Josie pressed the ice to her forehead with her left hand, touched the lashes with the pinkie of her right. She was going to have a whacking big bruise, but it wouldn’t show until later. Like everything. She pulled out the voddy and had a shot, eyeing Elena’s face, that mask. And her own face underneath, also a mask. And under that? What was under that, Jeanne of Montmartre? Daisy Mae? Something hideous, that Michael would paint in the mirror? Maybe you just kept peeling and never got down to the real face, maybe it just got smaller and smaller until there was nothing at all.
Nick
I
t was noon by the time she arrived home, her nerves jangling like a great set of keys. One more scene, always just one more. She wished she hadn’t done those white crosses, even though it was how she always got through those long shoots. Wired was the last thing she wanted to be. She pulled the noose on the gate and walked down to the house. As she neared the bottom, she slowed, stopping before the door. Something in her didn’t want to go inside, as if there were something terrible waiting for her. Ridiculous. She forced herself to open the door. An empty living room with four empty walls, nothing to be afraid of.
Get it together, Josie,
she could hear Pen’s voice in her head.
Don’t go fucking psycho on me, okay? We’ll go to the Rose Bowl, we’ll buy some new fucking stuff. It ain’t pretty but you’ll live.
She was exhausted, she’d been up some twenty-eight hours now, she needed some sleep. She sat on the blue couch and smoked a ciggie, staring out the windows at the flat light, overcast, a weird greenish tinge to the sky, like an old bruise. She thought she heard something coming down the stairs outside. Damn it. She felt so exposed in there, suddenly. She half rose, listening, but then she didn’t hear it. She got up and opened the door, but everything was the way it usually was, the splintered stairs, the peeling pipe-railing, the giant birds-of-paradise, purple and vaguely mocking. She closed the door and locked it. Though the door itself would give way to one well-placed kick.
The windows suddenly looked so raw without curtains. As if they had never moved in. They used to love it like that, but now all those houses on the opposite hill stared, without compassion. “What are you fucking staring at?” She got her purse and went into the kitchen that was less exposed, sat in the breakfast nook with the cutout hearts, and drank the last of the vodka, wishing she’d put away something before the shoot. She should have known she’d be like this, a night shoot. What she wouldn’t give for one of those Percocets now. Almost worth going in for some emergency dental work. She thought of the Diazepam bakery, but it was too early, the stone-faced Salvadoran didn’t come in until five.
She missed the painting of her cooking that always hung there, above the nook. Everywhere, the ghosts of the vanished objects glared—missing paintings, absent china, furniture, along with the boy who made them, bought them, loved them.
What isn’t there.
She didn’t want to look at any of it anymore, she hated this place, she should move, if only she had somewhere else to go, but she didn’t want to see anyone, explain anything. She retreated to the bedroom, where Montmartre still covered the walls.
La Bohème.
Lucky that Meredith hadn’t figured out how to steal the walls. When she did, no doubt she’d be back, and the walls too would disappear, the whole house, folded up and carried away.
She drew the felt curtains and lay in the fusty bed, willing sleep, the bed where he’d lain with his headaches, his mind grinding like a mill, just like this, grinding him away. She wanted the grinding to stop, the clocks. The Duke of the Dark Castle with his frozen hands. She had to sleep. She needed a pill, Christ, something that would knock her out cold, hide her in sweet oblivion. Compared with her, Michael was brave. He always moved toward the thing he was afraid of. Sitting in that chair, night after night, looking right into its face. Painting it in the mirror. When she couldn’t stand much at all. If only she could make it just stop.
She went out and phoned the house on Carondelet, but nobody was home. She called Tilly’s Cafe but Pen wasn’t there either. Genghiz answered at the salon on Melrose, Shirley was there but she had her hands in color, could she call Josie back? She tried the pay phone at the Teriyaki Oki Dog, a boy answered it, Matt somebody, but she didn’t know anyone who was eating there. She finally got hold of Paul at Cashbox, he didn’t have anything better than Sudafed. She washed dishes, she folded and restacked her clothes, mopped the kitchen floor, made the bed. Shirley never called back. At three in the afternoon, she put her dress back on and drove over to the Fuckhouse.
It was a broad-porched, two-story Prairie-style house on Franklin Avenue, built in the ’teens for a big, prosperous family, but the block had declined considerably since those old dirt-road, pepper-tree Hollywood days. Making what seemed to her to be a thunderous amount of noise, she clattered up the wooden steps, past the broken furniture on the porch and through the unlocked front door. In the living room, a boy she didn’t know with spiky red hair sat on the couch watching a nature show on TV with the sound off, listening to Dead Kennedys. Onscreen, an alligator was eating a heron. The house smelled of garbage and cigarettes. The ashtray had overflowed onto the coffee table, but she didn’t live here anymore, she didn’t give a damn. “Where’s Nick?”
“He’s not up,” the boy said, then finally turned his head, saw her in her newly bleached hair and the Pucci dress. “But I’m here.”
Josie checked in the kitchen to see if anybody was in there, Hector or Robbie slurping down a first mug of resinous coffee, but only the cockroaches were up, busy in the sink, feasting off the dirty dishes in their bath of filthy water. Back copies of the
Weekly,
old
Creem
and
Crawdaddy, Puke,
buried the wobbly table. Bags full of beer cans and bottles rested by the back door, waiting for someone to turn them in for cash when money was tight. She’d once lived like this. Had even thought it glamorous, the bands, manic boys and outrageous girls, and she had been the homecoming queen, a sort of Chelsea Girl in the movie of her mind.
She heard the water come on upstairs, someone in the bathroom taking a shower, and she climbed the bare wooden steps, white boots clattering on each step. She wondered how late they had all gotten home. The walls were covered with spray paint, drooling down the dirty white surface,
NO GOD
. WHO CARES?
NO ONE
HEARS YOUR
CRIES
.
She touched her own name in the stairway graffiti,
JoC,
and in the
C
a knifed heart. It seemed like another life. She walked down to the door at the end of the hall, plastered with stickers for bands and motorcycles, Nick’s two chief loves, and opened it without knocking.
The sun tried to penetrate the red pull-down blinds that bathed the room in a spooky daytime glow. It smelled like seven days of sex and three of speed, and Nick was fucking some skanky brunette doggie-style in his rumpled bed, the mattress half-exposed where her grip on the sheets had pulled them away. His poor face looked harsh and thin and hagged out, but his body was tight as a wire, a body somebody should cast in hot metal.
She knew she should just close the door and let him finish, but she was feeling difficult, a prima donna, and yes she had to admit it irked her to see her ex fucking such a cow, reminded her that for Nick it didn’t matter what pussy he got, it was all about as personal as a public toilet. So she threw a load of clothes onto the floor and sat on the butterfly chair with the tiger-stripe cover she had made for him when they’d been together, crossed her legs like Elena, and watched him do it, as if she were at the symphony. She lit a cigarette, threw the match on the floor.
“Watch me make her scream,” he said. He changed his rhythm from slow to little fast jerks, then plowed all the way into her, holding a fistful of her dirty hair like a rider holding a horse’s mane, and even now she knew what that would feel like, though she pretended she didn’t, just an indifferent spectator. Sure enough, the brunette went from her deep-in-the-throat moans to a real earsplitting howl as she came.
Nick arched back and froze, gripping the girl’s ass so hard she’d probably have bruises, and then collapsed on top of her like a toad on a rock, then rolled over, his cock still hard in the red window light.
“Like her?” Nick asked, slapping her big ass. “There’s enough for everybody.”
The girl turned over. She recognized her, somebody’s girlfriend, Tammy, Terri, she waited tables at Canter’s Delicatessen. “Hi, Josie,” she said, pulling the covers up over her big beach-ball tits, looking uneasy, as if she wasn’t sure if Nick and Josie might have gotten back together again.
Trini.
“Hey, Trini,” Josie said. “Nick, I want to talk to you for a second.”
Trini yawned, stretched, and snuggled down in the dirty covers for a postcoital snooze.
“So talk.”
“Alone.”
“You sat there and watched me fuck her, suddenly we’ve got secrets?” Nick said. “Gimme a ciggie.”
Josie threw him one of her Gauloises. He pawed through the debris on the bedside table—it looked as if he hadn’t cleaned since she left—found a cheap Bic lighter and shook it, struck the flint, took a drag, frowned. “Shit, what are these things?” He pulled a shred of tobacco off his tongue.
“Dried moose turds,” Josie said.
“Yeah, I guess. So, what are you doing here, I thought you’d be all in mourning.
She walks the hills in a long black veil
and whatnot.” Nick squinted against the harsh smoke, pushed his long stringy hair out of his hypothyroid blue eyes. “You couldn’t even talk to me that night at Lola’s, you think I was too stoned to remember? You were really a bitch.”
“Sorry.”
“You should be,” he said. “You can’t take that shit out on me, I didn’t even know the guy.”
“He was beautiful,” Josie said. “I was in love with him.”
“Well, what am I, last night’s cumstain?”
She said nothing. Next door, she could hear Robbie’s hacking cough. “Hey, I didn’t say it.”
She read the hurt in Nick’s jaded blue eyes. “So what do you want from me?”
“Who said I wanted something?” Josie rounded the cherry of her cigarette on the bottom of her boot.
“You’re here, you must want something. You don’t come over just to hang out.” He flicked his ashes in the direction of the bedside table, the sheet up around his waist, his other hand reached out and appreciatively jiggled Trini’s round haunch through the dirty sheet. “So what is it? No, let me guess.” He looked her lazily up and down. “By the way, I love that outfit.” She watched him stroke his skinny, tight-muscled chest, the small hard nipples. “You don’t want to get laid, I guess, so it must be dope. Am I right, Bob? A little something to settle your nerves.”
Needing something was such a drag. She wished she could tell him how bad it had been, the sleeplessness, the sense of something evil about to happen. Living with Michael’s death all day and all night, replaying the fights they’d had, the sight of him at the morgue. How it must have been for him, pretending things were fine while he was weighing his life in his hands. She should have known, it was right in front of her, all around. She didn’t know what was real anymore. She had stood over a sleeping woman and thought how easy it would be to kill her. She had almost put her head through a window. Coyotes were coming out of the hills for her. A little something to settle her nerves? “Something like that.”
Nick blew red smoke up into the red room. “So what are you going to do for me, Josie T.?”
Asshole. She couldn’t believe he thought he loved her. He loved Mickey’s Big Mouths, and d’Andrea guitar picks. He had no idea what it meant to love someone. Just like her, before she’d met Michael. To think she had fucked him when Michael was in the house on Lemoyne, struggling with his darkness. Who was the skank of all skanks? Not Trini, that was for sure. “What, you want me to suck you off in front of all your friends, is that what you had in mind? Why would you even ask me a question like that?”
He dropped the butt in a beer can, by the hiss you could tell it wasn’t quite empty. “Okay, dope it is. But you better not pull that shit anymore, like I’m some shit on your shoes.” He threw the covers back, his small electrified body with the oversized cock, and moved his skinny, sinewy legs to the side of the bed, took his jeans off the floor and put them on. She never knew a boy in rock and roll who wore underwear. “I may not have gone to Harvard, but I didn’t off myself. I didn’t lay that on you. I do give a shit, ya know.” He stood up, hitched himself inside his pants. “Although if you wanted to suck me off in front of all my friends, I wouldn’t say no.”
She drove him in her car over to his friend Red’s on Fountain Ave, where he lived above the old market, the oldest building anywhere in Hollywood, two storied, wooden with a peaked roof, it looked like a feed store. She stayed in the car—Red didn’t like Josie, from the time he was living with them at the Fuckhouse, freebasing off the electric coils on the kitchen stove. Well, what did he expect, he was a creep magnet, she couldn’t live in a house with that kind of dealing going on, it was just too much, she’d made Nick kick him out. “Get me some barbs, as many as he’s got, and some pot.” She gave Nick fifty bucks.
“What do you want with the downs?” he asked. “Not that it’s any of my business, but you’re not thinking of pulling a Marilyn, are you?”
She hadn’t been. Or not this minute anyway. “Well, it’s not any of your business. But no, I just need something to sleep. I’m so wired I can hardly blink.”
He gave her an extrahard look, but went in with the cash. In a few minutes he came back with an envelope of reds and Nembies and the weed. They sat in the car and she rolled up a doob, lit it, and punched in the tape. Nick startled when he heard the opening notes. “What the fuck’s that?”
“Rimsky-Korsakov,” she said. “Elegy for Tchaikovsky.”
He laughed, quickly, like he always did, his young face already lined. She could see how he would look at forty. “Roll over, Little Richard.”
She felt the tension slide off with the first wave of the high, like sandbags she could let slide to the ground. She reached over and turned up the volume.
Nick adjusted the outside mirror toward him, examined his eyes, his stringy sandy brown hair. He fluffed the strands, gazed at the hairline. “You think I’m gonna go bald?” He angled the mirror a different way, craned his neck. “Hey, see that gray Olds? Just about five cars back? I swear I saw it when we left the Fuckhouse.”