“Cool. And remember to keep last night between us if that’s all right.”
“Sure, that’s fine.”
“I don’t want her feeling weird about it.”
“Makes sense,” I say. “It was no big deal.”
“All right, cool. See you later then.”
~
When I get to the Marmont, I find Ava leaning against the outside wall of a poolside bungalow, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses shaped like John Lennon’s, her hair cascading down her shoulders in loose waves. She is still in the green camisole and cutoffs from yesterday but she is barefoot. I’ve never seen her feet before. All slender and graceful, like they aren’t even used for walking.
She leads me inside, where her boots are kicked off across the floor and her purse is hung over a chair. She doesn’t have any bags and even though I don’t ask her why, she says, “Jamal’s coming later to drop off my stuff.”
She stands at the center of a red rug. Orange light beats through the window; the edges of her glow.
“Is this what you pictured?” she asks me.
I don’t know what she means. But, no, I could have never pictured anything quite as glamorous as this. She is almost too bright to look at.
“When you had me come here the first time. You thought I might come back. Right?”
“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. I guess I did.”
“When I was booking the room I asked the man where Clyde used to stay. He said this one so that’s what I chose. Come here,” she says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Clyde slept here. All those years ago. Can you believe it?”
I kick off my sandals and join her on the bed, unsure of where this is headed.
“I wonder how many women he brought to this room,” she says.
Our bodies are so close. I watch as she moves her hand even nearer, until her fingers with their short, perfectly smooth nails are almost touching the soft underside of my knee.
And if she’s trying to seduce me right now, I will admit that it’s working. My heart beats fast and hard. I can’t look at her mouth without imagining it on mine.
This is the moment where I’m supposed to lean in. This is when everything starts. But I can’t do it. All at once, Ava feels like a stranger. And it’s my fault. I thought that inviting her here a couple weeks ago was such a perfect idea, that creating a glamorous future for her was a nice thing to do. I even thought it was generous, for me, to take the time to show her this place, to tell her about Clyde. But I think I always pictured myself here, with her. If I’m being completely honest, this chance is probably what I hoped for: To have a fling with the granddaughter of a legend in a Chateau Marmont bungalow. To get to be with her when she was still a secret, before the world got ahold of her.
What a stupid thing to wish for. A handful of thrilling days. A good story to tell later. Like what Clyde wrote in his letter to Caroline when he was talking about her mother: a few minutes in the spotlight on the arm of someone famous.
Ava is doing exactly what I once hoped she would do, but now, when I picture us together, we’re lying in a cherry orchard or I’m watching her bake a cake or we’re hunting for treasures in thrift shops. The memory of her curled up on the backseat of her beat-up car in the desert, entirely unaware of me, is enough to make my chest ache. But I don’t recognize the Ava I’ve gotten to know in the girl next to me now. I search her face, but her sunglasses are still on and I can’t find her.
There is only one chance to get a first kiss right. I can’t shake the feeling that if I kiss her now, it won’t be the right version of her I’ll be kissing.
So I say, “I brought my laptop. What neighborhoods are you thinking? West Hollywood? Beverly Hills?”
She straightens up, moves a tiny bit away from me, but barely misses a beat.
“Actually,” she says. “I was thinking Venice. Somewhere with a view of the ocean.”
I rise from the bed, wondering if I’m making a mistake to let this moment go. My laptop is cold and heavy when I sit back down. I open to the browser and hand it to her.
“Oh,” Ava says, looking at the screen. “The Internet is locked or something.”
“You just need a password. The front desk will give it to us.”
Ava stands up and grabs the key.
“You can call them.”
I cross to the desk, pick up the phone, and dial zero.
“Hey,” I say. “What’s the Internet password?”
I read it out to Ava and she enters it. She smiles.
“Success,” I tell the man on the other end. “Thanks.”
She does a search for Venice apartments and barely ten minutes into looking, she says, “Found it.”
“That fast?”
“It has an ocean view. I think it’s exactly what Caroline would have chosen. Want to see?”
I’m sitting at the desk now, and I don’t know if I trust myself to get back onto that bed with her.
I shake my head.
“I’d rather wait to see it,” I say. “Surprise me.”
She slips her phone out of her pocket and calls the broker, sets up an appointment for just a couple hours from now.
“I have to look the part, right?” she says when she hangs up. “Where should we shop?”
“I have to go over to Rebecca and Theo’s for a meeting,” I say. “But you should go to the Beverly Center.”
“The Beverly Center. Okay.”
“It’s just a couple miles from here. Take Sunset to La Cienega, and then stay on La Cienega until you hit Beverly.”
She nods. “I can do that,” she says.
“Venice apartments are hard to come by. It’ll be competitive. If the clothes don’t work on their own, you could always play the Clyde card.”
She’s up now, grabbing her keys, slinging her purse over her shoulder.
She grins at me.
“I’ll see what I can do.”
~
Charlotte and I get to Brooks Avenue at a little after nine, park near the beach, and stroll by the skaters and punks and tourists who look a little afraid of what they’ve gotten themselves into. I pull out my phone and double-check the address she gave us.
This is a nice building. I mean, really nice: white-painted brick with art-deco-style ornamentation. The door to the building is locked so we press a button, and soon Ava’s voice comes through the small gold speaker.
“Is it you?”
“Yeah, it’s us.”
“Take the elevator! Penthouse! Three-twenty-three!”
“Penthouse?” Charlotte says.
I widen my eyes like I know.
Then there’s a buzzing, which lets us into the lobby. In the elevator, we select P for you-know-what, and a screen asks us to enter a code, so we press 3-2-3 and the doors shut and we glide upward. When the elevator opens, we find ourselves on the roof, facing the ocean right in front of us, the Santa Monica pier to our right, its Ferris wheel lit up, silhouettes of palm trees against the dark sky.
We turn around to an apartment made of glass.
Ava stands in the doorway, dressed in high-waisted white jeans and a blue-and-white polka-dotted blouse. She has on bright red lipstick and a pair of shiny, bright red heels, a long string of pearls around her neck.
“Are those real?” I ask her.
“Of course they are. I had to look like a girl who belongs in a penthouse.”
Charlotte and I laugh, and Ava takes a seat on an outdoor sofa that must have come with the place. She rests her feet on an ottoman, crosses her ankles. I would hardly have recognized her.
“I went to Bloomingdale’s and told the woman to make me look rich.”
“It worked,” I tell her.
A moment later, Jamal appears next to her, in sagging khaki shorts and a gray ribbed tank top that shows o
ff his muscular body. They couldn’t look more incongruous: She’s dressed for a lunch meeting at an upscale restaurant and he’s dressed for a day at the beach.
“Finally,” he says, holding a bottle of champagne by its neck. “We can pop this open.”
“We felt like celebrating,” Ava says.
“I can see why,” I say.
“We don’t have any cups, though,” Jamal says. “I had to go to five different liquor stores till I found one that didn’t card me, and all that time I didn’t think about cups.”
Charlotte and I both have water bottles, so after Jamal accidentally sends the cork ricocheting off the roof, he fills our tins and then he and Ava pass the rest back and forth between them.
“How did you get this place?” Charlotte asks. “Didn’t you need rental histories and references?”
Ava takes a swig out of the bottle.
“Clyde was right,” she says.
“How so?” Charlotte asks.
But I know what she means: “Money can open doors,” I say.
She nods.
“I told the manager I could write him a check for the full year right now, and then he went to the bank and deposited it and called me back and said the place was mine. It was good timing. Terrence and I just finished the bank paperwork this morning.”
“Bank account in the morning, Chateau Marmont in the afternoon, penthouse in the evening,” I say.
“Yeah, if Terrence is watching my money, he’ll be impressed,” she says. “But I didn’t have much of a choice.”
I don’t trust myself to say Why not? in a way that’s even remotely convincing.
Instead I say, “Show us the inside.”
She takes us on a tour of the penthouse. One by one, she flicks on the lights. I can imagine what it must look like from above: a glass house, lit up and glowing in the night. Inside, it looks like it’s sprung from the pages of Dwell or Architectural Digest. Pure white walls, high ceilings, thick-planked wood floors. A bedroom with a closet the size of Toby’s old dorm room. A bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub and a shower that takes up half the room and has no door. A modern, airy kitchen opens onto the living room.
“Isn’t this the best kitchen you’ve ever seen?”
I nod, but I actually like my kitchen at home better, and even Toby’s tiny kitchen. I understand that this is full of nicer, more expensive appliances, but without pots and pans, cutting boards and mismatched mugs, bowls of fruit, and magnets on the refrigerator it feels too sterile.
“If you need any more locations for filming,” Ava says, “you’re welcome to use any rooms you want.” She’s standing in the middle of the cavernous living room under light wood beams and the yellow glow of recessed lighting.
“That’s so nice of you,” I say, but the truth is that the place has no soul. I haven’t seen a single scratched floorboard.
“Don’t you think it’s great?” Ava asks me a little defensively, and I don’t want her to be defensive, because doesn’t she deserve this? After everything she’s been through, shouldn’t she end up with a dream house on the rooftop of one of the most exclusive buildings in Venice?
“It’s beyond great,” I tell her. “We just need to get it furnished. Let’s go look at the view again.”
Back outside, everything feels less sad. The skaters are doing tricks on the street below us; the Ferris wheel on the Santa Monica pier spins and spins; from somewhere in the distance comes laughter.
“Can you believe it?” Ava asks. “Last night I was living in a shelter. A few months ago I was living in my car, sleeping under overpasses, hoping no one would find me.”
“You were untethered,” Jamal says.
“Yeah,” she says. “I guess. I never thought of using that word before.”
“Marcy used it on me,” he says. “I hadn’t thought of it either.”
“Who’s Marcy?” Charlotte asks.
“One of the counselors at the shelter.”
“The only nice one,” Ava says.
“Not the only nice one. The least strict one. The youngest one.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Ava says. “We never have to go back.”
“So you’re going to live here, too?” I ask Jamal.
“Nah,” he says. “She wants me to, but it’s not in the master plan.”
He smiles when he says it, looks out over the ocean. I don’t question him until later on, after Ava has fallen asleep on one of the outdoor sofas and Charlotte has taken a chair on the other end of the roof to e-mail one of her future professors about something. Jamal and I are sitting together a few feet away from Ava, still looking over the water.
“So explain this to me,” I say. “You could live in a shelter or you could live here, and you’re choosing the shelter?”
“This place is crazy nice,” he says, “but it wouldn’t be real for me.”
“But you could live here for free, right? Quit your job? What would you want to do if you could do anything?”
He smirks. Shakes his head.
“What?”
“Not everyone’s like you,” he says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Don’t get upset.”
“I’m not upset.”
“We’re friends now, right? So I can tell it to you straight.”
“Yeah, okay,” I say, trying not to feel hurt already.
“We don’t all have it figured out. We don’t all have internships and college all lined up and our parents’ credit cards.”
“I don’t have my parents’ credit card. I make my own money.”
“For some things, yeah,” he says. “But we don’t all have dens with pictures from the ghetto in frames on our walls.”
“It’s not like that,” I say. “That makes it sound terrible. My parents care about that stuff, they spend all their time teaching people about it. My grandfather—”
Jamal holds his hand out. I stop.
“I like your family,” he says. “Your mom told me about a lot of stuff I didn’t know.”
“And she called you handsome and graceful.”
“She did,” he says. “And I’ll always love her for it. But my point is that we don’t all have brothers getting us fancy jobs in movie studios.”
“I get it,” I say. And I do. But I still don’t want to hear it, don’t want to think about the conversations he and Ava must have about me when I’m not around to defend myself.
“What I’m saying is this: The shelter got me my job. And I finally got promoted so now I even get to work decent hours, on the floor, not doing stock. The deal is I work there until I have enough money saved up to get a place, and then the shelter hooks me up with an apartment. I keep the job, I pay part of the rent, and the shelter pays the other part. It’s not something I’m trying to get out of. It’s not just for the money, even though the money is something I need. I’ve seen the building where I’ll live. It’s cool. Near downtown on a quiet street. I need to start my own life and it can’t be here. I mean, look. This might work out for Ava, but I’m still a kid who’s only been to the beach one other time in my life.”
“You mean Venice Beach?”
“No,” he says. “I mean the ocean. I mean this.” He extends his arms toward the coastline. “This.”
“But you grew up here,” I say. “How did you only come once?”
“If you’d ever been to where I grew up, you wouldn’t call it ‘here.’”
“What’s it like?”
“Pawn shops. Check-cashing stores. Liquor stores.”
“Sure,” I say, because these places are everywhere.
He holds up his hand as if to say, Let me finish, so I shut up and look out at the dark sky and listen.
“Empty buildings,” he says. “Guys on the street all day. Fields covered in trash
. Street signs full of bullet holes. Boarded-up windows. People who look decades older than they are. Grandmas who just take every tragedy like it’s expected, just take another kid into their houses and act like it’s not crowded already, like it isn’t a burden to feed another one.”
“All right,” I say. A concession. He’s speaking like he’s in a trance, like he could go on for ages, but also like it hurts him.
“Guns,” he says. “Guns everywhere. I got my first gun when I was twelve. A gift from my cousin. We went out onto the street and I shot it into the sky. Everything went silent.”
“So what happened?” I ask. “Why did you leave?”
“My grandma died. I was in the foster system once, before she got custody, and I sure as hell wasn’t going back again. There were plenty of ways for me to make a living in the neighborhood, but I didn’t want her looking down from above, shaking her head in disgust.”
“What about the rest of your family? Do they know where you are?”
“Pops is locked up. My mom’s dead.”
“So is mine,” Ava says.
I don’t know when she woke up, but she’s sitting now, pulling a hoodie over her legs, and Charlotte’s walking back toward us, sitting down next to her.
Jamal turns to Ava, eyebrows raised in skepticism, but she doesn’t elaborate.
“All right,” Jamal finally says. “It can be that way. But it’s the other way, too.”
“What do you mean?” Ava asks.
“I mean Caroline is dead, but Tracey is alive. That’s rough, but you still have one mother.”
“But she doesn’t want me.”
“I don’t know about that,” he says. “We’ll give it some time. Check back soon, you know?”
“When you really want to find someone, it isn’t that hard. I should have known all along that she wasn’t looking. I feel so stupid.”
“There’s nothing stupid about wanting to be loved,” he says. “Believe me.”
We sit together for a little longer, and then Charlotte and I get up to go home.
“You’ll help me decorate, right?” Ava asks me. “Figure out what to buy? After the filming is over, I mean. I went to this place to try to buy a mattress today but I didn’t know what I wanted, and it would have taken a few days to get delivered anyway, so after a while it just seemed pointless. I left without choosing anything.”