Chapter 13 #2
“But yes, great books.” She lifted the reading glasses and read the embossed gold print on the green hardcover. “Leaves of Grass. Walt Whitman. Holy shit, is this a first edition?”
“Christmas present from my mom, a few years back. I have no idea how she found it.”
“When you said you lived in a pool house, I pictured a changing shed, perhaps with a bar.”
“The kitchen was a bar when I moved in,” Griffin said, strolling toward it. “I had it converted, though it’s still basic. I also repurposed the sauna as a closet. Care for a drink?”
“Yes, please, but first I need a bathroom. Do you have one of those?”
He pushed a hidden door in the wooden wall. “It’s minimalist, but not that minimalist.”
The bathroom reminded her of a powder room in a spa—all teak, glass, and smooth, white surfaces.
A little messy—it had the look of someone who’d been more concerned with packing for a week away than leaving the place tidy for their return.
Behind a glass door were wooden shelves and racks holding T-shirts and jeans, shirts, sweaters and suits, folded towels.
She found herself staring at Griffin’s underwear—cotton boxers—and quickly looked away.
It was like his entire life was laid out around her. And there wasn’t much to it.
Despite its architectural appeal, the pool house felt like a temporary retreat rather than a true home. Somewhere you came to regroup, rebuild, heal, before rejoining the world fully formed.
When she emerged, Griffin had placed glasses on the coffee table, alongside orange juice and sparkling water. Condensation pebbled on the bottles.
“Pantry’s a little bare, sorry.” He was chopping something at the counter.
For the first time in days, she felt completely safe.
Like normalcy still existed. She hadn’t even realized how on edge she’d been—which reminded her why she shouldn’t be lapping this up.
Vivien was who-knew-where, while she had a Hollywood star rustling her up lunch at a Beverly Hills mansion.
It was all too, too cozy. “First thing I was going to do when I got home last night was give the place a good clean.”
“You do your own cleaning?”
“Don’t most people?”
“Yeah, but you’re not…” He frowned, and she changed tack. “You work such long hours. I’m sure you could justify a cleaner.”
He screwed up his beautiful face, though it remained beautiful.
“I’m thinking there’s a story there?”
“I feel like you’ve heard enough stories about my life.”
“Can I take a wild stab that it comes back to trust issues?”
“I wish I could shock you and say no, but… Gotta say though, cleaning all that glass is a bitch. At least we don’t get sea spray.”
“How long have you lived here, since you moved back in?”
He thought for a few seconds. “Going on seven years.”
Okay, so not all that temporary. She was drawn to the terrace with the view over the city.
But just as she stepped outside—the demarcation no more than a groove in the stone where the glass door slid through—Griffin’s hand closed around her arm.
She suppressed a gasp. He was scanning a hillside to their left, frowning.
“Maybe don’t go out there,” he said, coaxing her back in. “There’s a spot on the hill where paps sometimes camp out.”
She could see nothing but green and brown scrub inset into sand-colored soil. He was like a Secret Service agent checking for snipers. “You don’t go outside?”
“I’ll risk it if I’m alone and fully dressed. But shots of me entertaining a woman at home would have currency, and we don’t want to alert the goons to your location. You’re okay standing here—they can’t get an eyeline inside.”
He returned to the kitchen as she sat on the sofa.
The view was so broad, she could track the earth’s curve across the distant Pacific.
The sun winked off the sharp edges of Century City skyscrapers, and the sky slid out forever, melting from cobalt to hazy white on the horizon, before the sea carried the blue back to meet the city’s sandy fringe.
“The view is actually better now than when my grandfather had the house built in the fifties,” Griffin said. “We have photos from back then, and you can’t see the ocean for the smog.”
“Your family’s been here that long?”
“He bought the site when the whole neighborhood was giant dirt terraces cut into the hill.”
“I’ve read about that. All the houses had to be single level so everyone got a view, so they sprawled sideways rather than up.
Flat roofs, floor-to-ceiling glass, the house arranged around the pool and the view.
The beginnings of mid-century modern. 979.
493,” she added, and Griffin smiled. She and a movie star had private jokes now. “Was it a gated community back then?”
“No, people were way more trusting. They wanted to show off their wealth, not hide it. They’d line up their expensive cars in carports for passersby to admire. No footpaths though—to discourage lingering. The paranoia didn’t hit until the late sixties.”
“The Manson murders?”
“Just over in Benedict Canyon.” He jerked his head to the west. “Hit my grandmother hard. She knew Sharon Tate—they were friends or rivals or perhaps something in between, though Granny was a few years older. They both posed for Playboy, back in the day. Jockeyed for the same film roles.”
“Your grandmother posed for Playboy?”
“A lot of them did. She said it was sold to her as an ‘empowering statement of feminine allure.’ Anyway, you know how Sharon Tate was nearly nine months pregnant when she was killed? At the time Granny was heavily pregnant with my mom. She stayed away from the funeral because she thought her belly would be too much of a reminder of what Sharon Tate’s family had lost, and she said she would have been a mess, anyway—the thought of her friend lying in that coffin with her arms around the swaddled baby she never got to meet… ”
“Say no more.”
“Plus, at that point the killers were still unknown and on the loose—they didn’t arrest anyone for months.
People become guarded—literally. Granny rallied the neighbors and lobbied for this street to be gated.
Dead-end road, and the hillside forms a natural amphitheater, so it didn’t take much, just some greasing with the authorities.
There are much bigger gated communities around now.
Then five years later, Patty Hearst was kidnapped, and private security became big business—a status symbol, even.
” He looked out at the pool. “Sharon Tate sat out there once in a bikini and drank martinis. We have photos.”
It didn’t take much to imagine a seventies starlet draped along a lounger, looking over the same skyline that rolled out before Lana.
The view was almost painfully beautiful, too much to absorb in one sitting.
Sure, Lana had seen views like that—from the Griffith Observatory, the overlook above the Hollywood Bowl, the Greystone Mansion.
But to own one? To have such a view that you got to know it as intimately as the brick wall in her studio, which had been generously sold as a feature wall?
No chance of hearing the sea though. This was where Griffin sat, looking out over the world he didn’t feel safe in. Look, but don’t touch. Like with Griffin, currently staring into the fridge—right there in front of you, but no chance he would ever be yours.
The only view from Lana’s studio was the parking building next door.
But she’d set up her apartment to face inward.
That was the point—to fold cozily in on itself.
Vivien liked to tease her about making an apartment out of books, thanks to the rudimentary bricks-and-planks shelving she’d stacked around the walls to house her ever-growing collection.
If there’s an earthquake, I’ll know to look for you under a pile of Edith Whartons.
Vivien.
“So, to recap,” Lana said, opening the sparkling water and pouring a glass. A loud bang sounded outside, and something splashed into the pool. Lana started, knocking the entire glass over her pants.
She leaped up, flicking water off. “Was that a gunshot? Did someone just shoot a bird?”
“A drone,” Griffin said, looking into the pool. He sounded unimpressed but not surprised. “Paps fly them over from time to time, trying their luck getting pictures. The guards are permitted to take them down. They use a silencer, but it doesn’t completely muffle the shot.”
“Drones?!”
“They’re less of a problem here than they were in Malibu, where people would fly them up from the beach. They’re banned there now but for a while they were a pain in the ass. Let me get you a towel.”
As he came back from the bathroom, something beeped—the tablet by the entrance. He tossed Lana the towel, then diverted to the door and touched the screen.
“Nice shooting,” he said.
“Sorry for the disturbance,” a woman replied. “Did you see where it landed?”
“In my pool. I’ll fish it out later.”
“I can’t locate the operator—nothing on the cameras. It was definitely zeroing in on your place.”
He ended the call. Suddenly Lana didn’t feel so safe.
“Ah, man, you’re soaked,” he said. “I’ll grab some clothes from Mom’s closet.”
“She won’t mind?”
“She won’t know. Her wardrobe is twice the size of this room.” He looked around, reconsidering. “Three times. And it’s packed.”
He came back from the house with a short-sleeved white sweater and a pleated skirt—pale pink with tiny white polkadots. Lana headed to the bathroom to change.
“If you give me your clothes, I’ll put them in my folks’ dryer.”
The skirt didn’t fasten all the way, but it felt secure enough, and the top was just long enough to drape over the waistband.
Lana felt like an unconvincing screen siren.
When she returned, Griffin was setting a platter on the coffee table—mandarins, halved cherry tomatoes, smoked salmon, and bocconcini sitting in what she guessed was balsamic.
“I pretty much opened the fridge and caught whatever fell out,” he said.