The following afternoon, the cloud ceiling lifted. After she finally delivered the Wellington, she caught a taxi Fairchild back to Hamble. Heading south, at every airfield they passed over, planes were lined up, rows and rows of them, their wings freshly painted with black-and-white stripes.
At the coast, lines of ships stretched into the Channel, their wakes drawing arrows toward France. Tanks and trucks and jeeps filled the roads, went over gangways and were swallowed by ships.
In the night, for hours, came the droning of engines. In the morning, everything was gone.
Constellations
Nineteen
Adelaide Scott lived in Malibu, not in an aggressively beach house-y way but in a shabby-fancy country-living way, north up the Pacific Coast Highway, past the fishing pier and that restaurant Moonshadows where Mel Gibson had gotten drunk before he went off on a Nazi rant to the cop who pulled him over, past Nobu, past all the popular beaches, way uphill from the highway, above the hazy blue plain of ocean. The air smelled like sagebrush and dust and salt. Adelaide’s three mottled mutt dogs came running out of her house when she opened the door and barked at me before sniffing around the bushes. “How was the drive?” Adelaide asked.
Commence ritual Los Angeles chitchat about routes and traffic.
“I used to have my studio in Santa Monica,” she said. “But the commute became unbearable, so I moved it to Oxnard, which has the advantage of being much cheaper and perfectly convenient from here. My assistants will never forgive me, but I have an entire warehouse now.”
Inside, the house was all dark green tile and red-gold wood and many-paned windows looking out onto hillsides covered in the paper-dry California brush that wants nothing more than to burst into flame. “I’ll make tea,” she said, leading the way, the dogs following. “Wait here. I can’t bear to have anyone watch me putter.” She waved me into a big living room under red-gold beams.
Above the fireplace, a strange sort of spiraling horn was mounted diagonally, very sharp at one end and about seven feet long.
* * *
—
Adelaide reclined in an Eames chair, her feet up on the footstool. She’d hung some reading glasses around her neck, and there was a document box on the floor beside her that I assumed had Marian’s letters in it. I sat on a leather couch facing the green tile fireplace, the spiraling horn. A dog jumped up beside me and immediately fell asleep with its butt against my thigh, apparently unaware I was a major motion picture star, an icon of the silver screen.
“What is that thing?” I said about the horn.
“A narwhal tusk,” she said.
“What’s a narwhal tusk?”
“If you don’t know, it’s better just to show a picture.” She got up and pulled out a book of wildlife photography, flipped through to an image of what were apparently narwhals surfacing in a patch of open water surrounded by ice. “They’re a kind of whale,” she said. Their blunt heads were speckled brown and gray and smoothly featureless except for the insanely long single tusks that stuck up like jousting lances. They looked like unicorns crossbred with dirty thumbs.
“My understanding,” Adelaide said about the tusk, “is that Addison Graves, Marian’s father, acquired the tusk somewhere on his travels. I have other things, too—exotic souvenirs I think were his. The old books over there as well. And that painting”—she pointed to an oil of hazy dockyards—“was by Marian’s uncle Wallace. I wound up with quite a few paintings by both Jamie and Wallace. Most of Jamie’s better ones are in museums. Carol Feiffer was very interested in the tchotchkes, though I don’t know any of the stories behind them.”
She took a small sketchbook from the document box and handed it to me. “This might be of interest.”
A piece of paper was folded inside the front cover. I opened it. Technically this belongs to the United States Navy…
Adelaide said, “That note is from Jamie to my mother.” I kept reading.
…really the reason I’ll come back is because I love you, and what I’ve left of myself can never be reclaimed.
I refolded the paper and flipped through the book. The pages were yellowed and crumbly and full of sketches in charcoal and pencil and occasionally watercolor. Mountains and ocean. Airplanes and ships. Soldiers’ hands. Tents in a snowy valley. Then the drawings turned abstract: chaotic lines and blotches and scribbles. Maybe a dozen pages like that. The rest of the book was empty.
Adelaide was watching me. “Troubling, aren’t they? Those last pages?”