Chapter 14 1964
After the party, my room greets me with intense quiet.
I put on my pajamas, slip my feet into a pair of ridiculous white marabou slippers that Judith Crown gave me last year for Christmas, saying, I’m sure I never paid you enough for sitting, then take the stairs to the turret.
I run a hand over the journals I’ve kept since I arrived. But I don’t feel like writing.
I walk over to the window, throw it open, and climb onto the little Juliet balcony that Bob’s sister jumped from.
Over there is Laurel Canyon Boulevard, down there is Santa Monica Boulevard. One would take me north, the other west to the sea or east to the freeways, which lead on to anywhere. And the night throws Theo’s question at me like an arrow: Why are you here?
Because this is where I was sent.
Once upon a time that was true. But seven years on, has the Chateau Marmont become the place where I’ve stayed?
I told Theo I’d teach Adele enough that she could escape to Paris to search for real happiness.
But what do I know about that—besides teaching her to do the opposite of everything I’ve done?
Out there in the world, women have just started to run marathons.
A woman has won a Nobel Prize for Physics.
Another has flown solo around the world. I, too, could run. Or win. Or fly.
What would that feel like?
Hawaii is all I’ve ever dared to let myself want: something so small that the Fates won’t notice—won’t burn that future to ash with the flame from one dropped cigarette.
But what if I dared to want something more?
There’s a flash of light in the grounds below.
The windows of the bungalow Bob used to live in are illuminated.
That’s when I realize I haven’t seen any builders at the Marmont—and I see everything.
If the lights flickered on, someone must be inside.
But what kind of builder works in the witching hours?
As suddenly as the lights went on, they’re extinguished.
A noise draws my attention to Theo’s balcony. Flitter is still beside Theo, her arm draped around his shoulders. Mrs. Flitter Winchester. It sounds wrong. But that’s unfair. Flitter deserves something after all these years. A part in a movie though. Not my boss.
Now Bob walks out onto the balcony and leans against the balustrade.
These days his hair is veneered with Brylcreem, mustache as precisely trimmed as if he uses a stencil, skin barbecued rather than tan.
Years of running a studio full of the most beautiful people in the world have made him ruthlessly aware of his shortcomings and he’s overcompensating, the effect now less spit and polish and more drool and shellac.
But I’m the only one who sees that.
I step backward—the last thing I want to catch is Bob’s eye.
Calliope appears next with a guitar in her hand. She holds it out and says in the voice that’s charmed thirty million men all over America, “Will you sing for us, Win?”
His features contract; he’s the eagle just before he plunges, ready to tell Calliope to go to hell. But everyone’s begging him to sing. He has to comply or be deemed an asshole.
The cheers crescendo as he takes the guitar.
He puts it on his lap, bends his head over it. I lean forward again. I’ve only ever listened to his music in a background way. Now I want to hear it.
What I hear first is gentleness. His hands are holding that guitar the same way he’d held Miss Devine Rey.
I recognize the melody but I’ve never heard it like this, stripped back to candlelight and midnight.
The song is about safety, about not having it, never having it and then finding it—but that is dangerous too.
And I wonder—is Theo the opposite of me?
Desperate to remain here, which is a kind of running—running into a place where nobody is real and nothing has consequence.
Here there’s no danger of finding yourself at a Vegas wedding chapel—you screw and move on.
Here, stomachs are pumped before you can die.
The song plays on. He’s silenced the entire crowd. Only his hands move; I don’t know how he can remain so still and yet disturb the entire universe. And for a moment I imagine someone touching me like that—as if they wanted to make music from my bones.
At the very same moment, Theo’s head lifts. His eyes meet mine.
I whirl away before he sees the longing. Not for him, but for something more than I knew existed.
A collective gasp rises up from below. Did they see me?
Worse—did Bob see me with my entire soul in my eyes?
“It’s just a feather.” Flitter’s voice.
“A bird, not a ghost,” Theo adds.
My damn slippers must have shed one of their feathers. Either that or I’m the Marmont’s ghost.
At the bottom of the stairs that lead from the turret to the seventh floor, I crash into someone. They don’t flinch—they’re expecting me.
“I saw you up there,” Bob Ashenhurst says. “I didn’t know that was where you’d hidden yourself away.”
His hair is silvery at the roots, age catching him faster than his crimes ever will, and his cheeks are fleshier—a word that makes me shudder no matter how much I try not to show Bob anything.
He’s standing in the middle of the opening to the hall. To squeeze past him would mean my body making contact with his. So I wait. He waits too.
And somehow the snakes that writhe on the Marmont’s carpets fill me with their venom. I look right at Bob.
“Yes, I hide in the turret,” I say. “Because it’s the place your sister jumped from. And even you have enough heart that I know you’ll never go up there.”
His body sags, just a little, to the right.
I make my escape, glad for my sake and for Calliope’s that I can be so cruel.
I’ve only just fallen asleep when there’s a knock on my door, followed by a giggle I’d know anywhere. I scramble out of bed to find Flitter and Calliope, hands squashed over their mouths like five-year-olds trying not to wake their parents.
“Don’t you ever sleep?” I groan.
“We haven’t been together for ages,” Calliope says. “You can’t throw your sisters out.”
I try not to remember that I have to be at work at eight, which is about four hours away, as I crawl into bed with them.
“Was it always this cozy?” Calliope asks.
“It’s Aria,” Flitter declares. “She makes everything better.”
A snug silence follows. My eyelids have almost closed when Flitter asks, “What do you think of Win? You’ve seen him the most.”
I consider. How to compress into one sentence the singer’s voice and the gruff one, the father who doesn’t understand so much that’s important at the same time as he understands so much that is.
The man who’s escaped to the Marmont; the man women miss so much that, when he leaves them, they die.
The man who didn’t want my aunt to fall asleep on her back.
“More real than I’d thought,” I conclude.
Calliope laughs. “That’s such an Aria answer.”
“Those eyelashes of his.” Flitter fans herself theatrically. “What I wouldn’t give to have those eyelashes tickling my thigh.”
“Oh boy.” Calliope sighs.
“Don’t you have enough men tickling your thighs right now?” I ask her.
She grins. “Probably. Although I hope nobody else thinks that. Thank god for the Marmont.”
Yes, the Marmont is the soul of discretion.
But I’ve never seen Calliope so overtly leaving one man’s bungalow while pretending to the world that she’s in love with someone else.
Until now, she’s been careful with her Brians and other beaux—not too many that we think you’ve been fucked, but just enough that everyone thinks you’re fuckable, is how the studio put it to her.
The same studio that filmed her areolas and then pretended to frown about whether to show them to the world.
Of course they will.
Then Calliope props herself on her elbow and says, “I’ve been meaning to tell you this, Aria, but it’s never the right time.
I think now it is. What happened all those years ago taught me to be the one who either enjoyed it or who got something out of it.
Men have sex for reasons other than love—why shouldn’t I? ”
Flitter stiffens as, once again, the incident we don’t discuss tarnishes our conversation like the bloodstain on the back of your skirt you hope each month to avoid.
Calliope doesn’t notice. She hugs her knees to her chest, looks Flitter directly in the eye, and says, “You should do what you want too. And you, Aria”—she turns her gaze onto me—“should also.”
A week later I’m pacing the minuscule lobby with Pilot, terrified that I’ve done the wrong thing.
Every lap I come face-to-face with Phillip, Calliope’s admirer.
The seams on his white polo shirt are almost breaking as they try to surmount his biceps.
His persistence—that he thinks he has the right to stand here waiting for a woman as busy as Calliope—only makes me edgier.
I go out to the pool where the sky is hiding beneath a wash of gray; winter’s waiting to pounce.
All I can think of are Theo’s words, I never want to sit by her bed in a hospital again and I hope to god I’m not the reason why that hope is about to be ruined.
Will she be back on time? Will she come back at all?
Pilot leaps in the direction of the Keep Out!
sign and I only just catch him before he barrels through.
He barks furiously, either agitated by or interested in whatever he can sense in that bungalow—maybe the builders are eating hot dogs.
But I can only worry about one Winchester right now, so I drag a whining Pilot up to the penthouse, settle him with a bowl of food, then return to doing worried laps of the gardens.