“I promise,” she said, as though she hadn’t heard. “You’ll look great.”
* * *
—
Siobhan called to say Redwood Feiffer wanted to have me over to his house for lunch. Always with the fucking lunches.
“Just me and him?” I considered informing her that I would not be giving this guy a blow job. My career was no longer a blow job–based barter economy.
“It’s a little unusual, but I don’t think he knows that. I think he’s so rich he’s used to hanging out with anyone he wants. You should think of it as a friendly thing. He seems like an okay guy.” He’s the money, her tone said.
Redwood’s house was only two miles west of mine as the crow flies, though crow flight is a less than useless measurement in the hills, where the streets are as kinked and looped as Silly String. I left M.G. behind and drove myself, thinking it might be offensive to bring a bodyguard to lunch. I was twenty minutes late by the time I pressed the buzzer on Redwood’s security box and followed the driveway’s nautilus curve to a hunkered-down house that was all sharp edges and raw concrete, like the bunker of an impossibly chic warlord. Redwood was waiting on his Brutalist doorstep in Adidas sneakers and a rumpled tan linen suit over a T-shirt with the jacket sleeves rolled up.
“Buenos días!” he said as I walked toward him. “Wow, I like your haircut. Très Marian.” Confidently, he opened his arms for a hug. “What’s the good word?” Just a moment too late, he saw my hesitation, my slight affront at his presumption, and switched smoothly to handshake mode.
“I never know how to answer that,” I said, shaking hands. “Do you say fine? Like, the good word is fine?”
“Now that you mention it, I don’t actually know. Maybe you just say a word you like.” He was leading me into a gigantic room that was fully open to the outdoors on one side. I’d seen houses like this before. They’re suspicious slit-eye pillboxes on one side and, on the other, nothing but openness and innocence, letting in the whole city-encrusted valley, the whole sky. Enormous sliding glass doors were recessed back into the walls so Redwood didn’t have to deal with anything as gauche and disruptive as windows.
“Tart,” I said. “That can be my good word.” Augustina had used it that morning to describe a certain PR person’s tone, and I’d felt a little trill of pleasure.
“But which meaning?”
“All of them. That’s why it’s a good word. The meanings speak to each other.”
“Ah! Yes. I get it. The tempting dessert, the seductive woman, the sharp, sour taste. Very nice.”
“What’s yours?”
He considered. “I’ll go with perchance.”
“Why?”
“It’s funny, and it expresses ambivalence, which is my go-to emotion. Either that or mayhaps.”
We walked through a room with low couches and a huge flat-screen, past a gleaming black grand piano, and out onto the patio. There were four chaises lined up next to a pool, and, beyond, the big flat circuit board of Los Angeles planing off into pale haze.
“Cool house,” I said.
“Thanks. It’s a rental while I decide if I want to move here. None of this stuff is mine.” He gazed off at the indistinct horizon. “I know this is a really obvious observation, but I feel the need to make it anyway—the sprawl of this place is legit mind-blowing. Especially when you fly in. Do you look out the window on planes?”
“Sometimes.”
“You can see the most amazing things. Like, once I was on a flight to Europe, and the pilot came on and said the northern lights were going off out the left side, and basically no one bothered to lift up their shade! There’s something damning about that, how people didn’t look.”
“I’ve never seen them.”
“But wouldn’t you look? They’re wild. Sheets of green, like you’d expect, but it’s the scale that blew my mind, how they’re moving crazy fast but somehow you can’t even really see them moving. I read a poem once that described the aurora as the moon hanging up her silken laundry. And another that called it glowworm light. I like that.”
His earnestness had me off-balance. Who talks about poems? I said, “I went in a glowworm cave once.”
“What’s a glowworm cave?”
“What it sounds like. A cave with glowworms living on the ceiling. It’s pitch-dark, and the worms really look like stars, even though they’re just larvae. The one I went in had water—maybe there has to be water, I’m not sure—and the worms were reflected, so you felt surrounded by all these little points of white light.”