Siren Queen(81)
XI
There were a few more scenes to film, but they didn’t need me, and the moment I was cool enough to touch again, Harvey Rose appeared and told me I had an appointment with Oberlin Wolfe.
“I’m going to get dressed first,” I said, and I knew how much had changed because he only nodded and stood back to wait.
I dressed hurriedly, and when Tara came to find me in my dressing room, I pulled her into a hard kiss. She hissed because I must have tasted of acetate and heat, but she clung to me.
“What happens now?” she asked, and I smiled at her.
“Now I go and talk with Oberlin Wolfe,” I said. After a moment of hesitation, I passed her my keys. “Wait for me at home.”
“How long?”
“Until I come back.”
She grinned at that.
“All right.”
I was mostly human, mostly just tired, when Harvey Rose escorted me up to Oberlin Wolfe’s office, going right by Janet, who stared at me with a kind of empty loathing and open envy.
Wolfe sat at his desk, and he watched me with eyes filled with the opposite of worship. He looked like an animal who could see a meal but knew it had been laced with poison.
“So it’s true. You rose.”
“I did. And my contract is up in a month.”
I could feel the edge of it even now. Wolfe and I had agreed on three years, and they were almost up. Over at Everest, they had been haunting Ord Street for their own flower of the East, while Aegis had gone farther afield, only to be tricked by fox girls in Beijing and swindled by snake girls in Guangzhou. If I walked in like I was, glowing and with the siren queen’s smile on my face, they’d give me whatever I wanted.
Oberlin Wolfe held my gaze, and then he looked away. He had been planning to scrape me out. I might have spent the rest of my life nodding away in some forgotten corner studio, trotted out to give a scene a bit of exoticism and Oriental wonder. Now he couldn’t touch me, and I drifted closer until it was only the desk that separated us. There was some narrow animal part of him that was frightened by me, by the light that still clung to my body.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice dry and papery.
Everything, I could have said, but I only smiled.
“Let’s start with what you’re never, ever going to do to me.”
No maids, no accents, no sham marriage, no more attempts to replace me with imitations, and then I paused.
Su Tong Lin had never gotten to ride off in the sunset with a handsome hero, and now that I had the chance, I wasn’t sure I wanted to.
“Monsters, however, are just fine,” I said finally. “I’d like to see more monsters.”
EPILOGUE
So you’ve probably seen Siren Queen, or at least the last two minutes of it. Somehow, the cameras caught it all, my wonder, my fear and awe, and then of course, the kiss that obliterated everything else. We could have burned straight through the film, but instead it caught us.
There was another minute of Emmaline and the hero talking seriously about monsters, and how in the end they will always be defeated, but no one remembers it. What they remember is the kiss, wild and gorgeous and the very first of its kind made everlasting in silver.
A few months later, I met Emmaline on a Friday night, all alone at her fire and ready for me to find her as I had so many times before. I sat in her chair with her, and my body remembered all the curves of hers. I also remembered the flash of her white feet in the November mud, leaving me and shutting me out, so eventually I rose, and went to tend my own fire.
My own fire. I had thought before that I understood what it meant to have a fire of my own, but I didn’t, not until I looked around the flickering silver glow and saw faces like mine. There weren’t many at first, just Paley Hong, who came six months after I earned my star, and Carmen Hensen, who held hands so tightly with Lauren Main that it must have hurt. I made sure that the ones who needed to find us did. When necessary, Tara dropped a message into the hand of that girl or boy, telling them to come, it was as safe as it could be, as safe as I could make it, and they would be welcome. Later, Jane came as well, and though we never sat in the same chair, she watched me from across the flames, her eyes alive with something that could never be caged.
Tara came sometimes, too, but she never cared for the fires. I thought for a while that we could live like that, split with my heart in the flames and hers on the page, but we couldn’t. There were five years where we were good to each other, a year where we weren’t, and then she moved to San Francisco to join the dreamers in the fog.
After I became a star, I worked with Scottie Mannheim, and after the war, after she walked out of Manzanar with a fire that wouldn’t be quelled in her heart, with Jane Takamura. I don’t know what deal Jane struck with Oberlin Wolfe, but it won her seven pictures with her pick of the stars, and I was in four of them.
I met Jane one morning when I was sipping tea at the commissary. She came up to me with a bright grin and a half dozen scripts in her arms, and sat down all uninvited.
“So I hear you’re the famous monster of Wolfe Studios,” she said, and suddenly, all I could think about was kissing the single dimple on her chin.
Jane didn’t make me a monster. I was a grieving young widow in The Rubies, and in One Parisian Night, we worked on getting my Cantonese back so I could play the spy. Her movies are more famous because of her name than mine, but it was a fame I didn’t mind sharing, not with her. Stars dim and flare. After almost thirty years of quiet obscurity, where I mostly slept and watched the diamond cities with a calm and agate eye, Siren Queen played to a whole new generation, and the girls went wild over me. They dug up Tara’s Starlight Requiem, where she’s less kind to me than she could be, and The Demons of Big Sur, where she does a little better. They talked in intrigued whispers about how close Greta and I were, and it pleased me that decades after Oberlin Wolfe died in that mysterious fire, they called her Greta. They realized that I must be the L that Jane talks about in her autobiography, her star, her darling, her grief, and sometimes her wife.