Beautiful Stranger (10 page)

“I’m not dead yet.” Anna grinned, hugging the two girls warmly, and then motioned to Sam. “Sam, I want you to meet two of my friends.” She quickly made the introductions.

“So, Anna,” Molly began, “it’s still Yale, right?” Anna thought she looked great in a ruffled yellow blouse and herringbone shorts.

“She’s only been planning on it since her zygote stage,” Olivia joked.

“Still Yale,” Anna confirmed. “How about you two?”

“Carnegie-Mellon,” Olivia told her. “Western history. I’m going to set myself up for a Watson so I can go to Eastern Europe. And Molly—”

“Molly can speak for herself, thank you very much,” her friend chimed in. “I got accepted to Dartmouth and Johns Hopkins, but decided I want to study Joyce in Dublin. So I’m going to Trinity College. Guess I can keep my old Trinity T-shirts and wear them around there,” she added with a laugh. “Maybe it was fate.”

“I’m going to USC,” Sam declared. “To film school.”

“Oh, right!” Molly exclaimed, understanding washing over her face. “Sam
Sharpe
. Your dad is in all those testosterone flicks.” Her eyes flickered in a subtle way that spoke volumes about what she thought about the genre.

“Yes, which gross billions worldwide,” Sam added, through what Anna knew to be a fake smile.

“Overseas,” Olivia corrected. “That’s why the writing is always so simplistic. They can’t depend on a plot, so they depend on blowing things up, lots of gore, and it sells internationally to the masses.”

Anna bristled on Sam’s behalf. “Have you ever even seen any of Jackson Sharpe’s movies?”

“Please,” Olivia scoffed. She leaned back against one of the cargo-sized blue boxes that the roadies used to transport speakers. “I don’t do testosterone flicks.”

“Well, then, how would you know?” A breeze pushed some hair into Anna’s face, and she brushed it away.

Olivia simply changed the subject. “So where are you staying? Your place, Anna?”

Anna nodded, moving a couple of feet to her right to let a roadie in shorts and a grungy T-shirt pass by. He was carrying two guitars for the star. “My mom’s away in Florence, so there’s no one there.”

Olivia waved an ostentatious finger at Anna and then winked at Sam. “Unless you count the live-ins. They’ve got the best cook in Manhattan.”

“She’s in Barbados, visiting her kids,” Anna informed her. “We’re cook-free.”

“Sounds fine to me. I’m psyched I finally get to see where you grew up.” Sam tossed her hair back and rubbed her chin thoughtfully. “Maybe I’ll find some geeky old class pictures, or better yet, unearth your diary—find out about some of your embarrassing crushes past.”

“Oh, hey, did you hear that Penelope Stanhope’s father got a Mac Arthur Genius Grant?” Molly asked Anna.

“He’s writing a cycle of tone poems for the Brooklyn Academy of Music with John Adams. Her family is in India now. She sent me an e-mail—she’s studying Sanskrit while she’s there.”

Sam laughed. “This is really funny. It’s name-dropping, East Coast-snob style.”

Anna smiled, because she’d never thought of it that way. “I suppose it is.”

“I’m dying for some champagne,” Molly groused. “Where’s the bar?”

“I think it’s behind us,” Sam pointed.

“Great. We’re off. Should we bring back a bottle?”

“No, because I’m coming with you. I’ll bring it.”

Molly and Olivia laughed as they started to thread their way back to the bar with Sam. For the moment Anna was alone, with John Mayer rocking and the crowd swaying to “Your Body Is a Wonderland.”

There were so many reasons she could feel disquieted, starting with all the horrible things that Ben had said to her two days before. But as Mayer rocked on, and the crowd rocked with him, she actually felt at ease. This was New York. Her New York, where the name-dropping was, as Sam had pointed out, just as plentiful as in its West Coast show business equivalent. But it was name-dropping she understood.

Tonight, she’d be sleeping in her very own four-poster bed. She’d breathe in and smell not bougainvillea, but the faintest lingering of the clothes in her own closet. It had been so long since that had happened.

After eight months as a stranger in a strange land, she was home.

How the Other Half Lives

“S
o now I finally get to see how the other half lives,” Sam teased, as she and Anna climbed the steps to Anna’s bow-front Georgian brownstone on Seventy-eighth Street between Fifth and Madison. The front façade was brick and limestone, the double front doors slate gray granite. “And by ‘other half,’ I mean the East Coast version of filthy-rich me.”

Anna rolled her eyes and used her key to let them in, then flipped on a hallway light. “You’re incorrigible,” she teased, smiling.

“So, this is where you grew up.” Sam found herself standing in a portico entranceway tiled in black and white. The ceiling above her was easily eighteen feet high, and all the walls were exposed brick. A crystal chandelier provided all the lighting. On the wall to her right hung a Picasso from his Cubist period. To her left hung a Degas depiction of several ballet students in rehearsal. Two grand staircases with oak banisters spiraled upward.

“My mother inherited the Picasso,” Anna explained. “Wait till we get to the atrium; you’ll see her ‘private collection’ if you’d like.”

“I’d like,” Sam agreed.

“Great, come on. No need for the stairs. We can take the elevator.”

“How many floors are there in this place?” Sam wondered aloud.

“Six. Five, not counting the service level, where the full-time help lives. They’ve got their own elevator in the back. Follow me.” The elevator door opened immediately when Anna pushed a discreet recessed button—the cabin was easily big enough for six people when they stepped on. “You want the grand tour or the quickie version?”

“Let’s go quickie,” Sam decided, though she was curious to see the entire space. Sam was used to the sprawling mansions of Beverly Hills and Bel Air, where square footage was in direct correlation to status. How did a privileged family like Anna’s live in a city like New York, where space was at such a premium?

Evidently, in certain residences at least, space wasn’t such a premium after all.

Anna’s brownstone was twelve thousand square feet, which meant that it was not nearly as big as the Sharpe estate in Bel Air, but about the same size as Dee’s home in Beverly Hills. The difference was, the space ran vertically instead of horizontally. Anna explained that the place had once been two separate nineteenth-century town houses, but her grandmother had purchased both, gutted both, and rebuilt and combined them into the family home.

The tour started on the top floor, whose walls were burnished mahogany, the floors polished wood covered in centuries-old tapestry rugs from Morocco and Turkey, and there were wood-burning fireplaces in just about every room. The very top floor was a twelve-hundred-square-foot duplex atrium with four enormous skylights. Sparsely furnished, mid-twentieth-century Abstract Expressionist paintings hung not on the walls but from the ceiling, on slender, nearly invisible wires. White figurine sculptures rested on marble pedestals, or—as was the case with a huge white marble piece of two nudes entwined—on the floor itself.

“Welcome to the Jane Cabot Percy gallery,” Anna pronounced, though there was something dry and ironic in her tone.

“Who are the artists?” Sam peered at a massive abstract in fire engine red and canary yellow.

“That one? Clyfford Still. The others? Mostly men she has known,” Anna replied flatly. “I probably should add the word
intimately
.”

“Wait—most of these were done by your mother’s
boyfriends
?”

“I suppose you could call them that. Some people collect art. She collects young artists. Mostly Italian, with a smattering of French and German. It’s like she has a golden touch, too. She meets them, and a year later their stuff sells at Sotheby’s for seven figures. It’s uncanny.”

Sam laughed as she wandered around the huge space, then followed Anna back to the elevator. “I still can’t believe your mom does these guys.”

“I don’t ask for details.” Anna shuddered as they got back into the elevator. The mental images were obviously too much to contemplate. “But suffice it to say I can read between the lines.”

“I’m just surprised you never told me this about her.”

What
had
Anna told her? Sam tried to remember. That her mother was so old-money upper crust that she never showed emotion. Because if you were “well bred” it was simply “not done.” Totally ironic, really, because Sam’s whole life was about emotion. That was the film business. Not that any of the emotions on display were necessarily real, of course. But emoting believably was what got an actor—say, her father, for example—the big bucks. Maybe that was why Hollywood people would hug you when they first met you.

“You can use one of the bedrooms on this floor,” Anna pointed out, as they got off on the fourth floor. “The one next door to my room.”

“Works for me,” Sam agreed.

Sam followed Anna down a long, brightly lit white hallway. On both sides of the hall, at regular intervals, were framed photographs of family members past and present. She recognized Anna’s older sister, Susan, and stopped for a moment to admire a black-and-white of the family together posed on a beach.

“That’s by Diane Arbus,” Anna pointed out. “She knew my grandmother. Anyway, when are you planning to call Eduardo?” Anna pushed open a door.

“I sent him a text during the concert,” Sam confessed. She looked around at the surroundings. “I think he’s staying at the consulate. And I haven’t heard back from—holy shit. Do you own every book ever written?”

The room they’d just entered was obviously Anna’s bedroom. The schoolbooks still neatly stacked on the antique rolltop desk were the dead giveaway. The room was just as simple as Anna’s room at her father’s place in Beverly Hills, furnished with an antique queen-size four-poster bed, an early American dresser that Sam suspected dated back to the original Ethan Allen, and a couple of expansive landscape paintings from the Hudson River school that were probably originals. There was a small bulletin board over the desk, to which was pinned a row of small photos of Anna and Cyn, taken in one of those el-cheapo photo booths, a program from an all-Bach New York Philharmonic program, and a small blue Yale pennant.

“How long has the Yale pennant been up there?” Sam leaned toward it for inspection. The print on the pennant was old-fashioned, from the 1950s or even before.

“Since I was eight,” Anna confessed. “It used to belong to my grandfather.”

“Wow. So you always knew what you wanted.”

“According to Ben, that means I’m living out a pre-programmed existence.”

Sam raised eyebrows that had been shaped and trimmed by Valerie on Rodeo Drive. “He said that?”

“More or less.”

Sam wandered over to the built-in bookshelves—they were eight shelves high, made of teak, and covered two complete walls floor to ceiling. And they were jammed with hardbound books. Sam looked at some of the titles at random. Molière. Dostoyevsky. Willa Cather. Balzac. She considered herself a good reader, and she’d read at least one book by most of these authors. But she wasn’t allergic to James Patterson or Jennifer Weiner either. This? This was wall-to-wall highbrow. It was impressive.

“Don’t tell me you’ve read all of these.”

“Oh, you know …” Anna vaguely waved a hand.

“You have,” Sam surmised. “Just admit it.”

It was one thing to know how smart and well-read Anna was in theory, and quite another to be staring at the hundreds of books she’d obviously pored through—probably right there on that brown teak four-poster bed.

“I have this thing about keeping the books I read. I suppose I collect them the way my mother collects art.”

“Hardly the same, unless you’ve fooled around with all the authors.” Sam smirked. “And most of them are dead. Plus, you can reread a book anytime you want.” Her stomach growled. “Can we get some food? I’m starving.”

“Up for Chinese? I’ll find a delivery menu,” Anna suggested. “Or if you want to go back out we could go for a walk. There’s a great all-night Greek place on Lexington and Seventy-second.”

“How about a diner? I’m thinking burger and onion rings. Or a Reuben. This is New York, after all. I’m texting him again.” She fished her cell out of the back pocket of her dark Citizens jeans.

Anna shook her head. “Maybe you shouldn’t. It’s after midnight, Sam.”

Sam felt her stomach turn over with anxiety. What was going on with Eduardo, anyway?

“All the more reason,” she finally decided. “It’s just a text. And if my new fiancé is otherwise engaged after midnight, he’s going to find himself unengaged to me pretty damn fast.”

Hello, Stranger

A
nna and Sam were just about to step out the front door when Sam’s Razr V3 sounded her familiar ring-tone—Blondie’s classic “One Way or Another.” Sam dug it out of her black hand-tooled leather purse.

“Who’s calling at this hour?” Anna asked.

“That’s what I want …” Sam’s voice trailed off as she checked the number. “Oh yeah. It’s him.”

“Eduardo?”

Sam nodded vigorously as she answered. “Hey! What’s going on?”

“Tell him we’re here,” Anna hissed, but Sam shook her head no as Anna listened to Sam’s side of the conversation.

“Uh-huh … Uh-huh … Well, it’s only a little after nine, so I’m not doing much of anything. … Anna and I are going to the movies later at the ArcLight. … I wish you could come too.”

A little after nine? That’s right, Anna thought. Sam’s cell was a California number. For all Eduardo knew, she was still in Los Angeles. And Sam was doing everything she could to continue the ruse. From the huge grin on her friend’s face as she talked, the deception was working.

“I could still get on a plane and get to New York,” Anna heard Sam offer. “Oh. No, of course I understand. … Okay. I love you too. Talk to you tomorrow.”

Sam clicked off. “Eduardo says hi.” Her voice was downbeat.

“You’re bummed that he didn’t want you come here,” Anna observed.

“At least he called me. I was getting worried. Well, maybe a little worried.” Then Sam brightened. “When I surprise him tomorrow, it’s going to be deeply satisfying. He’ll remember who it is he chose to marry.”