“Speaking of someone being up here,” Freddy said, “I don’t want Jessup in my office while I’m gone.”
Freddy acquired films in Europe and redubbed them; he was leaving that day for Germany, and whenever he was away Rae invited Jessup up for lunch. Although the last time, when Freddy was in Italy, Jessup didn’t touch his food—he spent the entire hour going through the accounts file, and there wasn’t a thing Rae could do to stop him.
“Never bring your personal life into the office,” Freddy advised.
“What have you got against Jessup?” Rae asked.
The two men had met only once; Jessup had asked so many questions you’d think he was interviewing Freddy for a job.
“He’s the mass-murderer type,” Freddy said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Rae asked, offended.
“Or maybe the lone-assassin type,” Freddy reconsidered. “I can just see him up in his room, writing in his diary and polishing his rifle.”
The idea of Jessup’s keeping a diary made Rae laugh.
“You don’t know Jessup,” she said.
“That’s just it,” Freddy said. “I don’t want to know him, and I don’t want him in my office, Rae.”
As soon as the car came for Freddy, Rae telephoned Jessup. She was planning to order up from the deli on the corner and put it on Freddy’s account, but Jessup was out on a job and no one seemed to know when he’d be back. Rae could have ordered something for herself, but she felt the urge to escape from the office. She had found a woman’s turquoise earring on the couch in Freddy’s office, but the scent of Chanel was so unnaturally strong that even if Freddy had spent all night with a woman who had doused herself with perfume the aroma would have been gone by now. And yet there it was, in the filing cabinets and the carpeting, just as if Carolyn was in the office. And so Rae went out, even though the air itself was orange and so thick it seemed as if thousands of butterflies had settled above Hollywood Boulevard.
The minute she left the building, Rae knew she had made a mistake. It was noon, and so hot that the few people there were on the sidewalk seemed stunned. When Rae walked past a jewelry store she found herself staring at a tray of gold chains in the window. In all the years they had been together Jessup had never given her any jewelry, not even a cheap silver chain or a semiprecious stone. All at once, Rae ached for a ruby ring. She nearly walked inside and asked to look at a tray of uncut stones, but suddenly she felt as if she was drowning. On the hot sidewalk, in the middle of a city built out of the desert, she was going under. Maybe it was just that she couldn’t get enough air in her lungs, or that the shadows along the boulevard were deep blue. The edges of things had begun to blur, and had she been submerged in ten feet of murky water it wouldn’t have been any harder to take another step.
This had happened to Rae once before, when she was seventeen and had come down with pneumonia. Even after she was released from the hospital everything looked funny, as if bleach had been added to the air, and a hazy filter hung between Rae and the rest of the world. Jessup telephoned her every night, but after he’d called, he hadn’t had much to say. They stayed on the phone for hours, in silence, as if the only way for them to communicate was by telepathy. But once, Jessup had actually said that he missed her.
“What?” Rae had said, certain that she’d misunderstood.
“Are you trying to embarrass me?” Jessup had said. “I said it once, don’t ask me to repeat it.”
There was something about her illness that made Rae fear she would never get well. She could only see white things: the sheets on her bed, the cream-colored walls, the ruffled curtains at her window. Everything else was fading; when she squinted, she couldn’t make out the titles of the books on the shelf.
“I think I may be dying,” Rae told Jessup one night when he called. She could practically hear him smirking. “I mean it,” Rae said. “I think I may be going blind.”
“I’ll tell you what your problem is,” Jessup said. “I’m not there, and the only thing worth seeing is me.”
A few days later a dozen roses arrived. Carolyn considered throwing them out; even though there was no card, she knew who they were from. But she made the mistake of opening the cardboard box, and once she saw the roses she couldn’t bring herself to put them in the trash. Instead, she filled a tall glass vase with water and carried them upstairs. As soon as she saw the expression on Rae’s face when those flowers were brought in, Carolyn knew that she had lost her daughter.
All that week Rae watched the roses, and as they turned from scarlet to a deep, mysterious purple, she felt her vision returning. But when she was allowed to go out again, and she shyly thanked Jessup for the flowers, he acted as if he didn’t know what she was talking about. By then, the roses had withered and Carolyn had tossed them into the trash, and Rae was left wondering if she had imagined the glass vase on her night table. After all, she had imagined other things when her fever was at its highest: a plane that was circling above the ceiling turned out to be just a buzz in her head; a green lion that sat by her clothes closet was only a sweater that had fallen onto the floor. It was possible that there had never even been flowers in her room, and once she was well again, roses really seemed too trivial a thing for Jessup to send.
Even though she had no fever now, Rae couldn’t continue on to Musso Frank’s, where she’d planned to put her lunch on Freddy’s tab. The sidewalk was like quicksand, the next corner seemed miles away. Rae ducked into the closest doorway, the entrance to a place called The Salad Connection. When she leaned against the plate-glass window she could feel the shudder of an air conditioner’s motor; each time a customer walked through the door a rush of cold air escaped, then was swallowed by the heat of the boulevard. Quickly, Rae began to count. She hoped that by the time she reached one hundred, she’d feel strong enough to walk back to the office and lie down in the dark. But she hadn’t even gotten to thirty when she noticed a sign offering free psychic readings every Wednesday and Friday. And that was when Rae stopped counting.
Ten years earlier, when Rae and her mother were engaged in the worst of their fighting about Jessup, they had gone to a tearoom near the Copley Plaza Hotel to have their fortunes read. They’d been arguing about the curfew Rae always ignored, when Carolyn had thrown up her hands, turned, and walked into the tearoom. Rae had followed and they waited, side by side and in silence, until the fortune-teller signaled them to a table. The fortune-teller was hidden beneath fringed shawls and thick rouge; she offered them poppyseed cakes and mint tea, then proceeded with a reading that was dead wrong. To Carolyn, who had a real distaste for boats, she promised a sea voyage. For Rae, a miserable student, there was a scholar’s future. Rae and her mother had looked at each other across the table; in spite of themselves, they smiled. Clearly, this fortune-teller would tell them whatever she imagined they wanted to hear. Of course Rae asked about Jessup. “What about my boyfriend? Will we stay together?”
“Oh, yes,” the fortune-teller had said, and for a moment Rae saw her mother draw back. “Your boyfriend,” the fortuneteller had gone on, “is tall and handsome and extremely shy. Polite, wonderful with children, could become a doctor or a lawyer—an all-around darling boy.”
That misreading had made Rae and Carolyn so giddy that they’d fallen out the door of the tearoom and into each other’s arms. Afterward it was a joke between them: when things seemed dark there was always a place near the Copley Plaza Hotel where it was possible to hear good news for only five dollars.
Good news was exactly what Rae wanted to hear right now, so she went to The Salad Connection, past a buffet table offering only the coolest food—lettuce leaves, cucumber, slices of avocado. Sitting in a leatherette booth, she ordered lunch and decided to skip dessert—if Jessup was thinking about gaining weight, she might as well think about it too. After she’d finished her salad, the waitress brought an empty cup and a pot of Darjeeling tea. There was a white business card on the edge of the saucer:
&nb
sp; LILA GREY
47 Three Sisters Street
Readings and Advice—Limited Private Consultations
25 dollars per hour
Good news, Rae saw, had gotten more expensive.
After scanning the room for the fortune-teller, Rae realized that the psychic was at the next table. She had expected something more than a few silver bangle bracelets and a small silk turban. The psychic appeared to be in her forties, with thick gray hair cut on an angle at her jawline, so that when she leaned over to peer into a teacup no client could see her expression or her eyes. But across the aisle separating them Rae could see the psychic’s hands resting on a tabletop, and the long, delicate fingers made Rae uneasy. A woman who picked up a teacup so cautiously might actually be searching for more than good news.
By the time the psychic sat down across from Rae it was nearly one o’clock, and Rae had the sense that if she weren’t careful she might just believe anything she was told. Out on Hollywood Boulevard it was now so hot that the asphalt melted. Whenever people crossed the street their shoes got coated with tar, and the smell of tar made them remember summers in whatever town they grew up in, and they found themselves yearning for lemonade, just as they had on hot days back home when the air hung above them and clouds had the burning, sooty edge of August. Inside the restaurant the air conditioner was turned up higher, and as the psychic raised her arm to pour the tea, Rae felt an odd chill along the backs of her legs.
“You can ask me anything,” Lila Grey, the psychic said. “Just don’t ask me when the heat wave will break because I don’t do weather.”
The fortune-teller in Boston certainly hadn’t asked them for questions; she had taken one look and had quickly decided what they wanted to hear.
“I’ll bet everybody just pours out their whole life story to you,” Rae guessed.
“Not really,” Lila Grey said.
“I’ll bet once they start talking about themselves, they can’t stop,” Rae insisted.
Lila Grey, who had three more tables to go, a dentist appointment in the late afternoon, and a stop at the market before she went home, was not as careful as she might have been. She might have at least looked at her client, but instead she glanced down at her watch. While she thought about having dinner with her husband that evening, out on the patio where it was cooler, Rae just couldn’t seem to stop talking.
“You know, maybe they’ve got a boyfriend, and they don’t know if he’s really in love with them …”
Lila Grey cut her off. “Is that your question?” she asked.
Rae leaned her head against the booth and considered. “I guess it is,” she said finally.
“If you don’t drink your tea, we’ll never know the answer, will we?” the psychic suggested.
As Rae gulped the lukewarm tea, Lila Grey finally took the time to look at her. The booth suddenly seemed uncomfortable, if only because there was now the odor of some strong perfume that was a little too sweet. When she had drained the cup, Rae offered it to the psychic. Lila Grey knew that something was wrong as soon as she touched the handle. She couldn’t even bring herself to lift the cup. Already the tea leaves had begun to settle, and Lila was certain that if she hesitated, even for an instant, she would soon see the outline of the darkest symbol you can find at the bottom of a cup. She pushed the teacup away, then quickly reached for a saucer which she placed over its mouth.
Rae leaned forward. “What is it?” she said.
Lila had always been able to identify the women she had to avoid. The first time the symbol had appeared during a reading she’d taken it as a warning; the second time she’d been tricked by the absence of a wedding band on her client’s left hand and by the dim light in her own living room. She shoved the teacup even farther away, and each one of her silver bracelets slipped down to her wrist. The effect was a sound like a wind chime, one you hear from a very great distance when you’re in the center of the desert and are out of everything: water and hope and luck.
Rae’s throat was dry. “It’s something awful, isn’t it?” she whispered.
Lila didn’t answer. And after all, what was this woman’s unhappiness to her; she had seen misery before, and she’d reworked it, turning bad luck into whatever fortune her client wanted to hear. But this was a fortune no one deserved.
Lila knew enough not to look at Rae. She concentrated and closed her eyes. A wall of blue ice sprang up around her, it was hard as diamonds, impossible to penetrate. Lila was still there in the booth at the restaurant, but she was moving farther and farther away from Rae. She had thought she’d lost the ability to escape, but all Lila had to do was imagine that she was a crow. Her wings were so black they looked wet; beneath her the earth was a small blue globe. Her feathers were unfolding, one by one; and the air was as thin and cold and as pure as glass.
“Please, tell me what you see,” Rae called to Lila, but her voice was tiny, as if she was standing at the edge of the planet calling up into the limitless sky.
“Even if it’s horrible, I don’t care. I want to know,” Rae called.
Her words were pieces of crystal, and Lila was too far away to be pulled back down. To her, gravity was nothing. She could feel the moonlight on her feathers, that cold, white light. It was so beautiful and lonely; it was impossible to be touched by another soul. And with the compassion of one so very far away, Lila looked back down at Rae; she knew the mercy in not telling more than the smallest shred of truth.
“It’s nothing so horrible,” Lila Grey said. “It’s just that I see you won’t be able to sleep tonight.”
That night, Jessup didn’t come home. Rae tried to tell herself that the studio had forced him to work overtime, but she knew no one could force Jessup into anything, and they certainly couldn’t stop him from making one phone call. If early in the evening Rae suspected Jessup might be cheating on her, by midnight it no longer mattered. She’d forgive anything, as long as he came home.
Turning on the radio just made things worse. People in Hollywood were warned to keep their windows closed at night if they didn’t have screens. A band of wild dogs gone crazy with thirst roamed the boulevards; they had begun to push open back doors and circle houses. On Sweetzer Avenue, in a backyard where birds of paradise grew, the dogs had attacked a six-year-old boy in a fight for his wading pool. By the time the police had arrived the boy’s neck was broken. They had managed to shoot a collie, and when an autopsy was performed the oddest things were found in its stomach: a silk scarf; small bones, which had not yet been identified; blue water the color of sapphires; three gold rings.
At two in the morning, Rae was certain she heard the dogs outside her window. The trash cans rattled and fell, and something that sounded like claws hit against the cement walkway. Rae double-locked her windows, and she huddled in an armchair where Jessup usually sat to watch her undress for bed. Tonight, Rae didn’t take off her clothes, because she could tell already, long before she watched the sky grow light, that the psychic had been right.
At seven the next morning Rae made a pot of coffee, and as she poured herself a cup she noticed that her hand shook. She went back to the armchair and waited, and at seven forty-five she finally got what she was waiting for. The telephone rang, and she picked up the receiver before the first ring was through. But after she answered, Rae found she couldn’t speak; staying awake all night had robbed her of her voice.
“Rae, are you there?” she heard Jessup say.
She could tell from the metallic sound of his voice that he was calling from a phone booth. At the very least, he wasn’t in another woman’s bedroom.
“Are you going to speak to me, or what?” Jessup asked.
“I’ll speak to you,” Rae agreed, and she was amazed by how calm she sounded.
Whenever he hurt her, Jessup acted like he was the one who’d been wronged.
“I didn’t come home last night,” Jessup said now. “If you bothered to notice.”
“Oh, I noticed, all right,” Rae said.
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Usually, not pressuring Jessup was the right thing to do—but now it backfired, and by the time Rae’s voice traveled to the broiling metal phone booth where Jessup was standing, the cool flatness of her tone infuriated him. He decided it was his right to be cruel.
“I’ll give you a hint as to where I am,” he said. “I’m in the desert.”
She knew he expected her to question him.
“Do you mind telling me in what state?”
“California,” Jessup said. “Outside Barstow. You think it’s hot where you are.”
“Do you mind telling me with who?”
“With who what?” Jessup said. He was enjoying this, she could tell.
“Who are you with?” Rae said.
“Maybe I just wanted to see the desert,” Jessup said. “Maybe I wanted to be by myself.”
Jessup let her sit there in agony for a moment, and then he told her the truth—he was out with a location company that had needed a driver at the last minute. He actually seemed to think this announcement warranted congratulations.
“That’s the reason you didn’t come home?” Rae asked.
“Every jerk in the world is making a movie, and I’m driving them around,” Jessup said. “Do you think that’s fair?”
Rae found herself wondering if it was the coffee that now made her feel so sick.
“Rae?” Jessup said. “Are you still there?”
That was when she knew.
“You’re not coming home,” Rae said, “are you?”
“The shooting schedule is eight weeks, and I think that’s enough time for me to set up my own deal with the producer. I don’t see why I couldn’t direct.”
“Tell me right now, Jessup,” Rae said. “Are you coming home or not?”
“Well, sure I am,” Jessup said. “Eventually.”
The future was so close Rae could feel it; it hung from the white stucco ceiling, and draped itself across the furniture.
“How can you do this to me?” she asked.