Chapter 51
51
JESSE
Now
Wednesday was Jesse’s last day in LA, and he decided to spend it more leisurely. He was done with research, and he had given up hope of meeting Minnie. So he decided to go easy on himself, to rest his tired feet, to lie in and go downstairs for a relaxing breakfast just before the service closed at 11a.m.
As he stepped out of the elevator into the bustling reception area, he thought he’d better find out what time check out was and ask whether he could leave his luggage in a baggage room. His flight wasn’t until tonight.
‘Yes, sir,’ a woman behind the desk said. ‘Check out is midday and you can leave your cases in the vestiaire in the basement.’
Vestiaire , Jesse thought, laughing to himself.
‘Thanks,’ he said, as he went to the dining room, picked up a paper, and slid into a table for two. He ordered coffee and pancakes from a waitress, eschewing the buffet breakfast, and scrolled through the news on his phone. While he was clicking on a story about another Tory MP embroiled in another scandal, he heard a familiar voice. A British accent. A man directing people: which car they should head towards and where and when they would reconvene. He dropped his phone on the table, looked across the restaurant and saw Devon Smith, the agent who looked like an actor, standing up, fastening the button on his jacket, extending a confident arm as if to say after you . The woman he was letting out of a large round table wore a white blazer slung over her shoulders and short black bobbed hair.
‘Minnie?’ Jesse whispered to himself, delighted. ‘Fuck!’
He threw his napkin down, bounced up and then froze, paralysed in the middle of the restaurant, as he watched the group of men and women, about six or seven of them, air kiss each other and say their goodbyes.
Fuck! Why didn’t I come down earlier?
Jesse opened his mouth to call out her name. To shout, ‘Nice to meet you, I’m Jesse!’ To see if he could eke out a long-forgotten joke.
But it was too late. He watched the group head off onto the street to awaiting cars.
Fuck.
She obviously hadn’t wanted to see him anyway. Maybe the agent hadn’t even bothered to convey the message. Jesse was just a distraction in a tightly packed schedule. Or if he had, why would she want to see him? She was busy. She was having the time of her life after everything she had worked hard for, after some shit-rotten luck, after she’d made the leap and jumped on a plane to get there. Minnie Byrne did not need Jesse Lightning to rain on her parade. She was being schmoozed, dined, directed. She was the talent. Jesse was just a small part of her journey; she was a small part of his. Perhaps they would one day both look back on their six-week friendship, their five magical days together and their one-night fling, with gratitude, he hoped.
Jesse looked at the floor, shook his head, and went back to his table, as agitated as he had been that first day in Bondiga’s Books, only this time Minnie hadn’t seen his beautiful, flustered face.
After Jesse packed, checked out, and put his case in the luggage store, he decided to walk all of Hollywood Boulevard, to find Angela Lansbury’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and to finish his LA odyssey in the most LA of ways. Saraswati was in his pocket, so the trip had been a success at least. Saraswati was the reason he had come, and he could delete the plane tracker app on his phone, go home, and get on with his life.
The September sun made Hollywood glisten as he walked among the stars, laughing to himself at this most touristy of things to do. Artie had called him a tourist for walking to Griffith, if only she could see him now. As he strolled, stopping at Starbucks to grab an Americano – extra hot – he looked down at the stars, wondering which way Minnie’s car had gone when she’d left the hotel. What was the next stop on her busy schedule? He called Ida again, trying Hannah’s phone rather than Henrike’s because it was a midweek evening.
‘She’s asleep already…’ Hannah answered.
‘Oh, OK. Everything all right? How is she?’
Hannah sounded tired. Distracted. Jesse pictured her sitting on the sofa. That sofa, watching TV with a glass of wine, and all the memories of tension and deceit bobbled back to the surface. It made him yearn for his flat. He had already made the rental feel cosy yet light, warm yet open, a home he and Ida could be happy in. He would make the flat he was buying next door even more so. For the first time, as he clutched the phone to his ear and felt Hannah, he felt a sense of relief that he didn’t have to live with her any more. He was liberated by her actions, and he could be OK with that.
‘I’ll tell her you called,’ Hannah said.
‘Thanks.’
‘You’ll be back in time to get her from school on Friday, right?’
‘Right, I fly tonight, overnight.’
‘Great because I have a – I have a thing on Friday night.’ Hannah wasn’t sure what her dinner with JP was about when he’d suggested meeting up, when he’d said he wanted to ‘check in’ with her.
Jesse smiled in the glorious September sunshine.
‘Don’t worry, I’ll be there.’