Chapter 10 1964
We arrive at the penthouse, where Adele and I squeeze past the unknowns, then proceed along the hallway where those with either more balls or sharper elbows have reached.
Lacey Magee, the woman I met on my first day at the Marmont, is among them.
While she definitely has the balls, she doesn’t have the face—the camera doesn’t adore her the way it does Calliope.
Her beehive is more of an ant nest now—small, crumbling—but she’s still here, a resilience that’s either admirable or sad.
I turn my attention away from her before I start applying that same thinking to myself.
Besides, there are so many other things to look at.
The living room holds more stars than a night at the Oscars.
As Flitter explained to me a few days after I arrived at the Marmont, the Beverly Wilshire is for people who think they matter, but the Chateau Marmont is where the scripts are written and the deals are done—it’s where the people who really do matter live.
There’s Judith Crown in red sequins, Augusta Hepworth in white silk and pearls. Peter Oldham elegant in a tux.
Adele’s head spins like a zoetrope and I smile because—wow. I forget sometimes that these people are beloved, that for so many Americans, what I have right now is an experience they would die for. Judith waves at me, Augusta too, and Adele gapes like she did in the pool.
I lead us deeper into the penthouse, where a bowl of raspberry punch is being debauched with vodka, and three guitars on stands now adorn the living room, as does a curved aqua velvet sofa. An array of gold, silver, and platinum albums hangs in frames on the walls.
Win’s been redecorating.
I take Adele onto the balcony, which is even busier than the living room. Win’s head stands taller than the rest, dark and a little shaggy. Beside him is a natural blonde I’d recognize anywhere, as well as one that’s come from a peroxide bottle. Flitter is back!
Luckily Adele is making her way to her father so I can throw my arms around Flitter, who throws her arms around me too.
“The Three Sisters reunited.” Calliope grins.
“Look at you, kid.” Flitter runs her eyes over my dress. “You scrub up all right. Must be all the lessons we gave you.”
Beside her, Calliope looks nothing like the pale woman who emerged from a bungalow not her own this morning.
Every eye is drawn her way, to the hair that falls in its natural wave down her spine, to the U-shaped cutout at the back of her dress where skin beckons.
Those who’ve yet to make it in Hollywood gawp from a respectful distance while those who’ve shared a screen with her trail their fingers over her back.
While Adele is talking to her father, I say to Flitter, “I thought you were out in the desert being an alien.”
“And I thought you didn’t go to parties,” Flitter returns.
“I’m a nanny.” I indicate Adele. “But why are you back from the shoot already?”
Flitter looks at Calliope. Calliope looks at Flitter.
“Bronte Bros. dropped me,” Flitter elaborates, hand on her hip, head in the air. “So I’m here to audition for the movie Matty’s making.”
I try not to let my mouth fall open. After Calliope’s dream tarnished but her star began to shine, Bronte Bros.
, Calliope’s studio, gave Flitter a contract.
But having got the contract she wanted, Flitter stopped going for the big parts, instead trying out for not even the sidekick parts, but the sidekick’s younger sister, thus doubling her success at something she never wanted and ceasing to fail at the only thing she hoped for.
But now she’s going up against Calliope.
Calliope squeezes her friend’s hand. “We always used to go to the same auditions.”
“Not all of them,” Flitter says under her breath.
My hand is arrested in the act of reaching out for Adele, whose father’s been dragged away and who looks like she’s about to slink off into the crowd.
Flitter just mentioned the unmentionable.
Calliope doesn’t seem to have heard. In order to keep the past shoved deep down beneath our collective heartache, I grab Adele with one hand and with the other, I raise the soda I’ve chosen in deference to my legal drinking age and the fact that I’m working. “Let’s toast. To—”
Calliope grins. “To all the wives who’d be mad at me if I ever wrote a memoir.”
Flitter cackles. Adele’s eyes pop and I assure her, “She’s kidding.”
I hope she is.
Flitter points in Win’s direction and says, “Sooooo, hot voice and cool lips. Or maybe it’s the other way around?” She smirks. “Give me the lowdown.”
“Ewwww,” Adele wrinkles up her entire face.
“This,” I tell Flitter, “is Adele Winchester.”
“Ah, you’re the orphan he inherited.”
Not for the first time, I wish Flitter wasn’t quite so Flitter.
With impeccable timing, Win beckons his daughter over and Flitter whispers, “Did you know he’s left a trail of dead women in his wake?”
Calliope leans in and, I hate to admit it, so do I. Flitter’s always been good at stories.
“Win loves to fall in love.” Flitter’s arms extend as she delivers the part-scandal, part-truth, good-time-gal soliloquy that she thinks makes everyone like her.
“And he loves to get married. In Vegas. His first Vegas wife died of an overdose. His second fell off a balcony. Last year, he cheated on another Vegas wife, who got her revenge by OD’ing in his arms.”
Now I feel icky. On the other side of Flitter’s story are ruined lives and a girl named Adele.
“But he went to rehab a year ago and now he’s sober as a corpse,” Flitter continues. “Perhaps the trail of dead wives will end here. I mean, can you imagine being the wife of the owner of the Chateau Marmont? Now that would give me power.”
“Power that isn’t really your own,” I say.
I’ve never thought Flitter was the kind to marry her way into what she wanted. But look at how many tarnished dreams there are in this room. Lacey Magee is just the most obvious—leave anything out in the sun too long and it rusts.
I study my friend, who’s as beautiful now as her features always hinted she would be. Not as beautiful as Calliope—that’s beyond any mortal—but six months in the desert have made Flitter tan and glowing, brittle too, like she had too much sun and not enough water.
“Power is power, Aria,” she says.
We’re interrupted by the man who was sleeping in the cabana this morning.
He slides his arm around Calliope’s waist and she kisses him the way Calliope Burns would, eyes closed, one hand limp at her side from the sheer, overwhelming passion of it all.
When she’s finished she says to us, “This is Brian. My beau. Brian, this is Aria Jones.”
Brian scrutinizes my dimensions like I’m a piece of furniture he isn’t sure will fit into a tight space in his apartment. “Never heard of her,” he says.
“Thank god,” Calliope and I say in unison, laughing, and in my friend’s eyes I can still see the girl of seven summers ago. That should be enough to make me stop. But last I heard, beaux don’t wake up in cabana chairs with someone else’s naked breasts on them.
“I saw you at the pool this morning,” I say to Brian.
“So did I, Aria,” Calliope says brusquely. “Don’t be boring.”
For the first time ever, I think, Don’t become mean, Calliope.
“Do you think there’s any chance they’ll go home together tonight?” Flitter says as the couple go off in search of a drink.
“I read about Calliope and Brian in Seventeen,” Adele breaks in, having just been deposited back in our midst by her father. “They seemed like the real thing.”
I eyeball Flitter, who’s probably about to tell Adele that nothing is real, and ask Adele, “Ready for bed?”
She stares at me as if I just asked her to go to Wyoming.
But there are lines of white powder being cut along the edge of the balcony.
Right then, the most spine-chilling scream I’ve ever heard shatters the revelry. Glasses slip from hands and smash onto the floor. Every other sound is silenced, except for the turntable, which is singing about a purple people eater coming down from out of the sky.
The Santa Anas barrel in and the palm trees bend like whips. White powder flies off the balustrade and into the air.
“Sniff if you’re down below!” Flitter shouts.
Everyone laughs hysterically.
It’s like the scream never happened.
But then I remember my aunt, who I forgot to check on this afternoon.
“Move,” I snap at the group in front of me.
They jump aside, startled to see a short green fury bearing down. I take the stairs to the fifth floor, open my aunt’s door, and I’m assaulted by the usual smell: perfume and sweat. Gin. Tarnished dreams.
“Miss Devine?” I call. It’s so dark tonight, like the moon is afraid of October and has left the stars to do their pitiful best.
The curtains bulge.
I clutch the back of the sofa, try to make myself believe that it was just the wind.
Suddenly all the lights snap on.
“Jesus Holy Christ!” I shriek, slamming my eyelids shut, grabbing blindly for holy water I can throw at a ghost. When I think I can see again, I open my eyes.
Standing in the doorway is Theo Winchester.
“Would you like to climb up and remove the half of me that’s stuck to the ceiling?” I ask coolly, before moving to shield my aunt from view. Having my employer see the ruined woman on the sofa that I’ve persuaded him to give a room to isn’t my idea of a good night.
It occurs to me that the curse I hurled at my aunt seven years ago has just come true. Miss Devine Rey might be clothed, but if she had any idea that someone else could see her in her mucky stupor, she’d feel as if the whole world was laughing at her.
Hot shame crawls over my face.
After a beat, Win says, “I’m checking the rooms.” He indicates Miss Devine Rey. “Is she all right?”
My tone turns from cool to icy. “I’m sure you’ve seen enough addicts to know that she’s not all right, but is nevertheless alive.”
I shouldn’t talk to my boss like this. But I need him to leave. “We’re fine, thank you.”
Unexpectedly, he walks over to my aunt. He lifts her up as gently as if she were a baby, shifting her position so she’s properly on her side and in no danger of tipping onto her back. Then he smooths her hair off her brow.
I remember his dead wives. He’s done this numberless times before.
“Thank you,” I say. This time I mean it.
He casts his eye around the room and I see it the way he must. The pictures on the walls of Miss Devine, so like the trophy albums that hang on his walls. The scar of red lipstick and saliva across her cheek.
“Adele wanted to say goodnight to you.” His voice, prosaic and present in this mausoleum of the past, breaks in.
“She’s forgiven me for telling her it was time for bed?” I joke, trying to behave like a governess, rather than the niece of a disaster.
“She has so few people left in her life that I think she’d forgive you just about anything.”
God, there are tears in my eyes. I remember fifteen-year-old Aria accepting that the person sleeping on the sofa was who she’d been left with, so she’d have to make the best of it.
I want at least one girl who passes through the Marmont to see those around her as the people she chose, rather than the ones she had to accept.
“Did you check the bungalows?” I ask, channeling professionalism rather than pitifulness.
He nods. “Nothing. It was probably just a thing that went bump in the night.”
And I swear I hear the Marmont’s pipes hiss, Don’t be so sure about that.