The urge exasperates me. No matter what happens between us, I can’t seem to shake this compulsion to take care of her. As my grandmother did before me.
To be fair, my grandmother also took care of me and everyone else. Shut-ins. Recovering addicts. The elderly in her church. Young mothers. She had a gift for it. Not the self-sacrificing, old-school kind of caretaking, but a matter-of-fact recognition that we all need love and tending. She didn’t chop bits of herself off and give them up to others, as I’ve been known to do.
I peer out the window. From here, I can see the big house on top of the bluff. Lights are on, both in the foyer and the kitchen, which has wraparound windows that face south and west to display the best ocean views for thirty-seven miles, views of sea stacks and rocks and wild surf, the small coves hidden everywhere.
Our house. A song of the same name floats through my mind, delicate as mist. The house I discovered when we were kids, the house Suze bought out from under me, the house that has become her refuge, and how can I resent that?
Except sometimes I still do, even though I have my own refuge in this house and the studio I inherited from my grandmother.
The kettle whistles. I pour water over the Golden Eyebrow tea leaves in my cup, set the timer on my phone to let it brew. Break off another bite of cranberry bread.
She’s home. I’m both longing to run up the hill to see her for myself and reluctant. Afraid of rejection, if I’m honest.
I also know she’s a wreck, both physically and mentally, and needed to get out of the fishbowl she lives in.
What better spot to retreat to than the rare Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece that sits empty almost all the time? It’s kept shining and perfect by a crew of cleaners and gardeners and handymen I manage for her. When she first bought it, she begged me to do the job because she trusts me. Because of our history, because of all the things, I agreed. As with so much of my connection to Suze, I’m of two minds on the task. It gives me pleasure to be in the house I’ve loved since we were children, to run my hands over the gleaming wood （which, to be fair, she paid a fortune to have lovingly restored） and gaze out the windows at the glorious view of the rocky Oregon coast.
It also makes me feel like a servant in a way.
Suze. Suzanne. A thousand memories of her face move through my mind, at so many ages and stages—the girl with absurdly long braids who wandered onto the beach one day when we were twelve; the tortured teenager who was cloistered away by her terrible, terrible father; the struggling actress; the movie star. She’s as fey as the Leonard Cohen song of the same name, as enchanting and elusive as sprites or faeries.
She’s just so beautiful. Beautiful like a royal. Even that first summer we met, when she was skinny and ate every minute of the day, as if she were feeding a roaring furnace, and her hair was ridiculously, foolishly long, it was hard not to stare at her. Her face was strong, big nose and wide mouth and oversize eyes of a color I’d never seen before and haven’t seen since, not quite blue, not quite green, like the curve of a wave rising to break—light-struck and impossible to ignore. When she turned those eyes on you, it was hypnotic. She hypnotized me, and all the guys, and then the world.
Never my grandmother, who said Suze was lost.
Now she’s back, and again broken even though she says she’s not. In my opinion, it started with the untimely death of her partner, Dmitri. He was an early victim of COVID, and died alone in his ICU room. It wrecked her. As it would anyone, but especially a woman who waited such a long time to find love.
I look up to the bluff. Lights have come on in the living room. I should go see her.
But rather than walking up the hill, I shrug into my rain jacket, pick up my oversize cup, and whistle for my dog, Maui. He’s a big black shepherd mix with shaggy, soft fur and the joyful heart of a three-year-old boy. My granddaughter named him for the character in Moana, and it suits his goofy nature. “Let’s go to the studio, buddy.”
Chapter Two
Suze
The first time I ever earned any real money, I bought a house, because Beryl, Phoebe’s grandmother, told me you can never go wrong with real estate.
Until that moment I’d lived a hardscrabble existence, first with my father, who never allowed me any money, then later trying to break into Broadway, waiting tables and scrambling for whatever parts I could get. But when I was twenty-one, I was cast as the lead in a very big film, A Woman for the Ages. Everything changed. I suddenly had so much money it seemed impossible to spend it all. Beryl advised me to buy a house, so I bought a cottage in Bel Air, and it started me off on the right foot. Two decades later, Phoebe was on a quest to save this place from ruin, and I bought it. To help her, honestly, though she didn’t see it that way.