Soul
S
he dreamed she was an inmate on a prison island. It was completely surrounded by a malarial swamp, everything shades of gray and murky green. Nothing for miles but dead water, a labyrinth of roots. It was hopeless, no possible way out. But among the prisoners, it was said there was a place you could swim out, a hole down at the very bottom of the swamp, that let you swim through and come out somewhere else, somewhere clean and beautiful, with transparent water and brilliant sky. Although it was just a prison rumor, she came across the spot she was almost sure was the place. She dove into the murk. Down, down, into the ooze, away from the sun, away from the light, and there it was, she saw it, the mouth of a cave. But just as she was getting there, she found she didn’t have enough breath, she couldn’t make it all the way. She turned back and tried to swim to the surface, but she couldn’t reach that either, she’d miscalculated the whole thing, she was drowning.
She fought her way into wakefulness, still smelling the swamp, the dead water clinging to her. Where was she? Her lungs ached, she needed aspirin, but didn’t want to move. She rolled over, sank into the pillow as it all came back to her. The black pool, the darkness and forgetting. That moment of surrender.
You stupid motherfucker.
Falling into a pool on pills and booze like every dumb-ass rock-and-roll accidental suicide. If it wasn’t for that flat-ass Spaniard, you’d be dead now.
Lying on the bottom of Meredith Loewy’s pool, like Marianne Faithfull in that Shakespeare movie, a crazy girl who’d drowned in a stream because some prince wouldn’t fuck her. Fuck. She was lying here breathing only by accident. She could still remember what she thought when she went in.
Yes,
that was what she was thinking.
Good. Here it is.
She lay in the stale bed, in the musty room, staring through the darkness to the wall where the dresser had been, their green dresser with its silver paisleys, now at Meredith’s, along with everything else. A slit of light barely illuminated the empty room.
There aren’t any accidents,
Shirley K. always said. If you left your jacket or ran into a post, you must have wanted it. Josie lay in the bed like a shipwreck on a beach, her lungs still hurting. Tears slowly slid down the sides of her face. Was that what she really wanted, just to die? Follow Michael down to the bottom? Like Dylan fucking Thomas, drinking himself to death that night in New York, wanting it without wanting to know it. By any rights, she should already be gone, a bloated potato girl in a fake fur coat. That was what she really wanted. To forget so thoroughly she’d never have another memory again, the bitter so bitter you gave up the sweet.
She shivered with the cold and the dank and the swamp.
You take care your own soul.
Her soul. She tried to picture a soul. A white feathered thing, like your lungs, those wings. But hers was more like a rotten old bathing suit that had molded on the hook, it would tear clean apart if she tried to put it on. A moldy old scrap only fit for throwing away, not even the devil would take it on consignment.
What was she doing here, alive, when Michael with his beautiful
alma
was gone? He was the one who cared about things like that, the true world, God, having a soul. Yet what had kept that fucking bitch Sofía awake that night, had not let her drown? Was that God? Was that destiny? Or just sheer fucking dumb luck. She thought of a kid on a skateboard by the sea, the wheels going around and around, praying without knowing it for a girl who didn’t know how to pray for herself.
Her nose was running, she needed water, she had to take a leak. She rolled to the edge of the bed, gingerly pressed herself to a sitting position, waiting for her head to settle back onto her shoulders. It was the worst kind of barbiturate headache, she felt her skull was going to crack in two, like an egg.
Duck eggs.
Not so elegant today, Michael. Not very elegant at all.
Holding her head, she stood up, groped her way to the toilet, bare feet on cold tile, eased herself down, tried to connect to make herself go. The empty bathtub gaped, an enormous sarcophagus, an empty boat. The hours they’d spent in that tub. Letting out water when it got cold, putting more hot in. Goofing with armies of plastic toys, flotillas of little boats. He once reenacted the whole Battle of Trafalgar for her. The bigger boats were Spain and the little ones were England, they were faster, and the general, Lord Nelson, was seasick the whole time. He died and said, “Kiss me, Hardy.”
She would lie against Michael, away from the faucet, and dream of their room in Montmartre. In the shadow of the Sacré-Coeur. The kitchen behind a curtain, the brass double bed, pancake saggy, the view of all Paris. She felt a rush of nausea. So many things he’d failed to mention, like an apartment off the Avenue Foch.
Her head throbbed like a smashed finger. She flushed and went to the medicine cabinet that was hung so high she could barely see herself, Michael had had to install another over the toilet so she could do her makeup. But she could see well enough to take in her matted hair, her face gray and gaunt, all shattered apart, she was getting a cold sore on her upper lip. She took out the aspirin, shook four into her palm and took them two by two, with swallows of water from the spigot. Who was she? Who was he? Nothing was familiar now, she could take nothing for granted.
She went back into the bedroom, opened the windows, though it was cold, she had to get rid of the swamp smell that still clung to the bed. She buried herself in the covers, as Montmartre came back all around her. She remembered how he used to make coffee in the morning and bring it to her in bed on a tray. He’d come in under the covers and tell her stories about their life on the Butte. The café on the corner, where they drank their café au lait from big bowls standing up at the bar. The dwarf owner, Madame Sorel, who had a platform built up the length of the bar, so she could look the customers in the eye.
“But what are we doing up so early?” She pinched his nipple, he liked that more than you’d think. “We were at Cocteau’s party until dawn, remember? You were Pierrot, and I was Columbine.” The moon-drunk clown and his silver lady.
He dangled a stem of grapes above her lips, so she could reach up and bite them off one by one. “We have to shop,” he said. “Before it’s picked over. Monsieur Clemenceau
le boucher
always tries to sell us the worst meat. We know if he wants us to buy the veal, it must be old.
Non, monsieur, les côtelettes d’agneau, s’il vous plaît.
”
“You go shop. I’m staying in.” Drinking the coffee, which he had ground in the brass tube he’d bought in the market in Istanbul.
“Ah, but sometimes I forget. . . . Last time the daffodils were so pretty, I spent all our money on them, remember? A whole armload, and dropped them onto you one by one while you slept.”
The idea of him, embracing an armload of flowers, dropping them on the bed in Montmartre to wake her up. All that yellow, lighting their room. They could have had that. They should have just gone. Tears flowed down her temples into her hair. She couldn’t understand. All these things had been within reach. But he was so damn perverse, he preferred to dream it than to make it come true.
Of course, it wouldn’t be
La Bohème
in Meredith’s flat in the sixteenth. She knew what it would look like. Plaster leaves on the ceiling, striped-silk drapes and chairs with pale wood legs. Not their artist’s room in Montmartre. But couldn’t they have had just as good a time in the luxury of Meredith’s apartment off the Avenue Foch, antiques and wallpaper, clean sheets and a maid?
Maybe. It would have been fine for her. But she knew it wasn’t what he wanted. He wanted Montmartre, where he was the young artist, fighting his way to himself. The Montmartre of their dreams, the two of them, living on their wits and what they could scrape together from odd jobs. Him playing piano in cafés, her modeling and singing in bars—really, just what they were doing in Echo Park. But in the flat in the sixteenth, he would be the son again. Like a prince, both important and irrelevant. His value only by association. And Michael had been trying so hard to matter to himself. That’s what he was doing here in his own just-starting life. The real Paris, that you could get to on a plane, wasn’t their Paris. There was no Cocteau anymore, he’d been dead for years, no Duchamp or Apollinaire, no Blaise or Jeanne, they were gone even when the poem was written. For all she knew, the Sacré-Coeur might be a disco by now.
She lay in the stale bed, gazing up at the ceiling, its tongue-and-groove surface bare of the pagoda paper lanterns and painted birdcages, the spiral of tassels they’d found in a box on Alvarado and tacked up there. This had been their Montmartre. Right here. This haven they’d made. The afternoons they lay in this bed, making love so slowly and thoroughly it wasn’t even sex anymore, it was a world of its own. And he read her his books, filled her with light, he changed her, he dreamed her up and there she was. He hadn’t told her about the flat in the sixteenth because she wouldn’t have understood, that
this
was their Paris.
She hadn’t understood him even that well. It was right there in front of her. Her idiocy made her lungs ache.
So why had it stopped being a refuge, and become something else—a dogtrack, a bullring, where there was nowhere to hide from his dark drama? July, or August. Things had been fine up to then. They’d gone to TJ and Ensenada—and he’d had that show, the review in the
Weekly.
He’d painted the Meredith picture, an exorcism. Was it her working on that film with Jeremy? Was it Reynaldo, the strain of supporting himself? First he quit, and then he was painting those mad monks, and then he stopped painting altogether. His mood moving from twilight to midnight. She remembered walking on Cerro Gordo by the water tank, and pointing out leaf patterns impressed in the sidewalk, that unexpected beauty, and he said, “Some leaves blew into the wet cement, Josie, it’s not the miracle of the loaves and the fishes.” The world that was the emanation of the divine had been reduced to a handful of dust.
He was the one who had taught her to watch for signs of the true world and suddenly it was as if all that had never happened. She was left alone, and he began to stiffen when she touched him, when once he would have pulled her into an embrace. “What did I do?”
“I just don’t want to be pawed,” he said.
She never knew what she’d done to deserve that. She’d thought it was his painting not going so well. Then the accusations, the jealousy, before he had any reason. Accusing her of lying to him, when it was him all the time. From the beginning. Pretending to be a virgin. Saying he didn’t play sports. Letting her believe there’d been no other girls, that he never talked to his father. He’d lied to her from the very first day. Shaping a picture of himself that had certain things in common with the real Michael, but left so much out. He wanted to appear much more helpless than he was. He certainly didn’t trust her enough to tell her about Saint-Tropez.
He hate he love her that way.
There it was. Josie may have pulled out the rug from under him, but it was Meredith who put it there. Unthinkable. And yet, why not. All kinds of things happened in this world, a brother, a sister, a mother, a son. She could picture it. It wasn’t such a stretch.
A hotel room with shutters, like that painting by Matisse. She’d come in, just to say good night, talk over the day. Adjoining rooms, of course, you wouldn’t have to go through the hall. The line that was so thin, it was not even there. She could see it. His mother walking in on him reading a book. Stroking himself as he read, he liked that, doing things while he did something else, to know and not know in that way. Meredith in a light robe, maybe her hair up in a towel. “Busy?” Probably half-crocked, she was disciplined in some ways but not in all. Lonely. No man in Saint-Tropez to flatter her, only the handsome son. Seeing him pull his hand out from under the sheet, pretending not to, yes, they both were like that. Talking to him as if nothing had been seen. Lounging around, having a good little chat. Her robe falling open.
He always said he loved Josie’s delicacy, her lightness, her small neat form.
For she is my love, and other women are but big bodies of flame
. . . But maybe he’d just been looking for someone who didn’t remind him of Meredith, and that night in Saint-Tropez, the woman who came in through the closets of a dream.
Was that all, Michael? Was I nothing to you but the anti-Meredith?
It started with those goddamn phone calls. Stockholm, Reykjavik, Hamburg.
July, August.
Though maybe he’d been making collect calls to Meredith the whole time, what did she know? She was as blind as the blind Merediths times ten. Restless, not sleeping, the painting had taken a bad turn. Had he longed for her, the room in Saint-Tropez, her warm full body exposed in the light robe? His eye drawn to the dark patch at the V of her legs, Meredith saying, “If you didn’t know me, would you find me attractive?”
Michael wouldn’t have stopped it. He always moved toward the thing that frightened him.
The two of them, you know what they were like.
The crippled boy, the deaf-mutes. He once told her Meredith liked to pretend she was his mistress in public, it was a game they played, in cafés and in galleries, the handsome boy and the elegant woman, a game and not a game. The boundaries already so blurred. He’d been taught since he was a baby how different he was from everyone else, how different they all were, the Loewys, rules didn’t apply.
Did you touch her, Michael? Did the smell of her make you dizzy, so familiar, the smoke of perfume, the dark musky smell of her body?
It was a night which had been brewing for years. He just wouldn’t have known how it would feel, to carry it around, his judgment of himself.
His erection visible under the sheet, hard and flat against his belly. Maybe she laid her head on the pillow, her breast falling from the robe. “What if we were strangers.” He so loved to pretend. Her hand caressing his face, how it might have happened. Maybe kissing him a bit openmouthed, letting herself forget for a moment it was her son, just a handsome young man, the feel of him jumping under the sheet, her hair a mess on the pillow, how warm she was, how familiar, her breast in his hand,
it’s only a dream, Michael, it’s not real,
something he must have dreamed about, dreamed and feared. Afterward, listening to the sound of the surf . . .
Shhh, don’t think about it, don’t say anything
. . . her hand to his mouth . . .