Rainey Royal (4 page)

Five minutes pass, an hour, she has no idea. Voices rise, and she ignores them.

When the door flies open, it slams the corner of Gordy’s bureau so that everything on top jitters. Howard, large in
the doorway, does not look so Christ-like now. “If you don’t release that goddamn cello, Daughter,” he says, “you can get thee to a nunnery for all I care.”

Rainey slips her ring back on, grabs Gordy’s penknife off his night table, and stands on the bed. The cello stands with her. It is her spruce-and-maple mother. It is her saint against temptation, though she can’t resist testing her hold on the pink room.

Watching Howard, she opens the penknife, slides it against the fingerboard, and slits the thickest string. It snaps with a wiry groan. What was the other thing Tina asked that night? Her father crosses the threshold with an angry stride. She is scared, but his anger feels better than when he smiles her up and down. She steps behind the cello but looks him in the eye.

“Does it hurt yet?” she says.

RAPTURE AND THE FIERCEST LOVE

On Monday Rainey witnesses the sorrow of Miss Honor Brennan, who wears a crucifix tucked under her clothes. Miss Brennan suggests they eat lunch together after class, at her desk. Revoltingly intimate, to see a teacher’s lunch, its homemade sandwich and nicked pear.

“I didn’t bring lunch.” Rainey holds her pack to her chest and backs away.

Miss Brennan dangles a rumpled brown bag and says, “I’ll share.” She has a widow’s peak that sculpts her glowing, blue-eyed face into a heart. “I think you could use a chat.”

“I’m fine.” Rainey’s hand is on the doorknob. The only thing keeping her in the science lab is curiosity.

“Yes, I agree you’re doing a tremendous job of holding it together,” says Miss Brennan. “But people are saying things.” She touches her crucifix through the starched fabric of her
blouse. Sometimes it works loose. Rainey has seen it. “I can’t believe they’re all true, but I’m asking you to stay and talk.” She is the prettiest teacher at school; she has to be dating one of the male teachers, right?

“Oh, for Chrissake,” says Rainey, but she doesn’t exactly fling herself out; she wants to hear what people are saying.

“Please,” says Miss Brennan, “sit, and tell me about your mother, Rainey. I understand she left.”

Rainey slowly closes the door. “She didn’t
leave
. My mother took a year to study Ashtanga Vinyasa yoga at an ashram in Boulder, Colorado.” She went to the library for this one. She goes to the library for everything. Miss Brennan looks at her steadily. “When she comes back she’ll be certified to teach it,” says Rainey. “We talk twice a week.”

Miss Brennan sucks in her lower lip and nods. “Sit down, Rainey.”

Rainey stays at the door.

“Your father says she never calls. He didn’t make a secret of it at our parent-teacher conference. Please. Sit.”

“She calls when he’s not home.” Rainey scuffs over to a chair and drops her pack on it. “
Ob
viously. He doesn’t know we talk. We talk about art. She’s my
mother
.”

Miss Brennan gestures firmly at the chair. “You can always leave,” she says. “Have a pear.”

Rainey sits tangentially. First she dislodges her pack. Then she shoves another chair out of the way. She does not have a pear.

“The teachers who care about you are wondering,” says Miss Brennan in the same soft voice, as if she were slowly wrapping Rainey in cashmere, “if you need help with your home situation. I don’t mean to pry, but”—she takes a delicate bite of her sandwich, which has a petticoat of lettuce around the edges—“some teachers have heard it’s like a commune. The word
cult
came up. Is it true, Rainey, that your father has a lot of young people living there?”

Rainey looks at her, amazed. Do people think her mother abandoned her to some cult?

“It’s none of your business,” she says.

“I’m making it my business.” Miss Brennan bites deep into her sandwich, and Rainey senses that she cannot, in fact, always leave.

“My father,” she says, “runs—it’s like a boarding school for brilliant jazz students. I live in a house full of music.” She chooses her words carefully. “It’s very creative,” she says. “My home is a very nurturing place.”

Miss Brennan pushes the pear closer to the edge of her desk. “Eat,” she says. “Where do these brilliant jazz students sleep?”

With Howard
, thinks Rainey. “It’s a five-story townhouse,” she says. “We have like a zillion bedrooms.”

“Is that enough?” says Miss Brennan. “Your father is very … charismatic. I’ve met him. Is there any … adult activity going on that might make you uncomfortable? Do you feel safe in that house, Rainey?”

“It’s
my house
. I feel two hundred percent safe.” Rainey stands, pushing the chair away. It screeches.

“People are concerned for you, Rainey. No one is gossiping. Don’t be angry.” Miss Brennan stands, too. “One more question. Please. Is it true there’s a man living there who isn’t related to you?”

Rainey possesses an expression of baffled innocence, and she puts it on now. “Gordy? My cousin?” She waits for doubt to register on Miss Brennan’s face. “He’s lived there since I was two.”

Miss Brennan says, “Your cousin.”

“He’s a genius on horn,” says Rainey. “He and my dad play in the best clubs.”

Miss Brennan nods. “Rainey,” she says, “if you ever need to chat, I’m here. It can be hard without a mom. I think things are tougher than you let on.”

The English teacher, Zach Moreno, always sits with Miss Brennan at lunch. And he is gorgeous, too. Mr. Piriello is fat, and Mr. Noble is craggy in a romantic way, but he is old. So, Mr. Moreno. It is like matching up Barbie and Ken, Rainey thinks. Maybe there is something she can do with that. Maybe she could flirt with Mr. Moreno more. In her mind, she picks up her chair and smashes Miss Brennan’s head. Only when she can see the blood does she shoulder her pack and say in her sweetest voice, “May I go now?”

T
HE PIETÀ BY
J
ACQUES
Bellange is the most delicious in the show at the Met, and Rainey is riveted. In the picture, Mary tips her head back and dips her fingertips into the tiny bowl between her collarbones as if holy water might have collected there. Her face is radiant with pain.

It’s Monday afternoon, the afternoon of the humiliation. Rainey lets her pack thud on the museum floor and pulls out her sketchbook.

A tour group sifts around the corner. Rainey feels it rather than sees it swelling behind her. “Ah, we love our art students.” The guide has a faint Germanic accent. “But this is the one you should be copying, Miss. It’s filled with contradiction. Come join us.”

Drop dead, thinks Rainey.

After a moment, he goes on in his tour-guide voice. “Let us explore the tension in this engraving by Claude Mellan.”

Rainey balances her sketchbook on one arm. The Mary in the pietà is a real woman, not like those stiff ones from the 1400s. She doesn’t try to copy the pietà precisely, with its fine hatch marks. Rather she wants to capture the curve of Mary’s neck, the folds in her garment, the muscles in the thigh of the Christ.

Never has she seen such muscles in the thigh of a Christ.

“We see Mary Magdalene with two symbols of the religious contemplative,” says the guide, and from his accent Rainey imagines him with skis and Alps. “The cross and the skull,” says the guide. “We don’t know why Mellan omitted
the third symbol, the book. And yet, and yet. Look at her, this reformed prostitute. Her robes have slipped. Her hair is undone. She’s a lush young woman, our Magdalene. This is a typical pose for her, during her desert days.”

Rainey totally sees it. Spiritual, pretty, a little loose, deep into her thoughts, not a big reader. Hair to her waist.

She refuses to look.

In the Bellange pietà, the Mother Mary sits with her legs apart and the body of Jesus on his knees between them, facing the viewer. This Mary is not embarrassed about any damn thing. She may be pure, but she is still a sensual, fleshy woman, caught up in grief.

The thing Rainey doesn’t get, as she sketches, is how the Christ stays upright, kneeling, if he’s dead. Every muscle is delineated. His nipples are erect. A fold of Mary’s hem flutters up strategically across his hip.

“So I wonder,” says the guide, as if musing to himself, “does she know? Is Mary Magdalene so transported by religious fervor she does not realize her bosom is bared? Or are the artists telling us, once a whore, always a whore?”

Rainey hears tittering and turns, furious. The engraving is small, but she can tell right away that the Magdalene, a big-boned, dark-haired sexy chick, is dreaming away. She could almost be Mary’s daughter. “Can’t you fucking
tell
?” says Rainey loudly, causing a guard to take several decisive steps toward her. “She’s like totally transported. Jesus Christ.”

T
UESDAY, FROM THE FIFTH
row, Rainey stares at Miss Brennan as if tenth-grade chemistry might save her life. Her gaze savors the heart-shaped face and locks onto the electric-blue irises. Obviously she’s listening, right?

Meanwhile, she inches her arm over to the wall where the Erlenmeyer flasks are lined up. Then she closes her hand around one.

She feels Tina encouraging her, without eye contact, from the front of the room. Miss Brennan separates them. A bunch of teachers separate them, especially in gym. They don’t know it strengthens Rainey to feed on Tina’s energy from a distance, to know what Tina is thinking without meeting her eyes. Like right now, Tina is thinking,
I dare you to eat the egg afterward. Real slow
.

Rainey pretends she doesn’t even know what her hand is doing with the flask because she is so riveted by Miss Brennan’s every word. Miss Brennan is gorgeous, even if she is like thirty. She looks like Wonder Woman. So here is what Rainey and Tina want to know: If a woman becomes a chemistry teacher
by choice
, does that mean she is a lesbo or hates sex? And are those two things the same?

Rainey has some unanswered questions in this department, but one thing she knows for sure is how to coax the fat glimmering hard-boiled egg in her lunch bag down the skinny neck of the Erlenmeyer flask.