Been There, Married That (ARC)

by Gigi Levangie

  My strapping, blue-eyed, lapsed-Catholic father was the epitome of the Jewish mother. When I’d spent every dime I had on that 750-square-foot house a hundred feet from the beach, it was to get my father out of the apartment he’d lived in, in the heart (or bile duct) of Hollywood, since forever. I wanted him to live closer to his granddaughter.

  I was so proud. I’d made enough money on a movie I’d written that was rewritten by hacks with sledgehammer fingers until it became the filmic version of marshmallow fluff to buy a house. But I already had a house, or, rather, Trevor already had a house, so I wanted to buy one for my dad. Isn’t that what you do as a child of a questionable-neighborhood apartment-dwelling parent? We’d never lived in a house, my family and I. Now, two, actually, two and a half, counting Pep, would live in a house. This was big for us.

  He begrudgingly approved of this little abode. A beach cottage built in the 1920s, someone’s weekend home. The place was a dump. I stepped onto faded vomit-colored wall-to-wall carpet, and my ankles were blanketed in fleas. Flea socks. The tenant, a bodybuilder who collected strays and crack pipes, stayed in his room, muttering to himself (and his muscles?) ignoring us carpetbaggers (I’d bag a different carpet, sans fleas). The place smelled like tanning lotion, dog (I hope it was dog) urine, and burning plastic.

  I don’t even want to get into the Jacuzzi in the backyard. I wouldn’t want anyone to get into that Jacuzzi without a hazmat suit.

  I didn’t care. I loved old houses and saw this shit box’s potential. I wrote a check and signed papers and became an adult. I owned my own tiny, flea-infested speck of land.

  A few weeks later, my dad told me Nic Cage was selling his house at the end of our street, on the beach.

  “It’s only four mil,” he said.

  “Dad, I just spent everything I have,” I said.

  “Yeah, but it’s a bargain,” he said. “It’s $1,105 per square foot. That’s a good investment.”

  After spending the rest of my option money to fix up the house and decorate, I drove Dad to the beach cottage to “present” my gift, which smelled like fresh paint and no more fleas. He folded his arms and walked around, inspecting the tiny home.

  “So,” I said. “What do you think of the new carpet?”

  He looked at it. Sniffed.

  “I like blue,” he said.

  I had chosen taupe.

  Nothing I did/wrote/bought would ever be good enough for Dad. That morning, sitting around the kitchen table with Dad and Pep over pancakes soaked in guilt, I realized I’d married my father.

  The pancakes were delicious.

  Dad explained to me and Pep that he needed his place back Saturday night; he had a hot date. Pep high-fived him and went to pack.

  “You and Trevor have a lot in common, you notice that?” I asked him when Pep left the room.

  “Bite your tongue,” he said. “My girlfriends are hotter than anything your ex-husband will get.”

  “You’re competing with my ex-husband over his girlfriends?”

  “I’m just saying,” my dad said.

  When we were kids, Fin and I knew Dad loved us because he loved playing tricks on us, like holding us down and dropping a glob of spit an inch from our noses. Or sticking Oreos in his eyes and chasing us around making zombie noises. Or playing “pull my finger” at the dinner table. We’d explode in fits of laughter. We were his pals, his cohorts in bad taste, not pretty little objects to be protected. We were taught and expected to get the last punch—and we did, good little soldiers. I didn’t even own a dress and didn’t wear one until elementary graduation, a hand-me-down from a neighbor. It was too tight around my middle. When I sat on the bench during graduation, the zipper split. I’d made straight As and gave my first speech, but Dad was disappointed because now Fin couldn’t wear that dress.

  “Sonia and I are having dinner at 5:00,” he said. “So if you could give us some space around 6:00 . . .”

  “What about Shu?” I asked.

  “What about her?”

  “Aren’t you two . . .”

  Pep walked in. “I like Shu,” Pep said.

  “You’ve never even met her.”

  “She speaks five languages, Mom,” she said.

  “I like her too, pumpkin. But she’s getting a little serious,” he said. “I gotta pump the brakes.”

  “Do you really want to blow what you have with Shu?” I asked.

  “Relax,” he said. “Geez, how’d I raise such an uptight kid?” He looked at Pep, who just rolled her eyes and shrugged, like, Who the fuck knows?

  After I helped Dad wash the dishes in scalding hot water (if your skin wasn’t peeling off, the water wasn’t hot enough), Pep and I took a stroll down to the beach and filled up on negative ions; I needed enough to last me through the divorce. Gabriela had told me we could stay with her family, so that was an option, but I didn’t want Bernardo to end up sleeping on the couch again.

  My cell phone, sticky with sunscreen, vibrated. An unknown number.

  Gio? If I opened my mouth, I might complain. I hated complainers, even me. Especially me.

  “Hello!” he said. Of course I answered. What? As Pep ran down to the water, I told him everything. The awful famous couple. The Realtor’s ironed face. My dad’s mystery date.

  “What happened to Shu?” he asked. “I like them together.”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Stay at my place,” he said.

  “I couldn’t ask you to do that,” I said. Could I? “You have a place?”

  “You didn’t ask,” he said. “I insist. I won’t even be there. I’m never there.”

  “I thought you only stayed in hotels—”

  “I’ve a house in Santa Monica Canyon,” he said. “It’s empty. I keep forgetting to sell, and then I stay there occasionally, and I realize I like it and I lose my nerve.”

  I heard French seep out of a loudspeaker in the background.

  “Gio, where are you?”

  “Just landed in Paris,” he said. “It’s the only city left where I can smoke outside a café.”

  I wanted to be Gio when I grew up. Without the cigarettes. Maybe an occasional cigarette. I thought of how sexy I’d look with one hanging off my lower lip like Brigitte Bardot. Without Brigitte’s lips. Or skin. Or eyeliner. Okay, maybe not quite as sexy.

  “Gio, thank you. We’ll stay,” I said. “Just for the weekend. Until the horrible famous people leave.”

  “I hope they never leave,” he said.

  I hung up, and a tear fell from my eye. The smallest kindness (this kindness was more plus-sized) reduced me to a human puddle. My new hormones? Or was a kind gesture so rare? In LA, favors were on the barter system. Wealthy Angelenos only bestowed favors if they received a bigger one in exchange. Look at all the private school buildings with famous names—you think they paid for the building? They’d pay off 10 percent, get their name splashed across the top, then leave the school struggling to pay off the balance while they bought Junior into college.

  Before Junior went into rehab and the singing/modeling/rapping career. Naturally.

  Pep and I packed up our things, and I gave my dad a hug and he patted my back.

  “I love you, Dad,” I said.

  “Be good,” he said and patted me again. Good dog.

  My dad was a child of the Depression. His father was an abusive alcoholic, his mother a long-suffering saint. To get to school, he walked miles in the snow in hand-me-down shoes from his older sister. He’d been small for his age, but he was tough. He joined the army at seventeen. He was a gunnery sergeant at nineteen, responsible for men much older.

  If his life were an equation, the answer would be: Not a hugger.

  “Watch Pep’s diet,” he said, waving his finger at me. “She’s getting too much sodium. And keep her away from the GMOs. And for crissakes, teach her some life skills.”

  Translated: I love you and my granddaughter so much.

  “You know what? Just send her to
me every couple of weeks,” he said. “We’ll start with the basics—cooking, cleaning, balancing a checkbook.”

  “Thanks, Dad,” I said. “And no go on the GMOs in the meantime.”

  “Keep an eye on the stock market,” he said. “Might want to stay in cash.”

  “That’s easy when you have, like, forty bucks to your name,” I said. “Call Shu.”

  As I left, I realized I hadn’t married my father. I’d married a different species, a rare and exotic bird of a man. The more I tried to figure it out, the more the why slithered away from me. Maybe it wasn’t about the why. Maybe it was about the who—who wouldn’t have married Trevor? It’s like asking who wouldn’t have slept with Warren Beatty in the ’70s.

  No. One.

  Pep and I puttered along Ocean, passing sunburned hordes of neon tourists and swarms of green Hulu bikes and terrifying scooters buzzing in and out of traffic, motorized mosquitoes diving for prey.

  A typical Saturday drive in these parts is what I’m saying.

  We pulled down into Santa Monica Canyon, outside a Spanish home, ivy hugging its walls, hidden behind a peeling dogwood, an old fountain gurgling in cool, shaded grass. The house was built in the 1930s for one of Howard Hughes’s favorite buxom starlets. Gio had told me she’d died there, having never left the premises for the last decade of her life. Hearing that, he’d bought it sight unseen.

  I molded my hand to the tree and looked up at the sun floating through the leaves.

  I couldn’t blame the old broad. I’d be buried here, if it were up to me.

  “It’s a fairy-tale house,” Pep said, her eyes wide with wonder as I punched in Gio’s security code. Four numbers for the year he lost his virginity, in the middle of the Vietnam War.

  “Whose house is it?” Pep asked.

  “A family friend,” I said. “Daddy knows him.”

  “Is Daddy coming, too?”

  That’s the problem with kids—so many questions and so few answers. The alarm beeped a welcome, and I pushed the heavy door and ushered Pep inside.

  I could see why Gio hadn’t sold. The house was Gio—solid, comfortable, pleasantly spooky. Spirits lived here, happy, dancing, drunk spirits. I slipped off my shoes, the cool Spanish tiles awakening my senses as I padded out to the veranda overlooking the pool, which, to no one’s surprise, at least not this reporter, was filled with leaves and green blue with algae. The land that time and The Hollywood Reporter forgot. No one would find me here. I felt myself exhale. I took another deep breath and filled my lungs with damp Santa Monica air.

  I heard a noise.

  A phone? A chime. The doorbell. Shit. Someone had found me. So much for the Witness Protection Program for Hollywood wives.

  Whatever happened to Agnes Nash? She knew too much and said it all!

  “Can I go in the pool?” Pep asked as I headed to the front door.

  “It’s covered in leaves.”

  “I know,” she said, wistful. “Why can’t we have a pool covered in leaves? It’s like the trees went swimming.”

  The chime sprinkled the air.

  Standing in front of the old Spanish door was a man in a cap and white apron, an oversized knotted plastic bag cradled in his hands.

  “Are you Agnes whose smile lights up the room?” he asked.

  “Depends on the size of the room,” I said, my smile lighting up the doorway, thinking of the man with the golden-tongued kiss who’d given this guy those specific instructions. “What’s this?”

  “Chicken soup,” he said. “Mr. Metz said to make sure you ate right away.”

  I raked enough dollar bills from my purse and coat pockets for a tip, which he refused, insisting Gio had taken care of everything. I acquiesced and dashed back inside, tiptoe-dancing on the tile, tore open the bag on the stained kitchen block, flipped off the plastic top, and sank my face into the schmaltz-glazed steam.

  Pep had fallen asleep on the deep pink velvet “princess bed,” as she dubbed the couch in the living room with thick white marshmallow walls and beamed ceilings. I wondered if the old couch were part of the original house, and if the lady of the house had expired on its cushions; it would be the perfect hammock for a last breath. The pillows were exhausted and smelled sweet with age and old perfume, the wood frame with elegant curlicues worn down by human touch, matching end tables new in the 1930s that had circled through the vagaries of interior design fads. They’d survived and emerged like those women you occasionally see with bold white hair and skin that moves with their expressions.

  I was wide awake, engaged with the sun’s quieting light playing tricks on the faded Persian rug that was definitely worth $60,000. How do I know this? Because every time Trevor ordered a rug from his decorator, he would yell, “Sixty thousand? It’s only a fucking rug! An old fucking rug!”

  He had a point.

  I wrapped Pep in a cashmere throw I’d found in the master and relaxed into that space that held no husband, no father, no sister (currently held in the Van Nuys Women’s Correctional Facility), no one except me and my sleeping child.

  Delicious, I thought. This moment feels delicious.

  I knew a girl, an old buddy, who’d used food adjectives for friends. She’s luscious. He’s yummy. I wondered what happened to her. As one circle grew, the other receded into a pinpoint.

  I heard a faint beeping.

  So faint it could only be heard after the sun went down.

  It was coming from an upstairs room.

  “And the moment’s gone,” I said as I rubbed my hands together, then let them fly.

  I hiked up the cramped spiral staircase toward the upstairs rooms, the beeping beckoning and mocking. “There’s no peace,” the beeping said. “What were you thinking?”

  I tracked the beeping to an office tucked into the back corner overlooking the yellowing backyard, the pool that was more leaf than water. An enormous personal computer with oversized screen set on a heavy, stained mahogany desk was plunked in the middle of the room, proclaiming itself the great overseer of beeping sounds. I switched on the light. The sound was coming from inside a drawer at the bottom of the desk.

  I opened the drawer. Amid a crunch of papers, old scripts, torn checks, pens, children’s scribbles, there was a small alarm clock, forgotten.

  Eight-track tapes.

  A bundle of envelopes, bound by a rubber band worn by age and stretched to its limit. The envelopes were yellowed at the edges, frayed by time.

  Addressed to Gio.

  In a variety of handwriting. Wisps of letters, wide, airy loops, others slashes and angry blots, several dotted with spilled wine.

  Love letters.

  I should not open them, of course I shouldn’t. I should’ve popped the batteries out of the alarm clock and shoved the letters back right away.

  I shouldn’t have opened them. But I did. Why? Because I’m weak. And nosy. And a writer. And a woman. And a human being.

  Dear Gio,

  I called and called and called.

  Is it really over?

  Sarah

  Dated January 7, 1982. So. I guess it’s over, Sarah?

  Gio,

  These last few weeks have been magical.

  Yours,

  Emma G.

  I checked the date. Emma G. Emma Gainesville, the English Rose, had starred in one of Gio’s ’80s gangster films. Forever in your debt, huh? I’ll bet.

  A pinging sound punctured my infatuation bubble (with its thin veneer of jealousy). Was I jealous? What right would I have to be jealous? Does every woman have that right after one life-changing kiss and a half gallon of home-delivered chicken soup?

  I say yes. Agreed?

  Chime.

  The doorbell. Chime.

  It was 11:08 already, my phone exclaimed. Who rings a doorbell at 11:08?

  I shoved the love letters back in the drawer and raced down the stairway before Pep was awakened.

  She was outside, still as a lamppost, her inky hair haloed by the hazy streetli
ght. The Princess of Darkness, appearing custom-wrapped by minions in black cashmere. The dogwood tree swayed in the wind like a woman cradling a baby, and what the hell, I thought. What the hell was Waverly Brown doing here?

  “I have a client who lives down the street,” she said as she strode past me on those eight-foot legs into the foyer, taking a moment to glance at the painting of a Spanish Madonna set above the entry table. “I can’t talk about it, but he’s at WME and he’s in a #MeToo mess. Yes, she’s underage, but only by six weeks. It involved cocaine and maybe a half dozen Xanax. I can’t talk about it.”

  I willed myself to blink; I felt as though I must be dreaming.

  “Anyway. I saw your car. I was just thinking about you.” She closed her eyes and took a deep, throttling breath. “Agnes, we need to talk.”

  “You know I’m not a negative person,” Waverly lied.

  “Actually, everything you’ve said so far has been negative,” I said.

  “Things are about to get really bad,” she said, her hands entangled in her long, beaded necklace. “Terrible, in fact.”

  “Jesus Christ, Waverly.”

  “Also, you owe me for last month,” she said.

  “Yes, yes,” I said. “I owe a lot of people. But you know, food.”

  “Do you know George Treadwell?” Her eyebrows mashed together. “I do. I can’t talk about it.”

  “George Treadwell? I mean, I’ve met him,” I said, thinking about his foray into the kitchen, his brief dip into the Fin show.

  “Step carefully. Keep your head low. Postpone any court date.”

  “My head low,” I repeated.

  “I keep picking up something,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense.”

  “There’s not a lot in my life that makes sense,” I said. I said pointedly. About her. In this room. Right now.

  “I feel like you’re connected to George,” she said. “He’s the key.”

  “George. Treadwell. The actor,” I said. “The one who’s acting in Trevor’s movie.”

  “For now,” she said. Her eyes darted about the living room before they settled. “Someone died in this room.”

  “Great,” I said. “Anything else?”

  “This is not your future,” she said, her hand outstretched, her impossible fingers playing a sonata in the still air. “Don’t get too attached.”