I ran to the Golconda as if it were an embassy on foreign soil.
12
Clive was somewhere in the building but it was unclear where. This was a problem because he had, for some ungodly reason, brought Chantal with him.
Errol yanked me inside by the collar. He pointed at the coffee bar and, sure enough, there she was, a vision in sustainable fashion. To the delight of the baristas, Chantal was ordering an oat milk chai latte as she chatted with Jin. She stood with one foot turned out, as only former ballet dancers and influencers do. Women who know their angles. Chantal’s neck was similar to Willis’s thighs in that it was its own jurisdiction. Some people have a mouth full of teeth, this lady had a neck full of vertebrae.
I had the faintest inkling she would be inside. When I shone my flashlight over the treacherous path to the inner sanctum, I noticed an empty little bottle of coconut water. Chantal did not strike me as the littering type, but she did strike me as the type to let things just drop out of her bag without realizing it. Like Oscar, Chantal seemed loose when it came to the physical world, at once obsessed with her body and divorced from it, the kind of person who claimed not to see outer beauty but whose life would be threadbare without it. Unlike Oscar, this was because Chantal used social media as a proxy for her soul.
“Lola!” she exclaimed upon seeing me. “Madame! How killer is this joint?”
She spun in a circle, as if appreciating a first snowfall. Her hair was pressed into beachy waves that fell over an asymmetrical top that looked as if she’d pried it off a gondolier. She also had on false eyelashes, the good ones that looked like they’d been clipped from the tip of a lynx’s ears. The only time I dared invite such apparati into my life was on Halloween, when my inability to operate them would pass for drunken application. But I could not compute her presence here. Chantal was in on the Golconda too? Et tu, Chantal? I couldn’t imagine her keeping this place a secret, holding it all in, signing an NDA. Reading an NDA.
She held one of the Golconda’s business cards in her hand, squeezing the edges, making the little folder talk.
“Ho-la, Lo-la,” said the folder, in a demonic voice.
I could count my interactions with Chantal on one hand, but both in person and online, she would claim to be “obsessed” with all manner of nouns, including me. How would an obsession with a scented candle or a hairbrush or a pair of socks work? Posters of the socks. Driving past the childhood home of the socks.
“Hi, Chantal,” I said. “How’ve you been?”
That was all I could muster. For one thing, I was self-conscious about the state of my appearance in her presence. For another, seeing Knox had hit me hard. I was unprepared to interact with anyone aside from Vadis or Jin. Plus, I needed to reserve my small-talk allowance. I already felt like I was blowing a “how’ve you been?” on her.
“Not as great as you!” she said. “Tell me everything. You’re such a mini-genius.”
It would take a regular-size genius to know if she meant my intelligence or my height.
“Do you have a McCarthy genius grant yet?” she asked.
“Not yet,” I said, trying to relax my face. “Still chipping away at that communism.”
Jin rolled her eyes, grabbed her tea, and retreated to the interrogation room.
“Later, Jen!” Chantal called.
Jin stiffened but didn’t turn around.
“So,” I asked her, “how goes the beauty business?”
The times I saw Chantal on my own, I felt like her parent. The times I saw her with Clive, I felt like their child. I suspected this was confusing for everyone involved.
“Oh my God, crazy busy. I need a second one of me. Or to become a literal octopus. One e-commerce site, two newsletters, a blog, endless TikToks, and three Instagram accounts is mental hospital time. I was just bitching about it to Harold.”
“Errol,” Errol said, not for the first time.
“Anyway, I’m in brand partnership hell. I have, like, no interns lined up for the summer, and I’m going to murder Kate Hudson. You don’t even want to know.”
“Chantal,” Errol explained, teeth clenched, “is waiting for Clive. So that they can go to the theater.”
I heard whispering in the distance. Two women were walking fluidly overhead, like a pair of doctors making rounds. They were draped in grays and egg-shaped silver jewelry. Finally, I recognized one of them. I’d seen her the night Vadis brought me here but hadn’t made the connection until now. Her photo appeared frequently enough in publishing trade magazines: Jeannine Bonner. Amos’s book editor. The one who’d suggested the restaurant, a night that seemed strangely distant now. One had to admire the scope of Clive’s efforts. I held my breath, wanting to observe Jeannine, an eagerness that proved to be one-way.