Away for the Weekend (17 page)

“We weren’t trying to steal anything.” Professor Gryck’s voice was brittle with exasperation. “It was an accident, you dolt.”

Calling him a dolt was probably a mistake. They were supposed to have lunch in the beautiful courtyard restaurant of the museum. She’d been planning it for weeks: tables were reserved on the elevated terrace overlooking the fountain and Professor Gryck had gone over the menu, making sure that there was nothing that would cause any of her charges to break out, throw up or go into toxic shock. (Beth isn’t the only one who suffers from allergies.) Professor Gryck was looking forward to this lunch. Civilized. Sophisticated. Elegant. The perfect ending to what was meant to have been a perfect morning. You certainly wouldn’t want to have a day of art and culture and then eat in some fast-food joint with plastic forks and styrofoam plates.

But even if their reservation hadn’t long expired by the time they were released, “the incident” (as Professor Gryck has come to think of it) ended any chance of them dining at round, marble-topped tables overlooked by priceless sculptures and modern fountains. Though it was ultimately established that she and her group were who they said they were, and that something had gone horribly wrong with the surveillance system, there was no question of them being allowed to remain. Or wanting to. In a civilized, sophisticated and elegant manner – but in no uncertain terms – she and her group were told to leave. And with a dignity amplified by righteous indignation, they left.

And so, in an unprecedented move that broke all of her own rules, Professor Gryck gave the contestants free time for a quick lunch.

“You’re to stay on this block.” She waved her arm back and forth so they’d know which block she meant. “We’ll meet back here in exactly one hour.” She looked directly into Beth Beeby’s glasses. She knows whom she blames. There was only one person in that alcove; one person myopically close to that precious portrait. “Don’t any of you be late. Do you understand?” Professor Gryck needed a drink. “Promise me that.”

Everyone promised. Or almost everyone.

“But we’re not supposed to leave the block,” Aricely is saying now.

They’ve finished their quick lunch and have half an hour to spare. Esmeralda, Jayne and Aricely want dessert. Gabriela wants to do some shopping.

“It depends how you define block.” In so many ways it has been a demoralizing, not to say deadening, morning. The only bright spot was that painting – that painting whose life and passion was just within her reach. Until the alarms went off and she was rudely hauled away. If she really were Beth Beeby, Gabriela would still be crying and apologizing. Since she isn’t, what she wants is to give herself a treat. Some foundation and a little blusher, for example. And maybe a scarf – filmy, flimsy and glinting with colour. Something to cheer her up. Surely she deserves that little crumb of happiness? Gabriela thinks so. “We’re not leaving the area; we’re just going to a different section.” The Sunset Plaza section. “It’s, like, two minutes away.”

“I don’t see why you have to go shopping,” says Esmeralda. “As I say in my essay, unbridled consumerism is destroying our nation’s—”

“Yeah, I know,” interrupts Gabriela. This has been mentioned before. “It’s destroying our nation’s soul. Only I’m not emptying the nearest mall, Esmeralda. I’m just getting a couple of things I forgot. I must’ve left my make-up bag at home. I don’t have anything with me.”

“Maybe if you call Professor Gryck—” begins Aricely, but Gabriela cuts her off, too.

“What’s wrong with you guys? So far we’ve been in a bus and a museum, and a museum and a bus. Don’t you want to just walk around a little? See the city without a piece of glass in front of your face?”

Jayne frowns. “But Professor Gryck—”

“Isn’t going to know we went anywhere, because we’re going to be right where she left us when the bus comes back.” If they ever get out of here, that is.

“But what if something happens to us?”

“What could possibly happen to us in half an hour? We’re not rafting across the Pacific. We’re just going into a couple of stores.”

“I still say Professor Gryck’s not going to like it,” says Esmeralda.

“Geez, Louise…” groans Gabriela. No wonder Beth chews her nails, if this is what her friends back home are like. “Trust me. She’s not going to know.”

Delila has been silent throughout this exchange, looking as if she’s watching a play and is trying to follow the plot, but now she says, “Well, you can count me in.” She missed a lot of the excitement in the museum because she was in the toilet; she isn’t about to miss any more.

“What about the rest of you?” Gabriela smiles encouragingly. As much as she’d like to leave them behind, if Professor Gryck does catch them disobeying her orders, she wants the others to be with her. Safety in numbers. Divided we fall.

Aricely looks at Jayne. Jayne looks at Esmeralda. Esmeralda looks at Gabriela.

“What are we going to tell Professor Gryck if she finds out we disobeyed her?”

“We’ll tell her we had to help Beth get a special non-allergic, organic kind of sanitary pad,” says Delila. “She’s met the girl. She’ll believe that.”

Gabriela’s spirits are almost immediately restored by being out on the street. This is more like it. The energy of so many people going somewhere, and going there in a hurry, hums through bone and steel; cellulose and concrete. Even on so short an acquaintance (and most of it from behind glass) she knows that Los Angeles is so much more than any other place she’s ever been. There is nothing ordinary or dull here. Nothing humdrum. Everything sounds louder; looks brighter; smells stronger; moves with a shimmer or a bounce. She feels as if her blood is foaming with excitement. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else? She loves LA! And LA, of course, should love Gabriela. She should fit right in; she should look like she belongs. Wearing her faux snakeskin zip-back heels and the ivory-coloured shift with the beadwork. Heads should be swivelling, elbows nudging.
Look at her! Who’s that? She is, like, sooo cool!
But LA doesn’t love her; it doesn’t even know she’s here. She’s not a goddess; she’s a geek – a lot more invisible than the air. The only advantage this gives her is that she’s wearing shoes that allow her to walk easily and quickly. Half an hour is a long time when you can stride.

“Wow, will you look at those two over there?” whispers Aricely; as if there is any chance that she can be heard on the other side of all that traffic. “They look like they’re out of a movie.”

Gabriela glances over. Not a movie she’d watch. “Good God, retro seventies.” She shudders with distaste. “Bell-bottom jumpsuits weren’t a good idea then, and they’re really not a good idea now. And look at her hair! She looks like she’s got a dog on her head.”

Jayne and Esmeralda aren’t interested enough to look, but Delila is trying to remember if she saw the man in the white suit at breakfast. He seems kind of familiar. And he’s good-looking, in an old-fashioned, European way. And it’s not just the hat he’s holding in his hand, or the James Joyce sunglasses. He looks as if he speaks several languages; as if he’s spent a lot of time sitting in cafés, but not here – where there’s a man at the bus stop holding an iguana and a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe skating through the traffic – in much older cities of narrow streets and buildings that were built long before any white man put his foot down here. But though it’s only been a second or two, when Delila turns back for another look, there’s no one there.

Crossed paths

They’re
running late, of course.

“Where do you think you’re going?” says Esmeralda as Gabriela heads towards another display of beauty products. “We have to leave.
Now
.”

“But it’ll only take a minute.”

“We don’t have a minute,” says Aricely.

Jayne holds out her arm. “Do you know what time it is?”

Gabriela groans inwardly. She made a mistake; she should have left them in the restaurant with their faces in plates of cake. Two mistakes: they’re not the Bad, the Boring and the Real Pain in the Neck; they’re the Grump, the Nag and the Talking Clock. “I just have to get one more thing and I’m done. I swear it.”

“That’s what you said ten minutes ago.” Jayne is still holding out her arm. “What is it now?”

“Eye-shadow foundation.”

“Eye-shadow foundation?” repeats Jayne. She wears the expression a medieval serf might wear if she were told that, one day, men would fly through the air and walk on the moon. “Are you serious?”

“I completely forgot. You’ve been rushing me so much…”

“You know, this sounds like something you can live without,” says Aricely. “I’ve never even heard of such a thing before.”

“Just because you’ve never heard of it, doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist,” says Gabriela.

“And who, disguised as a plain-Jane, serious fiction writer is really Super Shopper, able to leap whole counters at a single bound…” intones Delila, but she intones with a smile. Unlike some people, Delila is having a good time. If she’d wanted to spend the weekend in a museum, she could have stayed in Brooklyn.

The “some people” who aren’t enjoying themselves are, of course, Jayne, Aricely and Esmeralda. They’d much rather be reading a thousand-page novel. Gabriela’s “a couple of things I forgot” encompassed much more than those few words suggested. They thought she meant a lipstick and maybe an eyeliner. The basics most girls can’t leave the house without. They wear make-up; they understand that much. But they all put on make-up the way they put on gloves and a scarf in winter – because they feel they have to. There’s no art to it. No method. No plan. Which means that it isn’t a subject Jayne, Aricely and Esmeralda know much about – and they are girls who like to be the experts in any situation. But in this instance, it’s Gabriela who’s the authority. She doesn’t put a barrette in her hair without considering the effect. She has to test each pot, tube, brush, compact, palette and pencil; each skin, lip and eye colour, and balance them out against each other. Everything has to match.

“Well, if you want to be late for Professor Gryck, that’s fine with me,” says Esmeralda. She pushes on the door. “But we don’t. We’re going.”

Delila gives Gabriela a nudge. “They’re right,” she whispers. “We’re running on empty here when it comes to time. We better get moving.”

Gabriela sighs. With resignation. She hasn’t put up with all their moaning and griping to be the only one to get into trouble; she has no choice but to go with them. She hugs Beth’s backpack and, despite the fact that she doesn’t like to sweat, gamely trots up the street after them. Delila, built for endurance rather than speed, brings up the rear.

It seems to be a longer way back than it was coming, but at last they see the rest of the group, hovering on a not-too-distant corner.

“Well, I’ll be danged,” grunts Delila. “We really do have guardian angels. I think we’re actually going to make it.”

“Oh, my God!” Gabriela stops dead, her eyes wide and her mouth open in shock, staring through the river of traffic at something across the road. From her expression, it might be a UFO or a Hollywood star.

“What’s wrong?” Delila only just manages not to plough into her. “What is it?”

You couldn’t say that Gabriela’s forgotten about Beth. How could she when every time she looks at her hands she sees Beth’s savaged nails, when every time she glances in a window she sees her plain, pinched face? But, having other things to occupy her mind, she has managed to put Beth out of her conscious thoughts for most of the morning. Until now. For what she sees across the street is not, of course, a UFO or a Hollywood star. It is herself, Lucinda, Hattie, Nicki, Isla and Paulette, standing near a bus stop with bags of shopping in their arms.

“Oh, my God!” Gabriela repeats as a bus pulls up to the kerb, obscuring her view. They must be waiting for the car to pick them up. Delila’s right – they do have guardian angels. This is her chance to talk to Beth, just put down in front of her like a present. She can take her aside, have a quick word. Suddenly, for some inexplicable and illogical reason, she thinks that everything will be OK if she can just get to Beth before the car arrives and takes her away.

“What is it?” Delila asks yet again. “Is it somebody you know?”

As a general rule of life, it isn’t advisable to cross Sunset Boulevard in between lights. A chicken could cross the Autobahn as safely. Anyone will tell you that. Unless, of course, traffic is bumper-to-bumper and not moving. But it isn’t bumper-to-bumper now, and it’s moving very quickly.

Gabriela, however, isn’t thinking. All she knows is that she has to get to the other side. She hurls herself into the traffic, and, rather miraculously, for only a few seconds that no one will remember, every car, bus, bike, skateboarder and skater on the boulevard freezes and she runs through them unscathed. Esmeralda, Aricely and Jayne, who are almost where they want to be, don’t know there’s no one behind them any more. Delila runs after her.

But when Gabriela reaches the sidewalk, Beth and Lucinda are no longer waiting at the kerb; they’re walking up a side street towards the hills.

And after them goes Gabriela, like a bloodhound that’s caught the scent.

It’s a well established fact that things can always get worse. We tell ourselves that it’s always darkest before the dawn, but sometimes it’s darkest before it gets really, really dark. This is something Beth has always known. Yet, today – a day that got off to such a phenomenally bad start – as they wait to be picked up by the limo, it seems it’s something she’s chosen to forget. She’s been put into somebody else’s body. She’s been harangued and hassled by the Lady Macbeth of the fashion world. She’s been frightened out of her mind by a Hollywood sleazeball who seems to be able to disappear at will. She can’t even think about her mother or she’ll start to hyperventilate. But now, she’s convinced herself, everything’s going to be all right. Tea at The City of Angels College of Fashion and Design to meet the rest of the staff. The big party tonight to meet everybody who’s anybody in the LA scene. Nothing else can go wrong. It can’t. How could it?