Suite Scarlett

by Johnson, Maureen

  “Clambake,” Scarlett muttered. “Chip and the clambake. It sounds like a mismatched partner cop comedy.”

  “See? You haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

  “I haven’t gone anywhere yet.”

  “Come on.” Lola steered Scarlett in front of the mirror. “Let me fix your hair.”

  For a non-curly-haired person, Lola could handle Scarlett’s anarchist hair with surprising skill. More products were pulled from the magic drawer. A curl was pulled out here, scrunched up there. Two types of fine mist were sprayed, and a small amount of a light-as-air waxy substance was snapped over the tips.

  “Perfect,” Lola said. “Why don’t you try out the makeup I got you yesterday? That red lipstick would be fabulous with this. I’m going to go tell Marlene what’s going on.”

  Scarlett twisted up the lipstick as Lola went next door. She heard the whole conversation through the wall.

  “Guess what!” Lola said. “Scarlett’s going to take you today!”

  This had exactly the effect that Scarlett had predicted.

  “Why?”

  “Because I have to go somewhere with Chip.”

  “Where?”

  Marlene had a journalist’s instinct for questioning.

  “Just somewhere.”

  “I want you to take me,” Marlene said. “It’s TV.”

  Scarlett resented the implication that she was somehow less worthy to sit in a studio audience than (the admittedly photogenic) Lola, but she was used to this kind of thing from Marlene. She twisted the lipstick open and carefully tapped it against her lower lip. The color was strong.

  “Come on,” Lola said coaxingly. “It’ll be just as good.”

  “No, it won’t.”

  “My little sister loves me so much,” Scarlett said quietly to the mirror. “I am her favorite.”

  There were general moans of protest now. A low whine. These were coupled with soothing words from Lola as she tried to tame Marlene into submission. Scarlett rolled her eyes. Only Marlene could throw a temper tantrum about who was going to take her on one of her countless interesting trips.

  “It’s a favor,” Scarlett heard Lola say. “Just for me. I’ll tell you what. You go with Scarlett today and, later this week, I’ll bring you into the store and get you a makeover. Deal?”

  There was a pause and a banging around of what Scarlett assumed was the curling iron. Hopefully Marlene wasn’t trying to scorch a hole in the wall with it to stare at her through. It wouldn’t have surprised her, though.

  “Fine,” Marlene finally said. “I have to finish my hair.”

  Lola returned, a mask of placid innocence on her face.

  “She’s trying to look like you,” Lola said, smoothing down her dress. “You should be flattered.”

  “Somehow, I don’t think that’s what she’s doing.”

  “That lipstick is perfect,” Lola said, deftly switching subjects. “Told you. You really need to go for bolder colors. You have the skin and the hair for it. Some people spend thousands of dollars a year and fry their hair to a crisp trying to get your shade of blonde or those kind of curls.”

  Lola was always sincere. That’s why it was hard to deny her anything.

  “Speaking of frying hair, you should probably keep an eye on her,” Scarlett said, running the lipstick over her bottom lip one more time. “I’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

  Scarlett was poking around in her closet for some shoes when her phone rattled on the dresser. It was the front desk.

  “Get down here now,” her mother whispered urgently. “Now—now. Whatever you’re doing, drop it.”

  There was something in her voice that told Scarlett this was no drill. She shoved on a pair of flip-flops and ran.

  A GUEST ARRIVES

  There was no one behind the desk when Scarlett answered the emergency call—and no one had put out the WE’VE JUST STEPPED AWAY. PLEASE RING THE BELL FOR SERVICE! sign.

  “Mom?” Scarlett said, hoisting herself up and looking over the desk.

  Her mother was not crouching underneath.

  Scarlett looked around in bafflement, then went behind the desk and sat down.

  A tall woman suddenly stepped from behind the archway leading to the dining room. She had short, deep brown hair, cut through with an even darker streak, like a chipmunk. She wore skinny jeans on the bottom and a pink kimonolike shirt on top. Scarlett had seen lots of similar items in Chinatown, but there was something about the way the material hugged her form so gracefully, how the pink was soft and muted instead of super shiny…something told her that this was the real deal. Silk. Thick silk. Many worms had given all they had to make that shirt.

  The woman was standing with her fisted hands planted on her hips. Something about her stance suggested that at any moment she might raise her arms above her head and superhero it right through the ceiling and every consecutive floor until she hit the sky.

  Both Scarlett and the woman stared a bit on seeing each other.

  “Did you just call me mom?” the woman said.

  “Not you,” Scarlett said quickly. “My mom…is here.”

  “Your mother is here?” the woman said, looking around.

  “Not right now.”

  “But she’s staying here?”

  “No.”

  “Should you be behind that desk?” the woman asked.

  “Do you need help?” Scarlett replied.

  “Do you work here?”

  “I live here,” Scarlett said. “I can help you.”

  “Oh, so your mother is…” Scarlett could see the woman putting two and two together and slowly, ever so slowly, pulling a four into focus. “Who said child labor was dead? I’m being helped. But thank you. Someone, probably your mother, is getting me an espresso as we speak, an espresso that will hopefully prevent me from falling over. I’ve just gotten off the plane from Thailand. Twenty-nine hours. Have you ever been on a plane for twenty-nine hours? I haven’t sat still that long since I did a marathon meditation for two days when I was on the ashram. My ass could take it then. I don’t want to sit down again for a week, at least. I’ll admit it. I have jet lag.”

  The majority of that was delivered in one long breath. She swiveled her torso, cracking her back loudly, then strode over to the desk and peered at the framed pictures that hung behind it, showing all the successive generations of Martins posed in front of the hotel. The last picture had been taken four years ago. Scarlett loved the way her braces caught the sun in it. Eleven had been a rough year, for many reasons.

  “God!” the woman said. “How many of you are there?”

  “You mean my brothers and sisters? Four.”

  “Four!” The woman laughed again. It was a strangely animated laugh, like someone had attached her chin to a string and was jerking it toward the sky. “You don’t see that much in the city. I guess your parents aren’t fans of birth control.”

  Scarlett had had this exact thought many times herself, but she didn’t really like hearing this stranger saying it out loud. Nor did she like strangers hanging over her, practically staring down her cleavage. But it wasn’t the cleavage, or lack thereof, that the woman seemed most interested in.

  “That’s Dior, isn’t it?” she asked, pinching the strap and feeling the material.

  The woman was close enough for Scarlett to smell—she carried a faint fragrance of incense, and a light perfume that had an expensive feel inside of Scarlett’s nose.

  “Yes,” Scarlett admitted.

  The woman leaned over farther and stared at the picture again.

  “Interesting group,” she said. “All the girls are blonde, like your dad. And your brother is brunette, like your mother. Good-looking guy, your brother. How old is he?”

  “In the picture or now?” Scarlett asked.

  “I’m only interested in now,” the woman said with a smile.

  “Nineteen.”

  “Older sister as well? She’s stunning. How old is she?”

/>   “Eighteen.”

  Her interest seemed to end with Spencer and Lola. She tapped a fingernail against her front teeth.

  “It’s not exactly what I pictured,” she said, turning to look around the lobby.

  Scarlett didn’t know what to say. The hotel was what it was. Not the best. Far from the worst.

  Her mother entered from the kitchen, bearing a white mug on a saucer, with a tiny pile of orange rind clustered around it. The woman eagerly accepted this, pinching up all of the orange and dropping it into the cup.

  “Four shots of espresso,” her mother said.

  The woman nodded and sucked this back like it was nothing at all.

  “This is my daughter Scarlett,” her mother explained.

  “We’ve met,” the woman said. “Nice name. And nice dress. I’m more of a Vivienne Westwood woman myself. But really, I like small, up-and-coming designers, right out of design school. You get all the freshest ideas for a song.”

  Scarlett’s mother’s face had slipped into that half-paralyzed mask it got when a seriously paying customer was around.

  “This is Mrs. Amberson,” she said to Scarlett. “She’ll be here all summer.”

  “All summer?” Scarlett repeated.

  “All summer,” Mrs. Amberson said.

  “All summer,” her mother said again. “In the Empire Suite.”

  “The Empire Suite?” Scarlett said.

  “This is adorable,” Mrs. Amberson cut in. “Do you often sing in rounds? Makes sense. You look a bit like the Von Trapps.”

  It took Scarlett a minute to realize that she was talking about The Sound of Music. Actually, yes. Maybe they were a little Von Trapp like. Many, blonde, repetitive. Also, running for the hills sounded like a pretty good plan.

  “Will your husband be joining you at some point?” her mom asked, sitting back down in front of the computer.

  “Oh, no,” Mrs. Amberson said. “My husband is more of a concept than a person.”

  She let that mysterious sentence linger in the air for a moment.

  “Oh…fine,” Scarlett’s mom replied. “Just checking. And just so you know, we have a policy here at the Hopewell. As a family, we personally take care of some of the rooms.”

  “So I read.” Mrs. Amberson pulled a Whaddya Say We Do New York? guidebook from her voluminous bag. She flipped the book open to the correct page with one shake of her hand. It looked like it had been turned to that page a number of times; the spine had cracked there as a kind of permanent bookmark. “The Empire Suite comes highly recommended. How fortunate that someone just canceled and it was free.”

  The size of the lie almost caused Scarlett to burst out laughing. But that would only result in her mother having to kill her in front of the new guest, so she played with the stapler instead.

  “It is,” her mother said, forging on. “Scarlett is taking care of your room. She’ll be able to give you a hand with day-to-day matters, errands, things like that.”

  Mrs. Amberson looked Scarlett up and down like she was sizing her up for a harness.

  “I could really use something like that,” she said. “I’ll bear it in mind.”

  “Why don’t you let me get you another coffee?” her mother said. “Scarlett, if you’ll just…”

  She grabbed the desk pad and scrawled the words: GET UP THERE AND AIR THE ROOM OUT!!!!!!!!!!

  Scarlett felt her eyes widen. She was supposed to be taking Marlene out—possibly screaming and wrapped in a sack—in five minutes.

  “I…”

  Her mother turned and leaned over the desk.

  Scarlett’s mother did not have a severe face. In fact, she just looked like an older, female Spencer, which was usually not intimidating at all. But like Spencer, she could occasionally muster a truly dangerous look. Spencer reserved his for the stage, but her mother kept it for moments just like this.

  “I’m just going to go upstairs for a minute and open the windows,” Scarlett said.

  “Good,” Mrs. Amberson replied. “I assume that someone will come for the…”

  She waved at her bags.

  “Oh, of course,” Scarlett’s mother replied. “I’ll have someone bring them right up.”

  She said this breezily, as if there were dozens of staff members lingering discretely in the shadows, waiting to do these kinds of tasks. The illusion that this was a real hotel had to be kept alive.

  Instead of staying where she was, Mrs. Amberson followed along right behind Scarlett.

  “I’ll just go up with her,” she said. “Too much coffee unbalances me.”

  Scarlett opened the gate to the elevator and they climbed in together, then she pulled the gate shut, hard. It made a terrible squeaking noise in protest.

  “That’s charming,” Mrs. Amberson said, nodding at the gate. Whether that was sincere or sarcastic, Scarlett wasn’t sure.

  Standing side by side, Mrs. Amberson towered over Scarlett by several inches. Scarlett was fairly tall herself, so she suspected heels. She looked down to see that Mrs. Amberson was wearing tiger-print ballet flats. She caught Scarlett looking and turned her gaze to Scarlett’s flip-flops.

  “So,” Mrs. Amberson said, removing a very old and expensive-looking red cigarette case from her purse, “Dior, huh?”

  “It’s my sister’s,” Scarlett said quickly.

  “Your sister has good taste. Expensive taste. I take it this elevator is original, mechanics and all?”

  “Um…yeah.”

  “Very authentic.”

  Again, Scarlett had no idea what that remark was meant to mean. After about six days, the elevator triumphantly reached the fourth floor, and Scarlett sprang the gate. The Empire Suite was a long room at the front of the building, with three tall windows facing out to the street. The key stuck in the lock a little, but Scarlett got it open after a moment or two of jiggling.

  It had been at least four months since anyone had occupied the room. It was painfully hot and still. Most normal hotels had AC running constantly, and the steady stream of guests meant that the rooms were regularly freshened. This room hadn’t been dusted since Monique left weeks before. The room was neat, but had that odd feeling that empty, expectant rooms tended to get—almost like they were angry that they’d been neglected. A superfine layer of dust had accumulated. That was her problem now. Hopefully Mrs. Amberson wouldn’t run out and down the street to somewhere better.

  “I may need to…wake it up a little,” she said.

  “Wake it up,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I like that. Very evocative.”

  Mrs. Amberson stripped off the pink kimono, revealing a tight, short-sleeved tunic top, like something a dancer might wear. She tapped the cigarette case on her forearm and walked around the room, pausing to admire the dressing table and its moony mirror. This was the highlight of the room, in Scarlett’s opinion. Along with the gorgeous mirror, the table had a dozen small drawers that presumably used to hold all of the little things necessary for a woman in the twenties—lipsticks, bracelets, small bottles of illegal booze.

  “Well,” she said, apparently satisfied. “This is the good kind of authentic. I can smoke on the balcony, right? Don’t worry. I won’t burn the curtains.”

  She was already climbing over the desk, out of the window, and onto the tiny, sheltered ledge outside. It was really for flower boxes. It definitely didn’t qualify as a balcony.

  “That’s not really for people,” Scarlett said. “I don’t know if that’ll…”

  “I don’t weigh much. And it’s only four stories. I’ll take my chances.”

  She sat against the short wrought-iron rail, sticking her arm through the bars, away from the window. She kept the curtain tucked back with her leg.

  “You don’t smoke, do you?”

  “No,” Scarlett said.

  “Good,” she said through pursed lips as she lit her cigarette. “You should never start. Smoking kills. Oh, that’s good…”

  That last remark was addressed to the trail of smo
ke leaving her lips.

  “Twenty-nine hours,” she said. “No smoking on the plane. No smoking in the airport. No smoking in the cab.”

  Mrs. Amberson regarded her through the filmy veil that she breathed into the air. Scarlett felt the minutes ticking away. It was one kind of scary thing taking Marlene someplace. It was another, much more scary thing to take her there late.

  “Is there anything you need?” she finally asked. “If not, I’ll…”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been in New York City,” Mrs. Amberson said.

  She went back to smoking for a few more moments and, once again, Scarlett was left waiting for some kind of a sign of release. It was like Mrs. Amberson had her held there with a phantom leash.

  “If you want anything…” Scarlett tried again.

  “I undoubtedly will,” Mrs. Amberson said. “I’ll need to think about it.”

  “I’ll leave my cell phone number,” Scarlett said quickly.

  She scrawled it down on the hotel notepad on the dressing table.

  “Here it is!” she said, pointing at it as she backed out of the room. “Call me anytime! I’ll just let you get settled, check on your bags…”

  Mrs. Amberson didn’t answer. She just made an mmmmm noise, which Scarlett decided to interpret as a dismissal.

  “Do you mind if I call you O’Hara?” Mrs. Amberson asked, just as Scarlett reached the door. “Like Scarlett O’Hara?”

  “Whatever you want!” Scarlett said, as she backed out of the room.

  “We’re going to be great friends, O’Hara,” Mrs. Amberson added. “I can feel it, and I’m always right about these things.”

  THE STAR

  Back on the fifth floor, Lola and Marlene were standing in the hall side by side in a frozen tableau, like something from a horror movie. Marlene’s face was palpably red.

  “Where did you go?” Lola asked under her breath.

  “I have a guest,” Scarlett explained. “She just arrived.”

  “I got Chip to come by with the car to get you over there on time.”

  “Oh, good,” Scarlett said flatly.

  Lola plastered a happy smile on her face and turned to Marlene.