“But your parents?”
Violet’s thoughts somersaulted back to the strained phone call she had placed from Shreveport, telling her parents she’d been offered a job in Los Angeles and was taking it. They had begged her to reconsider.
“Come back home to Montgomery!” her mother had pleaded.
“Come back home to what?” Violet had responded. “There’s nothing for me there.”
Daddy had asked what California had that Alabama didn’t. She hadn’t known how to express that Hollywood didn’t have expectations of her.
Or sad memories of what might have been.
“I suppose they miss me,” Violet answered.
Audrey cocked her head. “So, what made you come all this way, if you don’t want to be a star?”
But Violet’s reason was too personal to share with a virtual stranger. She was not going to tell someone she’d only just met that fully realizing she could never have the life she’d been raised to live and wanted to live had sent her scrabbling for a new foothold on a meaningful existence.
“I was ready for a different life with new opportunities,” Violet said, with a slight shrug of her left shoulder.
For a stretched moment Audrey stared at her. “Then you came to the right place,” she finally said. “Are you allergic to cats?” She took a long pull on her cigarette.
Violet shook her head.
“You don’t have any furniture, do you?”
“Just a suitcase. I’ve been staying at a hotel.”
“The rent is sixty dollars a month. Plus half of the utilities.” Audrey dropped the stub of the cigarette to the pavement and ground it out with her shoe. “My place is a bit out of the way. Eight miles by way of bus and the red car. It’s a very pretty neighborhood, though. Close to the hills and the Hollywoodland sign. It was my aunt’s house. But now it’s mine.”
“The red car?”
“The trolley. The streetcar. It’s a good thirty minutes getting there in the morning and just as long or more at night. Still interested?”
“Yes. Yes, I am.”
Audrey smiled. “I’m on loan to one of the assistant art directors the next few days, so how about you meet me out front at quitting time? We can take the red car together so you can see the place and decide.” She rose from the bench, clutching the magazine and the handbag. “C’mon. You don’t want to be late getting back.”
Audrey strolled confidently to toss the wax paper into a trash can some yards away and Violet had to quicken her step to catch up. Audrey’s attention was fixed on the people they passed, some wearing elaborate costumes, some street clothes, some moving leisurely, some rushing as though desperate to catch a departing train. A few of these people Audrey greeted by name; some she did not. But everyone was given a look.
Amber Dawn Photography, 2008
SUSAN MEISSNER is a former managing editor of a weekly newspaper and an award-winning columnist. She is the award-winning author of Secrets of a Charmed Life, A Fall of Marigolds, and Stars Over Sunset Boulevard, among other novels.
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A Bridge Across the Ocean Page 33
