Paint It Black (4 page)

Josie shifted in the seat. Her body ached. She hadn’t slept more than two hours straight since that first phone call. The old rabbi talked about donations to a fund, and then the old men played the Bach, the sarabande. Two violins soaring together like birds, spiraling into the sky. After the doubt of Brahms, the pure yearning of Bach. She thought of Michael’s body on a pyre, smoke swirling up to a God who might care.

Then it was over, and nobody had said a thing about who he’d been, or how he died. Though really, did she think they would? There was nothing to say except that he found life too painful to bear, a fucking empty room, and checked out, an act that spit in the eye of God and on his flawed Creation. But there was still the graveside—maybe they’d do it there. Or would they go? She didn’t know, she had never been to a Jewish funeral. She would just stay with everybody, clap in the right place. She could always come back later.

The old men packed up their instruments, while others came forward, and Calvin Faraday. Together, they picked up the coffin on their shoulders and carried it out. She pitied Calvin, carrying his own son to the grave.

She followed along, blending in with the crowd, hoping no one would notice her, guess who she was, know that she was the one who’d failed to save him, that it was her fault. Outside, she watched the bearers load the coffin onto the hearse. Two old men helped Meredith into a black limousine. She wore a black coat and a big veil over a brimmed hat. They practically had to carry her.

Everybody got in their cars and turned on the engines and lights. Josie ducked below the dashboard and smoked a little of the joint she’d brought for afterward. She couldn’t wait, she needed it now, she would do her crying at home. There was lots of time, like the rest of her life.

The hearse began to move, and they followed it slowly up the manicured green of the hill, the rows of brass plaques under the deodars, a neat carpet of death. They wound up at the high-rent district—even here, the rich had their exclusive zone, an enclave marked by a low sandstone wall. They parked in the same order at the leafless curb. The earth smelled damp as she approached the sandstone enclosure. The grave was presided over by a line of cypresses, like in Van Gogh, the word
LOEWY
chiseled into a stone in the wall.

She took her place behind the other mourners outside the enclosure. She’d heard of a family plot, but hadn’t realized what it meant. His family was all buried here. The grandfather. A plot for Meredith and one for Michael, and room for husbands and wives and children. It had always been here. He’d grown up knowing there was a grave waiting for him. It was part of being a Loewy. She shuddered in the cold sun. He’d known where he was going to end up. The pyre was just a fantasy. Whatever he did, he couldn’t have escaped this rectangular hole in the ground, this pile of dirt covered by its blanket of Astroturf. If she’d married him, she would be buried in there, and if they’d had a baby, their child too. There was some
ming
for you. There was some fucking destiny.

But there was no marriage, no child. No more Loewys. And she would be shipped back to Bakersfield or God knew what. Never with Michael, never again.

A few folding chairs waited under a canopy. The old men helped Meredith to a seat. The bearers slid the box from the long car and carried it awkwardly, to the stand by the hole. She wondered that such old men could carry something so heavy, but maybe they knew how. Calvin slipped, but he righted himself. Her heart was crushing in. Just when she thought things would turn out right for them. She had loved him, but not enough. Not enough to stop it.

She watched Meredith in her black coat and pearls in the brilliant sunlight, wondering just how far she could see behind that black veil. She hoped not very far. Josie stood behind an old woman in a mink coat, making herself as small as she could. If she could just get through this morning, this hour.

In the distance, the long chain of mountains—Santa Susanas, Verdugos, San Gabriels—gleamed all the way to Baldy. It was so wrong. It should be pissing down rain, they should be cowering under umbrellas, each in his private shelter, every head bowed. Not basking under a brilliant blue sky. The old rabbi stood by the grave and read another prayer. He spoke about
may God give the family strength, let them find comfort in You and our love for them
yadda yadda. Nothing about pity, or despair. They got the coffin on the lift, and lowered the black box into the grave. She felt her heart compressed with each moment of descent, like a car being crushed at the junkyard, the breaking of glass, the popping of metal. Suddenly Meredith ran to the grave, like she was going to jump in. They grabbed her and she crumpled, weeping. They lifted her up, her legs muddy and stained with grass. They tried to hand her a trowel with some dirt to throw in, but she wouldn’t touch it.

Then one by one, each of them was given a white rose by a young man holding a bucket, they passed the grave and threw it in. Josie kept her eyes down as she took her rose and walked to the grave, trying to blend in. Then she heard Meredith scream, “Oh Christ, not her!”

Stoned, she pretended she hadn’t heard, all she wanted to do was throw in this rose,
I’m so sorry, Michael,
but strong hands turned her. Meredith’s face was inches from her own, a huge face, veiled, it blotted out the world, the wild eyes, whites on four sides, the big teeth bared, and she was ripping the rose out of Josie’s hand, the woman’s gloved fingers around her throat, those pianist’s hands, crazy strong. She couldn’t breathe. Meredith’s eyes were getting bigger and bigger, she shook Josie by the neck the way a dog shakes a rat. “How dare you! Why are you alive? How can you be alive when he’s dead?”

If this was India and there was a sandalwood pyre, she would have thrown herself in. And this paper she’d become would have caught fire, and she and Michael could sail away like two birds. Men in suit sleeves pried Meredith off, and then someone hustled Josie away, a man with his arm around her, as Meredith screamed, “How dare she come here, how dare she!”

Josie stumbled on her high heels, over the graves, on the uneven grass, her throat burning where the gloved hands had squeezed. She had no doubt Meredith could have finished her off right there, in front of everyone. And yet, she was right. It was what she deserved. She hadn’t saved him, she shouldn’t be here.

“Are you all right?” the man asked.

She nodded, crying, barely able to stand, her nose running, her hands shaking as she groped through her purse for a cigarette. She found one and put it in her mouth, but where was the lighter? Suddenly one appeared, a flame, big hands sheltering it.

It was the father, Calvin Faraday.

“Don’t blame her,” he said. “It’s just so damn hard.”

She clung to her cigarette with a trembling hand, as the men at the grave shoveled dirt over the most original human being she’d ever know. “I loved him too,” she managed to choke out.

“I know you did,” Calvin Faraday said. “But I’d skip the house if I were you.”

Josie nodded, glad that there was someone who didn’t hate her. Calvin Faraday reached into the pocket of his jacket and pulled out a handkerchief. She wiped her nose and her eyes with it, then didn’t know whether to hand it back, it was black with mascara.

“Keep it,” he said. He pulled out his wallet, and for a second she wondered if he was going to give her some money. But he took out a business card, wrote something on the back with a fat pen. “I’m staying at the Marmont. Give me a call, I’d like to talk.”

Calvin Faraday. What would Michael think? She said yes, she would call, that she’d like to talk. How would Michael feel, if he knew the sense of relief that there was a man, a grown-up man, who could protect her from those accusations? He would be furious, but he wasn’t here. She could feel the bruises from Meredith’s grip on her throat. She got into her car, pulled out of line, and went back down the hill all by herself, like a kid kicked out of class, humiliated and free.

4

Cal

S
he didn’t change when she got home. She just took a Valium Pen had left for her and sat on the porch off the kitchen, drinking voddy from the bottle, watching the hills opposite and the ones beyond that, and the Verdugos to the north all clear as a postcard. Michael was dead and the sun was still shining. She let the smoke from her ciggie rise, hoping he could smell it, and remember. But Paris was gone. There was no Blaise or little Jeanne. They would never live on one of those houseboats, growing papyrus on tire rafts in the Seine. Never sit out on its deck, her head on his shoulder, as the water slapped against the side of the boat, and the lights from the bridges came on.

She didn’t remember falling asleep, but woke to find her cigarette burned out in her fingers, her face cold and briny, the shadows grown long. The phone was ringing. She stumbled inside, and grabbed it.

“Hello, Josie? It’s Cal.”

Cal? Cal Worthington and his dog Spot? It was all she could think of, a used-car salesman who wore a cowboy hat and walked an alligator on a leash. “Who?”

“Cal Faraday. Michael’s father.”

Cal. Cal Faraday.
The Great Man. The GM, as Michael used to call him. How the fuck did he get her number? She pressed her thin fingers to her lips. Of course. It was Michael’s number. Of course he knew it. Her fingers felt like someone else’s fingers, a child skeleton’s. She felt like she was in a Buñuel movie. First you were strangled by a world-famous pianist, and then Calvin Faraday called you up on the phone. What was next, ants crawling out of a Buñuel hand?

“I’m just leaving Meredith’s. Gotta be back here at six to sit shivah. Goy boy like me. But I’d like to talk. Mind a visitor?”

“I guess.” What did he want to talk about? On the windowsill, the little pipecleaner circus Michael made last Christmas paraded, the tumbling clowns, the dancing dog.

“So, where are you?” Sounds on the line.

“Echo Park,” she said. Something so funereal in that word, she’d never noticed it before.
Echo.
The death of a sound that had nowhere to go but come back.

“Give me ten minutes.” A crusty voice, not deep, sandy and western. She kept thinking he was a New Yorker but that was just where he lived. He was from Oregon, some one-horse town on the coast. “Just tell me where.”

Josie looked around the shack. It was clean, but it smelled sinister, like fear, like death. “You know Sammy’s Lotus Room?” A drunk bar on Sunset, so tacky it was camp, in the bend where Echo Park took a turn toward Chinatown.

“I’ll be there,” he said, and hung up.

She was slow in getting ready, with the booze and the downer, and also reluctant, she didn’t know what she had to say to Calvin Faraday. She changed into leggings and boots, the scarred leather jacket, souvenir of the day she thought was the worst. Though she was learning there was always worse than that. She washed the makeup from her face, she didn’t want Calvin Faraday to think she wanted to impress him, that she gave a damn what he thought. On the way, she parked illegally in front of Gala’s Liquors on Echo Park Avenue and ran in for a pack of Gauloises. She’d laughed at Michael when he’d started ordering them. She’d been so sure a crap liquor store would not stock French cigarettes just because you asked. The shock every time she went in, and there they were. She was used to taking the world as it was, she’d never have guessed you could get what you wanted by asking for it.

She drove down Sunset, past the Chinese market to Sammy’s, but she didn’t get out, just sat in the car and played the Germs, “Going Down,” smoked a joint and waited until she saw a rental-looking white Chevy drive past and make the U-turn, park by the curb. It was four in the afternoon, the light already bleeding away. Cal Faraday emerged, wearing the same wrinkled trench coat she had seen in the morning. He took a look at the Lotus Room and untied his necktie, rolled it and stuck it in his pocket.

She gave him another minute, then crossed the street.

Inside it was dark, the few local drunks hunched over dollar well drinks at the bar, looking like they grew out of their stools like mold, watching the news with the sound off. The new Pres, Ronald Reagan, with his plastic-wig hair and idiot’s smile, waved to reporters and pretended he couldn’t hear their questions. In a booth by the wall, a Chinese couple sat cheek to cheek, giggling, their table full of glasses with umbrellas. The woman wore one in her hair. The jukebox played “Bali Ha’i.” A trio of punk rockers conspired in a corner over their breakfast of longneck Buds. There was no waitress this time of day, only Willie Woo, the Chinese bartender.

Calvin Faraday sat at the bar, his head in his hands.

She slid onto the stool next to him. He was drinking something brown on the rocks. Bourbon, she thought.
Jack Daniel’s and make it a double.

“Vodka tonic,” she told Willie Woo.

“You got ID?” he said, sharp, like he always did.

She pulled out her fake ID, he squinted at it in the weak bar light, it was no better than it ever was. She would be twenty-one next summer, but it wouldn’t mean shit by then. Without Michael, it would just be another empty day that roared like a shell you put up to your ear. Willie poured her drink. She lit a Gauloise and put the blue pack on the bar.

“Nice place,” Calvin Faraday said.

“I like it,” she said. “It looks as shitty as I feel.”

Willie slammed the drink in front of her, spilling some on the bar.

So, the famous father. She could feel him watching her, his eyes astonishingly blue. She could tell he was trying to put her and Michael together in his mind. Maybe in bed.
This is the girl my son chose.
She let him look. Men never judged her as harshly as women did. Her torn jacket, her boots, her silvery hair and dark eyes, her solemn face with its downturned mouth. She knew what he saw.

“It’s not your fault. You just walked in on a bad situation,” Calvin Faraday said. “Michael had issues you can’t begin to imagine.”

Bullshit she couldn’t. He’d been obsessed with Calvin Faraday, for one thing. The big-deal writer, on the track of guerrillas in Burma and four-toed wombats in the Amazon. She tried her drink. Like all the drinks at the Lotus Room it was cheap and weak and tasted like soap. “What’s shivah?” she asked.

He cradled his drink in his weathered hands. His forearms under the rolled sleeves of his blue and white striped shirt looked strong, snaked with veins, and awfully tan for midwinter. “Every night for a week, they get ten men to go pray at the house. Really just sit around and kibitz, but it’s not such a bad idea.” Calvin Faraday tilted the brown liquid in the tumbler. “Keeps the bereaved occupied.”

As if he was not one of the bereaved. As if she was not. But the shivah wasn’t helping her at all. “I didn’t think Meredith was religious.”

“The doctor gave her a shot. She’s down for the count.” Michael’s father glanced up at some mullah glowering over his beard on TV. “It doesn’t matter. It happens, she doesn’t have to do anything. It’s her old man’s friends. They’ve been through this a few times.”

Those old men. She liked men, men who knew what to do, who took care of things when bad shit happened. Men like her father, like Calvin Faraday. She never told Michael that, only that once. She hated to admit it, but it was the truth. And it was the one thing he was no good at.

Cal twirled his drink with a stout finger. His father’s hands weren’t anything like Michael’s. Michael had Michelangelo hands, you could cry just to look at them. His father’s were wide and strong and crooked, with hair on the backs of the fingers. Hands that could hold a shovel, flatten somebody’s nose. She could see Michael in the shape of the forehead and the straight thick eyebrows, but the father’s skin was rough—bad acne as a teen—and his gray hair grew wiry, not soft and dark. Still, they both had the same bony hero’s face, the square jaw, the stubborn sailor’s look.

The father held his glass between his two big hands, as if trying to warm them. “He called me that last day.” His head hung limply over his knuckly hands, he looked like he was praying. “I didn’t get the message.” He pressed his heavy hand to his face.

She couldn’t believe Michael had called his father, who never did shit for him. When he hadn’t called her. It sliced right through her, like the little egg slicer Gommer Ida used, a wire contraption that cut the white flesh and yellow heart into clean bare rounds. He had called this asshole, whom he hated, and not her? Was that what Cal came here to tell her? That in the end, she just hadn’t meant that much to him? Or was it the contrary, to prove he’d still been important. She could see Cal was waiting for her to say something, but she was such a bad actress, she never said her lines right, it was something perverse in her nature. And what was her line anyway? No, it’s not your fault, Cal? You were a bang-up dad. Always there when he needed you. That’s why he went and shot himself in the head. Yeah, if only you had been there.
When were you ever there, asshole? You left him all to me. All you people. What was I supposed to do, I’m not one of you. I didn’t know about how to deal with your son.
But he’d called the father he hated, in Kuala Lumpur. Not her.

“I just got back to my hotel when the call came from the consulate,” Cal said, drinking his bourbon, rattling the ice. “I almost didn’t make it in time, they had to hold the plane in Singapore.”

Josie’d never been to Kuala Lumpur, to Singapore or even San Francisco. Why was it supposed to be more tragic if they had to get on a plane? The way Meredith used to call him from South Africa or Beijing. The gods landing for a moment. “So what did you want to talk to me about, your travel arrangements?”

He looked at her differently then, a narrower gaze. Revamping his impression. She wasn’t such a nice girl after all. He gazed down into his drink as if it was a crystal ball. “I just wanted to talk. You know, get to know each other.”

She waited for him to say more. He obviously didn’t want to get to know her, there wasn’t that much to know. It had to be something else.

“He talked about you, you know,” Cal said.

He’d talked about her with Calvin Faraday? “Yeah? When was that?”

“He called me sometimes. Just to shoot the bull.”

He’d been talking to his father. Behind her back. What else? He could drive and he was talking to his dad, what the fuck else didn’t she know? It’s not like she would’ve minded, but why hide it from her? Or was this all just some kind of mind trip Cal Faraday was cooking up? “He never called you. I paid the bills, I know.”

“He called collect. I didn’t mind. Hell, I was ecstatic he was talking to me again.”

She exhaled deeply, tried to steady herself, sipped her rotten drink. “What’d he talk about?”

“You. A lot about you. Said you were original. Smart. He loved you. I never heard him talk like that about a girl. About anyone for that matter.” Cal pressed his cold glass to the middle of his forehead, rolling it from side to side.

If only she could believe it. People who loved you didn’t go off and kill themselves and leave you stranded by the side of the road like some junked car. They believed in their love. They believed that even if things didn’t go well, even if things looked like crap for a while, you could hang in there, love was worth hanging around for.
Smart. Original.
Who would ever think such a thing about her again? Tyrell, survivor of the end of the world, along with the cockroaches. The only person who could have seen something like that in her was dead.

“I was glad when he said he had a girlfriend, a real girlfriend, not one of his hyperintellectual Harvardettes, sitting around trading Kierkegaard for Nietzsche and raise you one.”

What hyperintellectual Harvardettes? She wanted to grab him by the lapels and scream,
What Harvardettes?
He had never told her about a girlfriend at Harvard.
He was a virgin, for Christ’s sake.
She thought of the way he trembled . . .
But he had learned so fast.
God. Had it all been an act? Why bother pretending you were a goddamn virgin if you weren’t? Was he just having a good laugh at her? What else didn’t she know about him?

“You were good for him, Josie, just what he needed.”

Good for him? Just what he needed?
This was how good she was,
HE WAS FUCKING DEAD
. Maybe he should have kept to his fucking Harvardettes. Though she knew exactly what Cal meant, that crass masculine wisdom. Meaning a girl who put out. Clear up his acne and whatnot.

“You were real,” Cal said. “He liked that a lot. Said your dad drives a tow truck.”

“Owns a tow operation,” Josie mumbled, unsure she could trust her own voice.

“Listen, mine was a fisherman, out of Coos Bay, Oregon. I was no student prince.” Josie knew all about him. First in his family to go to college, and to Harvard at that, full scholarship. Fisherman, logger, hunting guide, bouncer in a nightclub yadda yadda, it was all on the jacket copy. The things Michael so envied. Those battered hands said it all. “Michael was so tired of the air up in Meredithville.” He nodded to the north, through the wall and up to Los Feliz, the great house on Vista del Mar. “He wanted to live like a man.” What his father didn’t know about Michael could have filled an encyclopedia. His wet eyes so blue against the reddened whites, like the flag. “Poor bastard just didn’t know how.” He shook the ice in his glass.

“Why didn’t you show him?” Josie said, the bitter smoke curling from her child’s fingers into the light of the TV set. “Why didn’t you do something?”

Cal hung his great head, the burly shoulders, like a defeated bull. “That talks easier than it plays. He was a competitive son of a bitch. And loyal. To her. You know what they were like.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, as if he was about to say something more and then thought better of it.

She did know, but she wasn’t going to tell Cal that. She wasn’t going to tell him shit. “I only saw them together once. When he told her he was moving in with me. That we’d rented a place together.”

Cal Faraday stared at the bottles behind the bar, his blue eyes watering, a smile playing around his worn mouth. “God, I would have loved to see that. The storming of the Bastille.
Vive la Liberté.
” A tear dripped down his cheek, stubble-dotted, he brushed at it absently.