Chapter 47 1965 #2
I don’t say, I think Theo needs to do the same. But I believe it. He needs to discover the truth I’ve learned in Venice: that it doesn’t matter if you’re running from or running to—you’ll never catch up to yourself unless you stop.
That’s why we have to remain apart for now.
He might find someone else while I figure myself out; in fact, he most likely will.
Maybe then I’ll wish I had run to him now instead of staying here.
But I’m almost certain that if I do, it will end all over again in much the same way—and I don’t think I can survive that heartbreak a second time.
“Aria?”
Calliope’s voice returns me to the room.
And I remember the other things that happened at the Chateau Marmont, things that aren’t explained by Marley living in one of the bungalows—things I once thought, even if only briefly, that Calliope might have had a hand in.
“What about the screams? The fire? What about Pilot being fed vodka?”
Calliope frowns. “I don’t know. Maybe it was Marley, having some kind of withdrawal night terrors?”
“Why would she set fire to Theo’s bed?”
“I have no idea.” Calliope shrugs. “We may have discovered that I have a brain, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good at solving puzzles.”
I don’t laugh. “I used to feel like the Marmont was alive. Like the building itself was the one screaming and laughing and lighting fires.”
“I used to think it was the ghost,” Calliope says with a grim smile. “I believed in her, you know. Thought she was the one who spiked my drink at my birthday party so I was sick for three days afterward.”
I remember the retching. That I didn’t go into the bathroom.
She shakes her head, divining my thoughts. “I would have yelled at you to leave. I’m glad you didn’t come in.”
We’re quiet a moment, then I ask, “How’s Miss Devine Rey?”
Calliope finally laughs. “She’s back from rehab in fine form, ruling over everyone from her new court by the pool. She lies on a cabana swathed in jeweled caftans and dispenses advice to all the starlets.”
Calliope mimics my aunt’s sonorous tones. “ ‘Have meetings with anyone from a studio at Schwab’s, never in an office with a closed door.’ Or, ‘Everyone has a good side. Know yours. If you don’t know it, ask me.’ And, ‘Cooking is for ordinary people. Extraordinary people call Schwab’s.’ ”
I laugh hysterically. “Did I create a monster?”
“Bob thinks so,” Calliope says, eyes shining with amusement.
“He’s lost his poolside throne. She’s taken your old room because it’s within her means, had a fire sale of all her pictures and memorabilia, and then she gave Theo an envelope full of money for the past year’s rent, telling him to pay you back for everything you spent on her behalf.
And she’s declaiming her lines from Jane Eyre—she got the part of the housekeeper, thanks to you. ”
“Shouldn’t they be close to wrapping that up by now?”
It’s the only time Calliope looks sad. “They’ve barely started filming. Matty broke his leg, then the house they were going to use was crushed by a falling tree. The movie’s cursed. The only reason I want it to go ahead is for Miss Devine’s sake.”
“And Flitter?” I make myself ask.
“Has moved to the Beverly Wilshire. With Brian.” Calliope giggles. “God help her. He’ll spend all the money she has, then work his way through all the money she doesn’t have before the year is out.” She sighs. “I miss her. I’m lost without my sisters.”
That’s when I feel it. An extraordinary sweetness, like honey scooped from a hive, followed by an emptiness inside me where something used to live. Nostalgia. Which means—I did have a home.
“I miss…” I don’t know how to say it.
“ ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were,’ ” Calliope quotes.
I stare at her. “That’s Proust.”
“One of my characters said it in a movie. I didn’t understand it then, but I do now—when I think of the past, in the bed we all shared is the Flitter who made a deal with Bob.”
“Also in that bed is a girl called Calliope who loved me when she didn’t have to.”
That’s when Calliope starts to cry. Only for a minute or two. Then she sits up straight, one hand on my breastbone, holding me at arm’s length so she can say something right to my face. “Publish this.” She holds up my manuscript.
“It didn’t feel right, sending it out without telling you.” My voice is low, ashamed. I wrote her into a story and I can’t imagine how it would feel to have your life taken from you and retold into what? Truth? Or more lies?
She shakes her head. “This is your story. Not mine. See?” She points to the cover. “It says: A Novel. Your version of this person is yours. And it’s very good. Better than any book I’ve read.”
I roll my eyes. “When did you last read a book?”
“All right. Better than any story I’ve come across. And I’ve come across quite a few.”
And I feel that hideous but exquisite pain in my chest, the one you feel when you’re with someone you love and something they say makes you love yourself, just a little. It is a good book.
If I hadn’t come to Venice, if I hadn’t left Theo behind, I wouldn’t have written it.
I’m crying again and she is too, and this time she pulls off her false lashes and says, “They probably just make me look sicker.”
She unfurls from the bed, walks to the window, and inhales. If only all that life out there could find its way inside her, then, one day, there’d be a fifty, a sixty, a seventy-year-old woman who’d still equal lightning plus auroras to the power of heaven.
“You’re the only person I’ve told,” she says.
“The only one I’m going to tell. I have to work out how to…
I don’t know, disappear. If the studio finds out…
” She grimaces. “I’m a valuable asset to them.
They might force me to have more treatment, or do something crazy like appoint a guardian, say that nobody should trust decisions made by a twenty-five-year-old woman with a hell of a lot of cash in the bank and who probably isn’t of sound mind.
I’m scared they’ll try and take away what time I have left. So…”
I want to tell her that the studio wouldn’t do that, but from what I’ve seen, the studios will do almost anything to control the women who make money for them. I also want to ask her how long she has, but I’m afraid. What if she says just a few weeks?
She answers my unspoken question. “About a year. Maybe eighteen months if I have more radiotherapy.”
I don’t know if she’s lying. If she’s giving me the Hollywood version of her ending. In my book, Calliope Burns goes back to the Chateau Marmont and burns it to the ground. The final scene is her, phoenix-like in the turret, while everything except her is consumed by the pyre she lit.
With her back to me, she whispers, “Do you know what makes me cry at night? I never fell in love. Like you once said to me, I’ll die without ever knowing what it’s like to be loved the way Theo loved you, or to love another person the way you loved Theo. Imagine dying without that…”
Her voice cracks and I jump up and tuck her head against my chest and my voice is fierce when I tell her, “You did fall in love. Remember in A Rebel Without a Girl, the way Jimmy McLean kisses you at the end? That was love. And what about you and Peter Oldham? Three movies that made the whole world feel like we were the ones who’d never been in love because what you two had…
” I sigh, remembering the tug of longing when I watched Calliope on the screen each of those times.
“That was special, wasn’t it?” she concedes.
“Magical.” I tighten my arms around her. “Once in a lifetime. But you got to have it more than once.”
Before I can offer her any more lies that are also truths, she runs her fingertips over the title of my book.
“This is a novel. You can’t call it Calliope Burns because I’m real.
” The smile she gives me is the Calliope Burns special, the one people line up to see the same way they crowd the piazza outside the Palazzo Ducale to watch the golden orb of an April moon scatter its light over the water.
“My name is Helen,” she says. “Helen Burns.”
I walk over to the typewriter, insert a sheet of paper and type: Helen Burns: A Novel. Then I tear up the original title page and replace it with the true one.
“Do you know what I just learned, Aria?” Calliope’s voice is wistful. “That to be truly seen by one person is better than being seen on a screen by millions. I wanted to be loved by the world. But the world can’t love. Only people can.”
My tears come in a deluge. Because my friend is dying and life sends us our lessons too late sometimes. What if Calliope had been able to burn, truly, for one person—and he’d burned for her too?
What a star that would have made.
“I’m going to New York next week,” she tells me. “I’m going to deliver your manuscript to the best publishing house in the country. How long will you be here for? I’ll need to tell them where to send your check.”
I laugh. “In the event that there’s a check to send, I’ll be in Capri. I like being surrounded by water. So that seems like a good place to go. I’ll leave the same day you do.”
“Are you prepared?” she asks me then. “For what this might unleash?”
Is it the tumor making her say things that are a little crazy? All my book will unleash are rejection letters from publishers. I’m prepared for those.
Outside, the sun plummets, setting fire to the hem of the sky. The light transforms Calliope’s face so her eyes are suddenly ferocious, her jaw a sharp line of bone. “When this is published, you’ll have given me my revenge. That’s a gift I never thought I’d have.”
Back in the library, I’d hated myself for not calling out. In this book I am, at last, calling out—no, I’m screaming, strident and bloody, on behalf of Nathalie and every other woman who’s bled, wept, and retched on the mattress in my turret. But maybe it’s more than that. Maybe it is revenge.
For me. For Calliope. For my aunt.
“I’m scared that everyone will think it’s made up,” I tell her. “That he’ll get away with it until the end of time. But…” I pause, make myself whisper the improbable. “Even if somehow a miracle happens and people believe it, will it be enough?”
She stares at the bundle of paper in her arms. There’s something terrifying in her eyes when she says, “I don’t know.” A beat. “I spoke to your aunt.”
I don’t need to ask about what. It’s there in her eyes. Calliope knows too.
“Do you think it will be enough for her?” Calliope asks, almost like she’s daring me.
I shake my head. What vengeance could ever be enough for her?
The sun is gone now. The sick and failing Calliope returns and says to me, “Promise me that every time you move, you’ll tell me where you’re going so I can always reach you via the poste restante.”
“So long as you promise to tell me when…”
“When I’m about to die?” Calliope smiles. “I’ll never die. This”—she taps the manuscript—“will make me immortal. And thanks to you, it’ll be me who’s immortal, not just my face.”
When Calliope falls asleep, I stand at my window, unable to not think of Theo, who’ll have just finished his show in Rome.
He’s maybe back in his hotel room or out at a party with beautiful Italian women.
I close my eyes against that idea and from the mist outside, which is the color of ghosts and dreams, I hear a whisper, “Aria?”
Theo’s voice, as if he’s standing at a window too and, just like at the Chateau Marmont, magic makes sounds travel beyond their limits. And for the first time I let myself remember.
The stairwell, the way we collided and my whole world exploded.
The way he always made coffee for me, that I only had to tell him once how I liked it and then he made it exactly right every time.
He wanted to know how I liked everything: coffee, steak, pillows, sex.
I remember the sound of the sheets crackling like the fires he lit on my skin.
I remember the leathery nicotine freshness of him, a scent I’d pay a million dollars for, just so I could spray it on my sheets and roll myself in them—a little cave of him.