5. You Know What They Say About Glass Houses
YOU KNOW WHAT THEY SAY ABOUT GLASS HOUSES
THERE WAS AN IMMEDIACY to my sense that I had misinterpreted the occasion.
I was wearing my most trusted jeans, my favorite T-shirt, a vintage oversized leather blazer that was wholly unnecessary except for the aesthetic—the implication that I was polished and fashionable, capable of all the things I could usually perform but wouldn’t necessarily have expected to on that particular night.
But through the blast of air conditioning in the house came the unmistakable air of festivity, music playing loudly from a system that must have threaded throughout the property, inside and out.
Lana Del Rey crooned to me about summertime while Genesis led me through the massive, monastically sparse living room with an impossibly high ceiling, clearly designed to fixate the eye on the views of the Griffith Observatory and bright city lights.
The sky, dark by then, was still never as dark as I imagined skies should be at nighttime. Light pollution, I guess, or maybe a distant hint of smoke.
The house branched out like an iris from its central courtyard, which was slightly below us where we stood at the apex of the cliffside verticality of the design.
It was as if an Italian villa had been tilted via Photoshop, the fulcrum rearranged so that everything clung slightly sideways.
It reminded me, ridiculously, of one of those paper plate commercials where the inferior brand of plate failed in slow motion, with everything gradually tipping down to the city’s yawning void.
“This house is beautiful,” I said, to make conversation.
Beautiful wasn’t the right word, not even close.
It was almost museum-like—no, almost church-like.
There was a towering austerity, an almost clinical sparseness, though it wasn’t far off from what I understood to be hot in contemporary interior design.
My Doc Marten platform Mary Janes that normally functioned with the sonic utility of work boots echoed loudly as I walked.
I avoided the carpets, which were mostly white.
The interior smelled strongly of fresh paint.
“Mr. de Witt is a simple man. He enjoys open space, the sunrise, the ocean.” It was the first time Genesis seemed to feel open to discussion.
I hadn’t gotten a chance to observe her face closely yet, but I didn’t think she was very old, fifty maybe, a bit older than my guess at Emmanuelle’s age, though between the two of them Emmanuelle was much more visibly altered.
Which wasn’t to say Genesis was wholly natural—I assumed filler, and her version of blond had a caramelly thread, like ribboned ice cream.
“If it were up to him, the renovations would have been completed by now. Unfortunately,” she said in a tone laced with barely restrained loathing, “there has been some contention about certain aspects of the house.”
“You mean the other things back there? The greenhouse and the fountain?”
Genesis stopped short, and I nearly stepped on the back of her heel. She had turned to glare at me; the answer to my question, I gathered, was no. “Those are original to the property,” she said icily. “They’ve been there since Mr. Killian built the villa.”
Killian de Witt and his place in history felt like eons ago. Our apartment complex, ancient as it seemed, had been built well after the Hollywood golden age, sometime in the 1960s. I associated Killian de Witt with some other era—vintage cars and black-and-white pictures.
Of course, some of that lack of scale was institutional to some degree. Black-and-white photography of the civil rights era is essentially propaganda, but that was one thing among many that I was too young to understand.
“I didn’t realize this house had been in the family so long.” It was common industry lore that William de Witt was an actor of New York origins, a former “downtown darling” who’d made it off the Broadway scene.
Genesis glared at me like I’d had the audacity to suggest she had personally driven the estate to decay. “The property fell into disrepair over the years. Mr. de Witt has been in the process of restoring it.”
Hard to imagine a family as wealthy as the de Witts allowing one of their assumedly many properties to fall into disrepair.
Then she suddenly came to a stop.
“Ms. de Witt is in the courtyard,” Genesis informed me shortly.
There was a fresh air of disapproval to her tone, new if not altogether different, though I couldn’t yet tell whether it applied to Emmanuelle or to me.
I realized she probably saw me as Emmanuelle saw me, which was as Emmanuelle in miniature, an acolyte of Emmanuelle’s own design. Cracked from her rib, so to speak.
So there was nothing I could do to repair Genesis’s vision of me, it seemed.
I couldn’t understand it; she was, after all, broadly conceived as “the help,” something I understood even if she didn’t.
She might have been gratuitously regarded as being “like family” to the de Witts, but how would that be meaningful when it wasn’t as if she’d inherit their wealth?
She wasn’t a shareholder. It was a job, and there would be no substantive return.
Maybe she felt she owed William de Witt for something?
The loyalty felt bone-deep, like life or death had once been on the line.
I realized I was crafting a character for her, which was my usual compulsion.
In my head, I thought: Why couldn’t the plot be romantic, unrequited or maybe psychosexual, just for fun?
I, on the other hand, had casually disliked almost every employer I’d ever had.
They all had a fascinating technique, in my mind, to discard the possibility that I might have a private life, or irrelevant needs, or unprofitable wants.
One nation under capitalism, everyone a valuable member of the team until they weren’t—until their grandma died and they couldn’t make their shift.
Unwillingness to compromise mortality for frozen yogurt felt reasonable enough to me, but I digress.
Then again, Genesis didn’t seem admiring of everyone in the house.
Maybe the simpler truth was that we’d been drafted to opposing sides.
She spoke of William and Killian with something like reverence, but clearly had some personal enmity toward Emmanuelle, who had already proven a bit eccentric.
I could tell my primary coping mechanism would be to leave my own opinions of Emmanuelle untouched in the back of my mind, lest I come to any unsavory conclusions that got in the way of my ability to play my part.
“Thank you so much,” I told Genesis, when it became clear that she was depositing me at the top of the outdoor stairwell winding down from the terrace of the main house to the open courtyard one level below. “I’m really sorry I was late. It won’t happen again.”
For a moment, I thought Genesis might snap at me again, her brusqueness proving a feature of her personality in addition to a bug. I’d obviously seen too many cozy British mysteries about housekeepers.
Instead, she gave me a false, simpering smile, something I felt sure was worse. I was doing my best to be sincere, but the mirror she provided was clear evidence I’d failed.
“Of course,” she said, saccharine, looking at me like of course I wasn’t a problem, I couldn’t be one, because I was temporary at best. Then she turned and left.
“Anya darling!” Emmanuelle’s voice rang out from the level of the house that was built like an embrace around the pool in the courtyard below.
She was busying herself behind the threshold of one of those sliding glass walls, the ones that could be folded in to erase the boundary between what was technically inside and what was out.
“California living,” as Realtors liked to say—a phrase I saw all the time on the flyers that were sent to our house, boasting the multi-million-dollar new construction projects in the neighborhood.
All generic Japandi farmhouses that stood on the bones of 1920s Craftsman porches and Spanish-style bungalows that had been so quintessentially Hollywood once upon a time.
In that sense, I could tell this part of the house was new.
The structure around the courtyard was what looked like one large room, like the hall of mirrors in Versailles, clearly designed for entertaining.
There were palm trees scattered along the property non-natively, as with most of the city.
The natural foliage in this part of the hills was sparse.
Mainly wildflowers and holly bushes, unlike the other side, near Outpost Estates, where sycamores shrouded the hillside in a sort of perennial shade.
The clump of king palms that stood just on the edge of the courtyard rustled with untrimmed fronds; enough to give my mother a heart attack.
I only noticed because of the way the wind whipped through them—if dead fronds fell on our street, they usually fell on cars, making them obstacles more than dangers.
In the hills, during a Santa Ana, they were lethal. Fire hazards.
It was cooler up here than it had been on the streets of Hollywood below, but only a little. Already my lower back and hairline were damp again with sweat.
“Finally, finally!” Emmanuelle’s voice sang out to me with childlike delight.
I caught sight of her from afar as I reached the landing of the courtyard.
She was on the opposite side of the pool from me, the Griffith Observatory materializing behind her like a parrot on her shoulder.
It was dark out now, though with all the lights below from the city, the sky looked a half-convinced shade of gray.
Emmanuelle beckoned to me from where she was tossing things into a blender behind the bar. “I’m just mixing myself some dinner. Want one?”