“Hello, can I speak to Michael, please?” The crackle of the long-distance line.
It was the wrong day to pull that shit. “The name’s Josie,” she hissed into the receiver. “You can fucking say my name, Meredith, or kiss my fucking ass.” It felt fantastic to hang up on her, brilliant.
Michael appeared in the doorway, hands covered with paint, squinting like a mole after the dark cave of the bathroom. “Who was that?”
She turned to him, leaning on the wooden counter. “Who do you think? She calls and doesn’t even say hello. Like I’m the maid or something.
No habla inglés.
”
“What did she want?” He pushed the beads out of the way, there was still paint on his hands.
“I don’t know, I hung up on her.” She held out a glass of iced tea for him.
He didn’t take it. He just stared. “You hung up on her.”
“Yeah,” Josie said. “I hung up on her.” Her heart beat fast, he was seeing her now. She’d finally gotten his attention. What would he do, hit her? She hoped he would. It was life at least, a reaction.
“She’s in Sweden,” Michael said.
Josie put the jar with his tea down on the counter, backed away. “Well break out the brass band.”
“She’s my mother,” he said, coming toward her. “You don’t just hang up on her.”
“Why the hell not?” She pressed up against the counter, her free hand braced in an attitude that was pointedly casual, afraid and excited by the outrage on his face, finally some emotion there besides his stupid funk. She took a drink of tea, eyed him, waiting to see what he would do now. Would he strike her? Realize how pompous he sounded, like somebody’s father? She wanted to push him hard, see what would happen, though it frightened her too, she wasn’t sure if she was really ready to know. “Your mother’s a snotty bitch and I’m not putting up with it anymore.”
The phone rang again. Michael brushed out through the beads, answered the phone himself, glory be. “Hello? Meredith?” He rubbed his forehead without thinking of the paint on his hands, leaving a green streak. “I know she did. It’s hot here, it’s making us both kind of edgy.”
“Tell her we’ve been together a year, when’s she fucking going to get used to it?” Josie called from the kitchen, but he didn’t appear to be listening.
“Everything’s fine here,” Michael said.
At least he had the decency to lie.
He sat on the blue couch in front of the fan, picking his toenails, settling in to a nice long chat, the gloominess of his face lifting like tule fog when the sun starts to burn it off. Talking to the great love of his life. It was so painfully clear. Josie felt like crying out of sheer jealousy. How a woman calling from five thousand miles away could get that reaction, when she couldn’t with all her clothes off six inches away. Meredith hadn’t spoken to him for months after she’d cut him off. Now she was calling all the time, talking about her tour, the conductors, her exciting life. Michael said she did it when she was all jazzed from a performance, or bored or lonely in her hotel, it wasn’t just him, she’d call everyone she knew and talk forever. Her phone bill was the equivalent of a small country’s gross national product.
“Where are you staying? Sure, I remember Mr. Eriksson. He’s got to be ninety, he’s still there? No, in Sweden it’s the midnight sun. The white nights are Leningrad.” It was more conversation than Josie had had from him in weeks. “How’s Sofía?”
Meredith took the maid with her on tour, to do all the packing, make the travel arrangements, get the cabs and make phone calls and pick up the mail at American Express, do the shopping and cooking. Meredith stayed in suites with kitchens, so she could be sure of eating well on the road. When Michael was a kid, Sofía and the tutor flew coach while Meredith and he went first class. That said just about everything.
“No, I can’t,” he was saying. “Yeah, it sounds great, but we’re pretty busy here.” He glanced quickly at Josie, then away.
She knew what Meredith was up to. She was inviting Michael to join her in Sweden. To seduce him back into his old life, maids and hotels and white nights.
Why are you sitting in that hot squalid little shack when you could be here in Stockholm? I’d love to see you, why don’t you ditch Mimì and come out? I’ll send you a ticket.
And it filled her with such love for him, that despite everything, his crazy accusations, the nights he spent in the chair by the window avoiding her bed, the way he would shudder if she touched him, he would not leave her to run off to the midnight sun with his mother. He knit his forehead streaked in green, making those planes he liked to turn into tumors in the paintings. “Yeah, well I never fit in either, so I guess that’s two of us.”
They were still the two of them. She knew what the mother was saying.
She wouldn’t fit in. She’s not like us. I don’t know why you’re with her, I really don’t.
But still he chose her. He still loved her, he did. He would not leave her for his mother’s siren song. She vowed she would never fuck around on him again, that they would deal with their problems, she would wait for him. They’d get through this together. In her own way, she saw, she’d given in to despair as much as he had.
She dropped the shoulder strap of her slip, so her breast would peek out, the nipple like a bouquet, so he would remember what she could do for him that his mother could not. He rolled his eyes at her,
oh please,
picked up a drawing pad from the orange footlocker, and tucked the phone against his ear, so he could listen and draw at the same time. “I had that piece in the show at Barnsdall, did you get the clipping? A gallery’s even interested in representing me.”
Barnsdall Park’s municipal gallery was a big deal, lots of famous artists had had their first show there. And out of all that art, the reviewer from the
Weekly
had mentioned his specifically. Though it shocked Josie that he was talking about it with Meredith. At the time, he’d dismissed it—the show, the review, everything. “They let everybody in, Josie,” he’d said with a sneer. “It’s not the Whitney Biennial. Me and four hundred of my closest friends.” He hadn’t even wanted to attend the opening, but she’d made him go. People loved his painting, Josie nude on the couch in black stockings and her red little Jeanne wig. The reviewer called it Schiele-esque, which Michael hated for some reason, all but called her an idiot. Now he was bragging.
This was the part of Michael she found so impossible—the way he could take a position and then later completely reverse his point of view. He hated it when other people did that,
revisionists
he’d call them, but he couldn’t see how he did just the same thing. What was worse was that he believed the new version as much as he had the old one. And she was afraid that someday he’d do the same thing with her, the story of his love.
“Yeah, well, the photo wasn’t that great.” He frowned, turning away from Josie, not wanting her to watch him reel out his revised version of reality for his mother’s inspection. She was clearly finding something to criticize. That bitch. She never wanted him to be a painter. He was supposed to become a famous art critic, a
curator,
so he could travel with Mummy and yet still have something she could point to and say,
Oh, my son’s not just hanging out, he’s here for the Schiele auction.
Fuck her. She probably knew Schiele and didn’t think it was Schiele-esque enough. Josie could tell Michael wanted her to leave, to let him talk to his mother in private, but there was nowhere else to go—was she supposed to sit in their hot, stuffy bedroom? And anyway, this was her place, really, she was paying for it, she’d goddamn sit anywhere she wanted. She conspicuously plunked herself in the chair by the window, where the smoggy haze stalled over the giant ryegrass and nothing moved but the fan, waving its blue and green ribbons. A toy car on the toy hillside drove past little houses like the models in a race-car set. And beyond, the painted backdrop of a city through smog. What if it was all just an illusion, a diorama at the Museum of Natural History, and they were in it, she and Michael, locked in a two-dimensional world. But not Meredith. She was out there in three dimensions, with her concert halls and Stockholm and breezes off the fjords.
And Michael chatting away as if everything was fine, great, neato. She couldn’t help wishing she could rate that kind of heroic deception, instead of him saving her for the grinding reality, his terrible gnawing doubts about his life and everything around him. The true world so far away, it hadn’t been seen for so long, only this opaque day-to-day shit they were living. She had to admit, it was a relief to hear him happy, to know he was still capable of it. She had to give that much to Meredith. When he got that stranger’s face, and started in on one of his rages, Jeremy or some other crime she’d ostensibly committed, there wasn’t much that could snap him back out again.
She should have made him see someone. She should have not let him distract her. Even if he broke up with her. But she hadn’t been willing to take that chance.
Now, she could hear the actor in the bathroom, showering, singing “Number One,” going up into falsetto. God. She hadn’t thought there was that much hot water. She drank her tea. To think that she’d let him fuck her in Michael’s own bed. Christ. Well, at least she hadn’t enjoyed it.
She remembered joining Michael that day, on the blue couch in front of the fan, how she’d spread her legs and let the air go up her naked crotch, hoping to remind him just what they had seen in each other, how good it could be, but he put the phone on his lap and turned away, concentrating on Meredith in Sweden, which she could only picture as a loose collage of blond stewardesses in blue uniforms, bad disco bands like Abba, or else men and women in horn-rimmed glasses walking on rocky coasts in Bergman films. No wonder Meredith wanted Michael to come out.
He wouldn’t look at her. His mother said something funny, he laughed, and though it was good to hear him laugh, it pissed her off, too. Why could he pull himself together for Meredith, but not for her? It was exhausting to listen to them, they made the air hotter, more oppressive, how could they find so much to talk about?
She put her foot on the fly of his shorts, to see if she could rouse him while he was distracted. He frowned, trying to concentrate. She pressed gently, working the toes and the ball of her foot, feeling him harden despite his frown. She walked her toes up his cock as he kept talking to his mother. She could jerk him off like that, if he’d let her. Keep talking, she thought. It’s Meredith, your mommy.
He didn’t look at her, but slid his hips forward on the couch as he listened. She took a chance and slid her hand into the fly of his shorts. He covered the receiver and mouthed
cut it out.
But the look of his mouth and the way that he swallowed, she could tell it was turning him on.
“Pretend I’m not here,” she whispered. Like he’d been doing for weeks. She wanted him to want it, she knew there was a spark to be lit, it was still there. This holding her off was a punishment, but for whom, and why, she never could tell. When you loved someone the way she loved Michael, you couldn’t help being punished no matter who it was he was trying to hurt. All that love, all that joy, she knew it was in there, in that body, under that skin, in those green eyes, she’d lived with it, knew it, where could it all have gone?
She could feel the velvety skin of his cock, at least that still knew her. It always remembered her, and she touched him there, light and gentle, not rhythmic, yet it moved under her fingers, on its own, as if he were not attached to it. There was the Michael in her hand and the Michael who was talking to his mother in Sweden, and finally he sighed and shut his eyes, pretending she was not there, his unfaithful mistress, pretending it was the breeze, or the stirring of a thought, a womanless hard-on that grew and sought, without a head or eyes or ears, without knowledge or wonder, but a wanting that came before all of those things. Maybe he was imagining it was Meredith. Was that it? Was that what would get him off? His legs sagged apart, although his face was still turned, and she bent her head and took him in her mouth. At the contact, he gasped involuntarily and put his hand over the receiver, but as Meredith talked he let Josie run her tongue around the head of his cock, he thrust himself in her mouth, “Uh-huh,” he choked into the receiver, then covered it again, and arched and the sinews in his legs were hard as roots, covering the receiver as he bucked and groaned and then his hands in her hair as Meredith told him stories from over the sea.
“Okay, you,” Wade said, coming into the living room, all dressed, showered, and combed—cowboy boots and black jeans and leather jacket. “See you in a couple.”
“Yeah,” she said, not turning, so he couldn’t see the tears streaming down her face. “See you.”
She still wanted him. Fiercely, as she had on that day, as much as she had the first day at Meredith’s, the way she’d always wanted him. He just wasn’t like anybody else. She’d fucked a lot of boys but never wanted any of them, that was the truth. That was the goddamn truth. She’d never felt a fucking thing. And now she’d lost him, those hands on her body, those bony hips, his lips on her breasts, his tongue in her, his cock,
never and never.
She lay on the couch for the rest of the morning, like some crazy girl in a locked ward crying and masturbating all the day long.
Sunset Plaza
O
range crime lights illuminated new blacktop along Sunset Plaza as she climbed, her headlights washing the fronts of low modern houses crouching windowless to the street. The concrete walls and ivy and crushed white rock glowed in the artificial light. She parked a dozen houses up from the location, dry swallowed a cross top, and walked down, carrying Elena’s clothes in a bag. She’d just driven in from a four-hour sitting in Palos Verdes, it was going to be a long night. Greek statuettes flanked the flat black double doors she walked through without knocking, hoping she had the address right. The slate entry, walled in frosted glass, gave way to an expanse of immaculate white shag and a sheer wall of windows.
Total Sixties, it’ll blow your mind.
Beyond the white leather and glass of the sunken living room, past manicured lawn and bright swimming pool, lay the vast jeweled vista of night-crawler LA, spread out like a careless club queen passed out on a bed, skirts hiked above her waist, for anybody to fuck any way they wanted.
The crew had already trashed the carpet, black grimy cable smears and cigarette ash, wires snaking through the shag to feed light stands propped with sandbags. Jeremy and
My Producer
Gordo conspired, heads together, on a couch of ivory leather. “Whose house is this?” she asked. “Are they crazy, letting you use it?”
Jeremy pushed his lank hair back from his face, goggle eyes alight with a guilty excitement. “Actually, they’re in Aspen,” he said. “Actually.”
These people hadn’t dreamed how dangerous it might be to befriend a student filmmaker, and then say when they’d be out of town. How little he cared about them, compared to his need to use their perfect Sixties house for his movie. She felt like a burglar. Then she thought better of it. She wasn’t going to feel too sorry for people like this. They thought they could seal themselves away behind glass and white leather, but they were mistaken. Perfection was no protection. Disaster had a way of dropping by just when you least expected it.
Film students swarmed the set, drinking coffee, dropping cigarette ash, dragging lights, and setting up reflectors. The blonde in zebra pants knelt, taping cords. Her ass looked like a traffic island. Josie wished she had gotten some sleep. Her eyes kept catching on patterns, edges and corners, unpredictably threatening. She picked her way down the hall, found the master suite, blessedly all white. In the center, a white-leather-edged waterbed sat, plump as a fat bride. She lay down on its fur spread, let the water roll out from under her, slapping the far edge to recoil beneath her again. Suddenly, she remembered a boy from school who’d had a waterbed, what was his name? Steve something. They’d met at the Circle K, he took her home on his bike, a piece-of-crap Honda. She could picture his room, the AC/DC poster, the cheap tapestry of a bighorn sheep, but she couldn’t recall his face. Just the feel of the waterbed and his monotonous thrusts, and that stately ram.
She got up and changed into the Pucci dress, pinning the front closed—Elena was not the type for walking around with her black bra showing. Elena had never been to a Circle K, never lain down under a bighorn sheep rug. Josie examined her face in the mirror. After four hours in Palos Verdes and an hour-and-a-half drive into town, she needed to wash and start over. In the sparkly Formica bathroom, she taped the picture of Veruschka to the mirror under the space-satellite fixture, trying to remember how the face was created. Too bad Laura had quit the night of the sombreros, when Sergio had gone home with the blonde. Jeremy told her all about it. He had no personal life but he relished the dramas of others.
Josie opened her makeup kit, her bag of tricks, and began the slow transformation into Elena. Base, like gesso on a canvas, erasing the traces of her own personality, her dark eyes staring through the mask of her face. Then layer upon layer, building up another face, brown in the hollows, dark under the jaw, white on every bone. The two sets of eyelashes, giving Elena that Sixties look of pampered ennui. White shadow, black in the crease. Two broad bands of liquid liner, the spiky mascara. Pink lipstick, and a pale one over it. She brushed out her new-dyed hair, ratted it up, then swept the top layer over it, twisting it into a tiny chignon, no bigger than a silver dollar. She pinned and sprayed, then threaded plastic disc earrings through her earlobes.
And there was Elena.
She stared at her, this girl she had created.
Who are you? What do you know that I don’t?
Elena gazed back, that sweep of remarkable eyelash, a Jeanne Moreau smile on her downturned lips, and said nothing. She was a magician ready for the show, every ace in place. She didn’t let herself hang out, raw and ragged as a torn hem. Michael should have been with a girl like that. Someone smart, sophisticated, who would have loved him less but understood him better, anticipated his needs, handled him with dexterity. He thought he wanted Josie Tyrell, her scruffy innocence, to impregnate with his dreams. But he was mistaken.
The lights blazed in the living room now, generator outside humming like a fifty-foot hornet, a sound she knew would give Gil hemorrhoids. Jeremy hovered over the camera with Sergio and the Bobs, gesturing scene movement. Then he saw her. He straightened, and came to her on his storky long legs. “Josie!” He peered into her face. “My God, how did you do that?”
A small man with a strawberry birthmark on his cheek sat nervously on the white couch, his tiny feet in polished loafers that barely touched the floor.
“Who’s that?” Josie asked.
“My bank teller,” he confided, in his version of
sotto voce
which could be heard across the room, he had only two levels of volume, loud and louder. “Don’t you just love him?” Jeremy couldn’t resist the deformity. “So Mr. Cairo.”
“What are you going to do with him?”
Jeremy shrugged. “I’ll think of something.”
Poor Tellerman. He had no idea Jeremy was using him because he looked like Peter Lorre and had that thing on his face, and a toupee. He wasn’t in the script, but Jeremy would find a use for him. The potential for cruelty here was too painful to contemplate, so she walked outside, past the generator and the pool. It was damp and cold. She wrapped herself in her skinny arms, her thin poly dress no protection from the night. Down below, car lights snaked along the Strip with its hookers and dazed tourists and excited kids, too young for the clubs, but not too young to want to come down and be part of the scene, maybe catch sight of Debbie Harry or Joey Ramone. Josie had never hung out in front of the Whiskey, watching for the band. She might have been a hick from Bakersfield, but she always knew how to get past the box office.
One broad band below Sunset ran the double slashes of Santa Monica Boulevard, with its handsome, hungry boys watching the river of cars, hopeful thumbs ready, their cocks and asses. You could have anything for twenty-five bucks. So many lost boys and girls, even more lost than she. She’d given them rides, knew their stories, even pressed a few bucks into grubby hands. And above them all, the giant Marlboro man squinted down from his billboard with testosterone scorn, like God sneering down on Creation.
And where was the true world? Hiding its face behind this one like stars behind clouds. If it had ever existed. She didn’t know anymore.
You’ll have to remember for both of us
. . . But she couldn’t hang on. She pulled the half-pint of Smirny from her modeling bag, felt the hot burn of it in her throat, in her nose. She hadn’t slept in who knew how long, she felt like a puppet with somebody else’s face. From the lawn she could look down on God, be even more indifferent than He.
“Hi, you.”
Wade, standing beside her, his arms crossed, wearing his character’s costume, his suave Movie Director dark turtleneck and leather sport coat. “Saw you out here.”
Josie put the voddy away, didn’t offer him any. Serious actors didn’t get loaded while Working.
Tant pis,
as Michael would say.
“That was great,” he said, taking in the view. “The other night.”
Josie tasted vodka on her lips, rummaged in her bag for a ciggie, wondering what this would look like on film. She could almost see the script he was reading from,
It was great, the other night . . .
“I know that we’re working together,” he said, coming closer. She could smell his aftershave, Jovan Musk for Men. “I usually believe in waiting until things wrap. But you know, we’ve got a lot of chemistry, you and me.”
“There is no chemistry, Wade,” she said. She found the box, put a Gauloise in her mouth, and lit it with her father’s Ronson. Maybe she could light her breath on fire. That would make him think twice. “I drank half my body weight in tequila, that’s all.”
“We should try sometime without that.” He grinned. “Nobody’s ever complained.” She was afraid he was going to adjust himself in his pants. Thank God all he did was brush his hair back with his hand.
Nobody ever complained? Girls were kind. No one ever told him,
I could barely stay awake. If only you’d come faster, I could have ignored it altogether.
Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be. They learned to hold it in, tamp it down, like gunpowder in an old-fashioned gun. Then it exploded in your face, on a November day in the rain.
C
onrad, the Famous Movie Director, comes home to perfect Sixties house and his girlfriend, Elena. He’s upset about problems on the film he’s working on, and she listens, saying nothing, mysterious and haunted. It was even in the script.
Mysterious and haunted.
“Think
Belle de Jour,
Josie,” was how Jeremy described it. “Like
Blow-Up
meets
Belle de Jour.
” She saw it perfectly. Antonioni buttfucking Buñuel in Hitchcock’s basement apartment.
They blocked the scene, and then shot it. She liked being Elena, it was interesting, she could play with it—she’d never bothered much about one of her characters before. She’d just been the Girl. But Elena had little rooms you could walk into, the coldness behind the mask of her beauty, the edginess behind that.
Blah blah blah,
the Conrad character ranted, about his adversaries at the studio and how they were trying to take his film away from him, as Elena watched, pretending to listen. Josie could feel her, watching, not like a lover, but like a leopard contemplating its next meal. She could feel Elena’s remove. Elena was the star of a very private movie, herself as director, actor, and sole audience. All Elena’s admiration was for herself. She knew that’s how Elena got off in bed—she would watch herself getting laid in the mirrors of a man’s eyes.
Suddenly Wade was on her, his smell of leather and musk, his fat tongue in her mouth. She gagged, struggled, pushed him away. The feel of his tongue, the foreign taste. She wanted to spit.
“Cut!” Jeremy yelled. “What? What was that?”
Her face was red, she could feel it hot and prickly under her makeup. She’d fucked up the whole scene. But her mouth still knew Michael’s kiss. The way he would run his tongue along the inside of her downturned upper lip, or just brush her mouth with his. This was like eating garbage.
Since when did you mind eating garbage?
But she did. Surprisingly, something or someone in her did not want to anymore. She thought furiously. “Listen, she’s not really in love with this guy. It’s the other guy, what’s his name, Franco, that she wants. She can fake it until he kisses her.”
“Oh, Gawd . . . now you’re having ideas?” Jeremy looked at his watch. “Listen, Josie, I appreciate the insight, it’s terribly important to me and all, but we’ve got a long night. Can you just do it?”
Of course she could do it. It was only a movie, just a goddamn movie, what difference did it make if fucking Wade stuck his tongue down her throat or up her ass, she’d already slept with him. What did she think she was betraying that hadn’t already been betrayed? It was just a body.
It was just a body.
She had always had such a sense of that. But not now. It wasn’t just a body anymore. It had once been loved. Her body. Hers.
“She’s forgotten about Franco. This scene is about her being totally into Conrad,” Wade said. The actor was pouting, like any man whose kisses hadn’t been received with ardor and gratitude.
Jeremy looked from Josie to Wade, she could tell he was weighing who it would be easier to blow off, her or the actor. Jeremy sighed and turned to Wade. “Look, maybe a little more
romanza,
yeah? That’ll set Conrad off from Franco. Not so much full-frontal attack. I think that’s legitimate, don’t you?”
Wade struggled to contain his masculine ego, to pretend it was only artistic differences, not a girl who obviously wanted to vomit because he’d kissed her. “I was only doing it the way it’s written.”
“Okay, let’s be a little flexible, people. Take two.”
She still had to eat garbage, but at least it wasn’t being forced down her throat. She thought it wasn’t so bad being Elena, people listening to her for a change, being in possession—of her body, of a certain power. She didn’t know what else Elena had that she didn’t have, she was looking forward to finding out.
T
hey broke around two for dinner. Just the look of the pizzas made her ill, their red splatter and stringy white cheese, grease pooling at the top. Gil and the Bobs scarfed down their slices like grinning hyenas. The little tellerman, Mr. Cairo, had brought a carton of yogurt from home. He ate meticulously, scraping his underlip with the spoon, like a mother feeding a good baby, glowing with excitement about being on a real movie set. Wade lectured her about the difference between Conrad and the dangerous Franco, whom he also played, while Jeremy went over a blocking with Sergio, dripping grease on the pages. Sergio glanced across the table, ignoring the blonde in the zebra pants and the willowy brunette, both bristling with the stress of romantic contention, sending Josie sexual messages with his bedroom-soulful eyes. She wanted to go over there and kick the crap out of him. Sergio was a man in a candy store who was never hungry. She wanted to tell him that love was something people lived for, even died for. It wasn’t a chocolate cherry you ate half of and put the rest back in the box.