by Dylan Landis
Rainey puts her face in her hands. She likes the view better that way, ever since Howard sent the paintings, the chandelier, and the Biedermeier secretary desk to Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet, to raise cash.
“You knew I was at a sleepover,” she says.
“And what happened, a lover’s quarrel? Police raid the party? What sent you out in the street before dawn? No need to hide your face,” says Howard. She and her father sit in facing armchairs. “Look up, sweetheart.”
Her left wrist smells like tea-rose oil. Her mother trailed the scent through the house until she split, and Rainey still dabs it on every morning, between her toes and on her wrist. She plans on wearing tea-rose oil until she dies, whereupon she will leave instructions regarding the perfuming of her corpse.
From far upstairs comes laughter and music, the twirp of Radmila’s electric flute.
Rainey sends her softest voice out from between her fingers. It’s a voice she’s got down. “Gordy,” she says, “would you please make me a grilled cheese?” Gordy slides off the sofa arm with ironic obedience and goes into the kitchen.
“Whatever you were doing, don’t be embarrassed. We should be talking frankly. Look up, kiddo.”
Through her fingers she sees Howard relaxed and smiling, his long body slung diagonally in the armchair. Her father’s never touched her—it’s her fault she feels so bare in his presence, as if he were smiling and nodding right through her clothes. Relaxed, that’s how a chick should be, discussing sex with her father: casually slung.
“For Chrissake,” he says, and calls into the kitchen. “Tell her it’s 1974, Gordy.”
“It’s 1974, babe,” Gordy calls back. “You have a pretty hip father. Talk to him.”
“No one says hip,” says Rainey.
Howard shrugs. He pats the chair cushions, digs out something that appears to be bothering him—a recorder, of all things—looks at it in a puzzled way, and then toodles on it. It sounds wrong for him. When he stops playing he says, “So tell your old man exactly what you’ve been doing until four in the morning.”
“I was sleeping at a friend’s and I left.”
“Have I met him?”
“Her.”
“If it was a her,” says Howard coolly, “I don’t think you’d walk out at four in the morning. Not that you have a curfew. I’m not archaic.” He walks the recorder between his fingers. “They teach you the important things? How girls your age are approaching a biological peak?” When Howard talks about girls your age she wants to smash things. “It’s evolution,” he says.
Of course he would say this right as Gordy reappears. The plate clicks on the coffee table, and she smells the cheddar. She was starving, but now the smell makes her stomach clench. Far beneath it she smells Howard’s sandalwood oil. “Nourishment,” says Gordy. His hand moves her hair aside and parks on the nape of her neck. Howard says nothing. “Milk?”
“Coke.” Rainey tightens. She wants milk, but she doesn’t want Gordy saying the word. The hand goes away. She waits till she hears the kiss of the fridge and takes her face out of her hands. “You’re gross,” she tells her father.
“Guilty,” says Howard. He crams the recorder back between the chair cushions.
“Fuck you,” she says, and he laughs as if a child had said something clever.
“You are gross, Howard,” Gordy says, walking back from the kitchen with Rainey’s soda, and in that moment she thinks, It’s only hair, it’s only stroking, and she looks at him with relief.
Her father unslings himself from the chair and goes over to lean against the open piano. He drops a hand in and plucks at the wires without looking, creating an atonal melody that quickens Rainey’s breathing and irritates her. The truth is she doesn’t like jazz. Howard Royal’s daughter does not like jazz. He has tried to teach her about sixteenths and what it means to be on top of the beat or just behind it; he has played her the softly articulated notes called ghosts. But to her, his music has about as much internal rhyme as a flock of birds flapping up startled from the sidewalk.
Rainey thinks about how the lunchroom at Urban Day goes silent in her ears when Andy Sak looks at her across all those tables, stares right past Tina and Angeline, past Leah hunkering over her tray. Forget 1974: he could be any young male out hunting who spots her gathering. Of course if it were a thousand years ago, they would probably converse about as much as they do now. Sometimes she loves Andy Sak and lets him do things and sometimes she ignores him for weeks.
She takes a bite of grilled cheese and propels herself off her chair. “You are such an asshole,” she tells her father.
Howard’s fingers strum the piano wires, and he laughs. “Welcome to my house, Daughter,” he says. “Where I get to be the reigning asshole.”
RAINEY CUTS SCHOOL THE next morning and goes to the Home on the Upper West Side where her grandmother Lala lives. It’s an emergency. She waves at the front desk staff without signing in. They are all old friends. She takes the elevator to three and walks into Lala’s room. They lock eyes and smile their privacy smile. “Look who’s here,” says Bethie, Lala’s private aide, “aren’t you a sweetheart,” and she moves off with heavy twitching hips to watch the other patient’s TV. The other patient is a wispy woman, half paralyzed and mute from stroke who can’t complain when Bethie changes the channel. Lala pulls the plastic mask from her nose and mouth and nestles it down around her neck. “Dear heart,” she says.
Lala does not know about the sale of the oil paintings and the art deco and Biedermeier furniture. She is adagissimo, Howard says. Even Rainey knows that’s slow as a funeral. Lala left the townhouse weeping in an ambulette. No one moves out of West Tenth Street the normal way. Rainey’s grandfather, Pawpaw, who played jazz trombone, stayed away longer and longer on tour till finally he never came home. He is old and poor in Cincinnati now, still married to Lala on paper. Rainey’s mother got into a taxi at dawn, leaving behind her things and the scent of tea-rose oil. And Howard’s students depart furious or in tears when he has used them up.
But Rainey, Rainey will never go. West Tenth is hers. The house sits on its foundation and grips the concrete, and she will inherit it when Lala dies. Every time she visits, Lala says it. It is their ritual.
Last night Howard said, Welcome to my house.
“I’m making something new.” From her pack she extracts the beginning of a sculpture she has wrapped in a pillowcase—a pair of Lala’s fancy shoes from maybe the 1950s painted cobalt blue inside and out. She took the shoes from a carton in the basement and has started to adorn them with bits of vintage costume jewelry from Lala’s boxed-up things. What she doesn’t say is that she plans to glue them to the top of Lala’s girlhood Bible, and paint that, too.
“But those are mine.” Lala turns the half-encrusted shoes and looks at them from all sides. “Oh, my,” she says. “This is about me, isn’t it. You’re making art about your grandmother.” She looks at Rainey with shining eyes. “You know, honey, that house and everything in it will be yours when I’m gone.”
So it’s still true. Rainey kisses her grandmother’s parchment hand and says, “I’ll take good care of it, I swear.”
Lala used to float through the townhouse like a distracted queen. She wore long dresses the colors of Jordan almonds and beamed at the sexiest acolytes as if she had no idea they were anything more than Howard’s violinists and vibraphonists. Her bedroom, on the second floor overlooking the street, looked like the inside of a Fabergé egg. Rainey loved Lala’s room. She could never have imagined a time when Howard and his girl musicians would steam Scalamandré wallpaper off the walls, pull the canopy off the antique bed, and take down a French chandelier shaped like a purse.
Lala’s bedroom door had certain magical properties. It was as if brass sections in the parlor went mute for her when that latch clicked shut; it was as if Rainey’s mother stopped taking the stairs from Howard’s bedroom to Gordy’s and spending all that time on the roof. It was as if Gordy stopped slipping into
Rainey’s room to tuck her in late at night.
It was as if Howard stopped living off Lala’s money.
Rainey’s door, on the other hand, was porous as silk. Horn and piano flowed through it like water. A mother could kiss her, pass through it, and disappear. The door never even registered on Gordy Vine.
“I want Tina to live with me,” Rainey says. Tina has never said one judgmental word about the Gordy situation, has never said, for example, What’s wrong with you—just tell him to get out of your room.
“That’s very sweet,” says Lala.
“And I want Gordy to leave. He bothers me.” She waits to see if her grandmother has antennae when it comes to bothering.
Lala’s gaze becomes curiously focused, as if she is examining fine needlework.
“Fine, honey,” Lala says. “That’s between you and your father. Would you pour me some water?”
“Well, that’s the other thing,” says Rainey. She pours a cup of water from a pink plastic pitcher and pops in a straw. Lala waves it away. “I want Howard to go, too. If it’s my house, I want to be”—she has just heard about this, at school—“an emancipated minor.”
Lala struggles upright against the pillows. “Howard is an idiot,” she says vigorously, causing Bethie to look up. Rainey makes it halfway into a shocked laugh. “But he is also your father. Do you know what it means to inherit a house in trust?”
Rainey becomes sharply aware of the hum of things: the turned-down television and the blue corrugated tubes that jerk and sigh as a machine breathes into Lala’s mask. She imagines the molecular slosh of Lala’s pee as it inches along the catheter. The sack of pee, nearly full, hangs dangerously close to Rainey’s leg.
“You can trust me with the house.” Rainey caresses Lala’s shiny nails, which Bethie polishes with opalescent Revlon polish. The image of Saint Cath, folded at the bottom of her pack, radiates light. “The house will save my life,” she says. With Tina as backup, Rainey might be strong enough to make Howard and Gordy move out. At least the acolytes and folding chairs would have to go.
Her grandmother says, “Howard is the trustee. He lives there. He buys the heating oil; he pays the taxes. If he sells the house, it’s for your benefit. For college, say.” Her grandmother smiles and closes long, crinkly eyelids; she looks sleepy. After a moment she says, “A girl needs a guiding hand till she is twenty-five.”
At twenty-five she’ll be watching Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet cart away the floorboards; they have already taken so much. She drops her grandmother’s hand. It creeps back to Lala’s breast like a daddy longlegs.
The gray day, through wet windows, leaches fluorescence from the room. Rainey suppresses a childhood desire to chew on her hair.
“You know he auctioned off the chandeliers?” she says.
Lala’s fingers interlace and stroke one another as if they were seeking comfort.
“You know he sold the Biedermeier secretary?”
Bethie drifts over. “Stop upsetting your grandmother, honey.”
“Does she look upset?” As far as Rainey’s concerned, Lala has closed the bedroom door in her head. “She’s fine.”
“I don’t know,” says Bethie.
“He’ll be a lousy trustee,” Rainey says fiercely. Heating oil she figures she can live without, and taxes—she is sixteen, who is going to make her pay taxes? “Make me the trustee, Lala.”
Lala’s breathing becomes shallow. “Howard is your father.”
“I warned you,” says Bethie. She sashays to Lala’s side and pulls the mask back over her mouth and nose. Lala and the machine breathe in slow harmony.
“Howard is an asshole,” says Rainey.
Bethie’s entire body takes on the attitude of one who has been slapped.
“Dear heart.” Lala, breathless, lifts the mask. “Howard is only trustee of the house. A girl must always be her own trustee.”
SHE TRUDGES TO THE subway. She murmurs it. Be trustee of her own self; be trustee of the house that is her person. She steps, distracted, onto the IRT local. Don’t confuse the house of her self with a parlor once lit by a chandelier—a room where plaster cherubs now hold hands around bare bulbs and watch over her from wide, dusty eyes.
Her father has instructed her as to her assets. Among her debits: like most Americans, she hears disharmony when she listens to jazz. It is a failure of ear, imagination, and heart. “Though at least you’re not one of those people who says”—his voice rising into a falsetto—“ ‘Oh, play me something,’ and then talks right through it.”
THAT DAY AFTER SCHOOL she stops at the hardware store to explain about her door.
“You need a shim,” says the man, and shows her a thin, splintery wedge of wood. “Take it,” he says, pushing back her quarter. She can only get the tip in under her door. That night she goes to bed with the light on and stares at the doorknob. At around 1:00 A.M., the knob turns.
The door does not move.
The knob turns twice more. Then it stops.
THE NEXT MORNING, JUST showered, Rainey opens the bathroom door. Her mother’s bathrobe is red silk with a wine-dark stain on the belly, and has a deep V neckline, and things look a certain way on Rainey. She could wear a laundry bag and make it look good; her mother has said it.
But Gordy, who leans against the banister outside the bathroom, white hair fanned out around his shoulders, does not appear to have laundry bags on the agenda.
“Do you mind?” she says, hanging back. He could be waiting for the bathroom, but she doubts it.
“I got your message last night,” says Gordy. “And I respect it. I respect it. But let’s not act so aggrieved that we have to bar the door. All I ever do is say good night.” No one else is moving in the house. They keep their voices low.
Rainey crosses her arms. “Say good night when,” she says.
“You know when.”
He says it as if he were citing the grilled-cheese sandwiches. Sandwiches she eats. Sandwiches she is complicit in.
“You come in my room when I’m sleeping?” From the way he looks at her, she knows they both know that she knows. She waits for him to laugh at her. “Don’t you dare laugh,” she says.
He doesn’t laugh. “You have no right,” she says. She pulls back her hand and slaps him on the face, to see if it will relieve her of the horrible knowing feeling. It does, a little, though her hand must be burning at least as much as his cheek. His skin turns bright red. She wonders if he is really albino or just incredibly pale. He makes no move to slap her back.
“You sent me signals,” says Gordy. “You’ve sent me signals your entire life.”
Signals? She sends signals to everyone, all the time, even if the signals are submerged, like telexes in cables on the ocean floor. It’s what she does. It doesn’t seem to be something a person can learn; Leah is hopeless at it.
Gordy raises his elbows to block her hand. “You never said no.” He backs up toward his bedroom door.
Two flights down, the doorbell rasps. “You weren’t listening,” says Rainey, and shoulders past him and downstairs. She opens the heavy front door to find Angeline, Irene, and a guy with eyes like polished black stones.
“Are you Jay?” She’s aware first that the high autumn sun is rendering her red silk robe translucent and second that Irene is holding the burned Barbie, scorched at the ankles and wrists where it is missing its hands and feet. “Sweetheart, you can’t bring that here,” she says.
She senses Howard before she sees him beside her in his tartan pajama bottoms, breath minty, hair wild. “Is this the boy?” Howard’s chest and abdomen are bare. His beard needs trimming. She hates doing it.
Jay straightens and says, “Yes, sir.”
“You told him.” Angeline leans in and squeezes Rainey’s arm. “You’ll love Jay, Mr. Royal. We didn’t wake you, did we? It’s after ten.”
“I don’t have to love Jay.” Howard scratches a sworl of hair below his navel. “All that matters is if my daughter does.”
“So you’ll listen?” says Angeline.
“To what?” says Howard. His gaze locks onto Irene and then on what she is holding. “I’d say you were too old for dolls, gorgeous, but you play rough.” Irene smiles uncertainly. Howard laughs and turns. “I’m going back to bed.”
“Daddy, wait.” Rainey can’t help eyeing the Barbie. Irene smiles at her and holds it out. Rainey shakes her head. Howard’s at the stairs. “Daddy, can you wait just five minutes?” she calls. Howard waves at her without looking and climbs. “Three minutes? For me?” Howard is gone.
“Goddammit,” says Angeline. “You promised. You promised and then you ran out on me.” She strides past Rainey into the foyer and looks into the parlor. “If we play right here, will he hear us?”
Irene sidles past Rainey into the foyer, too, but Jay stays outside, holding his guitar case and looking at Rainey in the doorway, and she’s looking at him, too, the way his eyes gleam like fountain-pen ink, and his mouth looks hard and soft at the same time, and his chest tapers with elegance and economy. They only have seconds of staring in which to make up for all those years in which they have been strangers to each other.
“I know where you live,” he says finally, meaning he can come back alone to see her, but for a moment Rainey thinks he means I know what makes you come alive, and she thinks, Yes, you do.
“Come in and play,” calls Angeline, but Jay doesn’t take his eyes off Rainey.
“It won’t do any good,” he says. It’s a question.
“No,” she says. But she steps back so he can come inside.
Then, shocking herself, she shouts out to Angeline: Sing.
Angeline moves out of the parlor doorway.
Rainey watches her ascend to the third step and look up toward where Howard disappeared. She hears her voice, sweet and slow and big-throated, aching and full of blood like a heart. Angeline sings “Cry Me a River,” and her voice swells the staircase. She keeps singing, and it draws Howard slowly to the banister and down a few steps from the second floor in his pajamas. Angeline sings, and they all stare at her, Howard from above, and Irene sitting on the bottom step with her neck craned, cradling the Barbie, and Jay and Rainey in the foyer. Jay holds his guitar case in one hand, and his free hand is near Rainey’s, and she can feel his fingers laced in hers even though they aren’t touching.