Chapter 6 1964
Adele Winchester is standing on the balcony of the penthouse, staring at the pool.
“Adele?” I say and she whirls around. “I’m Aria. Your tutor or governess.” Your guardian, is what I mean.
“Governess?” Her shocked laugh is the same as her father’s. But that’s where the similarity ends. Adele is like Flitter a few years ago, on the brink of beautiful. Whereas Win is on the brink of unhandsomeness, but not quite there either.
“I don’t need a governess.” She scowls.
“Tell me what the current interest rate is and how much you’d earn over two years with compound interest on one thousand dollars—if you were able to find a bank who’d let you open an account in your name.”
Her glare intensifies. Now I can see the resemblance to her father. “Who cares if I can’t open a bank account?”
“Don’t you want to be able to do things on your own without having other people decide everything for you?”
She has no comeback. It’s the fierce desire tucked into the heart of every orphan—or almost-orphan, in her case.
“Look, my childhood wasn’t ideal, neither is yours,” I tell her.
“But you know what? Most girls are sitting in a BO-scented classroom wishing they were someplace else. We are someplace else. A place where, so long as you use your mind, I won’t tell you off.
If you get a math problem wrong, I’ll only care whether you tried.
If you tell me you hate Shakespeare, that’s fine too, so long as you read him first. Go ahead and sing out of tune—but just make sure that you sing. ”
Her glare has faded, but her arms are still folded across her chest.
“Let’s take a tour,” I say. I need her to accept me—not necessarily to like me, although that’d be nice—by the time her father returns tonight.
Adele leads the way out of the penthouse, wanting to show me that she can find her own way, thank you very much. I slip into one of the hidden doors in the walls with Pilot, press my finger to my lips, and he wags his tail like I’ve won over one Winchester already.
Five seconds later, Adele’s footsteps stop. “Aria?”
I pop my head out. “Do you want the behind-the-scenes tour or the regular one?”
“Where does it go?” she asks, peering into the stairwell.
“Everywhere.”
Her mouth lifts up just a little at the corners.
I take her through the Marmont’s intestines, show her which panels are doors and which aren’t, introduce her to Maisie the housekeeper, and to Isaiah.
In the lobby I point out Phillip, the young poet with a quarterback’s build and a lovesick heart who comes to stay whenever Calliope’s in residence.
He waits there all day, his sole purpose to speak to her.
Nobody has any idea how he affords such an existence, but I’d bet on a trust fund.
The only room I don’t show her is the library. Others believe the turret is haunted by Bob’s sister, but I know for sure that the library is the only haunted room here.
Our last stop is with Jupiter, Isaiah’s son, who’s one of the garage boys.
He’s two years older than me and he never stops smiling, not even when guests wipe the car seats with their handkerchiefs and curse the Marmont for letting a “colored boy” handle their cars.
From him I’ve learned that there’s power in not letting others hurt you, although I haven’t yet learned how not to hurt.
“When did Phillip turn up?” I ask after I’ve introduced Adele.
“Today. I warned Miss Calliope so she knows to come and go via the garage.”
“Do you think he’d leave if she just spoke to him a couple of times?” I muse.
Jupiter shakes his head. “Why should she have to speak to him just to make him leave her alone?”
He’s right. And I’m ashamed that I thought for even a moment that Calliope needed to take responsibility for another man deaf to the cues that are shouting, No!
“Wanna try this one?” Jupiter points to a navy car, a panther outstretched. It’s a Lamborghini, so of course I nod.
I slide into the passenger seat with Pilot. “I like to sit in a car I can never afford, close my eyes and imagine I’m driving away, seeing all the things I’ve never seen,” I tell Adele.
“Like what?” she asks, putting her hands on the wheel.
“The ocean. The desert.”
“You’ve never seen a desert? LA’s surrounded by desert.” The skepticism in her voice is so great it’s like I said I’d never been to the bathroom.
“Close your eyes. Go on,” I tell her when she rolls them instead.
I reach over and turn the keys so the radio comes on. With impeccable timing, “California Girls” plays and Adele’s face swings into a smile.
For three minutes, we’re just California girls in a Lamborghini in the basement garage of the Chateau Marmont, like we actually belong here in Hollywood.
Our last stop is the gardens. I introduce Adele to the one-legged woodpecker that lives in the dead tree trunk hidden behind the palm trees. It has red feathers atop its head and around its neck and the day I first saw it, I thought someone had slit its throat.
I take out the suet that I begged from Maisie and feed it to the bird. Adele seems to like this even more than the Lamborghini.
“Do you think Maisie will give me suet if I ask her for it?” she says, and that’s when I know this girl is absolutely worth saving.
Suet gone, we emerge opposite the path that leads to bungalow four: Bob’s bungalow, the farthest from everything, the one with its own gate to the street. Nobody’s stayed there besides Bob the whole time I’ve lived at the Marmont. He pays for it even when he’s overseas or in New York.
Today there’s tape barricading access to it. A sign reads: Construction zone. Keep Out! Other signs around the path warn: Do Not Enter.
Pilot barks, then lunges for the tape. Adele grabs him just before he slips under.
“Wow,” I say. “Bob must be…” My voice trails off.
“Bob. That’s the guy who came to our suite this morning,” Adele says. “Win told him it needs renovating or something.”
“So Bob’s left the Marmont?”
“He’s been moved to a suite. I don’t know. Pilot, shhh,” she scolds the agitated dog.
I look across to the pool. Bob is there, gifting kingly smiles to those who wave at him, encouraging them into his circle; the only studio boss who doesn’t hide behind secretaries and vice presidents, who sits down with the ordinary folk and makes them his friends.
My hand jumps out to guide Adele away. Pilot slows our progress, still barking at the Keep Out signs like there’s something in Bob’s bungalow we ought to have paid more attention to.
I take Pilot and Adele up to the safety of the turret—our schoolroom.
She walks over to the window and looks out at the view of movie studios and the San Gabriel Mountains.
One whispered “Cool” escapes her determination to be unimpressed, then she does a circuit, taking in the stuffed giraffe and the piles of books that once lived in the library downstairs until that room was ruined forever.
She halts beside the mattress in the corner. “Do you sleep here?”
I shake my head. “It’s for anyone who needs a safe place to sleep.”
“Why would anyone sleep here when they have a whole hotel room to stay in?” Adele asks incredulously.
Instead of answering her question, I gesture to the walls made from stories, the reading chair draped with a blanket that Isaiah’s wife crocheted for my sixteenth birthday. The view some people would pay a million bucks for. “This is one of the nicest rooms in the Chateau Marmont.”
Pilot wags his tail at F. Scott, the black cat statue, then curls up on the mattress and closes his eyes.
Adele sits in the chair, pulls the blanket over her lap, and lets me quiz her as I try to figure out what she knows and the best way to educate her in math, science, English, and art, as well as Marmont Life.
Despite the depressing conversation I had with Calliope this morning, I’d like to believe that teaching a woman to be curious and giving her an education could lead to something other than mopping her husband’s floors and using the silver screen to escape her life.
By nightfall I’ve discovered that she’s better at math than she thinks, that she’s read very little, that she could name any song or musical instrument, but doesn’t care to play.
We agree that she’ll read Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, that she can play records while she works, and that I’ll teach her knowledge rather than subjects.
“I don’t know what that means,” she says, stretching out her legs, which are long like her father’s. “But it sounds better than school. Now I’m starving.”
My stomach is complaining too. “Are you having dinner with your dad?”
“No idea.”
In the penthouse, we’re greeted by darkness.
“I guess I’m not having dinner with him.
” She gives an I-don’t-care shrug that only serves to show how much she cares.
“I don’t even know when dinnertime is. I’ve only lived with him for a couple of months and that was at the Beverly Hilton.
I’d come home from school and he’d shout, Not now!
like he thought I was the maid. Then he’d apologize and pretend like he hadn’t forgotten he owned me. ”
I snap on the lights. “Not having a daughter and then suddenly having one probably isn’t easy. But not having a father and then suddenly having one wouldn’t be simple either.”
She shrugs again, on the brink of descending into teenage angst, so I point to the faces stacked in the hallway, to the wall stained with white rectangles where the paintings once hung. “Baroque portraiture doesn’t suit the rock star aesthetic?”
Adele shudders. “Those men were old and creepy. Why is everything so weird?”
She gestures to the oak chiffonier carved with open-mouthed lions, to the stuffed owl that looks to have its eye on everything, as if it’s the Marmont’s henchman.