Rainey Royal (Deluxe Edition)

The acclaimed novel of girlhood, friendship, and sexuality set in the bohemian Greenwich Village of 1970, with a new introduction by Jessica Anya Blau

Fourteen-year-old Rainey Royal—fierce, gifted, and dangerously magnetic—lives in a once-elegant, now-crumbling townhouse with her cultish jazz-pianist father and the women who orbit him. Her mother is gone. Her father’s best friend hovers too close. And Rainey, left largely to her own devices, must learn to navigate desire, betrayal, and vulnerability in a city that shimmers with promise and threat. As she gathers friends and misfits into her orbit, Rainey tests the limits of who she can become—sometimes a rebel, sometimes a criminal, always a girl determined to recreate herself as both an artist and a young woman in a fractured world.

Each book in the Rainey Royal cycle can be read on its own, but together they echo and amplify one another, creating a world of almost unbearable richness and intensity.Praise for Rainey Royal

“Fierce, winning, and sharp as a blade.”
—Vanity Fair

“Rainey will remain in my mind forever as one of my favorite characters.”
—ELLE

“Wild, dangerous, sometimes certain and other times totally lost, Rainey is a fascinating, unique character.”
—Los Angeles Times

"It's difficult to remember a novel that was more continually on edge than Rainey Royal, a series of fraught moments that never seem to let off any psychic steam . . . beautifully drawn."
—Chicago TribuneDylan Landis is the author of three works of fiction in the Rainey Royal Cycle set in 1970s Greenwich Village: the forthcoming novel in stories List of All Possible Desires; the novel Rainey Royal, a New York Times Editors’ Choice; and the novel in stories Normal People Don’t Live Like This. Her work has appeared in O. Henry Prize Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading, and other anthologies. She has received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in fiction and lives in Los Angeles.Let Her Come Dancing All Afire

The patron saint against temptation sits straight-backed in an Italian convent as if mortised into her chair, and she is dead, dead, dead. Her name is Saint Catherine of Bologna, and nuns have been lighting candles at her feet since Columbus asked Isabella for those ships.

Rainey Royal, in the Reading Room of the New York Public Library, peers at the photo in the book so closely she can smell the paper. Her shiny hair spills over the page. Saint Catherine is not just about temptation; she’s the patroness of artists, for Chrissake—just what Rainey needs. She thinks they could be sisters, five hundred years apart. Rainey is an artist, and she embodies temptation.

Wisps of smoke from centuries of candles, she reads, have stained Saint Catherine’s hands and face mahogany. In the photo, the saint wears a gargantuan habit, her nut-colored fingers laced in her lap. Rainey wears a halter top and holds a dry clay egg in one hand and a silver teaspoon in the other.

While she reads, she burnishes the egg with the back of the spoon on her lap.

In her mind, Rainey lifts the musty black fabric. She looks up Saint Catherine’s legs. She sees this: not an old lady’s crinkles but the lucent flesh of a fourteen-year-old virgin. One morning, Cath walked out on her rich foster family, with its tutors and grooms, and offered herself to the nuns.

In the cloister, Cath will never listen at night for the marquis padding toward her through chilled marble halls.

Why Cath endured that setup at all is because her own father sent her there, to serve the marquis’s daughter. There’s always a man, right? So there’s always a problem in the house.

It is October 1972, and the problem in Rainey’s house is Gordy, who tucks her in. Gordy is the best friend of her father, Howard. She remembers this: Hugging her knees on the stairs one night, listening to the grown-ups in the Greenwich Village townhouse where she was born and where Gordy has lived forever. Her mother, Linda, came and went from both bedrooms without embarrassment, so Rainey grew up thinking all married ladies had sleepovers. Downstairs that evening her father said, Gordy and I share everything. Then a pause, and Howard’s voice again, lower, a tone she understood even before kindergarten: Except for the Steinway, my friend, everything, and then rising laughter.

No one wrote anything about Cath’s mother in the book. No one talks about Linda Royal, either, even when Rainey asks.

In the library, she reads how Cath and the marquis’s daughter grew up studying at the same table. When Cath walked behind her mistress in the gardens, their silk gowns swished like running water. That’s because Cath was given the daughter’s lavish hand-me-downs with barely yellowed armpits. Rainey can see it.

Plus Cath got unlimited paper and inks, being good at painting animals and the faces of saints.

“I found her,” says Rainey, causing all the library people at the long table to look up. With precise little bursts, she rips out the page on Saint Cath. The woman across from her, tracing a map onto onionskin, yelps.

“Oh, relax,” says Rainey. She packs up her egg and her spoon and the folded page and strides down the staircase and out into an autumn rain.

*

Rainey is fourteen, just a girl trying to get from the entry hall of the townhouse to her pink room on the third floor when her father, Howard, thumps the sofa in that sit down, baby way.

She stops, rain-soaked, in the foyer. The place is too quiet. Not an acolyte in sight. Did he send them upstairs to their own rooms or out for pizza? Usually the first floor is packed with young musicians. Some are students, some strays, but Howard Royal only brings home the best. Three days ago he found two brilliant cellist chicks—found, thinks Rainey, like shining orphans. The girls have been ensconced in his bedroom. Like he’s really going to jam with cellos. One acolyte’s a guy who supplies part-time money and part-time girlfriends and reveres Howard in an appropriately oblique manner. When someone new shows up, he says things like, What’s your ax, baby? But the rest are girls who play celestial music and give celestial blow jobs and can’t believe they get to jam and party and live in the extra bedrooms of, oh my God, Howard Royal.

Rainey hasn’t heard the place this silent in centuries.

Howard’s at one end of the parlor sofa, clamping a beer between socked feet and a clarinet between his knees. He’s adjusting the reed. “C’mere, baby,” he says. “Isn’t it amazing? We’re alone.”

On West Tenth Street, alone means three people: Rainey, her father, and Gordy, who lounges on the far sofa arm refractive as a patch of snow, from his long milk-colored hair to his alabaster hands. His jeans are white, too, and he parks a damp white Ked on the upholstery. Gordy Vine is not and never has been an acolyte. He is a horn player and the best musical technician in the house—even Howard says it. But Howard has the charisma. Gordy claims to be albino, but his eyes are green. He pretends to be unaware of Rainey by keeping his head down. He pretends he is not getting sidewalk crud on the brocade. He pretends to edit penciled notes in a spiral-bound score.

He’s thirty-seven. Ancient.

Rainey shifts in the foyer. “What?”

She has a stolen saint in her backpack. Her egg is stolen, too; it is supposed to live on the Studio Art windowsill at school. She holds out her arms to show the damage she will do the upholstery. “I’m soaking wet.”

She regrets this instantly. Gordy’s attention, like a draft from a threshold, wafts toward her. He doesn’t even have to raise his head. Howard blows on the clarinet’s mouthpiece, looks puzzled, and says, “Sounds like fish frying.” Not much about her father’s jazz makes sense to Rainey.

“Get your shoe off Lala’s sofa,” she says. Lala is Howard’s mother. She owns the house, but she lives in an old folks’ Home uptown. Some days Rainey can talk to Gordy any way she wants.

Gordy smiles. The Ked remains. “Rainey,” he says softly. Even his voice sounds albino. Rainey thinks of white plaster walls, licked by the painter’s brush.

“I sent the acolytes out to collect sounds,” says Howard, as if sounds were lost quarters that winked from gutters. “Sit, Daughter.”

She drops her pack, collaborates noisily with a folding chair in the parlor, and sits on it backward while Howard watches with pleased amusement. She smells his body oil: sandalwood.

“That school psychologist called again today,” he says, “but I think she’s on the wrong track. What do you think?”

Rainey flinches and looks to the ceiling cherubs for strength. The ceiling cherubs are three plaster angels who cavort around a trio of bare bulbs. Their ax used to be the chandelier, but last month Sotheby’s Parke-Bernet took it away. The house is shedding its sweetest parts like lost earrings; in return, electricity keeps humming, pizzas keep arriving, and Rainey keeps getting new school clothes every fall.

“Are we getting a new chandelier?”

“Do you know why the school psychologist called again?”

“No.” Rainey stares off into the kitchen, willing the refrigerator to disgorge a glass of milk.

“I think you do.”

“She’s full of shit. Can I go now?”

“Look at me, Daughter.” He smiles as if indulging her. “It’s important to be candid about these things.”

Gordy’s not-looking at her is now so intense he might as well shine flashlights in her eyes.

Howard, and the smile, persist. “So tell us why the school psychologist is talking about you engaging with the male teachers.”

The school psychologist always peels and eats an orange while she and Rainey talk. The scent comes back to Rainey in a rush. It is the scent of denial, the innocence that slides over her when Florence, the psychologist, asks how she feels about her mother, her father, the torments she dreams up for that Levinson girl.

Extricating herself gracefully from a straddled folding chair could be problematic.

“Screw you.” She knocks over the metal chair as she stands and elbows one of the new cellos, so she barely has to hear her father say under the clatter, Oh, you can do better than your old dad.

*

Sometimes Rainey has to share her room—a ginger operation, a kind of Howard trick.

It is one year after the onset of the blue and white pills. They are prescription, but Howard Royal gets them from a doctor friend and dispenses them daily from packs of twenty-eight. Rainey doesn’t need them, but he doesn’t believe her. Three weeks white, one week blue—he gives her one every morning with a glass of milk and waits until she swallows. He says things like That’s my girl and Because, sweetheart, with maturity comes responsibility.

And it is a year after the summer of Jean-Luc Ponty, when her father had Gordy take her one night to hear Ponty play in Central Park, and Gordy steered her under some trees. She was still thirteen. You radiate power and light, Gordy told her on the grass. But he is always saying shit like that. It was the only time he lost control, and they still didn’t go all the way.

It is 4:00 p.m. on a Friday, and Rainey takes a savage bite of Gordy’s grilled cheese. He has been making grilled cheese the way she likes it—and rice pudding and chocolate egg creams—for as long as she remembers.

Howard smiles her up and down. “Sweetheart, your room—”

“Tina is sleeping over Friday and Saturday in my room.”

Tina is Rainey’s best friend. They smoke pot on the roof and take turns reading Howard’s pornography aloud to each other. Rainey is positive her mother, who seemed cheerful and wholesome in this department, never read these books.

“Then Sunday,” says Howard. “My brilliant young cellists are in need of your floor. Just for a few days. Open your heart.”

She has seen the new cellists, always together—giggling on the stairs or leaving Howard’s room. They could be sisters, their faces like two porcelain cups, but one girl is shaped like a cello and one more like a bow.

“My heart?” says Rainey. “My heart is a cell in which candles burn at the feet of Saint Catherine of Bologna.” Language is the only turf on which she can stand with her father and joust. Occasionally it works.

“Well, then I pity you,” says Howard.

“When the fuck do I get my privacy back?” says Rainey. “Where am I supposed to do my homework?”

What she really wants to know is, where is the place beneath a girl’s armpit that the back ends and the side begins? She can share her pink room with strangers, but tell her this: Is there a region between back and breast that can, in a proper back rub, be considered neutral?

“Be creative,” says Howard.

What if it doesn’t feel neutral?

“Be creative and be adaptable.”

Gordy says nothing. His language with Rainey is often nonverbal. For example, the way he has been tucking her in the past couple of years: sitting on the edge of her bed without moving and sometimes stroking her long hair, as if he were the father and she were the little girl. The hair stroking makes her feel so porous and ashamed that she pretends to be asleep. She has no idea if Howard knows; he sleeps on the second floor, and Gordy and Rainey share the third. What would Howard even say? He strokes your hair—and? She wonders if Linda knew before she left last year. Gordy never says it is a secret, yet she senses that her silence is required. She has not told anyone but Tina. Often she wishes she had not.

Rainey would like to ask Tina a few things when she comes over, though she won’t. For example: Do Tina’s body parts meet clearly at dotted lines, like pink and green states on a gas-station map? Where does she get her God-given ability to not give a fuck?