Siren Queen(27)
IV
Friday, I’m sure, was meant for something, but whatever it was got lost in Friday night. Friday night was when all the walls came down, and Wolfe Studios shifted that slight bit to make it something other than a series of sound stages and back lots in the middle of the Hollywood groves. Something about Friday dropped the boundaries down like silk banners. The hunt rode on Friday nights, not like they did on Halloween and Midsummer, but we could hear their horns through the clinking of champagne glasses and the laughter that rose in an attempt to hide them.
If we were clever, we would have barred the door and stayed inside, but I think if we were that kind of clever, we would never have walked past the great silver wolves at the gate. Deals were struck on Friday nights. Directors had their heads turned by clever girls and beautiful boys. A Friday night lover could be a formidable ally on Monday morning, and they said that children conceived at the Friday night fires went on to be stars in their own right, heroes and ringmasters, politicians and beauty kings.
Once, a girl in our dorm saw something enormous and horned devour a darkly beautiful girl with a lisping Castilian accent. The next Monday, I saw that same girl in dance class, a calm and silver light in her eyes, and I wouldn’t have bet a single cent on whether she was more or less than she had been.
The Friday fires never became normal. I remembered one girl, tugging her pearl earring restlessly, who said that they existed outside of time. If we went walking too far into the dark, the studio would turn into earthwork halls and stone circles, unmoored and drifting in the dark and the smoke. A boy with a delicate mustache and wild eyes said that the fires were the reason for the studios in the first place, that it all went on to keep the fires burning. He jumped into one, nothing to sacrifice but himself. I remember his mother coming to pick up his name from the receiving office, carrying it out in an envelope. She was lucky to get that.
I had never gone to the fires before Greta was cast in The Belles, though she had ventured down there once or twice. I was putting it off for some reason, perhaps waiting until I had more than cast-off parts to show for it. I still hadn’t proved myself in any way that counted, but that night, Greta needed to wander and to move, or she might have frayed herself to pieces with stress and weak tears.
There were tides of old clothes washed around in the dorms, discards and left-behinds, and though it was rare for Greta to find anything that would stretch over her hips or her breasts, I did somewhat better. That night, she simply wrapped herself in yards of pale mulberry silk, pinning it here and there and in the end emerging awkward and strange but beautiful. I did well for myself in a shapely dress in newly fashionable black. No one else would touch it because it belonged to a girl who committed love suicide with a grip (“screwing below the line,” as Evelyn Drake said, and I was glad when she was exiled to Aegis in exchange for an Indian girl with a Brooklyn accent), but I wasn’t in love with anyone, so I knew I would be fine.
“Stay with me tonight,” Greta insisted. “I do not want to be alone.”
I still hadn’t figured out what had happened to Greta the night before. I knew she had been brought in to read for Joseph Spengler, and then she would have been tested against whatever male star they were showcasing. I tried to ask her, but she only pinched her mouth into a painfully thin line, shaking her head.
* * *
It occurred to me as we skirted the edges of the fires that for Greta, human though she looked, love might be something very different. I was old enough to see love wreck other girls, with pregnancy, with drugs, with a longing that could never be quenched, and the idea that Greta’s kind of love might be more destructive yet terrified me.
Tonight she clung to my arm as if I was a knight in shining armor, and whenever someone got too close, she buried her face in my shoulder. Most of the people we passed looked on her with contempt, fat and frumpy in her cocoon of silk, but a few looked with wonder at the gleam that peeked through. They never noticed me at all. I might have been her nurse or some old friend brought up from the valley to see the secret fires.
A few of the girls who lived in our dorm called us over, and when I shot her an inquiring eyebrow, Greta nodded. The sky was just losing its last traces of blue, and the fire they had gathered around was small and furtive. They seemed to be hiding, and the smiles the girls there gave us were shy. Studio changelings, I thought. They had been brought up in the shadows of the fires. They had scraped out a kind of life there, and they knew how to keep safe against the long nights.
We sat with them though neither of us could understand their strange and sharp language. It sounded a little like Cantonese, I thought, and French, and it mingled with some kind of punctuating hand sign that fluttered like small birds. One of them passed me a flask with a giggle, and shrugging, I took it. The first sip was unpleasant, pure burning with a crisp honey and herbal aftertaste that made me think of my father’s tortoiseshell cabinet. I passed the flask to Greta, who took a long pull immediately, gasping a husky laugh when she was done.
“Uisge beathe,” she said with a smile. “It’s different than what my cousins gave to me, but good. Thank you. Thank you.”
She passed it back to the tall girl with the dead pale skin and black hair, but the girl passed it back to her. As Greta took another long sip, I looked at the girl sharply, but her gaze was perfectly level. There was no gloating plan or lust for humiliation in the girl’s eyes, but I didn’t trust her. When she would have given Greta a third drink, I pushed her hand away.