by Dyan Sheldon
“Of course I know.”
“No looking at our bags,” warns Nicki, shifting hers out of sight. “Go on, name them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” says Beth. “We don’t have time for games. We still have a lot of shopping to do.”
“And that’s another thing.” Hattie, who only a minute ago was at the other end of the room trying on her sixth pair of boots, has somehow materialized beside Isla. “You haven’t bought anything. Not one single thing.”
Beth smiles sweetly. “I haven’t seen anything I like.”
“We’ve been here over three hours,” says Hattie. “That’s like going to a supermarket and not seeing any food.”
“And what about the guy in Transcendental? What was up with that?”
Beth doesn’t recognize the name, but she knows exactly which store Isla means. She was going through the motions of looking at tops in the boutique where some actor whose name she can’t remember apparently shops all the time, when she knew for certain that the man from the lobby was right behind her. She could feel his eyes on her. “Just what is it you think you’re doing?” she shrieked as she swung round. “Why don’t you leave me alone?” Only it wasn’t the young man in the white suit; it was an older man in jeans, a cowboy shirt and a cowboy hat (in her defence, his hat was white) looking for a present for his granddaughter. Beth apologized eight times.
“I told you, it was a mistake. I thought he was someone else.”
“Who?” asks Nicki. “I didn’t think you knew anybody in LA.”
“Or maybe you do,” says Paulette. “You keep looking over your shoulder.”
“Hey, that’s right!” Hattie snaps her fingers. “Even in the car you kept looking back all the time.”
“Maybe she’s pretending she’s in one of those old movies she likes so much where everybody’s a spy,” says Isla.
Beth fidgets. She should have known that, with whatever grudging respect they’d had for Gabriela now gone, it was only a matter of time before they jumped on her like a pack of hyenas on the carcass of an antelope. “You’re all making a big deal out of nothing.”
“What’s going on?” Lucinda strolls up to them, a new shopping bag swinging from her arm, looking wary. “You guys look really serious.”
“We’re trying to figure out why Gab’s acting so weird,” says Nicki. “And don’t say you haven’t noticed.”
Oh, Lucinda’s noticed. From the minute she woke up to the sound of sobbing, Lucinda’s noticed. The clothes, the make-up, the apologizing, the clinical amnesia when it comes to anything to do with fashion, the fact that Gabriela, who last night was as graceful as a gazelle, can barely walk. It’s like she’s a different person to the one Lucinda met yesterday. But she was hoping the others hadn’t noticed. “Well…” She smiles without any conviction. “Define weird.”
“Weird like she’s not really here,” says Isla.
“Weird like she didn’t know what Madagascar was,” says Nicki.
“Weird like she’s wearing pyjamas and no make-up,” says Hattie.
“I’ll go for weird like paranoid,” says Paulette.
“I don’t think that’s being weird,” lies Lucinda. “It’s just nerves and stress and excitement and everything.”
“Sure,” says Paulette. “I can’t walk right when I’m feeling nervous either.”
“I can hardly leave the house,” says Isla.
“OK,” Beth sighs. “OK, I’ll tell you. I guess I should have told you straight away, but I didn’t want to worry you or scare you or anything…”
“That’s very kind of you,” says Paulette, “but we don’t scare that easily.”
“This had better be good.” Hattie looks as if she’s trying to swallow her mouth.
“Well, you see, there’s this guy. I noticed him first in the hotel.” Beth explains about the young man in the lobby in the white suit and the Panama hat. How he was watching them while they were waiting for the car. How she saw him in the garden at the studio. How she saw him parked up the road when they were getting back in the limo. How she’s seen him while they’ve been shopping. Someone, not Lillian Beeby, has said that a trouble shared is a trouble halved, and as she talks Beth really feels that that is true. After all her anxiety, this is a trouble that can be understood. She should have told them from the start, instead of keeping it to herself. United we stand, divided we fall. Strength in numbers. You don’t have to walk alone.
When Beth finishes her story, there is silence for a few seconds. But only a few – and it definitely isn’t the silence of fear.
“Some guy’s been following us,” repeats Paulette, with as much conviction as if Beth had said that the bustle is coming back into fashion. “You mean, like a stalker? Is that what you mean?”
“Well, yeah, I guess you could call him that.” Beth makes a scrunched-up face. “There’s something really strange about him.”
Nicki, peering at herself in a compact mirror, says, “I didn’t see anybody strange in the hotel this morning.”
“Me, neither,” says Isla. “I mean, everybody who stays at The Xanadu has money, don’t they?”
“So what if he has money?” Beth snaps. “That doesn’t make it OK to follow us around.”
“I’m just saying that it’s not like he’s some kind of LA lowlife, is it? He has to be respectable,” argues Isla. “Guys with money don’t do stuff like that.”
“Why not?” asks Beth.
No one hears her.
“Well, personally, I don’t understand how you noticed anyone.” Hattie’s lips form a narrow, unbending line. “You were pretty much out of it even then. You hardly said five words while we were waiting, and, if you ask me, they were the only thing that was strange.”
Paulette turns on, rather than to, Lucinda. “What about you? Did you see this mysterious stalker?”
“Well… I—” Lucinda’s eyes ping-pong from Paulette to Gabriela and back again. “I don’t— I’m not really sure. There were a lot of people in the lobby this morning.” Her shopping shrugs. “I can’t remember everybody I saw.”
“Well, I know I didn’t see him,” proclaims Nicki, “and I always notice hats because they’re, like, my specialty. There’s no way I’d’ve missed a Panama.”
“I still don’t see why you’re all wound up because some guy was looking at us in the hotel.” Hattie continues to study her as if she’s not sure of the decoration or the colour. “Let’s face it, guys always look at us. You’d think you’d be used to it by now.”
“Besides,” says Isla, “if there really was some guy watching us, then he was probably a director or a producer. They’re always looking for new faces.”
If he is a director or producer, then he’s one who spends his time riding around town and climbing into people’s gardens.
Paulette’s smile is full of ill will. “Nobody but you saw him in the garden, did they?”
“I can’t explain that, but he was definitely there!” Beth’s voice is, for her, unusually loud and firm. There’s nothing like chronic frustration to make a person forget her shyness. “I saw him as clearly as I see you. He was right there in the back yard. If he wasn’t there, why did the alarm go off like that?”
“The guard said it was a malfunction,” says Paulette.
“It happens at our house all the time,” adds Isla.
“And we were all right there,” says Hattie. “Right next to you. So if you saw him so clearly why didn’t we see him, too?”
Nicki laughs without a stitch of humour. “Maybe he really did fly away.”
Blessed are the peacemakers, a group that can now count Lucinda among their number. “Look, it’s been a long morning. Why don’t we get some lunch or at least a drink,” she says. “There’s a café a couple of doors down.”
Beth, who, met with so much resistance, is starting to doubt herself, jumps at the suggestion. “That’s a great idea!” Lunch, that’s what she needs. She hasn’t had anything to eat all day. Maybe that’s all that’
s wrong with her – hunger. That and being in someone else’s body. She’s hungry. Hunger makes you hallucinate. Everybody knows that.
They come out of the shoe store and turn towards the café. Beth freezes.
Sitting at one of the tables, talking to a man with his back to Beth, is one of those LA types that Beth’s mother warned her about. Several times. There are undoubtedly quite a few things that she might be discussing with the man at the table, most of them illegal, but the improbable blonde isn’t the reason Beth has stopped like a phone whose battery has suddenly died. It’s the man. He may be facing the opposite way, but she knows him instantly.
“Luce, look!” Beth turns and grabs Lucinda’s arm. “That’s him! That’s him! Right over there.”
Not just Lucinda, but Hattie, Isla, Nicki and Paulette all look at her.
“Now what?”
“That’s him! Over there with the blonde with all the hair!”
Paulette groans. “Oh, for God’s sake. How long are you going to keep this up?”
“No, really. Right over there! At the café! I swear, it’s him.”
Hattie is the first to look round. “Where?”
Beth turns back to the couple at the table.
There’s no one there.
Nothing like this has ever happened to Professor Gryck before (nor to anyone else involved, come to that). The entire Tomorrow’s Writers Today group was frogmarched out of the exhibition area by the armed guards of this most prestigious of museums. The head of security (an ex-policeman who thought he’d seen everything, but obviously hadn’t) wanted to know what the heck Professor Gryck thought she was doing.
“I thought I was educating these upstanding and talented young students,” said Professor Gryck in the voice of an expert. “That’s what I thought I was doing.”
The head of security said it was more like she was training a gang of art thieves. “They were all over the place. Ignoring the signs. Touching everything. Going over markers. How do you explain that, Professor?”
Professor Gryck couldn’t. It never happened; none of her students touched anything; nor did they wander around like straying cattle. “These are responsible, highly intelligent and gifted young adults, not riff raff,” she informed him. “They would never do anything like you’re suggesting.”
The head of security pointed to the bank of monitors. “Well, it’s all on there. In black and white.” Apparently, they were trying to steal the special exhibit, loaned from the Louvre for the first time, Unnamed Lady at Window. The others were causing distractions while that plain, innocuous-looking girl made the lift.
“We weren’t trying to steal anything.” Professor Gryck’s voice was brittle with exasperation. “It was an accident, you dolt.”
Calling him a dolt was probably a mistake. They were supposed to have lunch in the beautiful courtyard restaurant of the museum. She’d been planning it for weeks: tables were reserved on the elevated terrace overlooking the fountain and Professor Gryck had gone over the menu, making sure that there was nothing that would cause any of her charges to break out, throw up or go into toxic shock. (Beth isn’t the only one who suffers from allergies.) Professor Gryck was looking forward to this lunch. Civilized. Sophisticated. Elegant. The perfect ending to what was meant to have been a perfect morning. You certainly wouldn’t want to have a day of art and culture and then eat in some fast-food joint with plastic forks and styrofoam plates.
But even if their reservation hadn’t long expired by the time they were released, “the incident” (as Professor Gryck has come to think of it) ended any chance of them dining at round, marble-topped tables overlooked by priceless sculptures and modern fountains. Though it was ultimately established that she and her group were who they said they were, and that something had gone horribly wrong with the surveillance system, there was no question of them being allowed to remain. Or wanting to. In a civilized, sophisticated and elegant manner – but in no uncertain terms – she and her group were told to leave. And with a dignity amplified by righteous indignation, they left.
And so, in an unprecedented move that broke all of her own rules, Professor Gryck gave the contestants free time for a quick lunch.
“You’re to stay on this block.” She waved her arm back and forth so they’d know which block she meant. “We’ll meet back here in exactly one hour.” She looked directly into Beth Beeby’s glasses. She knows whom she blames. There was only one person in that alcove; one person myopically close to that precious portrait. “Don’t any of you be late. Do you understand?” Professor Gryck needed a drink. “Promise me that.”
Everyone promised. Or almost everyone.
“But we’re not supposed to leave the block,” Aricely is saying now.
They’ve finished their quick lunch and have half an hour to spare. Esmeralda, Jayne and Aricely want dessert. Gabriela wants to do some shopping.
“It depends how you define block.” In so many ways it has been a demoralizing, not to say deadening, morning. The only bright spot was that painting – that painting whose life and passion was just within her reach. Until the alarms went off and she was rudely hauled away. If she really were Beth Beeby, Gabriela would still be crying and apologizing. Since she isn’t, what she wants is to give herself a treat. Some foundation and a little blusher, for example. And maybe a scarf – filmy, flimsy and glinting with colour. Something to cheer her up. Surely she deserves that little crumb of happiness? Gabriela thinks so. “We’re not leaving the area; we’re just going to a different section.” The Sunset Plaza section. “It’s, like, two minutes away.”
“I don’t see why you have to go shopping,” says Esmeralda. “As I say in my essay, unbridled consumerism is destroying our nation’s—”
“Yeah, I know,” interrupts Gabriela. This has been mentioned before. “It’s destroying our nation’s soul. Only I’m not emptying the nearest mall, Esmeralda. I’m just getting a couple of things I forgot. I must’ve left my make-up bag at home. I don’t have anything with me.”
“Maybe if you call Professor Gryck—” begins Aricely, but Gabriela cuts her off, too.
“What’s wrong with you guys? So far we’ve been in a bus and a museum, and a museum and a bus. Don’t you want to just walk around a little? See the city without a piece of glass in front of your face?”
Jayne frowns. “But Professor Gryck—”
“Isn’t going to know we went anywhere, because we’re going to be right where she left us when the bus comes back.” If they ever get out of here, that is.
“But what if something happens to us?”
“What could possibly happen to us in half an hour? We’re not rafting across the Pacific. We’re just going into a couple of stores.”
“I still say Professor Gryck’s not going to like it,” says Esmeralda.
“Geez, Louise…” groans Gabriela. No wonder Beth chews her nails, if this is what her friends back home are like. “Trust me. She’s not going to know.”
Delila has been silent throughout this exchange, looking as if she’s watching a play and is trying to follow the plot, but now she says, “Well, you can count me in.” She missed a lot of the excitement in the museum because she was in the toilet; she isn’t about to miss any more.
“What about the rest of you?” Gabriela smiles encouragingly. As much as she’d like to leave them behind, if Professor Gryck does catch them disobeying her orders, she wants the others to be with her. Safety in numbers. Divided we fall.
Aricely looks at Jayne. Jayne looks at Esmeralda. Esmeralda looks at Gabriela.
“What are we going to tell Professor Gryck if she finds out we disobeyed her?”
“We’ll tell her we had to help Beth get a special non-allergic, organic kind of sanitary pad,” says Delila. “She’s met the girl. She’ll believe that.”
Gabriela’s spirits are almost immediately restored by being out on the street. This is more like it. The energy of so many people going somewhere, and going there in a hurry, hu
ms through bone and steel; cellulose and concrete. Even on so short an acquaintance (and most of it from behind glass) she knows that Los Angeles is so much more than any other place she’s ever been. There is nothing ordinary or dull here. Nothing humdrum. Everything sounds louder; looks brighter; smells stronger; moves with a shimmer or a bounce. She feels as if her blood is foaming with excitement. Why would anyone want to live anywhere else? She loves LA! And LA, of course, should love Gabriela. She should fit right in; she should look like she belongs. Wearing her faux snakeskin zip-back heels and the ivory-coloured shift with the beadwork. Heads should be swivelling, elbows nudging. Look at her! Who’s that? She is, like, sooo cool! But LA doesn’t love her; it doesn’t even know she’s here. She’s not a goddess; she’s a geek – a lot more invisible than the air. The only advantage this gives her is that she’s wearing shoes that allow her to walk easily and quickly. Half an hour is a long time when you can stride.
“Wow, will you look at those two over there?” whispers Aricely; as if there is any chance that she can be heard on the other side of all that traffic. “They look like they’re out of a movie.”
Gabriela glances over. Not a movie she’d watch. “Good God, retro seventies.” She shudders with distaste. “Bell-bottom jumpsuits weren’t a good idea then, and they’re really not a good idea now. And look at her hair! She looks like she’s got a dog on her head.”
Jayne and Esmeralda aren’t interested enough to look, but Delila is trying to remember if she saw the man in the white suit at breakfast. He seems kind of familiar. And he’s good-looking, in an old-fashioned, European way. And it’s not just the hat he’s holding in his hand, or the James Joyce sunglasses. He looks as if he speaks several languages; as if he’s spent a lot of time sitting in cafés, but not here – where there’s a man at the bus stop holding an iguana and a woman who looks like Marilyn Monroe skating through the traffic – in much older cities of narrow streets and buildings that were built long before any white man put his foot down here. But though it’s only been a second or two, when Delila turns back for another look, there’s no one there.