movement slowed to half speed, quarter speed, as if the air had thickened. She could take nothing for granted, her hand on her shirt, her ability to keep the floor underfoot.
The students were playing Devo, their geeky mania filling the air. Normally she liked Devo fine, but today she wished she was at Phil’s place over at the Villa Elaine—he played Coltrane while he painted, Miles Davis. She wrapped herself in her sarong of a flowered tablecloth and came out to watch Callie. Ridiculous to have to cover herself, when she would be naked in front of them in a few minutes, but it was the convention and she hadn’t the energy to protest.
As Callie finished her gesture poses, the baby artists sketched furiously. How real their own futures seemed to them. When any of them might be dead tomorrow. She thought of the prayer Michael told her the Jews said on their New Year: “On Rosh Hashanah it is opened and on Yom Kippur it is closed, who will live and who will die, who by fire and who by water, and who torn apart by wild beasts . . .” She looked at the students, wondering which of them would be mangled in a car wreck, who would die by a stray bullet coming in off the park. The boy in the skinny tie? The girl in the shaved Mohawk? All looking at the model as if they didn’t own flesh, as if they couldn’t mount the stand themselves. Their eager eyes unlocking the secrets of the human form, but so much like Cal, talking about “the bereaved” as if it didn’t apply to him.
She walked behind them, glancing over their work. Some had airbrushed Callie, they were looking right at her and yet something inside their minds couldn’t let them see her nursed-out breasts, her belly’s record of babies, while others exaggerated her flaws, like brave children facing monsters, turning stretch lines into claw marks. This body. Who could just look at it as it was, without prettying it up or emphasizing its awfulness? This class should be taught by shamans, not art teachers.
Callie’s timer went off. She picked up her robe and slid into it, an olive green kimono that made her freckled skin glow. She came off the stand and threw her firm arms around Josie. She smelled of sweat and roses, her wild flame hair of Prell. “I’m so sorry, Josie. I heard. That lovely, lovely boy. I remember him.” She traced her fingers across Josie’s neck. “What’s this?”
A ladder of green bruises, the mother’s hands closing. How dare you. “Nothing. Forget it.”
“Josie, they’re bruises.” Callie’s eyes darkened with concern.
“Let’s just get on with it, okay?” Josie said, sounding colder than she liked to sound. Callie blanched, dropped her hand, left her alone. She was sorry to have hurt her, but she wanted them all to leave her alone, let her keep it together. Kindness was the last thing she needed. She had to stay in the icy place, the numb place, and their warmth threatened to melt her just when she needed the cold.
She climbed onto the model’s stand, set her timer, shrugged off the tablecloth. The little model’s heater hummed. She began her own short gesture poses. Thirty-second poses were her favorites, they let you take chances, go off balance, reach and twist. She was good at this. When there was nothing else, there was the body. She could always make an interesting shape in space, naked and barefoot before a classroom of strangers, even with her bruised neck and her stricken face. It felt good to put herself aside along with her clothes, and just be.
The sun from the dirty skylight fell onto her shoulders and hair. The students studied her like a puzzle that needed to be solved. She had always liked the way their eyes brought her into focus, found beauty in her assemblage of parts, neck and backs of knees, the knobby piano of a spine. She had not been thought beautiful growing up. No one had looked at her twice. One glance and they knew. Just another Tyrell. They breed like rats. Why doesn’t anyone wash their faces? The mother’s not all there, you know. She sits in that house, I don’t know if she’s been out in ten years. LA gave her a face of her own. It hung glamour around her like a champagne mink. That was what Michael had fallen in love with. Not understanding that nothing was under it.
She moved between poses, concentrating on creating positive and negative space. What isn’t there is as important as what is, Phil always said. What wasn’t there. The girl in Michael’s seat drew in big dramatic gestures, her hand making jagged bursts on the paper. A pimply boy dropped his eyes to his work when she met his gaze. She always knew the ones who were in love with her. They were shy once she dressed, or else talked to her in a weird forced normality, as if they hadn’t seen her nude, as if they’d met in a supermarket. This body and its freedom gave her the only power she’d ever had.
On a normal day, she would walk around after a session and let them show her their drawings. Some were proud, others nervous. As she looked at their work, it often occurred to her that no one existed in fact. Simply existed, the same for all. You could see it on every easel. Some fixated on the darkness of her bush and the hair in her armpits, in contrast with the wild bleach job. Others preferred the delicacy of her bones, or the attitude of her sober gaze and the unsmiling mouth. Marco, her first boyfriend in LA, called her an exhibitionist, said she should get a job in a strip club if she liked it that much, it paid better. She did like it, but it wasn’t what people thought—a sex job. It was the opposite—a statement, personal, frank, without intention to please. Here I am. This is me. My fact. I can do this, can you? Callie with her stretch marks, Frank, who was almost a dwarf. Each body held some truth the baby artists needed to see. Even that of a seventeen-year-old dropout from Bakersfield.
How she used to envy them. Someone was shelling out big money for each and every one of those seats—tuition, rent, art supplies. Although she’d gotten herself out of Bakersfield, and created a life she’d always dreamed about, a glamorous life—modeling, acting in student films, knowing the people worth knowing—still, she’d envied them. All this instruction, everything so well thought out, people like Phil Baby unlocking the world step by step. Nobody had ever shown her shit. Only Michael.
But now, she knew something else. That all the education in the world was not enough. It wasn’t always what you knew. Michael had gone to Harvard but it hadn’t kept him alive. Ignorance was familiar as sunshine, but now sh
e knew it was possible to know too much.
She remembered the poems Michael once showed her, things he’d written as a kid. Beautiful strings of words like music, talking about the true world, the way he could feel the presence of God like a face gleaming behind a curtain. “These are gorgeous,” she said. “You’ve got to write more.”
“They’re garbage,” he said, taking them from her. “Third-rate imitation Eliot. Dash of Dylan Thomas. A little Sexton on top.”
She shifted her pose, twisting, extending her arms, a dancer’s pose she’d seen in a book about Matisse. Red bodies against blue. She could re-create that pose, and it was still beautiful, even if it had been done before. But to satisfy Michael, everything had to be absolutely original, better than anything ever before, paintings or poems or music. She had always believed that knowledge helped you do things, but Michael’s knowing just took away his courage, his freedom.
“My mother always said, There’s no place in the world for a good concert pianist,” he said. “There are too many geniuses.”
At least if you were ignorant, you could do what you wanted, you had no idea what had been achieved in the past. You were free, instead of chewed at by bleeding impotence, dissolved away like a pearl in acid.
She looked again at the girl in Michael’s seat. Every term, there would be a new student in that chair by the window, someone who hadn’t known that Michael Faraday once sat there and fell in love with a model named Josie Tyrell. With whom he should never have shared a sentence.
Her timer went off. She wrapped herself and walked over to the table with the coffee urn, poured herself a bitter cup, wondering what had happened to his jacket. Meredith. She had to have it. She had the notes, of course she had the jacket. Josie blanched, thinking of how the woman had attacked her at the funeral, when she had every right to be there, every right and more. Whatever Meredith thought, Michael didn’t belong to her. She might like to think it, but it wasn’t true, it hadn’t been true since that day in the blue bedroom. She should have told Cal she wanted that jacket, maybe he would have grabbed it for her while Meredith lay passed out on her satin bed. Josie craved its coarse weave, a memory so strong it made her stagger.