Chapter 36
The sirens start on my drive home. Home is like “Henry.” Like “reality.” Another thing in quotation marks.
My husband took the house at my bidding.
I was the one to file, and I thought it was the one mercy I could show him.
I wanted to keep things amicable in the hopes my brother-in-law might not feel the need to retaliate on behalf of his little brother, whom everyone always called the nice one.
If I’d known how mean nice guys can get, I would have changed the locks while he was at the gym.
The other day, I drove by and saw a construction crew in the process of building out a wooden stud wall, and I had to pull over to catch my breath.
He had demolished the original fireplace with the crack in the facade, the one that predated PT and postdated him too, and it felt like a war crime, like bombing Notre-Dame, an act the UN should condemn.
I rented a storybook Tudor in the treetops of Kenter Canyon with original tile that looks great in pictures and grungy in real life.
It is quiet and peaceful and exhilarating and heartbreaking.
If not for my divorce lawyers, I could go days without using my voice.
My friends and colleagues are familiar with the ghoulish tactics of crisis PR teams; it’s not that they believe what’s being put out there about me, it’s that the public does.
It’s that I carry a stink. They will keep their distance until a pop star gets arrested for drunk driving or an Oscar winner fails to endorse the correct political candidate, until the tides begin to change online.
Hey. Is it fucked up we all collectively turned on this woman for the crime of ending her marriage?
Even if she cheated, even if she told him she wanted kids then reneged, even if she’s kind of getting old, even if she only won an Emmy because she’s white and passably pretty, though not nearly as pretty as everyone once believed, it’s not like she’s transphobic or anything.
You’ll have your renaissance, my former agent and best friend kept promising me, but then I realized she removed me from her close friends list on Instagram.
Her stories used to appear with a green ring, and usually I would watch them and know exactly where she was, because I was invited to all the same parties.
That was when I picked up the phone and called her rival.
Some of my neighbors are on the street, packing up their cars. I slow to speak to the older couple with the three rescue dogs who have no idea who I am. I roll down my window, and I can smell that it’s bad.
“Are we under evacuation?” I ask the husband. I watch as a piece of ash floats into my car and lands on my lap.
“Ready, set, go,” he says. “Did you sign up for the alerts?”
“I thought I did.”
“Double-check to be sure. I did it through the LAFD site.”
“Okay,” I say. “Thanks.”
“Stay safe,” he says.
“You too,” I say, and something about this exchange makes me want to cry.
I park in my short driveway and go into the house, turn the TV to KTLA.
On-screen is a map, and I locate my new street in the yellow zone, only half a mile from the red.
This means I need to pack my prescriptions and passport.
The wedding album I’ll leave to burn. I turn up the volume and go around the house, throwing what matters into a suitcase.
I can’t find my travel jewelry case, maybe I left it at home-home, and so I load myself up with all my gems and wheel my carry-on out to the car, looking like the Queen of Sheba.
Then I go inside, sit on the couch, and wait to be told what to do.
The west side is burning and so is the east, and the evacuation line keeps inching closer.
I nearly book a hotel on a sceney strip of Sunset in West Hollywood but impossibly, apocalyptically, a third fire breaks out in the middle of the urban grid.
I need to get out-out, I realize, and so I get in my car and drive north toward the hotel in Montecito where Jackie Kennedy and JFK had their honeymoon.
I did this drive with my husband so many times, the mountains on one side and the ocean on the other, more times than we had sex, if I had to guess.
My display screen lights up with a call from my agent.
My new one, Caroline, who is not my best friend and hopefully never will be.
“Faye,” she says. “Where are you? Did you get evacuated?”
“Just a little bit ago,” I say. The alert came as I drove under an ominous cloud of smoke that clogged the coast of Malibu. “But I’d already left.”
“Good,” Caroline says. “Okay. Good.”
“Are you okay?”
Caroline lives in the flats of Beverly Hills, but even the flats are in trouble. “For now, yes. My in-laws are here. They live in the Palisades. We keep checking their Ring. People are saying their entire neighborhood is gone. Hundreds of houses.”
I feel like someone stomped on my windpipe. I hate this kind of fear. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know,” she says, sounding just as scared as I am. Agents are supposed to put a shiny spin on bad reviews, rejections, first-season cancellations. But the end of the world is a foreign market. “Hey,” Caroline says, slightly more upbeat, “how do you think the pitch went today?”
“They clapped.”
“That’s good.”
“An offer would be better.”
“I’m trading with Claire. Hopefully I’ll have more for you tomorrow. As long as Los Angeles is still standing.”
“I guess we’ll see,” I say, depressed.
“Claire loves you. She’s a huge fan.”
Agents are always saying things like this, but huge fans pass all the time.
I ask her if she’s heard anything from the other studios I’ve pitched, and she tells me no new developments but that, for now, no news is good news.
“Passes come faster than offers,” she reminds me.
“And this pitch has generated so much interest. We’re going to get an offer, maybe even more than one.
Everyone wants erotic thrillers right now. Everyone.”
“But not everyone has an ex with a hotshot brother as litigious as mine, do they?”
“Coming, sweetie!” my agent calls. “Faye, sorry, I have to go.”
I tell Caroline to stay safe, that old Los Angeles fire-weather chestnut, and hang up.