by Davis Bunn
From across the street, Estelle heard strands of music from her past. Frank Sinatra sang “Fly Me to the Moon,” a melody that pierced her as sharply as a blade through her heart.
Estelle had no choice but to admit defeat and turn away.
She was wrong to have come. She should have left the past buried and at least half-forgotten.
CHAPTER 5
Connor drifted down the sidewalk, still locked in memories about his early days. His mother had returned to her place by the cash register while Connor was in his bassinet. The restaurant’s staff had all known Connor’s real age when he started working alongside his father in the kitchen. Connor had learned early and well the lessons of haute cuisine. But beneath the restaurant’s polish and the money, the family business had radiated a bitter unhappiness. Finally the year he had turned nineteen, it all fell apart. By then, Connor was already traveling the roads, chasing his own dreams.
Then an all-too familiar melody drifted through an open doorway, halting Connor in his tracks.
The restaurant he faced was called Castaways. The building itself appeared to be the oldest structure on the block, a two-story affair with the tall false front of bygone eras. Cast-iron tables and chairs flanked its broad front entrance. The long windows were embellished with flower boxes. The wood was varnished; the glass was polished; the brass handles to the open French doors gleamed. Connor thought the understated elegance suggested a woman’s hand at the tiller.
Connor stepped through the open doorway, and fell in love.
* * *
Sylvie walked to the bar and opened the cabinet that held the restaurant’s sound system. She put one of her father’s favorite albums on the turntable, and stood there listening with her eyes shut. She had often done this in the restaurant’s early days, when it was all too much and she thought she would never learn everything required to keep the place up and running.
Her father had been a gentle dreamer. The fact that so few of his dreams ever came true had only deepened his joy when one was realized. He had always called Sylvie the marvel that made every day complete. Even when she was bad, Gareth Cassick insisted that he was blind to all but the delight his daughter brought him. There had been some hard years for them both, for Sylvie was her mother’s child as well. That woman had left them when Sylvie was twelve. Sylvie’s clearest memories of her mother were mostly strident demands for her father to grow up, support the family, make something of himself, and do a job that mattered. Then her mother was gone, and for a time, everything was good. If not good, at least life had been a great deal quieter. Sylvie’s teenage years had brought out a bitter edge to Sylvie’s character. She had never been a screamer. Her early years had seen too much of that. Instead, she had developed an acrid sharpness. She could wound with a single word. Her father had simply accepted her tart rage as his due, and loved her through those years.
Gareth would have adored this place, she knew. The light fell through the west-facing windows, painting the old wood with a honeyed gleam. The sea peeked between the roofs like a scattering of blue gemstones. Sandy was in back, doing his magic with pastry and spices. The air carried the gentle incense of promise and good times for all.
Her father had loved the crooners of the fifties and sixties. When she pounded the walls of their home with arena rock, he listened politely. When she condemned his own music, he simply said it was an acquired taste. And acquire it she had, especially on days like this, when she would have given anything to hear his gentle optimism, and have him assure Sylvie that better times were just around the bend. Not yet within sight, but coming to them both . . . and very soon indeed.
She whispered to the empty room, “Pop, I could sure use one of your hugs just now.”
* * *
The man who entered her restaurant was too handsome for his own good. Sylvie started to say they weren’t open yet and could he return in a couple of hours. Something held her back, though. He fumbled the sunglasses from his face, like his fingers weren’t working well. He stood just inside the entrance, where the sun struck him fully, and gave her place a very slow sweep. The light played through his shoulder-length hair, not blond and not brown, but a mixture of both. His face was lean and strong without being cavernous. His hands were what her father would have called cowhand big; they fit well to strong arms and broad shoulders, atop a waist that was almost too narrow. He wore a simple T-shirt and stonewashed jeans and canvas boots. He was, in a word, gorgeous.
Then she saw the tears. His gaze was so clouded she wasn’t even certain he could see her approach. Sylvie saw no need to ask if he was all right. Clearly, he was far from okay. In fact, what she actually thought was, this guy’s day might have been as bad as her own.
Sylvie asked, “What is it?”
Of all the ways he might have replied, all the words to emerge from that stylish two-day growth, Sylvie would have never expected to hear what he said. Not in a hundred billion years.
The guy’s voice was deep and resonant and downright beautiful. He said, “Bart Howard wrote that song in 1954. He was interviewed after it hit number one for six different artists. He said he had trained for twenty years so he could write it in twenty minutes.”
Sylvie said weakly, “Excuse me?”
“Originally Howard titled it, ‘In Other Words,’ ” the guy said. “The singer who had been buying Howard’s work considered it too cabaret in style and refused to use it. Then Kaye Ballard recorded it.”
“On Decca,” Sylvie said. “As the flipside to ‘Lazy Afternoon. ’ ”
“Right. Decca wanted Howard to change the lyrics. He fought them, Kaye backed him up, and the song went out like he wanted.”
Sylvie said, “Then Peggy Lee recorded it. Nat King Cole. Sarah Vaughan. Brenda Lee. Connie Francis.”
The guy said, “Then came 1964 and the Apollo moon program, and Frank Sinatra put it on the album . . .”
“It Might as Well Be Swing,” Sylvie said. “What we’re hearing.”
“Quincy Jones did the arrangement,” the guy said. “Count Basie’s orchestra backed him.”
Sylvie asked, “Why does that make you sad?”
He almost managed a smile. “All that stuff, it used to be really important.”
“It still is,” Sylvie said.
He looked at her. Really looked. “Can I please have a job?”
CHAPTER 6
When Connor left the restaurant, he headed downhill. He felt impacted at gut level by the woman he had just left. Her image was so clear, she might as well have walked alongside him. Sylvie Cassick held herself with the grace of a former ballerina, slender and balanced and impossibly erect. Her hair was a honeyed trace off pure black, like smoke blowing through a night-clad sky. Her eyes were the gray of morning mist, light and soft and brilliant. Connor put her age at somewhere around thirty, the same as himself or perhaps a year or so younger. Still, there was a timeless quality to the woman, as though she had managed to compress centuries of life into months. She held none of the electric beauty that defined the current Hollywood fashion. Her cheekbones were too pronounced, her gaze too direct, her lips too full. Connor thought she was the loveliest woman he had ever seen.
Not that it should have mattered. At least, not to him.
Miramar’s finest shops were clustered along an avenue two blocks off the seafront. The pedestrian area had tiled avenues with elevated concrete basins holding flowers and blooming trees. There were benches for the elderly and a woman in a tuxedo making balloon animals for the children. There was a cupcake factory and an upscale café and shops touting local vineyards. The streetlights were modeled after Parisian gaslights. The entire area covered three blocks, and then Connor was back into the world of well-tended houses on small lots. The sea’s presence was strong here, a brisk mingling of salt and seaweed and biting wind. Connor stopped by a tree-lined park and watched the children play. He was falling for the idea that a place like Miramar might truly exist. And even if it didn’t, even if his
first impressions were nothing more than whispers of dreams long buried, Connor could think of nothing he would like more than to spend his life living the myth.
He had a purpose now, and he was on the clock. He would enter into this new role by using the talents he had developed in Los Angeles. There was no alternative, not if he wanted to blend in and remain unidentified. Which he did. Desperately.
Connor’s first big break had come on CSI. They had liked his work so much the producers had offered him roles in the two spin-offs—but only if he could change his appearance so that viewers who had seen him get shot on the first show wouldn’t realize he was back from the dead. Connor had worked with a professional stylist who had been in film and television for years. She had taught him a lesson that defined the very best character actors, the people who shifted not just roles, but personalities. She had shown him how no amount of face paint or costumes or cosmetic alterations would help most actors because they were too rigidly defined within themselves. If a performer could learn flexibility at the deepest level of his personality, then the exterior changes merely amplified this shift.
By the time Connor found the shop he was looking for, he had defined his new role.
He wanted a new beginning. What was more, he wanted to deserve it.
* * *
Connor entered the men’s store and bought two pairs of black gabardine slacks, a white knit shirt, two long-sleeve white-on-white dress shirts, a mock alligator belt, and black loafers. He paid central coast prices, not Beverly Hills, but the purchases still put a sizeable dent in his cash.
He asked the saleslady for the best hairstylist in Miramar, and she directed him to the corner where the shopping lane met the main road. He entered and asked for whichever stylist could cut him without delay. A young woman with flashing dark eyes and an overtight skirt introduced herself as Lucia and led him back. “What are we after today?”
Connor held his thumb and forefinger about an inch apart. “Trim it down to this length, and part on the left side.”
“All this lovely hair.” She took a fistful and lifted it away from his neck. “You sure you want me to cut if all off?”
“I have to look respectable,” he explained.
“Good luck with that.” Lucia smirked at his reflection. “You got ‘bad boy’ written all over you.”
“I’m starting a new job.” He checked his watch. “In less than two hours.”
“Guess we better get started, then.” Lucia led him to the basin. As she shampooed his hair, she said, “Bet it was a woman, she hired you.”
Connor smiled. “Guilty.”
“You see? That lady, she’s not out to respect you. She wants you to walk in, raise the temperature in her office.”
“Restaurant,” Connor corrected.
“Yeah? Which one?”
“Castaways.”
“Oh, that’s good. Sylvie is one smart lady.”
“You know her?”
“Everybody knows Sylvie. She took a bad place and turned it right around.” Lucia toweled him off and led him back to the chair. “Last chance.”
“Do it.” His hair was darker when wet, the color of sourwood honey in sunlight. He watched her snip away, and hoped it would prove this easy to make the internal shift. “What can you tell me about my new boss?”
“She’s got a past. I’m not saying I know what it is—and even if I did, I probably wouldn’t tell. But the lady, she’s what, thirty? Thirty-one?”
“Something like that, I guess.”
“She’s old for her age. My grandmother would say her soul’s been around for a long time.”
Connor thought back to the conversation about music, and the way she had watched him struggle for control. “Have you ever eaten there?”
“Oh, sure. Last time, let’s see, it was for my birthday, not the last one, the one before. The food’s really good. Like, French.”
As Connor watched his new persona take shape in the mirror, his mind returned to that first moment in the restaurant. He shivered.
Lucia noticed and said, “I know, they keep it like an icebox in here. You want, I could ask them to turn the temperature up a notch.”
“Thanks, I’m good.” He had left LA driven by restless longings for some small fragment of his old passions. That first moment in Castaways had crystalized everything. It was far more than a wonderful conversation with a lovely woman. It opened a door he had thought locked and barred forever.
Connor Larkin had been born to sing, or so he had thought growing up. But obviously he had been mistaken. Nowadays a growing tsunami of fans insisted his real purpose in life was to die.
During his teens, Connor had learned to play piano because he couldn’t find anyone to accompany him. All his friends had thought the crooners of the fifties and sixties should be left in the grave. Connor, however, loved the soft melodies and the big bands and the polished sound. Dean Martin was his favorite, but he had learned to sing them all. Frank, Sammy, Tony, the Elvis ballads—an entire lost generation of silky-smooth voices. By age sixteen, Connor had felt destined to join their ranks. Two months before his twentieth birthday, his ambitions took him to LA.
Connor soon had all the gigs he could handle, so long as he played to rooms of drunks and clinking glasses and brassy laughter and fat guys shouting at waiters. Connor had wanted more, though. He wanted the lights. He wanted . . .
Connor had been singing at the silver wedding anniversary of a Hollywood producer, when an agent approached and introduced herself as Ami Chen. She was with CPP, one of the three agencies that had a dead-solid lock on the Hollywood A-list. Only Ami Chen did not work with singers. She handled stars.
Ami liked his voice, but she loved his looks. Connor was rugged and handsome and rakish. According to Ami, the cameras would eat him alive.
Ami arranged for him to take acting lessons between his singing gigs. When she deemed him ready, Ami sent him out to casting calls. By this point, the acting was far more than some sideline activity. Connor had already endured four and a half bruising years making the rounds of music producers and getting squeezed from all sides. LA was filled with wannabees who shone in momentary spotlights, but dwelled in the city’s bitter shadows. His gigs paid the rent and bought him a secondhand car, but he basically lived hand to mouth. His four flatmates were all one bad week away from the bus ride back to Iowa or Nebraska or wherever they shipped their broken dreams. The back roads of Hollywood were packed with brittle laughter and tense desperation. Connor was far from the only handsome young face who forgot why he had made the trip west.
Then to his astonishment, Connor was offered an acting gig.
At first, Connor played the guy in the soaps who got it in episode three, after trying to take off with the money and the hero’s sweetheart. Even such a small advancement drew bitter envy from his flatmates. Connor had leapt from nowhere straight into speaking roles. When he was hired for a third gig, Connor had no choice but to move out.
Then the medical shows started offering him regular work. As the casting directors put it, Connor made croaking look good.
Then he did a Syfy drama playing a thief of technical secrets who deserved to get it in the end, and did. These were followed by the three CSI shows. That was when the online cult thing started.
When his agent first got wind of his following, neither of them believed it was real. Then Ami started fielding calls from abroad.
Connor did his death-throes in six Mexican telenovelas. He became the most popular American bad guy on Japanese television. He was devoured by wild beasts in India. Twice. He was attacked by a killer scorpion in Australia. He got bitten by a viper in Brazil. When he came back to the States, it was to play the evil genius in that year’s e-game smash hit. By that point, Connor Larkin was dying as often as once a week.
Connor was still growing accustomed to the idea that people actually liked watching him get eaten by fickle fate, when he was invited to appear at the Las Vegas Comic Con. The convent
ion organizers informed Ami that Connor’s online following fit their demographics. They flew him out first class. He was met at the airport by a limo, given the penthouse suite at Caesars, and paid ten thousand dollars for a two-day gig.
When Connor showed up, he was mobbed.
Three days after he returned to LA, Connor bought a home in the Beverly Flats. He finally accepted what his agent had been saying for almost a year. This was no longer a string of gigs. Connor Larkin had a new career.
* * *
Lucia worked swiftly. She finished by trimming his neck; then she blew his hair dry. Her inspection grew increasingly serious as she gave his length a final check. “You want something in there?”
“Wax, please.”
She opened the vial, rubbed it over both palms, her black eyes flashing a warning now. She worked it into his hair, then combed it into place. “I guess you clean up pretty good.”
“You’re an artist.”
Lucia trimmed a final wayward strand; then she waved the scissors in his face. “Don’t you go breaking Sylvie’s heart, you hear what I’m saying? Else there’s gonna be a lot of folks around here, looking to trim more than your hair.”
Connor did not say what he thought, which was that the last thing he wanted from this time and place was a woman. Not a casual fling, which was clearly what they were all concerned about, and especially not a serious romance. The very idea filled him with grim humor. Connor thought of all the reasons he had to remain single as he climbed the road back to his little apartment. All the tales he could tell Lucia of other flashing dark eyes.
The problem with bad romance was that Connor’s story had not started with Kali Lyndon. She was merely the outcome. Connor had become very adept at clamping down on the hollow ache that such thoughts brought forth. However, no matter how fast he walked the broad avenue, he could not escape the sense of being convicted. Lucia’s warning had hit home as fast as a punch on an open wound.
When he passed through the parking area adjoining the studio apartments, Connor spotted the woman he had seen earlier in the office. She was seated in a little fenced area he had not noticed until then, a miniature garden with a couple of shade trees and a Jacuzzi and a small kiddie pool. Connor thought the woman held herself oddly, as though some severe pain kept her slightly hunched to her left.