White Oleander - Janet Fitch [191]
Silence. The empty chairs, the paintings, the wooden-bead curtain between the main room and the kitchen. The only sound issued from traffic out the windows overlooking the 2 and the 5. It had been five days since he’d stood there, in the kitchen door-way, beads pushed aside, grinding coffee with his brass Turkish grinder shaped like a tube. Telling her he was going away. She’d been getting dressed for a booking in Northridge. “I’m going up to Meredith’s for a few days,” he ’d said. His mother was gone, off on tour in Uruguay or Paraguay, and good fucking riddance.
She ’d stopped in the hall, finishing her lipstick, accurate even without a mirror. “What for?”
“It’s a project I’ve been thinking about,” he said, grinding. “I need time to concentrate.” Casual, like it was nothing.
And she’d stared, trying to understand what he was really saying. They’d never been separated, not even when they fought. “Since when do I bother you when you’re working?”
“I thought you’d be glad that I am,” he said.
She was glad, but why would he think he had to leave?
He kept cranking the brass arm of the mill, standing in the kitchen doorway in his baggy jeans and bare feet with their long Greek toes. “I need the space, Josie. Try to understand.”
“But you always painted fine here.” It was true, the shack was small. It was hard for him to paint anything even the size of the blind Merediths. And his mother’s house was standing there, empty, up on the hill. “What if I come with you?”
He set the grinder down then and put his arms around her, tight. Kissed her. “I’ll be working. You know how I get. Trust me, it’s better this way.” She held on to him, her eyes closed, drinking in his smell, pine and moss and some peculiar chemistry of his own, that she craved the way an addict craved freebase. She could lick him like candy. He kissed her and held her for the longest time, crushing her to him, his scratchy beard.
She missed him like fire. She threw the mail in the bowl on the orange footlocker where the phone sat silent. She’d called him twice already, but he hadn’t answered — he’d never answered a phone as long as she’d known him. But if he didn’t come home soon, she was going up there, she didn’t care how much he needed his space. Screw that. Three days was one thing, but a week was a separation. She’d barely managed to stay away this long, doing her best to keep busy, book extra sittings, going with Pen to see the Weirdos at the Hong Kong Café, a party on Carondelet. Maybe it looked like she was living it up, but all she was doing was waiting for him. What was he painting that he couldn’t paint here? Or was he just dumping her? “Hey, fuck him and his brother too,” Pen had said when she ’d worried aloud at the Weirdos show. “This is great, just like the old days. Carpe fucking diem.”
It felt strange to be alone in the little house, in the tranquillity of the afternoon. This was the first time she ’d ever lived alone. She straightened the pillows on the couch, looked through the mail, put on the Clash, Sandinista!, sat down and got up, she couldn’t settle anywhere. The house seemed so empty, her presence didn’t even change its emptiness. At home in Bakersfield she’d shared a room with Luanne and Corrine, and on Carondelet she ’d lived with Pen and Shirley and Paul. Later, in the Fuckhouse, it was half of punk Hollywood. Now she was alone, her only company the paintings and drawings he ’d done, furniture they’d salvaged, collections they’d accumulated, toys and hats and flatirons. Without him, it took on the quality of a stage set where the actors hadn’t yet come on. She sat on the blue couch and leafed through an art magazine. A man making paintings using smashed plates. They’d seen his show at the county art museum. She ’d liked the big, heavy-textured works better than Michael had, their confidence,