by Dylan Landis
The egg polishing goes on for two more weeks, consuming entire art periods. Rainey steals her egg from the windowsill and burnishes during French, world religions, and math.
“What’s the fucking point?” says Tina. They are baking their dinner: zucchini muffins. They can’t decide if it’s better to distribute the whole nickel bag through the batter or roll a couple of joints first.
“My egg is perfect,” says Rainey. “It looks like pewter.”
Aqua threads trail from Lala’s ancient copy of The Joy of Cooking as if it has a secret underwater life. Rainey checks the recipe, then pours a dollop of vanilla into the bowl without measuring.
“Now, see, if he told me to rub an egg on a spoon,” says Tina, in that husky voice Rainey never tires of, “I’d stick the spoon down his throat.”
Rainey readies herself. She always has to mention the one thing that hurts; it’s like nudging a loose tooth. “Your grandmother said you could sleep here both nights, right?”
Tina winces. It’s a faint movement around the eyes. “Probably.” The grandmother is a sensitive subject. Tina turns her back and reaches for a bag of sugar. Her top rides up, revealing an indented waist that Rainey appreciates because it is necessary that they both be sexy, but revealing, also, a little sash of fat, which Rainey relishes because it is necessary that only one of them have a flawless body.
It is after the time Howard said to her, “Next to Tina, you’re a centerfold—is that why you hang out with her?” and Rainey, thrilled and mortified, choked out that Tina was her best friend, and Howard looked past her at silent Gordy and said, “ ‘The lady doth protest too much, methinks.’ ”
Tina licks a finger and dips it in the bag of sugar. “You think Gordy might come in our room?”
Rainey brains an egg on the edge of the bowl. She thinks about a redheaded oboist she likes to look at across the parlor till he blushes. She demanded his name once, and he stammered it: Flynn. Howard likes to say he has the only jazz oboist in New York. Rainey is not allowed to bother the acolytes, but she can stare.
Gordy has never come in on sleepovers before—she assumes because she stays up and talks.
“He just checks on me,” she says in a low voice. “He never does anything.”
When Tina laughs it sounds like huh. Rainey suddenly feels grateful to have confessed the hair stroking, grateful that Tina doesn’t judge. Maybe Tina intuits the back rubs, which only just started. Tina, caught beneath an overhead light that brings out the cinnamon in her hair, has her moments of beauty and perfect understanding.
“If he comes in,” says Tina, “can we be mean to him?”
“He lives here,” says Rainey, who only knows certain ways of being mean to Gordy.
“You know the kind of mean I mean.” Tina orbits her upper teeth with her tongue as if checking the jewels on a bracelet. They have both perfected the Pearl Drops move.
The words drawing off come faintly to mind—a lightning rod drawing off the fatal bolt; a sister drawing off a bully. A saint, intervening. Is it cool if the person drawing off does not know what she is getting into?
“Stick a knife in his heart for all I care.”
“Whoa,” says Tina. “Fond of the motherfucker, are we?”
THE FIRST TIME TINA came over, they sat on the carpet of Rainey’s pink room, which Rainey thinks of as girlfriend pink, a pink chosen by one of Howard’s ex-lovers to coax Rainey out of a black phase. Kids and acolytes are forever telling Rainey what this pink is like: it is Barbie, it is Pepto-Bismol, it is Bazooka bubble gum. But the first time Tina saw it she said, Oh my God you live in a vagina, and Rainey said, Fuck you, Tina, and the wary warmth of equals was sealed between them.
It is 4:30 in the morning, half an hour after the Vanguard padlocks up. The door to the townhouse opens; Rainey hears young musicians laughing and stairs beginning to creak. She and Tina fake sleep. They have eaten three zucchini muffins each. Come to the dance singing of love—Rainey has memorized the entire verse, but she is sure Saint Cath wrote it with a special, spiritual dance in mind, not the kind where you go under the bleachers with a boy. She breathes as slowly as her lungs will let her. She attempts to seal her skin, starting at the toes and working up. Her flannel nightie is as modest as Cath’s habit. After several minutes she sees, through her eyelashes, a doorway of light slice across Tina’s sleeping bag. She watches Gordy step with agility and night vision into the room and around the bag. He moves the edge of Rainey’s quilt, which she sewed herself, and sits, and his weight causes Rainey to tip toward him so their hips touch.
He strokes her hair.
I’m moldering, she thinks. I’m not actually doing anything and I’m moldering. But between her toes she smells of tea-rose oil, and she knows she is responsible for sending scent molecules swimming through some primal part of his brain.
“Eew,” says Tina. “What are you doing?”
“Checking on Rainey,” says Gordy. He rises, though. “Doesn’t someone check on you?” No, thinks Rainey, can’t you tell? No one ever checks on Tina. Somebody feeds her and keeps her clothed, but she is an untended soul. Gordy stands so close she can smell club smoke on his jeans; she can smell jazz. “What are you doing?” says Gordy. He sounds genuinely interested.
“Watching you,” says Tina.
Gordy doesn’t speak. Rainey doesn’t move. She wonders if Tina is drawing off now. It feels dangerous. You better stop, she wants to say, but she is faking sleep.
RAINEY LOVES HOW SHE and Tina can sit in certain ways and force certain male teachers to look at them. Sometimes the teachers stammer. Sometimes the armpits of their shirts get dark.
She and Tina have a code for it. They call it The Private Game.
TINA SAYS: “WHAT DO you like, Gordy?”
“I am an honorable man,” says Gordy. But he does not leave.
Rainey imagines herself fragmenting into the Gustav Klimt lady, the one made of glinting squares of color and gold.
“You like giving back massages?” Tina says.
Rainey is sure she never said a word about Gordy touching her back. He doesn’t do it every time.
It is five hundred years after Cath wrote her poem: Come to the dance singing of love, let her come dancing all afire. Desiring only him who created her and separated her from the dangerous worldly state.
As Rainey imagines it, Cath knew all about dangerous worldly states.
“I never go where I’m not invited,” says Gordy.
Under the heat of her quilt and the domed, dark canopy, Rainey conjures Cath at midnight in the marquis’s house, faking sleep, waiting for her door to swing slowly open.
“I like back massages.” Tina’s voice is a cat weaving around an ankle. You know the kind of mean I mean. They have never pushed The Private Game this far. Rainey hears the longest unzipping sound in the universe, a sleeping bag, followed by the feathery sound of a T-shirt being pulled up. She opens one eye and sees what Gordy must see: the lunar arc of breast as Tina flips onto her stomach. Not drawing off, thinks Rainey. Drawing in.
“But if you make one move off my back,” says Tina, “it’s over.”
This is followed by the shifting of Gordy’s shape, then silence, rustling. Then silence. Rainey palms the hard, shiny egg under her pillow. She fakes sleep as hard as she can.
Here is Cath’s second miracle performed after death: though buried unpreserved, her body never molders. Despite eighteen days in the soil it emerges with the flesh resilient and still scented with tea rose.
Undefiled by men, undefiled by death.
“Excuse me.” Tina’s voice is a doorbell chime. “That is not my back.”
Gordy rocks back on his heels. His voice is calm. “What did I do, Miss T? This is a back rub worthy of a saint.”
THEY HAVE CLOCKED MANY hours with Florence, the Urban Day psychologist, lying in their sweetest voices. Tina tells Florence what she tells Rainey and the rest of zip code 10011 and Planet Earth: that her parents pay her to live with her
grandmother because her grandmother has immaculate degeneration and is going blind. Rainey tells Florence that she plays jazz flute. She says her mother calls from the ashram twice a week and that her father helps with math and cooks bodacious dinners.
They were sent to Florence for staring inappropriately at the male teachers and doing the Pearl Drops thing. “I don’t understand,” Rainey said sweetly. “I’m in trouble for paying attention? And I shouldn’t cross my legs? That’s it?”
“THAT,” SAYS TINA, “THAT right there, that’s what I’m talking about. Quit it.”
The quilt on her bed was Rainey’s first. She made it by stitching scraps of Linda’s forsaken Jefferson Airplane T-shirt and Indian-print skirts and lacy nighties to a blanket with white satin binding. She cut up wrap dresses Linda wore to her job. No one said she could have the clothes; she took them from the closet. She doesn’t use blankets anymore; she’s gone to the library. She knows about batting.
Where the quilted bits of Linda intersect, Rainey stitched down left-behind earrings, buttons, torn and lacquered pieces of Kodak photos stolen from Howard’s albums. She spent months on her Tailor of Gloucester sewing.
Through her eyelashes she sees Tina burrow into her sleeping bag. “I don’t want a back rub anymore,” Tina says, and Rainey, in the womb of the quilt, marvels at the expansion of her own night-vocabulary. Quit it. Don’t want. Anymore.
“You can stop right now,” Tina says, and Rainey repeats to herself, You can stop.
“Yes, my lady.” Gordy stands, his hair phosphorescent in the hallway light. His hands are still and pale at his sides, like gloves. Rainey wonders what shade of blue his balls are under his jeans and decides on cornflower. Blue balls are the point of the entire exercise, the heart of the Pearl Drops thing, the source of all their power.
“Does it hurt yet?” Tina says.
SUNDAY, WHEN RAINEY COMES home from the museum, Howard summons her to the Steinway with a wave. No one puts anything on Howard’s piano: no ashtrays, no sheet music, no beer bottles, no rosin, no Harmon or wolf or Buzz-Wow mutes, no toilet-paper hash pipes, no framed family photos because it’s never been that kind of house. Fantastic sound is thumping through the parlor, with a heavy backbeat that Rainey likes. She stares down Flynn, who flushes and studies his fingering. He spends a lot of time waiting his turn. He reminds her of one of those long-legged birds that take delicate steps with backward-hinged knees. When Howard finally stops playing, Gordy lowers his horn, the snare stops clicking, and finally the winter draperies, which have stood through two summers in mournful dark red columns since Lala’s departure, suck up the last of the sound. The room is half empty, not everyone plays every time, and Rainey has no idea if there’s a schedule. Far beneath the jazz she hears the rattling of the air conditioner, which Howard hates, but he has to keep the windows closed for the neighbors and stop by nine at night.
Some of the acolytes stare at her with fascinated and hungry eyes, for she has constant access to Howard Royal, and she is as untouchable to them as a veiled novice.
Rainey opens her arms and rotates slowly. “ ‘Come to the dance singing of love,’ ” she says, and feels her powers grow. “ ‘Let her come dancing all afire.’ ” It was in the book, and now it is in the folds of her burning brain. She does not know what she is trying to provoke. She wants to prove she is protected.
Gordy laughs aloud. The laugh says, You are beautiful when you are nuts. Her father says, warningly, “Rainey.” She turns on him a gaze like a shield. Who knew she had a shield in her head and a saint in her pack?
“I hope you cleared your perpetually messy floor. I promised the cellists you’d share. A few days, Daughter.” The electric violinist, Gemma, shivers visibly as if the room has chilled. Everyone knows the cellists could double up with other acolytes. “Be generous,” says Howard softly. He would resemble Christ, Rainey thinks, if his beard did not receive the trimmer and the comb—a weekly father-daughter ritual he taught her young and that she could live without.
“So,” she says tightly, “I’ll just go up and move my shit.”
Rainey turns away as the flautist, Radmila, plays a patter of high notes. It’s water, dropping leaf to leaf through the rainforest canopy: Rainey can see it. Don’t try to understand jazz, Gordy said once: You are jazz. A few times he has whispered, You’re awake, aren’t you? She keeps faking sleep, as if she has left West Tenth and gone far away. Is she saving herself or is she moldering?
Howard’s musicians start touching their instruments again. Rainey, stranded, takes the stairs alone to her pink shell of a room.
It’s too late.
The cello-shaped chick and her friend, kneeling at the bureau, are dropping her clothes piece by piece into two piles on the rug. Keepers, she realizes, and rejects. “The fuck you are,” says Rainey, and slams her fist into the open door.
They raise their porcelain faces. “We’re just borrowing.” The friend holds up a T-shirt that Rainey doctored with grommets and lace inserts. “This is gorgeous. He said we could share the room, so we figured …” Behind her, two cellos bask on the bed.
Rainey stalks in and grabs a cello by the throat. “You want to put that shit back?”
When she and Tina talk like this in the girls’ room at school they can make anyone do anything. But these girls are older. They gaze at her, waiting to see what she has in mind for the hostage cello. Rainey jerks it hard. The instruments knock together and hum, and the girls clamber to their feet. “Clothes and whatever else you stole,” says Rainey. “Are those my earrings?”
Miss Cello works at her earlobes. “Please, may I have my cello?”
“Oh, are we at please now?” says Rainey, buoyed. “If I let it go, will you leave the house?”
Miss Cello tugs a key from her pocket and turns it triumphantly in the air. “Howard Royal gave me this.”
“Cello,” Rainey reminds her.
Miss Cello only pretends to know joy on this earth: Rainey can feel it. Miss Cello keeps her gaze on the ground, on filthy stars of chewing-gum foil and bottle-cap planets. Whereas Cath, dead and in the soil for eighteen days, looked at the earth particles all around her and was awed by every turning molecule.
Rainey drags the cello off the Linda-quilt. It makes a scratching sound across the buttons and thumps to the rug. The first girl lunges for it, and Rainey draws back her foot and says, “I’ll kick it. I really don’t care.” She’s only wearing Converse, but the girls freeze in the frosted cupcake that is Rainey’s room. “You can have it in the morning,” she says, “if you don’t steal anything else.” Of course, they have already stolen everything.
She drags her prize into Gordy’s room, pulls it inside, closes the door, and considers. Then she looks back out in the hall. Miss Cello is darting down the stairs, and her friend leans out from the doorway of the pink room.
“You should know that Howard does not give a fuck,” says Rainey.
“Seems like Howard doesn’t give a fuck about his daughter, either,” says the friend.
Rainey picks up a yellow ceramic ashtray from Gordy’s bureau and hurls it. The girl ducks and laughs. The ashtray hits the doorframe and falls without breaking. Miss Cello bolts back upstairs. “That bitch,” she says, and spots Rainey. Her eyes fill.
“I can’t go to school without my cello,” she says. “Why are you doing this?” If she got centered in that body of hers, she could be a totally different chick. Move like this, Rainey wants to tell her, and you could have men aching to draw a bow across your hips. But Miss Cello doesn’t want power. She wants to feel safe. Rainey sees through the eyes of Cath that she will never be an artist.
“Howard says give it back or get out.” The girl rubs her hands together frantically.
Rainey gazes at her till Miss Cello’s face contorts through several changes of expression. Give it back, or get out—this has to be a lie; Howard has no time for the settling of squabbles. Her mother got out; she sloughed off West Tenth Street to find God on the ash
ram in Boulder, Colorado. Lala descended the stairs weeping, in the arms of two ambulance men. But Rainey will hold fast to her pink room the way Boston ivy grips the sills outside the garden windows.
Heavy footsteps begin an ascent. Gordy’s white-blond head bobs into view. “Raineleh,” says Gordy. He picks up his ashtray, sits on the top step, and stares at her through the spindles, ignoring the cellists. “Are you being a little troublemaker?”
“No.” Rainey wheels around and locks herself in Gordy’s bedroom with the cello. “I’m fucking things up majorly,” she yells through the door.
Sometimes she comes to the dance singing of love, and sometimes she is deep in the dangerous worldly state. She is not sure which would be accurate now. When Tina asked Gordy, What do you like? it seemed like a good question. Rainey likes rubbing silver against clay until clay turns to pewter: alchemy.
Gordy’s room smells like socks. Outside his windows, a tree flips its leaves to their metallic backs. On the floor, the cello lies naked and bright.
Rainey drags it onto the unmade bed. She takes off the diamond ring her mother gave her, the one that belonged to Linda’s mother. She settles herself and with the diamond begins scratching an image into the instrument’s back. In the hall, people knock and test the doorknob. Safe in the room, Rainey is making art. Through the windows, the sky bruises. Around her, honey-colored dust sifts onto the unwashed sheets.
Five minutes pass, an hour, she has no idea. Voices rise, and she ignores them.
When the door flies open, it slams the corner of Gordy’s bureau so that everything on top jitters. Howard, large in the doorway, does not look so Christ-like now. “If you don’t release that goddamn cello, Daughter,” he says, “you can get thee to a nunnery for all I care.”
