Chapter 45 1965
One morning when I wake, I hear a man’s voice. I tiptoe downstairs, peer over the banister and there, sitting at the table with his sisters, is the beautiful Italian I met on the plane.
He rises to his feet when he sees me. “You look different,” he says.
“It probably helps that I’m not crying.” I slip into my chair.
“I’m Arturo,” he says as I reach for the biscotti, dunk it in my coffee, and bite into it, letting its sweetness mix with the sharpness of the coffee to make something quite perfect.
I only realize I’ve closed my eyes when I open them again.
“Aria likes biscotti,” Marzia tells her brother.
“But not proper coffee,” Alessia adds chidingly.
“Give her time,” Arturo says, like I’ll still be here months from now.
I don’t know what it is—time, ease, biscotti—but I behave a little more like myself. The questions I haven’t asked come tumbling out. “Have you always lived here?”
Arturo nods. “Our family has been here for one hundred years.”
“Wow.” I try to imagine having a home that’s part of your blood. Is the Chateau Marmont in my blood? Or am I in its blood?
“Are those your parents?” I nod at a framed photo of a man and a woman dressed in their best clothes, holding hands, a smiling crowd around them.
Marzia nods soberly.
Her brother elaborates, “They died five years ago. Our mother had cancer. One month later, our father died of a broken heart. Marzia was sixteen, Alessia twenty.”
“We started letting out two rooms so we had money to stay,” Marzia says.
“And Arturo sends money from Rome,” Alessia adds, lest I think her brother has abandoned his sisters to poverty and service.
My mind is circling the one dreadful thing we have in common. “You think your parents are a permanent part of your world,” I say. “It’s one of the most shocking things when you find out you were only given them for a very short time.”
Three sets of eyes stare at me. It’s the first clue I’ve given them about Aria Jones.
“What do you do in Rome?” I ask Arturo to turn the conversation away.
“I own two cinemas there. And one each in Florence, Genoa, and Venice. Movies are big business in Italy.”
“In America too,” I say grimly.
Oh yes, the Fates who put me on the same airplane as Arturo are definitely chuckling behind their hands. I escaped one city of made-up lives only to land in the home of someone else who deals in imaginary lives.
I search for a conversational segue that isn’t about movies and make-believe, nor about dead parents. “How do guests find you?” I ask Marzia and Alessia. “You don’t have a sign out front.”
“We have a friend at the tourist bureau,” Alessia replies. “When all the hotels are full, they send people here. Arturo knows people from America. They sometimes stay.”
“Would you like more guests?” I ask and I immediately hear Calliope’s voice whispering in my ear, You help everyone.
I hadn’t thought much about what she said that day, but now that I’m sitting at a table with nice people who cared enough to bring me bowls of soup, I find that I do want to help.
“Where to find them?” Alessia says with a bewildered shrug, as if she doesn’t know why tourists don’t just fall out of the sky.
“You need to advertise,” I tell her. “If I was a tourist, I’d much rather stay here and look out the window at that gorgeous view than stay at a hotel.”
Marzia beams while her brother asks, “Are you a tourist, Aria?”
I nod. “I’m on my grand tour. Hopefully I’ll come to a better end than Daisy Miller.”
It’s a stupid joke to make with Italians who are unlikely to have read Henry James.
But Arturo nods as if he understands, then they all try not to stare at my eyes, which are damp, because now I’m remembering Calliope and her assertion that there were so few stories named after a woman who didn’t die at the end.
Of course Daisy dies. And I feel a pang of affection for my dearest friend, who wanted me to go out and find my happily ever after, rather than just taking the only one offered to me.
“What else will you tell us about yourself, Aria?” Arturo asks now.
I copy Alessia’s shrug.
“Do you think your story isn’t worth telling?” Arturo prods. “Or that we aren’t worthy of having it told to us?”
I stand up. “I’m late for work.”
Behind me, Marzia scolds her brother, who replies, “When someone is silent, they need to know the listeners hear that too.”
I do two things after that conversation—two peculiar, spontaneous things that feel, on reflection, a bit like living.
I go to the shop on Calle de la Bande where I saw the pretty green typewriter. It’s like the Marmont, that typewriter, whispering things to me that so far I’ve not understood. Now I think I do.
I hand over the lira I’ve made from waitressing.
I have only enough money left to pay my board this week, so I’ll have to take some extra shifts at the restaurant.
But that’s okay. Once upon a time I thought that I couldn’t step into the world unless I had enough money to pay for every unforeseen circumstance for years to come.
I wanted so much safety around me that I couldn’t live.
Now I have just enough safety, and perhaps that’s all you really need.
I take the typewriter into work and, in the break between lunch service and dinner, I type the address of Marzia and Alessia’s home, giving it a name—Castello Fantasticare—that the tourists will love.
I cut up the paper into small rectangles and stack them on the counter.
When I leave that night, the pile is smaller and that makes me smile.
I slip back into the townhouse after eleven o’clock. Marzia and Alessia aren’t usually awake at this time, so I almost drop the typewriter when a voice says, “What is that?”
Arturo’s in a chair in the living room, right by the window.
Only one of the lamps is lit—and I notice how I don’t brace.
Three months ago, if I’d walked into a room at the Marmont with one man I hardly knew and just one lamp lit, I’d have been searching my pockets for pistols I’d have wished I owned.
Here, I don’t think about pistols or bracing, just about how tired my body is from working, but how eager I am to go upstairs and wind a sheet of paper into the typewriter and rest my hands on the keys.
I want to play the music of stories. That could be the thing that will make me smile.
“Drink?” Arturo offers, indicating the bottle of Amaro beside him.
I nod because he and his sisters have been good to me and I want to be respectful in return. I place the typewriter down, sip, and screw up my face. “It tastes like something you’d give to someone you hate.”
He laughs. “Amaretto then? It’s sweeter.” He pours my new drink. “My sisters had three telephone calls this afternoon. The newly baptized Castello Fantasticare is likely to be booked out by summer.” He nods at my typewriter. “I’m guessing your friend had something to do with it.”
“It’s the least I could do to say thank you.”
“You’re paying us. You don’t have to thank us,” he replies drily.
“You took a big chance on a weeping woman on a plane. So I do.”
I sip the Amaretto. It’s not a mint julep, and Arturo isn’t Calliope. Venice is not LA. And I like that, even as I miss the hot breath of the Santa Anas bursting through doorways like a forty-foot showgirl ready to shake a few hairs loose from their lacquer.
Maybe that’s what I want to do too.
“Is that why you bought the typewriter?” Arturo asks. “To help my sisters?”
“Not just that. I’m going to use it to tell one story. And find another.”
“No more silence?”
I smile. “Probably still some of that.”
He laughs. “Would you like to go out for a drink tomorrow night, Aria?”
“I…I don’t know,” I splutter.
He laughs again, but with less humor. “Americans should learn not to be so honest.”
“I’m not sure that Americans are honest. At least not in Hollywood.” I bite my lip. I’ve as good as told him where I came from. “I’ll let you know in the morning.”
I don’t think about Arturo or his question as I stand at the open window in my room.
I think about stories. How the word can mean two entirely different things—an account of events, or else a lie.
A true story, or a tall story. How we believe some stories simply because of the way they’re told or because of who tells them.
If it’s told on the silver screen by a beautiful woman, then we all want to believe.
If it’s told by a charming male studio executive with a killer publicity team, then boy do we ever believe it.
It’s cold outside, probably only forty-five degrees, but tonight I want the water scent and the water sound, want to breathe in history and wonder, want to listen to the hum of the two gondoliers who’ve stopped to chat, holding their poles against the wall so their gondolas don’t float away.
There are so many stories out there. Just look at all the stories that glitter above me, woven into constellations: Cassiopeia, who boasted of her beauty and was hung in the sky as punishment; Ursa Major, a casualty of Zeus’s wandering eye; Pegasus, the winged horse shaped from the blood of the beheaded Medusa.
Beauty, cruelty, and stories—all of life spangled above me in the night.
I take one last inhale, then I pull the quilt off the bed, wrap myself in it, stack my journals on the table, and place the typewriter beside them.
I remember Judith Crown, how she’d sit with her hands on the keys of the piano in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont before she began to play, as if in that thirty seconds she was feeling the thrum of all the music stored inside the piano, waiting impatiently for somebody to sit down and let it all out.
That’s how I feel.
Flitter, Calliope, and I—we were three intelligent women who lived in a city built on fantasy and we still didn’t have the imagination to believe that anything would change. But my imagination has since been fed by this city and now it is astronomical.
I open the journal on top of the pile, roll a blank piece of paper into the typewriter.
Flitter once said that Hollywood made our beds and then forced us to not just lie in them, but to sleep in them too. But that’s not true. Hollywood didn’t do that.
The men did that.
Men are just flesh and blood. We can fight flesh and blood.
And we don’t even need pistols to do it.
Calliope Burns: A Novel, I type.