She opened a cat food-sized can of dog food and scraped it into a dirty dish. “Thirty years, give or take. Shoulda sold it when the market picked up, but the mortgage’s paid off now, I couldn’t rent a one-bedroom dump for what this costs me. Except the roof’s gone.” Her dark hair was rough and unbrushed, the mustard-colored shapeless sweater did nothing for her legendary figure.
She had on some ugly fake emeralds in her ears, and a cluster of pink and green glass on her bony right hand. “I’ve seen your movies,” said Miss Teen Americana. Striking a perfect balance between girlish excitement and Midwestern abashed modesty. “You’re one of my heroes.”
“Acting,” she snorted. “I like animals. They never act. They’re entirely authentic.” The little greyhound was pushing his dish around the broken tile floor.
Easy for her to say, now that the work no longer came. “I love acting. It lets you live all kinds of lives. I’m studying with Chris Valente.”
“You got lucky. All kinds of creeps out there, preying on the hopeful.” She gave me a pitying look. “How long have you been in town, baby?”
“About a year.” I smiled a vulnerable Midwestern smile.
She didn’t say any more, as the kettle whistled and she got busy making the coffee, balancing a filter cone on top of a chipped porcelain pot, pouring the boiling water in.
“It’s harder than I thought,” I continued, feeling my way along. “I just lost my roommate.” I played it brave-grace under pressure. More sympathetic than whining. “I’m waiting tables down at Orzo. I thought I’d be further along by now.”
“Chapter and verse, baby,” she said, watching the water drip through the grounds. “Orzo. That’s not a bad place. I like their osso buco.”
So did Richard. “They had it last night.” I tried again to redirect. “I don’t mind working there, but the tips aren’t as good as you’d think.”
“That’s tough.” She took two dirty cups out of the sink, rinsed them without benefit of soap or hot water, and filled them with coffee. I prayed the boiling water would be hot enough to kill whatever had been growing on the chipped lip of the mug. “You know, I have a room,” she said. “Never thought of renting it out before, but you seem like a nice kid. Any interest in that?”
“So, did you get in?” Richard asked. He’d gotten dressed, was flopped on my couch like the Crown Prince.
“You had any doubts?” I said, straddling his prone body. “But she doesn’t have money. You should see that place. It’s falling down around her. You’d hardly recognize her, she’s shlepping around like a bag lady.”
“Is that what she told you? She didn’t have any money?”
“No, it’s just what I saw.”
“Don’t be misled. That woman’s got oodles.”
“You’re tripping.”
“Trust me. Just look at that jewelry. She still had it, right?”
“Dime-store crap, you can get it in a box of Cracker Jacks.”
Richard laughed, shifted me so my weight did more good. “You looked but you couldn’t see. Paul Rhodes gave her those rocks back in the days of wine and roses. You can see in the magazines. She’d never part with them. I mean, the sentimental value alone.” I loved the invisible ironic quotation marks around that “sentimental.” He put his sensitive fingers to his lips, dancing the fingertips. “Even if it’s as bad as you describe, she’s hung onto a few pesos, I can assure you.”
What if those emeralds were real? Ten grand? Fifty? I tried to ballpark it, but I had no idea what jewelry like that was worth; I didn’t exactly have a charge card at Tiffany. “She asked me to move in. Help with expenses.”
He pressed his mouth to my neck, something that drove me crazy. “A generous offer, Holly. You should consider it.”
“You think I should, do you?” I said, trying to keep some illusion of independence, but I was already slipping.
“Oh, the savings alone. And the link to a bygone Hollywood. The cachet, the entrée. Not to mention what she might have been lying about, forgotten under the couch or in a spare room. I think you owe it to yourself.”
I waited a few days to return to the house off Commonwealth. Her car was in the driveway, an old blue-gray Mercedes like a tank. I knocked, figuring it was late enough that she would have slept off even a heavy drunk, but early enough that she wouldn’t have gone out had she a mind to. No answer. I rang again and knocked. It was such a pretty house, it didn’t deserve to be as neglected like this, leaves lying moldy, cracks running through the concrete steps.
I had just given up when the little window in the door opened. She fumbled with several locks and a chain. Gilbert raced out, danced around my legs, jumping on me, he weighed about as much as a handful of chicken bones.
“I’ve been thinking about the room,” I said, hesitantly, vulnerable as all get-out.
Her ruined face smiled. Her hair still hadn’t been washed, either that or it always looked that way, long and dark and stringy. “It hasn’t been used in a while,” she said, leading me through the cloisterish living room with its heavy beams, and up through the dining room, around to the kitchen and a set of wooden stairs I hadn’t noticed before, narrow with an iron handrail and a sharp bend under a low overhang.
“Myrna Loy lived here in the ’30s,” Mariah said. “Gale Storm.”
We climbed the stairs into a little hall flanked with a couple of doors. She opened one. A dirty window illuminated an odd-shaped room full of boxes, obviously a former maid’s quarters.
“Of course, we’ll move this crap somewhere.” She stood in the doorway, scratching her dirty hair. “So what do you think?”
It was cold in the room, though I couldn’t tell if it was because it had been closed off or because the heat didn’t work. A stained mattress leaned against the wall. What a fucking dump. But it would probably save me close to $800 a month and there might be some fringe benefits. “How much would you want?” I asked her.
She shrugged. “Oh, I don’t know. What do you think? Couple hundred?”
Not bad, for in a mansion in Los Feliz. Wouldn’t that look good on my portfolio. Even if I would have to wash the dishes in bleach.
And so I joined the ranks of the oddly housed. Los Angeles is full of us-house sitters, subletters, permanent house guests.
It wasn’t much of a move-clothes, a few books, a TV and boom box, and my laptop. But it took two days to clear the boxes out of the room. Memorabilia, just as Richard predicted. A gold mine. Letters from Belmondo and Bertolucci and Bianca Jagger, David Bowie’s Aladdin Sane shirt, a drawing by Larry Rivers on a restaurant placemat. A lamp she’d taken from the set of Riverside 88, the Paul Rhodes film that put her on the map. YSL gowns in the closet, still in their designer bags. Old scripts marked with her handwriting, photographs, scrapbooks of reviews, and fashion layouts she’d been in, Bazaar and W and Interview. We sat on the floor and looked at a spread of her in Vogue, wearing Oscar de la Renta and Halston. She showed me the gown in the photograph, a Russian velvet dress with mink on the sleeves.
But the pictures made me sad. How bright she had been, blindingly alive, lit up from inside like a circus midway. And now here she was, a single lightbulb that had almost burnt out. I could smell her sadness, sitting next to me, in a pilled mustard sweater, and those lips, and her square cut emeralds dull with dirt. The way people’s lives turned out when they just ran them into the ground, like a rental car.
As we moved the boxes into another room across the hall, I saw something I didn’t much care for-rat droppings in the corners. Mariah said not to worry, she used these little traps that didn’t hurt the poor rats, you could carry them out to the backyard and let them go. I didn’t say anything, but later went out and bought some traps big enough to kill a cat. When I heard them pop in the night, all I felt was satisfaction.