Rainey Royal (2 page)

“I sent the acolytes out to collect sounds,” says Howard, as if sounds were lost quarters that winked from gutters. “Sit, Daughter.”

She drops her pack, collaborates noisily with a folding chair in the parlor, and sits on it backward while Howard watches with pleased amusement. She smells his body oil: sandalwood.

“That school psychologist called again today,” he says, “but I think she’s on the wrong track. What do you think?”

Rainey flinches and looks to the ceiling cherubs for strength. The ceiling cherubs are three plaster angels who cavort around a trio of bare bulbs. Their ax used to be the chandelier, but last month Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet took it away. The house is shedding its sweetest parts like lost earrings; in return, electricity keeps humming, pizzas keep arriving, and Rainey keeps going to Urban Day.

“Are we getting a new chandelier?”

“Do you know
why
the school psychologist called again?”

“No.” Rainey stares off into the kitchen, willing the refrigerator to disgorge a glass of milk.

“I think you do.”

“She’s full of shit. Can I go now?”

“Look at me, Daughter.” He smiles as if indulging her. “It’s important to be candid about these things.”

Gordy’s not-looking at her is now so intense he might as well shine flashlights in her eyes.

Howard, and the smile, persist. “So tell us why the school psychologist is talking about you
engaging
with the male teachers.”

The school psychologist always peels and eats an orange while she and Rainey talk. The scent comes back to Rainey in a rush. It is the scent of denial, the innocence that slides over her when Florence, the psychologist, asks how she feels about her mother, her father, the torments she dreams up for that Levinson girl.

Extricating herself gracefully from a straddled folding chair could be problematic.

“Screw you.” She knocks over the metal chair as she stands and elbows one of the new cellos, so she barely has to hear her father say under the clatter,
Oh, you can do better than your old dad
.

S
OMETIMES
R
AINEY HAS TO
share her room—a ginger operation, a kind of Howard trick.

It is one year after the onset of the blue and white pills. They are prescription, but Howard Royal gets them from a doctor friend and dispenses them daily from packs of twenty-eight. Rainey doesn’t need them, but he doesn’t believe her. Three weeks white, one week blue—he gives her one every morning with a glass of milk and waits until she swallows. He says things like “That’s my girl” and “Because, sweetheart, with maturity comes responsibility.”

And it is a year after the summer of Jean-Luc Ponty, when her father had Gordy take her one night to hear Ponty play in Central Park, and Gordy steered her under some trees. She was still thirteen. “You radiate power and light,” Gordy told her on the grass. But he is always saying shit like that. It was the only time he lost control, and they still didn’t go all the way.

It is 4:00
P.M.
on a Friday, and Rainey takes a savage bite of Gordy’s grilled cheese. He has been making grilled cheese the way she likes it—and rice pudding and chocolate egg creams—for as long as she remembers.

Howard smiles her up and down. “Sweetheart, your room—”

“Tina is sleeping over Friday and Saturday in
my room
.”

Tina is Rainey’s best friend. They smoke pot on the roof and take turns reading Howard’s pornography aloud to each other. Rainey is positive her mother, whose cool elegance she remembers as seeming somehow beyond sex, never read these books.

“Then Sunday,” says Howard. “My brilliant young cellists are in need of your floor. Just for a few days. Open your heart.”

She has seen the new cellists, always together—giggling on the stairs or leaving Howard’s room. They could be sisters, their faces like two porcelain cups, but one girl is shaped like a cello and one more like a bow.

“My heart?” says Rainey. “My heart is a cell in which candles burn at the feet of Saint Catherine of Bologna.” Language is the only turf on which she can stand with her father and joust. Occasionally it works.

“Well, then I pity you,” says Howard.

“When the fuck do I get my privacy back?” says Rainey. “Where am I supposed to do my homework?”

What she really wants to know is, where is the place beneath a girl’s armpit that the back ends and the
side
begins? She can share her pink room with strangers, but tell her this: Is there a region between back and breast that can, in a proper back rub, be considered neutral?

“Be creative,” says Howard.

What if it doesn’t
feel
neutral?

“Be creative and be adaptable.”

Gordy says nothing. His language with Rainey is often nonverbal. For example, the way he has been tucking her in the past couple of years: sitting on the edge of her bed without moving and sometimes stroking her long hair, as if he were the father and she were the little girl. The hair stroking makes her feel so porous and ashamed that she pretends to be asleep. She has no idea if Howard knows; he sleeps on the second floor, and Gordy and Rainey share the third. What would Howard even say?
He strokes your hair—and?
She wonders if Linda knew before she left last year. Gordy never says it is a secret, yet she senses that her silence is required. She has not told anyone but Tina. Often she wishes she had not.

Rainey would like to ask Tina a few things when she comes over, though she won’t. For example: Do Tina’s body parts meet clearly at dotted lines, like pink and green states on a gas-station map? Where does she get her God-given ability to not give a fuck?

A
ND WHAT CAN
R
AINEY
draw from Cath’s first miracle, performed after death and underground? The nun’s corpse exuded a scent so sweet and strong it rose through the soil and drew all of Bologna to her grave. Rainey can see it: every morning, men and women gather at the mound of earth, inhale deeply, and drop to their knees. All day the perfume clings to them. The grave smells like tea-rose oil!

No, the priest says, what you smell is Easter lily, the flower of Christ—but he is wrong. It’s tea rose, the scent of power and coiled-up sex, an oily perfume in a little brown bottle. It’s the perfume mothers leave behind when they split, that daughters rub between their toes to someday drive men wild. And after eighteen days, according to the book, the mourners get kind of manic. They love and desire their dead, sweet-smelling virgins even more than they hate and desire whores. They have to
see
. So they dig her up. The women and girls dig very carefully, scraping with silver spoons.

L
ATE
O
CTOBER SUNLIGHT SLANTS
through shuddering leaves, angling low into the windows. Rainey does her homework sprawled on her pink carpet—when she does it. More often she goes to the museum after school, pulling out a sketchpad, dropping her army pack with its straps and buckles noisily on the floor.

People look up. People always look up. She radiates power and light.

“Have you seen her notebooks?” Howard demands when he is summoned to the school. Rainey looks at him gratefully. They sit across a conference table from two teachers and the principal. It’s a cool school. Everyone wears jeans except the janitor. Even the principal wears jeans. Howard calls him Dave. When he calls the science teacher Honor he gives her a long, private smile, as if a waiter were even now
carrying in a silver tray set for two. “Her real notebooks, Dave, the ones she draws in. Do you people not know an artist when you see one?”

He pulls a pack of Kools from his shirt pocket, flashing a large watch that Rainey loves, smacks the pack on his hand, and flicks a cigarette toward her. Shocked, obedient, she pulls it out. Next to the cigarette, tucked farther down in the pack, she sees a joint.

“For one thing,” says Honor Brennan, and looks sharply at Rainey’s unlit cigarette. There seem to be so many things, Rainey thinks.

Rainey does not smoke menthol, and students can’t smoke inside the school, and she knows Howard knows this. He lights his own cigarette. She waves the lighter away.

“Come on,” says Howard, holding the flame. “Don’t be afraid. Regulations are just words on paper.” Dave looks at the smoke and coughs. He is wearing a tie-dye T-shirt. It is not impressing anyone, thinks Rainey.

She glances at her teachers, hesitates. “My thumb is burning,” says Howard. She can hear what he doesn’t say, too.
Fuck ’em if they can’t take a joke
. She leans into the lighter and inhales.

“This is highly unorthodox,” says Dave.

“Even artists go to college,” says the English teacher, Zach Moreno, softly.

“By definition, the artist lives
outside of society
,” says Howard, “and mirrors it to itself, whether he goes to college
or not. I’m an adjunct, personally, and this is what I teach. Are you noticing any lack of intelligence in my daughter? You’re not? Then—ladies, gentlemen—are we really here to discuss a few missed pages of homework for a girl who spends every afternoon in a museum?”

“She could go to art school,” says Dave. “There’s RISD. There’s Cooper Union if she can get in. But she needs the grades.”

“What are you grading?” Howard blows a stream of smoke past Dave’s head. “I think you should ask yourselves this,” he says. “Why does your art teacher ask a girl who can’t stay out of the Met to rub an egg with a spoon?”

F
RIDAY NIGHT
R
AINEY AND
Tina decide to get high. No occasion—just that Howard and Gordy are playing the Vanguard, with most of the acolytes in tow; just that two months into school Rainey is bored sick. The government is based on a tripartite system, and she’s supposed to care about this why, exactly? She’s in love with Studio Art; it’s got Rapidograph pens, and Rainey can draw anything—Ophelia drowning, Icarus falling, Janis Joplin lusciously dead from smack, with that fabulous throat—but Mr. Knecht assigned some weird shit. They had to form eggs out of raw clay, let them dry for two weeks, and then polish them in an endless, circular motion with the backs of teaspoons.

School did not provide the teaspoons. Rainey took one of Lala’s spoons, an English antique sterling spoon that shows
a leaping hart. She knows the difference between a leaping hart, which she draws surrounded by William Morris–like leaves, and a leaping heart, which she draws interpretively. Sometimes she draws it so interpretively she has to tear the picture out of her notebook and rip it into little strips and throw them out in different trash cans on her way to school.

The egg polishing goes on for two more weeks, consuming entire art periods. Rainey steals her egg from the windowsill and burnishes during French, world religions, and math.

“What’s the fucking point?” says Tina. They are baking their dinner: zucchini muffins. They can’t decide if it’s better to distribute the whole nickel bag through the batter or roll a couple of joints first.

“My egg is perfect,” says Rainey. “It looks like pewter.”

Aqua threads trail from Lala’s ancient copy of
The Joy of Cooking
as if it has a secret underwater life. Rainey checks the recipe, then pours a dollop of vanilla into the bowl without measuring.

“Now, see, if he told me to rub an egg on a spoon,” says Tina, in that husky voice Rainey never tires of, “I’d stick the spoon down his throat.”

Rainey readies herself. She always has to mention the one thing that hurts; it’s like nudging a loose tooth. “Your grandmother said you could sleep here both nights, right?”

Tina winces. It’s a faint movement around the eyes. “Probably.” The grandmother is a sensitive subject. Tina turns her back and reaches for a bag of sugar. Her top rides up,
revealing an indented waist that Rainey appreciates because it is necessary that they both be sexy, but revealing, also, a little sash of fat, which Rainey relishes because it is necessary that only one of them have a flawless body.

It is after the time Howard said to her, “Next to Tina, you’re a centerfold—is that why you hang out with her?” and Rainey, thrilled and mortified, choked out that Tina was her
best friend
, and Howard looked past her at silent Gordy and said, “ ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ ”

Tina licks a finger and dips it in the bag of sugar. “You think Gordy might come in our room?”

Rainey brains an egg on the edge of the bowl. She thinks about a redheaded oboist she likes to look at across the parlor till he blushes. She demanded his name once, and he stammered it: Flynn. Howard likes to say he has the only jazz oboist in New York. Rainey is not allowed to bother the acolytes, but she can stare.

Gordy has never come in on sleepovers before—she assumes because she stays up and talks.

“He just checks on me,” she says in a low voice. “He never
does
anything.”

When Tina laughs it sounds like
huh
. Rainey suddenly feels grateful to have confessed the hair stroking, grateful that Tina doesn’t judge. Maybe Tina intuits the back rubs, which only just started. Tina, caught beneath an overhead light that brings out the cinnamon in her hair, has her moments of beauty and perfect understanding.

“If he comes in,” says Tina, “can we be mean to him?”

“He lives here,” says Rainey, who only knows certain ways of being mean to Gordy.

“You know the kind of mean I mean.” Tina orbits her upper teeth with her tongue as if checking the jewels on a bracelet. They have both perfected the Pearl Drops move.

The words
drawing off
come faintly to mind—a lightning rod drawing off the fatal bolt; a sister drawing off a bully. A saint, intervening. Is it cool if the person
drawing off
does not know what she is getting into?

“Stick a knife in his heart for all I care.”

“Whoa,” says Tina. “Fond of the motherfucker, are we?”

T
HE FIRST TIME
T
INA
came over, they sat on the carpet of Rainey’s pink room, which Rainey thinks of as girlfriend pink, a pink chosen by one of Howard’s ex-lovers to coax Rainey out of a black phase. Kids and acolytes are forever telling Rainey what this pink is like: it is Barbie, it is Pepto-Bismol, it is Bazooka bubble gum. But the first time Tina saw it she said,
Oh my God you live in a vagina
, and Rainey said,
Fuck you, Tina
, and the wary warmth of equals was sealed between them.