Rainey Royal (15 page)

His gaze sweeps up and down her body, but to her surprise it lingers on her face. He seems to be searching for something. She can almost feel his throat constrict.

“The hair is wrong,” he finally says. “Can you pin it?”

She hopes he isn’t forgetting about the tapestry and the five hundred dollars, but this is interesting. Presumably this Eleanor had a normal mother who braided her hair and tucked her in at night. Presumably this Eleanor never felt like her father was smiling at her through her clothes. She stands straight so he can see her figure—it’s clear from the photo that Eleanor Lipschitz had that happening, too—and braids the damp strands slowly, planning to twine them around and coil them up. Mr. Lipschitz consumes the small movements of her fingers. She bets he loved watching these little rituals.

She doesn’t mean to talk, but it comes out. “My mother used to braid my hair.” This is true—she remembers slim, quick hands working behind her, and her mother’s thin soprano—but it is also true that Linda hated the detangling that came first and finally abdicated the whole post-bath scene, which then fell to the solicitous Gordy. He would put down his trumpet as if there were no job more important than combing the wet hair of a little girl, inch by tangled inch.

After which he would smooth the hair down her back again and again with his fingers before the braiding could begin.

A tiny sardonic laugh escapes her nose.

She better watch it; she might break the spell.

“Will you put on the watch, please, Miss Royal? No—the diamond watch.”

The watch glitters like it wants to get Rainey in trouble. Her grandmother Lala once had a watch like this. Her father probably sent it to Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, with the chandeliers.

“Is it too much”—Mr. Lipschitz sounds like he has a piece of cracker in his throat—“to ask you to sit in that chair and look out the window?”

Is it too much? Is it too
much
? To sit at a window, like Eleanor, who got to keep her blue room? She takes her seat in a blue armchair, leans forward, and looks down at Central Park. She watches a lady steer a baby carriage into a playground with pyramids and stop at a green bench. Mr. Lipschitz lowers himself onto the edge of the bed. Rainey feels herself studied, though not in the way she is used to. Under his eye she feels like an object of great beauty. She senses rather than sees his gaze stop at her glittering wrist.

“A wedding gift,” he says.

It seems better not to speak. A faint scent clings to the rose silk blouse. She leans back as she thinks Eleanor might have, arranging herself for a photographer, and fingers the dark pearls as if her mind were elsewhere. She knows her
bust is stunning, and she knows she has this in common with Eleanor. Once she glances at Mr. Lipschitz—Allen—and quickly away. It is an intimate act, the way he’s staring at her. Or maybe he is staring past her, at the edges of her, to blur the image so the similarities sharpen.

Finally he says, “Use anything you want except the jewelry and watches. They are my daughter’s. I’ll talk to her. The maid will give you a key.”

With help from his cane, he stands. But instead of leaving, he sets the cane on the bed. His palms turn toward her, helpless. Around them the room has deepened almost to sapphire. She feels a curious desire to slip the black pearls back into their dark suede bag and clasp the white strands around her neck instead.

“Miss Royal.”

“I need the pearls.” She rises to face him.

He lifts his hands very slightly; she sees the tremor of age. “Miss Royal.”

“I need the pearls to make the tapestry.”

“One time,” he says. “For one minute. Never again.”

“Not
all
the pearls,” she says carefully. “Your daughter can remake the strands from what’s left. But your wife is in those pearls.”

She looks at him, both bent and straight, elegant in his suit, his body spare. His face is wrinkled, but his eyes shine dark and frank. He wants something physical, which makes her wary, but he does not precisely want
her
.

“Think about it,” she says, and goes to him. She puts her arms loosely around him. With his arms he encircles her waist lightly, as if they were about to dance. She holds him so only their shoulders make contact and smells his clean, eucalyptus scent, and he allows the side of his head to touch the side of hers, and she wonders what it must have felt like to love this man. Like living in a sanctuary, with a steady supply of roast-beef sandwiches. Is it true there is infidelity in every marriage, as her father once said at one of her parents’ parties? She would like to think that he is wrong as she stands in Mr. Lipschitz’s arms. They hold each other tentatively but firmly. Their letting go, when it happens, has a slight resistance to it.

Closing his eyes, he thanks her.

“Wait,” says Rainey.

Mr. Lipschitz sways. Rainey takes the ebony cane from the bed and puts the dog head in his hand.

She could give him something from Eleanor, right now. She moves piles of clothing from the bed to the floor and lies down, kicking the high heels off. “Okay,” she says. Mr. Lipschitz seems deep in meditation, as if studying the floor through his eyelids. “You can lie next to me if you want,” she says. She can’t say
in my arms
; instead she says
for a little while
.

He opens his eyes and stops swaying. “Miss Royal,” he says, “I don’t want any nonsense.”

“I hate nonsense,” says Rainey. “I hate nonsense more than you.”

He sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes. His socks are tissue thin and look expensive and clean and have no odor. He lies flat on the coverlet beside her and looks at the canopy as if he were offering himself up to death.

“Ellie,” he says.

“Allen.”

“Allie.”

“Allie, give that artist girl my pearls.”

“Please,” he says. “You look like her. You don’t sound like her.”

She takes his hand.

Silence blossoms under the blue-canopy sky. Lying beside him, on her back, Rainey feels his skin cool and dry in hers; she feels the elegant length of his fingers, his knucklebones in their little sacks of flesh. She finds the warm wedding band and rotates it, and he lets her. She senses the molten glow of the black pearls from the pile of clothes on the floor. In her mind she begins Eleanor’s tapestry. It will be bright around the outside with floral colors, but the center will be a full, shadowed moon of dark fabrics: the woman’s private, lunar self.

“My wife had a faultless ear for piano,” he says, still looking up at the canopy. “If she heard it, she could play it.”

Rainey turns on her side so she can see him better. When their eyes meet he closes his. Is he embarrassed, or preserving the illusion of Eleanor? The lids are faintly blue, and when she touches them, her fingertips detect the darting motions of tiny fish.

“She played chamber music three days a week,” he says, as if her fingers were not on his eyelids. “But we had our daughter, Joan. I said,
A mother does not work
.” He clasps his free hand to his forehead, headache-style. “She never played again.”

Rainey looks around at the cornflower silk. She will razor some cuttings off the back of the curtain hem, where nobody will see.

She moves closer and puts her head on his chest. His heart beats with astonishing persistence. She had thought he would smell something like Lala, who traveled in an envelope of powder and old age. Does he pick up the scent of Eleanor’s blouse? She rubs the ancient-looking hand. His skin slips easily across the tendons. She examines him closely. Beneath the surface of his face she perceives the outline of his skull.

“Ellie,” says Mr. Lipschitz, “You remember Friday nights?”

“I think so.” She sees his eyelashes gleam.

Rainey blinks rapidly. What is there to cry about? She thinks hard about things that will happen next. She will eat roast-beef sandwiches every day at noon and drink milk from a glass nearly soap-bubble thin. She will finish the tapestry before Mr. Lipschitz, too, leaves this planet empty handed. Every morning she will light a candle to Saint Cath in her white room, and some afternoons she will wear Chanel and sit in the slipper chair, watching children at the pyramids in the park. On the blue coverlet, for Allen Lipschitz, she will
be memory, and she will be flesh; she will be eighty, and she will be eighteen.

He opens his eyes. “How should I feel?” He murmurs it almost to himself.

Rainey kneels above him without letting go of his hand.

She looks down directly into his beautiful striated irises and lowers her mouth, which is dry, very lightly onto his. Their lips and tongues do not move. Their gazes connect, and with no nonsense whatsoever they hold quite still.

After about ten seconds she straightens.

“You should feel good,” she says. “I think I’m ready to start.”

TWO TRUTHS

Late-summer Sunday, two years after college: Leah runs into Rainey Royal outside a coffee shop called Eat Here Now. “Friend or foe?” says Leah, delighted with how jocular this sounds, which makes her realize she is still afraid of Rainey.

She watches nervously as Rainey arranges herself against a parking meter. Rainey’s whole body seems to smile at Leah with perfect white teeth.

Does she remember upending Leah’s purse over the toilet? Or pressing a square of paper onto her tongue and calling it blotter, so Leah stuck a finger down her own throat?

“Friend!” says Rainey. Smile so cocky, voice so velvety—Leah wants to be in her thrall again.

But she has to be at work ten minutes ago; mice are waiting to be injected, though God knows they’re in no rush. They’re doing Bad Science in the lab this summer, worse than last
year. This is where she’s worked since she graduated from Amherst. Leah always knows the time, but she looks at her watch. “I’m late.”

Rainey catches Leah’s wrist. Her grip feels hot, cool, alarming. Leah wonders if she can get her to touch the other wrist, balance her out. “Nice watch,” says Rainey. Surely she sees it’s just a man’s Timex. “Was it your father’s? Am I right?” Leah feels herself smiling at the glittering sidewalk. “It radiates dadness. Smart gentle dadness. Same with my father’s watch,” says Rainey, and Leah feels herself studied as if for small cues. “I can always tell what emanates from a thing,” says Rainey. “I work with objects that belonged to the dead.”

“That is so romantic. Objects of the dead. I’m jealous,” says Leah. Of all the kids from Urban Day, only Rainey could claim something like that. Leah remembers the things she made in art from handwritten scraps and her grandmother’s dancing shoes and bits of cloth, while all Leah could draw were lines as straight and clean as her own spine. How did Rainey
know
things, she wanted to ask. How did she
make
things? What was it like living in that Raquel Welch body and having a father who flirted with his daughter’s friends? Back when Leah had no boyfriends—not that she has boyfriends now—Howard Royal would look at her like she was standing naked on some shell.

“My job is so gross I can’t even tell you. Good-bye,” Leah sings out, and starts to wheel away—this is meant to be funny.

Rainey hangs on to her wrist. “C’mon, let’s do breakfast. I want to hear about your life.” Leah shakes her head. Half of her wants her wrist back, and half of her wants Rainey to hold it all morning. She sniffs. Rainey smells like roses. That hair, too, past her waist, untrimmed, the way it gleams and swings. And that thrown-together gypsy look, as if Rainey somehow lived out of that enormous army pack, scavenging gold hoops and silky scarves from its pockets.

Rainey tips her head and smiles. “Please?” With her free hand she starts to toy with one of the many zippers on Leah’s lucky leather jacket.

Leah feels the moment snap. So must Rainey, because her expression freezes. She releases Leah’s wrist and Leah’s whole self relaxes. Rainey turns her attention to her pack. “All right,” she says coolly, “then buy a T-shirt.”

Since when does Rainey sell T-shirts? Anyway, Leah’s a leotard girl. She likes things trim, tucked in; she likes hospital corners and folded socks. Her mother the decorator has been after her to come to LA and work with her. You know how to position a thing with regard to the space around it, she says. You have restraint. Everything else you learn.