By the time they put me through to the boy’s suite at the Beverly Hills Hotel, I’ve already crossed the country and felt Cornelia’s words rearranging themselves inside me. The desert is only a few hours away. I want one last stretch of sky with him before everything changes, just a few days bathed in sunshine and hallelujahs.
“Do you have the weekend off?” I ask, when he comes on the line.
“Maybe,” he says, and I can hear the smile in his voice. “Depends what you’ve got in mind.” He chuckles.
I ask if he wants to come to the desert for a couple of days.
“Of course I do,” he says, and this time there’s real happiness in his voice.
“I think it’ll be just the tonic for us.”
“One last hurrah,” I add, lightly.
He laughs. “I’ll ignore that last part, but sure, baby girl. Will you pick me up at the hotel?”
“I’ll be there in an hour.”
I call Tilly, before I leave, and tell her about my conversation with Cornelia. She says Connie has a tendency to insert herself into other people’s business, and that because she lacks life experience and nuance herself, she projects fantasy onto others. —Why haven’t you noticed this before?
I am confused and promise to go through my memorial archive of interactions and investigate for myself.
“Don’t be naïve,” Tilly says. “I have no idea what she is talking about,” she continues. “I am in no way hurting, nor do I carry anything painful around with me that you don’t already know about.” She sounds irritated.
“And let me tell you one thing: you cannot find a man more appropriate for you than Topper. He is the real deal.” She sighs before telling me she has to go. There’s this thing, and then that other thing that needs taking care of.
“Love you,” she coos before hanging up.
“Ditto and toodles,” I reply.
The complexities of friendships, and the people in them, I think to myself, and the many sides of the truth, before rushing out again.
***
He’s waiting out front when I pull up, sunglasses on, overnight bag at his feet. The sight of him undoes something in me I didn’t know I’d been holding.
He leaps into the car, tossing his bag onto the back seat. “Baby, baby, baby,” he sings, smiling at me.
“You’re looking mighty fine,” I say, leaning over to kiss him hello. “I like the hair,” I add, touching his freshly cut, freshly dyed hair.
“The color’s called chocolate Labrador or somethin’,” he laughs.
“Gorgeous.” I smile, trying to memorise him.
“Buckle up, buttercup,” I say, heading east on Wilshire Boulevard. “You ready for some desert sun?” I hand him a cold bottle of Coke from the cooler in the back seat. “Here you go. How’s my little movie star doing?”
“Good. I met Marlon Brando the other day, can you believe it?”
“That’s so cool,” I reply as I gaze over at him before re-focusing my eyes on the road.
For a while we just drive and talk about nothing, studio gossip, small adventures, silly things. It feels like the old days, only bigger now, lit from behind by everything we’re not saying.
“You know, besides Casablanca, our director also made a picture called Young Man with a Horn, makes me laugh.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“That’s why I said yes to the role,” he smirks. “Thought, hey, that’s me. Wanna see for yourself? We could pull over and I could…”
“Keep your eyes on the road, King Creole.” I laugh, referencing the film he’s in the middle of.
He guffaws, but the sound trails off. The energy shifts, almost imperceptibly.
“They told me where I’m goin’,” he says at last, staring straight ahead.
My hands tighten on the wheel. “Where?”
“Germany. After basic training. Somewhere near the border. Gotta watch the Russians, they say.”
“What?” I stare at him. “Why? I thought you’d be stationed somewhere here.”
He lifts one shoulder. “Orders are orders.”
“This is beyond horrible,” I say. “I thought…” I stop. “I thought I’d at least have you on the same continent.”
He doesn’t want to sit in it. He breaks into song, drumming his restless leg against the dashboard.
I pull off the road and turn to him. “Do you want to drive?”
He looks over, eyes lighting up a little. “Sure.”
“Scoot over.”
***
We arrive at my house in the Movie Colony just as the early afternoon sun is gilding everything. The whole place glows, the pool, the palms, the mountains behind the houses.
The boy finds a parcel wrapped in paper in the hall, Mr Sinatra’s new album, sent to the house for me.
He smiles, opens it, and puts it on and Let’s Get Away From It All reverberates through the house.
“Ahhhh,” I stretch my arms, sliding open the glass doors to the pool. He’s framed in the doorway, grinning, taking it all in.
“A quick dip before drinks?” I ask, slipping off my sunglasses.
“You had me at quickie,” he grins.
I roll my head back and sigh. “You’re incorrigible.”
We swim and float. For a moment it’s just bodies in water, no history, no future, only sun and laughter and the sound of him calling me “buzzy” across the pool. I store it all away. It’s too heartbreaking to stop and feel.
***
Later, over drinks at the little bar in the sitting room:
“Next time you see me, I’ll be a married woman,” I say lightly, not sure how to broach the subject we’ve danced around since last year.
He flinches. “You’re still goin’ through with it?”
“You told me I should get married,” I sigh, sliding onto a stool.
“I know.”
“You told me to marry Topper,” I remind him, attempting a smile.
“I know,” he says again, jaw clenched. “I’m sorry, baby. Another life, another time.”
We sit in silence, sipping cocktails. The air is soft and heavy between us.
“I know it’s what you have to do,” he says at last. “I know I’m not livin’ up to us.”
“It’s okay,” I say, getting fresh ice I don’t need. “There’s a whole lot of circumstance.”
He walks over to the turntable, flips through the records.
“It’s good to be here,” he says as Return to Me floats through the air. “To be with you. I don’t know how I’ll survive without us.” He looks me in the eye, and I feel it again, the heartbreak re-surfacing. I push it down.
“Dino Martini,” I just say instead. “Good man.”
He sits back down. “Can I have another drink?”
“Absolutely.” I wink. “What’ll it be this time?”
“Bourbon on the rocks,” he says. He never really drinks; so he just throws out orders he’s heard other people make. It makes me chuckle.
I know he won’t enjoy it. I make him an Old Fashioned instead.
“Let’s go sit by the pool,” I say. “Catch the breeze.”
On the way out, I ask him to change the music. He obliges, and Nat King Cole’s Looking Back drifts out into the night, the title almost too on the nose.
“Are you trying to tell me something?” I ask with a melancholy smile, nodding toward the stereo system inside.
“Bingo!” he says, looking serious, swirling the ice in his glass. “You’re sharper than you look.”
And I remember a conversation we had in a time before this world, back at Humes in the hallway in 1948, and I am overcome by the magnitude of this moment and all the moments that came before. Where we started, and now where we are ending. It can’t be the end, I won’t have it be the end. I try to push it down, remove myself from the grief, but it’s impossible, so instead I don’t say anything. I just sit there swallowing it as it keeps pushing from inside, wanting to surface, to break out, trying to avoid an oncoming panic attack brewing inside me.
We sit side by side, glasses in hand, the desert cooling around us.
“How do you keep it so light?” he snaps suddenly.
I blink. “What do you mean?”
“Are you really superficial,” he asks, staring out at the pool, “or do you just not care?”
I set down my drink, watch the condensation ring it leaves.
“For all I know, life isn’t very long,” I say quietly. I don’t tell him that inside I’m fighting a battle I have no strategy for.
“How banal,” he mutters, though there’s no real bite in it.
“No,” I say.
“Can’t you see my heart is broken?” he retorts.
“Don’t you think mine is?” I raise my voice, just a little. “I’m a woman. There are expectations. You told me that yourself.” I start to cry, but quietly, he doesn’t notice at first.
He looks down, the fight draining out of him. “But you could’ve chosen me.”
“Really?” I ask. “Be honest now. Was that ever really an option?”
He sighs. “No. Not really. Not right now.”
He turns away. I take his hand.
“Don’t you want me to have a life?” I ask. “You have Anita.”
He slaps my hand away, tries to stand, then sits again, as if his body can’t quite decide what to do. He pulls me closer instead, lifts me onto his lap.
“It’s too much for my brain to deal with,” he says. I stroke his hair.
“I know. Me too.”
For a moment we just breathe, his chin resting against my shoulder.
“I don’t know what happens to us now,” I whisper. “Do we stay friends? Lovers? Do we separate?”
He looks lost, younger than I’ve seen him in years. “I honestly don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”
“I think we both know what the right thing is,” he says softly. “But I don’t think that’s an option. Do you?”
I shake my head. “No.”
He looks at me, really looks, and something in the room shifts. A kind of resignation, or recognition, or both.
“Come on,” he says at last, trying to seem happy and careless, but it doesn’t quite land. “Let’s go inside. Let’s… have some fun.”
But we don’t make it inside with any sense of lightness.
We walk quietly, wordlessly, to the bedroom.
It happens suddenly and inevitably. It feels less a choice than a current we’re caught in.
At first we laugh, a nervous laughter at the awkwardness of it, and also how familiar we still are beneath everything that’s changed.
Then we find the old rhythm and fall back into who we are together. It’s heated and intense, like a dance for life and death. Like our whole history is being choreographed into this intimate moment between us.
Afterwards, we lie there in the dusk of the desert. Still and quiet for the longest time. His hand rests on my hip, mine on his chest, as if letting go would break something fragile between us.
He turns his head toward me, offers a crooked grin, foolish and adolescent.
“Let’s get drunk,” he says. “Really, really drunk.”
It’s so unlike him, but the urge hits me too, the desire to blur the edges, to drown the ache, to make this last little chapter less fraught with heartbreak.
He puts on Don Gibson’s I Can’t Stop Loving You. After drink number three, I shout “Enough!” and demand a change in tunes.
“I feel like listening to rhythm and blues, like in the old days,” I say.
He obliges, cheeks flushed, eyes shining.
“This is why I never drink,” he says as darkness falls, and we talk through tears and cigarette smoke, slurring and gesturing wildly. I never usually smoke, but today calls for anything and everything to ease the pain of letting go.
“Me too,” I say.
“I always get sentimental,” he admits, and then, suddenly, he cries harder, properly now, hands over his face like a child.
I drop a cigarette on the carpet. Too late to stop it, a small burn appears.
“Whoops,” I say, placing it in the ashtray. “I don’t even like smoking,” I mumble, and slide off the stool in a graceless heap.
“I think we’d better go to bed,” he says, offering me a hand. I can’t quite stand up. Neither of us can, not really.
He gives up trying to help me to my feet, and instead carries me down the hall.
“Here, here,” he slurs, tossing me onto the bed as gently as he can manage. “Goodnight,” he says, softly this time, and promptly falls on top of me, asleep.
My novel GREAT ARE THE MYTHS will be serialised (one chapter each day) over the summer of 2026. If you would rather listen to the audiobook, the full story is available for free on all the usual platforms. Info and links HERE
My World of Interiors 