Chapter 20 1964 #2
Doctor Foster squeezes my hand. “You know that one day your aunt won’t get up at all?”
I close my eyes. The one person in the world who has some ownership of me is going to die, and soon. That’s what Maisie said too.
I open my eyes, remember the woman floating in the water at Malibu. The one who hasn’t drowned yet. “Can you get her into a rehab facility? I’ll pay for it.”
“The kind of facility she needs won’t be cheap.”
“I have money. Just get her a place.”
He nods.
Once he’s gone, I rest my head in my hand. What am I doing? My money will be gone and, with it, my dream. I can’t leave here without money.
But nor can I live with myself if I let Miss Devine Rey die.
I’m so late for work. I dash back to my room, throw off my pajamas, grab the nearest thing to hand—a psychedelic and very short mini dress that I think is Calliope’s or Flitter’s—then hurtle up to the seventh floor.
My apologies are cut short by Adele saying, “Last night, he”—she points to her father—“dropped his cigarette on the bed and it caught fire! He put it out with this!” She holds up the empty head sculpture and giggles, like it’s all just a funny story.
Maybe he did fall asleep with a cigarette.
Maybe I should concentrate on doing my job and earning back the money I’m about to spend on my aunt and then walking away from all this, like I’ve always planned.
Because Theo is walking out the door with a gruff, “I have work to do,” and it’s like one of those big cartoon hammers has banged me on the head until I’m just a flat puddle of Aria.
What was I expecting? Flitter’s the one he rides on motorbikes with. I’m the one who douses fires, not the one who ignites passions.
My next thought makes me stand as still as one of the Marmont’s antique statues—did I just give all my money to my aunt because I thought there might be something at the Marmont for me?
There’s nothing at the Chateau Marmont for me.
I take Adele up to the turret. That’s the only way I’ll ever make back the money to leave. I give her a set of problems about compound interest and rub my eyes. What I wouldn’t give to lie down on the mattress in the corner—the mattress that now has a wrapped present sitting on it.
Hope flares.
But the card says, Thank you. Love, Nathalie.
The starlet I helped recently. She’s gifted me a long, multicolored silk scarf, the kind the heroine in the movie ties over her hair so the lengths of it stream behind her as she sits in a convertible beside a man driving them off into the glorious sunset.
There isn’t enough breeze in the garage to make even a hair ribbon stream when I sit inside stationary Lamborghinis.
I put down the scarf, prowl the room, eyes seeing the objects in a new light now that I know it all belonged to Toni Ashenhurst. Did she write journals too? Are they here somewhere, full of evidence, maybe hidden inside the jewelry box her owl ring is kept in? Where even is that?
My fingers itch to pull things off shelves, to search for something that gives me more than the suspicions of one girl plus one doctor and a whole pile of questions. But Adele will think I’m mad if I start doing that now.
I exhale, stare out the window at the gardens. Calliope is making her way to Matty’s bungalow. Flitter is lounging by the pool. She waves, shrugging off her caftan, laying her beautiful smile over the dreary fall morning and her beautiful hand on Theo’s forearm.
They converse. When Theo walks away, Flitter retakes her seat. From up here, I can just make out Theo continuing along, looking over his shoulder, then ducking under the tape blocking the path to the bungalow that’s supposedly being renovated.
I’m about to turn away when Flitter stands up. She too looks over her shoulder, takes the same path. The tape doesn’t stop her either. She slips beneath.
I’m not prepared for the force of the punch to my guts.
The bungalow isn’t being renovated. It’s off limits so it can be used for Theo’s trysts.
Which would mean he lied again.
God, I’m such an idiot. So easily seduced by rock stars and whiskey and love songs meant for every girl in America, not me.
There’s only one thing I need to focus on: teaching Adele, getting paid, and getting out of here. No more motorbikes or dinners. No more schoolgirl crushes.
I whirl away from the window.
Adele’s on the floor, absorbed in reading.
“How’s The Bell Jar?” I ask, voice thin.
“This is way better than The Bell Jar.” She holds up one of my journals.
“Adele! Those are scribbles. Private scribbles.”
“I love this bit.” She reads aloud, quoting me to me, and I want to cover my ears. I don’t write journals the way everyone else does. I inhabit people who are different from me, but somehow also the same.
“ ‘When you go home each night to a drunk you can’t remember loving,’ ” Adele reads, “ ‘and a kid who doesn’t understand that laundry and cooking don’t just do themselves, and the kid wants something from you but you’re empty, so you yell at the kid and regret it two seconds later, knowing the kid will never see the regret, only the anger, just like the drunk sees only the bottle and the backs of his eyelids—that’s when you need movies.
You need movies so you can believe for just a couple of hours that if you stare at the screen hard enough, the blonde in the convertible with her pink scarf streaming behind her and Cameron Grant right beside her might be you. ’ ”
God, when did I write that? A few years ago, after I’d heard enough about Calliope’s life and not enough about Flitter’s.
When I’d worked out that Hollywood sells the promise that things will get better once the right person comes along—the cowboy who’ll drive the bully out of town, the man who’ll buy you a wedding ring, the slave who’ll rise up and overthrow an empire.
Those are the fairies we believe in when we stop believing in Tinkerbell, when we start to believe there’s nothing we can do to fix our lives, so we wait for the cowboy, the slave, the prince who’ll make everything charming.
We let the world batter us until we’re too small to even dream, let alone rise up.
I reach out to take the book off her.
But Adele holds on to it and says with the wisdom of someone who’s been carefully studying everyone around her so she can figure out how to fit in—God, I remember doing that too, thinking it would save me—“Most people don’t think about how we’re all connected.
But I like stories like that. Everyone has Cinderella inside them and the wicked stepmother too.
This book shows you that.” She points to my journal.
“If you made this into a real book, I’d read it. ”
I pick up The Bell Jar. “This is a real book. My journal isn’t.”
“And Esther has both Cinderella and the stepmother inside her,” Adele says, as if she’s actually been reading Plath and she understands what it’s like to be both lost and hopeful, to have the world see your story through the wrong set of eyes.
Before we can continue our first ever successful English lesson, footsteps sound on the staircase.
My eyes run to the door. Nobody comes up here, besides the starlets I lend the mattress to.
Of all people, Theo appears, in dark jeans and navy T-shirt, with at least one tattoo slinking down to the end of his deltoid muscle.
I pluck the notebook out of Adele’s hands and hide it the same way I close my eyes to keep my soul a secret.
“Calliope Burns is having a party tomorrow night,” Theo says, which is a weird hello, but most of my conversations with him aren’t exactly normal.
It’s Calliope’s twenty-fifth birthday. A costume party by the pool—dress as a cliche is the theme.
Theo makes a slow circle of the room, pulling an edition of the Encyclopedia Americana off the shelf, running a finger along the bindings of my novels, making me jealous of every single one of those spines.
Then he says, “We should go together. So we don’t have to go by ourselves.”
Is he talking to Adele?
He’s looking at me. Shouldn’t he be asking Flitter?
I shake my head, trying to clear out a space for his words to converge into sense.
“You’d prefer to go with a handsome young actor,” he says sardonically. “Fine.”
He turns to leave. I could let him go. Stick to the vow I made five minutes ago. Think only of the fact that he might have lied. But the place where his finger stroked the palm of my hand last night is still warm.
Greedy for more.
“I’d prefer to go with you,” I call.
He half-turns, enough that I can see the corner of his mouth. Enough that I can see he’s smiling.