Chapter 37
My room is not yet ready at the hotel. They’ve had a sudden influx of guests, due to the living nightmare unfolding in Los Angeles, and as an FYI, they’ve waived their no-dogs-allowed policy for the time being.
It’s just me, I tell the receptionist, and she says I can go and grab something to eat at the bar if I’d like and that my room should be ready by the time I’m done.
The wood-walled tavern is as I’ve imagined the cabins at Lake Wanika.
I’ve been there, of course, but memory is the original unreliable narrator.
There are a few patrons scattered about, their suitcases by their sides, heads rounded over their phones, and in the corner by the garnish station, I see a face I recognize.
I am planning on turning away, hiding out in my car until my room is ready, but then she lifts her face and looks directly at me, and we have no choice but to acknowledge each other.
I roll my suitcase over with an apologetic smile.
“Fancy seeing you here,” Claire says.
“I was going with long time, no see.”
Claire offers a polite laugh. She’s wearing the same clothes that she was wearing in our pitch meeting today—black suit skirt that hits her at mid-calf, Nikes, and an oversized gray sweater, which she uses now to wipe a smudge from the lens of her nerd-girl glasses.
“Where do you live?” I ask.
“I’m south of Sunset on Swarthmore.” She finishes her glass of wine. “In the Pacific Palisades.”
“Oh no,” I say gravely.
Claire signals the bartender for another round. “Yeah.”
“Have you heard anything?”
“Just a bunch of unsubstantiated rumors on Nextdoor that everything is gone.”
“I mean, it’s Nextdoor.”
“That’s what I keep telling myself,” she says, but she does not sound optimistic.
“I’ll give you your space,” I tell her, but Claire shakes her head.
“Have a drink with me. Keep me from doomscrolling, please.”
“What are you having?”
“Some thirty-dollar glass of Pinot Noir that is dangerously drinkable.”
“I’ll do the same,” I say to the bartender.
“Would you like to just get a bottle?” he suggests, and Claire and I look at each other, say in unison, “Sure.”
I shimmy my tote bag off my shoulder and go to hook it under the bar but find that Claire has taken them all.
I don’t want to ask her to remove any of her things, so I sit down with my large tote in my lap.
I make a tremendous amount of noise doing this, all my rings and bracelets and charms clinking and clanking together. Claire looks me over with a laugh.
“You’re like that episode of Friends.”
“Which one?”
“The one where Joey puts on all Chandler’s clothes. Except, it’s jewelry.”
“I can’t find my travel case anywhere.”
“I use this one from that I got the last time I was evacuated, because I was like you. Wearing everything. I’ll send you the link. Super cheap. Apparently it’s what all the jewelers in the diamond district use.”
“God bless a good find.”
“So,” Claire says as the bartender pours her a half-inch taste of the wine. “Your pitch today.” She swills her glass, knocks it back. “Great,” she tells him, then turns to me. “I need to know something.”
My heart bangs in my ears. We should not be having this conversation, Claire and I. She knows it too. But her mouth is stained purple, our city is burning to the ground, and there is the sense that we can say anything to each other without consequence.
“Is it true?” she wants to know.
I clear my throat, itchy with my toxin-tour through the westside of Los Angeles. “What part?”
“That your husband didn’t fuck you.”
My smile is rueful. That’s the part I would want to know, if I were on the other side of the conference room table. “My agent would tell me to tell you that I took inspiration from my marriage, but that the events and characters themselves are fabricated.”
“And would that be true?”
I stare at the bartender’s modest pour. That’s how you know it’s a nice bottle of wine and not just an expensive one. Carefully meted-out splashes that ensure you’re always sipping, savoring, but never drinking.
“No,” I say.
Claire blows all the air out of her lungs. “Wow.”
I wince. “Caroline is going to kill me for telling you that.”
We sit. We sip. We savor.
“Actually,” Claire says, “I think this is good.”
“Good?”
She turns to me, her eyes magnified and determined behind her glasses.
“I want to make this film with you, Faye. I think it’s nasty, and real, and extremely fucking hot.
I mean. We know that women have rape fantasies, right?
Fifty Shades was page after page of chicken scratch and still it was a phenomenon, even among smart women.
But how do you do an elevated version of that in today’s climate?
It’s a delicate line to walk and no one is even trying.
The industry operates from a place of fear and anxiety and you don’t need me to tell you that it shows in the flaccid final cut. ”
Claire pauses so that the bartender can top her off, waits for him to move away and attend to someone else.
“The talk around town is that everyone loves this pitch but that they’re too scared to touch it because they don’t want to be sued into oblivion, but if you think about it, he only has grounds to do that if what you are claiming about him is true, and what man in his right mind is going to come out and admit to having the sex drive of a doorknob? ”
I stare at her, my chest ballooning, my heart rising. “I want to make this movie with you too.”
“You need a hit.”
I look down at my hands. All the rings on my fingers and not a single wedding band. “I can’t believe I thought I needed one before.”
“My ex is a punk too. You’ll get through it.
Speaking of—” She lifts her phone. “I should give him a call. He had the kids when we got the evacuation notice. They went to my in-laws’ in Newport.
” She takes one last sip of her wine. Tells the bartender to put the bottle on her room.
She hoists herself off the stool and reaches for her bag hanging underneath the bar, finally clearing space for mine.
I remove my big tote bag from my lap and hang it up, and now that I have some breathing room, I take off my coat too, the long suede one some stylist convinced me to buy but was so expensive I’m too afraid to wear it.
I fold that in my lap and smile at Claire, who, standing, is about eye level with my collarbone.
“Oh,” she says, startled. “Just like from the story.”
I touch my chin to my chest to see the silver charm snagged in the button of my shirt. I shake out my collar, straighten the chain.
“So you took it when you two broke up?” Claire cocks her head, studies me with X-ray eyes.
I laugh off the concern on her face. “I promise I wasn’t held against my will for a week in the Adirondacks, Claire. It’s just a fantasy.”
Claire raises her eyebrows and presses her lips together, emitting a dubious vibration.
She turns and rolls her matching hard-shell suitcases behind her.
Unwatched, I slip the pendant under my shirt and lay my hand over its familiar shape.
There are times I think the metal organ beats with blood, warm as my own.
Times too, that I think we did change the ending.