Siren Queen(44)
“What do you think of me?” I asked. Jacko Dewalt was right, I was as cold as the Atlantic, but if Harry Long had wanted someone warm and bright and bubbly, he wouldn’t have taken me into his midnight Bentley.
I had given him permission to look, but there was something curiously antiseptic about the way he regarded me, amusement tempered with something like real compassion. There had been little enough of it in my life that it looked to me like pity, and I prickled a little.
“I think you are a lovely young woman with a bit of a taste for blood,” he said at last. “I think you will work very hard to get a tenth of what other girls as talented as you will be given. I think that you could be a magnificent monster, if you don’t forget that, after all, you are a monster.”
“That … wasn’t what I expected,” I said. I wished suddenly that Greta was here with me, but she was home in the dorm, malingering and staying out of sight as her belly grew. I had been raiding the farm stands for her when I could, bringing back oranges and apples and great bouquets of dark lettuce. It was better than the chalk at least.
Harry’s finely drawn eyebrow went up, and he smiled.
“Did you expect me to seduce you over oysters?” he asked, and I shrugged.
“I don’t know why else you brought me here.”
“Because monsters need to look out for one another,” he said. “You are Emmaline Sauvignon’s sweetheart, aren’t you?”
I hadn’t expected to hear Emmaline’s name that night at all, and I jerked like a fish on the line.
“You know Emmaline?” I asked in shock, and he smiled a little.
“Of her, anyway. I know about the company she keeps. When she first came to Wolfe Studios, she was just a little girl from Minnesota who did very well at one of the auditions. She got tired of small roles and bit parts, and came to look for wisdom from my friend Helen Martel.”
Helen Martel’s star shone dimmed but still true. She had done a handful of pictures at the beginning of the talkies, and then taking the money she made, spun it into real estate gold. All anyone knew about her anymore was that she had a different property for every week in the year, and that she did not suffer fools.
“Emmaline and Helen Martel…”
“Perhaps. But I didn’t think that you would hold it against her, given what you thought coming here.”
That was different, I might have said, but of course it wasn’t.
“No, I only wanted to enjoy dinner with a young woman who is going places and also to say sorry for landing you such a blow today.”
“It was nothing,” I said, and he laughed.
“Stoic to the last, I see. No wonder you make such a good siren.”
“You said you were a monster yourself, that we should look out for one another…”
He tilted his head to one side, but instead of answering, he only said, “Ah, there’s Teo now.”
Teo turned out to be a smiling young man with thick black hair and a slightly babyish face. They spoke fluent Spanish together, and Teo smiled at me.
“Glad you liked the food I put out,” he said diffidently, and I felt a little dizzy.
“You’re Mexican?” I asked, startled, and Harry smiled, a little more bitterly.
“Venezuelan, not that it makes a difference here,” he said.
“It does back home,” Teo added, taking the food out of the grocery bags and putting it away with the ease of long familiarity. When I saw him pull an apple from the bag and bite into it, one hip hitched against counter and watching me with a friendly and curious look, something locked together in my head.
“Monster in more ways than one,” I said, understanding, and Harry nodded.
“Monsters to others perhaps, but at home we are simply ourselves. Best you learn that early on.”
They fed me, which still meant a great deal when memories of long and hungry afternoons weren’t so far behind me. My mother made it a matter of pride that we all had dinner together, eating late enough in the evening that our stomachs rumbled, but during the day we were mostly on our own.
Teo and Harry chatted lightly about the price of fish at the good market, who was sleeping with whom, the charms that Harry kept up around his house to turn back ill wishes. Someone was pregnant, someone had made an unwise deal with a devil and now even more unwisely flaunted the black fingernail that went with it. They included me sometimes, but were just as happy to let me stay silent. I ate their food and soaked in a kind of nourishment that I didn’t even know that I had been lacking.
I had thought that the Friday fires were real, that what Emmaline and I had lived there and only there. Now that love leaked into the world I had to live in the rest of the time, came out in a fan of avocado on a white plate and a careless kiss as Teo passed behind Harry to collect the dinner plates.
Harry told me I could stay the night, but Greta would worry, so I told him no. On the ride home, I was silent, feeling full of a new kind of wonder. Harry and Teo didn’t belong to the Friday fires. In Harry’s house in Bel-Air, they belonged only to themselves.
When I walked into the room, Greta was still awake, on her side on the couch, reading a magazine with a scowl as she sounded out the odd difficult English word. She raised her eyebrow as I locked the door behind me and leaned against it.
“You’ve met someone,” she guessed, and I came to sit next to her. In her flannel nightgown, she was as round as a pear.