Chapter 32 1964 #2
Theo manages a wry smile. “That’s my first ever rejection.
And you know what? I’ll take it. And Aria?
” He straightens up and comes to stand beside me, leaning against the kitchen counter again, him facing one way, me the other, only our hips touching.
“There’s one thing I’m glad I said to you.
But I don’t want you to feel like you have to respond.
Because I’m guessing you haven’t come across much in the way of love here at the Marmont.
” He reaches over to cup one hand at the back of my neck, lets his thumb brush oh so lightly over my cheek, and all my resolve about not kissing almost melts away.
“I’m also very aware,” he murmurs, “that I’m thirty and you’re twenty-one and…”
I slide my body between him and the counter. The only space left is between our lips.
Theo inhales sharply.
I stretch up onto my tiptoes. “I’ve changed my mind about not kissing you,” I whisper. “I’ll be thinking about it all night anyway, so let’s buck the Hollywood trend and go for reality rather than imagination.”
He laughs; it tickles my skin, the black leather scent of him teases me too. And now I want his hands to tickle all the parts of my body that Flitter drew onto a sheet of notepaper five years ago.
But he draws away and says very softly, “I want you to be sure. Think about it tonight. Then come and have breakfast with me and Adele tomorrow, if you want to.”
“I won’t just be thinking tonight, Theo. I’ll be dreaming too. So yes.” I smile at the hunger lurking in his eyes. “I’ll come to breakfast. So long as you promise that tomorrow night we can do everything I dreamed of. And everything you dream of as well.”
When I return to my room, the door is open again. I stop, look behind me, need someone to witness the open door and prove that I’m not seeing things.
Then voices drift out from inside and I shake my head. Maybe I do need Bob’s Quaaludes. What with Theo taking me places I never thought I’d go, plus all the strange happenings around here, I’m leaping to overwrought conclusions.
I take the ten steps forward and find my two sisters sitting on my bed, spilling ash over my new quilt from their cigarettes.
Flitter smirks. “We’re dying to know where you’ve been.”
“What Flitter means is, we’re sorry. About the party,” Calliope says.
Flitter waves her cigarette in the air. “Aria forgives everything. But Aria is usually in bed well before now.”
Calliope pats the space beside her. Flitter grins like an eager teenager. And my face breaks into a smile too. Everything is changing. But here in this room there’s still a bed and three girls—and a place for me.
I climb in between them and reach for a cigarette.
“The orphan auditions are next week,” Flitter says. “It’s a shortlist of three. Me, Melissa, and Calliope.”
I want to care more about this. But in a few hours I’ll be having breakfast with Theo. I can’t stop smiling at my first ever delicious secret.
Calliope notices. “Something’s happened.”
“You really are a fortune-teller,” I say. Then the words burst out of me, too wonderful to stay hidden. “Theo said he loves me.”
Flitter’s and Calliope’s mouths open so wide they could catch giraffes.
“Love?” Calliope says.
“Win?” Flitter now.
She’s still calling him Win. And, despite the motorbike ride, I haven’t ever heard Theo mention her. Nor has she ever spoken of him with anything other than casual flirtation. So her reaction can’t be jealousy or hurt. It’s straightforward disbelief—which hurts even more.
Then Calliope walks over to the record player and taps a fingernail on it.
One of Win’s records is cued up and now I feel like those girls on Sunset Strip. Especially when Flitter repeats Win’s name with such incredulity it’s like I’m dating Jesus Christ.
I shove the quilt aside, spilling ash all over my bed. Jump to my feet. “Why is that so hard to believe? I know I’m not beautiful or famous. But Theo’s never made me feel like you’re making me feel right now—like I’m beneath him just because I’m ordinary.”
Not even ordinary. Plain. A beast, the voices from the past hiss.
Calliope strides over to me, stopping just inches from my face.
Her eyes aren’t the eyes she used to have.
They’re the eyes of a woman who’s taken something—probably many things—to get herself onto her feet and into her smile.
I’m about to ask her when she became a person who pretended to be a fortune-teller, who made her friend feel like a fool, and who keeps herself alive with pills rather than dreams, but she says, stealing all of my words, “This isn’t your dream.
What about the ocean, the house by the sea? ”
“I was thirteen! Even you told me it was a lonely dream. Why should I be held for the rest of my life to something I said when I was a kid?”
Flitter butts in, tone acid. “Hell, I’d give up a lonely cottage for Win any day.”
Calliope whirls around. “Shut up! Shut up for one minute with your stupid unfunny asides.” She spins back to me, doesn’t see Flitter’s face cracking. “If you do this,” Calliope says, “you’ll be even more invisible than you are right now.”
“Not everybody needs the whole world to see them!”
“I’m not saying it right.” Calliope turns to Flitter again. “Help me say it right.”
But Flitter is on her feet, face pieced back together, only her eyes still broken. “You’re on your own, kid,” she tells Calliope. “You don’t need me.”
She walks out the door, and the ground trembles, like the Marmont is as angry as I am—like it’s trying to tear down this city made of studio sets and technicolor ghosts.
“Aria.” Calliope holds my arms to stop me from going after Flitter.
“At least your dream got you out of here. It put you into life. I know life terrifies you, but you need to go out and live it anyway. I keep waiting for you to do that, believing that you will. But if you go straight from here to Win’s penthouse and into Win’s life, then the life—the lives!
—you could have lived will all vanish. Like that. ”
She snaps her fingers in front of my face.
“It’s why I did the fortune-telling thing,” she says, shocking me with how easily she admits to it.
“I needed to make you think. Like I told you in that tent, death is your past, not your future. Stop just holding on to your dream; go out and chase it to wherever it leads. I need to know that you got away.”
Oh, Calliope is so good at making people believe in her.
I almost want to tell this Aria person to go chase life, rather than dreams. But I am the Aria person—and Theo is my new dream.
And suddenly I’m frozen in place by the thought—the way she’s talking, it sounds like she’s the one who wants me to leave.
Badly enough that she’s trying to scare me away?
“If you’d given me and Flitter a set of encyclopedias,” Calliope says, trying out a smile to lure me deeper into her spell, “we would have turned straight to the entries for Hollywood and Marian Monti. You’re the only person I know who’d read every one from cover to cover.
There was nothing Flitter and I could say and you wouldn’t ask a question about it.
You were curious the way other people dropped acid—evangelically and always searching for something.
I believed you’d start on your beach in Hawaii and then you’d see how much world there is out there and you’d tackle it like that set of encyclopedias, not content unless you laid your hands on all of it.
But you’re still here. And you might as well be dead for all the living you’ve done. ”
Her voice is raw when she finishes. But I’m done with taking advice from a strung-out actress who can no longer keep her role-playing to the screen—and who doesn’t know how to live any more than I do.
“You think because you’ve pretended to be a princess and an ingenue and a cowgirl and a call girl that you’ve actually lived those lives? They weren’t real, Calliope. Just like you aren’t a fortune-teller. Even your name isn’t real. There’s nothing about you that’s real!”
Real. Real. Real.
My cruelty echoes, the Marmont taking her side, not mine—making me the one who’s mean.
And I don’t know why my memory chooses to show me this piece of my life right now, but it does: when I sat in Theo’s office and told him that female birds might be quiet, but they were full of birdsong too—and that the woman who’d discovered that fact had been ignored by biology.
I’ve never sung along to a song, not even when I’m alone in this room.
I’m always too scared that Bob might hear me.
Flitter, Calliope—have I ever heard them sing?
Or is all our birdsong stuck in our throats, glued there by fires and Bobs and hand jobs in libraries and a dream of power that’s delivered us only powerlessness?
My face crumples. But Calliope’s, hers transforms into an even lovelier smile, the kind you’d sit with in a dark movie theater, popcorn uneaten in your hand, because you’re struck by the wonder of it.
“The lives I get to have on-screen, all of them are better than real because they have no consequences,” she says. “I can marry, but I never have to be a wife. I can have a child but never have the chance to hurt it. I can die…”
Her voice quavers and all my anger collapses and my hand squeezes hers because this might be the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.
“I can die,” she continues, looking at our joined hands, “and then I can stand up and walk away from that dead girl. You have no idea how lovely it is to live a life you can constantly fuck up, but never regret. A life where you can love so often, marry so often—but never have to stay for the divorce.”
I interrupt, can’t believe I’m saying this to a woman who’s not just my friend, but my sister.
“Is that what this is all about? You’re mad because you wanted the world to love you, but when you see the love that Theo’s given me, you want that instead?
You liked it better when I was nothing to anyone? ”
Calliope sniffs, then wipes her eyes. One set of false lashes comes away—the legs of a wingless creature stuck to the back of her hand.
She shocks me by hugging me tight, despite what I just said, and she whispers, “You have so many gifts. You help everyone. You give career advice to actresses and story ideas to writers. Every woman who’s passed through the Marmont leaves with a piece of Aria inside them.
So go be your own kind of star. If you fall in love with Theo now, you’ll be his forevermore. But you’ll never be yours.”
I draw back from Calliope so she can see my soul in my eyes when I say, trying to put it into a language she understands, “I feel for him the way you feel about your ambitions.”
“Then I’m sorry for you,” she says.
Then she walks away, and I wonder how this changed from a conversation that was meant to be all mint juleps and giggles to an exchange of all the things the three of us never said over the years but perhaps should have.