The Last Equation of Isaac Severy(28)
After many hours of groping down blind alleys, Hazel returned to Tender Is the Night, refusing to believe that her grandfather had been out of his mind. She had to keep looking. The gift card for the now-defunct Book Circus seemed to her irritatingly unhelpful. The Hollywood bookstore had gone bankrupt years ago, and its multistoried complex now housed a combination gym and health food store. She quickly discarded the thought of haunting racquetball courts and bulk food aisles in search of camouflaged mathematics, and instead looked back through the novel. She scanned it several times but didn’t notice anything unusual, other than an underlined word on the second page, littoral, next to which was scribbled a definition in Isaac’s hand: “of or pertaining to the seashore.” Hazel had probably looked up that very word when she’d first read the book back in college, though she hadn’t retained its meaning. She scrambled the word for anagrams but could produce only tortilla and R. T. Lolita. She did the same for Raspanti’s name, but after a few hop ninja rats and no Japan shirts, she gave up.
A less nonsensical discovery came to her the second night as she lay in bed, weaving the gift card between her fingers and trying to recall Book Circus’s motto: “Run away with the Circus”? “Send in the Books”? As the lamplight caught the store’s clownish logo, she noticed that an edge was pulling away slightly from the black plastic. She went to her desk for a better look and realized that it was just a cheap sticker. She peeled it off to find a gold embossed script underneath: “Hotel d’Antibes, 5819 Foothill Drive, Los Angeles.” It wasn’t a gift card at all but a hotel key card. A large, proud, rose-colored hotel . . . Perhaps Isaac’s allusion to Fitzgerald’s first line was no literary coincidence. Is this where she would find room 137?
Hazel would have shouted an exclamation had it not been for Sybil, Jack, and Drew sleeping downstairs. She considered throwing a coat over her pajamas and borrowing Isaac’s Cadillac, but she knew the sputtering engine would wake them. Instead, she called Bennet, suddenly craving the sound of his voice. She wanted to hear him say that he missed her, that his dog missed her, that he’d discovered this new restaurant with devastating crab cakes, and when was she coming home already? But his voice mail answered. Hazel listened to his deep, unhurried greeting asking her to leave a message, and hung up.
She couldn’t sleep, and for the next hour, she stared at the ceiling, pushing a swirl of negative thoughts about Seattle out of her mind. Instead, she tried to summon the constellations she and her brother had tried to create on their bedroom ceilings using strings of white Christmas lights and a box of pins, an ambitious compensation for their city’s lack of actual star cover. They had painted some of the bulbs black in order to get the intensity of each star just right, but succeeded only in making a mess. As her eyes eventually closed and she drifted toward sleep, Hazel imagined a reality in which their star project had been a success instead of a childish tangle, in which those white string lights were still suspended from their bedroom ceilings instead of having ended up in that bubbling water with Isaac.
*
At nine the next morning, after devouring a few pancakes left behind by Sybil and Jack, Hazel made the five-minute drive from the canyon to a hotel just up the hill from Hollywood’s Franklin Village. As she stepped from the Cadillac and squinted up at an imitation French chateau that was neither proud nor rose-colored, she tried to imagine what Isaac could possibly have been doing here, so close to his own house. With its blue mansard roof and multiple stories of louvered shutters, the Hotel d’Antibes really must have been something in its day, but now it was merely clinging to old triumphs, waiting for an imaginative investor to come along. A few feeble rosebushes and bougainvillea adhered to its facade, a surface that must have once been creamy like cake icing but was now cracked and gray. The anemic lawn was flanked by a pair of shaggy fan palms, and enclosed on three sides by a malformed hedge.
A green information box on the sidewalk informed her that this was a “building of note,” which was, presumably, a notch or two below historical landmark.
Erected in the 1920s as a set of apartments, the property was transformed into a hotel during the Depression after tenants could no longer afford the rents. The new hotel quickly became a playground for the elite, and over the next two decades was the setting of myriad Hollywood legends—ruinous romances, overdoses, questionable accidents, and career sabotage—a place where those with means could check in for a few months and fashionably let themselves go.
At the bottom was a quote from a movie mogul:
If one is contemplating a mental breakdown in style, one need look no further than Hotel d’Antibes. Just don’t make a mess of the damask.
She started up the walk, already anticipating the dull stench of the lobby. As Hazel entered the reception area, passing beneath a low-hanging chandelier, the burgundy carpet sent its catalog of memories wafting up her nose. A family of four gathered at the concierge desk, the father in the process of interrogating a clerk about which sightseeing bus they should take.
As Hazel stepped across the lobby, taking in the balding furniture and old lamps recently invaded by compact fluorescents, she noticed a particularly tragic paw-footed sofa. She couldn’t help but think of Bennet and his hatred for all things antique and decomposing, even the stodgy charm of her bookstore. She pulled out her phone and sent him a text—I’m in a hotel you would loathe—along with a snap of the sofa.