Invisible(27)

Chapter 7


Antonia spent a weekend with her father and Lara before she left for L.A. in June. She had to move all her things back from the dorm for the summer. The dorm rooms were made available to students in summer programs, and she would be assigned a new room in the fall. She piled everything from her dorm room into her bedroom, along with her father’s office equipment, and it looked like a warehouse by the time she got it all in. She could barely get to her bed, and she had to pack her suitcases for L.A., to add to the mess. But it gave her a chance to see them before she left. She wouldn’t see them again until the end of August. She would be turning nineteen while she was in L.A. It didn’t bother her to spend her birthday away from home. Since it was in August, she was usually at camp in Maine anyway, or had been for many years, from seven to fifteen.

Her father and Lara were going to Greece, and had decided not to rent the house in Water Mill again. They were excited about their trip, and Antonia was thrilled about her internship in L.A. Her father had added to her allowance so she could get a decent place to stay in a safe neighborhood. She was going to rent a car, since public transportation was poor in L.A.

    She felt like she was camping out in their apartment for the weekend. With her bedroom turned into an office, and now a storeroom, there was really no place for her to stay. They could have used a three-bedroom apartment to give him an office, but he loved the apartment they had. Lara was sad that they wouldn’t see her all summer, but she knew it was going to be a great adventure for Antonia. Her father told her to take a good look at it, because if she stuck to her plan to write screenplays after college, she might be living there one day. The prospect of her moving three thousand miles away didn’t seem to bother him, which Antonia noticed too. He never seemed able to bridge the gap between them. There was an emotional void in him that she was increasingly aware of as she got older, and a lack of fatherly feelings toward her. She had always blamed some inadequacy in herself for it, but she was beginning to wonder if there was something missing in him. Or habit. Maybe he had avoided any strong emotional tie with her for so long, whatever the reason, he just couldn’t find the connection anymore.

She said goodbye to them before she went to bed on Sunday night, and left the apartment early Monday morning. She took a cab to the airport with her two suitcases filled with summer clothes, most of them suitable for work. She had a reservation at a small hotel near the studio they had recommended to her, and she had given herself a week to find a small furnished apartment, or a room somewhere. She felt very grown up flying across the country for a job, and searching for an apartment on her own. She’d never done anything like it before. She knew no one in L.A., except her mother if she could find her. It would be like finding the proverbial needle in a haystack. She was going to call actors’ agencies, and search through directories by name. Anything was possible. The only thing she knew was that her mother would be forty-four years old now. She was going to search under her maiden name of Basquet and her married name. She suspected that she didn’t use her father’s anymore, since she’d left him twelve years before, and it couldn’t be a fond memory for her either.



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    The flight to L.A. was uneventful, and she arrived at the hotel at noon local time. The hotel was small and battered looking. The room was barely bigger than the bed, but it was cheap, in a safe neighborhood, and there was a pool.

She had lunch at a coffee shop nearby once she dropped off her suitcases, scoured the real estate section of the newspaper while she ate, and circled four or five apartment listings. She called for the apartments from her hotel room, and two of them had already been rented. After lunch, she picked up her rental car. She had to take out extra insurance because of her age, but they were willing to rent to her. Her father had given her a credit card for major expenses. She rented a small, unimpressive Ford, but it would get her where she needed to go. They gave her a map of the city and neighboring counties, and she set out to see the two apartments. Both were in seedy-looking buildings, and the apartments were awful. She went back to the hotel, and took a swim in the pool. There were no hotel guests visible. She assumed they were all at work, or out for the day. She called two realtors and they had nothing for her either. She wasn’t worried. She knew she would find something sooner or later. And on Friday, she did.

    It was a small residential building in West Hollywood that rented out furnished studio apartments by the month for reasonable rents. It was small and modern and clean, tucked in between Spanish-style buildings. It was within her budget, and she rented a room on the second floor, with a view of the neighbor’s garden and a large palm tree just beyond it. It wasn’t fancy or even pretty, but it had everything she needed, and it was more than adequate for two and a half months.

“Welcome home,” she said to herself, as she dropped her suitcases in the apartment and went to look at the kitchen. It had a small fridge, a double hot plate, and a toaster oven, which was all she needed. There was a diner nearby and a Mexican restaurant up the street, where she suspected she’d be eating most of her meals. The apartment came with linens, and there was a Laundromat down the street where she could do her laundry.

She hung her clothes in the closet. A noisy old air conditioner kept the one room cool, and she was sorry the building didn’t have a pool, but that would have been a luxury she couldn’t afford.