Rainey Royal

by Dylan Landis

  “Miss Royal.”

  “I need the pearls.” She rises to face him.

  He lifts his hands very slightly; she sees the tremor of age. “Miss Royal.”

  “I need the pearls to make the tapestry.”

  “One time,” he says. “For one minute. Never again.”

  “Not all the pearls,” she says carefully. “Your daughter can remake the strands from what’s left. But your wife is in those pearls.”

  She looks at him, both bent and straight, elegant in his suit, his body spare. His face is wrinkled, but his eyes shine dark and frank. He wants something physical, which makes her wary, but he does not precisely want her.

  “Think about it,” she says, and goes to him. She puts her arms loosely around him. With his arms he encircles her waist lightly, as if they were about to dance. She holds him so only their shoulders make contact and smells his clean, eucalyptus scent, and he allows the side of his head to touch the side of hers, and she wonders what it must have felt like to love this man. Like living in a sanctuary, with a steady supply of roast-beef sandwiches. Is it true there is infidelity in every marriage, as her father once said at one of her parents’ parties? She would like to think that he is wrong as she stands in Mr. Lipschitz’s arms. They hold each other tentatively but firmly. Their letting go, when it happens, has a slight resistance to it.

  Closing his eyes, he thanks her.

  “Wait,” says Rainey.

  Mr. Lipschitz sways. Rainey takes the ebony cane from the bed and puts the dog head in his hand.

  She could give him something from Eleanor, right now. She moves piles of clothing from the bed to the floor and lies down, kicking the high heels off. “Okay,” she says. Mr. Lipschitz seems deep in meditation, as if studying the floor through his eyelids. “You can lie next to me if you want,” she says. She can’t say in my arms; instead she says for a little while.

  He opens his eyes and stops swaying. “Miss Royal,” he says, “I don’t want any nonsense.”

  “I hate nonsense,” says Rainey. “I hate nonsense more than you.”

  He sits on the edge of the bed and unlaces his shoes. His socks are tissue thin and look expensive and clean and have no odor. He lies flat on the coverlet beside her and looks at the canopy as if he were offering himself up to death.

  “Ellie,” he says.

  “Allen.”

  “Allie.”

  “Allie, give that artist girl my pearls.”

  “Please,” he says. “You look like her. You don’t sound like her.”

  She takes his hand.

  Silence blossoms under the blue-canopy sky. Lying beside him, on her back, Rainey feels his skin cool and dry in hers; she feels the elegant length of his fingers, his knucklebones in their little sacks of flesh. She finds the warm wedding band and rotates it, and he lets her. She senses the molten glow of the black pearls from the pile of clothes on the floor. In her mind she begins Eleanor’s tapestry. It will be bright around the outside with floral colors, but the center will be a full, shadowed moon of dark fabrics: the woman’s private, lunar self.

  “My wife had a faultless ear for piano,” he says, still looking up at the canopy. “If she heard it, she could play it.”

  Rainey turns on her side so she can see him better. When their eyes meet he closes his. Is he embarrassed, or preserving the illusion of Eleanor? The lids are faintly blue, and when she touches them, her fingertips detect the darting motions of tiny fish.

  “She played chamber music three days a week,” he says, as if her fingers were not on his eyelids. “But we had our daughter, Joan. I said, A mother does not work.” He clasps his free hand to his forehead, headache-style. “She never played again.”

  Rainey looks around at the cornflower silk. She will razor some cuttings off the back of the curtain hem, where nobody will see.

  She moves closer and puts her head on his chest. His heart beats with astonishing persistence. She had thought he would smell something like Lala, who traveled in an envelope of powder and old age. Does he pick up the scent of Eleanor’s blouse? She rubs the ancient-looking hand. His skin slips easily across the tendons. She examines him closely. Beneath the surface of his face she perceives the outline of his skull.

  “Ellie,” says Mr. Lipschitz, “You remember Friday nights?”

  “I think so.” She sees his eyelashes gleam.

  Rainey blinks rapidly. What is there to cry about? She thinks hard about things that will happen next. She will eat roast-beef sandwiches every day at noon and drink milk from a glass nearly soap-bubble thin. She will finish the tapestry before Mr. Lipschitz, too, leaves this planet empty handed. Every morning she will light a candle to Saint Cath in her white room, and some afternoons she will wear Chanel and sit in the slipper chair, watching children at the pyramids in the park. On the blue coverlet, for Allen Lipschitz, she will be memory, and she will be flesh; she will be eighty, and she will be eighteen.

  He opens his eyes. “How should I feel?” He murmurs it almost to himself.

  Rainey kneels above him without letting go of his hand.

  She looks down directly into his beautiful striated irises and lowers her mouth, which is dry, very lightly onto his. Their lips and tongues do not move. Their gazes connect, and with no nonsense whatsoever they hold quite still.

  After about ten seconds she straightens.

  “You should feel good,” she says. “I think I’m ready to start.”

  TWO TRUTHS

  Late-summer Sunday, two years after college: Leah runs into Rainey Royal outside a coffee shop called Eat Here Now. “Friend or foe?” says Leah, delighted with how jocular this sounds, which makes her realize she is still afraid of Rainey.

  She watches nervously as Rainey arranges herself against a parking meter. Rainey’s whole body seems to smile at Leah with perfect white teeth.

  Does she remember upending Leah’s purse over the toilet? Or pressing a square of paper onto her tongue and calling it blotter, so Leah stuck a finger down her own throat?

  “Friend!” says Rainey. Smile so cocky, voice so velvety—Leah wants to be in her thrall again.

  But she has to be at work ten minutes ago; mice are waiting to be injected, though God knows they’re in no rush. They’re doing Bad Science in the lab this summer, worse than last year. This is where she’s worked since she graduated from Amherst. Leah always knows the time, but she looks at her watch. “I’m late.”

  Rainey catches Leah’s wrist. Her grip feels hot, cool, alarming. Leah wonders if she can get her to touch the other wrist, balance her out. “Nice watch,” says Rainey. Surely she sees it’s just a man’s Timex. “Was it your father’s? Am I right?” Leah feels herself smiling at the glittering sidewalk. “It radiates dadness. Smart gentle dadness. Same with my father’s watch,” says Rainey, and Leah feels herself studied as if for small cues. “I can always tell what emanates from a thing,” says Rainey. “I work with objects that belonged to the dead.”

  “That is so romantic. Objects of the dead. I’m jealous,” says Leah. Of all the kids from Urban Day, only Rainey could claim something like that. Leah remembers the things she made in art from handwritten scraps and her grandmother’s dancing shoes and bits of cloth, while all Leah could draw were lines as straight and clean as her own spine. How did Rainey know things, she wanted to ask. How did she make things? What was it like living in that Raquel Welch body and having a father who flirted with his daughter’s friends? Back when Leah had no boyfriends—not that she has boyfriends now—Howard Royal would look at her like she was standing naked on some shell.

  “My job is so gross I can’t even tell you. Good-bye,” Leah sings out, and starts to wheel away—this is meant to be funny.

  Rainey hangs on to her wrist. “C’mon, let’s do breakfast. I want to hear about your life.” Leah shakes her head. Half of her wants her wrist back, and half of her wants Rainey to hold it all morning. She sniffs. Rainey smells like roses. That hair, too, past her waist, untrimmed,
the way it gleams and swings. And that thrown-together gypsy look, as if Rainey somehow lived out of that enormous army pack, scavenging gold hoops and silky scarves from its pockets.

  Rainey tips her head and smiles. “Please?” With her free hand she starts to toy with one of the many zippers on Leah’s lucky leather jacket.

  Leah feels the moment snap. So must Rainey, because her expression freezes. She releases Leah’s wrist and Leah’s whole self relaxes. Rainey turns her attention to her pack. “All right,” she says coolly, “then buy a T-shirt.”

  Since when does Rainey sell T-shirts? Anyway, Leah’s a leotard girl. She likes things trim, tucked in; she likes hospital corners and folded socks. Her mother the decorator has been after her to come to LA and work with her. You know how to position a thing with regard to the space around it, she says. You have restraint. Everything else you learn.

  “I don’t wear T-shirts,” says Leah.

  Rainey says, “Then just look at one. They’re beautiful.”

  It has now been twenty-four hours and twenty minutes since the last injections: not good. These things should be exact. Rainey unfurls a black top from the pack. It bears the face of a saint painted in gold, a delicate female face with full parted lips like hers and a halo of feathers. She’s wearing one like it, with a halo made of little gold arrows. If it were on a leotard, Leah would grab it. “Twenty dollars,” says Rainey. “She’s pretty, right? She’s the patron saint of artists. Look, it’s signed.”

  “It’s beautiful, but—”

  “But what? She’s the patron saint against temptation, too, but that doesn’t seem to be your problem.” Rainey laughs.

  Leah wants to duck; she feels as if a helicopter rotor is whirling overhead. “I don’t have any extra money.”

  “Why extra? Don’t you ever just buy a shirt? Or a piece of art?”

  Leah does not buy pieces of art. She likes her walls bare and white. Her mother has taught her all kinds of decorator facts, such as Things That Should Be White and Every Room Needs a Touch of Gold.

  She steps back. “I have to work,” she says. “I’m the only person in on Sundays.”

  “Well, that’s cool.” Rainey rolls the T-shirt back into her pack. “I’ll go with you. We can play Two Truths and a Lie. Then you can help me sell shirts in the park.”

  “I can’t bring you to work.” Rainey would be repelled by her job, or she would bring mischief into the lab, or both.

  “Why not? I’ll be good. I won’t touch a thing.”

  Two Truths—whatever that game is, Leah’s not giving up any truth. Her truths would be mortifying, and she can’t cough up lies. “I’m not allowed to bring people,” she says.

  Always been obsessed with you. That would be true. Wanted to be like you. Wanted to have a cruel streak and secrets and a sex life and be an artist. Is that six nuggets of truth or one big lump? By then Rainey will know Leah is not worth her time. That, or she will attach herself to Leah in some dangerous manner.

  “Really, I can’t,” says Leah.

  “You’re the only person there,” says Rainey. “Who’s going to know?”

  SHE STROLLS RAINEY PAST the security guard, who knows her and is busy with the Post, into an aging, hospital-like building. It’s so silent most Sundays, if she stands in certain spots, she can hear air molecules crash in her ears. Brownian movement. She loves that. No one works weekends but a handful of lab techs engaged with animals, and they are all on different floors. Monkeys, dogs, rodents, cats.

  Rainey looks around as if she has never seen anything resembling a hospital.

  “Look, this could make you sick.” Elevator goes so slowly. “I have to inject twenty mice who have tumors under their skin. It hurts.”

  She gets a skeptical look that she takes to mean: It doesn’t hurt you. “Is that the first?” says Rainey. “Truth or lie?”

  “It’s science,” says Leah, by which she also means, but cannot say: It is my religion.

  She can’t tell that to her mother, either. Helen called last night from LA, where she is becoming known for her highly textured, all-white interiors, to say: That job is sucking the life out of your life. Or words to that effect. Words like: Twenty-three—darling, don’t you want a boyfriend? You need some life in your life, darling, besides those fucking mice.

  Her mother said darling the same way she said fucking: so it rang, high and sweet, like a struck glass.

  “I like the mice,” Leah had said. “They’re sweet.”

  THE DOORS GLIDE OPEN on an old, greenish hallway. Even under fluorescent tubes, Rainey’s dark hair shimmers. Leah shortens her stride so she can watch the hair lap against Rainey’s back. The hallway leads to a glass-walled corridor where a sign reads BREAULT ANIMAL RESEARCH FOUNDATION. “BARF,” says Leah. Rainey looks at her sharply. “Acronym,” Leah says happily. At the corridor’s end she unlocks the prep room for her lab. It’s a surgical space, which pleases her. On the long countertop, she takes bloods once a week from mice she tucks under a bell jar with an ether-soaked rag. Above the counter, a sliver window runs the length of the room. September sun slants through the glass, and she wonders if Rainey, being an artist, appreciates the cool aesthetic of it all: steel cabinets, steel countertop, the scalpels she forgot to zip up in their case.

  Rainey ignores a wheeled chair, caresses the slope of a bell jar, and sits on the counter, skirt drawn over her knees. “What do you do in here?”

  “Preparations,” says Leah. “It’s a prep room.” No way will she tell about the bloods—the way she cuts off just the tip of a mouse’s tail, the tiniest southernmost slice, and milks blood into a test tube. While remembering to breathe, lest she faint. Mouse is out cold, after its skirmish with the ether. And the tail tip, resembling a clotted pimple, gets flicked into the trash.

  Nor will she tell Rainey what had her kneeling, her first day, in the hall, sinking through a lake of algae-colored tile and praying no one in a white coat would walk by. It was the sound: the click of scalpel against the countertop, at the bottom of the slice.

  She gathers syringes from a cabinet and, from a lab fridge bearing a sticker that says NO FOOD, little bottles of halothanadol and two Baby Ruths.

  “Chocolate?”

  “Fat,” says Rainey, and grabs some minute amount of flesh at her waist.

  It would be delicious to stare. Leah doesn’t. She arranges everything, including the Baby Ruths, symmetrically on a steel tray. “I’m on the sugar diet,” Leah says. “My theory is it keeps you wired, and you stay thin from always moving.”

  “Sometimes it’s good to be still,” says Rainey. “Are you sure you want to hurt those mice?” She taps an unlit cigarette as if she means to light it. In the prep room. Near the ether. Leah can’t help thinking that she looks like a butterfly in an operating room—a rare and beautiful contaminant.

  “Not that I’m squeamish,” says Rainey, and tucks the cigarette behind her ear. “Tina showed me her cadaver in med school. She was dissecting the hands. It was rather beautiful. She said she felt gratitude, not disgust. If you were wondering.” Truth or lie, Leah thinks, she’s on a roll. She notices the cabinet door still open, syringes exposed. Hoping Rainey won’t take it personally, she strolls over and locks the cabinet.

  Across the hall she juggles tray and keys, opens the door to the colony, and flicks on the light. The room always feels like a cruel trick. Inside, tall metal racks hold dozens of bare, transparent plastic bins that slide in and out like drawers. Each mouse lives alone in its own bin. And that’s it. No daylight, no running wheels, no little shelters, no toilet-paper tubes to scurry into, no cellmates—and mice like to play; they are social and curious. The colony breaks her heart. Some of the mice rear up in what Leah takes to be interest when she walks in. Then they drop back onto their feet, being morbidly obese—literally, genetically, bred that way.

  Leah watches Rainey take it in, look around at the bins and sniff. Lab perfume, Leah calls it: fur, food, and cedar. Mice groom themselves,
though it’s hard to nibble one’s own back if one weighs the mouse equivalent of three hundred pounds.

  “Sorry, guys, it’s us.” Always greet the mice. Leah sets her tray down on a metal trolley, which she covets, along with a tower of plastic drawers. In five hundred words or fewer, explain why you wish to pursue research in the biological sciences, the grad school applications ask, and Leah wishes she could write about lab equipment, the way its chilly elegance clicks with her brain. So exquisite, how everything in BARF is pristine and performs some precise function. Perfect job for her. Stopping a study because it hurts a few mice is not high on any lab’s list.

  “They’re adorable,” says Rainey. “Are they nice?”

  “They’re gentled from birth.” Leah goes to a rack of mice that are not in use and slides out a drawer. “Let her sniff you,” she says. Rainey dips a hand in the bin.

  Leah plucks her first mouse, Experimental No. 1, a.k.a. Big Handsome, out of a drawer by his thin pink whip of a tail and sets him gently on a scale on the cart. She makes her obeisance: “Yea, though you walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” she says, picking up a syringe, “thou shalt fear no evil, for it will all be over pretty soon.”

  “That sounds awful.” Rainey’s voice is a texture Leah can’t name: water, gravel, silk.

  “It’s important,” says Leah. Halothanadol turns fat mice into thinner mice, that’s the general idea. If it can cure obesity, it might cure the side effects—heart disease, diabetes, like that.

  “Just say you couldn’t do it.” Rainey separates out a twist of her hair and dangles it into the bin. “Two Truths and a Lie,” she says. “You first.”

  “Rainey, not now.” Leah sinks a syringe through the rubber stopper of a halothanadol bottle, pulls up the plunger, holds the syringe up to look for air bubbles, and flicks it sharply to dislodge them. Then she ejects a fine spray. Big Handsome patrols the perimeter of the scale in little spurts.

  “Me first?” Rainey has the mouse in her palm now. It quivers and sniffs. It is the size and shape of a fig. She folds her arm against her chest and lets the mouse creep to her elbow. “I fell in love with an eighty-year-old man,” she says. “I was eighteen. I lived in his apartment. I wore his dead wife’s clothes, and I slept in his bed. I really loved him.”