Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  Then he moves past her, sits on the bottom step by Irene, takes out his guitar, and picks at the strings. To Rainey’s amazement Howard sits, too, at the top of the stairs. Gordy pads down from his bedroom and leans against the wall behind Howard.

  Angeline’s voice is invisible and everywhere; it is seawater that rises through the rooms. When she stops, the silence shimmers and contracts. Rainey would like to draw her now, in triumph, her breastbone high, her gaze aimed straight up at Howard like a light. She remembers the weight of Angeline’s arm across her chest.

  Howard waits a few moments and claps his hands together slowly three times.

  “Very pretty,” he says. “You should sing in the park. Try some open mikes. You’ll do very well.”

  “That’s it?” Angeline stands marvelously erect.

  Rainey reaches down, smooths Irene’s hair, smiles at her, and gently pries the Barbie from her fingers. The scalp is black, but the eyes are bluer than sky.

  “What did you expect?” Howard rises. “You have to grow into that voice, my sweet. Live a few more years. Have your heart crushed.”

  Rainey sees him wink.

  “What about Jay?” says Angeline.

  Irene looks at the floor.

  “Jay will always be your accompanist,” says Howard.

  “I told her we shouldn’t have come,” says Jay to anyone close enough to hear.

  Angeline is still staring up the staircase at Howard. “Screw you,” she says softly, and her shoulders droop.

  Howard beams down at Angeline. “Anytime.”

  Jay is suddenly busy with his guitar case, and Rainey wonders if he will be staring at her again. Howard yawns and turns.

  Rainey perceives Irene’s fingers closing into fists, and she tightens her own grip on the Barbie. She feels the seam of a hip printing onto her finger; she feels a tiny, fulsome breast pulsing into her palm. She feels the doll’s skin heat in her hand.

  “You don’t know how to listen,” she calls, then flashes on Howard attending to Tina’s scales, on a clarinet lesson behind a closed door. “People throw money at her,” she shouts, as Howard disappears up the staircase. “Some girls are better than you think.”

  BABY GIRL

  Damien’s curls sweep Rainey’s face. He smells of last night’s communal dinner: chili with red onions and Cabernet. He clamps her mouth with his right hand and fastens her wrists with his left. He lives above Rainey in the former servants’ quarters and is a student of her father’s; he could wring blood from the cornet, Howard says.

  Damien’s in her room because she slid the shim out when he knocked. He was upset about Howard. He’s on her bed because she drew her feet up for him to sit. At three o’clock in the morning, to talk. Just to talk.

  She would never scream in her own house.

  She feels like pieces of her body might be falling off, like turrets and bell towers from a castle. Damien stops, finally. He peels his hand gingerly off her mouth. Her teeth hurt. “Thank you,” he says, and zips. “Fuck, you’re magnificent.” She spits at him. The spit lands on her quilt.

  “You are on the street,” she hisses as he ambles toward her bedroom door.

  With a hand on her doorknob, he turns. He wears a plain white T-shirt with a hole at one shoulder and lanky jeans; and under these he is thin and taut as a wire hanger. “Why?” he says. “Why would I end up on the street?” He has a look of serene entitlement, Rainey thinks, as if, having nothing extra on his person, he feels he can take what he needs.

  “You patted your bed,” Damien says, already half outside the pink room. “You did that thing with your eyes.”

  When she hears him on the stairs, she bolts down to Howard’s room. Her father refuses to turn on his lamp. “Talk,” he says wearily. She stands in his doorway in her nightgown, which Damien tore at the top, and hears a second body stir under the sheet.

  “You have to throw Damien out right now,” she says, wondering which of her father’s acolytes is listening under the covers. “Please, can I talk to you privately about this?”

  “We’re one family,” says Howard. “And we’re all asleep.”

  “He just forced himself on me.” She knows she is backlit by the stairwell light, which she has switched on, and she holds the top of her nightgown together in one hand. “I am not joking.”

  “Damien? My beautiful boy?” From the rustle she can tell he’s propped himself on an elbow and is peering at her. “I wasn’t awakened by screaming.”

  “Daddy. He had his hand over my mouth.” And it is true that she fought, but it is a lie that she tried to scream. She wonders if Damien is already asleep.

  “Oh, Rainey. Oh, baby girl.” Howard switches on his lamp and the light washes his face. To Rainey he looks ravaged by exhaustion and also, to her surprise, deeply sad. She locks eyes with Radmila, the Yugoslav flautist, who holds the sheet to the butter knives that are her collarbones. Radmila gives Rainey a tiny, apologetic smile.

  Howard has not called Rainey his baby girl since she was a child. It is the winter of 1976, and she is seventeen years old and feels like she is five, standing before Howard with a dead sparrow and asking him to make it fly.

  “It sounds like something went very wrong, baby girl.”

  “Will you throw him out?”

  “I’ll give him hell. I guarantee he won’t touch you again. He won’t even look at you on the stairs. Will that do?”

  “No,” says Rainey.

  Howard rakes his fingers through his hair till it stands. “Ah, Jesus,” he says. “Have you heard that boy play cornet? Have you listened? An artist can’t be a criminal. Listen. Young men get confused about yes and no. I wish girls could understand that.”

  “Men get confused about a lot of things,” says Radmila. Rainey looks at her sharply, but there’s no smile.

  Howard, half covered by the blanket, pins Rainey in the doorway with his gaze. “How did Damien get into your room?” She is silent. “So you let him in,” says Howard. “Could that be half a yes?”

  Rainey fingers the rip that Damien began. She will finish it when she gets back to her pink room. She can hear the sound already, long and zippery. When she gets to the hem, she’ll rip the gown the other way.

  “Rainey. Did you let him sit on the bed?” Rainey says nothing. “Could that be another kind of yes?”

  “I don’t know,” says Rainey. “I just know what happened.”

  “If I talk to him right now, will I see fingernail gouges on his face?”

  Radmila says softly, “Howard. She said he forced her.”

  Howard lies back with his hands under his head. “I believe there was rough play,” he says. “I’m so sorry you were hurt, baby girl. Can your father offer some perspective?” The blanket jumps as he scratches a calf with his foot. “Can I?” he says gently, as if she were still waiting with a limp bird. “Radmila, don’t you need a glass of water?”

  “Why would I need a glass of water?” says Radmila.

  “Because you’re dying of thirst,” says Howard. “Go.” Radmila shrugs, gets out of bed naked, picks up Howard’s T-shirt from a chair, and puts it on. When she has slipped past Rainey and started padding downstairs, Howard says, “When I was a boy, my babysitter—”

  “I don’t want to hear this.”

  “Oh, you can tell your old dad about Damien, but I can’t tell you my story? What is that? Listen,” says Howard. “I was about nine, and she got me all mixed up about sex and pain and whether I could walk away. Sex, if you can call it that, went on for two years. Crazy, huh? So I know exactly how signals get crossed.”

  Rainey squints, trying to keep certain images out of focus. “There was no signal,” she says. “I told him we could talk.”

  “Maybe he misunderstood your cues,” says Howard. “Maybe what you are experiencing now is called regret.”

  He reaches over and palms something on his nightstand, and Rainey hears the tiny tambourine sound of a pill bottle being shaken.

  �
��Regret?” says Rainey. “You think what I’m experiencing now is called regret?”

  “Sweet baby girl,” says Howard, “take a Seconal. Sleep. Tell me how you are in the morning.”

  Rainey does not take a Seconal. She closes the door. Magnificent. Howard’s beautiful boy has said it. Magnificent is how she will be in the morning. She walks up two flights of stairs to Damien’s tiny room, bangs his door open so it shudders on its hinge, and turns on his light. “Sit up,” she says, as he blinks at her from the narrow bed. “You have to listen to me.”

  She will stand on the townhouse stoop, the flaps of her torn gown open. Snowflakes will rise beneath the streetlights. Cold air will scrub her clean.

  KEEP MY HANDS FROM STEALING

  Rainey locks herself into the ladies’ room of the Madison Gardens coffee shop, not far from the Met. It’s perfect: a little bathroom for one. She slings her heavy pack over the doorknob and pulls out a glass pillar candle she decorated herself for Saint Cath.

  Lights the candle, wobbly on the sink, with her last cardboard match. Strips off the T-shirt she stayed up all night in. Slicks under her arms with soap.

  Cath, I need five minutes in this grotty bathroom. She slips a plastic razor from a pocket of her pack. You can do that. And let old Mr. Lipschitz love my work, and let him maybe give me a place to live and let him have, like, zero libido.

  She shaves the left pit. Someone rattles the knob.

  Rainey cruises through the right pit, leans over the sink, and washes her hair with the green bathroom soap. This is what she wants Mr. Lipschitz to smell: soap and tea-rose oil. Not leather jacket and sweat. Not that she left the townhouse unshowered at five in the morning after a fight with her father, who had just returned from playing a gig.

  Last night she found an older girl sprawled on her pink bed, making actual jazz come out of Rainey’s junior-high flute. The girl’s enormous duffel was propped against the dressing table. This kind of shit was always Howard’s doing. Rainey’s eighteen, but this girl looked halfway into her twenties. She wouldn’t leave, so Rainey waited up for Howard till almost sunrise. He came home with an arm draped around Reba, who had bongos between her legs in Union Square till Howard lured her indoors.

  His fingertips dangled low.

  “The casa’s a little full, sweetheart,” he said when Rainey demanded her room to herself. “Grab a sleeping bag. Or duke it out.” His middle finger brushed Reba’s nipple, and a spark flew out and caught Rainey in the eye.

  The knob of the ladies’ room turns again. Rainey has an interview in twenty minutes—she looked at the restaurant clock—with an old man who might commission a tapestry.

  “Hang on,” she says. She ties a turquoise scarf around her wet hair and slicks Vaseline on her eyelids and lips. Shine, she loves shine. Men have eyed the shine on her since she was a kid. They are, all of them, so full of shit. But this is not a problem she would bring to Saint Catherine of Bologna. Cath scorned temptation and the worldly state. She was all about the art.

  Loud knocking. “Hello, there are three of us out here?” Rainey had cut ahead of a lady in slingbacks, and right through the paint-chipped door she can see her, how her hat matches her gloves. On the Upper East Side it is the hour of church; it is the hour of brunch. Rainey skipped dinner, and she is too broke for breakfast. And she’s forgotten her perfume.

  Without perfume she’s stripped of her powers. She passes her wrists quickly over the candle flame, prays, Saint Cath, anoint me. I make you all these pretty things. It’s true, Cath could perfume her own flesh from molecules of nothing, a miracle she performed after death instead of rotting, and Rainey believes she smelled of tea rose, the scent of mothers.

  New knock. Male. Some serious knuckle in it.

  “What?” she says. “I’m not feeling too well.”

  Brilliant—in a coffee-shop bathroom, not feeling well means junkie; it means needles jamming the plumbing. She swipes on deodorant, lifts one foot to the sink, starts dry-shaving her leg—and accidentally rocks the glass-pillar candle. It falls with dreamlike lassitude, then explodes. Shrapnel everywhere.

  Hard banging, and a male voice. “Whatever dope you’re doing in there, sister, you got five seconds before this door opens.”

  In five seconds she opens it herself. She’s wearing a low-necked, gauzy black tee on which she’s painted the face of Saint Cath in gold. Be resplendent, she thinks. Glass parings glitter at her feet. Her lips part. Her eyelids shine, and she stares at the manager. His eyes flare with a look that needs one of those long German names that would mean something like anger braided with lust.

  “Scram,” he says.

  He reaches for her arm, and she tries to wrench away, but he escorts her past a line of staring women and out into the sun.

  FROM THE LIVING ROOM of the Lipschitz apartment, she hears a door close far off with a chocolaty thump. She hears footfalls that speak of Persian carpets. It’s Fifth Avenue. To get this far, she’s been scrutinized by two doormen, an elevator man, the housekeeper.

  The man who limps into the room is thin and angular as a branch snapped off a winter tree. His eyes are ice blue. He catches her in deliberate scrutiny of a little Impressionist landscape hanging by a grand piano—as bare as her father’s, which she knows better than to even brush against. She’s chosen the landscape because it hangs in a place of honor. “You’re the artist?” he says in some kind of accent.

  She forces herself not to brush invisible leaves from her skirt, takes a measured half second to tear herself from the painting, and beams at him. He holds an ebony cane topped with a silver dog’s head whose nose thrusts through his fist. He’s dressed up—a suit, a tie. Church and brunch again, though with a name like Lipschitz, who knows about church.

  “I brought a sample of my work,” she says.

  She opens her army pack, which in this peach-colored room has all the presence of a burlap sack, and pulls out a white satin bag. The bag is cinched shut with a black grosgrain ribbon, voluptuously tied, and holds something the size of a gallon of milk. She cradles it in two hands like an offering, and waits. Inhaling, she smells tea-rose oil wafting from her wrists. Cath is restoring her powers.

  He looks at her with startled gray eyes as if surprised to find a girl in his apartment, wet hair trailing down as if she’d walked in from the sea.

  “Vonnie Gardner says you want to take a scissors to Eleanor’s things,” he says.

  But he knew. He asked her to come. He saw the tapestry she designed and sewed for his friend Mrs. Gardner, and examined it a long time where it hung on the wall. Mrs. Gardner wrote this to Rainey in a letter, which she found stepped on in the West Tenth Street foyer. Mrs. Gardner wrote that Mr. Lipschitz seemed to examine aspects of her late husband in all the intersections of the tapestry, in the buttons and fabrics, in the photograph fragments stitched down with gold thread, in the cuff links and snippets of shirting—collar points and even buttonholes—worked with exquisite neatness into a pattern of Rainey’s own devising. Rainey loves patterns, she loves kaleidoscopes, she loves butterfly wings arranged in mandalas under glass, and she loves rose windows in cathedrals, all the intricate designs of nature and man that make a closed system.

  “Allen looked at it so long,” Mrs. Gardner wrote, “I offered him your name. It took him a while to understand that I was talking about memorializing Eleanor.”

  Rainey’s stomach makes an inappropriate noise.

  “Mr. Lipschitz,” she says, “I won’t cut up any materials you don’t desire me to use.” She lets the words desire me hang in the air with the dust motes, but they don’t seem to register. “This is a tapestry I made for another gentleman. May I open it?”

  She follows him into the dining room, extracts the rolled-up cloth from its white silk sleeve, and unfurls it on a table of inlaid wood: her pattern on his pattern. Mr. Lipschitz stands near her, lean and old and elegant in his black suit.

  Rainey wonders what that fine, dark wool would look like in a tapest
ry. She never says memory quilt, though she thinks it. She says two months, roughly, and five hundred dollars. When the right moment comes, she will ask to work where the beloved lived. If the person is rich, she might ask about an extra bedroom. If the person is rich and lonely, it can be a balm and a novelty to have a young artist stay.

  RAINEY KNOWS THE SECRET of stepping very, very close to a man without actually moving her body, and she does that now. She sniffs: he smells nothing like an old man, rather a bit like eucalyptus. Eleanor must have chosen it. She wonders if he is aware of his own patterns: the mosaic of book spines behind glass doors; a bracelet of landscape paintings circling the room. Around the table, the backs of dining chairs swoop and curve in heartlike shapes.

  The tapestry, which she borrowed back from a widower on Park Avenue, is less than a yard square but heavy. It’s made from a few hundred diamond-shaped cuttings of florals and pastels. Prints spiral loosely down the center, while solid colors stream toward the edges. Rainey does all her sewing by hand—she tells people the feel of the fabric helps guide her through the work—and this is true, but it is also true that her mother’s sewing machine is broken. At many points where the diamonds of fabric meet, she has stitched buttons, pearls, the face of a ladies’ watch freed from its band and glass, an Eiffel Tower charm, a tiny key, a Victorian locket, snippets from old photographs, their edges pierced by the points of the finest needles.

  But it is the center of the piece that draws the eye back: part of a small wedding photo in black and white. She has carefully torn the edge to deckle it and sewn it to the tapestry using mouse-stitches.