Siren Queen(45)
“I have,” I said. “A man, actually. Two of them.”
“That does not sound like you,” Greta commented, and I nodded and told her all about the house in Bel-Air, and the price of fish, and the different masks worn by monsters.
IX
Greta hid for most of September. Most of the publicity for The Belles of St. Desmond was already in the can, and after it premiered to raves across the country, Greta was in a position to have artistic fits. I brought her the papers that talked about her Scandinavian spates of darkness, seasonal megrims that turned the glowing starlet into a moon in eclipse. She laughed at them, and took up wearing a filmy nightgown left behind by a girl who had left to marry an orchard owner. It floated around her like a fog of dry ice, and it gave the dorm a reputation for hauntings when she walked the halls on restless nights.
Nemo’s Revenge wrapped, but Scottie Mannheim told me to hang on to the rubber tail. Return of the Siren had already gotten a green light, and Harry and I were back together. He was all beaming pleasure to see me, and he took me home with him every few weeks. A shot of me getting into his Bentley appeared in Variety, under the headline “Captain Tames a Siren?” and Harry offered it to me, framed, with a flourish.
Emmaline had gone to Gstaad at the end of August, and the papers were full of her teaching Cassidy Dutch to ski, to enjoy wine, to simply exist in the privileged peace of the Alps.
“They love to see nobility,” she said one night before she left. “Grace and generosity that elevates rather than degrades.”
It was the only time she had come close to mentioning Dutch during the fires. She knew how to ski, and how to snowshoe and fish through ice as well, doing it all in a cold that I couldn’t imagine in the California sun.
I read the magazine articles that had pictures of Emmaline flushed and triumphant on the slopes, and I missed her so much that I cut out one of those pictures and slid it under my pillow so I could see it at night. Greta would have disapproved, and Emmaline herself would have laughed fit to kill, but it was better than nothing. I decided I would ask her for a real picture when she came back. Perhaps she knew someone who could take a photograph for us, her at home and barefoot, pale hair bound in braids for sleep and a glass of red wine in her hand.
Without Emmaline and without Greta, I still went to the fires, walking between them with a kind of assurance that would eventually become the real thing. Sometimes I heard my name and turned away. Sometimes I stayed for a short time at Harry’s fire, one of an adoring cadre. I looked at the knowing women there and the charming men, and I wondered, but didn’t ask.
Once I walked through the darkness and found a gleaming platinum fire, and around it I could see men and women I didn’t recognize. They were painted in silver and black, and though their mouths moved, they did not speak. They were ghosts, though I doubted they had ever been human in the first place, and I thought of the button-eyed silk dolls my mother had made.
I came home to Greta, who paced our apartment endlessly, only leaving it to step out onto the balcony in the orange-skied night. She slept in short bursts, coming awake at every noise, and more than anything else towards the end, she craved fish. I struck a deal with a grip whose brother worked on a commercial fishing boat. Every few days, he brought us gleaming cuts of halibut and yellowtail wrapped in paper and paid for from the money Greta never touched. She opened the paper with hands that shook from hunger, and with her hair tied back to keep it out of the way, she bit into the raw firm flesh with relish. She ate it, bones and scales and all, and when she did, she glowed with a kind of satisfied light.
It was easy to think that time never passed on the lots, but there was something different going into October. After a strangely arid August and September, October saw rain every day, even if it dried and was a memory by two in the afternoon. Walking down the dorm hallways, I saw some girls with altars set out to welcome their dead, small and private and ashamed in a place where the dead could rise up after a stabbing and where the only gods ruled at the Friday fires.
“I’m going with you,” I told Greta one night.
She sighed, but there was a smile in it. She stroked her belly, by now unmistakable.
“I’ll call her Luli if we all survive this, then,” she said, and, startled, I began to laugh. I hadn’t heard from my sister in months, though my mother sent me notes acknowledging the money I sent home.
“Good,” I said, and sitting on the floor, I pressed my ear against her belly, getting a sharp kick to the cheek for my trouble.
“I’ll be better to you,” I whispered, and Greta’s fingers combed through my hair.
Wolfe Studios was tense through the week leading up to Halloween. There was something fevered in the air, and we all felt it, from Oberlin Wolfe on down. I caught Brandt Hiller’s name in the papers off and on, and his picture as well, smiling and hollow-eyed. He’d been seen sneaking out of Gloria West’s house in Pomona, he was caught in a clinch with Dina Everwood at Del Ray.
“Poor boy,” Greta said softly, touching a picture of him getting into Gloria West’s limousine. “He’s drowning.”
As far as I know, she hadn’t seen him since the night I had gone to get love-comes-home for Emmaline. Thankfully her anger had mellowed to something that she could live with, and the baby mellowed it further. She was almost human sometimes.
On Halloween night, Greta dressed for the first time in ages. She showered, scrubbing her hair until it was pure silver and sewing it up in a crown of braids around her head. She put on a long shapeless dress made of blue linen. I watched her twist and turn experimentally in it, ensuring she could move her arms fully, and then she slipped on a pair of lace-up workman’s boots that I suspected she had stolen off someone on The Belles of St. Desmond. Iron was strictly regulated in the studio, no chance of getting any of that, but she slipped an ice pick into her pocket. It wasn’t iron, but it could ruin just about anyone’s day.