Chapter 29 1958
Occasionally at the Marmont, there are screening nights in the small theater at the end of the first-floor corridor. Not-yet-released movies are played to guests like Marian Monti, Judith Crown, and Augusta Hepworth, stars so influential they could convince a rational person to drink diet water.
Tonight’s movie is extra special. The supporting actress is someone who’s lived at the Marmont for two years: Calliope Burns.
Seated in the front row are the three aforementioned stars, as well as Bob Ashenhurst, Calliope Burns, Flitter Reeve, and Aria Jones. Even Miss Devine Rey has left her room and taken ownership of the last chair in the front row beside Aria, who can’t sit still.
This is the night she’s been waiting for. Her hand is held tightly in Calliope’s. Calliope’s other hand clutches Flitter’s.
The Three Sisters.
But will they still be sisters when they find out what Aria’s done?
Their eyes are fixed to the screen, waiting. But Calliope and Flitter are waiting for something different from Aria.
The lights go down. The projector whirs. Film flickers onto the screen.
Aria turns to look at the boy operating the projector, the one who delivers mint juleps and paracetamol from Schwab’s.
His name is George. He’s an orphan who lives in the dumpster behind Schwab’s; he has no aunt to give him a room.
He wants to be a Hollywood camera operator and he helped Aria do this—all she had to do in return was ask Isaiah, who usually operates the camera, to pretend to be sick so George could man the camera and meet a few Hollywood directors.
George nods at Aria.
Her heart is going to burst out of her body. Because something is about to happen, something that could either be the right thing or the wrong thing—Aria doesn’t know.
Then there it is.
A dim room. It’s hard to see much more than a young woman with pale hair. The back of a sofa. The back of a head of brown hair too—hair belonging to a man.
“It’s my birthday tomorrow.” The woman’s voice rings out through the speakers.
The sofa belches as the man shifts. Fabric rustles. A belt buckle clatters.
Ziiiii-iiiii-p!
The sound crackles, turned right up to its breaking point.
Then the man says, “There’s one condition to you getting the part.”
His voice is almost recognizable if he just says something more. And look—now he’s turning his head to the side. His profile will be visible in one more second. Her face too, because she’s stepping forward and the lights are brightening…
Music breaks in joyously. The audience gasps.
The title, He’s Just a Rebel Without a Girl, appears on the screen.
The lighting illuminates a woman’s cheekbones.
It’s Calliope! She’s wearing the half smile, half pout of a girl who’s hoping to be found by a rebel in the opening scenes, one who’ll teach her, over the next two hours, a bit of bad—but not too much! —to go with her good.
Murmurs move along the rows of seats. What was that before? He—who was it?—said a condition? Do you think…?
The men whisper, Wish I could see the rest of that other movie. The women search one another’s eyes to find out who knows, start to wonder if maybe they aren’t the only ones—but what do you do with that knowledge?
The women who don’t yet know put their questions aside because they’re watching a Hollywood movie, which is all relentless beauty until the credits roll. Then they stand and blink, ready to walk back out into the real world—the one that nobody bothers to make beautiful.
Aria isn’t there. She has no desire to face Bob or Calliope after what she just did.
As soon as Aria makes it out to the hallway, she runs. Within seconds she’s disappeared into the Marmont’s belly and only lets herself get spat out on the top floor where she makes her way to the one door nobody ever opens.
The doorway to the turret.
Around and around the stairs go, narrow and dark and easy to slip on, to be pushed down, to be broken on.
But Aria has been up and down these stairs a thousand times this year, carrying every book and object from her library, even the leather chair with George’s help.
The only thing left in the library on the ground floor is the red sofa and the Aria who thought she’d lost everything, only to discover that there is always more to lose.
At the top of the stairs she enters her secret room.
The books and magazines are stacked in neat piles along the walls, as are her journals.
The chair is positioned by the window. There’s no heat, just a blanket, a sweater, a coat, and mittens in a box under the chair.
There are two lamps: the one with a high-heeled shoe as its base stands by the chair; another taller lamp with a colored glass shade stands sentry by the door, casting rainbows of red, blue, and green onto the ceiling.
Aria stares at those rainbows: the blue is the color of the eyes of the starlet who arrived yesterday; the green like Lacey Magee, who watches every move Calliope makes; the red is like the starlet of two months before whose room hosts parties nobody speaks of but that everyone knows are the wildest in history.
The door opens and Aria jumps. The books could be a weapon, the stairs too. Her vigilance sags when she sees Calliope, remembers that the reason she chose this room is because nobody will come up here and face the ghost who’s said to linger, least of all Bob.
Aria stares at Calliope. Calliope stares at Aria.
“I’m sorry,” Aria whispers.
A tear breaks from each of Calliope’s eyes, leaving thin lines of black on her face. “Don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “You shouldn’t have…”
Thunder crashes outside. Three months of rain falls from the sky as Aria cries too.
Aria has looked and looked at the film and she’s certain and thankful that it’s not absolutely clear that it’s Calliope, because what Calliope did will break every morality clause in her studio contract.
She’s looked and she’s looked, and what she believes is that the film issues a threat.
It lets Bob know that Aria has a little grenade in her hand—one that she can set off any time she chooses by showing the rest of the film where the identities of the man and the woman become apparent.
Bob will know that Aria won’t want to show the entire film unless she absolutely has to because doing so will damage Calliope.
But Bob will also know that she might, if pushed far enough.
And then everyone will see the evidence that he is the Devil of Hollywood, not the king.
She has shown enough of the film to keep Flitter, Calliope, Aria, and Miss Devine safe.
She has shown enough to give them a little power.
Only Aria knows that the film cuts out after the section that just aired in the screening room. Only Aria knows that she has less power than she appears to have.
Calliope crouches on the floor, one arm braced against the wall, the other wrapped around her belly. And Aria knows that the grenade did go off and it’s blown up the best friendship she’s ever had.
“I’m sorry,” Aria whispers again. She wipes the back of her hand over her nose. “I dream every night that I stood up and told Bob to go away. Then in the morning I remember I did nothing.”
Calliope’s sobs are the loudest sound Aria has ever heard and she wonders if they’ll travel down through the lungs of the Marmont and people will think it’s the ghost. Then in one sudden movement, Calliope is beside her, her head buried in Aria’s lap.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Calliope says, and Aria rejects this outright. Her wrongness is irrefutable, and she still isn’t sure if what she did tonight is more wrongness or repentance.
Calliope lifts her head. Her eyes are so blue, the same color as the sea Aria dreams of, as if the pain has made her even more beautiful. “Come with me,” she urges Calliope. “To Hawaii. There are no Bobs in Hawaii.”
She’s so sure Calliope will say yes. But Calliope shakes her head.
“I wouldn’t have called out either if it had been me hiding behind the chair that day.
Because it wouldn’t have changed anything.
Besides…” Calliope pushes herself to her feet, crosses to the window, opens it, leans out, and shouts the worst thing of all into the storm.
“You eventually forget why you have to give a man like Bob what he wants while still keeping him outside of you. You forget why it hurts less that way.”
No, Aria wants to shout too. No, no, no.
Calliope pulls her head back into the room.
Her face is wet, her makeup a ruin. But now her eyes sparkle, two little jewels in the dark, dark room.
“And I just got a standing ovation.” Her voice is gentler when she goes on.
“It’s time to learn the price of things, Aria.
It takes real courage to do that. Like Jordan Baker says in a book I know you’ll have in one of those piles: ‘It takes two to make an accident.’ Maybe you think those two things are this town plus ambition.
But the way I see it, those two things are what I did with Bob plus a trash can labeled ‘things to forget.’ And they equal what’s going to happen next month when people watch Rebel Without a Girl and, for two hours, they’re not ugly or pimply or stuck with a deadbeat boyfriend.
They live in a castle and they sleep beside a king whose one pleasure in life is to make sure they get their happy ending. ”
More rain, louder now. The stars are trapped behind it, so is the moon. But Aria doesn’t need anything more than lamplight to see that one movie won’t be enough for someone whose ambitions have no perimeters. Calliope will want bigger dressing rooms, her name in larger font on a billboard.
Mint juleps to speed along the forgetting.
And Aria blinks away the last stupid tears she’ll ever shed as a child.
Calliope finishes by saying, “In that film, it’s just a man with brown hair and a stupid girl who didn’t even say no. The real problem is that Bob knows someone has that film.”
“He knows I have it,” Aria confesses. “He saw me that day in the library.”
The door bursts open with a crash. Aria almost leaps from the chair. The ghost!
But it’s Flitter.
“I found you!” she cries when she sees Calliope. Then her eyes register Aria’s presence and she says, “Don’t tell me it’s you who’s got that film?” She exhales. “Jesus.”