Chapter 16 1964
I’m braced for Theo to interrogate me and Adele as soon as we’re in the penthouse. But he puts a record on, goes into the kitchen, opens the fridge, tosses Adele an onion and me a carrot, and tells us to start chopping while he throws ground beef into a pan.
Adele stares at me with a question in her eyes.
“Safe for now,” I whisper, then turn to Theo and ask, “What are we making?”
“Spaghetti Bolognese.”
My stomach, so used to the repetitive menu from Schwab’s, groans with delight, which makes Theo and Adele laugh.
I decide to follow Theo’s lead and relax. For now.
We chop and fry. I grate a block of Parmigiano Reggiano, which I thought came in a little green canister, and soon it’s done and we throw on sweaters and sit outside on the balcony. For the first few minutes we’re all very quiet, paying homage to the food and the golden LA night.
“Who’s this?” Adele asks as a voice crescendos on the record player.
“Nina Simone,” Theo replies.
Her voice is golden too as she sings about running away, leaving behind her wedding band and a warning not to smoke in bed. It’s not a sentiment I can see catching on here.
Adele continues to probe, having taken on the role of interrogator that I expected her father to assume. “The way other people have photos everywhere, you have records. Why so many? Do you like singing? I’ve never seen you do it.”
Theo studies his daughter. “You’ve acquired Aria’s habit of three questions per sentence.”
“Aria said that’s how you learn.”
I’m sure Theo really would like to fire me now. But he props his foot on his knee, takes out his cigarette packet, and turns it over in his hands.
“Other people go to church,” he says, voice quiet as if he’s afraid we might laugh. “I listen to music. In music I find…” He considers. “Solace. A sermon about how we live now. A gospel about how we might live if we fixed ourselves. And yes, sometimes I like singing.”
“I’ve never seen you do it,” she repeats.
I can hear what she’s asking: Will you sing for me? But Theo doesn’t do subtext.
And Adele, who’d never have taken such a risk a month ago, persists. “Why don’t you sing anymore? You’re not, like, making a record or anything. You ask me, ‘what did you do today,’ but I don’t know what you do all day.”
I push back my chair. I’m going to take the plates to the kitchen and scrub the patterns off the china while the two of them get this over with.
Theo glowers at me. So does Adele.
Two glowering Winchesters are a force not to be reckoned with. I sit back down.
“I’ll confess first,” Theo says. “Then I’d like to know what Bob meant. Deal?”
Adele nods.
I try not to lean forward too avidly as I wait for the big revelation of what he does all day—and all night too, on construction sites.
“I go out driving,” he says, tossing the unopened cigarette pack onto the table. “On the freeways.”
My efforts to not look too agape at this massive anticlimax mustn’t succeed, because the Winchester scowl fires at me again. “That’s what I do at nights,” he says. “During the day I go to AA meetings. And”—he hesitates—“parenting classes.”
It takes all of my willpower not to let my dumbfoundedness repeat, parenting classes?
Adele is very quiet. I’m almost certain there are tears in her eyes. Because her dad does care. How many men in the entire country have ever been to a parenting class? But her rock star dad has.
“I snuck out just once at night.” Her words rush out. “Don’t blame Aria because she trusted me and that made me feel good.”
“Okay,” he says slowly, unable to resist sending me one tiny dagger with his eyes.
“I went to Googie’s,” she says. “Which is basically just across the road.”
That makes about as much sense as Theo saying he drives the freeways at night.
“Couldn’t you just order what you wanted from Schwab’s?” I ask, a little cross now that I find out I’ve been having a heart attack over what turns out to be a midnight craving.
She shakes her head. Lowers her eyes.
Classic sign of guilt.
Theo must think so too because he says, “Well?” Despite his promise not to yell, his voice is snappy.
Which makes Adele sling a torrent of words at him.
“I went there because of Mom, okay? One time when she and I were listening to the radio, one of your songs came on and she laughed and told me how she’d come to LA one summer for vacation and met you and you’d taken her on a couple of dates.
One time you took her to Googie’s for a burger.
And I was missing her that night and it’s the only place in the whole state of California where I knew she’d been. So I went there.”
She crosses her arms and shoots Theo the glare she inherited from him.
Oh god. This place, so full of beautiful people, all with sad and terrible things inside them. I try again to leave but Adele grabs my hand.
I have no idea what Theo will say. But maybe the parenting classes are working. Or maybe he’s a better dad than he thinks. He says only, “Thank you for telling me.”
Which is exactly right. It lets Adele know he listened. And it lets Adele blink away the tears she doesn’t want to shed right now.
The next couple of minutes are filled only by forks scraping bowls clean. Then Adele looks up. “What do you think about when you’re driving?” she asks.
Theo chews, swallows. “About songs I could write. Whether I’ll get on a stage again.
Whether I’ll be able to stay sober. Whether you’ll be able to go back to school next year.
Why your mom never told me she was pregnant.
I think about her having a baby when she was only three years older than you.
” He clears his throat, trying so hard not to avoid his daughter’s eyes while he gives her a piece of his soul.
“About why some people die and why some people have to keep living. I think about the mistakes I’ve made. There are a lot. So I need long roads.”
A wry smile. No, a sad smile.
“Wow,” Adele says. “That’s a lot.”
I smile at the teenage understatement. Theo does too. Then he says, “I was thinking I should sell the bike and get a car now that I have a daughter.”
“The bike?” Adele and I say in unison.
Theo looks at us like we just shouted fellatio. “The bike.”
“You have a motorbike?” Adele demands. “Why haven’t I been on it?”
“Because we don’t go anywhere together,” Theo says, obviously having no idea what the fuss is about. “But we should.”
Adele jumps up. “Let’s go for a ride. I could drive it out of the garage for you. I’ve been practicing—” she smiles devilishly—“on Lamborghinis.”
Theo’s eyebrows are not happy. “Where did you get a Lamborghini from?”
“From Jupiter,” I supply, and Adele just about kills herself laughing.
“They don’t make them on Saturn,” she cackles.
Theo stands. “I’m guessing the only way I’ll make sense of this conversation is to take you for a ride. How about we drive up to Laurel Canyon?”
“Yes!” she shrieks, and it’s the first time I’ve ever seen her excited about doing anything with her father.
Perhaps Theo’s thinking the same because he says gruffly, “Give me a moment,” then he disappears into the bedroom with the speed of a greyhound. Maybe he needs to pee—he’s so hard to read that either emotion or bladder discomfort could equally be the reason for his vanishment.
Adele is bouncing around, pointing to her bright red Wrangler jeans. “Will these be okay for a motorbike?”
“Perfect,” I assure her. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
She stops the bunny hops. “You have to watch.” Before I can remind her that I won’t be able to see anything once the bike pulls away, she says, “Please?”
So I agree, because once upon a time I would have given anything for there to have been someone I could have said please to—someone who’d have said yes in return.
In the garage, Theo and Adele climb onto the bike, her holding the grab rails, not her father. With a burst of thunder, they take off, Adele squealing, and I smile when I think about the state of Theo’s ears.
I sit on the curb of Marmont Lane and watch the cars rush past like days.
More than two thousand five hundred days have passed since I first stepped out of the taxi right here, but the past forty or so have sped by like motorbikes.
It’ll be December 1 sooner than I’d imagined and I’ll once again stand on this curb with a suitcase in hand.
Above me looms the revolving showgirl, the giantess in silver boots that the guests either shoot at or salute. She’s been here as long as I have. The orange tan on her legs is sun faded, as is her lipstick and leotard, but she’ll forever entertain anyone who wants to watch.
“Aria. Win hasn’t thrown you out, has he?”
There’s Bob, standing over me with a smile on his face.
“Nope” is all I say.
He frowns—it’s the first time I’ve ever seen him look perplexed. Then the motorbike comes to a halt in front of me. One of Adele’s hands is holding on to her father’s back and it makes my mouth smile and my heart hurt when she leaps off and hugs him. Then she says to me, “Your turn!”
Bob looks from Theo and Adele to me. “Well played,” he says to me, before he walks away, and for one second I wish Theo had thrown me out of the Marmont because then I wouldn’t have to keep wondering, month after month, year after year, when Bob will make good on his threat.
He won’t, I tell myself. You have evidence, remember?
“Your turn,” Adele repeats.
“Your dad has better things to do,” I say.
“Are you scared?” Theo says, a challenge in his eyes and a grin on his lips and my mouth drops open because right now in his leather jacket astride a motorbike, he is exactly what his songs promise.
And I wonder what the city of angels looks like from higher than the seventh floor of the Chateau Marmont.
I throw my leg over the motorbike.
Off we fly. Up Laurel Canyon Boulevard, then right onto Mulholland Drive. I’m as high as the showgirl, and the city has been painted gold. It’s a rare, smog-free night and on the far horizon, the ocean is indigo denim that I want to slide right into.
This is the world.
I’m going to cry on the back of a motorbike.
We slow for a red light. I take the chance to wipe my eyes. At the same time, Theo turns his head, and I don’t think I was quick enough because he asks, “Okay?”
I nod.
“That was the first time she’s ever hugged me, when she got off the bike,” he says gruffly, and do you know how hard it is to keep holding on to the grab rails when you could put your arms around a person and squeeze them the way this bittersweet night is squeezing both your hearts?
When we return, Adele is still jumping up and down. “Wasn’t it cool?” she says to me and then, to her father, “I know two guitar chords.”
And Theo says, as if he’s finally learning to translate his daughter’s words into the longing that hides beneath, “There are at least three guitars in the penthouse. Show me?”
She races up the stairs, so eager to tie them together with another thread.
She needs those threads so badly.
If it were me, I’d pick the acoustic guitar. The other two are finned and shark-like—a bit like their owner—but Adele chooses the red one with the word Fender scribbled beside the tuning pegs.
She takes a seat on the sofa and says, “I don’t think you need to go driving around the freeways anymore. I mean, you can literally do anything. So why, if you could do anything, would you just drive around on the freeways?”
Having delivered that little grenade with the nonchalance of a teenage girl and the wisdom of a sage, she strums, lets her voice dip low as she hums.
Theo sits down beside her. “You can make a song with just two chords. You just hum and play what feels right.”
She plays one chord and then another. Theo hums in a different key, and the song is so simple and will go unremarked in all of human history, but it’s just too beautiful to watch.
In the witching hours, nightmares creep beneath my blue cotton quilt. A gas station. A blue Ford Custom. My mother’s white pumps melting in the flames.
Then a laugh breaks the night apart like lightning—exultant, wild, cruel.
Then gone.
Footsteps tap, halting outside my room.
All I can see is darkness. All I can hear is breath.
Darkness. Breath. Darkness. Breath.
My door handle rattles like angry bones.
I press my hand over my mouth. I can’t scream. The one time I screamed at the Marmont I got my first and only warning.
I stare wildly at the door.
The handle turns.
But while women in movie bedrooms never lock their doors, I do. The key is safe in my hand; I’ve slept with it beside me since I was thirteen years old, the way other children sleep in the soft embrace of teddy bears.
The footsteps recede.
I’m safe.
Then comes the smell of smoke.
Someone is trying to burn us all down.