Rainey Royal (11 page)

In slow motion, she rolls out from under the arm and slithers out of bed.

She tugs her jeans on. She sees Irene watching her silently in the dark, blows her a fingertip kiss, and keeps dressing. She extracts her sketchbook from under the pillow and slips out of the room past Angeline Yost, whose throat is a flute, who has told her:
People throw money at me
. Who has shown her:
Some fires need to be set
.

H
ER FATHER CONFRONTS HER
in the townhouse parlor. “Four o’clock in the morning? Interesting, Daughter.”

They have arrived home at the same time. He and Gordy were coming from a club.

Rainey puts her face in her hands. She likes the view better that way, ever since Howard sent the paintings, the chandelier, and the Biedermeier secretary desk to Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, to raise cash.

“You knew I was at a sleepover,” she says.

“And what happened, a lover’s quarrel? Police raid the party? What sent you out in the street before dawn? No need to hide your face,” says Howard. She and her father sit in facing armchairs. “Look up, sweetheart.”

Her left wrist smells like tea-rose oil. Her mother trailed the scent through the house until she split, and Rainey still dabs it on every morning, between her toes and on her wrist. She plans on wearing tea-rose oil until she dies, whereupon she will leave instructions regarding the perfuming of her corpse.

From far upstairs comes laughter and music, the
twirp
of Radmila’s electric flute.

Rainey sends her softest voice out from between her fingers. It’s a voice she’s got down. “Gordy,” she says, “would you please make me a grilled cheese?” Gordy slides off the sofa arm with ironic obedience and goes into the kitchen.

“Whatever you were doing, don’t be embarrassed. We should be talking frankly. Look up, kiddo.”

Through her fingers she sees Howard relaxed and smiling, his long body slung diagonally in the armchair. Her father’s never touched her—it’s her fault she feels so bare in his presence, as if he were smiling and nodding right through her clothes. Relaxed, that’s how a chick should be, discussing sex with her father: casually slung.

“For Chrissake,” he says, and calls into the kitchen. “Tell her it’s 1974, Gordy.”

“It’s 1974, babe,” Gordy calls back. “You have a pretty hip father. Talk to him.”

“No one says
hip
,” says Rainey.

Howard shrugs. He pats the chair cushions, digs out something that appears to be bothering him—a recorder, of all things—looks at it in a puzzled way, and then toodles on it. It sounds wrong for him. When he stops playing he says, “So tell your old man exactly what you’ve been doing until four in the morning.”

“I was sleeping at a friend’s and I left.”

“Have I met him?”

“Her.”

“If it was a her,” says Howard coolly, “I don’t think you’d walk out at four in the morning. Not that you have a curfew. I’m not archaic.” He walks the recorder between his fingers. “They teach you the important things? How girls your age are approaching a biological peak?” When Howard talks about
girls your age
she wants to smash things. “It’s evolution,” he says.

Of course he would say this right as Gordy reappears. The plate clicks on the coffee table, and she smells the cheddar. She was starving, but now the smell makes her stomach clench. Far beneath it she smells Howard’s sandalwood oil. “Nourishment,” says Gordy. His hand moves her hair aside and parks on the nape of her neck. Howard says nothing. “Milk?”

“Coke.” Rainey tightens. She wants milk, but she doesn’t want Gordy saying the word. The hand goes away. She waits till she hears the kiss of the fridge and takes her face out of her hands. “You’re gross,” she tells her father.

“Guilty,” says Howard. He crams the recorder back between the chair cushions.

“Fuck you,” she says, and he laughs as if a child had said something clever.

“You
are
gross, Howard,” Gordy says, walking back from the kitchen with Rainey’s soda, and in that moment she thinks,
It’s only hair, it’s only stroking
, and she looks at him with relief.

Her father unslings himself from the chair and goes over to lean against the open piano. He drops a hand in and plucks at the wires without looking, creating an atonal melody that quickens Rainey’s breathing and irritates her. The truth is she doesn’t like jazz. Howard Royal’s daughter does not like jazz. He has tried to teach her about sixteenths and what it means to be on top of the beat or just behind it; he has played her the softly articulated notes called ghosts. But to her, his
music has about as much internal rhyme as a flock of birds flapping up startled from the sidewalk.

Rainey thinks about how the lunchroom at Urban Day goes silent in her ears when Andy Sak looks at her across all those tables, stares right past Tina and Angeline, past Leah hunkering over her tray. Forget 1974: he could be any young male out hunting who spots her gathering. Of course if it were a thousand years ago, they would probably converse about as much as they do now. Sometimes she loves Andy Sak and lets him do things and sometimes she ignores him for weeks.

She takes a bite of grilled cheese and propels herself off her chair. “You are such an asshole,” she tells her father.

Howard’s fingers strum the piano wires, and he laughs. “Welcome to my house, Daughter,” he says. “Where I get to be the reigning asshole.”

R
AINEY CUTS SCHOOL THE
next morning and goes to the Home on the Upper West Side where her grandmother Lala lives. It’s an emergency. She waves at the front desk staff without signing in. They are all old friends. She takes the elevator to three and walks into Lala’s room. They lock eyes and smile their privacy smile. “Look who’s here,” says Bethie, Lala’s private aide, “aren’t you a sweetheart,” and she moves off with heavy twitching hips to watch the other patient’s TV. The other patient is a wispy woman, half paralyzed and mute from stroke who can’t complain when Bethie changes the
channel. Lala pulls the plastic mask from her nose and mouth and nestles it down around her neck. “Dear heart,” she says.

Lala does not know about the sale of the oil paintings and the art deco and Biedermeier furniture. She is
adagissimo
, Howard says. Even Rainey knows that’s slow as a funeral. Lala left the townhouse weeping in an ambulette. No one moves out of West Tenth Street the normal way. Rainey’s grandfather, Pawpaw, who played jazz trombone, stayed away longer and longer on tour till finally he never came home. He is old and poor in Cincinnati now, still married to Lala on paper. Rainey’s mother got into a taxi at dawn, leaving behind her things and the scent of tea-rose oil. And Howard’s students depart furious or in tears when he has used them up.

But Rainey, Rainey will never go. West Tenth is hers. The house sits on its foundation and grips the concrete, and she will inherit it when Lala dies. Every time she visits, Lala says it. It is their ritual.

Last night Howard said,
Welcome to my house
.

“I’m making something new.” From her pack she extracts the beginning of a sculpture she has wrapped in a pillowcase—a pair of Lala’s fancy shoes from maybe the 1950s painted cobalt blue inside and out. She took the shoes from a carton in the basement and has started to adorn them with bits of vintage costume jewelry from Lala’s boxed-up things. What she doesn’t say is that she plans to glue them to the top of Lala’s girlhood Bible, and paint that, too.

“But those are mine.” Lala turns the half-encrusted shoes and looks at them from all sides. “Oh, my,” she says. “This is about me, isn’t it. You’re making art about your grandmother.” She looks at Rainey with shining eyes. “You know, honey, that house and everything in it will be yours when I’m gone.”

So it’s still true. Rainey kisses her grandmother’s parchment hand and says, “I’ll take good care of it, I swear.”

Lala used to float through the townhouse like a distracted queen. She wore long dresses the colors of Jordan almonds and beamed at the sexiest acolytes as if she had no idea they were anything more than Howard’s violinists and vibraphonists. Her bedroom, on the second floor overlooking the street, looked like the inside of a Fabergé egg. Rainey loved Lala’s room. She could never have imagined a time when Howard and his girl musicians would steam Scalamandré wallpaper off the walls, pull the canopy off the antique bed, and take down a French chandelier shaped like a purse.

Lala’s bedroom door had certain magical properties. It was as if brass sections in the parlor went mute for her when that latch clicked shut; it was as if Rainey’s mother stopped taking the stairs from Howard’s bedroom to Gordy’s and spending all that time on the roof. It was as if Gordy stopped slipping into Rainey’s room to tuck her in late at night.

It was as if Howard stopped living off Lala’s money.

Rainey’s door, on the other hand, was porous as silk. Horn and piano flowed through it like water. A mother could kiss
her, pass through it, and disappear. The door never even registered on Gordy Vine.

“I want Tina to live with me,” Rainey says. Tina has never said one judgmental word about the Gordy situation, has never said, for example,
What’s wrong with you—just tell him to get out of your room
.

“That’s very sweet,” says Lala.

“And I want Gordy to leave. He bothers me.” She waits to see if her grandmother has antennae when it comes to bothering.

Lala’s gaze becomes curiously focused, as if she is examining fine needlework.

“Fine, honey,” Lala says. “That’s between you and your father. Would you pour me some water?”

“Well, that’s the other thing,” says Rainey. She pours a cup of water from a pink plastic pitcher and pops in a straw. Lala waves it away. “I want Howard to go, too. If it’s my house, I want to be”—she has just heard about this, at school—“an emancipated minor.”

Lala struggles upright against the pillows. “Howard is an idiot,” she says vigorously, causing Bethie to look up. Rainey makes it halfway into a shocked laugh. “But he is also your father. Do you know what it means to inherit a house in trust?”

Rainey becomes sharply aware of the hum of things: the turned-down television and the blue corrugated tubes that jerk and sigh as a machine breathes into Lala’s mask. She
imagines the molecular slosh of Lala’s pee as it inches along the catheter. The sack of pee, nearly full, hangs dangerously close to Rainey’s leg.

“You can trust me with the house.” Rainey caresses Lala’s shiny nails, which Bethie polishes with opalescent Revlon polish. The image of Saint Cath, folded at the bottom of her pack, radiates light. “The house will save my life,” she says. With Tina as backup, Rainey might be strong enough to make Howard and Gordy move out. At least the acolytes and folding chairs would have to go.

Her grandmother says, “Howard is the trustee. He lives there. He buys the heating oil; he pays the taxes. If he sells the house, it’s for your benefit. For college, say.” Her grandmother smiles and closes long, crinkly eyelids; she looks sleepy. After a moment she says, “A girl needs a guiding hand till she is twenty-five.”

At twenty-five she’ll be watching Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet cart away the floorboards; they have already taken so much. She drops her grandmother’s hand. It creeps back to Lala’s breast like a daddy longlegs.

The gray day, through wet windows, leaches fluorescence from the room. Rainey suppresses a childhood desire to chew on her hair.

“You know he auctioned off the chandeliers?” she says.

Lala’s fingers interlace and stroke one another as if they were seeking comfort.

“You know he sold the Biedermeier secretary?”

Bethie drifts over. “Stop upsetting your grandmother, honey.”

“Does she look upset?” As far as Rainey’s concerned, Lala has closed the bedroom door in her head. “She’s fine.”

“I don’t know,” says Bethie.

“He’ll be a lousy trustee,” Rainey says fiercely. Heating oil she figures she can live without, and taxes—she is sixteen, who is going to make her pay taxes? “Make me the trustee, Lala.”

Lala’s breathing becomes shallow. “Howard is your
father
.”

“I warned you,” says Bethie. She sashays to Lala’s side and pulls the mask back over her mouth and nose. Lala and the machine breathe in slow harmony.

“Howard is an asshole,” says Rainey.

Bethie’s entire body takes on the attitude of one who has been slapped.

“Dear heart.” Lala, breathless, lifts the mask. “Howard is only trustee of the house. A girl must always be her own trustee.”

S
HE TRUDGES TO THE
subway. She murmurs it.
Be trustee of her own self; be trustee of the house that is her person
. She steps, distracted, onto the IRT local. Don’t confuse the house of her self with a parlor once lit by a chandelier—a room where plaster cherubs now hold hands around bare bulbs and watch over her from wide, dusty eyes.

Her father has instructed her as to her assets. Among her
debits: like most Americans, she hears disharmony when she listens to jazz. It is a failure of ear, imagination, and heart. “Though at least you’re not one of those people who says”—his voice rising into a falsetto—“ ‘Oh, play me something,’ and then talks right through it.”