Crowne of Lies

by Reiss, CD

  Selma inspected it. “Interesting. Not a Swarovski.”

  “Is yours?”

  Mandy gave me a wide-eyed look, demanding I say something I couldn’t. She was trying to help me, God bless her, but also fuck her because the GAC was a secret, and if I was outed, we were all outed.

  Selma found a blue stone in the pouch and held it out. A spike of epoxy stuck to one side. “I called the man at the Swarovski buying office.”

  Shit. Swarovski did not fuck around. They’d know where it came from.

  “Les Montcharion,” Mandy added, putting her stone away.

  “Right,” Selma said, fisting her rhinestone. “He said it was a custom run from 1998. Big order, but defective.”

  Shit.

  Shit shit shit.

  “Logan,” I said softly as he signed the bill, “we have to go.”

  “For Basile actually.” Selma turned to me.

  Logan’s hand froze. My heart stopped.

  “Wasn’t that your dad, Ella?” Mike asked as if he hadn’t been paying attention to a damn thing we’d been saying. “Maybe someone working for him did the house project?”

  “Maybe.” I took my napkin from my lap and pushed out my chair.

  “I called to ask,” Selma said, “but Bianca stonewalled.”

  “Nicely, I’m sure,” Mandy said in a thickly sarcastic tone.

  “Excuse me,” I muttered as I took my bag off the back of the chair. “I have to run to the ladies’.”

  Leaving them, I passed the hallway to the bathrooms and wound up at the elevators with a pounding heart. I hit the button down and ground my teeth when the doors didn’t open right away.

  “Ella,” Logan said.

  “Leave me be.” The elevator came and I got in.

  “No,” Logan said, standing beside me.

  “I just want to go home.” The doors closed and we descended.

  “I’ll send for the car.”

  “No! I mean home. Home. Not your house.”

  “Then I’ll take you there.”

  I couldn’t bear being in an enclosed space with him longer than I had to be. He’d try to fix it all. He’d promise me the world, but the world wasn’t in the contract. Being his wife was what I’d promised and it was the thing that had halted my career and stolen my vision.

  The doors opened onto the lobby floor, and I stalked out, knowing with every step that he was beside me. When I got to the curb, I tapped my phone for a car.

  “Ella.” Logan got right in front of me. “What happened?”

  “What happened?” I entered the address of the warehouse on Highland. “I told you no. I said ‘no Selma Quintero’ and you didn’t listen.”

  “I thought you were being modest.”

  “You set up a dinner with a totally powerful art dealer I’m not ready to meet like you wanted to be as vicious as possible in the shortest amount of time. Then you have the audacity to ask me why I’m nervous. But”—I pointed in his face—“lucky ass you, I know you better. I know you’re not cruel. You’re just selfish, self-involved, self-centered. You’re the little piggy at the end of the line going”—I poked his chest with each me—“me, me, me, me all the way home.”

  “This dinner was for you, because I never see you, and if I have to meet with Mike, I might as well give you someone to talk to. It’s what a husband does.”

  “Wait, wait. You never see me? Why does that matter?”

  Why did it matter? It shouldn’t. It didn’t. I knew it didn’t because that was the deal.

  I’d let the cat out of the bag to both me and him.

  I wanted him.

  “This has been a humiliating disaster.” I looked at my phone. The car was close but needed to be closer before I said more stupid shit.

  “Humiliating that she knew your group?”

  He thought the fact that Mandy and Selma had souvenirs in their wallets was some kind of social proof.

  He was right. It was social proof that I’d given up more than I could ever get back.

  “She knew about nothing.” I put down the device. “Nothing that’s mine. You made me leave it. I was doing something important and I dumped it to be your wife. What the fuck was I thinking? I let you ruin everything. You know what? I might as well take your name. Walk the walk. Be a placeholder for the next Mrs. Logan Crowne.”

  The car came, and the doors unlocked with a clack.

  “I’m going with you.” He opened the back door.

  “Logan.” I got between him and the back seat. “Stop. Jesus Christ, you don’t listen!”

  “You’re talking crazy. This isn’t Ella.”

  “Yes, it is. Please. It is.” I sat and grabbed the handle, but he held it open.

  “I don’t want this to be why we broke up,” he said. “This isn’t the story I want to tell.”

  “You’ll come up with something.”

  I yanked the handle and he let me close the door. When the car pulled away, I was completely alone, watching the streets go by with a driver who was blissfully untalkative.

  Except I wanted to talk. My friends had moved on. My family was dead. On the way to nowhere, I’d burned every bridge behind me.

  Doreen would know what to do, and if she didn’t, she’d listen to me talk until I found the solution myself. I could tell her anything, except the problem of her son.

  My mother in-law would never be mine. I had a dead mother and a stepmother who hated me.

  Bianca stonewalled.

  Asked about missing stones among the ones I’d skimmed for years, she’d said nothing.

  I’d put her in a position to answer for things I’d done. I’d carelessly passed my wrongdoing on to her. She’s been put on the spot because of me.

  That wasn’t fair.

  Nothing she’d done was fair, but that didn’t excuse me.

  “Hey,” I said to the driver a second before I actually decided what to do.

  “Yeah?” he looked at me in the rearview.

  “Can you take me to West Hollywood instead?”

  * * *

  Bianca was, as always, a cartoon of herself, answering the door in a purple muumuu and full makeup. A white poodle barked at her feet.

  “Ella!” she cried, actually smiling as if she was glad to see me. She scooped up the dog and moved aside. “Come in!”

  “I’m sorry to bother you.”

  “Nonsense!” She closed the door and held up the poodle. “You haven’t met Mr. Tubbs.” She addressed the dog. “Mr. Tubbs, this is Ella.”

  “Hi, you’re cute.” I patted his head.

  “Mr. Tubbs keeps me company now that you’re gone.” She clapped down the hall as if she hadn’t just said something absurd.

  “I moved out when I was eighteen.”

  “Of course you did,” she called from the kitchen. “Do you want tea? I was having a little wine. You’re not driving, are you?”

  “No.”

  When I got to the kitchen, the dog was on the floor and Bianca was pouring a glass of Chablis.

  “Whoa,” I said. “Stop. That’s—”

  “Let’s just finish it.” She poured until the bottle gave out and handed me the overfull glass.

  Why had I come? Was I looking for a mother? Bianca was the only one available of the three, but she didn’t seem capable of comfort or wise words.

  “Thanks.” I took the wine and sipped it.

  “So what brings you?” She sat at the nook and I sat across. “You can’t need money.”

  “No.”

  Mr. Tubbs scrambled up next to me.

  “Oh, he likes you!” Her delight seemed genuine. “What then? Tell me. You need something. Wait! I have it.” She leaned in to look right at me, and even in a tipsy haze, she managed to look right through me. “You’re bored.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  “What?”

  “Is it that obvious?”

  With a satisfied smile, she leaned back and crossed her legs. “I know you is what I know. You
get this look like you’re about to do something reckless. Whenever I saw that look, I’d have to run and find you something to do or you’d get ‘fuck fashion’ printed on all the hanger tape.”

  “It was ‘fashion is for losers’ and it gave Papillion a little edge.”

  “Which we were sorely lacking that season, I’ll give you that.” She raised her glass and drank. “After Basile died, we never really had the same… I don’t know…”

  “Authority?”

  “No, not that. More…”

  “Conviction?”

  “Yes!”

  “Like we were playing the old hits but didn’t have the balls to stand by a new song.”

  “Cowards. We were cowards. No, well… I am.” She nodded with a faraway stare then snapped out of it. “Drink up. Then tell me the truth. You have all the money you need, but you couldn’t last six months without a job. You want to come back.”

  I nearly spit my wine.

  “I guessed right again?”

  “Why would I come here asking for that? You spent how many years trying to get me out?”

  “My God, Ella.” She seemed deeply offended, or at least I assumed she was offended. “You hated it. You hated it even before I got there. You just didn’t know it. Of course I was trying to get you out. If I hadn’t fired you, do you know where you’d be? You’d be there right now, at this hour, working your tail off and hating every minute of it until you exploded in some mischief or other.”

  I hid behind my wine, taking two big gulps and not even emptying half the glass.

  “I don’t want my job back,” I said, holding down a burp.

  “You need some water.” She sailed to the fridge like a purple flag on a windy day.

  With perfect instincts, Mr. Tubbs got up and went after her. As she filled a water glass in the refrigerator door, she took a treat from a canister and tossed it right into his mouth.

  “I wanted to apologize for something,” I said.

  “Oh, let me sit for this event.” She put the glass in front of me and got another bottle from the fridge. It was already half-empty. “What are we apologizing for?”

  God, she was intolerable.

  “I… stole some things from work. Some rhinestones.”

  “Some?”

  “Some. A lot. Over the course of a few years. Overages. Defects.”

  “The Swarovskis.”

  “Yes.”

  “I knew, dear. But thank you for bringing it up. More wine?” She poured before I could refuse.

  “You knew? Why didn’t you say anything?”

  “Out of respect for your father. And I admit…” She shrugged, cupping her glass. “I wanted to see what you were going to do with them. I have to say I was a little disappointed with that house thing.”

  “Wait. You knew?”

  “Suspected. But que sera. You were always a mystery to me.”

  “You fired me for stealing the dress but not the rhinestones?”

  “I fired you because you were ready to be fired. And by the way, I do love what you did with it.” She flicked her hand at Daddy’s dress.

  I’d forgotten I was wearing something I’d have to explain.

  But I really didn’t have to explain anything to her. She seemed to know it all already.

  “I want to be good,” I said as the wine rushed to my head. “I want to be a good person who does good things and makes good decisions but it’s just…” I drained my wine.

  “It’s just?”

  “It’s so hard when all the good stuff is blah.” Was I slurring already? Of course I was. I’d had three drinks over dinner. All I needed was a few mouthfuls of Chablis to put me over the edge. “Life is just… it’s this blah blah blah then you die alone anyway because who wants to hang out with blah? Nobody! They all want Bad Ella. Bad Ella’s so talented and real. Bad Ella does such interesting things and we can watch from over here, where it’s safe and we get to stay good.”

  “Ella, dear?”

  “And oh my poor husband is so bored with me being good. He just doesn’t know it. But if I go back and do Bad Ella things, we’re finished and I’ll have all the money in the world…” I threw my arms up. “But not him.” I let them fall heavily to the table. “So. I’m here because you’re the only mother I have and you’re the only one who can tell me what to do.”

  “And you’ll do the exact opposite.” She switched our wine glasses. Now the one in front of me was mostly empty, which was good and wise.

  “So you’re going to tell me to rob a bank?”

  “No. It’s irresponsible of me to not tell you to rob a bank though. Lord knows, the financial sector should be paying me to tell you what to do as an insurance policy against you actually doing it.”

  “I’m sorry. Too many negatives. I’m confused.”

  “Be good.” She slapped her palm on the table. “Be good and stay good. You’ll get used to it. You’ll keep your husband, who you obviously love—”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Don’t be an idiot, Estella. Just keep yourself together. Life is mostly boring most of the time. Sometimes you meet a man like your father, or Logan Crowne if you will, who just makes it all worthwhile.”

  “It should be worthwhile just because. Without them. Just me. I should make it worth—uh, I don’t feel so good.”

  Like a shot, Bianca gripped my arm and pulled me to the hall bathroom, where I unleashed a fifty-seven dollar salad into the septic system before its time. She held my hair back while Mr. Tubbs yapped at the bizarre noises coming from my throat.

  “Hush now,” Bianca scolded the dog.

  “I stand by my assertion,” I prayed to the porcelain. “It should be me. I make me happy. No one else.”

  “Happiness is other people.”

  “I thought hell was other people.” I let loose again. It seemed impossible that my stomach could hold that much.

  “Who said that? Was he French?”

  “You said it when I broke your windshield.” I pushed back and Bianca let go of my hair. I rolled to a sitting position on the tile. “I feel so much better. Thank you.”

  Bianca snapped a hand towel off the bar and ran it under the faucet. “I never knew you were such a lightweight.”

  “Did you tell me hell was other people so I’d believe the opposite?”

  “No. You were hell and you were a person. I was probably angry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  She wrung out the towel and handed it to me. “You must be truly, truly ill or possessed by something you haven’t expelled from your system yet.”

  “I made it hard for you,” I said after I wiped my mouth, abruptly more sober than drunk.

  “You were a miserable bitch from day one.”

  “I said I was sorry.”

  “Alert the media.” She took the towel. “Are you staying tonight? Your room still has a bed in it. I think there are a few of your things still in the closet.”

  My old room. Logan’s house. The warehouse.

  Three places to sleep for three stages of my life.

  Which one did I want to live in?

  None. But at least Bianca was finally being honest with me.

  “Can I stay here?”

  “Of course. Let’s clean this up and get you to bed.”

  Shockingly, Bianca knew how to both clean a toilet and not complain about it. We made quick work of it together with Mr. Tubbs on the other side of the door, yipping for his mother.

  On the way to the stairs, we passed my father’s old office, and my eye caught on two urns side by side on a high shelf. My father’s was polished gold. My mother’s was pewter.

  Instead of heading up the stairs, I stopped to gaze at the urns.

  Appreciating Bianca’s honesty meant I had to do her the same favor. I owed her the complete deal, not just carefully chosen admissions.

  “My mother’s urn,” I said.

  “Yes?” She scooped up the dog and made a kiss-face at him.r />
  “It’s in the same place.”

  “My goodness, Ella, did you think I’d throw it away?”

  “It’s empty.”

  She laughed brightly, as if cued by the ba-dum-bump after a perfect joke.

  “What?” I asked. “You knew?”

  “I knew it the day after your father and I were married.”

  She’d never said anything of course, because she didn’t give a shit about my mother or what she meant to Daddy.

  “Of course you did.”

  “Your jeans, that morning, after you declined to show up for the wedding? Strewn on the floor. Of course. You were sleeping, and your father and I were getting ready to go on our honeymoon. I turned them right side out to fold them. At first, I didn’t know what on earth you’d gotten on the knees. What could you have been crawling through? A volcano?”

  Was my secret a secret? Had my father known what I’d done? Did he die hating me and never telling me? Or did he understand?

  “Did you tell Daddy?”

  Instead of answering, she took two steps to the second floor and stopped with one arm under the white poodle and the other draped over the banister. “Are you coming up?

  More steps, until her ankles were level with my eyes and I had to look up at her.

  “Did you? Bianca! Did. You. Tell. Him?”

  “Why does it matter now?”

  “Because I never got to explain. If he died thinking I missed his wedding to throw mom’s ashes in the garbage disposal or whatever… he’d think I did it out of spite.”

  “And you didn’t.” The statement was both a question and encouragement for more.

  “No, I didn’t. Mom up there, looking down at Dad and his new wife… I’m not saying I didn’t hate you, because I did. But I wanted Dad to be happy and I wanted Mom at peace. So I spread the ashes over the front pavement at the Observatory, because she named me star and that’s dumb, but it was all I could think of. Then I put the urn back. Without her inside, it was just a container.”

  “That’s a lovely story,” she said dryly.

  “Did you tell him?”

  “Did I?” She looked into space for a moment, head tilted. I assumed she was coming up with an extra biting retort. In the end, I kind of wished she had. “Basile found out a couple of years later. He moved it, and it was too light. He was… shall we say, distraught.”