Rainey Royal (13 page)

“I don’t know,” says Rainey. “I just know what happened.”

“If I talk to him right now, will I see fingernail gouges on his face?”

Radmila says softly, “Howard. She said he forced her.”

Howard lies back with his hands under his head. “I believe there was rough play,” he says. “I’m so sorry you were hurt, baby girl. Can your father offer some perspective?” The blanket jumps as he scratches a calf with his foot. “Can I?” he says gently, as if she were still waiting with a limp bird. “Radmila, don’t you need a glass of water?”

“Why would I need a glass of water?” says Radmila.

“Because you’re dying of thirst,” says Howard. “Go.” Radmila shrugs, gets out of bed naked, picks up Howard’s T-shirt from a chair, and puts it on. When she has slipped past Rainey and started padding downstairs, Howard says, “When I was a boy, my babysitter—”

“I don’t want to hear this.”

“Oh, you can tell your old dad about Damien, but I can’t tell you my story? What is that? Listen,” says Howard. “I was
about nine, and she got me all mixed up about sex and pain and whether I could walk away. Sex, if you can call it that, went on for two years. Crazy, huh? So I know exactly how signals get crossed.”

Rainey squints, trying to keep certain images out of focus. “There was no signal,” she says. “I told him we could talk.”

“Maybe he misunderstood your cues,” says Howard. “Maybe what you are experiencing now is called regret.”

He reaches over and palms something on his nightstand, and Rainey hears the tiny tambourine sound of a pill bottle being shaken.

“Regret?” says Rainey. “You think what I’m experiencing now is called regret?”

“Sweet baby girl,” says Howard, “take a Seconal. Sleep. Tell me how you are in the morning.”

Rainey does not take a Seconal. She closes the door. Magnificent. Howard’s beautiful boy has said it. Magnificent is how she will be in the morning. She walks up two flights of stairs to Damien’s tiny room, bangs his door open so it shudders on its hinge, and turns on his light. “Sit up,” she says, as he blinks at her from the narrow bed. “You have to listen to me.”

She will stand on the townhouse stoop, the flaps of her torn gown open. Snowflakes will rise beneath the streetlights. Cold air will scrub her clean.

KEEP MY HANDS FROM STEALING

Rainey locks herself into the ladies’ room of the Madison Gardens coffee shop, not far from the Met. It’s perfect: a little bathroom for one. She slings her heavy pack over the doorknob and pulls out a glass pillar candle she decorated herself for Saint Cath.

Lights the candle, wobbly on the sink, with her last cardboard match. Strips off the T-shirt she stayed up all night in. Slicks under her arms with soap.

Cath, I need five minutes in this grotty bathroom
. She slips a plastic razor from a pocket of her pack.
You can do that. And let old Mr. Lipschitz love my work, and let him maybe give me a place to live and let him have, like, zero libido
.

She shaves the left pit. Someone rattles the knob.

Rainey cruises through the right pit, leans over the sink, and washes her hair with the green bathroom soap. This is
what she wants Mr. Lipschitz to smell: soap and tea-rose oil. Not leather jacket and sweat. Not that she left the townhouse unshowered at five in the morning after a fight with her father, who had just returned from playing a gig.

Last night she found an older girl sprawled on her pink bed, making actual jazz come out of Rainey’s junior-high flute. The girl’s enormous duffel was propped against the dressing table. This kind of shit was always Howard’s doing. Rainey’s eighteen, but this girl looked halfway into her twenties. She wouldn’t leave, so Rainey waited up for Howard till almost sunrise. He came home with an arm draped around Reba, who had bongos between her legs in Union Square till Howard lured her indoors.

His fingertips dangled low.

“The casa’s a little full, sweetheart,” he said when Rainey demanded her room to herself. “Grab a sleeping bag. Or duke it out.” His middle finger brushed Reba’s nipple, and a spark flew out and caught Rainey in the eye.

The knob of the ladies’ room turns again. Rainey has an interview in twenty minutes—she looked at the restaurant clock—with an old man who might commission a tapestry.

“Hang
on
,” she says. She ties a turquoise scarf around her wet hair and slicks Vaseline on her eyelids and lips. Shine, she loves shine. Men have eyed the shine on her since she was a kid. They are, all of them, so full of shit. But this is not a problem she would bring to Saint Catherine of Bologna. Cath scorned temptation and the worldly state. She was all about the art.

Loud knocking. “Hello, there are three of us out here?” Rainey had cut ahead of a lady in slingbacks, and right through the paint-chipped door she can see her, how her hat matches her gloves. On the Upper East Side it is the hour of church; it is the hour of brunch. Rainey skipped dinner, and she is too broke for breakfast. And she’s forgotten her perfume.

Without perfume she’s stripped of her powers. She passes her wrists quickly over the candle flame, prays,
Saint Cath, anoint me. I make you all these pretty things
. It’s true, Cath could perfume her own flesh from molecules of nothing, a miracle she performed after death instead of rotting, and Rainey believes she smelled of tea rose, the scent of mothers.

New knock. Male. Some serious knuckle in it.

“What?” she says. “I’m not feeling too well.”

Brilliant—in a coffee-shop bathroom, not feeling well means junkie; it means needles jamming the plumbing. She swipes on deodorant, lifts one foot to the sink, starts dry-shaving her leg—and accidentally rocks the glass-pillar candle. It falls with dreamlike lassitude, then explodes. Shrapnel everywhere.

Hard banging, and a male voice. “Whatever dope you’re doing in there, sister, you got five seconds before this door opens.”

In five seconds she opens it herself. She’s wearing a low-necked, gauzy black tee on which she’s painted the face of Saint Cath in gold.
Be resplendent
, she thinks. Glass parings
glitter at her feet. Her lips part. Her eyelids shine, and she stares at the manager. His eyes flare with a look that needs one of those long German names that would mean something like anger braided with lust.

“Scram,” he says.

He reaches for her arm, and she tries to wrench away, but he escorts her past a line of staring women and out into the sun.

F
ROM THE LIVING ROOM
of the Lipschitz apartment, she hears a door close far off with a chocolaty thump. She hears footfalls that speak of Persian carpets. It’s Fifth Avenue. To get this far, she’s been scrutinized by two doormen, an elevator man, the housekeeper.

The man who limps into the room is thin and angular as a branch snapped off a winter tree. His eyes are ice blue. He catches her in deliberate scrutiny of a little Impressionist landscape hanging by a grand piano—as bare as her father’s, which she knows better than to even brush against. She’s chosen the landscape because it hangs in a place of honor. “You’re the artist?” he says in some kind of accent.

She forces herself not to brush invisible leaves from her skirt, takes a measured half second to tear herself from the painting, and beams at him. He holds an ebony cane topped with a silver dog’s head whose nose thrusts through his fist. He’s dressed up—a suit, a tie. Church and brunch again, though with a name like Lipschitz, who knows about church.

“I brought a sample of my work,” she says.

She opens her army pack, which in this peach-colored room has all the presence of a burlap sack, and pulls out a white satin bag. The bag is cinched shut with a black grosgrain ribbon, voluptuously tied, and holds something the size of a gallon of milk. She cradles it in two hands like an offering, and waits. Inhaling, she smells tea-rose oil wafting from her wrists. Cath is restoring her powers.

He looks at her with startled gray eyes as if surprised to find a girl in his apartment, wet hair trailing down as if she’d walked in from the sea.

“Vonnie Gardner says you want to take a scissors to Eleanor’s things,” he says.

But he knew. He asked her to come. He saw the tapestry she designed and sewed for his friend Mrs. Gardner, and examined it a long time where it hung on the wall. Mrs. Gardner wrote this to Rainey in a letter, which she found stepped on in the West Tenth Street foyer. Mrs. Gardner wrote that Mr. Lipschitz seemed to examine aspects of her late husband in all the intersections of the tapestry, in the buttons and fabrics, in the photograph fragments stitched down with gold thread, in the cuff links and snippets of shirting—collar points and even buttonholes—worked with exquisite neatness into a pattern of Rainey’s own devising. Rainey loves patterns, she loves kaleidoscopes, she loves butterfly wings arranged in mandalas under glass, and she loves rose windows in cathedrals, all the intricate designs of nature and man that make a closed system.

“Allen looked at it so long,” Mrs. Gardner wrote, “I offered him your name. It took him a while to understand that I was talking about memorializing Eleanor.”

Rainey’s stomach makes an inappropriate noise.

“Mr. Lipschitz,” she says, “I won’t cut up any materials you don’t desire me to use.” She lets the words
desire me
hang in the air with the dust motes, but they don’t seem to register. “This is a tapestry I made for another gentleman. May I open it?”

She follows him into the dining room, extracts the rolled-up cloth from its white silk sleeve, and unfurls it on a table of inlaid wood: her pattern on his pattern. Mr. Lipschitz stands near her, lean and old and elegant in his black suit.

Rainey wonders what that fine, dark wool would look like in a tapestry. She never says
memory quilt
, though she thinks it. She says
two months, roughly
, and
five hundred dollars
. When the right moment comes, she will ask to work where the beloved lived. If the person is rich, she might ask about an extra bedroom. If the person is rich and lonely, it can be a balm and a novelty to have a young artist stay.

R
AINEY KNOWS THE SECRET
of stepping very, very close to a man without actually moving her body, and she does that now. She sniffs: he smells nothing like an old man, rather a bit like eucalyptus. Eleanor must have chosen it. She wonders if he is aware of his own patterns: the mosaic of book spines behind glass doors; a bracelet of landscape paintings circling
the room. Around the table, the backs of dining chairs swoop and curve in heartlike shapes.

The tapestry, which she borrowed back from a widower on Park Avenue, is less than a yard square but heavy. It’s made from a few hundred diamond-shaped cuttings of florals and pastels. Prints spiral loosely down the center, while solid colors stream toward the edges. Rainey does all her sewing by hand—she tells people the feel of the fabric helps guide her through the work—and this is true, but it is also true that her mother’s sewing machine is broken. At many points where the diamonds of fabric meet, she has stitched buttons, pearls, the face of a ladies’ watch freed from its band and glass, an Eiffel Tower charm, a tiny key, a Victorian locket, snippets from old photographs, their edges pierced by the points of the finest needles.

But it is the center of the piece that draws the eye back: part of a small wedding photo in black and white. She has carefully torn the edge to deckle it and sewn it to the tapestry using mouse-stitches.

“Your wife’s tapestry might be simpler. It depends on what you tell me about her, what’s in her closet and jewelry box.”

“And I would do with it what?”

“It’s a work of art. It hangs on the wall. You look at it and remember. If it were me, I’d light a candle in front of it.”

Mr. Lipschitz fingers one of the pearls.

“It’s good you’re doing that,” she says. “They get dull if no
one touches them. The oil on your fingers makes them glow. Did your wife wear pearls?”

He pulls his hand back.

“A Yahrzeit candle you light once a year, Miss Royal.”

Lighting a candle once a year, that’s nothing. When they dug Cath up after two and a half weeks and found her body still resilient, the nuns took her home to the cloister, cleaned her up, posed her in a chair, and lit candles at her feet. Five hundred years of nuns lighting maybe a million votives—that’s devotion. Not this Yahrzeit thing.