It made me feel dizzy, like I wanted to grab hold of something heavy and hang on. This was the life I was going to be living, everyone separated from everyone else, hanging on for a moment, only to be washed away. I could grow up and drift away too. My mother might never know where I was, and in a few years, if someone asked her about me, she might shrug like this and say, “Haven’t seen her in two, three years.
And suddenly I felt panic. I’d made a mistake, like when I’d played chess with Ray and knew a second too late I’d made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn’t afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn’t want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn’t need to see it, the hideous eyelets albino creature that lived underneath.
You never thought, maybe I should have left Astrid some words.
Like Berlin, I was layered with guilt and destruction. I had caused grief as well as suffering it. I could never honestly point a finger without it turning around in mid-accusation. Olivia.
I was graduating in two months, but I wasn’t to Pitzer, that was for sure. I was the old child, the past that had to burned away, so my mother, the phoenix, could emerge once again, a golden bird rising from the ash.
I didn’t want to remind her that I was the reason she was trapped in electric bills and kid’s shoes grown too small, the reason she was clawing at the windows like Michaels dying tomatoes. She was a beautiful woman dragging a crippled foot and I was that foot. I was bricks sewn into the hem of her clothes, I was a steel dress.
Loneliness ia a human condition.
On the cover that leaned against the dirty couch, John and Yoko pressed together for a kiss they would never finish. People were always trashing Yoko Ono, blaming her for breaking up the Beatles, but Josie knew they were just jealous that John preferred Yoko to some bloated megaband. Nobody ever loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list.
Her violence. Claire, what did you know about violence? My mother’s strength? Well she wasn’t strong enough to avoid being the background of my art. Just the background. Her words just my canvas.
I was the center of my own universe, it was the stars that were moving, rearranging themselves around me, and I liked the way he looked at me.
So much for those gleanings from novels, from paintings, as if love were a matter of posing in picturesque dishabille. No. You went into it as a tiger encountering another tiger. You went into it like a person jumping off a bridge.
It wasn’t like America, where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time. We hadn’t learned yet, there was not such thing as an empty canvas.
The Fool, the Zero card, dressed in motley, dazzled face to the sky, foot about to come off the cliff. Pierrot. It wasn’t Michael at all. It was her. You fool... And which one was he? The Magician? She’d thought he was. She’d thought he had it all lined up. The world spinning on his little finger. Or else the Hermit with his lantern, looking for the true world. But no, here he was. The twelfth card. The Hanged Man. Lashed upside down to his cross tree. Unable to go backward or forward.
I wanted to freeze this moment forever, the chimes, the slight splash of water, the chink of dogs’ leashes, laughter from the pool, the skritch of my mother’s dip-pen, the smell of the tree, the stillness. I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck. I.
They congratulated themselves and went back out to their sodas and Chex mix, leaving me in front of the mirror, a toddler’s fussed-over Barbie abandoned in the sandbox. I blinked back my tears and forced myself to look in the mirror. Looking.
But she was sure old Henry’d showed up with the other granola-heads, lit incense and rang finger cymbals and blew some pot, no doubt, in John’s memory. Om rama rama. Did John Lennon really want all that? Was that what he was about? From what she’d heard, the guy’d had some wit and brains – did he really want to be the dead guy of the hour, like a melting centerpiece?
Shot by a desperate fan. On the news, fans were always desperate. Got his signature and then shot him down. The saddest thing about it was that she wasn’t more shocked. To Josie, it just seemed part of the way things were heading, Ronald Reagan, greedheads running everything. Killing John Lennon seemed like just mopping up. Thirty thousand people missing in El Salvador, those nuns, and everybody in America was worried about who shot JR.
It was true, Jeremy took advantage. And she let him. It was his film, and she really didn’t care. It was just a body, like a rented suit. Michael had tried to make her feel differently about herself, that it wasn’t just for use by others, it was hers, she belonged to herself, she had to occupy herself.
She kept thinking about it as Jeremy talked about his Concept for the movie, the locations, some house off Sunset Plaza he pronounced “total Sixties, it’ll blow your mind.” She imagined walking into the house and blowing her head off.
And it occurred to Josie how tortured Michael must have been by the way his mother’s gift just flowed out of her, so clear and certain and unobstructed, like a spring. How painful it must have been for him to watch this. Michael had that genius, maybe even more than Meredith, but couldn’t let it out like that. Just pour it out. And no matter how good he was, even if he was the one picked out of a whole show, he could never feel it. He could do everything except find a way to satisfaction.