Chapter 4 1964 #2
“Those leavings cost more than I can afford. I’m happy to shop in the Marmont’s checked-out rooms.” I pull out a deep blue, short-sleeve knit top.
Calliope won’t let the conversation go. “Have you still not gone further than Schwab’s?”
Last time she was here, I promised her I’d jump on a bus and go at least as far as Hollywood and Vine, dip a toe into the city I look out at from the turret, familiar to my eyes, foreign to my feet.
“Aria,” she presses. “There’s a whole world beyond this.”
“That’s what I’m saving up for.”
“Experience some of it now. Otherwise I’m worried that…
” She inhales cigarette smoke, breathes out sparkling diamonds.
“This has been your home for seven years. A home is as necessary to a person who’s found herself homeless as air is to a lung.
If you try to leave it behind in small pieces, it might be easier. ”
I tamp down the memory of the first time I stood at a bus stop on Sunset Boulevard, the day of the nineteenth-birthday party we didn’t have for Calliope.
I’d realized that if something happened to me, nobody would come looking for me.
The sheer aloneness of thirteen-year-old Aria has caged me here ever since.
But on December 1, the adulthood I’ll step into will give me the courage to walk out of this place I’ve lived in for seven years, but that hasn’t been my home.
I haven’t found home yet.
I hold the blue top up against my black capri pants, which I found last year in Augusta Hepworth’s room. You keep them, Aria, she’d cooed when I’d called to let her know she’d forgotten them. It’s my thank-you.
She didn’t say what she was thanking me for. But I knew.
“Look how green your eyes are with that top,” Calliope says. “You’ve always suited that hairstyle better than anyone.”
Years ago, after what I did to Bob Ashenhurst, I’d paid Judith Crown’s hairdresser most of my babysitting money to chop my hair off into a pixie cut.
I’d wanted to be invisible and had no idea it was fashionable.
Back then, the cut did nothing for me. But now I see that I’ve grown into it—and I’m momentarily disconcerted.
“You look demure and wise,” Calliope says. “Don’t be afraid to show him that you’re funny and bright and kind too.”
I kiss her cheeks, leave the room, melt into the walls, emerge on the ground floor, and knock on the door of Theo Winchester’s office.
No answer.
I push open the door, go inside, sit down and wait.
“Christ!”
I don’t hear him come in, even though I hear everything at the Marmont. He’s either stealthier than I am or I’ve let my guard down for the first time since 1957.
“Mr. Winchester.” I offer my hand. “I hope your ankle is better. I’m Aria Jones.”
“Aria Jones, who makes a habit of wiping out people in stairwells and lurking in offices. Do you have a vendetta against me or has someone paid you to kill me?”
It seems that Theo Winchester will fit right into the Marmont with that tendency to create a drama out of everything. In five seconds I’ve gone from causing a tumble to being an assassin.
He opens a drawer, pulls out a pack of Lucky Strikes and a gold lighter in the shape of a guitar.
He’s sans sunglasses today, so I can see his eyes, which are as dark as his hair.
He’s wearing a collared gray sweater, dark jeans, and a square-cut black onyx ring on his left pinkie finger.
His hair is unkempt, his face just as Calliope described—Win is obviously a man who celebrates midnights and loathes middays.
Now I’m being melodramatic. I smile.
“Is my face amusing?” he asks.
“Not at all,” I reply truthfully and he barks out a laugh.
“Why are you here, Aria Jones? I can’t find the fifty-thousand-dollar guitar that was supposed to be brought to my room. And I haven’t had breakfast yet.”
“Your guitar is most likely in bungalow three. The guys from The Windows are staying there and they pick up every instrument that comes in the doors. But the reason I’m here,” I press on, ignoring the eyebrows quirked up at me, “is because I’m offering you the chance to employ me as your daughter’s tutor.
Like a governess, but without the nineteenth-century dress.
” I attempt a joke to get his eyebrows to relax.
It doesn’t work.
“You’re offering me the chance to employ you,” he repeats incredulously. “How old are you? And who says I need a governess, if they even exist, for Adele?”
“I’ll tackle those in order,” I say, trying to sound like the governesses the Brontes and Thackeray served up in their novels.
“I’m almost twenty-one. I’m the most intelligent person in this building and possibly in the city.
If Adele was expelled, she’s rebelling against something.
Sending her to another school means she’ll rebel all over again.
Then she’ll be left to wander around the Marmont unsupervised. You can’t—”
I cut myself off, my fists tightening into hard balls of memory.
I try another approach. “What do you know about teenage girls?” I ask, thinking to prove my expertise. After all, until recently, I was one. Then my mouth says, “Scratch that. You’re a rock star. I don’t want to know what you know about teenage girls.”
God, this is a horror movie only Hitchcock would be proud of. Indeed, Win’s face is a riot of expressions, like I promised him a symphony but howled like a wolf instead.
I try to fix it with a more concise summary. “That came out wrong. What I mean is that you bought a hotel in a city of earthquakes and wildfires. So you need to be careful.”
He stabs his cigarette into the ashtray and walks over to the window, limping a little.
From here, the Marmont looks glorious—the bird-of-paradise flowers ornament Eden with licks of shimmering flame.
He rests his hips against the windowsill and says, a challenge in his voice, “All right. You said you’re the most intelligent person here.
Prove it. Tell me something I don’t know. ”
This is almost too easy. Someone schooled by encyclopedias knows more obscure facts than anyone.
The key is choosing one that interests him, and quickly, because he’s tapping the window frame like he’s either taken too many dexies, has discovered the bass line of his next hit song—or is dying to kick me out.
“Most people think that only male birds sing. But Margaret Morse Nice wrote a chapter about female birdsong in her book Studies in the Life History of the Song Sparrow. She thinks female birds have evolved to be the quietest for survival reasons. So while you might think they never sing, it’s just that most people don’t listen.
” I can’t resist adding, “I wonder if there’s a parallel between that finding and the reason her research is mostly unknown? ”
A surprised laugh escapes him and it’s like watching an eagle stretch out its wings and your breath catches because you weren’t expecting such grace from something so fierce.
Then he says, like he just can’t help but turn back into a regular man, “Is that true? You could make anything up.”
“That would mean assuming you’re stupid, which I guess you’re not if you’ve made enough money to buy the Marmont.” I should stop there, but the fact that he hasn’t made a pass and I’m enjoying the conversation makes me say, “Do you think a thing is only true if you’ve heard it before?”
“You’re feistier than you look.” Win returns to the desk and takes out another cigarette, looking amused, like he’s just found a new toy to play with, or break.
But Theo Winchester isn’t the first and nor will he be the last man who looks at me and sees something plain and ordinary. To everyone, I’m a wisp of black, like smoke or midnight. A dull piece of background you just don’t see. Which is how I like it.
So I don’t know why I retaliate. “Are beautiful people always kind? Ugly people always mean? Small people always worth overlooking?”
“It would seem not.” He rubs a hand over his forehead as if he has a headache, which are an epidemic at the Marmont. “Do you always ask so many questions?”
I’m guessing he doesn’t want to hear that the answer to that is a solid yes.
But I need this job. Need to make rent and add to my War and Peace savings account so I can finally make my wish come true.
I need to save his daughter in a way that I didn’t save Calliope.
I shove that thought away with both hands.
“Please let me help your daughter.”
Silence.
Then, “What are your terms?” he asks.
“Fifty dollars a week. I don’t need vacations. I’m happy to work day and night.”
Unfortunately, he proves himself as un-stupid as I’d suspected by saying, “And? You must want something else if you’re asking for so little.”
I come out with it. “There’s a tiny room on the first floor.
A closet really, beside the restrooms. It’s been unoccupied for years.
You’d never get any money for it. I want that room for myself, rent-free.
And my aunt, Miss Devine Rey, lives in a suite on the fifth floor.
She needs to stay there. But she can’t afford to pay for it. ”
“So she sent you here to charm me?” He says it with satisfaction, as if cynically amused that the young, plain girl could be so trite.
“If she’d wanted to charm you, she’d have sent someone else. Charming people isn’t my style, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Then tell me why I’d forgo bookings on a suite to do your aunt a favor.”
Because being thrown out of here would kill her. I can’t be a murderess, even to Miss Devine Rey.
That’s a truth I don’t want to tell him.
But his hands are pressed to the desk and he’s leaning forward, waiting for me to convince him. This is my last shot.
I reach for euphemism or metaphor, but out it all comes, each word a sledgehammer.
“You don’t understand this place. I do. I know that all anyone here cares about is fame—getting it, keeping it.
I know it’s the place where you order hot water, not for your teakettle, but to put in your gin—the tea bags are to hide your stash.
It’s the place where a girl might start the day with one man in her bed and end it with a different one beside her and she’ll walk away trying to convince herself that the only thing she regrets is diluting the gin with hot water. ”
I press my teeth into my tongue to make myself stop, can’t fight the urgent need to bite my fingernails despite the fact that Win is watching me and will see that all of my nails are bitten right down to the quick.
“How long have you been here for?” he asks, voice softer now.
“Seven years.”
He crosses to the empty sideboard, fist clenching around air when it doesn’t find a bottle or a decanter.
Then he strides back to the window and the glorious sun falls over his face, and for a moment I can see that his eyes are brown and there are lines around them as if he’s flung himself at life and told it to give him everything it has.
“Can you start today?” he asks.
“I’ll start now.” I slip away.
I’m beaming when I reach the lobby. And as if the Marmont has set this up just for me, a note sounds from the piano.
Judith Crown is seated there in all her glory, long black gloves making us focus on her hands, which are as elegant and lovely as when she was sixteen and starring in her first movie.
It’s only her eyes and her skin that show the stain of reds downed with vodka, but false lashes, low lights, and foundation do a good enough job of hiding that.
She’s wearing her rings over her gloves and the diamonds glisten beneath the chandelier.
Then she starts to sing and everyone who hadn’t already been staring stops.
Her voice is like sunshine on the back of your neck after a cold, dark winter. The desk clerks, the other guests, all of us unfurl into that light, and it’s not just Judith’s jewels glistening now but our eyes too.
This place is so damn beautiful sometimes.