Chapter 2 Seven Years Later 1964
Seven Years Later
I’m flying down the stairs from my turret to the fifth floor to babysit Judith Crown’s latest kid when I round a corner and wham!
I crash into him like an accident, strewing bruises and curses over the wooden treads.
They’ve been worn to such a high shine by the housemaids’ feet that no matter how much this man wheels his arms and recombines the words damn, god, sons, and bitches, he topples backward.
Thankfully a landing is only a few steps behind, but the fall is enough to make his ankle turn at an awkward angle.
The Chateau Marmont echoes the man’s curses back at him. He catches me smiling at the reverberating blasphemies and God is damned again.
“Are you going to laugh or help?” he snaps.
A golden-haired dog bounds over, a grin on his face too. I rub his head. “Hello, boy. What’s your name?”
“His name is Pilot. His ankles are intact. Whereas mine…” The man tries to step forward and winces. “Dammit.”
In the lamplight of the stairwell, I can’t see much, just that the stranger is exceptionally tall and has black hair, which is a little long and a lot scruffy.
His lips are extravagantly pouty, the kind the starlets would kill to have adorning their own faces, or else to have paving the road to hell down their necks.
Dark sunglasses cover his eyes, like he’s the wayward friend of the blond lead in the big summer movie—the guy who isn’t handsome exactly, but who you can’t stop looking at all the same.
Yes, after seven years in Hollywood, even I’ve started describing people using movie tropes. Which means it’s definitely time to leave.
“Lean on me. I’m an expert at helping people who are unsteady on their feet,” I say to my injured acquaintance, assuming the sunglasses hide the start of tomorrow’s hangover or this afternoon’s high.
“I’m not under the influence of anything except being used by you as a human skittle,” he says curtly.
So I put him in the latter of the two categories of people at the Marmont: those who swallow liquor like water, and those who are drying out. It’s usually only a few days before they’re soaking wet and wilder than ever.
I offer him my shoulder as a crutch. “It’s ten steps up, then the elevator is close by.”
“You’re half my size.”
He looks around for a better option than an almost twenty-one-year-old Aria Jones, who can only say she’s five foot three if she’s standing on her tiptoes.
He must realize that unless he thinks he can ride his dog up the stairs, I’ll have to do.
He puts an arm around my shoulders, leaning more of his weight on the wall than on me. The dog patters up behind.
“I’d rather not have the whole hotel see me like this,” he mutters.
“As well as being an excellent crutch, I’m an expert at being invisible.”
I crack open the door to the corridor and spy Chester Meringue, who’s clinging to vaudeville with the same fervor as the Hollywood censors and their rules about three-second screen kisses.
He’s juggling two kitchen knives, a pair of panties, and a banana, an uncomfortable combination at the best of times.
I shut the door, wince for the fate of Chester’s toes when I hear a thunk, and reopen the door when his groan sounds resigned rather than bloodied.
Chester moves away. But now we’re interrupted by gunshots. My companion jumps, jars his ankle, and his curses flow as freely as the Chateau Marmont oddities.
“It was just two shots, so it’s okay,” I tell him.
His eyebrows soar to exhilarating heights. “What exactly is the number of gunshots that would concern you?”
I check my watch. It’s six o’clock. I’m going to be late.
“Too busy to deal with a massacre?” he says acidly. “Ankle-maiming enough for today?”
I make myself smile politely and explain. “The author Paul Rydell is in residence. He has a love-hate relationship with the forty-foot neon showgirl on Sunset Boulevard. Sometimes he shoots her—just with an air rifle—in the ass. Two buttocks equals two shots. Now the coast is clear. So let’s go.”
I’ve finally silenced him. We hop along to the elevator, and I pray that it doesn’t break down until we’re out of it. Part of the Marmont’s charm is its careless antique shabbiness, like an aging French courtesan whose couture gown is frayed—but it’s Chanel, so who cares?
“Miss Aria!” Isaiah cries when the doors open. He kisses my cheeks. “You always take the stairs.” Then he sees the man. “Ah, you have cargo.”
My injured companion says, “Seventh floor,” and the elevator lurches upward like an incompetent cat.
“Need a hand?” Isaiah asks when the doors open.
The man shakes his head and I hope it’s because he really is eager to have as few people as possible see him like this rather than because he’s the kind to search for another elevator when they see the color of Isaiah’s skin.
If I find it’s the latter, I’ll tell Maisie the housekeeper to short-sheet his bed.
Pilot leads the way, stopping outside the large penthouse, which means my acquaintance is someone important.
“I’ll send the doctor up,” I tell him as he slips his key into the lock.
He nods and closes the door behind him. A second later it cracks open and a gruff, “Thank you,” issues from within.
Then he’s gone, taking his shades and his lips with him, leaving behind the sensation of gentle pressure on my arm as well as a hint of musk and devil-may-care.
I shake my head. Who was that? He isn’t a wannabe actor—dreamers can’t afford penthouses.
Perhaps he’s one of the studio-contracted actors who’s done something bad and been put here to hide away until the fuss dies down.
But they’re usually the most conspicuous of all, enjoying their notoriety and their free accommodation.
The infamous don’t hide in stairwells. Only the invisibles do, like me.
I check my watch again. It’s that time between martinis and valium that’s the most dangerous of all.
I can’t go to Miss Devine Rey’s room to call the doctor.
So I hurry down to the lobby where a guest is banging out an impassioned version of “Les Toreadors” on the baby grand, an apt metaphor: the Marmont is full of posturing bulls and overconfident matadors.
As for me, I’m the red flag, the one who gets out of the way just in time.
Not today. No, today I’m rounding another corner, and there beneath the gothic chandelier stands a girl with a suitcase sitting like a forlorn puppy at her feet and I’m flung so violently backward seven years that a sound flies out of my mouth.
But she isn’t the ghost of Aria-past. This girl is pretty, for a start.
She’s around fifteen, I’d guess, but she’s trying to look older with false lashes and hands-on-hips attitude.
“Can I help you?” I ask. Even though I have a doctor to call, an air rifle to confiscate, and a baby to sit, I can’t leave her standing there looking so vulnerable, so lost.
She glares. “My dad just bought this place, so I don’t need help.”
Another gasp escapes me. It’s like this girl is the murder scene in Psycho, put here to scare me silly. “Bought? The Marmont? Your dad?”
I make myself stop bombarding her. I need to tuck her away where she’s safe—and quickly. “Owning probably isn’t the same as knowing. What room do you need?”
“The only thing I know is that I have a headache.”
“Les Toreadors” becomes a chord-heavy version of “The End of the World” and even my temples start to pound. All we need is for the air rifle to go off again.
Thankfully the desk clerk appears. I hand the girl over, then shut myself behind the carved wooden door of the phone booth. “It’s Aria,” I say when Doctor Foster answers.
“What do you have for me today? Judith Crown’s stomach needs pumping? Augusta Hepworth has another black eye?”
“Just a sprained ankle. In the penthouse.”
“I yearn for the days of sprained ankles, Aria. Thank you.”
I laugh and hang up.
Then I frown, remembering what the girl said.
Someone’s bought the Chateau Marmont.
Which could ruin all of my plans.
I run back up the stairs, knock on Paul Rydell’s door, and hold out my hand.
He sighs and passes me the air rifle. “Can’t live with her, can’t live without her.”
Over his shoulder, I can see her—the forty-foot giantess in silver boots and a scanty blue leotard who twirls on the edge of a silver dollar, advertising the Hotel Sahara in Vegas.
She arrived the same year I did and casts flashing green and red light into Rydell’s room, as well as a smile every five seconds, before presenting him with her rear end.
The lights would give me nightmares, but Rydell keeps writing her into his books and only shoots her when the words won’t flow.
“Ask for a different room,” I tell him.
“Then the words might never come,” he says mournfully.
Like everyone here, his need for fame outweighs the pain of earning it.
I take the rifle up to my turret, where there are so many books stacked in piles around the room that it looks like the walls are made of stories.
I hide the rifle among the eclectic mix of objects—a lamp whose base is a foot in a high-heeled shoe, a black Art Deco cat that I call F.
Scott. Then I barrel down to Judith Crown’s room only fifteen minutes late.
Thankfully she must have drunk exactly the right amount of gin and hot water because she just kisses my cheeks and dashes out while I collapse onto the sofa.
“What a day,” I say to the baby, who giggles through pink lips so like her momma’s. Maybe those lips will just smile and sing, like her momma does. Maybe they’ll never taste gin, nor fear; maybe she’ll use them to ask for what she wants rather than to swallow down what she doesn’t.
God, I’m the one who needs a gin and hot water.
“Let’s take a walk.” I carry the baby downstairs in search of Mr. Mason, the manager, who’ll be able to tell me about the Marmont’s new owner. But Mr. Mason’s office is locked.
It’s never been locked before.
I take out the skeleton key I was gifted by the housekeeper on my fourteenth birthday, push open the door and see immediately what’s missing: the photograph that used to sit on Mr. Mason’s desk of himself, his long-dead fiancée Toni—Bob Ashenhurst’s sister—and Miss Devine Rey.
If the photo’s gone, it means Mr. Mason is too.
No.
The baby grizzles, oblivious to my shock, so I take her upstairs, feed her, bathe her, read her a story, and tuck her into bed. Then I stare out the window at the endless lights of LA.
Fourteen years ago, something happened. I don’t know what.
Just that Toni Ashenhurst died and my aunt locked herself in her suite and hasn’t left it since.
Yet we somehow keep renting a two-bedroom suite at the Chateau Marmont, when surely the money from my aunt’s career ran out long ago.
I’ve always assumed that because of their past friendship, Mr. Mason has been very inventive in the way he accounts for our suite.
And I try not to cost my aunt anything: I wear the clothes the stars leave behind—whatever they lose at the Marmont, they never want to see again.
My aunt wears the clothes she’s had since she cloistered herself in her suite.
But we order everything else from Schwab’s, the pharmacy and diner across the road, which can’t be cheap.
And now the Marmont has a new owner. Which means I have a problem.
When Judith returns, I tuck her into bed too, remind her that she has to get up when the baby cries rather than roll over and go back to sleep.
Then I go to my aunt’s suite, where everything is the same as it was seven years ago: chinchilla stoles hang on the coatrack by the door; ambergris incense sticks burn on stands, hiding the stench of decay; and monogrammed luggage sits beside the dressing table as if Miss Devine is always dashing off.
I fetch her a glass of water, hoist her into a sitting position, and try not to let it ache too much when she cries.
“Someone’s bought the Marmont,” I say, and that’s enough to rouse her.
“Who?” she whispers.
“I don’t know. I’m trying to find out. But I need to know if you can pay for this room.”
“I can’t,” she weeps before she falls back into the Quaalude sea.
I exhale. Check my watch. It’s two in the morning. But I haul myself back up to my turret and pull War and Peace from the stacks of books. Inside, I’ve cut a rectangle through the pages to hold all the money I’ve earned from babysitting.
$4,552. I’m four hundred and forty-eight dollars and three months short of my goal.
For almost seven years I’ve lived here under the guardianship of a woman I hardly know.
But on December the first, three months away, I’ll be twenty-one.
An adult—no longer the ward of an aunt. My plan has always been to walk out of here with five thousand dollars in one hand and my life in the other, thus fulfilling the promise I made to myself seven years ago—to escape the Marmont and leave poor orphan Aria behind.
And I’m so close. I just need three more months and less than five hundred dollars.
But now I have to somehow earn enough money to both pay the rent until then and to add to my escape fund too.
Or I need to make miracles happen and convince the new owner to let my aunt and me continue to stay here for free.
I’m living in Hollywood, the land of miracles. Surely there’s one—just one, please God—out there for Aria Jones?
A sharp breeze bullies its way in through the window, demanding, Who’ll look after your aunt after you’ve gone? She kept you when you had no one. You owe her.
I slam the window against wind and guilt. I have enough problems to solve right now and, besides—don’t I owe myself something too?