Chapter 5 People Can Surprise You #3
The foothills rise in the distance. Houses in his neighborhood are mansions, many shrouded and tucked deep into greenery, set apart from each other with massive trees and expensive landscaping, tropical jungles and English gardens.
A pause at the gatehouse—a small building the same Spanish Mediterranean style as the main house, but with only one room—and Louis, Jack’s groundskeeper, hears the sound of the car and appears in the window, a slow blink as he clears his vision.
Recognizing Frankie, he starts to let her in, but then spots Jack in the passenger seat and hurries.
The imposing metal frames creak open, and the car’s headlights bring patches of the yard to life as they wind up the hill.
The mansion is pure opulence. Sprawling and three stories, it’s white stucco with dark-brown trim, Moorish-style light fixtures, and tiled stairs.
Terraces jut from several locations, each with stunning views of the tennis court and the Arroyo and the Colorado Street Bridge.
On either side of the house, bright-fuchsia bougainvillea grows against the white walls in a brilliant grip.
There are seven bedrooms, eight bathrooms, marble doorframes, and painted wood ceilings.
Off the kitchen, there is yet another little tiled patio surrounded by a wood fence with a gate that leads to an alley.
The alley was Frankie’s escape route on the occasions when she accidentally fell asleep with O’Shea still in the house.
Once, she even startled a trophy hunter, a little man who was rifling through Jack’s trash looking for mementos or scripts or anything he could sell.
I get reporters out there too, Jack admitted when she relayed what happened.
After that, they deemed it safest to stay together in Venice.
His Venice cottage. Already, it’s become a symbol of what they shared, a common loved ground, their haven where nothing else mattered.
Yet even there she snuck in the back gate and waited till the coast was clear.
At first the effort was fun, but eventually she began to wonder if part of her appeal was her willingness to play the game and not question the rules.
How much of why he likes her is because she accepts his situation?
Though O’Shea is gone, he readied the house before he left.
Windows glow, amber tinted and warm. “Follow me,” Jack says at the front door before leading her straight through the house and out to the back patio.
Beyond is a path that snakes through twists of oak trees to a small pond, around which are boulders and a few Adirondack chairs.
Past that is the western lip of the Arroyo, with views of the Rose Bowl and mountains and streams and gullies and even the massive and opulent Vista del Arroyo Hotel, which sits directly across the way.
At six stories tall, the resort often hosts guests who stay for months at a time, and has so far survived the Depression, known even now as the seat of high-society events and a top spot for fine dining.
Beyond the hotel is Colorado Boulevard, chock-full of people and businesses: a bowling alley and clothing stores and restaurants and Dad it’s why she called after the morning with the champagne.
We get what a horrible wonder this all is.
Everything good we have—it’s like the ugly beauty.
A woman who’s so beautiful that her beauty loses all meaning. ”
“When you talk, it gets worse.”
Again, he smiles. Charming, even now. “But it could be a man too.”
“That’s good to know.”
“Anyone that’s just too perfect,” he says. “Or has it too good, maybe that’s it. Because if all you get are perfect apples, you don’t think twice. You forget to appreciate them. And pretty soon you forget there was something to appreciate to begin with.”
“Maybe the perfect apple’s just not as interesting as one with curly, frizzy hair, let’s say.”
He watches her, steady. “To me, the curly, frizzy-haired apple is perfect.”
The way he looks at her, sometimes it takes her breath away. But now an idea is forming, a new tactic. “You and June have that in common.”
He takes a swig of his soda. “We spend most of our time hating each other. But we know what it’s like to belong to the world, and not belong to ourselves. We’ll always have that.”
Ignoring the chairs, she takes a seat on a large boulder at the water’s edge as Jack picks up the old aluminum pail by the fishing poles. Tentatively, Frankie says, “So maybe you’d consider helping her? Since you understand her—”
“No,” he says firmly. “I want my life. But I know June, and I know she’ll understand why.
And I know she’d make the same choice. But that was a nice try, Frankie Donnelly.
” He gives a grin before sifting through dirt in the pail.
“Night crawlers. Look away if you don’t want to see this.
” Which, of course, makes her look. Jack notices, and smiles as he hooks a worm.
“Fishing is how you eat. It’s not a luxury—at least not the fishing I’ve done. ”
She studies him—the flop of his hair against his forehead, the trees behind him, lit up and haunting—and wishes she hadn’t stopped him from talking about doing plays. “So you’d really prefer theatre and all that struggling?”
“It’s not a struggle if you love it. Theatre is acting. Real acting. At least for me it is.”
“I never did a play, but I got good with being somewhere else. We didn’t have money for books or movies.
But the movie posters—those you can look at for free.
And my mother practically hunted them down.
Every time there was a new one, she’d take me to it to show me, and later she’d have an entire story ready to go with it. ”
“She could’ve been a writer.”
“In a way, she was, just nobody knew it. Nobody but me. And she got me doing it too, with the posters. That’s what kept me going while I worked.”
He watches her. “My fellow dreamer.”
The owl calls again, its question emerging from deep within an oak tree.
Jack turns toward the sound. “With my dad, the second I saw the whisky come out, I had my stories ready to go. They were always about someone I pretended was in the other room, someone I was protecting. Maybe it gave me a purpose, I don’t know.
My black eye would always be one some imaginary person didn’t get.
” He takes another swig. “So. Who should we be so there’s no house, no studio, nothing but a pond and fishing poles and us? ”
“Can I be someone named Bertha?”
“Only if you want me fishing on the other side of the pond. Bertha was my first-grade teacher, and she was awful.”
“How’s Annie?”
“Annie,” he says, watching her take off her shoes and touch the water with her toe. “Annie goes barefoot and eats apples down to the core. She hates snakes but can charm bees.”
“Bee charming? That’s possible?”
“I thought I didn’t need to explain the rules of imagination. Because there’s one rule. And that’s that there are no rules. So yes, Annie, you’re a bee charmer. And I’m some guy named Grant.”
She smiles. “Are we a couple, Grant?”
“You know we are.” He hands her a fishing pole. “Like this,” he says, casting the line into the water. “I forgot the music.”
For a moment, each falls silent, listening. Often, music’s drifted across the ravine from the Vista del Arroyo Hotel, and they’ve danced beneath the treetops. Tonight, there’s nothing, so she conjures a song in her mind. She starts to hum. A swinging melody.
He smiles as he places the tune: “We Just Couldn’t Say Goodbye” by Guy Lombardo. “Well, Annie,” he says, taking a seat behind her. “My thought is maybe we don’t have to.”
She leans back against his chest, breathing in the smell of water and oak and sage and him, and lets him say this.
Why correct him? Life will do that on its own when he realizes that the studio will not cave and that she’s accepted a promotion for a job that she’s wanted and worked hard for, but that the job’s goal is to protect him and save his reputation and, in truth, will mean warning him off a relationship with someone like her.
Because if he gets out of this engagement and people find out about her, they will assume she’s the reason, and they will hate her, and hate him for what he’s done, especially when June starts to show.
The public doesn’t want Jack to be happy as much as they want to be happy for him, in their own way.
So she lets him say what he wants to, because tonight is a night for pretend.