Paint It Black Read online

  She could read them now. But what would she find there, except discovering what a bitch she’d been, an idiot, stupid fucking moron? Things she should have known, that could have saved him. Should have, could have. She should have read them, should have read them all along.

  But that was never the deal. When you started spying on someone, where did you stop? Read his mail, cross-examine him, follow him around? Sleep across the doorstep? She trusted him, trusting that it would all turn out in the end. She had to. He would have hated her if she hadn’t, he would have left her long ago.

  Through the spongy murk of voddy and the remnants of the pills, dread fattened inside her like a thick black snake. It grew, crowding her guts. She drank down the rest of the voddy to see if she could burn it back. It shrank enough to let her breathe. She stood and stumbled as far as the dining table, where she sat down heavily. She turned on the lamp, the rice-paper shade Michael had decorated with Chinese figures. Harmony. Peace. Tao. Ming. Ming meant destiny. It was shaped like hair with a part in the middle, a line for a forehead wrinkle, two square eyes and a nose. Ming also meant death. It never occurred to her to ask, what was ming doing in there, along with peace and virtue? So many things she hadn’t asked when she had the chance. Afraid to. Who was the blind woman here?

  She pulled out one of his sketchpads and spread it on the scarred tabletop. Life Drawing. Michael Faraday. His mother’s address on Via Paloma, the old phone number. She touched the writing. Vertical, regular, the e’s like 3’s. Backward-flipped d’s, the g’s like 8’s. Down-crossed t’s. Never and never . . . No more of that handwriting. No more of the waves in air that made his voice, the sound of his laughter.

  Pen moaned in her sleep and turned over, the ass of her tights stretched tight over red panties. “Oh for fuck’s sake,” she mumbled and then after a moment the snoring started again. Vista del Mar. Josie opened the smudged yellow of the sketchpad cover.

  Contour drawings. That spontaneous line. It was already there, the liveliness of the forms. The proportions already good, the bodies had weight, the gestures vitality and direction. Just a beginner, but he learned so fast. Everything came so damn easy to him.

  Not true.

  The hard things came easy. But the easy things he found impossibly hard.

  She touched her fingertips to the black charcoal fingermarks on the page. His long fingers nearly twice the length of his palm. Those beautiful hands. Christ. She wished she could feel them right now, on her naked body. It was the only thing that ever made her feel better. He always knew how to make her feel better. When he wanted to. Fuck you, Michael, you son of a bitch. On her own now. All alone.

  Focusing on the pages, turning them carefully, not to tear the yellowing paper, she watched his progress through Introduction to Life Drawing. She recognized most of the models—Frank the dwarf, all chunky defiance, his huge cock—Michael had seen him as mythological, menacing as a figure in a dream. Colleen Keen with her long legs and wide hips, like a drip of water. Marguerite’s stupid modern-dance poses. Funny. And Pen.

  She didn’t realize he’d had Pen. She glanced over at her friend, skirt bunched up over her ass, face burrowed into the couch back, breath coming ragged. On the page she was all bristly imperiousness, hand on hip, weight on one foot, impatient. Even her pubic hair looked aggressive. What did it mean, that the two people she loved best in the world hated each other? It was the sides of herself, irreconcilable.

  Finally, Josie herself. The curve of her back, the delicately articulated bones. Her somber face over the small shoulder. His poet’s lady, his silver lily.

  A sudden image gored her, like a vicious animal she’d caught, not knowing how powerful it would be. Michael once told her about his famous father going boar hunting in Hawaii. “They have to weld a brace across the spear, to keep it from mauling you.” But she wanted to be mauled. She let it run right up the spear, sink its yellow tusks into her flesh.

  A day hot and so smoggy you needed a snorkel. He’d caught up to her after class, asked if she wanted to go swimming. “But we’ll have to take the bus,” he said. “I don’t have a car.” He didn’t want to be controlled by a machine, he explained, but she just figured he couldn’t afford one. So she drove, up Vermont past the auto-body places, the punk shops and cafés. She still could remember, she’d had Patti Smith on the tape deck. The song was “Frederick,” and she had thought, If Patti can be in love, anything’s possible.

  A park grew in the center of the street above Los Feliz, planted with enormous magnolias, roots snakily intertwined. Houses big as hotels sitting back on giant lawns. When he’d pointed out the turn, she’d had the strongest impulse to take that long finger in her mouth. But she didn’t. She didn’t know him that well yet.

  The steep road turned and forked, she lost track, Vistas and Coronas and Villas, until he finally told her to park in the shade of an immense wall. Messy pittosporums and orange trees littered the sidewalk, and a fancy iron gate barred the way. He smiled then. That was when she fell in love, right then, as he lifted the chain and opened the gate. Showing her it wasn’t really locked, just wound around to look that way. He was a boy who knew things, things that looked one way but proved to be another.

  In a lot of ways.

  No, she would not think about that. Now was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. She wanted then. The coolness of the overgrown trees outside the Spanish house, moss mottling its thick walls and painting the red tile roof with chartreuse velvet. How she took his arm not to twist her ankle in her high heels. “Whose house is this?”

  “Some people I know.” The soft voice that made you want to put your ear to his mouth. The sweet smell of his breath. She followed him around the back of the house, an enormous place, uncared for, unpruned white rambling roses climbing high into the trees, the footing treacherous with slick leaves, thinking, Rich people should take better care of their homes.

  Here it was, the pool. Stained dark, leaves scattered over the surface and dotting the none-too-clean bottom. Still and silent in the shade of the great trees. Certainly not the pool she’d envisioned—freeform, sparkling aquamarine in the sun. Not wanting to betray her disappointment, she’d unbuttoned her dress, stepped out of her underwear, and dove in like a girl in a movie. The shock of the cold. She came up gasping. He hadn’t told her it was unheated.

  Was he snickering at her, a real swell joke? But he’d seated himself at a green iron table littered with droppings, unpacking his charcoals, his pad. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked. “The water’s wonderful.” If you were a polar bear.

  “No thanks. I am not sportif,” he said.

  That made her laugh. Boys always bragged about their sportiness, their prowess at things they couldn’t do. They never admitted their deficiencies. “How sportif do you have to be to float in a pool?” He shook his head, and she dove under again, revealing a flash of ass—mooning him.

  And here on the yellowed paper, her white shape took form under black water, blurry as a half-conscious thought. The uncertainty of the pale flesh rising to specifics of face and small breasts. The layers of darkness around her. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around.

  The snake in her gut coiled, flexed. She had to stop looking and just breathe. Michael watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature. When all she’d been thinking that day was how quiet it was, after the constant noise and bickering at the Fuckhouse.

  And he’d told her about the deaf-mutes. The people who lived there, a woman and her crippled son. Recluses. “She doesn’t like him to mix with the world. I tutor him sometimes,” he said, working charcoal over the surface of the large page.

  “So where are they now?”

  “At the hospital. The boy has a heart condition.”

  And a leaf came spinning out of the trees and landed in his dark cropped curls. Yellow. Why could she remember that, and he couldn’t remember their whole life
together, couldn’t remember one damn thing?

  And she’d asked, “What about his father?” Not realizing what caves were burrowed in every lapse.

  “Dead,” Michael had said. “He was epileptic, subject to rages. One day his brain just burst. The boy found him on the study floor, blood pouring out of his ears.” He sketched, his hand moving boldly across the pad, making these eucalyptuses, these pittosporums.

  A sad house. She knew it even then.

  “Want to see it? Come on. They won’t mind.” He picked up his portfolio, and held out his own hand. She hesitated, but could not resist, she had never seen a house like this. He took her hand and pulled her from the water in one swift movement. He was so strong. She hadn’t imagined that from looking at his tall, lanky, lazy body. Behind him loomed the silent bulk of the house, the brooding eyes of its windows. She dried herself off with her dress before putting it back on, slipped her feet into her shoes. He found the key under the mat.

  With its old-fashioned hexagonal black and white tiles the big kitchen was a disappointment, a sink with the built-in washboard and a faucet that came right out of the wall. Not at all elegant. China piled up to the ceiling on sagging shelves inside glass-fronted cabinets. The house had an odd scent, like floor polish and cedar and mothballs. In the dining room hung a chandelier bagged in muslin like a cluster of bees suspended over a vast lake of table. A silver tea service gathered dust on the sideboard, and she remembered thinking, Maybe cleanliness was just middle-class. How would she know, she grew up on a tow yard in Bakersfield.

  The living room, down three steps. All that fragrant wood under enormous, worn-out Oriental rugs. At the end, a piano gleamed. Black and long as a pickup truck. “Which one plays?”

  “They both do,” Michael said. “They play music for four hands.”

  Deaf-mutes playing songs for four hands that neither of them could hear.

  Under the sweep of stairs, a room paneled in dark red leather lay hidden. She had never seen anything like that. Like a womb. Against the walls, stretching from floor to ceiling, bookcases bore elegant leather-bound volumes. She pulled one out. It was filled with music, but not the way it was usually written, just single lines down the page—2 Flöten, 2 Oboen, 2 Klarinetten in B. Notes in the margins.

  “The father’s room,” Michael said. “He died, right there on the rug.”

  Someone had died there, but not the father. The house was nothing but ming, with its great sweep of staircase, iron railed, floored in stone. She’d run her hand along the strange sponginess of the curved stucco wall, it was as if the house had grown there, like a fungus after rain. He’d opened the door at the head of the stairs, let her in first. “This is his room.” The boy’s.

  It was decorated like the library of a monastery. No rug on the wooden floor, a trestle desk, a narrow iron cot guarded by a primitive painted Madonna and made up with a coarse gray blanket woven with a single red stripe. And books. All the books, tattered and whole, tall leather-bound ones and paperbacks, vertical and horizontal. “Lucky he’s deaf and not blind,” she’d said, teasing him. After all, how would a crippled boy climb all those stairs? But she understood, even lies could be true, if you knew how to listen.

  They moved through the French doors into the crippled boy’s studio. Where he was supposed to have been. I need the space, Josie, try to understand.

  But she didn’t understand. She didn’t. Maybe it was the voddy and the Percocets and maybe she was just stupid but she didn’t. Maybe she was blind and mute and deaf and falling in the darkness, but she didn’t. He was finally working again, they were good again, it was good. He’d been so cheerful. He loved her, they were going to give it a chance. It was just going to be a few days.

  She could see it so clearly, him in that studio, the windows opening onto trees through their rusty screens. His orderly worktable, cans full of brushes. That smell of turpentine and linseed oil, a canvas on the big easel, as it had been that day, when she’d tried to peek under but he stopped her, smoothing the tarp. “He’s an artist too, the deaf boy?”

  “He’d like to be,” Michael said, turning his back to her. “But he hasn’t the confidence. He’s afraid he’ll never be great.”

  Try to understand.

  “Does it matter so much?”

  He straightened the charcoal twigs that were already straight. “It’s the only thing he’s really suited for.” Flicked the tip of a brush in the coffee can, running his thumb over the clean bristles. “If he can’t do that, then why exist.”

  “As long as he likes to do it, what difference does it make? He’s just got to do it, and fuck what people think,” she said. “Otherwise it’ll get all twisted up inside.” Brushing her cheeks with a fan-shaped brush, like she was putting on makeup. “We had this neighbor, once. He’d been crippled in Vietnam. He used to get drunk and sit on the porch in his wheelchair and pretend to shoot you.”

  Michael smiled, looking down at the art supplies, so fastidiously arranged. “I heard you have to have a permit.”

  And here she’d thought he was someone who could see. She could feel the disappointment in her mouth, it tasted like dirty nickels. “It wasn’t funny. He was imagining blowing your head off.” That asshole’s house, bottles on the porch, the broken panes repaired with newspaper and duct tape. The sound of his laughter when he “got” you. Her brothers threw dogshit on his porch, so it would get in the wheels of his chair and then onto his carpet. “He wanted to kill you, don’t you see? He wanted to. If he’d had a gun he would have.”

  Michael shook off the smile then, dark eyebrows knitting over pale green eyes. Now he was listening, now she knew she could trust him. She picked up a sketchbook, started to open it, but he pulled it away. “Please don’t, Josie.”

  Jo-cee. No one else ever said it like that, they always said Jozee. She let him have the sketchpad when he asked. She might have teased him over it, allowing it to bring them over the line to touching, to kissing, but she’d never been with a boy like Michael before, it made everything different. She’d only gone with boys like her brothers, they’d share some Olde English 800 and cheap reefer with you and tear your clothes, too mean to undo the buttons. Nick Nitro’d been a god by comparison. But this, this was altogether new, and made her unsure. Putting her hand to his cheek, his scratchy beard, she drew his face down to hers. He was trembling. She felt like she was the boy and he was the girl and that gave her courage. She might not have gone to college but she knew about this, how to press against a boy, wake him up.

  That kiss. Sewn on her body, stitched into her skin.

  “Show me what to do,” he whispered. “Show me what you want.”

  She led him to the narrow iron priest’s bed. The way he looked at her as she unbuttoned her dress made her tremble too. She ran her hands under his jacket, over his jeans, he was more than ready.

  “Wait,” he said. “Come with me.” He took her hand and led her down the hall to the last door. The blinds were drawn, stale air suffused with a smoky perfume. He opened the drapes, cranked open the old-fashioned windows. An astonishing room. Luxurious, feminine, all blue and white, its antique white furniture with burnished gold trim. He turned down the bed to reveal blue sheets with white piping, shed his clothes, all but the white shapeless underwear, the kind her mother bought her brothers in packages of twelve, and slid in. Lying on the pillows, his bony square shoulders, his cropped dark hair. The well between his ribs, the line of hair. The pleasure of his complete attention. If only there was a drawing of that.

  She took his long finger in her mouth, it still tasted slightly of graphite, and his closed green eyes flickered like a dog having a dream, and he moaned. Oh . . .

  How could he have killed himself when we could make love like that? How?

  She stripped off her dress, still damp from the pool, and guided his hand down her body, between her legs, she could feel herself pulsing and curling around his fingers. His face, as he memorized her. “There,” she said. “You
ever play a guitar?” His hands so strong, he could do her all day. Worlds away from everything she had ever known. His beautiful body, long and slender on the blue sheets.

  Not white. Not dead and cold, wrapped in a sheet with a knot at the chest. On the stereo, under the dark windows, Richard Hell on KROQ sang “Going, Going, Gone.”

  If only she hadn’t been careful that day. If she’d gotten knocked up, at least she’d have something now, some proof he existed. Instead of these lights, and some paintings and the rest of her goddamn life. She never wanted to be alone like this. She’d finally found someone who could give her everything, and then he took it away. Just took it away. You asshole! The joy, the delight, where did it go? What did you do with it? Her gut ached, as if her love was being dug out of her with a dull knife. She needed him to make her feel good again, right now. You son of a bitch. You son of a fucking bitch.

  Tears dripping onto the drawings, ruining them. She closed the sketchpad. She wanted to remember him on the blue sheets but all she could see were those blackened eyes, those inky lips. Were they the same lips he kissed her with? What about what he felt like in her arms, and how they danced to Louis Armstrong? That’s what she had to remember. The pleasure they had taken in each other. Couldn’t you remember how I loved you? But he didn’t. The story of her life. God gave you everything just to take it away. Just so you knew exactly what you were missing.

  The phone rang on the orange footlocker, by Pen’s sagging right hand. Pen groaned and turned, her heavy hand dropping to the floor, and crammed the pillow over her head. Josie staggered over, shin banging into the footlocker, and grabbed at the phone. “Yeah.”

  The sound of hoarse breathing. Then a slurred, deep, woman’s voice. “Why are you alive? What is the excuse for Josie Tyrell? I ask you.”