Chapter 12 1964
After I’ve said goodnight to Adele, I go back to the party.
Perhaps the scream frightened the unfrightenable—the crowd’s thinned by the time I slip back in. Everyone has distributed themselves into circles. Bob’s is large, but Calliope’s is the biggest. Bob will have noticed. Calliope will have too.
Flitter is stuck in Bob’s circle among the starlets who stare up at him with adoring eyes. “We’re holding auditions for extras for Jane Eyre next month,” he says to them. “Tell the casting director I sent you. That’ll get you to the top of the list.”
“Thank you,” they gush at this extraordinary kindness.
I escape to the balcony with a splash of rum and soda in a glass.
The night is eerily still—probably the scream came from farther away and the sound carried here on the wind that had whipped up earlier.
I stare up at the sky, but Los Angeles is too bright to let anything shine up there and I wish that it wasn’t—until I remember that I no longer wish upon stars.
I sink into an unoccupied couch, sip, feel the rum slide down my throat.
“Are you breaking the law?”
My head snaps to the right. Theo Winchester, twice in one night.
He takes the seat beside me and indicates my drink.
“Yes,” I tell him, taking a much larger sip than before.
He lifts one of those melodramatic eyebrows. “Most paid employees would lie.”
“Speaking of pay”—perhaps it’s the rum talking, or that scream has made me reckless too—“when will I be paid?”
“No chitchat in deference to the party?”
“Only those with substantial bank accounts can afford not to take the opportunity to clarify the most important terms of their employment.”
A wry smile settles onto his face. “I was falling asleep inside. But there’s no danger of that out here. Is every conversation a boxing match with you, Aria?”
“If boxing doesn’t suit, we could try jousting. But I’ve never learned to ride a horse.”
He laughs, and his face relaxes, arranging itself closer to beauty. I can almost see what Calliope and Flitter mean. Tonight he’s wearing his signature dark jeans and a dark navy shirt. But his buttons and the buttonholes don’t seem to be getting along. And from what I can see of Win’s chest, it’s—
Irrelevant. I fix my eyes on the city lights.
Win clears his throat. “I need to explain a couple of things about Adele.”
He shifts to the edge of the couch, leaning so far forward it’s like he’s about to run away and says, “It’s true what they say—I don’t know if I’m Adele’s father.
I dated her mother back when I was seventeen and just starting out and I thought variety was the thing worth chasing, rather than those rare moments when absolutely nothing changes.
I didn’t know she’d had a kid.” He curses.
“Imagine being the kid left with someone you might not even be related to? My single goal is not to screw her up any more than she already is. Given I’m descended from a long line of screwups, that’s probably beyond me. ”
He looks at me over his shoulder, smile mocking his partially spilled guts. “Don’t feel too sorry for me, Aria.”
“I don’t,” I tell him. “Anyone who can afford to buy a hotel while I earn fifty dollars a week is beyond my compassion.”
He laughs again, then shifts back against the cushions, sinking into the act of sitting as if he might stay here for a minute or two. “Maybe you’ve heard some of my history,” he says, attention focused on lighting a cigarette for himself and one for me too.
I accept—this is definitely a smoking conversation—then say, “I heard you’ve left a trail of dead wives in your wake.”
He winces. “Thanks for the brutal honesty.”
“You would’ve hated it if I’d lied.”
He tosses his hardly smoked cigarette on the floor, grinds it out with his foot.
“Well, here’s the real version, not the gossip.
I married my first wife, Honey, in Vegas to escape the Korean War draft.
I’m not blind to the irony of being the man who married to save his own life, but whose wife died instead—of an overdose.
What else do the wives of alcoholic rock singers die of?
And if you think I learned from that, you’ll be disappointed to hear that I married my second wife, Joanie, in Vegas too.
Vegas plus an alcoholic equals a very bad decision.
She died in a car wreck. Ran off the road while she was drunk. ”
His voice is flat. But he shrugs like Adele. “I’ve been sober for six months, so there should be no more Vegas wives.”
“How did you end up buying the Marmont?” I ask, sensing he needs a break from talking about dead wives and bad decisions.
Win reaches over to steal the last of my cigarette. I hand it over, then cross to the balustrade and lean my back against it so we don’t have to keep turning our heads.
“My father was a studio musician for Millennium Wolf. He had a share in the Chateau Marmont. It was family legend that he won it in a poker game. He died of pancreatic cancer a year ago and the share passed to me. After rehab, I didn’t want to rush straight back into making an album and heading out on tour.
So I decided it was better to own the whole of something than just a part.
The Marmont’s reputation for being the place where you go to not be seen was what I wanted. ”
“That is a story that could only be told in Hollywood. Most people buy a Ferrari to fix their midlife crisis, not an entire hotel.”
Another surprised bark of laughter. “Jesus, how old do you think I am?”
I grin. “Win, answering that question is bound to cause offense. Twenty-year-olds and movie stars think anyone over twenty-five is old.”
“I’m thirty, so by your miserable calculations, I’ll soon need a walking stick to carry the weight of my midlife crisis on my hunched back.”
I laugh. Across from me, he props his elbows on his knees. He looks like he’s in a photo shoot and the photographer has just told him to press all the camera’s buttons.
Hot lips indeed.
My stomach clenches for the first time ever.
God, how much rum did I put in my glass?
“Don’t call me Win,” he says. “Win is a name girls shout at concerts. Win is definitely an alcoholic. Win is also a serial Vegas husband. I’d rather just be Theo.”
His words remind me of what I am—not the kind of girl he wants shouting his name in lust. This camaraderie we occasionally fall into is situational—like when I met Flitter and Calliope and we all desperately needed something so we glued ourselves to one another like Band-Aids.
Theo’s desperate for a solution to his situation with Adele, and I need money.
We each know what the other wants and we aren’t playing games.
Well, I don’t think we are.
I turn over what he said. I know how Adele feels—going to sleep every night in the possession of someone who owns you but doesn’t love you. Perhaps Theo will love her one day though. That’s where Adele and I are different.
And that’s why I’ve always wanted to leave—so I won’t ever be owned again by someone who doesn’t love me.
I want to own myself.
But my goal tonight is to help Theo understand Adele. He’s got a lot on his plate—sobriety, a shitty past—but that doesn’t excuse him from being a shitty dad.
“Why did Adele get expelled?” I ask, remembering what Calliope told me. Remembering too the girl creeping down the driveway at three in the morning.
Theo joins me at the balustrade, draping his forearms over it and looking out at the glitter. “You know how high schools have mascots like bears and tigers?”
“I didn’t go to high school.”
“Bullshit.”
“It’s probably better if you think that. Then you won’t fire me.”
I’m so good at light and breezy. It’s the constant pitch of the Marmont—everyone’s so breezy, it’s a wonder we don’t all just blow away.
Theo rubs his hand over his face and curses.
“If you want to employ someone who graduated from the same school that expelled Adele, that’s your choice,” I say evenly. “But I don’t think it would be a very good one.”
He straightens up and faces me. “You’re not afraid of giving your opinion, are you? Are you so sure I won’t fire you?”
“Are you so sure you’d prefer someone who’d been to high school, but who lied about everything else?”
I turn to face him too. “This is the place where everyone lives lies, not lives. We want everything costumed and scripted and edited, and just one tear falling down a cheek so it’s artistic rather than painful.
Go ahead, fire me for being real. For being afraid of lots of things except my own opinions.
But in my opinion, I should teach Adele to look at this world through her own particular eyes—and then she can decide whether she wants to be a part of it or not.
If she goes to Paris instead, she’ll know enough to order a coffee and write not-half-bad poetry in a cafe she can find her own way to.
She can look for real happiness, rather than think that happiness is pretending to be someone you aren’t on a screen. ”
Theo exhales. Then he says, eyes two pins fixing me to the spot, “Why are you here, Aria Jones?”
I fix my attention on the revelry inside, watching the tight smile Flitter gives Bob, the Hollywood smile Calliope bestows on a man who isn’t her beau, the look he gives Calliope, like she really is Lulu Limana, the femme fatale from her latest film.
The man slips his arm around Calliope’s waist.
“You were telling me about Adele,” I say.
Silence.
Theo takes out another cigarette. Then he says grimly, “The mascot for Hollywood High isn’t anything real, like an animal.
It’s the sheik from the 1920s Rudolph Valentino movie.
A year ago I would have thought that was funny.
But Adele grew up in Bowling Green, Kentucky.
On her first day at Hollywood High, she walked out the door in her Bowling Green clothes and her Bowling Green shoes and her brown hair and I didn’t think about the fact that Hollywood High has genetically self-selected to have only blond students who are as entranced with movies as everyone here. ”
He tosses back water like he wishes it was wine.
“Adele turned into an expert petty thief to update her wardrobe. One night, she went to a party, which she left in a car with a boy four years older than her—Christ, he was eighteen, just a couple of years younger than you. He crashed the car and she spent the night in the hospital, just about throwing up the lining of her stomach because she’d drunk too much and taken something else.
I still don’t know what she did with that boy, but I do know that I never want to sit by her bed in a hospital again. ”
Holy shit.
I’ve trusted the word of a thief and a drunk who told me she wasn’t doing anything illegal out on the streets of LA after midnight.
I sit back down on the couch.
Theo’s going to fire me if I tell him. He’ll also fire me if I don’t and he finds out.
My only option is to hope the Marmont keeps this secret buried as deep as the rest.
Maybe I’m too trusting, but I don’t think Adele’s a delinquent—she’s a girl who wants her mother. And Theo’s a man who does love his daughter—but he has no idea how to express it.
I look across at him. A man who celebrates midnights is what I thought when I first met him. And yes, out here, he’s a pitch-dark slice of night with two black stars for eyes and, oh boy—do I want to wish upon them.
Neither of us speak. Until Theo says in a cadence I haven’t heard him use before, “Don’t feel too sorry for me, Aria.”
“There they are!”
My curse is only slightly less worse than Theo’s, and I’m not sure if I’m only cursing because I got a fright, or because the riot of giggling announcing the arrival of Flitter and Calliope has interrupted…something. Or nothing, most likely, besides my imagination.
Flitter drapes herself on the couch, pats the space beside her, and coos, “We initiated Aria into the ways of the Marmont seven years ago, now it’s time to initiate you, Win.”
“I don’t know whether that’s an invitation or an explanation,” Theo says and it’s so smooth, that transition, just like Calliope has always been able to do—metamorphose from human to god with just one breath.
In the candlelight, lounging on the couch, cigarette in one hand, charisma in the other, he looks like he could write you a song that’d make your insides burn. And for one second, I imagine how it would feel to step into a fire rather than running to the nearest hose.
Flitter’s voice cuts into my wayward thoughts, giving Win a précis of the guests.
“That”—she points to a man who has one arm around a man and the other around a woman—“is Duke Graham. He’d thank cocaine in his Oscar’s acceptance speech and it wouldn’t be ironic.
And that”—her sharp finger moves to a weeping woman—“is Pattie Carpenter. Her husband kicked her out, but she bears her crosses on the Chanel-padded shoulders of the gowns her lover gave her. Both her husband and her lover have slipped into the powder room with Nancy Nunn, who writes so-called novels about her life. She’s the kind of gal who’d thank both her gynecologist and her priest in her book’s dedication, just so you’d wonder…
” Her hand rests on Win’s forearm. She looks good there.
Powerful.
I slip away, take the elevator down to the first floor.
“No stairs tonight?” Isaiah asks me.
“My feet are sore.”
“Sore feet, sore heart is what they say.”
“Nobody says that,” I call, but the elevator is already creaking away.