When they reached the hotel, Spencer took Eric upstairs to clean up a little before dinner. Scarlett ducked behind the front desk. Lola stashed a few quick-fix items in the back of one of the file cabinets—a mirror, some little papers that blotted oil from your face, a clear lip gloss. She fumbled around with these for a moment, then went into the dining room to prepare the way as best she could.
There was a pungent odor in the air that smelled vaguely like exhaust fumes. Marlene was making a half-hearted effort at setting the table by dumping silverware in the middle. Her dad brought a defeated-looking salad from the kitchen. He had decided to wear his hipster cowboy shirt. It was white-and-blue check with yellow roses embroidered on the collar. He’d bought it from the thrift store downtown and was exceedingly proud of it, not realizing that even the coolest NYU student would have a hard time pulling off that look. Spencer’s code name for it was “The Texas Style Massacre.”
Of course he was wearing it tonight. Of
course
he was.
“Someone else is coming,” Scarlett said, trying not to sound too nervous. “A friend…of Spencer’s. From out of town. From North
Carolina. His name is Eric. He doesn’t have any family around, so…we brought him back. Is that okay? He’s upstairs.”
Marlene stopped shoving around the silverware and gazed at her. She was talking too much and too fast. If she did this all night, she would scare Eric away—that is, if he didn’t take one look at her dad’s shirt and leap right out the window.
“I guess it has to be if he’s already here,” her dad said. “I just hope we have enough. We have another guest for dinner.”
“Who?”
In reply, a tall figure appeared in the doorway dressed in what looked like a blue silk karate outfit and little Japanese slippers.
“I’m not late, am I?” Mrs. Amberson said with a smile. “I lose track of time when I’m meditating.”
Her face was tautly stretched into a smile that didn’t seem entirely sane to Scarlett. It wobbled just a bit in the corners. Also, she was carrying what appeared to be a dead ferret in her right fist.
“No,” Scarlett’s dad said, obviously trying not to look at the dead animal. “Right on time. Please, sit down.”
The addition of Mrs. Amberson and her dead ferret to this mix was not something Scarlett had anticipated. She sat down quickly to steady herself, and Mrs. Amberson planted herself right next to her, slinging the ferret around the back of her neck in a swoop that grazed Scarlett’s ear.
“I hope you don’t mind this,” she said, flicking the thing with her finger. “It’s a vintage fur collar I converted into a bead cushion imbued with essential revitalizing oils. I call him Charlie.”
So the ferret had a name. Even better.
“Marlene and I have met,” Mrs. Amberson said, preempting any introduction. “I’m very excited to meet the rest of the clan.”
Spencer came through the doorway that very second, followed by Eric. Eric had changed into one of Spencer’s T-shirts. Spencer was taller and more slender than he was, so the fabric gripped his body snugly, showing off the massive muscles in his arms. Scarlett felt herself rock forward in the chair.
Spencer sighed when he saw the cowboy shirt, but Eric didn’t so much as raise an eyebrow. He shook her dad’s hand as if nothing was amiss. The two of them sat down on the opposite side of the table. Mrs. Amberson shrugged her shoulders lightly, allowing Charlie the Dead Ferret to shift a little.
“Amy Amberson,” she said, all smiles. “I’m the new guest. I’ll be here all summer.”
“All summer?” Spencer repeated.
“I think it’s adorable how you all do that,” she said. “Spencer…another wonderful name. All associated with classic films. There’s Marlene Dietrich, who played Lola in
The Blue Angel.
Scarlett, of course, is Scarlett O’Hara from
Gone With the Wind.
And Spencer is Spencer Tracy, one of the great leading men of all time.”
As she spoke, she was taking in Spencer and Eric with much too long and appreciative a look. It started on Eric and his tight shirt, but it landed and lingered on Spencer.
“I’d say you’re more of a Cary Grant type,” she added.
“Believe it or not,” Scarlett’s dad said, roughly shaking a can of grated cheese to dislodge the lump from the bottom, “we just liked the names. It wasn’t intentional.”
“We all know what we’re doing,” Mrs. Amberson said. “Whether we realize it or not.”
“This is really nice of you,” Eric said politely, filling the silence that came after that baffling remark. “Thanks for having me.”
“Manners!” Mrs. Amberson said. “Nothing is more attractive than manners.”
“I have manners, too,” Spencer said. “Lots of them.”
There was a crash from the kitchen that sounded like a small garden shed being pushed down a flight of stairs. Her dad set down the cheese and calmly excused himself.
“I hear you’re an actor,” Mrs. Amberson said to Spencer.
“You heard correctly,” he answered, motioning to Eric. “We both are.”
“I’m an actress as well. Or, at least I was. I’m always interested in mentoring young thespians.”
A slightly vulpine smile crossed her lips.
It was obvious that Spencer had picked up on Mrs. Amberson’s signals. There was a playful glimmer in his eyes. Even his posture changed in a moment—he got straighter and started twirling his fork between his fingers like a tiny baton.
“I’ve always wanted to be mentored,” he said, slipping into a truly horrible grin.
Scarlett was trying to figure out how to get her knife under the table and stab Spencer in the knee without hitting Eric by accident, when, out of the corner of her eye, she saw the black Mercedes stop in front of the hotel.
“It’s them,” Marlene said, springing out of her chair. “Lola and Chip. I’m going to ask Chip to stay, too.”
Spencer’s smile fell away completely and he stopped the evil flirting game.
“Is that Lola?” Mrs. Amberson said, craning her neck to look at them out of the window. “My, my. She’s stunning. You know who
she reminds me of? The lead singer of ABBA. The blonde. I got stuck in a bathroom with her once, at Elaine’s. I was trying to tell her a joke. It was right after “Dancing Queen” came out. The joke had something to do with a dancing queen, and I know it was good. But she’s Swedish, and I was a little drunk, so I’m sure you can imagine how that went down.”
She took a deep breath and rubbed her cheeks roughly to wake herself.
“The Swedes are a difficult people to know,” she added thoughtfully.
Scarlett turned up her eyes slightly. She was sure that Eric would be staring at Lola out the window. All guys stared at Lola. It wasn’t Lola’s fault, and Scarlett didn’t resent her for it. Really, it had never been a problem until today. To Scarlett’s surprise, though, Eric wasn’t paying Lola the slightest bit of attention. He was looking squarely at her, Scarlett Martin. And he was smiling.
From this close, she could see the color of his eyes perfectly. They were a misty, shifting blue marbled with gray, like smoke rising through an early morning sky. Something deep inside of her was switching on—something felt like it was
moving.
It felt like the same part of her brain and stomach that responded to steep elevator drops. She was falling…
In her panic, she forced herself to turn away, and found herself looking into another pair of eyes—this time, the two glassy ones of the ferrety creature on Mrs. Amberson’s shoulder.
“I’m so sorry,” Lola said, hustling into the dining room. Marlene had Chip by the hand and was dragging him along right behind her. “I forgot. I thought it was tomorrow…”
As soon as they came into the room, Eric shifted his attention away smoothly, but she could feel that she was still in his focus.
The kitchen door swung open and Scarlett’s parents emerged with a lasagna that had a foul-smelling gray cloud hovering over it. If they were startled that yet another visitor had joined them, they didn’t show it, possibly because they were concerned with the thing they had just dragged from the hellish depths of their temperamental industrial oven.
More introductions were made. Two more chairs were pulled up to the table. A pitcher of instant iced tea was passed, as was the droopy salad and a still partially frozen loaf of garlic bread. The lasagna hissed when it was touched by the metal spoon. Everyone ate in silence for a few moments, except for Mrs. Amberson, who was fine with a glass of water and a little of the bread. She graciously explained away her small appetite by saying that her stomach was still in a different time zone.
“What do you do, Chip?” she asked. “Are you a student?”
“I just graduated,” he answered, cautiously picking at his food.
“High school?”
“Yeah,” he said. “I went to Durban.”
“Where is Durban, again?” Spencer asked, all innocence. “Is it on
Ninety-eighth Street
?”
“No,” Chip said. “Seventy-third.”
“You sure? I could have sworn it was on Ninety-eighth. Something’s on Ninety-eighth. What could I be thinking of?”
Spencer flinched suddenly. Scarlett didn’t see her do it, but Lola must have gotten to him somehow. She had to shove some of the
lasagna into her mouth to keep from laughing, and almost screamed from the scorching pain. She accidentally elbowed Mrs. Amberson in a mad grab for her iced tea.
“And what about you three?” Mrs. Amberson asked, jostled back into the conversation.
“Lola, Spencer, and Scarlett got into specialized high schools,” Scarlett’s mother chimed in proudly, “Spencer went to the High School of Performing Arts, Lola just graduated from Beacon, and Scarlett goes to Frances Perkins.”
“That’s one thing that seems so weird about New York,” Eric said. “There are so many kinds of high schools. In my town, there was just the one high school. That was it. One football team. One prom. Here, it seems like everyone does something special.”
He looked at Scarlett again when he said
special.
She suddenly realized she was clutching the edge of the table with both hands, like a bar on a roller coaster ride. She quickly released her grip, praying that he hadn’t noticed. Maybe he had, and he hadn’t meant the good kind of special. Maybe he meant the kind of special associated with people who are only allowed to use plastic safety scissors.
“You in a show or something, Spence?” Chip asked. He often tried to bond with Spencer, which was about as wise as a chicken trying to bond with a hungry alligator. But before Spencer could open his mouth, Eric answered.
“We’re in a show together,” he offered, happily spooning up a second huge helping. “We’re in
Hamlet.
Spencer just joined the cast today.”
It was like someone had made that needle-being-dragged-across-a-record screeching noise that they sometimes use in movie previews. Both of Scarlett’s parents turned in unison.
“It just happened,” Spencer said quickly. “Really. Today. About four hours ago.”
Mrs. Amberson latched on to this at once.
“
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
!” she exclaimed, unaware of the myriad expressions flying across the table, the drama that was silently being played out. She launched into a half-hour-long story about her friend getting mugged while he was on his way to perform in Shakespeare in the Park. She talked so long that dinner was finished when she concluded, and she had clearly exhausted herself. Marlene openly glared at her in boredom.
“If you’ll excuse me,” she finally said, “I need to head to bed. Thank you for a lovely evening, everyone.”
Eric stood when she left, then made his own polite farewells.
“We’ll walk you out,” Spencer said, nodding at Scarlett.
“Make sure to come back,” her dad said knowingly. “We should talk.”
Out on the sidewalk, Eric remained blissfully unaware of the furor he had accidentally caused.
“I have to get going,” he said. “Your family is…so different from my family.”
“We know what that really means,” Spencer said.
“No. They’re great. I mean it. Thanks for bringing me along. See you tomorrow, Spence. And thanks for the invitation, Scarlett.”
He reached out to shake her hand as well, holding it just a moment longer than necessary. His hand was strong, a little rough along the bottom of the palm. This beautiful creature had actually come into
her life, had dinner at her house, touched her hand, and now he was leaving.
There was no time to revel in the moment, though.
“Can you help me think of a way to keep from ruining my life in the next fifteen minutes?” Spencer asked, spinning her around to face him. “I’d really appreciate it.”
“I had kind of been hoping to lay it on them myself later, when I had time to think of a clever story in which I became famous and highly-paid, but it looks like it’s going to be now. Why did you invite him here?”
Spencer was about to lose it. He was pacing up and down the sidewalk in front of the door and rubbing his face so hard that it looked like he might be in danger of snapping off his own nose.
“What should I say?” he begged, his voice cracking a little. “It’s not Broadway. It’s not TV.”
“It’s Shakespeare,” she offered weakly, knowing that that made no difference.
“Do I lie?” he asked, peeling his hand off his face. “I’m okay with lying, except…I’m going to get caught, when, you know, they actually come and see it’s in a parking garage. Or when they ask me how much I’m going to make, and I say, ‘Four dollars a day.’ They won’t be impressed. They will be the opposite of impressed. I have to make this work, Scarlett. Think.”
Scarlett bit her finger and thought.
“Why?” he said. “Why are we not Chip? He doesn’t have this problem.”
“He’s going to rich camp in Boston,” Scarlett said, trying to cheer him with that morning’s gossip. “He wants to drag Lola along because he can’t hack it there by himself.”
This did not have the desired effect.
“Great,” he said, pressing the heels of his hands into his forehead. “That’s just great. I can’t think about Chip. I can’t think about why Lola is with him, I can’t think about any of it. How does that guy…live? How can he do so much nothing and get paid for it?”
“You’re not thinking about this,” Scarlett said.
“Yes, I am,” Spencer said. “This is all I am going to think about all night. Why are all rich people so useless? And why are they all around us?”
“Because we live in New York?” Scarlett said. “Best city in the world? And we live in a hotel? Where they sometimes come and stay, and that’s how we survive?”
“It’s not fair,” he said. “Why does Lola bring him here?”
“Because he’s her boyfriend.”
“You say that like it makes sense. Okay. Okay. Have to think.”
He took a deep breath and sat down on the sidewalk.
“They liked Eric,” he said. “That’s good. That’s something. They can see I’m in a show with someone who’s polite. Not a complete freak. That always helps.”
“Yeah…” she said. “And he’s good. He’s just like you. He does all those things you do. Mime, or…”
“I’m not a mime,” Spencer quickly corrected her. “Or, just the
once. They made us do it for school. Never tell anyone I’m a mime. People punch mimes. It’s just stage combat, physical comedy…basic actor stuff.”
“Whatever it is,” Scarlett amended, “you know you’re incredible at it. Eric said so, too.”
“Yeah, well, everyone does something.
He
got a commercial out of it, anyway.”
The door swung open, and Marlene stood there, hands on hips.
“Are you getting a real job?” she asked.
“No comment,” Spencer said.
Marlene didn’t move.
“We’re having a talk in private,” Scarlett said.
“The street isn’t private.”
Now Marlene was a lawyer.
“Come on, Marlene,” Spencer said gently, “give us a minute.”
“But I want to hear.”
“That’s why private was invented,” Scarlett said. “For times just like this.”
Their privacy was further interrupted by the appearance of Chip and Lola. Spencer narrowed his eyes and looked like he was on the verge of coming out with something truly exceptional to say about his nemesis, when Lola cut in quietly.
“Mr. Kobayashi in the Sterling Suite needs his toilet unblocked,” she said. “And then Mom and Dad want to meet you in the Jazz Suite.”
It was very hard to make a good snap following that. Marlene giggled softly and went back inside.
“Thanks for passing the message,” Spencer said.
Chip didn’t linger. He gave them a nod of good-bye, and Lola walked him up the block.
“It’s going to be so sad when he goes to Boston,” Spencer said, watching them. “But it is exciting to know that, somewhere, there’s a school with a major in Alphabet Studies.”
“School,” Scarlett said, suddenly. “That’s it.”
“What? What’s it?”
“Eric goes to NYU, right? Are a lot of people in your cast from NYU?”
“NYU, Juilliard. I’m the only one who’s not, I think. Why?”
“Clearly,” she said, “this is a joint NYU-Juilliard production. Maybe not
officially.
Who would make you leave a production run by two of the top theater schools?”
Spencer struggled with the idea.
“Look,” she said, “they just want you to have some kind of degree in something—some kind of security. It’s kind of a showcase. Professors from these places will come to the show, right?”
“Probably,” he said. “Maybe.”
“This will give them hope. That’s all they want. And you
do
get paid. Just try not to tell them how much.”
“It’s better than anything I could have come up with,” he said. “I was just going to resort to crying a lot and banging my head against the wall. It’ll take some work to sell it, though…”
He got up from the sidewalk and grasped her by the shoulders.
“This may be the last time I see you as an actor,” he said. “Also, I’m about to become very, very unclean. I have a bad feeling.”
Lola came up behind them and politely excused herself to get past.
“I’ll meet you upstairs,” she said to both of them. “And good luck.”
“Luck?” Spencer repeated, stepping toward the door. “What’s luck got to do with it? Skill, baby. Nothing but.”
He did the walking into the door trick for good measure, probably just to amuse himself, and then headed off to meet his fate. Unlike Scarlett, who always smiled, the gag only seemed to perplex and sadden Lola.
“Is he ever going to stop doing that?” she asked.
“Hopefully not,” Scarlett said.
It was a long, painful wait in the Orchid Suite.
Lola was on her bed, her foot balanced on a book, carefully removing her toenail polish. Scarlett went to her mirror and took one last look at herself in the dress. Maybe it was the Dior dress that had caused Eric to smile at her, the production staff to pull her down to the stage floor, Mrs. Amberson to invite her to lunch. Maybe that was all it took in life—some really good dresses.
“Sounds like everything went well this morning,” Lola ventured carefully.
“Except for the part where Marlene wanted to kill me,” Scarlett said, sitting up on her bureau. This probably wasn’t a safe move, as it wobbled under her, but it kept her distracted from what was going on a few doors down.
“I think she’s all right. And Mrs. Amberson bought lunch for the two of you. That was nice. She’s very…”
Lola didn’t know how to finish that. Come to think of it, neither did Scarlett.
“Spencer’s friend is very cute,” Lola said, carefully rubbing her toes clean with one of her special wipes. “I don’t think I’ll mind if he does this play if he keeps bringing home friends like that.”
As soon as she thought of Eric, Scarlett was nauseous again. She beat her heels into the dresser handles, then let herself down heavily. She opened up her computer. Several e-mails had come in from her friends. Chloe met a guy she liked. Tabitha had been bitten by a weird spider and her eye was all puffy. Josh sent a single, very drunken line: I KAN SING IN WELSH!
Scarlett didn’t have the energy to reply to anyone, so she tried to write for a bit. She ignored her disjointed notes from the night before and started with a clean page.
Write what comes into your head
, she told herself.
What came into her head was a pair of eyes—that stunning marbled blue.
Eric. He was a subject she could get into. She described every part of him she could think of. The soft, low voice. The slight shadow of sandy stubble that framed an angled face. Thumbs casually hooked into pockets. A graceful shuffle from foot to foot as he spoke, his focus up and all around him…
She was absorbed in the task when there was a single knock, the door flew open, and Spencer strode in. Scarlett snapped the computer closed quickly.
“Well,” he said, “it’s done.”
“Done,” Scarlett said, “as in…”
“As in I told them, and they said they would think it over tonight and tell me tomorrow. So I have a whole night of it hanging over my head. Hooray!”
He collapsed to the floor in a dramatic heap. Lola leaned down and looked him in the face.
“What exactly did you say?” she asked.
“I
may
have said that it was an invitational audition for Juilliard,” he said. “That may have come out of my mouth at some point. I also may have made something up about a possible scholarship to NYU. It’s not that these things are true…but we don’t know that they’re not true, right?”
“If you say so,” Lola said mildly.
Something odd passed between Lola and Spencer, a long moment of silence and staring—Lola from her high ground on the bed, and Spencer from his fainting pose on the floor. His face had become very serious.
“If you have a problem with me, you should just come out and say it.”
“I still think you should consider the scholarship,” Lola said. “But whatever you decide…”
“Thank you.”
“Maybe you can let me make my own decisions, too,” Lola added.
“I always do.”
There was some unknown argument between Lola and Spencer that had hummed along in the background for as long as Scarlett could remember, some residual vibration from their own personal Big Bang. It was never clear what it was about, and it never came to any kind of a head. It simply surfaced now and again as static, unexplained and transient.
“I need to get out of here,” he said, bouncing up and breaking the tension. “It’s too hot to even breathe. I need to burn off some energy. Do you think I would
definitely
kill myself if I tried to do a fall down the Central Park steps, or just
probably
kill myself?”
“I’d go with the first one,” Lola said, picking up the nail polish brush again.
“That’s what I thought, too,” Spencer said, disappointedly. “Think I’ll just go curl into a ball.”
“What’s the problem with you two?” Scarlett said, when he was gone.
“There’s no problem,” Lola said. “We have different ways of looking at things. We always have.”
“It’s more than that,” Scarlett said.
Lola replaced the nail polish brush and looked up at Scarlett.
“I’m afraid for him sometimes,” she said.
Lola’s plainspoken sincerity struck a chord. If she was being very truthful with herself, Scarlett was a little afraid, too. She never questioned Spencer’s ability…just their general luck. She worried for them all. Every day something else seemed to chip off this quivering pile that was their lives. It could only be a matter of time before the whole structure came crumbling down. But unlike Lola, she could never say that out loud.
“Whatever the case,” Lola went on, “it’s his problem, Scarlett. It’s good that you care so much, but you have to lead your own life. I mean, you have your own problems. And you have a guest to take care of.”
Lola was right, but the reminder still wasn’t very welcome. She did have problems, like the weeks of nothing that spread out in front of her, the lack of money, of general life. At least Spencer had a goal, even if it was kind of a hard one to reach.
Come to think of it, maybe she did have an unreachable goal of her own.
She opened her computer again, where her imaginary Eric was waiting for her, looking at her again like he had at the table. Something
had
happened there, something that wasn’t imaginary. And if that had happened…well, anything could.
“Maybe this time,” Scarlett said. “Maybe things will work out.”
“Anything is possible,” Lola replied. “But honestly, it would kind of take a miracle.”