Chapter 48 1965
Capri is endless water. It’s bikinis and sunshine; it’s a blue I never saw in any of the artworks that hung in the Gallerie dell’Accadamia in Venice.
It’s another restaurant job at night, serving cocktails to tourists who are so stunned by all the beauty that they tip too much and I can save a little bit of money for my future, whatever that turns out to be.
It feels even more like fantasy when I receive a telegram from Calliope.
You’re officially Aria Jones, author, it says. See, your mom knew you needed a knockout name.
It takes an hour of letting that sink in before I can read the rest of the message.
She says that Helen Burns will be published by one of the biggest publishing houses in New York.
A contract will be waiting for me by week’s end at the post office in Sorrento—along with a check.
Apparently the publishing house is so eager to sign me that they’ve already sent the check as an incentive. I can cash it pending my signature.
Maybe it’ll be enough that I won’t have to work for a month or two and I can travel around before I settle somewhere else and find another waitressing job.
That’s as much as I let myself think. Where I come from, conditions are always attached to offers. I don’t want to let myself get excited, only to discover that I’ll need to sell myself as well as my book.
I’ve only just started to become myself—I can’t sell those tiny, just-discovered pieces of Aria to anyone.
A few days later I trade my bikini for the tiniest miniskirt in the world and a crop top—tanned stomachs are the only accessory, besides turbans and sunglasses, that people in Capri wear. Needless to say, I’ve become a devoted Caprian over the past month.
I catch the boat to the mainland, take my time winding my way from the port to the city center.
I stop at the Basilica di Sant’Antonino, sit on a pew, and soak in both the quiet and the quiver in the air, like in Hollywood, where people stared reverently at billboards and a sidewalk paved with stars.
We all need idols, it seems. We all want something more than what we have in our skins.
Why aren’t we enough for ourselves?
Am I enough for myself yet?
It’s early afternoon when I arrive at the post office. I collect the envelope and take it over to an uncrowded corner near a trash can so that, if I slit it open and find that the sacrifice required to be an author is Aria Jones, I can throw it all away.
Out slides a check for twenty-five thousand dollars.
Holy cow!
I stuff the check into my string bag so fast that anyone watching would think it was a gun, then I hurry back to the port and onto the boat.
I stand near the front, see nothing of the blue water, feel nothing of the wind, can only imagine that my time serving food to strangers in exotic locales has caused me to lose my ability to read.
After I disembark, I run back to my room, ignoring the shouted, “Buongiorno, Aria,” from one of the waiters I work with, lock the door behind me, snap on the lights, pull out the check, and read it again.
It still says twenty-five thousand dollars.
Holy, holy, holy cow!
I starfish on the bed and scream because it’s impossible to be quiet when you’ve got a check for that much money in your hands.
Five minutes later, my bed’s a ruin and three people have knocked on the door to make sure I’m not being murdered. I make myself sit up, make myself believe that, despite there being two more envelopes enclosed with the first, none of them will ruin my Hollywood ending.
The handwriting on one is Calliope’s. Celebrate is all it says.
Dare I?
I pick up the other envelope, run my finger over the seal. The most dream-crushing thing could be inside. I could set it down, put on my bikini, go to the beach, swim until sunset, and not think about how much you have to give to get twenty-five thousand dollars.
But haven’t I already survived the most heart-bruising thing I can imagine?
I open the envelope.
It’s from my publisher.
It says that I’ll receive an editorial letter and the marked-up manuscript by special delivery to the post office in Sorrento in about a fortnight. They want to publish as soon as possible, and ask that I please attend to the edits promptly.
That’s it. No other conditions.
“Well,” I say to the empty room. “I don’t have much to do besides working on my tan and that”—I check my reflection in the mirror—“is perfect. So, yes, I can be very prompt.”
Should I move to Sorrento to do the work? Should I check into the Gatto Bianco here on Capri like all the famous people, and enjoy a little luxury?
No. I spent seven years in a hotel and my time in hotels is done.
I drop the check into the drawer of the desk in the tiny apartment I’ve been renting, which has whitewashed floors, a wooden chair and table, a blue jug stuffed with hydrangeas from the market, a cascade of bright pink bougainvillea flowers tumbling over the outside walls, and a view of the Punto Carena lighthouse and all the sea stretching west. Then I go to work at the restaurant like usual.
Two weeks later, I quit my waitressing job, catch the ferry to Sorrento, and deposit the check into a new bank account that Calliope’s opened for me using one hundred telegrams and her name to get it done because single women aren’t allowed to have their own bank account—unless your best friend is a Hollywood movie star.
I withdraw enough to cover rent and food for three months.
I have no real idea how long it takes to edit a manuscript, but I can come back and get more if I need longer.
Then I go to the post office and collect my manuscript.
It’s bound tightly with string and is scribbled all over with comments like: I’m not quite sure what her motivations are here?
Please elucidate. Or, Dig deeper. We need to feel this happening, not just be told that it happened.
Always the scenes that you’re most scared of writing are the scenes you most need to write.
It’s time to be brave.
I return to my room, roll paper into my little green Hermes 3000 and start from the beginning, not letting it pour out in a rush of words from my journals mingled with words from my nightmares and dreams like I did in Venice.
I make myself type no more than five to ten pages every day.
I buy a record player so that every time I want to squirm away from what I’m writing by going to the beach, diving into the water, and washing memory away, I have something to ground me.
A Scarlatti sonata. A Theo Winchester anthem.
My god, that man can write music.
I remember that Adele liked to have music playing when she worked in my turret and the memory makes me smile. Adele. I haven’t let myself think about her because yes, that bruises my heart too.
Is she back at school? Has she made friends? Has she learned to love her father?
And what about Flitter? Will I see her again? Or my aunt? I’d like to see her holding court by the pool.
I let the questions with no answers come at me, one after the other, don’t close my eyes or push them away. I feel them. Then I unleash all of my bruises and all of my smiles into the story I’m writing.
No, Calliope, I write to her. I wasn’t prepared for what it would unleash in me. But I’m letting it out anyway.
That wasn’t what I meant, she writes back. I meant—are you prepared for what it might unleash upon the world?
I shake my head. That’s definitely the tumor talking.
For three months, I type and swim and type some more, because what Calliope said to me is the last thing I think about each night: This will make me immortal.
I need to make that wish come true for her before she dies. But also—I let myself think it at last—I want what I talked about with Calliope.
I want a reckoning. One that locks Bob up in a turret room, bleeding what’s left of his soul onto a dirty mattress while the starlets dance, unashamed and unfettered, around the pool below.
The book is done. Three hundred pages of my soul and Calliope’s and my aunt’s and one hundred more women, so many forgotten, who were seen to have nothing more than two stars for eyes, a hundred-dollar bill for a body, and enough entrances for a man to walk right through.
But also so many women who kept going. Women I’m so proud to have known.
I hug the stack of pages to my chest and remember leaving a store in Venice with the very first dress I’d ever bought for myself tucked into a bag, thinking: What talent do I have that would make me smile?
It makes me smile to take the ferry to Sorrento with my book tucked into my basket, makes me smile to wrap the typed pages in brown paper, makes me smile to hand the parcel over to the desk clerk, a parcel addressed to the biggest publishing house in New York City.
It makes me smile, yes, but it also makes me wonder: What now?
What can I do next that will make me smile like this?
There’s more that I want to do. One book isn’t enough to keep future Nathalies and Calliopes safe.
They’ll still arrive in Hollywood, still be prey to the Bobs, even if by some miracle, enough people read my book to understand what the Bobs are capable of.
Writing the book has made me see that one part of the vow I made so many years ago was a vow worth making: to try to keep the starlets safe.
What I no longer believe is that I have to be invisible to do it.
I want the book to be the mattress in the turret now that I’m no longer there. No—I hope the book is better than the mattress in the turret. That it saves more, faster.
But can an inanimate object save anyone?
The question sits in my head as I check the poste restante for mail. There’s a letter waiting for me and I open it, expecting it to be from Calliope. But it reads: Aria. You saved my life. Thank you. Miss Devine Rey.
Oh! As I reread my aunt’s words, the smile on my face is so enormous that a stranger says to me with a knowing smile, “Ah, a love letter.”
Yes, I suppose it is. My aunt will most likely never say that she loves me. And yet, her letter tells me that she does.
I pay for some paper and write a reply, telling Miss Devine about my book.
At the bottom of the letter, I say, This morning I was wondering if reading my book might save some future starlet.
But after reading your letter, I’m wondering—what if there was something that could be done before the saving had to happen?
Something I could do that stopped a starlet from ever starting to drown?
Then I add: Please write back. Of everyone alive, it’s Miss Devine who’s seen enough of Hollywood to help me find the answers to my questions.
When I return to Capri, I walk down to the beach for the first time in days.
The late afternoon sun is warm and strong and I tip my head back so the rays fall on my face, melting away the tight muscles in my neck and shoulders from sitting too long at the typewriter.
And only now does it hit me, right there on the sand when I realize I have nothing to rush back to my room to do.
I’ve written a book and it’s going to be published and I still have the best part of twenty-five thousand dollars sitting in a bank account.
I should dance on the sand. I should throw myself into the water.
The sand is crowded with vacationers. As is the sea. So many people and me, alone.
I sit down, try to recover my smile, as well as the pride that I have in myself at last. Over there is a group of people I know, Americans and Italians, all working the restaurants and hotels just as I was doing before I quit like every other fly-by-night American who comes here to get a tan and live cheaply and swim all day.
With them is a man I went out with a few times.
I could join them, swim with them, sit beside the man at dinner and we might kiss again. I could tell them about my book.
But I don’t want that. I want my people.
Who are my people? The ones who’d dance with me on the sand, then leap into the water, holding my hand?
What if—please God, no—what if I’ve found myself, only to lose everyone that I love?
The sea crashes and retreats, crashes and retreats. It offers no advice.
It’s up to me to figure out what to do.
It always has been.
I return to my room. Pack my suitcase. Catch the ferry out of Italy.