Paint It Black Read Online Free PDF Page A

to go swimming. “But we’ll have to take the bus,” he said. “I don’t have a car.” He didn’t want to be controlled by a machine, he explained, but she just figured he couldn’t afford one. So she drove, up Vermont past the auto-body places, the punk shops and cafés. She still could remember, she’d had Patti Smith on the tape deck. The song was “Frederick,” and she had thought,
If Patti can be in love, anything’s possible.
    A park grew in the center of the street above Los Feliz, planted with enormous magnolias, roots snakily intertwined. Houses big as hotels sitting back on giant lawns. When he’d pointed out the turn, she’d had the strongest impulse to take that long finger in her mouth. But she didn’t. She didn’t know him that well yet.
    The steep road turned and forked, she lost track,
Vistas
and
Coronas
and
Villas,
until he finally told her to park in the shade of an immense wall. Messy pittosporums and orange trees littered the sidewalk, and a fancy iron gate barred the way. He smiled then. That was when she fell in love, right then, as he lifted the chain and opened the gate. Showing her it wasn’t really locked, just wound around to look that way. He was a boy who knew things, things that looked one way but proved to be another.
    In a lot of ways.
    No, she would not think about that.
Now
was too big, like a giant dark planet coming up over the horizon. She wanted
then.
The coolness of the overgrown trees outside the Spanish house, moss mottling its thick walls and painting the red tile roof with chartreuse velvet. How she took his arm not to twist her ankle in her high heels. “Whose house is this?”
    “Some people I know.” The soft voice that made you want to put your ear to his mouth. The sweet smell of his breath. She followed him around the back of the house, an enormous place, uncared for, unpruned white rambling roses climbing high into the trees, the footing treacherous with slick leaves, thinking,
Rich people should take better care of their homes.
    Here it was, the pool. Stained dark, leaves scattered over the surface and dotting the none-too-clean bottom. Still and silent in the shade of the great trees. Certainly not the pool she’d envisioned—freeform, sparkling aquamarine in the sun. Not wanting to betray her disappointment, she’d unbuttoned her dress, stepped out of her underwear, and dove in like a girl in a movie. The shock of the cold. She came up gasping. He hadn’t told her it was unheated.
    Was he snickering at her, a real swell joke? But he’d seated himself at a green iron table littered with droppings, unpacking his charcoals, his pad. “Aren’t you coming in?” she asked. “The water’s
wonderful.
” If you were a polar bear.
    “No thanks. I am not
sportif,
” he said.
    That made her laugh. Boys always bragged about their sportiness, their prowess at things they couldn’t do. They never admitted their deficiencies. “How
sportif
do you have to be to float in a pool?” He shook his head, and she dove under again, revealing a flash of ass—mooning him.
    And here on the yellowed paper, her white shape took form under black water, blurry as a half-conscious thought. The uncertainty of the pale flesh rising to specifics of face and small breasts. The layers of darkness around her. That’s what he’d seen that day, a brightness with darkness all around.
    The snake in her gut coiled, flexed. She had to stop looking and just breathe. Michael watching her, as if she were glamorous, as if she were a rare and mysterious creature. When all she’d been thinking that day was how quiet it was, after the constant noise and bickering at the Fuckhouse.
    And he’d told her about the deaf-mutes. The people who lived there, a woman and her crippled son. Recluses. “She doesn’t like him to mix with the world. I tutor him sometimes,” he said, working charcoal over the surface of the large page.
    “So where are they now?”
    “At the hospital. The boy has