Everything Leads to You (23 page)

When we get home it’s almost six already, so we collapse onto the bed and sleep for an hour and then we make coffee like zombies and get to work.

Part 3

THE APARTMENT

Chapter Seventeen

Juniper’s apartment is introduced like this:

INT. JUNIPER’s STUDIO APARTMENT—DAY.

A small bright space filled with PLANTS and BOOKS.

So I’ve used the plants and books as the starting point and chosen everything else based on them.

This morning Charlotte and I dug through piles of old art books at thrift stores up and down Sunset Boulevard. Stripped of their jackets, they are faded tan and pink and green cloth. I’m going to stack them in corners of the room, using them as makeshift side tables. We’re stripping the film history books and DVDs from Toby’s bookshelf, but I’ll keep his novels on the shelves as they are. Juniper would definitely read novels.

My dream is to create the impression of potted plants hanging from a beam in the ceiling, but Toby is not an indoor plants kind of guy, and I doubt his landlord would appreciate huge holes in the walls. I have no idea how this will work, but I’m browsing a West Hollywood nursery anyway, choosing the plants I want while Charlotte negotiates a loan from the owner. I’m relying on Morgan to create one of her perfect illusions.

“Okay, here’s the deal,” Charlotte says, walking toward me from the office. “He’ll let us rent up to thirty plants for $15 a day, but we have to keep them really healthy, or else he’ll make us buy them. How does that sound?”

“Good.”

“Choose what you want and put them on this cart, and then I’ll do all the paperwork with him and get directions for when to water them all while you go across the street to get pots.”

“This is why I need you,” I say.

“We still have three other tasks on our list for the day.”

I nod and select my thirty plants of various sizes and textures and shades of green. I choose one with yellow flowers to put in a prominent place, and then I let Charlotte deal with the business side while I start looking for pots. But I only find a few that are right, because Juniper would not have matching sets—she would have whatever she could find at the time.

I talk the woman at the register into giving me a deal and then I head back as Charlotte is loading the plants into the back of my car.

My phone rings. Ava.

“Hey,” she says. “Guess what? Everything went through. I have access to the bank account.”

“So cool,” I say, setting the pots in the backseat. “Are you rich?”

“Yeah. I think I am. I just bought myself a forty-dollar lunch.” She laughs. “And I got a manicure.”

“That’s awesome,” I say.

“So I need to find a place to live.”

I wait, but she doesn’t mention getting kicked out so I just say, “We have a couple more errands right now but you could come over after and we could start looking.”

“I have a better idea. I’m going to get a room at the Marmont. Meet me there when you’re done?”

“Looks like Ava came into a lot of money,” I tell Charlotte as she shuts the trunk. “She’s checking into the Marmont this afternoon.”

She widens her eyes.

“Long term?”

“I don’t think so. Just until she finds a place.”

“Still,” she says. “That’s expensive.”

“Seriously.”

“Did she say anything about last night?”

“No. I guess she doesn’t know we went to look for her.”

I call Jamal to let him know I heard from her.

“Yeah,” he says. “She left me a message when I was at work. Said she was getting a room at some fancy hotel. You gonna go check it out?”

“Yeah, a little later.”

“Cool. And remember to keep last night between us if that’s all right.”

“Sure, that’s fine.”

“I don’t want her feeling weird about it.”

“Makes sense,” I say. “It was no big deal.”

“All right, cool. See you later then.”

~

When I get to the Marmont, I find Ava leaning against the outside wall of a poolside bungalow, wearing gold-rimmed sunglasses shaped like John Lennon’s, her hair cascading down her shoulders in loose waves. She is still in the green camisole and cutoffs from yesterday but she is barefoot. I’ve never seen her feet before. All slender and graceful, like they aren’t even used for walking.

She leads me inside, where her boots are kicked off across the floor and her purse is hung over a chair. She doesn’t have any bags and even though I don’t ask her why, she says, “Jamal’s coming later to drop off my stuff.”

She stands at the center of a red rug. Orange light beats through the window; the edges of her glow.

“Is this what you pictured?” she asks me.

I don’t know what she means. But, no, I could have never pictured anything quite as glamorous as this. She is almost too bright to look at.

“When you had me come here the first time. You thought I might come back. Right?”

“Oh,” I say. “Yeah. I guess I did.”

“When I was booking the room I asked the man where Clyde used to stay. He said this one so that’s what I chose. Come here,” she says, sitting on the edge of the bed. “Clyde slept here. All those years ago. Can you believe it?”

I kick off my sandals and join her on the bed, unsure of where this is headed.

“I wonder how many women he brought to this room,” she says.

Our bodies are so close. I watch as she moves her hand even nearer, until her fingers with their short, perfectly smooth nails are almost touching the soft underside of my knee.

And if she’s trying to seduce me right now, I will admit that it’s working. My heart beats fast and hard. I can’t look at her mouth without imagining it on mine.

This is the moment where I’m supposed to lean in. This is when everything starts. But I can’t do it. All at once, Ava feels like a stranger. And it’s my fault. I thought that inviting her here a couple weeks ago was such a perfect idea, that creating a glamorous future for her was a nice thing to do. I even thought it was generous, for me, to take the time to show her this place, to tell her about Clyde. But I think I always pictured myself here, with her. If I’m being completely honest, this chance is probably what I hoped for: To have a fling with the granddaughter of a legend in a Chateau Marmont bungalow. To get to be with her when she was still a secret, before the world got ahold of her.

What a stupid thing to wish for. A handful of thrilling days. A good story to tell later. Like what Clyde wrote in his letter to Caroline when he was talking about her mother:
a few minutes in the spotlight on the arm of someone famous
.

Ava is doing exactly what I once hoped she would do, but now, when I picture us together, we’re lying in a cherry orchard or I’m watching her bake a cake or we’re hunting for treasures in thrift shops. The memory of her curled up on the backseat of her beat-up car in the desert, entirely unaware of me, is enough to make my chest ache. But I don’t recognize the Ava I’ve gotten to know in the girl next to me now. I search her face, but her sunglasses are still on and I can’t find her.

There is only one chance to get a first kiss right. I can’t shake the feeling that if I kiss her now, it won’t be the right version of her I’ll be kissing.

So I say, “I brought my laptop. What neighborhoods are you thinking? West Hollywood? Beverly Hills?”

She straightens up, moves a tiny bit away from me, but barely misses a beat.

“Actually,” she says. “I was thinking Venice. Somewhere with a view of the ocean.”

I rise from the bed, wondering if I’m making a mistake to let this moment go. My laptop is cold and heavy when I sit back down. I open to the browser and hand it to her.

“Oh,” Ava says, looking at the screen. “The Internet is locked or something.”

“You just need a password. The front desk will give it to us.”

Ava stands up and grabs the key.

“You can call them.”

I cross to the desk, pick up the phone, and dial zero.

“Hey,” I say. “What’s the Internet password?”

I read it out to Ava and she enters it. She smiles.

“Success,” I tell the man on the other end. “Thanks.”

She does a search for Venice apartments and barely ten minutes into looking, she says, “Found it.”

“That fast?”

“It has an ocean view. I think it’s exactly what Caroline would have chosen. Want to see?”

I’m sitting at the desk now, and I don’t know if I trust myself to get back onto that bed with her.

I shake my head.

“I’d rather wait to see it,” I say. “Surprise me.”

She slips her phone out of her pocket and calls the broker, sets up an appointment for just a couple hours from now.

“I have to look the part, right?” she says when she hangs up. “Where should we shop?”

“I have to go over to Rebecca and Theo’s for a meeting,” I say. “But
you
should go to the Beverly Center.”

“The Beverly Center. Okay.”

“It’s just a couple miles from here. Take Sunset to La Cienega, and then stay on La Cienega until you hit Beverly.”

She nods. “I can do that,” she says.

“Venice apartments are hard to come by. It’ll be competitive. If the clothes don’t work on their own, you could always play the Clyde card.”

She’s up now, grabbing her keys, slinging her purse over her shoulder.

She grins at me.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

~

Charlotte and I get to Brooks Avenue at a little after nine, park near the beach, and stroll by the skaters and punks and tourists who look a little afraid of what they’ve gotten themselves into. I pull out my phone and double-check the address she gave us.

This is a nice building. I mean,
really
nice: white-painted brick with art-deco-style ornamentation. The door to the building is locked so we press a button, and soon Ava’s voice comes through the small gold speaker.

“Is it you?”

“Yeah, it’s us.”

“Take the elevator! Penthouse! Three-twenty-three!”

“Penthouse?” Charlotte says.

I widen my eyes like
I know
.

Then there’s a buzzing, which lets us into the lobby. In the elevator, we select
P
for you-know-what, and a screen asks us to enter a code, so we press 3-2-3 and the doors shut and we glide upward. When the elevator opens, we find ourselves on the roof, facing the ocean right in front of us, the Santa Monica pier to our right, its Ferris wheel lit up, silhouettes of palm trees against the dark sky.

We turn around to an apartment made of glass.

Ava stands in the doorway, dressed in high-waisted white jeans and a blue-and-white polka-dotted blouse. She has on bright red lipstick and a pair of shiny, bright red heels, a long string of pearls around her neck.

“Are those real?” I ask her.

“Of course they are. I had to look like a girl who belongs in a penthouse.”

Charlotte and I laugh, and Ava takes a seat on an outdoor sofa that must have come with the place. She rests her feet on an ottoman, crosses her ankles. I would hardly have recognized her.

“I went to Bloomingdale’s and told the woman to make me look rich.”

“It worked,” I tell her.

A moment later, Jamal appears next to her, in sagging khaki shorts and a gray ribbed tank top that shows off his muscular body. They couldn’t look more incongruous: She’s dressed for a lunch meeting at an upscale restaurant and he’s dressed for a day at the beach.

“Finally,” he says, holding a bottle of champagne by its neck. “We can pop this open.”

“We felt like celebrating,” Ava says.

“I can see why,” I say.

“We don’t have any cups, though,” Jamal says. “I had to go to five different liquor stores till I found one that didn’t card me, and all that time I didn’t think about cups.”

Charlotte and I both have water bottles, so after Jamal accidentally sends the cork ricocheting off the roof, he fills our tins and then he and Ava pass the rest back and forth between them.

“How did you get this place?” Charlotte asks. “Didn’t you need rental histories and references?”

Ava takes a swig out of the bottle.

“Clyde was right,” she says.

“How so?” Charlotte asks.

But I know what she means: “Money can open doors,” I say.

She nods.

“I told the manager I could write him a check for the full year right now, and then he went to the bank and deposited it and called me back and said the place was mine. It was good timing. Terrence and I just finished the bank paperwork this morning.”

“Bank account in the morning, Chateau Marmont in the afternoon, penthouse in the evening,” I say.

“Yeah, if Terrence is watching my money, he’ll be impressed,” she says. “But I didn’t have much of a choice.”

I don’t trust myself to say
Why not?
in a way that’s even remotely convincing.

Instead I say, “Show us the inside.”

She takes us on a tour of the penthouse. One by one, she flicks on the lights. I can imagine what it must look like from above: a glass house, lit up and glowing in the night. Inside, it looks like it’s sprung from the pages of
Dwell
or
Architectural Digest
. Pure white walls, high ceilings, thick-planked wood floors. A bedroom with a closet the size of Toby’s old dorm room. A bathroom with a Jacuzzi tub and a shower that takes up half the room and has no door. A modern, airy kitchen opens onto the living room.

“Isn’t this the best kitchen you’ve ever seen?”

I nod, but I actually like my kitchen at home better, and even Toby’s tiny kitchen. I understand that this is full of nicer, more expensive appliances, but without pots and pans, cutting boards and mismatched mugs, bowls of fruit, and magnets on the refrigerator it feels too sterile.

“If you need any more locations for filming,” Ava says, “you’re welcome to use any rooms you want.” She’s standing in the middle of the cavernous living room under light wood beams and the yellow glow of recessed lighting.