Chapter 22 1964 #2
As for me, everything suddenly feels so endless.
There will always be a sixteen-year-old Melissa and a twenty-five-year-old Calliope.
There will always be a woman who accepts the double entendres as the price she has to pay for daring to wear a swimsuit to a swimming pool.
Or, if she’s a different kind of girl, she’ll pull her shoulders back and let her basketballs bounce because at some point, she got so damn tired of paying the woman’s tax that she told herself to just play along—maybe that way she had a chance of winning.
But she doesn’t.
And I’m going back up to my turret because it seems like I’m the only person who’s not enjoying the party.
But as I’m walking away, I hear Theo say, “Please don’t leave.” His voice is so husky it just about melts the dress off my body.
Now I’m enjoying the party.
“Attention everyone!” Calliope’s voice breaks in.
She’s sitting atop Brian’s shoulders, tinkling her champagne glass with a spoon.
“Last time I was shooting in Europe, a little number most of you wouldn’t have seen”—the crowd laughs; Calliope’s last film won an Academy Award—“I found the most extraordinary person. A fortune-teller, descended from fifteen generations of wise women. She’s here tonight to predict your futures.
Give her a minute to set herself up.” Calliope gestures to a black tent covered in moons and stars.
“Then you can find out who’ll beat you at next year’s Oscars. ”
Everyone starts to chatter excitedly.
“Is it a good thing to know your future?” I ask Theo. “I wouldn’t have wanted to know about my parents.”
“Some things I’d like to know,” he says.
“But others…I used to drink to not feel the present. If I’d known I was going to suddenly have a fourteen-year-old girl to parent, I’d probably have drunk enough to be dead.
Which would have been the worst decision in a lifetime of terrible decisions.
Sometimes it’s better to have to deal with life as it happens.
Because”—he smiles at me—“I’m starting to think life is okay. ”
Oh, yes it is. Especially now that we’re walking deeper into the gardens, where we’re hidden by palm trees and jasmine. Music drifts from the speakers—a guitar preparing for a love song by tossing a few gentle chords into the night.
It’s one of Theo’s songs. He grimaces. “God, couldn’t they find some decent music?”
“I love this song,” I tell him as we stop in the shadows beside the tree my one-legged bird lives in.
Theo looks at me. “You know what? It’s not too bad.”
We laugh. Laughter is magnetic; it makes people move closer together. Our bodies obey that primal rule. I try not to think about what’s supposed to happen next.
Which is good. Because Theo’s attention is diverted by something over my shoulder.
Two people are walking toward the bungalow protected by the Keep Out! sign.
Theo calls, “That’s off limits.”
One of them turns around. It’s Flitter. She smiles, and with her Hollywood-white teeth and her red off-the-shoulder cocktail dress, she suddenly makes me feel like a crow.
She’s so distracting that when I finally take another look at the person she was with—who’d looked for a split second like Bob Ashenhurst—whoever it was has disappeared.
Flitter would never go for a moonlight stroll with Bob.
“Sorry, Win,” she says. “I got bored of waiting to hear from the fortune-teller about whether my tits or Melissa’s were big enough to get me the part in Matty’s film.”
How is it possible to do anything other than look at someone’s breasts when they say that? Theo is both human and male and his eyes have definitely dropped to Betty Boop level.
“Where’s your costume?” I ask because the Hollywood sign is gone. Now she’s just a lick of red flame.
“It was hiding all my attractions.” She winks at Theo.
I wait for him to move away from me, to reach for Flitter’s hand. But a cry goes up from the poolside. The news travels fast: the fortune-teller is ready to begin. And she’ll start by telling the fortune of the owner of the Chateau Marmont.
There are so many people looking in our direction that I sidle away from Theo, who’s back to the brooding-brows and stormy-thoughts version of himself.
“Nobody is telling my future,” he mutters, but Flitter slips her arm into his and says, “We can’t have ours told until you do.
Unless you want this party to turn into a riot, come with me. ”
She ushers him over to the tent and he disappears inside. I pity the poor fortune-teller who has to face those eyebrows. And I pity myself for having so nearly had the thing that comes after two people step close together in the moonlight.
“Aria Jones.”
I jump, then curse at having let my guard down so completely that I was daydreaming about futures rather than blending into the present.
Bob’s standing in front of me, wearing a crown. He is himself too: The King of Hollywood.
I turn my back. I have no turret around me, no power out here, and while I hate myself for being the one to flee, I don’t have a confrontation with Bob in me tonight.
Before I can leave, he says, playing the game so much better than me, like always, “Did I see you arrive with Win? Things are going well, I take it.”
He can’t know how I feel.
I plunge away, into the crowds, don’t stop until I get to the penthouse.
On the screen, a man is singing a love song to an orphaned woman.
“It’s super cheesy,” Adele tells me, crunching on popcorn. “But maybe it’s like grilled cheese—you really need one every now and again.”
I manage a laugh, feel a little better.
“Go back to the party,” she orders. “Or I’ll start to think you don’t trust me.”
“You sound like your dad when you’re grumpy.”
It makes her smile, this further proof that she belongs to Theo.
“Aria?” she calls after me. “You look really pretty.”
Pretty isn’t beautiful. But it’s a damn sight better than beastly or plain.
The smile I’m wearing as I walk back to the party doesn’t last. The gossip at the poolside is that the fortune-teller told Flitter she’d marry Win.
“Flitter Reeve, the Queen of the Marmont,” someone says.
“What was she in?” is the reply. “That Roman Empire thing from a couple years back?”
“I’ve never noticed her,” the first person muses. “But she is one fine girl.”
Yes, Flitter does look exceptionally fine tonight. Her eyes sparkle as everyone takes another look at this woman whose backstory is being rewritten right in front of me.
Has her future just been cast by a fortune-teller? Where does that leave me? Or is it a scheme cooked up by Calliope to get her friend noticed? But Calliope’s never been a schemer. Nor has she ever been so medicated. Every time I see her, she’s popping pills.
I press through the gossip, looking for Theo, trying to ignore the chatter, trying to remember that I was the one Theo looked at in an elevator full of people.
Judith Crown catches my hand. “The fortune-teller is looking for Aria Jones.”
Augusta Hepworth glides over. “It’s your turn, Aria.”
Between her and Judith, I’m swept over to the tent and pushed inside.
“Aria Jones.” A three-pack-a-day-chased-down-with-whiskey voice comes from the darkest corner of the tent. I see her, red scarf pulled over her brow, covering her hair. She has a patch over one eye as if she was once a pirate.
“Sit down,” she says.
Like an automaton, I do what I’m told.
“Shuffle the cards. Deal three. One for past, one for present, one for future.”
Out comes Death. Then The Lovers, upside down. Finally, The Fool.
The fortune-teller taps the first card. “You know what this means. But Death is your past, Aria, not your future. As for your present, The Lovers reversed means one-sidedness, an imbalance of some kind. Perhaps you’re holding on to a dream so tightly you’ve forgotten that dreams alone aren’t enough. ”
I push back my chair. I can see where this is going. One-sidedness. Theo Winchester has no feelings for Aria Jones. Why would he? I threw a bucket of water on a fire and now I think he likes me? The Fool on the final card looks up at me, laughing.
Yes, I’m a fool.
“Wait!” the fortune-teller says. “You haven’t seen your last two cards. Here.”
From the deck she pulls out The Tower and then, Judgment.
Yes, Aria Jones who lives in her turret is right now facing her judgment.
I spin away. Bang! The chair cracks to the floor.
“I haven’t finished,” the woman insists.
I freeze. I know that voice. It’s almost perfectly disguised, but I know it.
“Calliope?”
“Nooooo-ooooo-ooo!!!!”
A scream comes from outside the tent, so shocking that I scream too.
Both the fortune-teller—is it Calliope?—and I run toward the tent flap. Out by the pool, the crowd has stepped away from something. Something staggering. A flash of red. Red on red.
Flitter is on fire!
She teeters beside the water.
I run toward her. Why am I the only one running? Why is everyone else just staring? She’s going to fall, hit her head—burn.
At last someone else runs too. It’s Theo. He’s closer than me and he hurls himself toward Flitter, but he isn’t in time to grab her before she topples into the pool.
I drop to my knees screaming, “Flitter!”