Free Paint It Black by Janet Fitch Page B

it.
    Out in the living room, the Louis record ended. Silence filled the house.
Ce toit tranquille, entre les tombes
. . . She couldn’t take the silence. She stumbled out into the living room, and started the album over again, a music scratchy with yearning. She lay on the blue furry couch, open like a book that had been abandoned, a book she knew by heart, a book with all the pages torn out. She lay on her back with her arm across her eyes, letting the clarinet complain, then joined by Louis’s horn, “Lonesome Blues.” Imagining Michael was here again. Dancing with her, naked. She had never lived anywhere so private before, that you could do just what you wanted, with the windows wide open. Drinking kirs, the champagne opening with a soft pop, not splurting out of the bottle, just a fizzy smoke, and he’d filled the glasses, the drinks turning pink with cassis. They toasted their new house with one hand as he slid the other up her thigh. The wine sweet and cold, his fingers warm, exploring her as she drank, until they forgot their drinks and made love, and again.
    But he wasn’t a virgin.
    Virgin or no virgin, what did it matter. She wasn’t going to let that asshole Cal take it away from her. An afternoon like that, and after, when they just lay on the couch, not talking, not listening to any music, just watching the sun get lower through the open windows, the color of orange sherbet, melting all over the hills. They had that. They had that. She could still feel that breeze, and his fingers, the look on his face, the lines near his eyes, the lashes fluttering against his cheeks as he fucked her with his piano-strong hands, his cock, practiced, unpracticed, what the fuck difference did it make, it was beautiful beyond anything she’d ever imagined. She pretended her fingers were his, holding her breast, touching her, making her sex ripple like a flamenco skirt. She was almost there when the lock rattled in the door and she just had time to stop fingering herself when Pen walked in with a bag of groceries on one hip.
    Reluctantly, she pushed Michael’s shirt down, put her arm back across her face.
    “Is this what you’ve been doing all day, just lying there jerking off, listening to old records?” Pen said. She went over to the stereo and yanked the needle off the Hot Five. “This is no good. Pull yourself together, Josie. Enough’s enough.”
    The phone rang again and Pen waited for her to answer it, but Josie didn’t want to, it was just going to be Meredith breathing and then hanging up on her as she had been doing for days. Pen picked it up, annoyed. “It’s for you,” she said, passing the phone to Josie. When Josie wouldn’t take it, Pen stuck it in front of her nose, and when she still wouldn’t touch it, dropped the receiver onto her face. Josie picked it up reluctantly.
    “Yeah?” she said. Nothing good ever came over a phone line, hadn’t she learned that by now?
    “Josie, it’s Cal,” came the voice over the line, that sandy, western voice. “How you holding up?”
    She was glad it was him. This surprised her. But Cal knew what it meant to lose Michael Faraday, that specific being, that unique and miraculous collision of biology and history, spirit and matter.
    “I had this dream, Cal. That he was alive. He was in this white city, and he was carrying this goat down to the water.” He looked so beautiful, all tanned and naked except for a pair of cutoffs, with a red goat slung around his shoulders, he was holding it by its legs. “I tried calling but he didn’t hear me. Then all these women in white came out onto the stairway, and I couldn’t get by them.” A religious procession, moving so slowly, carrying a plaster saint. “I knew I had to reach him before he got down to the water. There was a boat and if I didn’t reach him, he’d be gone forever. But they wouldn’t let me get past.”
    “I know,” Cal said. “Mine are about looking for him after a disaster, a crash in the